Author: Dan Sanders

I'm a dreamer, a weaver of words, actor, picture maker, memory keeper

Wavy Gravy Was Born Today

Some people arrive in this world like a whisper. Wavy Gravy showed up like a marching band that took a wrong turn and decided to stay.

Born on this day in 1936, back when the world was still in black‑and‑white, he somehow grew into one of the most colorful human beings to ever wander through the American story. Hugh Romney was the name on the paperwork, but the universe had other plans. It needed a jester. A peacekeeper. A clown with a conscience. A man who could talk down a crowd of 400,000 hungry, muddy, half‑mad festival‑goers at Woodstock with nothing but a microphone and a grin.

He fed people. He calmed people. He made them laugh when they were ready to break. He turned compassion into a kind of performance art, and he never stopped believing that humor could be a tool for survival. The Hog Farm, the Seva Foundation, the endless parade of red noses and tie‑dye — it was all part of the same mission: make the world a little lighter, a little kinder, a little more human.

Wavy Gravy reminds us that you can take the work seriously without taking yourself seriously. That mischief can be mercy. That joy can be a form of resistance. And that sometimes the best way to keep the peace is to show up dressed like a psychedelic Santa Claus and tell everyone it’s going to be okay.

On the day he was born, the universe clearly decided it needed more color. And all these years later, we’re still living in the glow.

From Rambling Harbor, where the tide rolls in with its own kind of cosmic joke, I tip my hat to the man who proved you can change the world with a laugh and a ladle.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

FREE SUBSCRIBING

Some Thoughts and a Poem

I was just remembering the old Trump slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and while I know a lot of folks are hurting because of the price of oil, I still think this: if there’s no earth left to drive on, the price of gas doesn’t matter.

Oil drilling harms the Earth in multiple, well‑documented ways, affecting land, water, air, wildlife, and the climate. The damage begins long before the first drop of oil is pumped and continues through extraction, transport, and burning.

Oil drilling isn’t just a technical process or an economic talking point. It tears open land that never asked to be touched, poisons water that once ran clear and leaves behind a kind of silence that feels heavier than sound. Every spill, every leak, every plume of smoke is another reminder that the earth absorbs more than we ever admit — and it remembers longer than we ever will.

That’s the ground my poem “The Scorched Land” stands on. It came from the moment I realized the planet isn’t just a stage for our mistakes — it’s a witness. A witness to the forests scraped away for access roads, the oceans slicked with oil, the air thickened by what we pull from below. These aren’t abstract harms. They’re wounds. And the earth carries them the way a body carries scars.

The poem lives in that uneasy space where anger and grief meet the stubborn belief that we can still do better. It’s not political. It’s personal. It’s the voice you hear when the world goes quiet enough for you to notice what’s been lost and what’s still worth saving.

If you’ve ever felt that shift under your feet — that sense that the ground itself is keeping score — then “The Scorched Land” is the part of this post meant for you.

And if you want the part of this story that doesn’t fit neatly into facts or headlines, it’s in the poem that grew out of all this.

The Scorched Land

When the last of us remain on this scorched land,
We will watch the ancient footage of our folly—
How we spurned the cries of nature and her hand,
How we slowly drained the lifeblood of this planet.

We will see the glaciers melt, and oceans rise,
We will see the forests burn, and deserts spread,
We will see storms, floods, droughts, and fires,
We will see the mass extinction of the living dead.

We will wonder how we could have been so blind—
How could we have let our greed destroy our home?
How could we have ignored the signs of our decline?
How could we have sealed our fate with a catacomb?

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Subscriptions don’t bite and they are free

The Diamond Sutra.

The Diamond Sutra is set up as a conversation between the Buddha and an elderly disciple named Subhuti. Two voices, one asking, one answering, both circling around the same old questions we still ask today: What matters? What lasts? How do we see the world without getting lost in it?

Some dates slip past us without a sound, and some carry a little echo if you stop long enough to listen. This one goes all the way back to 868 A.D., when somebody — a monk, a printer, a pair of hands we’ll never know — pressed inked wood against paper and created what we now call the oldest printed book with a publication date. The Diamond Sutra. Sixteen feet of teachings, questions, answers, and the quiet persistence of human curiosity.

The word sutra comes from Sanskrit and means “teaching,” but it’s more than that. It’s a thread, a line connecting one mind to another across centuries. The Diamond Sutra is set up as a conversation between the Buddha and an elderly disciple named Subhuti. Two voices, one asking, one answering, both circling around the same old questions we still ask today: What matters? What lasts? How do we see the world without getting lost in it?

The physical book itself was printed from carved wooden blocks onto seven long strips of paper. Each page had its own block, carved by hand, reversed like a mirror, every line a small act of faith that someone in the future would want to read it. Those seven sheets were pasted together into a scroll about sixteen feet long — a book before books were bound the way we know them now. Imagine unrolling that thing, the slow reveal of words that had already traveled further than most people of that time ever would.

And then, like so many things, it vanished.

For more than a thousand years the scroll sat hidden away in Turkestan, sealed up with hundreds of other manuscripts in one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. A whole library walled off, maybe to protect it, maybe to forget it, maybe because someone thought the world was ending and wanted to save what they could. We’ll never know. What we do know is that in 1900, a caretaker sweeping out a cave stumbled onto a doorway that hadn’t been opened in centuries. Behind it: bundles of manuscripts, paintings, scrolls, and among them, this sixteen‑foot conversation between a teacher and a disciple.

I like stories like this. They remind me that the things we make — the words we write, the thoughts we try to pin down — have a way of outliving us. They get lost, they get found, they get read by someone a thousand years later who has no idea who we were but still feels the spark of recognition. A voice calling across time saying, “I was here. I wondered about the same things you do.”

Maybe that’s why I keep writing. Maybe that’s why any of us do.

SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE ALWAYS FREE

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day didn’t start with flowers, cards, or brunch. Its earliest roots in the United States came from women who were trying to hold their communities together in the face of disease, war, and political division.

Ann Reeves Jarvis, a West Virginia woman who lived through the mid‑1800s, spent her life organizing “Mothers’ Work Clubs” to fight outbreaks of measles, typhoid, and diphtheria in Appalachian towns. These clubs inspected milk, taught sanitation, and even quarantined homes when needed. During the Civil War, she insisted her groups care for both Union and Confederate soldiers, and after the war she organized a Mother’s Friendship Day in 1868 to help reunite divided families.

Around the same time, Julia Ward Howe — abolitionist, suffragist, and author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic — issued her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation, calling for women to gather in the name of peace after witnessing the devastation of the Civil War and the Franco‑Prussian War. She envisioned an international congress of women dedicated to preventing war. A few communities observed her proposed “Mother’s Day for Peace,” but it didn’t take hold nationally.

The holiday as we know it today came from Anna Jarvis, Ann Jarvis’s daughter. After her mother’s death, she campaigned for a day to honor the sacrifices and quiet labor of mothers. In 1908, she held the first official Mother’s Day service at her mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia. Within five years, nearly every state observed it, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day a national holiday, celebrated on the second Sunday in May.

Ironically, Anna Jarvis spent the rest of her life fighting the commercialization of the holiday she created — protesting florists, card companies, and anyone who turned her solemn tribute into a business opportunity.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE ALWAYS FREE

I’m Nobody! Who are You?

I published my first book on March 5th. It’s called I Was There. I probably should’ve called it Who Am I, because it’s a memoir, and since I can’t hang a famous name on it, no one really cares. If I were a famous musician, actor, or politician, it wouldn’t matter if my entire memoir was just me sitting by a luxury pool all day sipping fancy drinks made by an impeccable butler — or better yet, a Butlerette in a miniskirt — people would be clamoring to buy it.

On Amazon, where my book is available, I’m competing with the likes of Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and Trevor Noah’s mother, for God’s sake — all of whom have written memoirs. And that’s just naming the lesser-known ones, except maybe Trevor’s mother, though I suspect everyone but me knows who she is. I’ll add, with sincere condolences, that all are deceased, and underline that I am not willing to die for this book.

I have considered changing the name to something like Outlaw, rewriting it just a bit — not changing the facts, just throwing in more drama and sex. I could confabulate. In writing, confabulation is when you unknowingly fill in gaps with invented details because your mind wants the story to feel complete, smooth, or emotionally coherent. It’s not lying. It’s not embellishment on purpose. It’s the brain saying, “Let me tidy this up for you,” and slipping in something that feels true even if it isn’t. Then I could list my book under Autofiction, which could easily be misunderstood as autoerotica — and that should outsell Trevor’s mother.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a good friend who’s also writing a book. Hers is about murder, and as I said to her, she has a better chance of gaining buyers because everyone knows what murder is. Along with not dying for this book, I’m also not willing to kill for it. And let me quickly add that my friend is not the murderess in her book either. Though I’ll bet she’s a killer in a miniskirt.

I also need to say my book is not boring. The folks who have read it have all been sincerely enthusiastic in their positive reviews. It deals with ten very turbulent times in my life — ten years when this country was an amalgam of ideas, movements, people, music, war, and yes, even sex. I was involved in some amazing moments with some amazing people, some known to history — people who, if they wrote a memoir today, would give Trevor’s mother a run for her money.

But you see, what I did, I did quietly. Not a lot of fanfare or fangirls or fantastic shenanigans. Maybe what I need to do now is go out and do something to call attention to myself. Maybe run for President on the WTF Party — that’s the What The Fuck Party — or maybe the LWRS Party, the Left Wing Radical Scum Party. You may have heard mention of that breed of human; I think they’re currently under investigation by the residents at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But the truth is, I never meant to make a splash with my book — not even in a luxury backyard pool with fancy drinks being served by a Butlerette in a miniskirt. I just wanted to tell my story to a few friends and family while there was still time. Part of the problem, I think, is that many of my friends thought I was writing a completely different book — probably about my hazy, crazy days in radio, which I barely mention.

If all of a sudden some major publisher caught on to my book, a major studio made it into a major and successful motion picture, and I suddenly had fame and fortune and miniskirt‑clad Butlerettes running around, I know I’d be looking for the nearest exit to the highest mountain I could find.

In short, I think maybe Emily Dickinson was right, and her idea fits my personality better.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d banish us — you know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell your name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!

Maybe that’s the whole point: I never wanted to be Somebody. I just wanted to leave a trail for the other Nobodies to follow home.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

SUBSCRIBING IS FREE

Fashion or Conspicuous Consumption on Display

Maybe it’s just me—many times in cases like this it is at least mostly me—and before I go any further, I want to say I did not watch it. Instead, I watched the New York Knicks get some Boston Celtics revenge against the Philadelphia 76ers. But this morning the news is all over the event like bugs on a bumper, and the event I’m referring to is the Met Gala. An evening where individual costumes commonly range from $50,000 to $200,000, the Met Gala is officially known as the Costume Institute Benefit. It exists to financially support the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unlike other Met departments, the Costume Institute is self‑funded. According to reporting summarized by The New Republic, the Met Gala has raised approximately $166.5 million over the past decade—an average of about $16–17 million per year. What makes this arrangement striking is not simply the sum raised, but the structure behind it: the museum collects the revenue while the immense aesthetic costs are absorbed by designers and luxury brands. The result is an event framed as philanthropy but sustained by a logic that more closely resembles high‑end advertising.

In the end, watching the Met Gala felt less like witnessing fashion and more like staring straight into the neon heart of conspicuous consumption. All that glitter, all that theater, all that money draped over people who can barely walk in it — it hits me like a scream I can’t quite swallow. Maybe it’s just the guy in clean jeans and a sweatshirt talking, but there’s something grounding about clothes meant to be lived in, not displayed like trophies. And standing in the shadow of all that gaudiness, I’m reminded how far spectacle can drift from anything that feels real.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

SUBSCRIBING IS ALWAYS FREE

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, in New York City. He became a legendary American folk musician, songwriter, and activist whose long career made a significant impact on music and social movements. Seeger wasn’t just part of the folk revival — he was one of the engines driving it. In the 1940s and ’50s, most of America listened to crooners and big bands. Seeger was dragging a long-neck banjo across union halls, college campuses, and picket lines. He taught people that folk music wasn’t a museum piece. It was a living language of protest, hope, and ordinary people trying to make the world a little fairer.rer.

When he joined The Weavers in 1948, the group became a kind of Trojan horse for social change. They took traditional songs — work songs, spirituals, Appalachian ballads — and smuggled them into the mainstream. Their version of “Goodnight, Irene” hit No. 1 in 1950, and suddenly millions of Americans were humming a tune from the Black folk tradition. That was Seeger’s quiet genius: he made the radical feel familiar.

But success painted a target on their backs. The early 1950s were the height of the McCarthy era, when suspicion was a national pastime, and anyone with left‑leaning politics was treated like a threat. Seeger had been outspoken about labor rights, racial justice, and peace — long before it was fashionable — and that made him an easy mark. The Weavers were dragged into the anti‑communist hysteria, labeled subversive, and effectively erased from radio and television. Concerts were canceled. Record contracts evaporated. Their career didn’t just stall; it was deliberately strangled. Seeger was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He refused to name names or apologize for his beliefs. He did not hide behind the Fifth Amendment. Instead, he told Congress he had a right to sing for anyone he pleased. It was a bold act of conscience, and it cost him dearly. He was indicted for contempt and blacklisted for years.

Even after these setbacks, Seeger stayed active in music. He wrote and made famous songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” These songs became important for civil rights, labor, and anti‑war movements. His version of “We Shall Overcome” helped make it a key song in the civil rights movement.

Seeger was also a committed activist beyond music. He worked for environmental causes, especially the cleanup of the Hudson River, and remained involved as he aged. He inspired artists like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to continue his tradition of songs about social issues.

Seeger died January 27, 2014, at 94, but his songs and beliefs continue to inspire. He believed music could unite people.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

SUBSCRIPTION ARE FREE

May Day.

May Day shows up every year like an old friend who never knocks, just walks in and expects you to know why they’re there. It’s a day with more identities than most of us manage in a lifetime — workers’ marches, ancient bonfires, maypoles, the whole spring‑is‑coming‑whether-you’re-ready-or-not business. A strange mix of protest and petals.

Long before it was a date on a union calendar, it was the halfway mark between the equinox and the solstice, a reminder that the world keeps tilting toward the light even when we’re not paying attention. People lit fires to chase off whatever darkness they believed in. Maybe they weren’t wrong. We still carry our own shadows around, and sometimes a little symbolic fire wouldn’t hurt.

In the labor world, May Day is the day people stood up and said enough — enough hours, enough bosses squeezing the last drop out of the last worker. It’s a day built on the idea that ordinary people deserve a life, not just a living. That message hasn’t aged a bit.

And here we are, another May 1st. No bonfires on the beach, no marching bands down the street, just the quiet truth that the year is moving whether we move with it or not. Spring is trying its best. The light hangs around a little longer each night. Even the air feels like it’s leaning forward.

Maybe that’s the real heart of May Day: the nudge. The reminder. The gentle shove from the universe saying, Get on with it. Dan would’ve liked that part.

So here’s to May Day — the ancient, the political, the personal. A day that asks nothing more than that we notice the world turning and decide, in whatever small way we can, to turn with it.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

NO CHARGE TO SUBSCRIBE

I Was There

There’s a moment, when you finish a book that came out of your own bones, where the world goes strangely quiet. Not peaceful quiet — more like the hush that settles over the harbor right before the fog rolls in. You stand there thinking, Well, I guess I really did this.

“I Was There” didn’t start as a book. It started as scraps — memories, radio nights, the odd corners of life that stick to you like sea salt. I wasn’t trying to write anything grand. I was just trying to make sense of the noise in my head before it drifted off like a gull that couldn’t be bothered to land.

But stories have their own stubborn tide. They kept washing back up at my feet. And eventually I realized I wasn’t collecting them — they were collecting me.

Now the thing is out there in the world, floating around on Goodreads and Amazon like a bottle tossed into the Atlantic. People can pick it up, shake it, hold it to the light, decide if they want to walk a few miles with me. Some already have. Some will. Some won’t. The tide doesn’t ask permission.

What matters is this: the stories aren’t trapped anymore. They’re free to wander, to be misunderstood, to be loved, to be argued with, to be read at 2 a.m. by someone who can’t sleep and needs to know they’re not the only one who’s lived through a few storms.

If you want to take a look, here’s the Goodreads page — no passwords, no secret handshake, just the book sitting there waiting: Click the little arrow on the left side of the Goodreads page under the word read and a drop-down will appear with the link on it.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249304682-i-was-there

I’ve walked a long road to get here. Some of it was smooth, most of it wasn’t, and all of it ended up in these pages. If you decide to read it, I hope you find something in there that feels like truth — or at least something that feels like company.

The tide keeps moving. The stories keep coming. And I’m still here, walking the shoreline.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

NO CHARGE FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS

When April Teaches You How to Feel Warm Again

Some days don’t announce themselves. They don’t kick down the door or roll in with thunder. They just show up quietly, like an old friend who doesn’t need to knock. Today was one of those days.

The official coastal temperature — the one the weather folks love to toss around — sat at a stubborn 47°. Cooler at the coast, they say, as if we haven’t lived long enough to know the ocean keeps its own personality. But then I stepped outside, and the sun hit me in that particular April way, the way that says, Relax. I’ve got this.

And just like that, I felt better already.

MSN Weather, in its polite little digital voice, tried to explain it:
“Dominant factor: humidity.”
Which is really just science’s way of saying the air has softened. The sharp edges have rounded off. Your skin isn’t fighting the cold anymore. The breeze isn’t stealing heat from you like it did all winter. And the sun — well, the sun is finally acting like it remembers what month it is.

Stand in the right spot — out of the sea breeze, tucked against a sun‑warmed wall, maybe near a patch of pavement that’s been soaking up the morning light — and the whole world shifts. The thermometer can cling to its 47°, but your body knows better. Your body says 59°, maybe more. Your body says, Hey, we made it. Look at us now.

That’s the thing about April.
It’s not just a month.
It’s a mood.
It’s the first real exhale after months of bracing yourself. It’s the moment you realize the warmth isn’t a rumor anymore. It’s here. It’s real. And it’s trying its best to meet you halfway.

So yes, the coast may be cooler.
But today?
Today feels warm enough to believe in again.
Warm enough to loosen your shoulders.
Warm enough to remind you that you’re still here, still breathing, still capable of feeling good for no grand reason at all.

And sometimes that’s all a person needs — a little sun, a little shelter from the breeze, and the quiet surprise of feeling warm again.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

Earth Day at the Harbor

Today is Earth Day, and every year it rolls around, I think about how it didn’t begin with a parade or a proclamation, but with a book — Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring back in 1962. One woman sitting at a desk, writing about pesticides and poisoned water, managed to shake the country awake, at least for a moment.

And then there was Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin who must’ve felt like he was shouting into the wind. He went on speaking tours, trying to get pollution onto the national radar. The people heard him. The politicians mostly shrugged and went back to whatever they were doing.

So the people did what people sometimes have to do: they organized themselves. They made enough noise that the country couldn’t ignore it anymore. That noise became the first Earth Day in 1970.

Standing here in Rambling Harbor, watching the tide drag the morning light across the water, it’s hard not to think about how long we’ve been warned, and how slow we’ve been to listen. The planet keeps sending messages. The question is whether we’re finally ready to answer.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

NO CHARGE FOR SUBSCRIBING

Sunday Morning Sex Ramble

If you thought your Sunday morning coffee packed a punch, wait until you get a taste of this story. Scandal, silk stockings, and a dash of notoriety—Mae West and her infamous play are about to spice up your brunch scroll.

On this day in 1927, actress Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in jail for starring in the play Sex, which she also wrote and directed. It was her first Broadway show. Although Sex received terrible reviews, it drew huge crowds. After 41 weeks, police arrived and arrested the cast and crew, but only West ended up in jail. She was charged with “producing an immoral show and maintaining a public nuisance.” She said, “I wrote the story myself. It’s about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.” This reminds me of the movie I suggested the other day, “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” (2017), which explores similar themes of reputation, societal norms, and strong female characters.

While in jail, West had to give up her silk stockings but was allowed to keep her silk underwear. She had her own private cell and charmed the warden and his wife, who invited her to dinner at their home each night. She made friends with other inmates while making beds and dusting. In her free time, she read business articles about different Hollywood studios. She was released two days early for good behavior.

The following year, she wrote and starred in the play Diamond Lil (1928) on Broadway, and it was a big success. She went to Hollywood, got a part in Night After Night (1932), and was allowed to rewrite her scenes. In her first scene, a hatcheck girl says to her, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” and West says, “Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.” It was a hit, and the next year she co-starred with Cary Grant in I’m No Angel (1933). By 1935, she was said to be the second-highest-paid person in the United States, after William Randolph Hearst.

Mae West knew a thing or two about stirring the pot—and sometimes, that’s exactly what Sunday mornings are for.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

There is no charge to subscribe