Smoke & Mirrors

A quick bit of news… the fine folks over at Six Finger Films are shooting a short based on a chapter of my upcoming novel. The Kickstarter campaign is live over here, and I’ll post more news as it makes progress.

Cheers.

You Are the Ninety-Nine Percent.

My response to the Occupy Wall St. naysayers. Feel free to tweet/post/share or otherwise spread the word.

Semper Occupare.

-Craig

Seventy-Two Hours Without a Blink

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. You are now old.” I knew it was a joke, and that I wasn’t really old. But whenever in the company of late-teen or college age kids, I would shoulder my way to the drink table, certain I was leaving a wake of whispers and sneers.

Then came thirty, the cultural death knell of youth. By age twenty-nine, I’d given up on writing; I was earning more money than I ever imagined I would, but the job was draining the life out of me. And I had a recurring dream that my teeth were falling out. But my first thought the next morning was,“Really? That was it?” The pressure was off; the dread was over.

Age forty is when the jokes really begin around the birthday cake. But I’d had my pre-emptive midlife crisis after the first dot.com crash, when I decided to try my hand at writing one last time (I hadn’t put pen to paper in years). When my fortieth came around, I’d moved to San Francisco (something I’d wanted to do for years), and my first novel had been released to, if nothing else, critical success. I was officially middle-aged, but I had nothing to look back on and second-guess.

But something else happens at forty. Those increments of time—minutes, hours, days, years—begin to lose their magnitude. At age ten, a year is a whole tenth of your life (a goodly chunk of which you can’t remember) and everything takes forever. The school year, long drives, waiting for Christmas, the last five minutes of the school day, everything. By age fifteen, a year is a little shy of 7% of your life; skip ahead to forty, and a year isn’t so long at all, anymore. Your friends and colleagues have been getting married, buying houses, having children. Maybe you’re one of them, maybe you’re not, but by this point in your life, the day fires you out of a cannon as soon as you wake up.

Then you blink, and you’re half a century.

Dispatch from Interzone: The Monster, the Shaman and La Casa Cero

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 wiser. Our cells are turned off, severing us from the noise grid—the phone calls, text messages, emails, status updates, tweets and news feeds—those things we were all perfectly fine without barely a decade ago. For the next three or four hours, we walk. Taxis and public transport are likewise against protocol; walking keeps the eyes open and maintains a shade of the unfamiliar on home turf. Our conversation sprouts an array of tentacles during these walks: writing, publishing, book selling, history, conspiracies, spirituality, furniture, skepticism, martial arts, family, love, death, drinking, comics, travel and whatever else the conversation wants.

Dispatch from Interzone: Shopping for Centipede Meat

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 novel. I was honored to be among them, though I’m the first to admit I’ve struggled with Naked Lunch a number of times. The book simultaneously demands and yet defies being read, at least my own attempts. Burroughs as an orator, however, has few equals. I will never forget the night when I was eleven or twelve years old, watching Saturday Night Live in one of its earliest seasons. The host, Lauren Hutton, stepped onto the stage and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. William Burroughs.”

Dispatch from Interzone: Drinks with the General’s Son

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 still and facing my direction. A woman holds her in a way that suggests restraint—one arm around the torso, palm against her chest—but the blurry, blue-eyed dog shows no want of anything but to stand perfectly still. I glance down as I pass. A patch of fur and skin about the size of my open palm is missing from her neck. I see raw tissue, blood crusted on the torn edges of fur but no active bleeding. I’m guessing she was on the losing end of a fight over a burger scrap, though I suppose it could be a gash from a twist of fender.

A List of Things That Have Saved My Ass

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 in a couple of weeks. Aside from a few U.S. road trips, I’ve seen most of Europe plus some time in Israel and a few countries south of the Equator. I’ve roughed it hostel-style when I motorcycled through the U.K. and Ireland, traveled business class on the company dime (back when I was a respected professional, before I decided to piss away my fortune on this whole writing thing) and settled down for a time in different places—Dublin, London, and my current ex-pat home, Bolivia. Traveling in style or on a budget have plenty of their own unique pitfalls, plus a few in common.