One day, I'll disappear and hide in a corner of Britain. I'll own a bakery in a village, live above it, have a big garden because I like mowing. I want to get up when I feel like it, let people queue for my products, and when they're gone, shut the shop and think about tomorrow. Creating magic - that's my dream. And I'll do it.
I remembered staffing a volunteer table for ACT UP in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood in 1991, on the corner of Castro and 18th Street, and on my table were posters, stickers, and t-shirts that bore the same slogan in all caps - ACT UP slogan house style. I wore one of those shirts to model for passers-by.
My father ran a corner drug store where he worked night and day, seven days a week, until he died of a stroke. He literally worked himself to death.
I found myself drawn to the remote Kimberley region of Australia - in the far Northwest corner of the country - our last frontier.
I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.
All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.
My character, Rick Spleen, is a what-if version of me, really, where nothing did quite turn out right and everything else is still around the corner.
