I’m sharpening the pen on the strop as we speak. Just got the novel back from my U.K. editor Charlie. Fantastic, painstakingly detailed feedback. Really, if you want a smart critique, hit me up for Charlie’s contract info. It was less brutal than I’d expected, but I’ll admit it: I’m dreading having to tear at my narrative threads. But that’s the path, right? The finery’s in the edits, at least for me. Maybe Hemingway shat gold on every first draft. Not me. I shit shit. And then I work it like Play-Doh.

I still remember being in college and asking a poetry teacher/friend if he knew of any writing contacts or gigs he might hook me up with over the summer. You know, something easy—slip into the warm bath for 3 months as an intern with the inside track. No dice. His answer to me: “Want to be a writer? Hit the streets, fucker.”

This week’s JIMMY’S POTPOURRI show will feature the music of Tony Bennett, plus musings on Rasputin, dirty dreams, and other madness. Sunday 9am-noon, streaming live online at www.killradio.org

I had the chance some years back to visit the Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane.  The inmates there are too mentally ill to stand trial, or in many cases, too programmed for acts of horrific violence to be committed to a normal prison, as hard as that is to imagine.

The prison was general population, meaning inmates were mostly free to amble about in the halls and common areas, as were I and my handler.  There weren’t any guards nearby; just the occasional nurse.  So, just us and the “residents.”

Staff got attacked all the time; sometimes killed.  And so it was terrifying—imposing threats in all directions constantly.  My adrenaline was pumping like mad and I could barely breathe, being surrounded by killers walking freely just feet away.  (And in there, “killer” was, in many cases, a gracious understatement).

My terror wasn’t because of how they were looking at me.  I mean, yes, some were drugged to the point of shuffling and drooling, but too many others were locked on me with terrible, clenched-teeth gazes because I was alien, an interloper, prey—and they made absolutely sure I felt it.

No, as much as I tried to fathom the human wreckage these men had left behind, it was next to impossible in comparison to the sickening, overwhelming vibration of so much evil so concentrated in one place, as hokey as that sounds.  (Maybe I’d been preconditioned by the staff who’d told me beforehand that most of the men in there would never—or at least, *should* never—be released; that without supervision and druggery, it was highly likely they would rape, maim, and kill as easily as a yawn).

And that’s what stuck with me: that despite whatever legal or other protections may come to pass to hopefully lessen future potential bloodshed around us, ultimately there is still conniving evil in the world; there are men like these, and no amount of discussion, interdiction, politics, monitoring, or intervention will change that.

In other words, we are gut-wrenchingly fragile, yet this fact too often doesn’t manifest in behavior, between people, or in the media, except during a horrific crisis when all denial is ripped away.

As I sped away from Atascadero, I was overcome by sadness—maybe even mourning — over the human beings in there who, at birth with so much potential, and now by nature or nurture, will spend every breath locked up for our safety.  They’re in there being shot up with drugs, shackled to beds, hunting and being hunted in fear and in the halls, now, even as you read this, forever.  That, along with all the lives they’ve destroyed including their own, is almost the saddest thing in the world—but so is the perfectly sane hypocrite who has everything going for him, yet treats people like shit day in, day out, until a horror breaks and he’s reminded for five minutes that any of us could be crushed at any moment…then promptly forgets.

If humans needed less reminding, there might be a lot less evil bred in the world.

My novel about two gonzo performance artists, which somehow survived 6 months of plotting, 6 years of writing, 1 year of editing, 1 year of 42 rejections by NY agents, one divorce, 10 years of San Francisco fog, 3 jobs, 5 deaths, 5 relocations, the chance discovery of my dream girl, 3 years of desk drawer darkness, followed by another year of editing, is finally in the hands of an editor. I can’t wait for you to read it! Stay tuned!

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
      —Samuel Johnson

L.A.’s NIHILIST FILM FESTIVAL is this Friday 12/7 at 8PM. If you’re a fan of surreal, absurdist, nihilist, short, wacky, crazed, Spanish, underground, cut-and-paste, low-brow, monobrow, waxed brow, conceptual, or WTF film, don’t miss it! Last year featured silverware f*cking. Hello!?? Admission is only 99 CENTS (in honor of the cliff). Echo Park Film Center, 1200 North Alvarado. Curated by le grand nihilistmeister hims-elf, Elisha Shapiro.

NIHILISM UNLEASHED! Creator of the Nihilist Olympics that attracted world press in 1984, and the only Presidential candidate ever to run on the Nihilist ticket, ELISHA SHAPIRO is arguably the most famous living Nihilist on Earth. Find out how he became a Nihilist when he and I chat this Sunday on the JIMMY’S POTPOURRI show. (And if you need more Nihilism in your life, come to Elisha’s annual NIHILIST FILM FESTIVAL to be held in L.A. Friday, December 7 at the Echo Park Film Center at 8PM — the entry fee is a whopping 99 cents!)    Hear it all this Sunday 9am-noon on JIMMY’S POTPOURRI—listen anywhere online at www.killradio.org

UPDATE: The audio’s now available online—click the play button below to listen in.
Interview with Elisha Shapiro, the Funniest Nihilist by Scotch Wichmann

Forbes recently ranked L.A.’s Silverlake district as the #1 hipster neighborhood in the U.S., surpassing even Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and San Francisco’s hipster Mission District. What the hell are hipsters, anyway, and what’s drawn them to Silverlake? To find out, tune in tomorrow for my 3-part segment SILVERLAKE HIPSTERS, which includes interviews with L.A. architectural historian Laura Massino and District 13 L.A. City Council candidate Scott Crawford. Sunday 9am-noon on the JIMMY’S POTPOURRI radio show. Listen live from anywhere at www.killradio.org

UPDATE:The podcast is ready for listening—you can play it here:
Silverlake Hipsters by Scotch Wichmann

I had my most intense ghost experience in 1990 during my freshman year in college. My roommate and I were studying one night when our dorm room suddenly became freezing cold, even though the city was a sweltering 80 degrees and we had no air conditioning. The nerves in my skin started buzzing—like TV snow—as if I’d suddenly been draped by an invisible blanket of static electricity. I looked up from my book just in time to see a man standing in our room. Our room’s door was locked, yet somehow he’d gotten in without a sound, and now there he was, obscuring the entire door with his wide 6’5 frame. He was opaque and dark—a shadow man—with no discernible features except for two glowing yellow eyes. I glanced at my roommate, who was staring at the door with his mouth and eyes wide open, unable to speak. I looked back at the door again and the figure was gone. I asked, “Did you see that?” And my roommate replied, “The eyes!” Doubting myself, I glanced down at my book, and to my shock, saw an afterglow of the man on the white of the page—an after-image burned onto my retinas like a camera flash. I looked to the left, then the right, and the image moved with my gaze. How was that possible, if what we’d seen hadn’t emitted some kind of energy?

The man continued visiting us over the next two weeks with increasing frequency. Every time he appeared, my roommate and I would feel our room go abuzz with cold static and our hair would stand up. The static energy was so powerful that we could tell where the man was in our building—even if he was at the far end of the hall, we could feel where his energy was coming from in the same way you can feel the Sun’s heat with your eyes shut. The man visited at all hours, including the dead of night, until we started losing sleep. The cold static was rubbing my nerves raw to the point that I felt hypersensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others. When the static was around, I gained a measurable amount of psychic awareness, and my roommate was having the same experience. For fun, one of us would draw a picture, then focus on it intently, to see if the other could pick up on the thoughts and draw the same picture. The results were uncanny; again and again, with increasing accuracy, we were able to reach each other’s thoughts. The other students in the dorm thought we were possibly insane, but they couldn’t argue with the fact that our arm hair was standing up, and that we seemed able to know what the other was thinking in test after test.

I had my first out of body experience during this time of raw nervousness. One evening while walking up a path to our dorm building from class, I felt a surge of “jangly nerves”—an energy that seemed to come up from the ground and wash over me—and suddenly I was flying, like a Chinese dragon with a long tail that was still attached to my physical body. My dragon-spirit “body” flew up the path to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to a small living room where I saw my friends sitting around talking. Then, in a flash, my spirit retracted, slamming back into my body. All of this had occurred in the blink of an eye. Not sure if what I’d experienced had been real, I ran to the dorm, down the hall, and up the stairs to the living room, where I found everyone—all the students I’d seen in my vision were there—except one woman, Laura, was standing, while in my vision I’d seen her sitting. I asked her, “Were you just sitting on that couch a second ago?” To which she answered, “Yes. Why?” So it was true: I’d visited the living room before I’d arrived.

After 2 weeks, my roommate and I couldn’t take it anymore. Our nerves were fried, and we were averaging 2-3 hours of sleep per night. Desperate, I researched everything I could find on exorcism, cleansing, repelling ghosts, you name it. I finally settled on a series of shamanic rituals that involved communicating with the ghost, and relocating him. I chose the ground outside of the dorm as his new intended home. Naked and alone in the dark of the dorm room, I carried out the exhausting ritual over several hours, during which the ghost communicated that he was lost. I reassured him that his new home in the earth would be comforting, and less disruptive to everyone around him. He agreed to be bound to his new home, which I sealed by burying a jar in the dirt right outside of our dorm building (which, appropriately, was called “the Shire” in the Middle Earth housing complex on the campus of U.C. Irvine). I walked back inside the dorm building, and felt a quiet sense of peace—the static energy was gone, and never returned while we lived there.

Several years later (around 1996, I think), a friend who knew the above story handed me a copy of the university’s newspaper, which included a news article about the incident. The reporter had written that the Shire was apparently experiencing a haunting, and that the ghost bore a resemblance to a ghost encountered several years earlier during which a “shaman had been brought in” to exorcise the building. The story detailed the exorcism—including the burying of the spirit in the dirt—and then said that recent building construction around the Shire had no doubt released the ghost back into the wild….