I had trouble coming up with questions to ask myself, so I asked my wife, who is a psychologist in a prison, to ask me questions like I was one of her inmate patients.

I see that you were placed in the mental health system. What prompted this?

I wrote a book about my favorite authors and their metaphysical ukuleles. It’s as crazy as it sounds.

What makes it crazy?

I didn’t mean to do it, exactly. I started out bored one day in New Mexico, kind of stranded in a diner, so I started writing about Herman Melville’s time with in the Marquesas, living with a tribe he believed were cannibals. The story seemed more real to me once I gave Melville a ukulele, so I went with it.

“UKULELE FALLOUT”

1. Healthy and Optimistic

Richard Brautigan’s ukulele fell suddenly from the sky on a sunny October day. It landed in Washington Square Park on the North Shore of San Francisco, not far from the Benjamin Franklin statue.

The first to approach Richard Brautigan’s ukulele was a homeless wino. He watched the ukulele fall from the sky while eating a sandwich he had been given across the street at Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral. The sandwich fell out of the wino’s hand, occupied what sky remained between the hand and the grass of Washington Square Park, and, like Richard Brautigan’s ukulele, took its place among the poplars and cypresses, the sandboxes and sprinklers and tennis balls saturated with dog spit in the park. The wino picked up his sandwich and continued to eat.

A jogger also saw Richard Brautigan’s ukulele fall from the sky. She jogged over to the fallen ukulele.

The Questions I’m Most Often Asked

Do you write longhand or on a computer?

Longhand’s all right for short stuff, like when I’ve just edged around a corner, let everybody else keep walking, so I can write a story down right quick. Used to taxiing in a plane and taking off were when I wrote a lot of short pieces, because I couldn’t have my laptop out, but also because I couldn’t imagine just sitting there staring at the back of the seat in front of me. Keyboards are my preference, though. Ergonomic, black, wired. I can go really fast. I can even forget I’m typing, sometimes. Like my mind’s just pressing letters onto the screen. And I go through keyboards pretty fast, too. But, lately, the bones in my hands are wearing out faster. It’s not ideal. But so far it’s just in my three-times broken hand, with the messed-up finger tendons. So I guess it’s no surprise.

Early in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, protagonist Maxine Turnow enters into an internet space called DeepArcher.  It’s not exactly a web site, not exactly a video game, but it acts similarly to both.  It is, essentially, a safe space for coders to hide or share information.  Under the guise of avatars, users are able to wander through a variety of digital worlds and communicate with other avatars in attendance.  The pixelated landscape comes into focus slowly for Maxine.  She “recognizes from a thousand train and bus stations and airports… the smoothly cross-dawning image of an interior whose detail, for a moment breathtakingly, is far in advance of anything she’s seen.”  She intuits that the program is pushing her toward boarding a shuttle, but she hesitates, enjoying the complexity and effluvia of the station around her.  “‘It’s all right,’ dialogue boxes assure her, ‘it’s part of the experience, part of getting constructively lost.’”  Maxine drifts deeper into the experience, “after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself.”