J: Well, thanks, Matthew for coming and taking an interview. So where did you learn to write. These are sort of the standard questions. Where did you learn to write?
M: Well, I started wanting to write in high school. I read Fitzgerald when I was 15. I was a pretty early reader and like a passionate reader when I was a little kid. But then when I was 14, 15, I read The Great – not Gatsby. I read This Side of Paradise. And that was the book that made me want to be a writer. Not a very good …

We squeeze out to the smoking patio, somehow imagining it will be quieter than inside. With my list of eight questions smudged on the palm of my hand, I hold out my recorder and ask her:

Photography by Ellei Johndro (Featured Artist)

“We don’t like you,
we just want to try you…”
…Black Rebel Motorcycle Club tells you this as you shoot up La Cienega and it could be LA’s motto. The Monday rush-hour is mysteriously absent and you thank some higher power for this, but are left to question the circumstance. There is no discernible pattern to LA traffic. It comes. It goes. It parts like the Red Sea. It hits you like a tsunami. Whatever the reasons, you are thankful for the clear shot north into Hollywood. Because you are a journalist. Because you are on an …

Tending rattlesnakes is a tricky business, but an important one to any man looking for answers. Grab the neck. Control the head. And urine does not kill the venom in their bites, though for some reason, the mescaline-whiskey hangover confused my mind into thinking that all slithering poisons can be cured with the antidote to a jellyfish sting.

In the year 142,304, the original human star called “Sun” finally burned itself out, becoming the white dwarf it was always destined to become. Life on the original planet persisted for almost two millennia, adapting as it were to the cold, harsh climate of the planet they still called Earth. But finally, in Cosmological Decade 18, two full space decades earlier than expected for the Degenerative Era’s birth, the Sun’s dwindling energy had completely defused, and the original planet called Earth became uninhabitable.