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…

The Lay Psychiatrist is in, and some thing 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…

I seriously want you to be funny, so let’s examine the process — We are reading a Costa Rica bulletin board where a Frenchman we know only on postings there wrote a weird post. WTF is he talking about? And we laughed because we were not apart from the joke. “I have empathy for people who are trying to be funny,” I said…

Drinking Hornitos with salt and lime —