Introduction

To My Book

I’ve long thought about writing a book, about what it’s hard to say. I have ideas — there are always ideas — but for an entire book, I’m not sure. I just know I’m supposed to write at least one in this lifetime, and in order to do that I have to start. Where do you start? With the introduction, of course.

The introduction will be longer than the book. That is to say I don’t really plan to write a book, the task is too daunting, but I can write an introduction. I can write an introduction for longer than it takes to lose the appetite to write the actual book. That’s my plan. Start with the introduction and keep going until the book fever goes away, and I don’t have to deal with it.

I’ve conceived many ideas for books. One was about a guy who gets blacked-out drunk at a party one Saturday night, goes outside to smoke a cigarette and gets into his car before anyone realizes he’s gone. On the way home he hits a homeless man, but he doesn’t remember doing it. His car has a small dent he doesn’t notice. He goes home and passes out in bed.

The next morning he wakes up with a bad hangover and is aghast (as are his friends) that he doesn’t remember driving home. He gets through the hangover and goes about his Sunday.

On Monday he gets into an argument with someone about morality. He states unequivocally that people are responsible for their actions, even ignorant people, even those who have their entire lives been surrounded by ignorant people and who were never exposed to decency and responsibility, who had no exemplars to follow. He is adamant about this — a man must account for himself regardless. He and he alone is responsible.

On Monday night he is watching the news, and there is a story about a homeless man killed by a hit and run driver. He doesn’t know why but it catches his attention. He doesn’t notice the small dent in his car until the following week and assumes it happened while he was parked on the street near work.

The rest of the book is him trying to live his life with accountability despite the dim, but ever-dawning awareness he was the one who killed the homeless man that night.

I don’t know, maybe it’s more of a short story. Maybe I just wrote it.

I had another idea for a book just today. It would be entitled “Entanglement” which is a great title and a double entendre for being caught up in something, the messiness of the world, of relationships, of society and also quantum entanglement which Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” to describe particles, perhaps light years away, which interact with one another inexplicably. But there was no detail to that book, only a very broad idea and a good title.

Another book I started was born of an idea I had in a strange place. I had gotten into geography a few years ago, but not in the way a normal person gets into geography. I started playing these Sporcle quizzes wherein you have to name all 197 countries of the world in 20 minutes. I played it until I could name them all with time to spare. I learned how to spell Liechtenstein and Kyrgyzstan in the process.

Another thing I learned is there is skiing in Africa. Not from the quizzes, but from online searches. One place was in Ifrane, Morocco, and so we booked a trip there one winter, so we could say we skied in Africa, and also to Fez which is only two hours away. When February came around, and it was time to go, there was no snow in Ifrane, but we stayed there nonetheless in the fancy hotel nearby, the only fancy thing in the town. We were apparently the only Westerners there, everyone else, it seemed, were rich Moroccans.

Because there was no snow, we had nothing to do but stay in the hotel for four days which had a huge gym with tennis and basketball courts, several pools and an extensive spa. One day when I was in the sauna, I marveled at how my life had taken me to this place and imagined my 25-year-old self went to sleep one night and woke up in the sauna, not remembering how I got there or anything in between.

I would leave the sauna, figure out I was in a nice hotel somewhere far from the States and convince the front desk to tell me my room number. I would go to the room, see the three suitcases, one of which was a woman’s suitcase, another of which was a kid’s, discover an Ipad and Iphone, technologies I had never seen, see my 52 (at the time) year-old face in the mirror and realize I had fast-forwarded far into my future. And then the game was whether to act like everything was normal for as long as possible until my memory came back or freak everyone the fuck out beyond imagination. That was where I got to, roughly seven pages in, before I lost momentum.

I’ve also contemplated writing science fiction which is most of what I read these days. Traveling into four-dimensional space, through wormholes, faster than the speed of light by bending space itself. I have some interest in writing about the mundane realities of the real world, but more in exploring the fantastic, the unreality underlying the illusion of “reality,” the confluence of science and mysticism that belies the hyper-narrow lens of everyday consciousness. But this is a big undertaking, at least to do it right, and I’m not sure I’m up to the task.

I’ve written about a recent cab ride into New York from JFK. The Sikh cabbie was driving the minivan like a maniac but skillfully, switching multiple lanes to pass trucks. We passed by decrepit motels on the side of the highway with neon signs that had gone out except for two flickering letters. I imagined how dirty they were, how many robberies and rapes had gone on in them. We passed housing projects, ugly brick prison-like structures, their cramped apartments blue-lit with TV screens. The Sikh cabbie was Virgil guiding me through hell.

When we exited the Midtown tunnel I could see the new glass and steel buildings, and it seemed like we had traveled to the future. Once in Manhattan, I saw the beautiful old buildings too, the charming restaurants, bars and cafes, teeming with young people out on the town. It was like we had exited purgatory (the tunnel) and arrived in heaven. This was where the well-to-do and hopeful dwelt, those who had escaped the dereliction of slums alongside the Van Wyck Expressway.

While I had a good time in the city seeing family, the most memorable part of the trip might have been the cab ride. When I arrived at my brother’s apartment in Tribeca, I tipped the cabbie well and thanked him for his skillful and insanely fast driving. I could tell he appreciated it — he was a master at his craft, though most people probably didn’t notice.

There are so many things I could write about, but this is only the intro. And I’ll have to think of a way to keep it going to avoid the hard part, which is Chapter 1.