I made my living as a full-time writer until I dropped out — I was hanging out with my wife on the south coast of Crete, in a block shelter on the seacliff between Pitsidia and Matala Bay. I’d just quit my job at the Arizona Republic’s Arizona Magazine. A guild was forming, and management was pissed off about it and froze all…

She comes in and rearranges my stuff when I’m gone — I am standing in front of the gas stove at the San Francisco apartment. It is probably from the 1970s, and the oven still bakes along. Three of the burners work fine, one does not work. One day on my return, I turned on the fire under a teapot intended…

The Secret Journals of a lay psychiatrist — As I open this chapter of my life to pubic view … that was a Freudian slip but I don’t care it all goes in … it feels like a scene from a movie, the curtain pulled aside, me, in noir and blanc, peeing down at the street. When the…

In my first About Me I gave the vantage point of a young ego — In my first “About Me,” I described myself with a romantic perspective. I was creating, from what I had wrought, a narrative which would provide an ego identity with adequate defenses. What I did was based in cognitive dissonance. Whatever happened, I justified myself. There was a part of myself…

A Tesla was fun to drive before the nagging bitch got hold of it — It started out great, and then the expensive “dings” began to multiply. We were pleased with the lower rates, reflecting that we were driving safely, except for the troubling signs that the only way to avoid higher rates was to use FSD. My wife began to complain that if a…

The Lay Psychiatrist explains how healing is done — I have a web page where you can set up an appointment, but before you come in you have to call me and give me some information about what you need. My three o’clock, Mr. Spire, told me he longs to be a healer. I said I long to be…

The Lay Psychiatrist is in, and something is in the elevator — “Something coming up in the lift,” he said. “I say something, because it’s not a person. Or at least it doesn’t feel like it’s a person in the dream. I hear the lift, and I have this fear of what’s coming up into the light.” He suffers from delusions. Identification…

“The wind is in from Africa, last night I couldn’t sleep.” * — The photo above shows what Matala Bay looks like now. In 1980, when we spent three months there, none of the buildings in the photo existed. When I was thirty years old I was on a trajectory. My wife advised we sell our four bedroom house in Phoenix, because we…

We want men to be protective of the weaker, and I think we have an exceptional military if it has good leadership. I especially like General Milly. These younger men flying flags from their pickups no doubt want to be in a hierarchal order, with good leadership to make them proud of themselves as part of something larger, and shared. But absent compulsory service at 18, for at least a couple of years, they start forming up into proud boys or something like that. Of course calling themselves proud boys is no different from Fox calling its news fair and balanced. As they say, "the lady doth protest too much." (the older sense, of insisting that something is true.) There is something poignantly sad watching them try to get what they really want by falling in behind criminals who know how to manipulate this need to the dark side.