Category: story teller

When the World’s on Fire but the Game Still Kicks Off

There’s something almost absurd about it. You wake up, flip on the news, and the crawl is talking about U.S. strikes, Iranian retaliation, oil tankers burning, diplomats glaring at each other like they’re about to drop gloves at center ice. And then you look out your window in Boston and see a bunch of Iranian soccer fans in jerseys, laughing, grabbing Dunkin’, taking selfies with the Zakim Bridge like they’re on a school trip. It shouldn’t make sense — but somehow it does. Because governments go to war. People don’t.

The political layer is steel. The human layer is soft. Washington and Tehran can’t agree on the color of the sky. Forty‑plus years of sanctions, threats, and proxy fights have made sure of that. But the Iranian kid who grew up juggling a ball in an alley doesn’t hate the American kid doing the same thing in a backyard in Revere. They’ve never met. They’ve never had a reason to hate. The hate lives in speeches. Humanity lives in stadiums.

Sports are the one place where the world pretends to behave. FIFA isn’t the U.S. government. Gillette Stadium isn’t the Pentagon. A soccer pitch isn’t a battlefield. It’s the last neutral zone on Earth — a weird little island where people who are supposed to be enemies end up sitting next to each other, yelling at the same ref, complaining about the same overpriced beer. You can have a U.S. soldier deployed in the Gulf and, at the same time, an Iranian midfielder jogging onto the field in Foxborough to polite applause. That contradiction isn’t a glitch. It’s the point. Sports are the last place where we practice getting along.

And Boston, of all places, gets it. This city’s got a long memory and a short fuse, but it knows how to host a crowd. We’ve had Irish and Italians who hated each other living on the same block. We’ve had Yankees fans walk into Fenway and somehow leave alive. We’ve had marathon runners from countries bombing each other still share water cups on Boylston Street. So, a few thousand Iranians showing up for a soccer match? Boston shrugs and says, “Yeah, kid, grab a seat.”

The truth nobody says out loud is that most people — Iranian, American, whoever — are just trying to live their lives. They want their kids safe, they want to pay their rent, their team to score one lousy goal so they can scream and forget the world for ninety minutes. And maybe that’s why the whole thing works. Because while the politician’s posture and the missiles fly, the rest of us are still out here trying to figure out how to share a planet without killing each other. And sometimes the only place we remember how to do that is in a stadium, with a ball, a whistle, and a crowd full of people who were told they’re supposed to hate each other but don’t.

Maybe that’s the lesson. The world’s on fire. But the game still kicks off. And for ninety minutes, nobody’s an enemy. They’re just fans.

Leave a comment

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

Jack Herer

Jack Herer was one of those big‑voiced American characters you don’t see much anymore — the kind who could walk into a room and make the wallpaper nervous. A man built out of stubbornness, belief, and whatever spark it is that keeps certain people from ever shutting up when they know the world’s got something wrong.

He wasn’t born into the counterculture. Hell, he started out in Buffalo, a long way from hemp fields and head shops. But once cannabis crossed his path in the late ’60s, it was like the universe tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hey Jack, this one’s yours to carry.” And he carried it like a man dragging a lighthouse up a hill.

By the mid‑’70s he was already out there on the sidewalks, booming voice, finger jabbing the air, telling anyone who’d listen — and plenty who wouldn’t — that hemp wasn’t the devil’s lettuce, it was the plant that could save the damn planet. Fuel, fiber, medicine, paper, food — he said it could do everything but tuck you in at night. And honestly, he probably had an argument for that too.

Then came The Emperor Wears No Clothes, his big, sprawling, half‑history‑book, half‑battle‑cry masterpiece. The kind of book that feels like it was written by a man pacing the room, waving his arms, daring the world to prove him wrong. It became the bible of the legalization movement, passed around like contraband scripture. You didn’t just read it — you got converted by it.

Jack didn’t slow down. He founded HEMP, traveled like a man allergic to staying home, and turned every stage, booth, and folding chair into a pulpit. People said he was loud, relentless, impossible. They also said he was right.

And then there’s the strain — Jack Herer — bright, sharp, electric. The kind of high that feels like someone opened a window in your skull and let the breeze in. A living tribute, sold in glass jars from coast to coast. Not many activists get a statue. Jack got a sativa.

He had his battles — strokes, heart attacks, the body giving out while the mission kept marching. He died in 2010 out in Eugene, Oregon, but the strange thing about certain people is they don’t really go. His book’s still in print. His strain’s still on shelves. And the world he spent decades shouting about is finally, slowly, catching up.

Jack Herer didn’t just push for legalization. He carved the road with his bare hands and dared the rest of us to walk.

Leave a comment

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

June 16th Bloomsday

 A day when the literary faithful raise a glass — or several — to James Joyce, that beautiful madman who turned one ordinary day in Dublin into a whole universe of wandering, worrying, loving, lusting, loafing humanity.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how a single date can become a pilgrimage. Most people wake up on June 16th thinking about coffee, bills, maybe the Red Line running late again. But Joyce fans? They wake up ready to walk the city like Leopold Bloom, ready to trace the steps of a man who spent most of his day just trying to get through it without losing his mind or his lunch.

Joyce picked June 16th, 1904, because it was the day he first walked out with Nora Barnacle — the woman who’d become his anchor, his storm, his everything. Leave it to a writer to turn a first date into a literary holy day. The rest of us just hope we don’t spill something on our shirt.

And yet here we are, more than a century later, with people all over the world reading Ulysses out loud, page by page, like some great communal chant. Dublin fills up with folks in straw hats and period clothes, reenacting scenes that half the world still pretends to understand. And the other half? They’re like me — they love the idea of Joyce, the music of the language, the wildness of it, even if they occasionally get lost somewhere between Sandymount Strand and the inside of Stephen Dedalus’s skull.

But that’s the thing about Bloomsday. It’s not about “getting” Joyce. It’s about celebrating the messy, wandering, ordinary miracle of being alive for one more day. A day of errands and temptations and memories and small kindnesses. A day where you try to make sense of the world and mostly fail, but you keep walking anyway.

And maybe that’s why Bloomsday hits me a little harder this year. Because most of life isn’t the big moments — it’s the walking around. The thinking too much. The bumping into people you didn’t expect to see. The quiet ache of remembering someone who’s gone. The sudden joy of a warm breeze off the water. The way a single day can hold a whole lifetime if you pay attention.

So here’s to Joyce. Here’s to Bloom. Here’s to June 16th, 1904 — and every June 16th since.

And here’s to all of us, still wandering our own cities, still trying to make sense of the map, still hoping for a little grace along the way.

Leave a comment

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

King Philip’s War — the version they never taught us

They don’t put this in the glossy schoolbooks, but New England was born in blood long before anybody slapped a Minuteman on a license plate. King Philip’s War — 1675 to 1676 — was the kind of fight that leaves a scar on a whole region, even if the region pretends it never happened.

Metacom — the English called him King Philip because God forbid they learn a Native name — was the son of Massasoit, the same Massasoit who fed the Pilgrims when they were starving and clueless. The Wampanoag kept the peace for fifty years. Half a century. Longer than most countries manage. And how did the colonists repay that? Land grabs. Broken treaties. “Misunderstandings” that always seemed to end with the English owning more shoreline.

Eventually, Metacom had had enough. And when he pushed back — when he finally said “no more” — the colonists called it savagery. They called it a massacre. They called it everything except what it was: a people fighting for the last pieces of their home.

The war burned through New England like a fever. Entire towns were wiped off the map. Twelve of them are gone completely. Proportionally, more people died here than in any war this country ever fought afterward — Civil War included. Think about that. The deadliest war in American history happened before there was an America.

And when it was over — when Metacom was killed — they cut off his head and stuck it on a pike in Plymouth. Left it there for twenty‑five years. A generation grew up walking past it. That’s not a metaphor. That’s not a legend. That’s the kind of thing a place remembers even when it pretends it doesn’t.

Thousands of Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuc people were killed. Thousands more were enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean like cargo. New England likes to talk about its abolitionist heart, its moral backbone, its “cradle of liberty.” Funny how the cradle always leaves out the bones underneath.

And here’s the part that hits closest to home:

You and I — we went to school in the same New England. We learned about the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Revolution, the Tea Party, and Paul Revere galloping around like he invented midnight. But Metacom? King Philip’s War? Maybe a sentence. Maybe a footnote. Maybe nothing at all.

That silence isn’t an accident. It’s a choice. A whole region deciding which ghosts get to speak and which ones get paved over.

Leave a comment

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

Self-Promotion

Fifty‑five of you have hit that “subscribe” button, and I’m grateful for every one of you. Maybe you’re here for the stories, maybe for the memories, maybe because something I wrote once made you stop and think. Whatever brought you here, I’m glad you’re still with me.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how strange it is to promote yourself. It feels like standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign that says, “I wrote a thing, would you mind reading it?” And yet here I am again, doing exactly that.

I’ve spent a lifetime telling stories — on the air, on the page, in the quiet corners of my mind — and somehow they keep spilling out. Some of them turn into poems. Some turn into books. Some just sit with me until they decide what they want to be. But every time I share one, I feel a little less alone in the world, and maybe you do too.

So this is me, waving from the dock, saying thank you for sticking around. Thank you for reading, for listening, for letting me ramble. If something I write makes you think, or laugh, or remember something you thought you’d forgotten, then this whole strange exercise in self‑promotion is worth it.

And just so there’s no confusion: the link below goes to my memoir — ten years of my life, the most dramatic ones — gathered into a book I’m proud of.

I’ll keep walking through my mind. You keep stopping by when you can. Seems like a fair deal.

Leave a comment

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

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

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

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