Columbia, South Carolina, 1:51am.

Night train from Raleigh to Miami, through the South. Talking with a chemical engineer John from Oklahoma, by way of New York who has climbed the Seven Sisters, highest peaks on each continent. Sipping wine in the viewing compartment, doing it in style. He is working on a thriller about climbing, as well as five other book projects.




















Start talking with the conductor, who majored in journalism and says his favorite works tend toward Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. He starts talking about the crazy things he has seen, which he says could fill a novel. A man taking a crowbar to his skull and then running through the train compartment, claiming he has AIDS and will infect the whole car. A woman who starts talking in tongues and sticking pins in a voodoo doll. When the female conductor asks her what is up, informs her that the doll is her. I ask Anthony why he doesn't write a book about his experiences, he says "I make a hell of a lot more as a conductor, unless you write for GQ or something."

Stopped in Columbia, South Carolina, 1:51am.

"Want some coffee bubba?"

"Sure, I've got another 100 pages of Arisugawa Park to revise, before I get some sleep."

"It's strong. Hope you like it black."


#endurancewriter

Vegas is Crazy

Two months of writing in Vegas is crazy. 

not because I did anything, but because of what I didn’t do,

To practice virtuosity one must with restraint

Completely in the flow as a writer 

and I tell you Las Vegas is bedrock, functional. 

I am like a tamed beast,

watching with locals the tourists experiencing the flair

These places are like forgotten, forgotten relics of a mechanical past,

streets here on the Strip are eight-lane freeways––

I am lost a pedestrian out in the wilderness, 

timing my movements to shadows. 

The earth will swallow me up on my way to the Rio. 

The bum asks me for water and I give him my last half cup 

of mostly ice and trickles of life-saving water. 

Water. 

It is so hot under the sun under the sycamores by the freeway, 

that his soul might perish before he found the shore.

Vegas, always Vegas. This city Vast. It is America, but it isn’t. 

It is the America that always welcomes. 

Vegas is a turning point, a flash point, a mob.