Down South Perspective

April 14, 2006, 4 AM local time. I’m leaving this little Caribbean island on the dawn flight tomorrow, the 15th, as planned. If I don’t finish this book today I will do so when I get up very early in the morning, at “first chicken,” as the expression goes here. I want to finish writing on this island, where it all started. Tonight at dusk a surfbuddy, Nick Truman, will come over to take a photograph of me sitting here at my writing table.The manuscript, this unedited book, on the table to my right, is (will be) just over 900 pages. Near the bottom of that pile is (will be) this page, the one you’re reading now; there should be no more than two pages below it when we do the shot. Maybe three. Maybe more. We’ll see how it goes.

Not counting my 1998 murder investigation, I started writing this book a little more than three years ago – contemporaneously with Bush’s criminal empire-building war, the second one — so I’ve been working on it for about a thousand days. Taking into consideration the months during which I didn’t write because I was busy getting hit by a van, metaphorically, and factoring in how many pages I wrote then immediately deleted in disgust, each page of that manuscript represents about a day’s work. On some of those days after writing I pretty much felt like my image on the cover of the book – although it doesn’t exist yet, I envision the cover as a graphic representation of my face, with my forehead bleeding from staring at the blank page.

Armed with this knowledge, please glance at the photograph Nick took again, at the manuscript sitting there, noticing the thickness of it and keeping in mind how thin each individual page is, and how each page represents a day’s work. Also notice how thin I am, thin and sapped and dispirited from all my diseases and dis-eases, my consumption and Lyme disease and the one I can’t pronounce, plus my after-writing throes and queasy gut and terminal loneliness and dark shit and sick puppy shit and the other shit that almost killed me over the last three years.

Here’s my final piece of writing advice, in the form of an observation: If you’re going to write a book, really write one (not someday) you better be one driven motherfucker.

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From Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise. This passage was cut in the first edit and does not appear in the book.

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