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.

I’m arguably the least real of all my characters, a state of affairs for which I make no apologies, being, indeed, altogether proud of the fact. I am, as it were, the created creating--a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

New Age City was a cornucopia of Transsexual Breathwork, Colonic Hypnotherapy, Psychotic Readings, Women’s Foot Massage Circles, Men’s Menstrual Networks, Nymphomatic Drainage, Applied Tautology, Body Piercing for the Inner Child, Alternative Unbirthing, Soul Upheaval, Past Life Digressions … To say nothing of the extraordinary products available through independent distributors of network marketing companies: Self-esteem Creams, Psychic Gels, Clairvoyant Eyedrops, Aboriginal Aphrodisiacs, Ostrich Feather Energy Bars, Irradiated Healing Clays, Chai  Enemas …

There was something sacred about those afternoons—pagan, it’s true, but sacred. The browner my skin turned, the more clearly I understood the sun truly is a god worthy of worship.
    Even with eyes closed I could see him. I felt him sink into me at the atomic level, infuse my cells as I drifted in and out of sleep, floated on pillowy clouds of sun-induced lethargy, head spinning with idle questions such as Where are the records of all the things that never happened? and Why do hippies have big feet? and Is “self-referential” a self-referential word?

YOU'RE ONLY OLD ONCE.