I spent the better part of this windswept weekend revamping my old web site, 8763 Wonderland. Just because I no longer post at Wonderland, I realized a few days ago, does not nor should not imply that I’m absolved of the responsibility to keep the place neat and tidy for the thousands of visitors who stray over that way every month.

So I put on my cyber workclothes and set out to fix up the neglected joint, starting with a new coat of paint in the form of a new presentation and style and I’m still working on updating the roughly 647 posts over there: removing dead links and images, adding tags that should have been plugged in long ago, and all that jazz.

What a weird, strange trip it’s been re-reading some of the material at Wonderland. The site first went up in July of ‘05 and became fairly inactive after I left L.A. in September ‘06. First of all, there are the Trace stories, of course, nearly 70 of them, the often neo-noir adventures of my alter ego during that tumultuous time in my life, a down on his heels writer struggling to survive between gigs while battling illness, both physical and psychological, alcoholism, and a bevy of women in his life; not to mention the hucksters and rainmakers who cross the path of every professional writer.

If one is inclined to study my own character arc through Trace, the story titled The Misfits, written on April 26, 2006, charts the beginning of my downfall, the slow descent back into the murky waters of porn that I promised never to swim in again. An interesting calm before the breakdown is evident in the elegiac strains of Saturday, written on May 27, 2006. And then with The Poet and the Pistolero (July 2, 2006) the obligation to continue providing Trace tales for my readers simply took on an odd, almost psychotropic turn; to me this is truly the end of the Trace canon but Return to New Colombia on July 10, 2006, attempted to play Paul Auster-inspired shenanigans, as if mocking my readers. It was a true revelation of the narrator moment, a literary conceit devised to say, “Look, people, I am so done with this character.” In other words: I am so done with the life I’ve been leading this past year or so.

The story that provided this blog with its name, Carver’s Dog, was, I think, a pretty decent Trace story. I was tremendously inspired by the stark, soul-searching minimalist prose of Raymond Carver in those dark days, reading “Cathedral” and Ultramarine over Happy Hour margaritas at the Acapulco Cantina and Grill in Glendale. Definitely not recommended reading for those engaged in a suddenly prolonged wrestling match with the less than better angels of manic-depression but when one is in an uncontrolled manic-depressive state, there is no such thing as being wrong (and, believe me, there were plenty of people asking me back then, “Are you sure you should be reading that?”).

My stalker, Laura Kandl, is also well-represented in the Trace stories, I noticed while editing this afternoon, in the chilling A Sexual Obsession With Soup Pots, Stalked, and Don’t Take Your Guns To Town. Hi, Laura. How are you?

Not all of the fiction posted at Wonderland was Trace-related, however. I was beginning to explore with flash fiction back then, quick 200-words-or-less blasts of narrative, often dialogue-driven, like the obscure “William Tell Overture”:

“I’ll tell ya about the William Tell Overture.”

“Okay.”

“Do you really wanna know?”

“About what? The William Tell Overture?”

“Yeah. The William Tell Overture.”

“Okay, yeah. What about it?”

“Nah. Never mind.”

“What?”

“You don’t really wanna hear it. I can tell. You’re just humoring me.”

“Knock that shit off. Don’t start that. I want to hear about the goddamn William Tell Overture!”

“Heh. The fuck you do.”

I remember discussing that story with gentle Joseph Mailander over drinks at the Tam O’Shanter on March 12, 2006, during my birthday celebration with J.M., John Shannon, and Will Campbell. Joseph didn’t get the story and John chimed in with, “The dialogue is set to the rhythm of the William Tell Overture.”

Joseph Mailander is well-represented at 8763 Wonderland, as he is here at Carver’s Dog. I’ve interviewed him over there; he has chimed in on how to make a perfect Manhattan cocktail; and he sometimes penned dead-on literary parodies in the comments section of posted stories. In January 2006, when Joseph and I publicly applauded rain on the coveted Rose Parade, one commenter called us a “couple of old farts”. In elegant reply, Joseph wrote:

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I turn 49 in a month. I visualize myself at 68 (which must be the first OF age, as it is fifty years downstream from age 18):

It will be a gray autumn day. I am standing before a certain rock in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side and thinking, “Damn, you rock, I used to jog by you every day for fencing practice, when I was 18 and all this stuff we call adult life, my whole life, was ahead of me…you never gave me any trouble, you never wanted anything, you just sat there, marking the moment, and I passed you by, knowing when I saw you I only had a quarter mile left out of two miles, but also knowing…now, I can’t run even a quarter mile.

But you know, I never forgot you, not even now that it’s fifty years later, here you are and here I am. You’re just going to keep being this old rock, this Manhattan schist, and me, I’m going to just go down from here and won’t be able to look at you or even think of you, but damn, it was sure nice to know you for fifty of your four billion years; you were a great rock and you meant a lot to me…in fact, no matter what path I took after you, had it been that attorney path Dorothy Gioia and my ex-wife wanted or that Ivy League path nobody wanted or that insolent man path my father wanted or that banker path Lynn wanted or that writer path I wanted, and no matter what chick I ever hooked up with and what I ever learned to cook and no matter which of these paths I loved or rued or wherever I went, I would have gone through those fifty years, and yet ended up right here, you see, you and me, you, the rock, and me with all my life behind me, I would have come back to you…after any path at a…because right here, you were the only thing that really registered with me…you were the only thing that never once disappointed me, or did anything to me at all, you just told me that I was young and alive and could run past you as the wind passes you, without a care or complication in a shared eternity….

And I’ll take a couple of steps back down the path and then I’ll take a little jog right past that rock, like I did fifty years before…just for the irony of it all…

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Joseph is a good friend. So are David and Julie Scott. I had dinner with those beautiful people one Sunday in February ‘06 when my depression was at its worst. After dining with the Scotts I went home and wrote Kafka in L.A., the most mean-tempered words I ever flung at two women very close to me at that time, “Miss L”, aka Hurricane Shirley, and Josephine Gillis. The opening of the piece is foreboding enough:

An unseasonably warm night here in L.A. It’s February and it feels like summer’s embrace out there. And a full moon to boot, which just might be feeding my depression, as if my darkness really needs a little more fuel.

And the final summation:

The absence of pain. Sometimes I think that’s all we can ask for, not to be happy, but the absence of pain.

The absence of pain. I’m still not there and I don’t know if many of us ever reach that lofty plateau. But the important thing, the thesis of this entire commentary, is that I continue to evolve. As a fictive narrator of self-reflective flash fiction — that’s the only speculative writing I do, all else is for profit — and as a human being.

John Steinbeck once asked “Can a man think out his life or must he just tag along?” There’s a middle ground, though, thinking ahead and then sitting back and seeing where that thinking takes you; not always to good places but sometimes to places where you are, for once in God knows how many years, at a level you can cautiously call “comfortable”.