Well, it took several hours over two (three? I can't remember) days, but I finished all three threads. Easily worth the time and effort.
Tom, you'll be happy to know that I ordered both Ghosts and Ballyhoo and In Cold Sweat earlier today. I look forward to reading them both and I'm sure I'll enjoy them immensely.
I AM happy! Thanks!
All good news gratefully received.
If you like the memoir, you'll like the two companion volumes to the memoir, the novel
Chasing the Last Whale and
Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian.
Both will be self-published and therefore entirely free from artistic constraint. For the first time in my career, I'll be able to say everything I ever wanted.
Here's the introduction to
Hallucinabulia, which will be finished in a month or so:
Most of my dreams were nightmares. Some of them were so bad that I began writing them down. I wasn’t sure why I bothered; preserving them to read over again wasn’t the goal. Instead, I think I simply wanted to get them out of my system. And by capturing them, I caged them. My nightmares often made me wake up screaming. Putting them on paper helped me cope with the thoughts and emotional hangovers they produced. Sometimes my nightmares ruined the entire day.
As I began publishing more books, I stopped keeping a dream diary. There simply wasn’t enough time, since the military-history titles I published required a massive amount of research and note taking. I wrote all day, morning to night. The diary also seemed to have run its course. I had different tools--psychotherapy and medication--to cage my nightmares. In time, the nightmares tapered off. Though my dreams are still as vivid and lingering as movies, I can’t remember the last time I had a horror show on the level of the ones I present here. I used to hate going to bed, because my nights were usually a journey into hell. But I’ve lost my fear of sleep.
Hallucinabulia is the third volume of the
Ghosts trilogy. It joins
Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist and my novel
Chasing the Last Whale. All explore the same theme of conquering a traumatic past by converting your anger over loss into gratitude for what you once had. The feedback I’ve gotten from
Ghosts and Ballyhoo prompted me to publish this extremely private document, since it provides context to the memoir and serves the same function: It banishes and entertains. Not everything in this book is negative. Some of it will make you laugh.
Hallucinabulia also documents the psychological and emotional state in which I existed until October of 2011, when I was diagnosed with Meniere’s disease and was able to finally junk the rage that had eaten me alive for my entire life.
By reading my dreams, you’ll be able to see for yourself how far I've come. I’m proud of that achievement. Showing you what was inside me for so long is also my way of bearing witness. It's a chronicle of disaster, no different from a diary kept during the Black Death, for example. I’ve edited some of these dreams, removing details and changing specific nouns and verbs. What you read is nowhere near as hideous as the nightmares actually were. It’s my prerogative to withhold, and besides, my intent in publishing
Hallucinabulia isn’t to exploit my history or seek your pity. It’s simply to create another art project. I wrote 90 percent of this diary in longhand, filling several notebooks, and then I transcribed it onto my computer. It deserves to be published if for no other reason than the sheer time and work that went into it. Also, I think some of the imagery is outstandingly odd and hilarious.
There’s great freedom in being housebound and solitary. I’m now indifferent to so much that worries others. At the top of the list of things I no longer care about is how people perceive me. Make of my dream diary what you will. If there is a message in the
Ghosts trilogy, it’s this: You are not alone. Plenty of us know what you’re going through, since we’ve gone through it ourselves. I kept thinking that things could not possibly get worse, but I was wrong. There’s no bottom to reach, no “bad as bad can be.” Bad is not finite. As bad as you can imagine your life can become, reality has a way of topping you.
And yet...
The person who had these dreams is now happy. He’s achieved clarity, and gratitude has allowed him to weather far worse storms in the past six months than he did in the fifty years that came before. Clarity and gratitude saved his life.
As long as you’re alive, there’s hope.
.
