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…

Takes off his pants for the Lay Psychiatrist — When he walked into the room I thought it was a man on stilts. He had the longest legs I’ve ever seen, so absurdly long that I asked him to take off his trousers so that I could have a better look at them. “Just drape them over the arm,”…

The Lay Psychiatrist meets an elderly Don Juan — I heard the beating of hooves on cobblestone. Don Juan was dressed in black, though there was an enormous red plume in his hat that seemed unaffected by the surrounding air as he thundered up and reined in the white stud in front of a tavern. When I awakened from…

The Lay Psychiatrist learns about the spiritual puberty — “I need the romance,” young man, the old woman said. She wasn’t eighty yet but she was never going to see seventy again either. She’d called me because she thought a lay psychiatrist is a sex therapist, who shows a girl how to take it in the vernacular. She had…