Too Clear, Too Clean. The Problem Was

I Hope To Keep Writing Journalism As Long As I Write Fiction; It's Afforded Me Such Amazing Adventures And Opportunities. It Does Take A Lot Of Time, So It's Hard To Do Both At Once, But I Try To Do A Big Journalism Piece Every Couple Of Years, And I'll Hopefully Continue With That.

But I Always Need To Identify With A Character To Write About Him Or Her - And By "identify," I Mean See The World Through That Person's Eyes And Have A Strong Sense Of The Inner Logic Of Their Acts And Decisions, Wacky Or Wrongheaded Though They Might Be. In That Sense, I Think There's Some Of Me In All Of Them.

And It May Be That A Crowd At A Particular Moment Of History Creates The Object To Justify Its Gathering, As It Did At The First Human Be-in And Monterey Pop And Woodstock. Or It May Be That Two Generations Of War And Surveillance Had Left People Craving The Embodiment Of Their Own Unease In The Form Of A Lone, Unsteady Man On A Slide Guitar.

He Remembered His Mentor, Lou Kline, Telling Him In The Nineties That Rock And Roll Had Peaked At Monterey Pop. They'd Been In Lou's House In La With Its Waterfalls, The Pretty Girls Lou Always Had, His Car Collection Out Front, And Bennie Had Looked Into His Idol's Famous Face And Thought, You're Finished. Nostalgia Was The End - Everyone Knew That.

A Swell Of Gratitude And Appreciation For His Assistant, As Opposed To The Murderous Rage He Felt Toward The Rest Of His Staff