for Gen Tsaconas
To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle.
— Confucius
I live beachside in San Diego, California, in a small ground-floor studio with a fold-out couch, a burned-out RCA color television, an eight-by-four kitchen stocked with miniature appliances, and my Toulouse-Lautrec lithos tacked to the walls. I have surrounded myself with philosophical texts — Critique of Pure Reason, The World as Will and Idea, The Republic (both translations) — even though I have no idea what Kant, Schopenhauer, Plato, and the rest are talking about. Eight years ago, in high school, I wrote an ending to an unfinished novel by Mark Twain called Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, and my instructor, Mrs. Ramsey, was so impressed that she thought I should make an appearance on television and claim to be Twain’s ghost. Her praise was enough to hatch the notion that I am a writer, but so far I have not been able to duplicate that early success. In the interim I work as a prep cook at a famous bayside resort and jazz club. (I’ve never seen so many roaches in a kitchen; now and then you’ll catch them carrying off whole hams.) This is my sixteenth job in the last eight years.
