Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

  It Makes No Difference And the sun don't shine anymore And the rains fall down on my door Now there's no love As true as the love that dies untold But the clouds never hung so low before - It Makes No Difference Robbie Robertson                 Sometimes when I let my imagination rove I picture my dad running across a Montana wheat field, dark brown dirt under his fingernails, hair tousled, and long summer days where the only rule his parents laid out was, “Be home by dark.” In summers, in Montana, darkness came closer to midnight than regular dinner time hours. I imagine as the long day wound down, my dad sitting down next to a small fire, Montana cowboys and sheepherders telling stories, smoking cigarettes, and singing songs.   And I’m sure their voices cracked and sang off tune, and maybe the songs were traditional and passed down from generation to generation and may have sounded not unli...

  For What It’s Worth … I am a Poet. My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying, learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. It’s a great job. Naturally, I’m starving to death…. --Lew Welch--             In the Spring of '97, I started seeing The Withdrawals on a regular basis.  I was single, making a decent chunk of change, and really didn't enjoy hanging out by myself.   So, like I was still in college, I went trolling for live music.   Nothing compared to the live experience of dancing, getting to know the regulars, the songs, and eventually the band.   Being a regular fan broke down the myth that separated them from me, the artist from the fan.   When my only experience of art was in a museum, a big auditorium, a published book, a radio station, the artist seemed somehow different, somehow speci...

On Being a Writer                 I’m not sure why, but at an obviously weak moment when I was 17 years old I sat down at my desk and wrote a story.   And after no editing, revising, creative writing classes, or real encouragement from any real writers or teachers, no ambition, discipline or any reasonable degree of aptitude  announced –to myself mostly –and my best friend, “I want to be a writer.”                 I wish I’d never uttered that phrase.   Some ____ years later, I’m saddled with the weight of that phrase.   I had no idea what I was getting into.   I mean, this is America.  No one really writes anymore, or at least how I imagined writing to be.   Stephen King or Mary Higgins Clark don’t write; they work:  8 hours a day, complex formulas, books out on deadlines, b...

            Under the white hospital gown, I am wearing underwear and I'm waiting for the Doctor. The room is bare; next to the ceiling a small digital video camera is trained down to film my next interaction.               Despite what it looks like, I'm not a patient and I'm not really visiting a doctor. No: I'm a standardized patient at the university medical school, and am administering a test to medical students. Today, I'm a patient with a "Duodenal ulcer" and I'm in a lot of pain.             As third-year students, they are to interview me, obtain a relevant medical history, perform a simple diagnostic examination, make an initial diagnosis, explain a treatment plan, and do it all within 15 minutes while I grudgingly answer and make sure they understand how much pain I'm in.     ...

Maze The low sun casts the dry, desolate San Luis Valley into a harsh, flat brown.                 I should be watching the road, scanning the horizon for cops, anything but drinking and thinking, smoking and thinking. Stop thinking.  Stop thinking.   Unshackled from my day job, I'm driving like some sort of '90s version of Hunter S. Thompson , "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs begin to take hold."                 Feeling strung out from the everyday madness of responsible life, I want escape from this increasingly bitter search for career and family and the rigors of being a American in 1998, and I'm not getting it.  So I light up and take a puff.                 Marijuana, pot, grass, kind-bud,...