I've always been fascinated by biographies that gloss over catastrophic periods in their subject's life, as in, "then he spent seven years in jail."

Well, I've never been in jail — handcuffed once for goofing on a cop — but the last seven years have given me a basket of funny, "I can't believe I did that," stories.

This came up last Friday when I had a job interview for a trade newspaper here in Northern Virginia. The interview lasted five and a half hours, so toward the end I was saying whatever the id commanded.

Since I'm also somewhat literal, when people ask me "How I got into this business," I tell them. It doesn't take long for their faces to either register disbelief, shock or disgust.

My friend Orloff says I have a way of surviving — like a cat that gets its tail ripped off by a car, but lives to meow about it. So here's a wrap up of some things I've done to survive as a writer since 1996:

-- I've sold four cars at various times, to pay rent or bills, or in one case, to get to my brother's wedding. Right now I'm commuting on Tevas.

-- Also at various times, I have staged what are now my famous garage sales. There's been six of these clearance events, each of which was bound by one rule — get it all down to three bags. Even now, if I had a car, everything could fit inside it. I simply view stuff for its use value and have no controlling emotions toward anything.

As far as the garage sales are concerned, under normal circumstances, selling my sports jacket off my girlfriend's mother's back [in New York] would be funny enough. I think I got five bucks for it. But selling used sweatsocks, four pair for a dollar [in Austin, '97] was funnier — but hey, they were clean and matched.

However, the funniest garage sale event also occurred in Austin [the second time, '99], when I sold a couch to upstairs neighbors in an apartment complex. Apparently a rat had crawled inside the couch to die. I didn't know about it. I swear.

The next morning, they had stuffed the rat inside a ziploc bag and nailed it to my door. There was a hilarious note with the corpse, which they had christened, "Stiffy."

-- Lived in a tent in Japan, surviving on $8 a day. You can read about this at The Japanese Mountain Diet.

-- Drove across the country for two years, living in a [different] tent, with my brother outside of Atlanta and on various couches. I was surviving on old savings that were getting thin. There was no income. At this point, I developed the habit of being able to sniff out free laundry opportunities. For some reason clean clothes were more important than food.