Time Itself Shrinks From My Piercing Gaze

Author Transubstantiates Depression into Stark Megalomania

No question I have put in the ‘time’ to achieve all which now lies before me. A nice little shelf of books, as I keep saying. But more than mere quantity—I managed to manifest literal dreams.

School paper adviser Gray Vincent (RIP) mentoring youthful scribe

True story: I used to sit in the Lugoff-Elgin High School library in 1981, reading periodicals like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, imagining what it would feel like to either write for them (I was already knocking out copy for the yearbook and school paper).

Better yet, if I were interviewed by one of their writers as a cre

ator—a filmmaker, a novelist.

How did it work out?

So Many Roads author and Rolling Stone editor David Browne

One day in the dream, decades later, I would find myself in San Jose, California, hanging out with the editor of Rolling Stone. We were both on a panel at an academic conference, one I was moderating. Three months later he’d call to interview me, both as a literary novelist and a shopkeep with threads running through the Grateful Dead scene, for a massive piece on the band’s upcoming at-the-time fiftieth anniversary concerts. That’s the now-editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, mind you.

Alas, while my quotes along with another thousand words of his article would end up in the cut-out bin, a little dream came true nonetheless. Not to mention that the writer, David Browne, would include some of the material in an addendum to So Many Roads, his fine biography of the band. It all worked out.

Around that same era, in another dream, I exchanged emails with a writer working on a piece for no less an illustrious publication than The New Yorker. He asked me a few questions about a cult-like group he’d been researching, one I had encountered back in the Grateful Dead touring days. Before I knew it, he’d published his piece featuring one of my quotes, attributed to ‘the novelist James D. McCallister.’

In The New Yorker.

In which I was identified as ‘the novelist James D. McCallister’.

“Well, dang,” as my character Chelsea Colette ‘Creedence’ Rucker often says in abject stupefaction.

The rub here, I suspect, is that both of these events occurred as part of a process, and in the moment didn’t register on a level as tremendous as ‘dreams coming true’. I already knew David as a colleague and social media friend; email is a ‘cool’ medium. Neither interview felt momentous. Especially after the now dozens of times I have appeared in live audience, print, television and radio formats, as both interviewer and interviewee.

And now, sitting here this rainy, humid May morning having put Mansion of High Ghosts in its place on ‘the shelf,’ a novel which took me twenty years to ‘get right,’ one reflects on such matters with a sense not merely of pride—such is better left to the unseen angels who made all this possible—nor of triumph; more a sense of landing, arrival, docking at the island of Port Serenity.

And, yes, as the bombastic headline suggests, having beaten Time itself at its own game. Hell, I have had near death experiences, including a literal one, I now understand, in the car that day thirty-four years ago. Initiated in blood and seasoned by horror, I have faced up to it all, not merely to survive, but to thrive.

It will have its day, Time. Every dog does. But for now, Time shrinks before my withering gaze. Instead of the season of what-now, today feels more like, what won’t I do now, at least that to which I put my energy and consciousness? If my teenaged imagination, steeped in the hope of glory, could produce at scale like this, what will the trained mind of a mature master of reality creation like moi conjure next for himself? Stay tuned. S’all I can tell ya.