An Excerpt, Please Be Gentle.

So I have started – very cautiously – doing some writing on a novel that I have been thinking about for years. It will be one of those long and awful and difficult novels (for you and for me both).

I have had the basic pieces in place for a couple of years, but I’m kind of afraid of it. I don’t know if I can write it.

But I figure that this is a good time to do something scary, and since I don’t rock climb or wrestle alligators, this is going to be my scary Everest for awhile. It will probably end up being my white whale (Moby Dick reference! What?! What?!).

So I was going through my (giant plastic tub of) notes the other night and I found this little bit and I was pleased to have written it.

This character lives in an amalgam of San Diego and Los Angeles, so some of the specific reference points may not make any sense, but what do you care? This is all first draft quality stuff anyway.

This is while he is narrating as he drives (sometimes it is in first person, this totally is).

Anyway, I digress. Sometimes I digress so that I can feel better about myself.

I pull off the 15 and onto Friars Road. It’s an eight-lane-wide traffic artery sprawling fat and busy and fertile like some Cal Trans version of a lady-in-waiting. Somewhere a civil engineer runs his thumb slowly along his lower lip and leers at Friars Road. Oh yes, he says to himself, one day you’ll be a freeway too.

Eventually there will be no roads or streets, only freeways of varying width and height. The eminence of their domains eating up everything that one would have been driving to in the first place. Doesn’t matter anyway, we’re all pretty used to driving by now. Driving and driving and driving and driving. At work there’s a guy whose round-trip mileage to and from his cubicle is greater than the distance that a medieval serf traveled away from the place of his birth during his whole life. One day I told the guy at work that. It was the first and last time that we spoke.

In the shimmer and mist of the light rain at night, I start to imagine that the lights of the on-coming cars are little fishers in the drippy present and that sunlight is burning through from the dreams of the future, but when I get there, as the lights pass by me so bright – as I pass through the fabric of the Now, I look out over a ghastly America; it’s all freeway.

The America of our future is all freeways, jammed together, one right along the other, on top of the other, the asphalt hot, the concrete jagged and broken from the sheer tonnage of that much engineering crushing in on itself. Below, through the steaming black tar-filled cracks – as if through the slats in a pier – I can see down below and it’s only more freeways. Above me there is no sky, just a thick spider web webbing of on-ramps and off-ramps and clover leaves and I realize now that there is no sun in the future, only the blazing head lamps of an entire world relentlessly on the move. On the go to no where. Literally. No Where. A mad rush to dawn. Only there is no dawn. The dawn has been replaced by the very lack of itself. There is only going. There is only speed. There is only velocity. There is only eagerness to find a destination.


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