I need to go to Los Angeles

I'm a lucid dreamer, which means that I'm consciously present and alert when I dream. Sound asleep, I direct what I do (quelle suprise, directors direct their dreams). Last night I found myself in a dream where it was imperative to save life, and I couldn't do it, because I don't have a car. I can't dream the unreal. Being car-less and stranded prompts a larger question.

Did God ordain that I should work in a factory and never write a word? -- perhaps so.

I sold my car to buy a third novel starring Chris and Peachy. Friends sent money to help me finish and publicize it. Now the punishment intensifies, no food, no car, no book sales. God has a strange sense of humor. An encyclopedia of TV tropes quoted a passage I wrote 17 years ago, a story with hot sex scenes, murder and gunplay, private jets and limosines, no different than my recent work. I write about luxury and intrigue because I experienced it, traveled in circles of wealth and power, cruelty and kindness, the electrifying chemistry of hard men and beautiful women. I try to keep my stories realistic. Honest. Plausible.

As far as I know, no one else in my family tree ever wrote fiction. I'm not certain if they read anything other than newspaper headlines, medicine labels, tax tables, and product assembly instructions. Literature was something taught in school and suffered as an irrational duty, like Bible verses and prayers on Sunday accompanied by a pre-printed envelope, a vig for God in weekly installments. I have brothers and cousins who worked in factories, paid God, stuck at it and gained union seniority, better money, generously defined benefits.

They eat well, have nice homes and new cars. I pine for grapefruit juice, casaer salads, fried chicken, haven't had any in many months. I bought electricity, coffee, lunch meat and chili, cigarettes by the carton, so I could sit and write, listen to music on the radio until I saw what happened moment by moment in a story that seems authorless now, completed. My people stumble into situations not of their choosing (nor mine). Life happens. We try to do the best we can, or raise hell, if hell sinks to an unacceptable depth. "We only live once," Chris says in the final crisis, winning a woman's trust with something other than money.

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I spent my one life accordingly. I worked in factories as a teenager and young adult, decided to join the circus of film and television, became a screenwriter and novelist, careened from failure to failure indifferently because the work mattered, the market didn't. One hopes to improve, but I don't think that's what happens with most authors.

There is an apogee in every creative career. Fred and Ginger, sprightly young things; Ayn Rand's second novel; Gilded Age industrialization after the adolescent tantrum of Civil War and before adult World Wars taxed everything twice, made America a nonprofit global cop. The era in which we are living now is strewn with vacant factories and plump political lies, a post-industrial welfare state that shed manufacturing jobs, became a global "consumer of last resort" on credit, no way to repay it.

I did something similar, walked away from employment, ran up credit cards I couldn't repay. Perhaps it's a national disease. As a unique American snowflake I stamped my foot and wrote what I liked, the way I liked it, first person. Hahahaha. Nothing left to do but laugh at myself, try to forgive, make a cup of coffee and think about dinner, cold chili over baked potato.

It's important to be good to myself to the extent possible. Maybe I'll mosey down the road and buy a Kit Kat and a bottle of fake orange juice. I spent the afternoon ripping out partitions in the horse barn, throat parched from decades-old straw dust and barn filth, something to do while I'm not writing. There is nothing further to write. I hit a million words recently, plenty of punishment, thanks, don't care for any extra or additional. I'd rather shovel shit.