There Might Be A Different

When You Read A Short Story, You Come Out A Little More Aware And A Little More In Love With The World Around You. What I Want Is To Have The Reader Come Out Just 6 Percent More Awake To The World.

I Know That My Only Chance At Any Kind Of Depth Or Profundity Is To Linger Within The Story, Trying To Make It Distinguish Itself.

In My Personal And Spiritual Life, I Reject That. I Don't Believe In That. I'm Always Trying To Get My Mind Into A Less Judgmental Place, Making Less Rigid Judgments About Things Like "perverse" Versus "pure." But In Terms Of Prose, Those Sorts Of Oppositions Seem To Work.

I Am Trying To Remember That Things Have Certainly Been Crazier In Human History And They May Get Crazier Here And Now, And [here I Am Trying To Be Optimistic] It's Even A Good Thing, To Be Going Through All Of This, If Only To Be Reminded That History Hasn't Stopped - Human Existence Is As Fundamentally Unmanageable Now As It Ever Was.

I Might Take From The Current Political Chaos A Desire To Somehow Reflect Its Essential Qualities In A Story - The Blatant Lies That Get Accepted With Repetition; The Way Mass Media Seems To Be Agitating People En Masse; The Way, Particularly, That A Relatively Lucky And Affluent And Privileged Population Can Be Undone By A Certain Spoiled Quality; That Feeling When Two Decent People Violently Disagree, Because They Are Arguing From Two Non-intersecting Data Sets - Well, The List Goes On.