YOLO Gone Loco

A FRIEND OF mine once described these essays as wind sprints, a warmup blast before the “big game” of a novel or novel-esque creative non-fiction project—whatever I was working on at the time. They were fun, quick primers and, after writing about a hundred of them, I discovered they were teaching me to be a better writer. Since I tried to set them at a maximum of 1,500 words (rarely succeeding at first) I began to appreciate the economy of language, the importance of the first line, the effectiveness of the wrap-up and the critical brevity that is, as Shakespeare put it, the soul of wit.
My neighborhood is an eclectic one—a mix of artists, aging hippies, free-spirited eco-conscious capitalists, some professors, army veterans, landscapers, at least one writer, computer programmers, potheads, blue-collar, white-collar, no-collar, some married couples who prefer their own gender, some who prefer the other, a transgender septuagenarian who does yard work in a bikini, and the affable survivors of divorce who salvage what they can from their failed unions to seek new paths to happiness.
That’s the physical neighborhood. “The neighborhood,” though, is also a reference to my own mind—a peculiar, nebulous hamlet where nothing is what it seems and reality can expand, contract, somersault and transmogrify at any given moment. It is this neighborhood, superimposed on the other one, that has resulted in this collection of stories.
There is, I admit, at least one seed of reality in every anecdote, from which grows a strange hybrid of fictional and non-fictional fruits. My “neighborhood” is a place where, along with all the mundane stuff, I can freely have a beer with an emperor penguin, converse with a spider about the art of web building, receive press statements from mosquitos calling for a truce and strike a deal with an owl after I catch him wearing the necklace he stole from me.
Welcome to the neighborhood. Be prepared because anything can happen, and hopefully the possibility of possibility makes your stay entirely worthwhile.