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 life. A few hours later I’m on my third flight and at last, almost a full day since I left San Francisco, I reach my new home: Cochabamba, Bolivia. Spanish Colonial architecture in varying states of disrepair and ruin. Bursts of color from shop signs and the native garb of the street vendors; the multi-colored busses and sometimes whole buildings painted luminescent pink or green. It’s barely noon but it feels like midnight. My adopted home city is at 8,500 feet, it’s streets crammed with vehicles and there’s no smog control. Combine the thin air, carbon monoxide and hallucinatory colors with my thirty-six sleepless hours and I feel like I’m breathing on Mars.
Dispatch from Interzone: Breathing on Mars
God and Lung Cancer
I shook a man’s hand Thursday night and that man was dead Friday morning. I’ll call him “T.” That I hardly knew T is an understatement. I met him for the first time at a hospital on Wednesday night and the second on Thursday. We never spoke but for my own “hello.” He was lucid but weak, and while his lack of strength was no doubt appropriate to his condition, the frailty that possessed him was not. T had not lived as a frail or fragile man, this much was abundantly clear. His beard was very long and very grey, and a fair amount of his tattoos were done back when tattoos made one unwelcome in most places. I don’t know how old he was but in normal, civilian years I’d guess he was probably around 300.
The Rural Juror
Once more.
Again.
Try it again, slower.
Okay, now you’re dropping out.
Take your time.
Ignore the punctuation.
Pay attention to the punctuation.
Relax. Make it more natural.
Pick it up. A little more force.
You’re dropping out again.
You’re off mic.
Slurring a bit. Take it from the second line.
From the top of the paragraph.
You’re off mic again.
Dropped a plural. Try it again.
You lost the “and.” Make it clearer.
Lost the “the.”
Break the narrator’s voice from the dialogue.
Let’s do that curtain line again.
A little faster.
Don’t rush it.
A little sharper on your enunciation.
One more time.
Again.
Harrison IV, Clevenger I
It always starts with a voice. Sometimes there’s an idea for a person or a plot, but the pen doesn’t hit the paper until I hear a voice. Without the voice, I’m lost. Eight hours of writing means three hours of scribbling and five hours of pacing, listening and waiting. It helps to assume the role of the voice, which is one of the reasons I’m comfortable working in the first person. Dermaphoria has been written in chunks as a pseudo diary, and many chapters were refined in blog format in certain nethercorners of the web, as I found it easier to be the narrator posting a personal account of his life, anonymously on line, than to be Craig at his desk writing a novel. Sometimes, I feel the best way to inhabit the voice, or vice versa, is not to write a story, but instead write a letter.
Unfinished Business
Originally published in the July 22, 2004 “Men’s Issue” of the Santa Barbara Independent
My father is a man of few words, and he delivers those few with a surly charm that can, at times, render a poignant father-son moment dark comedy. He sat on my couch during a recent visit, while I finished a piece for an approaching deadline.
“Boy,” he said, putting his book aside. Addressing any of his sons, regardless of age, as boy usually preceded something serious. “You and I got any unfinished business?”
Watching the Watchmen
(Originally published in the Santa Barbara Independent, 8 July 2004)
My idea for this article was to write a sober, rational overview of the USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act, originally slated as part of a series for my regular Books Unbound column. I’d planned a close examination of those sections of the Act regarding privacy and free speech as they pertained to the average citizen’s reading habits.
Rare First Sedition
(Originally published in the Santa Barbara Independent, 24 June 2004)
In anticipation of our forthcoming Independence Day, I took to spelunking the Political Science shelves for some appropriate reviewing material. Imagine my complete lack of surprise when confronted by a wall of inflammatory volumes from both the Left and the Right, written with crystal clear hindsight and assailing the evils of the opposite end of the political spectrum, asserting the corruption of mass media by the other party, along with the occasional Green, Anarchist, or Libertarian author insisting all the other guys have it wrong, both Left and Right.
