As per usual with most of his novels, there’s a rash of disappearing characters, cryptic threats, violent snuff films, grotesque sexual abuse and a total lack of any positive emotion within the narrator (yawn).

Oscar Wilde once said “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” For Wilde there were actually many things he considered to be the WORST things about life, but this quote in particular rings true in this town, in this day and age, in the entertainment industry specifically. I mean, with TMZ, the tabloids and paparazzi, not too mention The Emmy’s, The Golden Globes, and The Academy Awards—one thing is for certain—actors LOVE to be talked about and recognized.

Maybe we enjoy the secret thrill of watching a once-cute child actress blossom into a buxom sex-symbol only to get bloated on whiskey and cocaine and her own radioactive ego, left to crash and burn like a kamikaze bisexual and flush what’s left of her toxic soul down a shit-stained toilet. Maybe… but then again maybe not.

Executives and Greedheads around this town tend to burst into flames when they’re told they should Respect their writers. After nearly a decade of sheer desperation, 2010 has proven the most lucrative year for me yet as a paid, working screenwriter here in L.A. The catch is, my checking account is still running on fumes and I might have to siphon gas from some fat-cat’s Lexus in order to drive my car off Mulholland Dr.

Never was the land together,
cohesive, an uninterrupted mass
of soil, rock, sand, grass
all bound in a harmonious package, leather
spread-eagled in one faultless piece.
Always were places disparate.
Sky unbroken, but land split
and ponded, rivered. Water reached
out from every fissure, issuing
lacklessly. The ground’s appendages
multiplied, fresh edges
made into shores and ocean chewing
into them eagerly. In the beginning,
this wasn’t a big problem for
people. They swam well, explored
by boat. At length, the constant crossing
of distances somehow seeped
into their bodies, their cores. They’d say,
“It can’t have always been this way,”
and dream of land gathered up in a heap.