Insomnograph | Insomnograph
Oct.24.2011
A good friend turned fifty this weekend. If he was melancholy about hitting the half-century mark, he didn’t show it. All he wanted was some drinks with a few close friends and his wife, which is exactly what he got.
On my twenty-fifth birthday, one of my cards said, “Happy Birthday....
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Sep.11.2010
I'll be reading at the Sensitive Skin Magazine birthday tribute to John Coltrane. The full scoop is here:
http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com/sensitive-skin-presents-a-tribute-t...
And I've got a short in the new issue that just went live:
http://www.sensitiveskinmagazine.com
Spread the word.
-...
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Jun.07.2010
Peter Maravelis and I meet about once a month back in San Francisco. We exchange one or two brief messages to set a time and day; always the same location, known only to us. Nothing else is discussed until then. We could be swapping Christmas cards as easily as black briefcases, with nobody the...
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May.18.2010
Back in November of 2009, City Lights hosted a celebration honoring the 50th anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch, during which a mix of local authors, old friends and colleagues of the late William Burroughs gathered at San Francisco’s Make Out Room to read passages from his seminal Beat...
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May.03.2010
One dog in particular stands out in my neighborhood. Longish white fur mottled with hazy black spots, she looks like an out-of-focus Dalmatian. Her bright blue eyes are visible from half a block away like twin pinpoints of television static. I see her on the sidewalk one night, standing perfectly...
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Apr.26.2010
I’ve been meaning to append one of these travelogues with some tricks of the trade I’ve picked up over my years of travel, but the practicality of it came off as a real buzzkill after my other musings. So, this time around I’ll lay out my tips for hitting the road and resume my normal pontificating...
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Apr.11.2010
The sky is backwards, the constellations upside down. I’ve been to the Southern Hemisphere before, spent several weeks in South Africa around ‘98-‘99, but I never looked at the stars. Standing outside alone at night in Johannesburg and staring up the sky is a bad idea. But when I look above...
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Apr.10.2010
I step off the plane in La Paz fifteen hours after leaving SFO. My carry-on feels ten times heavier than when I brought it on board and I’m having a tough time breathing. Inside the airport there’s an oxygen station and I know the thin air isn’t my imagination. I’ve lived at sea-level my entire...
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Jan.20.2009
This is what I sound like after a two-week chest cold and several days locked in the writing pit without using my voice. Seth Harwood invited me to join the likes of Scott Phillips, Eddie Muller, David Corbett, Vicki Hendricks, Jason Starr and Michael Connelly, to name a few, in reading for his...
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Aug.05.2008
Following is a post from the way-back archives of my home site. Like everyone else here, I'm routinely pelted with requests for my advice to aspiring writers. Halfway through writing my third novel, I've finally got the stones to confess to the underlying truth, that I always feel out of depth,...
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