Author: Dan Sanders

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

Psychedelics, Prayer, and the Big Question: What’s Really Going On?

I’m scrolling Facebook, minding my own business, and up pops Timothy Leary — yeah, that Timothy Leary — calling LSD a “microscope for consciousness.” And I’m sitting there thinking, Jesus, Tim, that’s one hell of a claim. But it stuck with me. Got under my skin a little. Made me wonder about awareness, perception, and all the ways people try to crack open the hood on their own minds.

Leary swore psychedelics could peel back the wallpaper and show you what’s really going on behind the scenes. But the more I chewed on it, the more I thought: are drugs the only way people get there? Or have monks and mystics been hitting the same level of awareness for centuries without dropping anything stronger than tea?

You look at Buddhist monks — guys who sit still longer than most of us can stay awake — and they talk about slipping into states where the “self” just dissolves. No ego, no boundaries, no noise. Sounds a hell of a lot like what Leary’s crowd described, minus the tie‑dye and the Grateful Dead soundtrack. They get there through breath, silence, and discipline. No shortcuts. No chemical boost. Just decades of showing up.

Then you’ve got Christian mystics writing about ecstatic union with God, Sufi mystics spinning themselves into divine drunkenness, Indigenous traditions using rhythm and fasting to shift consciousness. Different cultures, different methods — but they all end up describing the same thing: a mind cracked open wider than the everyday grind ever allows.

Leary’s microscope was chemical. The monk’s is meditation. The mystic’s is prayer. The Sufi’s is rhythm.

Different tools, same damn question: What is consciousness, really? Is it just neurons firing, or is there something deeper we can tune into if we know how?

Science is still poking at it with machines. Religion is still trying to wrap words around it. And regular people — folks like you and me — are still trying to experience it without losing our balance.

Some take the long road — decades of practice, discipline, devotion. Some take the shortcut — a few hours that feel like a lifetime.

And honestly?

Who are we to say the drugs aren’t the HOV lane to the same destination? Who are we to say the monk and the psychonaut aren’t both touching the same absolute truths — just arriving by different routes?

Maybe awareness has more than one doorway. And maybe every doorway leads to the same room.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not telling you to drop acid or freeze your backside on a monastery rock. I’m just thinking out loud here.

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When We Happened.


I wrote this while remembering how ordinary moments, a laugh, a glance, a shared silence—can feel sacred once we know they will not return. It is not a poem about loss, but about presence: the way two lives can briefly align, then drift apart while still carrying the echo.

Once upon a time
as the story is told
We happened,
knowing our love
would never grow old.

No soft‑spoken whispers,
just cries of longing,
taking each other by storm,
for once, feeling like belonging.
In all our desperate cries
of yearning

We knew our time
would not last for long,
for like the summer’s burning
One would soon be gone.

We threw off the guides.
and let go the tether,
making the most
of our summers together.

This began as a memory of one woman, but it became something larger — a reflection on all the women who, like me, were searching for a place to belong, even if only for a short while. Some loves arrive when they shouldn’t, some fade before they can settle, yet each leaves a mark that time can’t erase. We happened once, and maybe that was enough — a moment that still burns like summer long after the season has gone.

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    Rating: 1 out of 5.

    Howard Phillips Lovecraft-H.P. Lovecraft,

    Born August 20th, 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft-H.P. Lovecraft,

    It’s the birthday of H.P. Lovecraft, born Howard Phillips Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island, back in 1890 — a man who somehow turned the quiet corners of New England into a map of cosmic dread. Funny how a place like Providence, with its brick houses and sleepy streets, could produce someone who spent his life staring into the abyss and then reporting back on what stared right back at him.

    Lovecraft wasn’t writing about monsters, not really. He was writing about that feeling you get at three in the morning when the world tilts just a little, and you realize you’re smaller than you ever imagined. He gave that feeling names — Cthulhu, Yog‑Sothoth, the whole tentacled family reunion — but the real terror was always the same: the universe doesn’t care. And he wrote that truth with the intensity of a man who felt it in his bones.

    He lived most of his life broke, anxious, and tucked away in rented rooms, scribbling stories that wouldn’t become famous until long after he was gone. There’s something almost New England about that — the stubbornness, the quiet grind, the belief that the work matters even if nobody’s listening yet. Providence shaped him, and in return he reshaped Providence into a place where shadows have weight and old houses whisper at night.

    On his birthday, I think about how strange it is that a man who rarely traveled farther than the Northeast managed to chart entire galaxies of fear. And how his stories, written in the margins of his own troubled life, still echo through books, movies, games, and the imaginations of anyone who’s ever felt the cold breath of the unknown on the back of their neck.

    Lovecraft didn’t give us hope. He gave us honesty — the kind that crawls under your skin and stays there. And maybe that’s why he endures. Because sometimes the world really does feel bigger, darker, and stranger than we can handle. And he was the one who said, “Yes. It is. And here’s what that looks like.”

    And when you look at the end of his life, it fits the man: a quiet death in 1937, only 46, worn down by illness and poverty, leaving behind stories that outlived him by decades. Today his grave in Swan Point Cemetery has become its own kind of pilgrimage site. The headstone now famously reads “I AM PROVIDENCE.” Visitors leave coins, stones, shells, little figurines, handwritten notes — small offerings to a man who spent his life writing about the vast, uncaring universe.

    And lately, there’s this odd little tradition that’s grown legs: bottles of vodka left at the grave. Lovecraft hated alcohol, wouldn’t touch the stuff, so maybe it’s a joke, maybe it’s a dare, maybe it’s just fans being weird in the way fans get weird. But the strange part is how the offerings sometimes move. A bottle set neatly at the base of the stone ends up a few feet away the next morning. Stones rearrange themselves. Notes shift. Cemetery staff say it’s wind or animals or teenagers, and maybe it is. But standing there, looking at that grave with its quiet declaration — I AM PROVIDENCE — you can’t help feeling that the man who wrote about the thin places in the world might still have one around him. A little ripple. A little nudge. A little reminder that mystery doesn’t always need monsters.

    Just a grave, a name, a bottle of vodka that won’t stay put, and the sense that even now, something old and curious is paying attention.

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    Born Today: August 14th 1943, Mitch Snyder

    I met Mitch in prison, and later we shared a home at CCNV in D.C. That’s where I saw the man behind the headlines—the fire, the flaws, the stubborn heart, and the relentless drive to stand with people the system would rather forget. Anyone who has read my book knows the depth of our friendship.

    Born August 14, 1943, Mitch Snyder was a prominent American advocate for people experiencing homelessness. His life was as complicated as it was impactful, a long arc from troubled youth to fierce activist, from a kid abandoned in Brooklyn to a national voice demanding dignity for the unhoused.

    Snyder’s early life was marked by hardship and rebellion. Growing up in Brooklyn, he faced his father’s abandonment and drifted into criminal activity that eventually landed him in prison. But prison was also where Mitch began to change. Influenced by fellow inmates and by his reading — including the Bible — he joined hunger strikes and work stoppages over prisoners’ rights. He found purpose in resistance.

    During his time at Danbury Correctional, Mitch met two men who shaped the rest of his life: Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Both were anti‑war priests serving time for destroying draft records in protest of the Vietnam War. Their commitment to justice and nonviolent resistance struck Mitch hard. They showed him activism wasn’t just anger — it was discipline, courage, and sacrifice. Mitch joined them in hunger strikes and work stoppages, learning firsthand how fasting could force attention onto issues the powerful preferred to ignore. He carried that lesson with him for the rest of his life.

    After his release, Mitch moved to Washington, D.C. and joined the Community for Creative Non‑Violence (CCNV). The group had roots in anti‑war activism but evolved into one of the most forceful voices for people experiencing homelessness. Mitch’s leadership brought national attention to the crisis. He staged public funerals for people who died on the streets, occupied abandoned buildings, and used hunger strikes to pressure the government into action.

    One of his most famous actions was occupying an abandoned federal building. After intense pressure on the Reagan administration, the building was leased to CCNV for $1 a year to serve as a shelter. It was a symbolic victory — a reminder that the government had responsibilities it couldn’t simply shrug off.

    Mitch’s life wasn’t without controversy. His sacrifices — including leaving his family — and the toll activism took on him were debated publicly. But his commitment never wavered. He gave everything he had to the cause, and the weight of that struggle eventually became too much. In 1990, overwhelmed by the ongoing crisis and the lack of meaningful governmental response, Mitch took his own life.

    His story was later told in the biopic Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story, with Martin Sheen portraying him. But for those of us who knew him, Mitch wasn’t a symbol or a headline. He was a complicated, brilliant, stubborn man who refused to look away from suffering — and demanded the same from the rest of us.

    Mitch Snyder’s legacy is a testament to the power of individual activism and the impact one person can have on society. His life reminds us that homelessness is not a statistic — it’s a human crisis demanding compassion, courage, and relentless advocacy. His work continues to inspire those who believe in giving voice to the voiceless and standing with people the system would rather erase.

    And for me, he remains the man I met in prison, the man I later lived with at CCNV, the man who gave me a home and a safe place when I once again found myself running for my life and helped me begin a new life. And always he will remain flaws and all the man I call my friend.

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    Rating: 1 out of 5.

    August 6th, 1945.

    I grew from birth to the age of ten in the “Atomic City,” Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I even had a wooden carved bomb that read “Dan Sanders Atomic Baby.” Fighter jets and guard houses were my normal views and surroundings. My dad worked for the Manhattan Project that helped create the atomic bomb, and I know he had reservations—hell, more than reservations. I’m sure he had nightmares about how it was used. He often said the first bomb should have been dropped on Mount Fuji as a warning shot, and that killing civilians—children—was an act of revenge, not war, and I agree with him.

    The death toll on August 6, 1945 — the day Hiroshima was bombed — is estimated at 70,000 to 80,000 people killed immediately. By the end of 1945, about 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima, including those who suffered a long, agonizing death from radiation poisoning, which I have seen time‑lapse video of, and it is truly horrifying.

    Sometimes at night when I think about this—and it’s not always on the anniversary, for it has haunted me for as long as I’ve been alive—I picture some kids in an open field, sunny green grass, blue sky, playing soccer laughing then suddenly turned to dust.

    I met a survivor of that bombing many years ago, and he talked about how his life was spared because his house was a few miles from the hypocenter, and he was hunched behind a brick wall working in his garden, talking to his wife standing on the porch. After the blast wave passed over, he looked for his wife on the porch, and all that was left was a shadow left on the wall.

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    Rating: 1 out of 5.

    Poet James Dennis “Jim” Carroll.

    Jim Carroll, born in Manhattan in ’49, on August 1st always felt like somebody Boston would’ve claimed if New York hadn’t gotten to him first. He had that street‑level honesty, that “tell it straight or don’t bother” attitude you hear in corner bars from Dorchester to Eastie. The man wrote like he was peeling paint off a tenement wall just to see what truth was underneath.

    And that line of his — “Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.”

    That’s not airy poet talk. That’s a guy who’s seen things, done things, lost people, and knows damn well the ghosts don’t stay quiet. They sit with you. They mutter. They remind you who you were when you were too young, too wild, too stupid to know better. Carroll understood conscience the way a Boston dockworker might: not as a halo, but as a reckoning.

    He came up in Manhattan, sure, but he carried himself like someone who’d survived a few winters on the Charles. Basketball courts, Catholic guilt, street corners that could make or break you — he turned all of it into fuel. The Basketball Diaries made him famous, but the poetry is where he really bled.

    And the music — that was Carroll stepping into the fire. The Jim Carroll Band didn’t sound like a polished studio act; they sounded like the Lower East Side chewing on a live wire. Clubs like CBGB weren’t venues, they were battlegrounds: sticky floors, busted monitors, cigarette haze thick enough to write your name in. Carroll walked onstage like a guy dragging his past behind him, letting the amps spit it back out at full volume.

    “People Who Died” wasn’t just punk — it was a street‑corner funeral shouted over guitars that sounded ready to explode. It was raw, sloppy, beautiful noise, the kind that made you feel like the world might crack open if the band hit one more chord. Carroll didn’t sing like he wanted applause. He sang like he wanted the truth to hurt a little.

    Carroll’s voice — on the page or onstage — was raw, unvarnished, and weirdly tender. He could take the wreckage of youth, addiction, bad choices, the whole mess, and make it shine like something worth keeping. He wasn’t afraid of the dark. He walked into it with a notebook or a microphone and came back with lines that hit like a punch and linger like a bruise.

    On his birthday, I try to remember him the way a Boston guy would — a tough‑minded poet who listened to the dead, argued with them, wrote down what they said, and handed it back to the living like a warning and a blessing rolled into one.

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    Mother Jones

    Today’s the birthday of the woman Teddy Roosevelt once called “the most dangerous woman in America.” And she was eighty‑seven. Eighty‑seven.

    Mary Harris Jones — Mother Jones — the old Irish battle‑axe who outlived half the men trying to shut her up. She wasn’t dangerous because she carried a gun. She was dangerous because she carried the truth, and she swung it like a pickaxe.

    This was a woman who buried four kids, lost her husband, watched her business burn to the ground, and instead of folding up, she turned herself into a one‑woman earthquake. She walked into coal towns where the bosses owned the cops, the judges, the damn air, and she told them she wasn’t leaving until the workers got treated like human beings instead of replaceable parts.

    She marched with miners coughing up black dust. She marched with mill kids who should’ve been playing stickball instead of losing fingers in machines. She marched with whoever needed marching — because she understood something America still forgets every other Tuesday: nothing changes unless somebody makes noise.

    Roosevelt called her “dangerous.”
    Hell yes she was.
    Dangerous the way a storm is dangerous when you’ve built your house out of lies.
    Dangerous the way a grandmother is dangerous when she’s done being polite.

    Mother Jones didn’t ask permission. She didn’t wait for the right moment. She didn’t care if the powerful men in suits thought she was too loud, too old, too stubborn. She fought like hell for the living, and she never apologized for it.

    So today, raise a glass — coffee, whiskey, whatever’s handy — to the tiny Irish woman who scared a president and shook the country awake.

    Happy birthday, Mother Jones.
    Still dangerous. Still needed.

    “God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”

    Mary Harris Jones Mother Jone

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    The Day My Life Crossed Paths with Diana Vreeland — And a Sliding Glass Door

    Some mornings I wake up to odd and strange but true little facts about my life — and since Diana Vreeland was born today, July 29, 1906, this is one of them.

    Diana Vreeland — born Diana Dalziel, old world name, old world money — came at the world sideways, like somebody kicking open a door everyone else politely knocked on. She didn’t “cover” fashion — she ran it. Half the industry bent around her like metal under heat. You read her quotes — “Elegance is refusal,” “Red is the great clarifier,” “Exaggeration is my only reality” — and you can hear that sharp, aristocratic snap in her voice, the kind that could make a whole room sit up straighter without knowing why.

    She wasn’t selling clothes. She was selling nerve. The permission to be strange, bold, loud, impossible. She wore sweaters backwards because it amused her. She praised bikinis like they were scientific breakthroughs. She thought blue jeans were as beautiful as gondolas. She pushed editors, photographers, designers — hell, anybody who got near her — right up to the edge, because that’s where she lived. In that electric zone where taste becomes vision and vision becomes myth.

    And she did it all with that wicked little smirk — the one that said she knew something you didn’t, and she wasn’t about to explain it.

    Now here’s where my life, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, brushes up against hers in the strangest way — the kind of detail you only tell when you’re leaning over the bar at Kelly’s, waiting for your number to be called.

    My first wife, Joannie — in the book I’m rewriting because, yeah, after reading it myself I know I can do even better — before she got lucky and married me, was married to James Ferguson Vreeland. And the reason the last name matches is simple: James was Diana Vreeland’s brother‑in‑law. Diana Dalziel married Thomas Reed Vreeland, and James was Thomas’s brother. Same family, same name, same weird little thread running through the whole thing.

    And if you’ve read the book, you already know the punchline: he was the guy who walked straight through the sliding glass door in McLean, Virginia. In his own way he was kicking in a few doors.

    And here’s the part that still hits me in the chest when I think about it — the part that isn’t funny, isn’t strange, just true: the son I gained custody of and moved to Boston with was James’s son.

    Postscript: I didn’t use these names or this information in my book the first time around because I was afraid, I’d get sued. I tiptoed around the truth, changed details, softened edges — all because I didn’t know any better. But I’ve since learned something important: you can’t be sued for telling the truth about your own life. Memoirs use real people all the time — family, ex‑spouses, bosses, teachers, celebrities, neighbors, even the guy who walked through the sliding glass door in McLean, Virginia. It’s normal. It’s allowed. And it’s part of the story I’m finally ready to tell the right way.

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    Hunter S. Thompson

    Today is the birthday of Hunter S. Thompson, born in Louisville, Kentucky, 1937 — and I wake up feeling like the sky’s got a little extra static in it. Like the day itself is leaning forward, waiting for somebody to do something reckless and honest.

    There’s a certain charge in the air when you think about Thompson. Not the Hollywood cartoon of him — the real man, the one who wrote like he had a live wire jammed straight into his spine. The one who understood that America wasn’t a postcard, it was a fever dream, and the only way to tell the truth about it was to dive in headfirst and come up swinging.

    I think about him the way I think about a storm rolling over the harbor — that low, electric rumble, the kind that makes you stand a little straighter because you know something’s about to break loose. He wasn’t tidy. He wasn’t polite. He didn’t sand down the edges. He was the edge.

    Louisville boy. Southern heat in his blood. A kid who saw early that the “official version” of anything was usually the biggest lie in the room. So he made his own version — louder, stranger, funnier, truer. He wrote like someone who refused to pretend the country wasn’t half‑mad already.

    And maybe that’s why he still hits me so hard.
    Because he reminds me that the world doesn’t need more polite little sentences. It needs people willing to say what they actually see. It needs voices that don’t flinch.

    On his birthday, I picture him barreling down some Kentucky back road in a beat‑up convertible, sunglasses on, hair flying, muttering about Nixon or the Derby or whatever fresh American absurdity had caught his attention. And he’s laughing — that cracked, dangerous laugh — because he knew the joke was always on the people who thought they were in charge.

    Maybe that’s the lesson today.
    Live a little louder.
    Tell the truth even when it’s ugly.
    Write the thing that scares you.
    Don’t sand down your voice to make anybody comfortable.

    Hunter S. Thompson didn’t just write about America — he wrestled it, bit it, spit it out, and handed us the bones.

    Happy birthday, Hunter.
    The harbor feels rowdier today, and I’m not fighting it.

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    July 16th, 1945, The Big Boom and Me

    On this day back in ’45 — 5:29 and 45 seconds in the damn morning — the desert out in Alamogordo lit up like somebody flipped on a second sun just to see what kind of trouble it could make. A bunch of scientists stood around in welder’s goggles, slathering on suntan lotion like they were prepping for a day at Revere Beach instead of kicking off the nuclear age.

    Enrico Fermi, cool as a guy waiting for the T that’s already late, took bets on whether they’d ignite just New Mexico or the whole planet. Real casual end‑of‑the‑world office pool.

    Then the thing goes off — BOOM — sky goes white, sand melts into this ghostly green radioactive glass, like the desert tried to make its own cursed souvenir.

    Ken Bainbridge, Harvard physicist running the whole Manhattan Project circus, turns to Oppenheimer — the man who’d spend the rest of his life haunted by the glow — and drops the line only someone with a New England soul could deliver clean: “We are all sons of bitches now.”

    Weeks later, August 6th and 9th, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled — the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war. A permanent scar on humanity, no matter how you slice it.

    Bainbridge spent the rest of his life trying to undo the monster he helped midwife into existence.

    And about a year after all that, I boomed onto the planet myself — born into a prefab little government town called Oak Ridge, where the fences hummed, the jet fighters buzzed overhead, and every entrance had a guard who looked like he’d seen too much. I spent my first ten years around atomic plants, security checkpoints, and the strange quiet of a place built to help make the damn thing in the first place.

    Thirty years later, I was getting myself arrested trying to stop nuclear proliferation — life’s funny like that, it circles back with a badge and a pair of handcuffs.

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    The Man Who Refused to Live on Autopilot Henry David Thoreau

    It’s the birthday of Henry David Thoreau, born July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts—a man who treated conscience the way some people treat religion. He didn’t just write about living deliberately; he practiced it like a stubborn art form. Poet, philosopher, abolitionist, tax resister, transcendentalist—Thoreau collected titles the way other people collect parking tickets.

    And here’s the thing: every time I read about Thoreau refusing to pay taxes that supported slavery, I think about my own little rebellion a century later. When the phone tax went up to help bankroll the Vietnam War, I looked at that bill and said, “Nope.” Ten percent, gone. I refused to pay it, wrote it right on the check. It wasn’t Walden Pond, but it was my own small patch of moral ground, and I stood on it.

    Thoreau would’ve understood. He believed a person’s duty wasn’t to obey, but to stay awake. To look at the world and decide what you can live with—and what you absolutely cannot.

    I’ve walked around Walden Pond more times than I can count. Not in some tourist way, but in the way you walk a place that’s part of your own story. I’ve stood inside the space where he built that cabin, imagining him shaping those boards, thinking those thoughts, refusing to let the world flatten him out. There’s something electric about standing where a stubborn soul once stood. You feel the charge in your feet.

    Thoreau didn’t ask permission to live the way he believed. He just lived it. And maybe that’s why his birthday still matters. It’s a reminder that resistance isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a quiet walk around a pond. Sometimes it’s a tax you refuse to pay. Sometimes it’s simply deciding your life is yours, and you’re going to live it with your eyes open.

    On July 12, I think about Thoreau’s stubbornness, and I think about mine. Different wars, different taxes, different centuries—but the same old human urge to stand where your conscience tells you to stand.

    And to keep walking.

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    4th of July and Fireworks

    Listening to fireworks being set off by the locals — not the organized town or city displays, but the people I’m stuck calling my neighbors — the ones who somehow get a thrill out of blasting sky rockets and bomb‑like booms that shake the walls and crawl right up your spine. Shianna is pressed against me, trembling, looking for shelter, for safety, maybe even for some explanation I can’t give her. And in the thick, steamy night, with the air cracking open around us, I found myself wondering what it would be like to be a child in a war‑torn country, hearing real bombs dropped by adults fighting over reasons that never make sense to the ones who suffer for them. To watch your home, your school, the field where you ran and laughed blown into pieces you don’t recognize. To lie in your bed and hear explosions creeping closer and closer to the place you’re trying to make a life, and to wonder what your world will look like when morning comes — if morning comes at all.

    And sitting there with my cat shaking against me, I realized how easy it is for a whole life to be reduced to waiting for the next sound, the next shock, the next thing that might take everything. The fireworks stopped eventually. The quiet came back. But it wasn’t the kind of quiet that comforts. It was the kind that reminds you how fragile the world really is, and how thin the line is between the night you survive and the one you don’t.

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