DEFINITIONS

What is the hairy edge?



It is a place that exists inside my mind. Its as real as the memories in my head and as fantastical as all the fiction I have written. As concrete as the faces of the people of love and as ephemeral as the piece of music I've been writing for twenty years and don't have the ability to record.

"The dreams made of smoke and the reality hewn in Stone" Gunter Grass



It is an almalgam of all that crap that has filtered through my brain in 50 year. It reads like Samuel Delaney and James Dickey and Phillip Dick and Margaret Atwood and T Jefferson Parker and Harlan Ellison and bill bissett. It sounds like BB King and Leonard Cohen and Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rankin and the Rolling Stones. It looks like frames created by Sam Peckinpah and John Ford and the Cohen Brothers and Ridley Scott.



The Hairy Edge falls between the things I've done, the stuff I'll never do, the work I will most certainly do, and the dreams of "someday I'll get to it"



The Hairy Edge is the moments when I am physically alone yet still connected to the people all around me. Like walking through a snowstorm for two hours, the flakes on my eyelashes, the city all quiet and frozen and not moving and I don't see anyone but I'm thinking of what I'm going to buy my wife for Christmas. When I'm driving from Toronto to Kingston at 2 am, the highway empty, the wheels humming, John Lee Hooker rumbling in my ears and my mind is thinking of my brother and how the next day I am just going to get him drunk. Solitary. Not alone.



The Hairy Edge is a space I create when I am writing, not the words on the screen or my fingers on the key but just that moment, that place, between the words forming in my mind and the letters appearing. That place is quick and temporal and the most salient of all.



The Hairy Edge is out there. Well, not really out there. I was out there once when I was young and I came back with less teeth, more hair and underpants that smelled like Jose Cuervo tequilla. I am old now. I don't want to be out there. I want to be in here. In here with my wife and my dog and my John Wayne westerns. I live in here and its a nice place to live. But sometimes I have to be away from here so I got someplace that is not here and not out there but perhaps some place just south of both of them, where my sould remains the same but my mind kind of bleeds off a little.



The Hairy Edge, for purposes of this site, is my musings. The ones I usually keep in my head. The thoughts that compell my wife to ask "Hon what you thinking about" and when I don't answer she knows where I am



Now the Hairy Edge has a space.



Lets see if I can fill it