What drives me.

I guess if you want to know who I am you need to know what drives me. It comes down to one simple thing. Writing, I love to write!!!! I love to write so much that I live and breathe it. I mostly write potboilers because those types of stories are the grit that is under your nails and as hard as you try you can never get it out. So my desire to write leads to other passions in my life that feed this addiction called writing. One of those is paint by numbers. I love paint by numbers. It fuels my obsessive nature. Which then leads me back to writing and how I obsess over the fact that I do not have time to do it.

The Machinations Of Dr Groovis Toovis And My Relationship with Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick was visionary. But they were tortured visions. The kind where you wake up in a cold sweat. I knew Philip. I accepted him. Excesses and all. The words that he wrote, dripped honey on the paper. I was drawn to his writing like a moth to a flame. I had to have all the things he penned. But, I can't think that I didn't have a hand or a leg(albeit invisible) in his writing career.

People gravitate to his novel Blade Runner, or, for those in the know, such as myself, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. But, I was enamored with his masterpiece, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch.

I was so fascinated by it because I am positive he was so inspired by my sci fi master piece I wrote two years before he wrote his.  The Machinations of Dr. Groovis Toovis.

The Machinations of Dr. Groovis Toovis, is a story about a super villian like Dr. Fu Manchu. In it he wakes up one day with a vision that he can change the world and make it a more groovy place by putting LSD in the water supply of Los Angeles, thus expanding the population's collective mind and bringing it to the highest elevation of enlightenment. But something goes awry.

I will not tell you the rest because I want you to hunt down this classic and read it and gain your own enrichment.

Greetings again

Greetings from the the sun-baked land of LA. It's hot here. But not as hot as my career. I sense a comeback folks. I am putting together deals. Meeting important people. Big things are on the horizon. It's all about the break wide open!

Sun will rise and great cities will fall. Dirty angels will blast comforting notes from their battered horns.

The Mailman And My Wild Days And Nights With The Great Charles Bukowski

Nobody wrote like Buk. Nobody had the stones like he did, to live life to the fullest. to celebrate the grit and existence of the loser. The rooming house boarder, the  Barfly. Bukowski was the bard of the bum, the miserable minstrel, walking lonely streets of LA. People would look at him and see him as a dirty old man and pass "notes" to one another like giggly school girls. But they would never get the soul of such a great writer, such a great, but ragged prince.

I knew Buk. Drank with him when he was just a brash thirty-five year old with a head full of stories but not the voice to convey those yarns. I gave him his voice.

We were out bar hopping one night, and I lent him a copy of my latest opus called The Mailman, about a man who one day wakes up after a surreal vision and decides he needs to deliver letters to the good citizens of the City Of Angels. So, he goes to work for the Post Office. This is a story that holds a mirror up to America in the middle sixties and shows what  an ugly beast it had become.

Well Charlie took it and staggered out of the bar.  He read it that night cover to cover. Needless to say he loved it-- in fact, he was in love with it! So inspired by it, he trashed his little room in search of his typewriter-- he had to write... had to put ink to paper because what he read in my book touched him in ways that he did not understand. My words reached those dark places in his dark soul. They soothed him the way David's harp soothed King Saul.

So, when he found his typewriter, he began pounding away at what would be his iconic novel Post Office.

This work would not only go on to be his best seller, it would be talked about in the halls of Academia. It would be loved, caressed by generations of dough-eyed collegiates.

I like to think I had an invisible hand in steering such greatness.

Gypsies

Fire burns  in their eyes and they whirl like dervishes. Dancing for change, love, and piece of mind. Their costumes are garish and they exude a zest for life that only gypsies can exude. I look at their Medusa like hair and get lost in the pyre that is their passion for living. Oh they taunt me in this city square to the eerie laughs of Karl Marx and Victor Hugo.

A Moment Of Clarity

Ok, as the train lurches back and forth on the way to Brussels, I see things more clearly. My head feels like a barbell--but even so, the world seems like a much lighter place. I no longer feel like a wounded Atlas with a grimy globe on my shoulders. I've learned alot in the last few days--some of those memories I thought it best to erase. 

I think we will all be ok if we love each other and appreciate each other's differences. Amsterdam is now but a fly spec. But the lessons learned are gigantic and they shall remain with me for the rest of my life.