Recovering from the traumatic brain injury of social media

“California will break you if you don’t watch out,” the old homeless man told me, “One slip and you’ll fall right through the cracks, just like I did.”

There is such a thing as a healthy fear of certain consequences. What this guy told me that day, in that alley, in the small cavity that I’d found where I could smoke my pot outside the bracing wind and where he’d made his bed, was never far from front of mind.

excerpted from my forthcoming novel, BANG