YOLO Gone Loco

A FRIEND OF mine once described these essays as wind sprints, a warmup blast before the "big game" of a novel or novel-esque creative non-fiction project-whatever I was working on at the time. They were fun, quick primers and, after writing about a hundred of them, I discovered they were teaching me to be a better writer. Since I tried to set them at a maximum of 1,500 words (rarely succeeding at first) I began to appreciate the economy of language, the importance of the first line, the effectiveness of the wrap-up and the critical brevity that is, as Shakespeare put it, the soul of wit.
Now, years later, I set about tinkering with some of the more amusing anecdotes and releasing them as a compilation. I realized the episodes most endearing to me were the ones about my neighborhood, and so I set about polishing some of them up while lashing a few new ones together and arranging them for casual viewing, kind of like the literary version of a collection of impish garden gnomes in the flower bed.
From the outside, my neighborhood is nothing special. In fact it's situated like a Bermuda Triangle between a highway, a freeway and an Interstate that, now that I think about it, only goes in circles, nothing "Interstate" about it. Anyway, drivers are usually flying by way too fast to notice it within its meager perimeter of forest, and so there we thrive, hidden in plain sight, like some lost tribe of the Amazon ensconced in the shrubbery of the big city to flex our eccentricities.
My neighborhood is an eclectic one-a mix of artists, aging hippies, free-spirited eco-conscious capitalists, some professors, army veterans, landscapers, at least one writer, computer programmers, potheads, blue-collar, white-collar, no-collar, some married couples who prefer their own gender, some who prefer the other, a transgender septuagenarian who does yard work in a bikini, and the affable survivors of divorce who salvage what they can from their failed unions to seek new paths to happiness.
That's the physical neighborhood. "The neighborhood," though, is also a reference to my own mind-a peculiar, nebulous hamlet where nothing is what it seems and reality can expand, contract, somersault and transmogrify at any given moment. It is this neighborhood, superimposed on the other one, that has resulted in this collection of stories.
There is, I admit, at least one seed of reality in every anecdote, from which grows a strange hybrid of fictional and non-fictional fruits. My "neighborhood" is a place where, along with all the mundane stuff, I can freely have a beer with an emperor penguin, converse with a spider about the art of web building, receive press statements from mosquitos calling for a truce and strike a deal with an owl after I catch him wearing the necklace he stole from me.
I can't even write my name without thinking, afterwards, that I could've done it a little bit better and so I've tweaked most of these to elicit a certain timelessness and universality, as much as that's possible. Getting reacquainted with them has provided me with a few surprise laughs. And that, ultimately, is the point; to give a few laughs in a world that, through cruelty, lack of imagination and general ruthlessness, seems to constantly be trying to suppress them.
Welcome to the neighborhood. Be prepared because anything can happen, and hopefully the possibility of possibility makes your stay entirely worthwhile.