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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Not At This Address
My mother, my uncle tells me, has lost her wits. She lets a group of neighborhood kids into her house. They steal from her. Worse yet, she gives them money. Blank checks. She signs the checks, and these kids fill in whatever amounts they want. “They’re robbing her,” he says, “robbing her blind.”
April 1999A View Of The Lake
The lakes of northern Michigan were mysterious to me when I was growing up. There was always at least one undeveloped side and a few swampy coves on each. I saw the trees on the lake’s edge as the border to an endless forest full of bears and big cats.
April 1999The Madman
The Lebanese village of Magdaluna, where I grew up, had none of the modern conveniences. It was stuck somewhere in the eighteenth century until after the Great War, when my father returned from the army with his beat-up radio. When I was a child, we had no running water in our homes, electricity was unheard of, and our toilets were holes in the ground way out in a field.
April 1999The Life And Times Of A Minor Western Writer
For almost a month now I’ve been trying to collect the fifty-five dollars that a national environmental magazine owes me for a four-hundred-word book review. That’s two twenties, a ten, and a five.
April 1999Before And After
Every day of the month before I committed suicide, I listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and was perfectly happy. It focused the mind wonderfully to know that, barring a miracle, in four weeks, then three, then two, I would no longer exist.
April 1999A Piano Player Enters The Room
Chick Chom Tang and I are very much alike: childless, suburban-bred, TV-culture baby boomers who somehow missed the boat on the Promises of Youth. Neither of us has ever come close to marriage. Both of us have been poor (by American standards) all our adult lives.
April 1999Payday
It’s summer, and I’m taking two women from a foundation that helps fund my work to see where the money is being spent, and if the money is being turned into productive, life-sustaining gardens.
March 1999Homage To A Sorcerer
Carlos Castaneda has died. There aren’t many to bear witness to or for him, because he didn’t allow many witnesses. One met him by invitation, usually, and even that was more fluke than not. Those invited were of all sorts. I happened to be one, for reasons that weren’t clear to me and probably aren’t important. Perhaps I was called to be a witness?
March 1999Liberation Marketing And The Culture Trust
Liberation marketing takes the old mass-culture critique — consumerism as conformity — fully into account, acknowledges it, addresses it, and solves it. Liberation marketing imagines consumers breaking free from the old order, tearing loose from the shackles with which capitalism has bound us, escaping the routine of bureaucracy and hierarchy, getting in touch with our true selves, and, finally, finding authenticity, that holiest of consumer grails.
March 1999The Disappearing God
I don’t mistake self-punishment for devotion anymore. I am a born-again believer in lovingkindness. I don’t waste my time with a God who leaves me. My God lies down with me and tells me I am beauty and grace incarnate. My God celebrates me as gloriously as I celebrate Him. I worship a God who believes in me.
February 1999
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