"I tried every trick in the book. I stood and begged, sat and begged, lay down and begged, begged on my knees. I drew little signs indicating I was unemployed, I was retarded, I was a starving artist, I was an orphan, I was deaf or blind or mute, I suffered from dengue fever, I had a broken heart. I changed locations and times. I faked whiplash, a fractured femur, an abscessed tooth. I moaned and groaned, gnashed my teeth and wailed as I sat impossibly twisted on the sidewalk. I even squirted ketchup swiped from a deli all over my jeans and complained of intestinal bleeding. But nothing, I mean nothing worked!"

"But instead of feeling gladdened by the new day, a wave of panic washed over me. I was certain another day in New Age City would be the end of me."

"It began with a life-or-death decision to remove the Needle of False Security from my arm, turn away from the Medusa of Routine, part the Veil of Bogus Guarantees and pass on into that vital place where, regardless of the question, all you have to say is yes."

Let’s begin a new literary movement. I don’t care what we call it. Let’s start writing novels for people who don't like novels. Because these days who can blame them? You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. So let’s at least please ourselves.

Years from now when verisimilitude is finally understood as a terribly limiting proposition, let our daringly experimental books (often self-published, often ignored by the mainstream) be remembered as the Rubicon fiction crossed on its journey into multidimensionality.

Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.

It would be Halloween. It’s always Halloween in my imaginary life. Even in my earliest years, the ones I never technically experienced but only heard about from my biographers, it was Halloween—Halloween a metaphor for donning a mask of “reality” and becoming a spy in order to expose the “real” world’s fictitious underbelly.

Not that we were being insincere. Or maybe I should say we were being sincere in our insincerity.

I can still see-feel-hear-smell-taste her, her maddest of bodies that made divinest sense to a parched and withered me. My mind swam like a drunk octopus with images of the two of us in a dizzying array of compromising--possibly illegal--positions.

One must appreciate life's little ironies, even at one's own expense.