Thanksgiving, Dogs, Blessings, Books

The mighty, heroic, holiday-fatigued Luigi!

Thanksgiving came and went with dogs and food and champaigne. Inexplicably, it's now early December and tonight is my work party.

There is one particularly heroic bulldog (see above) who, Katy and I agreed is basically the Henry Miller of canines with his unfettered zest for life, no matter what holds him back. To aspire to the rough and tumble optimism of the bulldog. . .

I've been reading Miranda July and trying to start The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. But instead, feeling particularly forlorn a few weeks back I started a desultory re-reading of the radical text, The Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem that meant so much to me as a naive college student.

I also remembered that I never really finished it because, at the time, the life-changing demands it asked of me were overwhelming to ponder. It wasn't just what he advocates but it is also the fiery and poetic way that he slays every taken-for-granted concept, icon and tendency in our Western Culture.

Not to say I'm any more prepared to accept his words but at least I'm more sufficiently disabused of some pretty dopey notions.

Actually what sparked the re-reading was the very recent interview with Vaneigem that was trenchant, lyrical and unrelentingly idealistic. There is lot to that interview and I'm thinking about writing more about it.

I've been trying to force myself into a routine that's hard for me. Probably hard for most: switching between projects, maintaining individual focus for each. The early darkness and the California cold (relative to the rest of the country) has made it easier to stay home and focus and force the blossom of inventiveness under a spell of domestic tranquility.

On my days off there is nothing better than a quick, hot shower and putting the coffee to boil and french-pressing it and making toast and oatmeal in our large, multi-nooked sunny kitchen which, with its big herb-garden window overlooking a wind-swept garden down below, bears the resemblance to the prow of a glass air ship. I spend hours there with my notebook, my computer until I get antsy and then it's time for a revitalizing walk.

But the challenge is working on short stories, editing, honing and re-drafting them and then going back pell-mell into my ongoing memoir-novel which is about a hundred, sloppy pages. The challenge is to embrace the quotidian pleasures to create marvelous adventures. In this, I'm very blessed.

Food, shelter, love, family, friends, inspiration, livelihood: these I have and I give endless thanks. Or at least I try to. I hope my writing conveys it.

Last night I spent several hours on Duotrope navigating all the literary magazines out there and submitting a much-edited, highly-mutated short story of mine about Oakland to three of them. But what intrigued me was the variety of genres out there, sub-genres, literary fetishes, weird things. There is possibility, that much I realized.

Meanwhile, the unread books keeps growing and I suffer reader's panic. Alternating with writer's panic. And so I eat and read the news. We've been eating so many pungent, warming feasts that we've made from a hodgepodge of recipes.

Vegetarian sheperd's pie. Homemade hot and sour soup. Lentil stew. Homemade chicken and noodle soup. Borscht. Homemade chicken tortilla soup.

All containing copious amounts of ginger and garlic, all of which help to combat the germs and sicknesses that seem so ubiquitous this winter.

Lastly, I have signed up for an Introductory Horticulture class.

Good day.

Notes On Beginning A Novel

I just read online today that an old friend of mine from high school just completed his first novel. I'm happy for him and feel justifiably motivated to start working on mine. I wonder how one finishes a novel, or really, for that matter, maintains the presence of mind and the necessary tunnel vision to even start one. Yet another problem arises:

I start working on the novel, but then my brain jumps back to the common assertion that actually, no I need to write and finish some short stories in order to savor the notion of finality. To be able to submit them. To, god forbid get them published.

But rarely does a short story give me the same frisson as a good novel, or even a big, baggy, sloppy novel. There are exceptions, fairly major ones: Jesus's Son, Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Amy Hempel and my now long-lost copy, which keeps getting rarer by the day of The Piano Stories by the forgotten progenitor of Latin American magical realism, Felisberto Hernandez.

I used to think that one of the stories in that collection, "No One Had Lit A Lamp" was one of the greatest things I'd ever read, as well as being a prime example of how every instance can contain unquantifiable weirdness.

I gave it to a girl a long time ago. Or lent it, I can't remember which.

And yes there is Tobias Woolf too: there are segments in the second half of the justly-famous, and perennially studied "Bullet In The Brain" that make me tremble.

So I'll work on them, knowing each one, in some way, is only a prelude or a hint of the novel I want to write, or one of the novels I want to write. And then I think that wanting to write a novel is the offspring of a febrile, stunted mind. But then again, not wanting to write the novel would leave me vastly wanting. In life you figure out how to fill wants and needs in a more less practical balance? And yes, it is a question.

This "first" novel is going to be about a LOT of things I have no personal knowledge of, like murder and crime families for one thing. And Islam too. Islam? I suspect it will have less to do with Islam per se and more to do with fanciful heresies and related sects, like the much over hyped Yezidis who live in Northern Iraq. The Yezidis?

The Peacock Angel of the Yezidis. . .

Now, I'm curious to see my own thought process splattered on the page. A novel-planning binge began in my brain today. It was this morning, a grey, quiet day at the bookstore, typical for Mondays. Not many people passed through but some real maniacs felt compelled to loiter in the doorway. I shelved, I cleaned, I researched a rare book or two. I've started buying too, that is to say: buying books for the store from people who want to sell them to us, which is always enjoyable because people bring in all sorts of unlikely things. Like a bag entirely full of gardening, civil war history and erotica, and then you speculate what the soon-to-be prior owner of the books does or used to do, either for a livelihood or a vocation or simply for pleasure.

But it's impossible, when I'm working and when I'm working alone which is most of the time, not to think about writing. Here are the artifacts of it, enclosing me. The smell of the used bookstore which I've grown to savor. I'm reminded six or seven hours of the day about what I want to do with my life, with my brain, with the images in my head. It's oddly claustrophobic, somewhat stifling but also lucky. Like being inside my brain. And then escaping back into it.

I need some other completely unrelated part-time job. Or volunteer gig that is as far away from books as possible. This is one of the challenges for myself right now.

The books exist on the shelves to remind me to start thinking like a writer. And doing that means making improbable connections across the pulsing landscapes of the brain. The Internet aids and abets this process, often hampers and exacerbates. I'm forever thinking I can never do enough research or I haven't been to enough places or read enough books. And then the Internet corroborates this. I'm sent into the wilderness of other people's exploits and failures and victories, trying to cull from that history something that is profoundly mine yet everyone else's too.

I will refrain from saying anything else right now. Mostly because I'm full of tempura eggplant and being mollified by warmth and tango.

A Long Part Of A Story

Here's a rough, uninhibited draft part of a story I'm working on: a false memoir story: just part of the first two are covered, and not the third one which comes later.

Three Things To Forget

I was never taught to kiss or shave or tie my shoes.

I find it funny that when I first did them it was at the same time.

Was it really? No, not quite. But almost. I knew how to tie my shoes, but it was the easy way, the way a paid nanny taught me and it was not the proper way. Kissing I thought was violence. Until I did it wrong. And it was. Shaving, I assumed, was just what the muscular Apollos in the commercials did before they are whisked away on a sexual spaceship.

Now I can say I have a fairly hefty past. Because of just three things which are the beginning of many more.

It was when kids who were almost not kids played cruel games to pass the time.
Like Truth Or Dare. Or Thirty Seconds In The Gazebo or Doing Time or Smother The Lover. Doing Time, as you might have guessed, was an incarceration game. Smother The Lover riffed on the notion of the dog-pile which was an experiment in endurance, sort of like being tickled when you’re bound to a chair with garden hose. The word "lover" was our first dirty word and it incited the players to pile upon each other like rabid dogs. Often the pea at the bottom of that writhing pod would be four breaths close to passing out. But it was exciting being that pea.

The kissing was at a party full of ten and eleven year olds. It was a pool party where some brave boys had snuck in beer but the parents were nesting within the bowels of the house, playing a card game or watching detective shows, leaving us kids to the darkly-lit residential fringes where water splashed and girls laughed and the sound was the same but different.

Cold feet on rough concrete, easily scraped. We're always running. The slimy rim of the pool that made me shiver. The taste of pie you buy from the vending machines, the stale, frosted shell and the slaughterhouse innards.

Was it a birthday party or some other festivity? Birthdays were the only reason why anyone did anything. You always wanted to get old. Made a big display of it when you did. The houses had scraping edges and basin-shaped backyards that typically had pools gouged into them. The landscape was artificial like candy and thus purely enticing. You don’t stop liking candy even so close to your teens. Candy is a prop and a delight. It is not an acquired taste.

A bamboo grove, falsified or real, whispered on the edge of the pool. Some bogus oriental gazebo where people played their cruel games in. Things like Velcro wallets and limited edition tennis balls got lost in the ornamental foliage and people used that as an excuse to hide there. The unmistakable sound of Velcro opening, even on those sneakers where you could stow secret nickels. But the Velcro sound was never naughty, for it never protected such things.

I admit, now that I remember, it wasn’t a kiss at all that first time.

It was a glorious fuck-up.

Instead of kissing, I sucked and then finally bit this poor girl’s cheek. Her skin was tasteless but flushed. I heard her take in a sharp breath. A shard of air. Every particle was distinct and important. My tongue met her skin, as light and dry as an eyelash. My lips followed, my two front teeth with their rabbit’s gap sank into the occasion.

She took in another gasp. The sound of her breathing was shocking. Maybe she had sipped a half a beer and been splashed by cold, chlorinated water in the side of the pool as of yet unwarmed by the jostling of smooth bodies. I never thought about breathing until I sucked that poor girl’s cheek in the poolside twilight.

I wonder why it wasn’t her lips I kissed. They were, after all, presented to me. But I turned her cheek. What was it about those lips? They were chapped like motel wallpaper and there was candy, perhaps meat stuck in her braces, dissolute traits which made her seem dangerous and I remember it wasn’t her but her sister Corey, who chased me and pinned me against a grounded canoe in a game the camp counselor called Predator Prey.

Corey’s braces had made her gums bleed which invested her with a menacing, predatory face. That was a game that made me nervous. I took those things seriously. It was an unspoken way to gain status: being good at unimportant games.

Cruel games and cruel experiments: later we sit in offices and crack jokes about dying young.

The night of the pool party we had been experimenting with beer foam and lollypops like kids will do, and sometimes with more outright cruelty, knowing that something will always get hurt and will forever cry out to make it stop. Make it stop something will demand. Or not.

I don’t know why it wasn’t her lips. The peeling skin and the flotsam rotting under her metal-gated teeth was less nightmare and more ambiguous invitation. But her cheek was like the skin of a fruit. I’m talking about someone else now, I think. Pale like marble on the outside, sticky, fuchsia meat within, as distant and astronomical as a neighboring galaxy.

She told me it was funny what I did.

Everything was either funny or nice. Agony we kept quiet about. Ecstasy we saved for our dreams. I played it off like a joke. This was a first survival mechanism. I learned early to play things off as jokes, until people got wise that that was what I was doing which made things worse.

You set the fire in the bathroom? Yeah, all in good fun though. You scored a point for the other team? It was a joke, man! When you read aloud your voice cracks and you sound like a girl? I’m mocking my fat friend but I love him. You throw bottles at passing traffic? That was not me, that was him, his father abused him, his sister tried to sleep with him and soon, but you don’t know this now, he’ll become a white supremacist who’s doing time. And not the game Doing Time which was always interesting when the girls got to be the guards. There was visible unease in the boy's faces, as if a lesson was not only being taught but forcibly digested.

. . .HERE AN INTERMEZZO...an awkward encounter with a friend in a park. . .

I wouldn’t have kissed him were it not for the cheap wine and the lovely, riparian verse and the harvest moon with the frilly edges, almost cigarette-burned. B
But the girl I kissed was at a pool party where people were shooting billiards under a plantain tree. The submerged lighting gave everything a blue Hollywood glow. The boys had hairless, bright chests like billiard balls.

I was less self-conscious about taking my shirt off but I remember that even the slightest gust from the valley below could harden my nipples. My friend’s chests felt good to my open palm, like matter at its most permeable. I was palming them because of some game, twister meets hot potato and the smiles in everyone’s eyes were as hard as candy.

We had other games too. Hide N’ Seek crossed with Doing Time (a jail game).

We were ten or eleven and not afraid of life, only each other and what we might become. The girls had fierce hips. Less jutting than stabbing, like they were sidewinders and could injure you in your blind spots if you weren’t paying attention. Walking was as risky as driving when you’re night-blind. You had to pay attention. It was all quite nerve-wracking.

I remember she had a Polish last name and hair so blond it was almost white. I don’t remember being driven home later than night or feeling the anticipation of being in my room, stranded with myself and my eager hands. I don’t know how vivid my conjuring might have been, or if my imagination has gone stale in the intervening years that have done much to sully the soft, impressionable matter I was then. Life’s work, at least in these dirty metropoli is to mangle the softness, a task both necessary and traumatic.

I don’t remember what I might have done by candlelight with my headphones on. Today I attribute minor hearing loss to having expensive headphones. I attribute my immunity to hot coffee cups to my child’s love of candles. But what I would give to remember those first raptures, like a cow remembering dry lightning

But that night I also shaved because I thought I had whiskers. It was just prickly fuzz and I bled a lot, shiny pinkish blood that I smeared in my journal like some occult oath. The oath of the abyss I called it. I would cross the abyss of my own male fears. I’m an only child. I used to love Christ. But now I mistake him for matter. I’m a junkie for matter but I don’t have a lot of things.

I just praise the stones I pull from the creek. . .

TO BE CONTINUED

The Non-Plight Of The Honky Gringo

Here's a broken-up story for you, fragments from a longer quasi-non-fictiony thing called The Non Plight Of The Honky Gringo.

Sleep is evasive. I read till I nod off, come up for air, go back down the pit, wanting those dreams where I fly and say, I'm flying in a dream and now that I know that, I can fly anywhere, any height, disrobe, be naked in the blue air, send my love to the ants below. Flying in dreams, because I've done it before, what I remember is the thrilling coolness of the breeze my soaring body makes.

My boss sleeps soundly, but then she exudes and orchestrates more energy in any given hour than most people do in a week, a genius of her noble profession, which is noble, truly and forever.

(It is books.)

Sleep for me hinges on what I aim to face the next day. I think this is flawed logic.

A nightmare of a job I won't sleep at all. An appointment, a job interview, the dentist, I'm a little better but not much. If it's a day of leisure, maybe the best, I drown like a baby.

What's the very best though is crashing into sleep from a day that is as long and interesting as an underwater canyon. Think of the last very long, very interesting day you had and go into pin-drop detail describing it.

This last night I lay there visualizing French farms and Polish weddings, pastoral customs I wouldn't know what to do with but that I'd like to observe.

The ashen, acidic, abattoir rot emanates from the botched piping, making me wonder what crime is being suppressed by the imbeciles below. A murder? A trainwreck of sloppy joes and ashtrays and dead rats in the walls?

When I walk now, I make sure not to go my habitual routes, not from paranoia but from a self-empowering espionage. I take unnecessary detours, I backtrack and skit down an alley as if trying to outwit an analyst who's trailing me with judgment on his tongue. Back in childhood, when I spent a lot of time in my room alone, either reading, writing, listening to music or doing generally odd, ritualistic things, I used to pretend there was a child psychologist hiding out in the wardrobe. He was a spy. (More often I made her a she.) People in his trade were forced into the position of spies and saboteurs. The most interesting children had tendencies to burrow deep into arcane alcoves of the mind, hard to pry out, hard to find.

I always thought he came in through the window, along with the coyote howls, the fig tree limbs, the smell of summer limes, sun-baked asphalt cooling under a blue moon, fuzz from lost tennis balls getting stuck in my teeth.

Food is something else.

I ate the plate called Happy Buddha but was disappointed by its lack of variety. I drank the tea called Green and felt less nervous than if I hadn't. The mangoes are delicious this part of the summer but I still don't know how to cut them properly. Their juice feels electric on my fingertips.

I had a dream last night that was more like news.
Poetry is news that stays new. My dream comes with a real-life prelude:

Another lifetime ago, when I was involved with a raven-and-nickel-haired poetess she took me, in her tiny blue clown car, to a tumbledown movie theater next to a gay blues bar, a Jewish pastry shop and a giant rotting lake that had a Christmas tree in the middle of it. This was called The San Antonio.

The theater served warm beer and cold pizza and had gutted couches for people to lounge in while they watched the movies. This movie was about Oakland, in particular about an old, notorious drug dealer who, when he died, was escorted in a massive, outlandish parade of horse-drawn carriages, top-hatted coachmen, major-domos, etc. all through the blighted areas that he had fed and ruined with addictive, powdery drugs much to his advantage, his legacy, his legend.

I used to walk past spit-polished Bentleys idling outside of crumbling SRO's.

In my dream, I was walking through a bad neighborhood that was inevitably filling up with people like me who weren't from bad neighborhoods but because of their artistic livelihoods felt like they had to live in them. In this dream, a funeral procession was turning a corner. Just as my friends and I were walking across the street

Sun blasted against the side of a brick building. Their was an old painted advertisement for bread against the side of some broken-down factory. The funeral was for a "Gangster". And it had all grandiose trappings of that real-life gangster's funeral in Oakland.

Suddenly as the funeral procession neared the center of the block, a legion of screaming police cars screeched to a halt in the opposite intersection, adjusted into barricade formation and cops, and plainclothes detectives, and strangely-uniformed volunteers all brandished rifles, pistols, automatic weapons and started just firing on the mourners, the carriages and the sympathetic onlookers. A barrage of gunfire, all of it done stoically, methodically, without too much concern.

They were aiming for the Gangster Second In Command. It was very shocking. But I awoke thinking, Cops probably do this. They go to Gangster's funerals and fire away at the other Gangsters. It's the best place to find other Bad Guys all together at once.

I know nothing about the hard life.

I talked to a nurse yesterday who had paralyzing eyes and who was jealous that I worked at a bookstore. Her job is usually sad, she said, so she doesn't need to hear about Afghanistan on NPR 24 hours a day, not that she doesn't need to, but it doesn't behoove her disposition to, so could I recommend a book maybe, a book on tape, something else to listen to on her commute?

Which is funny, because it's the kind of the thing I've talked about before. Ease of day-to-day life can sometimes inspire a darker aesthetic side. Whereas if you're a nurse, a truly brave occupation I could probably never do, the horrors of the hours need to be mitigated with something less heavy-handed, something, even, life-affirming. It's understandable actually. I realized this only later.

I read somewhere it's best to stay put now. Cultivate a place. Let your garden get interesting.
I can't stay put usually, or I can stay put in a larger context but in the smaller one, I fidget like a sugar-high waif.

I wolfed down a fried tiger shrimp sandwich at a bar. The same bar where I watched the tail-end of a no-hitter and realized that sports can unify people more than most things. There was genuine glee when he threw that final strikeout. Drinks all around. Aggressive hugs. Shouts to the skies.

A man on the 14 bus, unnerved by a gesture I made, called me a "foreign racist" and, bewildered, I looked around to find even the scantest evidence for this madman's accusation and I found instead a compact mirror a woman had left on a seat that showed me the Russian letters on my ever-present black, bleach-embellished shirt.

Which doesn't explain much.

I am not Russian. I am not foreign. I am not racist, insofar as we're all not racists but still make split-second, visual assumptions whenever a non-us comes our way. He also told an old man to "spit out the dragon, old man."

The old man didn't listen.

Thoughts/Ideas While I'm Thinking Them

A SLOW Monday listening to Eastern European folk music, eating Greek yogurt and carrot juice. Priced some extremely rare and expensive books this morning, including a son's none-too-flattering photo essay about his alcoholic father and chain-smoking mother: Ray's A Laugh as well as some Gnostic treatises.

EVERYBODY all the time is loaning or giving me books. When you consider this, plus the additional fact that I work in a used bookstore, or actually two used bookstores, it would seem my addiction for the printed word will soon take on Keith Richards proportions. But it's interesting the books people give me. Stephen at Phoenix gave me Joe Orton's Diaries. And Jodel from Goldstein (my old job) loaned me My Dark Places by James Ellroy. And Wendy from the same place loaned me an Octavia Butler novel.

YESTERDAY, A SUNDAY, ambivalent pale grey skies cut, here and there with flashes of pale light. Walked further on 24th than I'm used to. 24th street that is, one of the more colorful, mural-plastered boulevards, mostly Latino and Vietnamese, and I had this moment, walking to a coffee shop for a writing meeting, that I had crossed some interstitial boundary and was in another city, another country, not necessarily a Spanish-speaking one, but an indefinite one where I could learn nothing from the local murals, or discern any sort of religion from the whiffs of incense from the botanical stores.

THIS psychic feeling of border crossing most likely stems from my enraptured reading of The City And The City by China Mieville. More on that later. More on that later: a mantra of sort for the persistence of obsession?

THINGS I'M WORKING ON HEATEDLY, DISTRACTEDLY<<

1. Short Stories. Not sure if I have the temperament for this form. But I appreciate the discipline/the slice of lifeness/the brevity and solemnity. And the potential interconnection between several tales, like a resonance chamber. I like the ease with which a vignette can arrive on the page and linger in the memory, like a mysterious postcard from a distant ex-fling. My unifying concept is a sequence of dreamy city stories featuring, honestly what I'm most familiar with space-wise: San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Los Angeles.

2. Lyrical Essays? I kind of think my longer, illustrated blog posts will be this: essays/meditations on books, culture, art and the personal circumstances of receiving/appreciating cultural artifacts and how they affect one's LIFE. Departing from the idea of life formed by culture. Something like Henry Miller's The Books In My Life or Sontag's Against Interpretation but with personal anecdote, asides, pictures, allusions, cross-references, etc. HERE, some forthcoming ones:

a). Essay on Story of the Eye the movie vs. Story of the Eye the book.

b) Essay on Thomas Disch

c) Dirty novels of the 60's.

d) The Brothers Karamazov as ultimate novel of late-twenties CRISES.

3. OTHER ESSAY TALES. Not sure what I want to call these. Myths? Apocryphal memoirs? Tiny textual movies? One in particular that's getting really long and out-of-hand: a lively, vivacious, somewhat dirty tale of being a straight guy with nothing but hedonistic, sex-loving gay and lesbian friends and the antics that ensue. That might sound superficial? Placating? Trite? MAYBE, but I feel like I have the anecdotal evidence to make it transcend its gossipy-sounding summary, turn it into a cultural document that presents MY generation's life and times in America's most ridiculously awesome city (San Francisco.) ALSO: another essay about the man who travels but wants NOTHING in his journey. Not girls, not ganja, not machine-guns. NOTHING.

4. WORKING NOTES FOR NOVEL, w/Working Title: Assassins. This novel so far has a bunch of segments/story-lines summarizes, some characters sketched out, but nothing fully finished or thought through. Plot thoughts so far: A man grows up with hippie parents. His mother unfortunately has an incident. Kills someone. The Man's sister flees. He is alone and is cursed by the crime of WHO the mother kills, a woman who just happens to be part of a powerful female crime syndicate. The Son grows up nursing a strange fascination-horror with things like perfume, bathrooms, parking lots, courtyards. He is taught that any woman he meets might be a part of this crime syndicate with the working title Pistis Sofia. That he is a marked man. His neurosis becomes a long poem. Then one day his poetry begins to show up at crime scenes that mimic the one his mother was involved in. He must catch the person who's trying to catch him before they catch him??? And on and on. Too much going on with this one...

That's it. Back to book peddling.

Reading Your Work.

I maybe should have posted an announcement here, days, even weeks before it happened, that I was going to be in a reading on Thursday May 28 at 8 p.m. at Dog Eared Books. But no matter--the reading indeed happened and it went well with a very good crowd in attendance too. A lot of my friends would have told you that they had never ever seen me read before. And they would have been correct. It was the first time I've read anything, in that sort of context, for at least 5 or 6 or 8 years. I was among an esteemed group of fellow readers, including Maria De Lorenzo and Ali Liebegott. The setting, a bookstore, was both familiar and unsettling. There wasn't a podium, for example, so I felt the need to pace a little, or do a nervous toe dance. An incredibly bright light was above my head. No microphone either which I think helped me to enunciate more clearly and pause more effectively between suspenseful sentences. Since I had to talk louder, I felt more in control. I was also wearing my Mr. Peanut Death Head shirt which some people in the front row found distracting but to me was quite empowering.

With the ten minutes I had, I read two excerpts from stories that are essentially about the same thing: what happens when people, under economic, romantic, or metaphysical duress are forced to flee to an environment that is strange, difficult and alienating for them. Usually, I'll take a real place and exaggerate its most salient features. I'll give it a new name too. In this case, I thought of Oakland and parts of Detroit I've only heard about and called it Ashland. (Actually, that was my Mom's recommendation. Shout out to her, as Palin would say.) I think this is generally a good way to make a fictional world come alive: base it on parts of other places, combine, set to mix and pour out on the page and then throw in some out-of-left-field details that you completely make up.

The first story was more polished, had been edited a lot, workshopped into the ground. The second I wrote in a sun-blasted frenzy down in San Diego for the Memorial Day weekend. It was raw, somewhat obscene and in a crisper, more sardonic tone that a lot of my other pieces. No editing, drafting or any of that was involved. Most people seemed more impressed with that second story which, for better or for worse, I called Pictures From Ashland. I only read two pages of it. It's sort of futuristic, but not really. It's cataclysmic, but too absurd to be all that disquieting. It's about people like me who want to live cheaply and do desperate things to achieve that goal. Below, I've excerpted a part I didn't read, but came after the part I did read.

From Ashland Story:

So we left on the 5 cent ferry bound for Ashland. And the others inevitably followed. The ones who had come before came out of their crawlspaces to try and have sex with us. A whole new genre of pioneer was born. I was one of them. We put down cash from hot appliances on a place as big and rotting as a turn-of-the-century zeppelin hangar. The former owner had that circus look going for him. He wanted to bring in the “new breed” he said. Fishy-sounding language, a tad Mein Kamfian. We would sow culture and harmony to the bad places and for very cheap too. It would be kristallnacht every night, I thought meanly, deliriously. He was making me hate what I was so I, of course, had to hate him even harder.

Our compound, all decimated concrete, steel and glass, was on the edge of the poorest, most bullet-riddled stretch of housing in the West of Ashland, a post-industrial boondocks known as Yardage Town. Trash-can fires. Old ambulances on blocks. Soviet-style housing. Industry had died there just like the bison. Our zest for novelty already set us apart. Days felt longer at first, impossibly long, like how you imagine the Serengeti. I needed to know where to go, what to do. I had no bearings to begin with. I was mapping every inch with my eye. Slowly. One day, I went riding on my bike just to test out space. Already, near the Zip Town projects, some kids had tried to sidewind me with shopping carts. They came out of nowhere from behind abandoned semi's. Soon bottles from passing cars went by my head. The shattering of glass was like a strange, yet familiar bird call.

I got out to what I thought was a safer pasture, a landscape beaten within an inch of its life.
I rode leisurely through the former syrup works of the Mr. Pibb bottling empire. Now nothing but blown-out barracks, tree-eaten asylums and autopsied terminals. This was what they called “non-residential” but instantly I knew that was a joke. A hundred, maybe a thousand unseen people cuddled up in the wreckage, with flashlights for eyes and nobody to protect them. Here you were pretty much in International Waters. Nothing but scavengers and pioneers and kids. I scanned every compass point. But I wasn’t vigilant. How could you be? He ran out of nowhere, dressed like a jogger from the ‘80s, shirtless and wearing short, tight spandex. I hit him dead on with my bike and he fell into a pile of smashed window glass. It haloed his head like dazzling blue snow. I sensed danger the moment he reared back up with the beautiful shards jammed in his cheek.
“Oh my god, I am so fucking sorry,” I moaned.

“Not half as sorry as you’re going to be bitch” he said, and he clocked me in the gut with an invisibly quick fist. It knocked the wind right out of me. A miracle it only did that. I bent double, struggling to find a breeze. In that instant, I was in grade school again, a grass-stained tomboy who loved to dress like Scout, (you know from To Kill A Mockingbird) on the day that Kate Gallagher huffing and puffing in her piss-yellow pigtails, punched me right in the kidneys. This time, the man doing it to me had more force, both scrotal and historical behind the blow. I fell to my knees, my eyes dragging down his long, muscular legs.
“That’s what we do to wild dogs around here,” he added helpfully. I got back up, feeling no less than a million things at once. For some reason he was still laying there, right in the street, staring at me and grinning, half-in-the-shadow cast by a machine-gunned watchtower, his other half in the acid light of the noonday sun. Nobody anywhere could see a thing.

The story doesn't quite go to the worst possible place it could go. Instead, I played around with the idea that everyone, in times of general cataclysm, can achieve some kind of paradoxical equity based on fearlessness. The ending is surprisingly happy, perhaps unrealistically so.

The Long Summer Of 2001: A Picture Story

The thread of this picture story begins simply enough: a text message to a sunburned man in the back of a van. It ends with a poignant virtual reunion on Mother's Day. And begins again somewhere else, like right now, in this room.

Two weeks ago, heading back from the Russian River I heard via text that my FAVORITE ROCK BAND EVER, The JESUS LIZARD, were reuniting for a show at the Fillmore in October. They are a band that I've never ever seen live (my only conscious opportunity, way back in the early days of High School, was thwarted because I had Catholic youth group commitments that involved crying and coffee). Ticket procuring was mandatory no matter the price. So I went home and bought them easily enough.

The Jesus Lizard has been with me since the twilight of 8th grade. I used to go to the now defunct Tower Records in El Cajon for afternoon bouts of cultural scavenging. Their magazine selection was legendary. That was the heyday of the arty cut-up music and culture magazines Ray Gun and Bikini, which were each kaleidoscopic mishmashes of music reviews, video reviews, art, culture and film articles. It was in Ray Gun that I first heard about the Jesus Lizard. Timothy Leary was describing them as the best thing he'd ever seen live. So I went out to the Warehouse and bought a disc of theirs without having heard it first.

LIAR was the album. I was initially scared by it until I realized that its rhythmic yet demented noise rock was a perfect compliment to my nightly, free-form aerobic work-outs. The ancient hand-me-down speakers as big as jet engines pulsated with David Yow's glossolalial tales of pygmy violence, slaveships, whiskey, gladiators and holy men with evil intentions. Thereafter I listened to it repeatedly all through high school (and today and yesterday as well). Sure enough, Yow's imagery, delivery and the band's overall aesthetic of moonshine-induced roadhouse mayhem, seeped like lighter fluid into everything I wrote back then, which was mostly blasphemous prose poetry about things I really didn't know anything about.

But none of that is really important. I am sad to say that many of those notebooks from that era have been incinerated by a boy who was in the throes of adolescent shame and self-loathing. (My goal is to someday recreate these in a fictional form, to give life to everyone's long-since-destroyed adolescent diaries.)

Flash forward to Santa Cruz, a place that is the psychogeographic template for most of the fictional settings I create. I'm HUGE on SPACE in STORIES. I like CITIES that are characters. And characters that are as populous in their skulls as tiny, densely populated towns. The places that we make MAKE us just as much as our language does.

What's so special about Santa Cruz? I won't list all the many, obvious reasons but I'll just harp on a point I find illuminating, which has more to do with categories than anything else. My point: Santa Cruz is not a city OR a small town. It isn't urban, suburban, or rural--at least not thoroughly. OK, I lied: the word "town" partly defines it but only vaguely. It is a BEACH TOWN--one of the oddest social conglomerates that exists. But that too, for another time...

The summer of 2001, I was in Santa Cruz, heading into the home stretch of my college life. Well, almost. That was the summer I was sharing a room that was attached to a real house. From the front, you would have thought, "Wow, this is a real nice house on a sunny, flowery block." And therein you would have been fooled. My room was like an added-on trailer, or fledgling rumpus room, that had grass growing on its fringes and mold eating the desks, a room that had a broken futon in it and a revolving cast of roommates (well, two) and a wall that was entirely sliding glass that looked out into a burned-out, weed-stricken and derelict yard. In the kitchen, garbage overflowed onto the broken linoleum. The disposal was stopped up with the remnants of a shattered shot glass.

Beyond the yard: a dark, inviting alleyway. Rusted and warped lawnchairs lay like broken skeletons in the tall grass. A tree rubbed its branches against the sliding glass until they were chainsawed by the landlord. I was driving a car that was covered in mud and birdshit, its interior scattered with gyros wrappers and notebook paper.

Good stories started here.

Me and my buddy CJ found work that summer at Zanotto's Family Market, which is now a Trader Joe's. It was your standard high-end yuppie grocery store. CJ, a caustic. hard-drinking Alaskan, worked in the meat department despite his flagrant lack of experience. I was thrown in the deli adjacent to him and quickly took on something of a managerial position, a joke if ever there was one. I won't relive right now the long, dirty days of dressing raw chickens, sticking my arm shoulder-deep into buckets of pickles and mayonnaise, of evading the cameras that the managers trained on the employees, of being whacked on the thigh by frozen animal parts and having my pseudo-authority questioned by Aptos-bred, red-headed nymphets.

There were lots of hilarious parts about the job, including brazen acts of petty criminality that were fully justified and completely foreseen. I started getting a belly there from too many blackened Tri-Tip sandwiches washed down with beer. I fed a homeless poet friend of mine for days on overly-fat sandwiches. I was stained everywhere. I reeked of pickle juice and mustard. I experimented with mixing hummus with pastrami and found it to be an ingenious failure. I drank a lot of Guinness at the Poet and Patriot. I went home to my house that was full of my gallivanting, bookish friends. They were working equally ridiculous jobs. Evenings, Walken films and free food and Bacchanalia and books. And my work friends would come over too to hear about the attic ghost and steal some of our Natural Ice.

It was there, at Zanatto's where I met B., a Polish/Cajun/Texan punk-rock Bettie Paige look-a-like who became a close friend of mine, a friend that nonetheless I lost touch with for seven years.
When I met her, the first thing she said to me, in her thick, Texan accent was, "You like the Jesus Lizard! I LOVE THE JESUS LIZARD!" and a peculiar friendship was born based on working, happy hours, bars, music and talking and telling tales. Most of the tales came from her. I had nothing really to tell. The first thing I learned about her was that her tattoo on her right arm depicted a scene from the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. (Of course, the amorous part of the friendship made it more serious than other friendships but predictable drama was somehow avoided. Strangely more of an un-predictable sort of drama, that was potentially threatening and yet the butt of endless bar jokes, took its place.)

B. was the first person I befriended who had seen and done things that I couldn't even imagine. Dangerous things. Seedy things. Glamorous things. And thus she was more real for all that. Her life, at times, sounded like the lyrics from unreleased Jesus Lizard songs. (Later, perhaps I would say she could have figured in a handful of Gun Club songs.) She had been through hard times and lost not a few loved ones. She had been betrayed, suffered setbacks and navigated the poisons of the city and the flesh with grace and humor.

But it was interesting, all of it, and she had clearly maintained a good attitude about it all. She laughed often, and musically, with that Southern lilt I had never heard before. She loved life in a less analytical way than I did. I envied her for that. I was just a wide-eyed college boy dreaming huge dreams and barely supporting them with my own earnings.

I kept a notebook then, one I would never have the fortitude to write these days. My penmanship was hysterically miniature, like that of an obsessive-compulsive scribe. Back then, I think I was more self-consciously "literary"--without having much in the way of finished works to back up my effrontery. I supplanted "experience" with lots of words and thoughts. I just had rambling, overly-analytical sentences in a big black book.

But that summer, my writing changed. It got looser, wilder, less of a tight and nervous, madman's scrawl. An avid scrapbooker ever since I was a little kid--one of the neuroses of the archiver-- I also started putting pictures in the books, usually on top of old outlines for school papers I had long since turned in. May B. forgive me this trespassion (if the chosen image is not to her liking) but I can't resist this photo of a photo from the same black book above. It's of her a year or two before I knew her, I think. Along side it, are my marginalia and my drawings of demonic angels. I just cracked the book open recently. It's barely held together.

Other photos in the BOOK had been mailed to me in suspicious parcels by friends of a more Dadaist bent.

A gift from the immortal Chris Sparta above. . .

That summer I was reading Hopscotch by the Argentine literary magician Julio Cortazar. This book is meant to be read in multiple ways. You can either read it in a linear fashion or "hopscotch" around the chapters, per the instructions he has at the beginning. (I read it straight through at first, the linear way--and then later, when I first got to San Francisco I read it again, this time hopscotching around. It wasn't exactly a different story, but a different tonal take on the same story.) This novel is a virtually plotless evocation of the Bohemian life of Argentine ex-pats in Paris. It is dense with conversation, philosophy, news clippings, quotations, eavesdroppings, observations and comical and erotic escapades. Of course I thought the heroine, La Maga, a beautiful, intelligent yet tortured young woman bore a resemblance to B. which maybe she did. I have since lost that copy of Hopscotch.

Reading Hopscotch that summer, I figured I had made it to some enviable place of hedonistic, pseudo-intellectual self-involvement spiced with absurdity, intrigue, easy romance and a drunkard's love for words. My friend B. validated these suspicions--but she also threw them into question and laid bare my naivete. I hadn't experienced enough, that much was clear. I was still learning. And not even that. I was pretending at learning. I needed to live.

A page from the diary of that long summer. . .obscenities excised.
Stand-out phrases: "pursued in the shower by a gang. . ." and "drinking Duvels by candelight"

The summer quickly became September. The job had grown more distasteful. I couldn't eat sandwiches all the time. The managers hated the thieving employees. The store was suffering too. Most of the customers were racist. Nobody was buying the expensive meats except for my Communist professors. My Born-Again shift leader liked calling us "scum-bags" with a medicated grin on his face.

B. and I's friendship became more platonic--a decision both mutual and beneficial. With my blessing, she had met a man who wanted to take her back to Texas with him. She was debating it seriously. She was in love with him. He was in love with her. I flinched at first at the news, and felt pain and fear and pre-emptive loneliness as the prospect of her leaving my life became ever more real. More than anything, I'd be losing one of the best friends I had ever made. And I certainly couldn't stomach another day of work without her laughter and mischief to keep me sane.

I went home to San Diego for my birthday to think things over, to celebrate. Two days later, I was awoken by my mother, as she tearfully told me that something bad, unspeakably bad had happened in New York City that day. People are attacking, she stammered. I stumbled awake and went to the television set and watched the signature event of my generation smoldering and replaying on the television screen. It was the first time in my life that an event had occurred that I was obliged to look at, over and over and over, until it had been singed into my brain. A Symbol as heavy and leaden as God had been born and I'd do well to memorize what it looked like.

Later that day, I walked to the park near my house with my notebook in hand. I found my usual picnic bench next to the golf course that had a decent view of the outlying lake and hills. I was joined out of the blue by three mailmen who were on their lunch break. They joked about the "attacks" as something "only a mailman could have done." I thought maybe that I was hallucinating. I went back to Santa Cruz with weirder, darker thoughts in tow, an involuntary member now of "Generation 9/11/," a prospective inheritor of crises I was too ignorant to understand.

Yeah, I guess I am...

Back in Santa Cruz, life was tense and rumbling. The job fizzled out. We threw a big party when it ended. Those days we were always throwing wild parties in the house, parties that spilled out into the yard and the alleways. And then B. left with her man for Texas.

I was sad for months when B. left. I was happy for her because I had the hunch that her boyfriend was a good guy and would make her happy. We wrote each other letters, and then one day, they stopped coming. I tried the telephone number she gave me. It worked a few times. And then no more. It had changed. A new one wasn't provided.

Life moved on. Relationships, jobs, houses: the triumvirate. I found myself in San Francisco one morning re-reading Hopscotch, feeling chastened by this new, difficult and profoundly beautiful city and wondering if I wandered around at random would I find La Maga standing on some bridge, just like Horatio does in the novel.

For seven years I heard nothing of her. And found out nothing. I actually was worried. And I tried many times to find her on the Internet. After all, if someone's not on the internet??! Then what?

And then, just last week, on Mother's Day I "searched" for her name and it came up on the facebook. And we talked and sent messages and tried to fill in the years with hastily written emails. I was relieved to know that she was indeed happy and had married the guy and they were raising a family in Texas.

Will the Internet be the thing that finally makes it impossible to forget our pasts? In this case, with B. I am grateful for it. Barring the internet, there would have been little conceivable way I could have found her again, short of hiring a private detective.

The Long Summer of 2001 became a text that took itself seriously, as Bruno Schulz would say. I have it to thank for the endless reams of prose that followed. I found inspiration in B., in my job, in the events around me, not just in Santa Cruz but in the world at large. Perhaps I could live after all, and not just dream and scheme about it. I could take myself more seriously. But not too much. Because that would be bad.

April Into May

(More Georgia photos above.)

Before I know it, it's time to pay rent, buy a Fast Pass, make a list of monthly obligations and curse chronology for being so quick-tempered. Before I know it it's time to worry about new flus, new allegations, and the beginnings of collective disillusionment. I'm still reading the Brothers Karamazov, quite slowly, savoring the flow of events it describes as well as the baffling complex political theology it discusses. So much melodrama and it is all so addictive.

And many essays too, including a rediscovery of my old copy of Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag, which is fairly indispensable. It makes literary essay writing seem fun, playful and inspired, unlike a lot of the essays I had to churn out in college. I've also been told by a friend that I need to read Martin Heidegger's Being And Time. We'll see about that. Although I do look at philosophy as a special kind of literature. And it's always nice if a philosopher writes beautifully. I do intend on reading some more poetry next month, if only because I've neglected it for a long time now.

April had some instructive and fun excursions. I like to think of them as experiments in finding better or just different ways to live, even if the ways themselves are only temporary. I like to think some of these experiments might contribute to my hackneyed theory that living as an artist might actually be good for the planet and for our society. At least from the economic point of view. Moreover, that an artist can, in fact, be a good citizen and not just a mad narcissist who fiddles while Rome burns. But maybe I just have guilt? Because if the artist is at home making art, someone is working hard to make the food that feeds him, right? But the artist can't feed the farmer. Well, he can feed his soul I suppose. That's for a longer take.

These instructive trips included one to the local organic farm, Alemany Farm where I worked for 5 hours in the hot sun and got to bring home vegetables I had harvested, like kale and chard. Small farming is the wave of the future, I'm almost certain. And I really, really felt good using my hands for things other than answering phones and collating paper. I enjoyed helping out the kids and using a shovel and sweating to the sound of earth being moved around. And ground cherries are delicious. And the Jerusalem cricket is horrifying.

And then a week later I was in Macon, Georgia and just last weekend, we went camping and kayaking at the Russian River. I'm still a camping novice but trying to get my forest-legs. There's nothing like sweet fire-smoke on your clothes and fresh, hot food under the stars. And being on a river, slowly with nowhere to go except the nearest sandbar that has a rope swing above it. And the tangled trees and thick brush rustling in on you as if the fire pit is the only thing holding dark squirming weirdness at bay.

April was also the usual sporadic work schedule, caffeinated bouts of revising, nights both fun and unfortunate at the Argus and the Broken Record and a great workshop that meets every Sunday (at least until next Sunday) moderated by the local writer and teacher, David Booth. I highly recommend any classes he is offering. I've learned more from him about the hard mechanics of short story writing and revising than from anyone I've had. He's also a damn fine writer.

While working hard at revising and starting some 6-10 short stories, I came up with a division system for them based on what I think are the most pervasive themes. So far I've divided the stories into 3 separate divisions: 1) Haunted Homes (Not Houses) 2) Lovers In Peril 3) Fixations Of The Future. I realized this attempt at categorizing things that are barely written and some only simply outlined was inspired by the short story collection Dangerous Laughter by Stephen Millhauser that is on my shelf and waiting to be read.
He divides his collection into 1) VANISHING ACTS 2) IMPOSSIBLE ARCHITECTURES and 3) HERETICAL HISTORIES. All of which are enviable divisions. I can't wait to read more of the stories therein.

May on the horizon. No predictions. Except more spring. And biking with super-duper tax-refund bike.

Rainy Day Reading Doldrums

A weekend of enclosing myself. The rain has come blessedly. But it is also disorienting and deepens glum moods. Confusions. For example, I was disoriented enough yesterday to wake up early after a late night at a blistering, ear-splitting rock show (Murder City Devils), shower, get dressed, board an unusually vacant train toward Oakland, and walk towards my work....which was closed because it was a holiday. And I had forgotten, or assumed we didn't observe it. NO matter. The rest of the day I spent at a window-side table in the Outer Mission cafe I go to, reading Paul Bowles with my jaw dropping to the floor every sentence or two. More on him later.

Pondering the whole weekend long in an off-white room, keeping books and coffee within finger's length. Today at work the outside is wild and grey and rainy, with fiery, mother-of-pearl patches in the sky like the trees are on fire, but only cooly burning.

Indoors this weekend, hammering out story outlines and rough drafts. Time slips by, you adhere to a routine, it all becomes monastic. Plus the money situation compells a hermitage.

I'm curious how to assemble a short story collection in a market that isn't looking for them? My story sequences always end up becoming episodic novels to some degree. I like the idea of structure and tapestry and architecture in words. I like exquisite games that keep you re-reading, looking back, thinking like a detective. My own interest has pushed my reading outside into other genres: mysteries, roman noirs, science fiction, slipstream, genres that rely on games, I believe, more than "traditional" literary fiction.

My ideas sprout branches and then, lo and behold, another idea plops out writhing and whose demands I'll never meet any time soon. I told her my latest: Borges meets Quentin Tarantino!
The interlocked novellas of assassins in strange places creating mazes to lure unsuspecting men! Half-jesting but seriously. And then it will expand and deepen in my brain: and it becomes a novel about fate and death, two things I don't know much about, scarily enough.

Reading indoors: more Dubliners, Paul Bowles The Delicate Prey, more Delany's On Writing, Delany's critical works Silent Interviews and Shorter Views and just started the short novel by James Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice and about to start an interesting older book I have yet to crack, Francine Prose's Reading Like A Writer. I'd like to explore what I'm "learning" from these books once my lethargy has shaken off.

Image Inspiration

Inspiration for me often comes from recurring images. Things in the field of vision that you just can't get out of your head. Like this picture of tree-serpents hugging Greek columns in Oakland.

Sometimes all you need is an image you catch on the fly and then catch again and again. One of my most accomplished stories, 'Hysteria In Autumn' or so I think its accomplished based on the number of drafts of it I wrote, was inspired by the site of a porta-pottie being lifted into the heavens by a crane. At the time I was going through a tough spot in my life (involving bad decision making in the romance department) and I took a lot of personal refuge in ironic images, or at least interesting contrasts that made me laugh and entertain hope at the same time.

THE holy toilet that so captured me, however, was carried aloft at the construction site for the Catholic Church in Oakland below known as Cathedral Of Christ The Light. Unfortunately, I never managed to capture it on camera there, so the above photo from a different site will have to suffice.

I did however spend many of my work breaks over a year or two watching the church evolve from glorious raw scaffolding to ovoid launch pad to its current state as iridescent glass vulval egg that some people claim is more Ikea than Holy.

I'm not alone either in noting the suggestive shape of the center part of the church. I can't tell you how many people I've overheard walking around Lake Merrit exclaiming, "Wow, that church is going to look like....look like...a vagina!" NO offense to church-goers or women; tis more a commentary on architecture than anything else.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of my reconnaissance, I was enthralled by the virginal scaffolding and the strange men that moved within that cocoon:


THE close-up was particularly inspiring.


THE WHITE CRANE was the one that lifted the porta-potties high into the sky.
FIAT LUX!



My office building is the large steel-grey megalith filling the left side of this photograph that completely dwarfs everything else in its path.
HERE is the wonderfully autumnal view from my work window:

Anyway, it all makes me curious what other landmark/thing/specter in the field of vision will provide similar inspirational fodder.

I'll keep you posted.

Sharing A Segment About Oakland

Some of you might recognize the above from West Oakland. I took that photo a long time ago. But for some reason this morning, as we spit out of the tunnel as I do every working day, I remembered how pretty Oakland is and can be, despite its delapidated, grimy, rubble-strewn character. Plus today was a perfect Oakland day: a sparkling lake, a beautiful skyline, all sort of people walking around the water.

Oakland is a muse for me, believe it or not. For lots and lots of reasons which I will talk about endlessly here and there and in my stories.

Other good photos of my old stompin ground: West Oakland.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of sharing actual fiction on this site, I wrote this morning the BEGINNING of a potential very short story about life in Oakland. I think I want to, at least for right now, share BEGINNINGS of stories, to see if they work and if they encourage further readership. The following is more poetic, less plotted, and more rough than most things I write.
Encouragment and critique accepted graciously.

Scenes From A Story About Oakland:

Morning was like a mock birth in a freshly-ruined cathedral. Sawdust and chipped plaster stuck to my skin as I stretched away my aches.

Right around seven, the vaulted ceilings of my home began fluttering pale blue as gilded dust danced in every corner. Doves or pigeons fattened their chests against the crusty glass. You anticipated some visitor from on high, maybe a paratrooper or a crash landing.

The air was as alive as any slum, invaded by the spirits of long-dead industry, the oily dreams of cylinder merchants and steamboat conductors and peg-legged prostitutes. I’ve watched old home movies of this neighborhood and my house still stands in them. I'm connected to things that should have been utterly obliterated.

The cracked windows flooded with dirty, sepia light as Henry appeared at the top of the stairs in his polka-dot suspenders, his shredded jeans, and little else. Half-naked was the way to go around here. Or else you’d be itching and turning red more than usual. Not from illness, but from weather that has been trapped and taunted like a rare, ruby-backed moth.

I knuckled my eyes open and coughed up a part of last night. Instantly, I smelled eggs going hard in oil and my stomach remembered the boilermakers from the night before.

My sweat had almost eaten through the winter flannel on the bed.
I have to do something about the fractured headboard. I need to sweep and buy tools.
I made a note of all this on the back of a crumpled receipt as I slithered into my underwear.

A ruined cathedral?
Or a shipwreck?
I awoke to a different interpretation each day.

Day by day, I was retreating further from the things that raised me. If only those things could see me now, I thought, they wouldn’t even know me.

If the other eight stowaways weren’t already grumbling awake, they were after Henry made his boisterous, Gene Kelly on angel dust entrance down the rickety, blue staircase. We started with coffee out of a French press and sticky buns that the bakery wanted to throw away. We finished out the evenings with curry, red ales and horror films, the combination conducive to nightmares that always clarified some hysterical part of my adolescence that I had forgotten.

By day, when we were running around, there were taco trucks and stealing from the orange orchards of the filthy rich. Sometimes we’d splurge on Korean barbecue which always left us in a state of catatonia.

The summer would get so stifling I took to sleeping outside on the concrete loading dock on a piece of factory-grade silk. Above me, a pink moon hung like a pumice stone on the mottled washboard of the Milky Way.

Black cats would undulate out from the foliage as I slept, and keep me company, or else act threatening, when they were only having full-moon fevers.

Distant big-rigs, night-time helicoptors, the bleating of wild dogs, my own conjurations of future success lulled me into a twisting and turning half-sleep.

I found a newspaper and a quiet park in the late mornings. I read the names of the survivors on the plaque. The black kids would throw bottles at the lily-white joggers; the metal artists in their oil-stained Dickies scored methadone behind the boarded-up church. I looked at the facts. They looked askance. This wasn’t how it was designed. But nobody could think of anything that fit together better.

I didn’t have to imagine, but I was convinced that my caravan was forever turning in for the night at some crucial, yet hazardous crossroads. A spice I couldn’t name kept dogging me onward. A woman I couldn’t remember kept calling out my name.

The whole of the Western part of the city was an asphalt desert; all the buildings were eroding back to their original scaffolding, the color of mildewed copper, tide pools, and rotting fruit.

One word sufficed: ambergris.

Wednesdays, the parade of cement trucks broke the pre-dawn hush with the racket of churning and braking, backing-up and dumping. The lot lizards came out from their chicken-wire corners, hobbling like the elderly and suffering sun-stroke in their vinyl skirts. It was hard to feel bad for them, without feeling bad for everyone else too.

Evenings, we did our more daring runs. Rust was in. Old boat parts were in. Anything from a fire truck or an ambulance, a school bus or a golf cart. We didn’t touch chemicals except a cheap cocktail of hash and opium, called Red Rock. I learned the wiles of broken-down machinery. How to negotiate a busy street corner without attracting attention. A crowbar or a composition book rarely left my satchel. Coffee could you take deep into the day, I discovered, turn you into a camel that could cross these industrial latitudes without cramping up or going hungry.

To be continued. . .

In Pursuit of the Short Story

Because you can't be in front of the computer all day I took a brisk hike yesterday, under overcast skies, through bracing, sea-scented air, up the crooked, wooden staircases set into the bright green, boulder-strewn hills of Glen Park.

Lately, all I want to do is sweat in the woods.

The eucalyptus here aren't real woods, true, and they do seem to monopolize all the sunshine. But really, just to stand sore, muddy, even scraped and spun on endorphins on the top of some steep, misty place is a good thing. I miss nature oftener than I used to.

Glen Park offers gorgeous views. And intriguing, muddy ravines below. Clover-patches glistening from old rain. I imagine a body laying in the clover: a strong image for something worth writing down.

I find gorges that enclose tree-canopied corridors to someone's version of an underworld. Intestinal, mildewed tunnels leading into the depths. Nature as Gothic. A word for that I remember out of the blue: chthonic.

Seth introduced me last week to this simple, but invigorating place. On my hike yesterday, I thought mostly about how to achieve unity in my prospective short story collection. I thought about how I think so much clearer when I'm pursuing some semblance of a healthy life too.

When I got home, I figured out a curriculum, in counterpoint to Seth's own short-story curriculum. If I read a rotating variety of short stories, perhaps I'll get better at writing them? And then I can put together story compilations like mix-tapes.

So far, stories from the following are on my present list, but I've hardly started reading them:

1. Blow-Up and Other Stories by Cortazar: so far, very interesting. I enjoy weird stories where you're not sure exactly what happens but yet you can't forget the story. Or where exquisite vagaries abound in nonchalant harmony. It's all in the details. Same thing with his novel, Hopscotch: not much happens except for verbal mazes and interior deliberations and uncanny images, but a lot of it is pretty unforgettable.

2. Scrub-Station by Julia Solis: Actually, re-reading this. A brilliant photographer, adventurer, chronicler of decay, urban ruins, etc., she's also a great fiction writer. Solis' stories tells what happens when the sinister magnetism of ruined landscapes conspires with our own appalling desires (which just so happens to be an obsession of mine too!) "Elizabeth of Factories" might very well be one of my favorite short stories. Her website is Dark Passage, and she is the author of the equally amazing: New York Underground.

3. The Invention Of Morel by Aldolfo Bioy Casares: Apparently, this novella has been getting lots of pop-cultural street-cred because it's featured in Lost. Borges also calls it "perfect" and its heavily alluded to in the art-film fashion-fest Last Year At Marienbad.

4. The Collected Stories of Grace Paley: Don't know much about this yet, but many, many writers think she's brilliant. Look forward to it.

5. The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles: Bought this years ago, never really got to it. If Tobias Wolff says it's "one of the most profound, beautifully wrought, and haunting collections in our literature" than I bet it's pretty damn good. Interesting guy too, who lived most of his life in Tangier, Morocco, played music with Aaron Copland and wrote the novel The Sheltering Sky, which Katy read and loved and is on a distant reading list of mine.

6. Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass by Bruno Schulz. Reading this now for a potential essay I'm writing about it. Strange stuff that takes a while to get used to. Incredibly lyrical, complex evocations of the writer's own young manhood in the small Polish town he lived right when Hitler came to power. Fascinating for his emphasis on mythologizing his own upbringing in prose that isn't afraid to read like poetry. Also features the artist's own drawings which are wonderful. Will probably be commenting on this book later.

Also: many of the usual suspects of short stories: Kafka, Joyce and Flannery O'Connor.