Tag: books

Footprints In Time — On Sale This Week

My memoir Footprints In Time is on a Kindle Countdown Deal this week. If you’ve been meaning to grab it, now’s the time — and Kindle Unlimited readers can read it free.

I wanted to share a moment from one of the chapters — a stretch of life that still sits heavy in my memory. It was Biloxi, right after Camille tore through the coast, when everything felt raw and unsettled and we were just trying to keep moving.

“And for us, it was another chapter in that wild, dangerous, beautiful stretch of life with Joannie and the kids — the years when we lived on nerve, instinct, and whatever the universe handed us. Camille didn’t stop us. She just became part of the story.

Camille moved on, but something in the air around us didn’t settle. You can feel it when another storm is forming — not wind, not rain, just that quiet dread that sits behind your ribs. We left Biloxi carrying that feeling west, and it followed us straight into the next trouble waiting under the bright lights.”

follow the link to the book: https://a.co/d/09t0S86m

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Arthur Miller

Born Today October 17th October,1915 Arthur Miller

Today marks the birthday of — born in New York City in 1915, raised in the hum and grind of a country already learning how to mythologize itself. Miller didn’t write about heroes; he wrote about the ordinary men who got chewed up by the machinery. Death of a Salesman hit the stage in 1949, dragging Willy Loman — part dreamer, part ghost, part every man who ever believed the pitch — into the harsh light. Willy was loosely modeled on Miller’s uncle, Manny Newman, a man chasing the American Dream long after it stopped running.

Miller followed that with The Crucible in 1952, a story that pretended to be about 1692 Salem but was really about the fevered paranoia of McCarthyism — the communist “witch hunts” that turned neighbors into informants and suspicion into a national pastime. And in one of those perfect American ironies, Miller himself was dragged before the House Un‑American Activities Committee four years later. He refused to name names. They found him in contempt. The country he wrote about so fiercely turned its spotlight on him, demanding he play along. He didn’t.

Years later, in 2000, Miller wrote:

“Poetry may seem an odd word for a witch-hunt, but I saw there was something of the marvelous in the spectacle of a whole village, if not an entire province, whose imagination was captured by a vision of something that wasn’t there… The Crucible… became the awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin.”

That line hits harder now than it did then. Because from 2016 straight through 2026 — and still counting — we’ve had our own front‑row seat to imagination gone feral. Whole communities whipped into a frenzy over shadows, rumors, and fantasies dressed up as gospel truth. We’ve watched people swear allegiance to things that weren’t there, fight battles no one was waging, and torch friendships, families, and futures over ghosts.

Miller warned us about what happens when a society becomes possessed — when fear becomes fuel, when suspicion becomes scripture, when imagination stops being creative and starts being corrosive. His plays weren’t just stories; they were flare guns fired into the night.

And here we are, still hoping we don’t follow the same path all the way to ruin.

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Camille, Biloxi and the Big Blow

Hurricane season’s back on the weather reports again — all those swirling graphics and tight‑lipped meteorologists pointing at the Gulf — and every time I watch them I get pulled straight back to one night in Biloxi. The night Camille came for us, and I realized some storms don’t just hit, they remember you.
When Camille Came Calling — And Found Us in Biloxi
Every coastal town has that storm — the one people still talk about like it happened last night. For Biloxi, Mississippi, that storm was Hurricane Camille, August 1969. A Category 5 buzz‑saw that didn’t just hit the coast — it carved its name into it.

And we were there.

Joanie — yes, that Joanie, the one I zig‑zagged across America with, three kids in the back seat, living on forged prescriptions, stolen returns, and whatever luck we could scrape together — she and I were holed up in a motel in Biloxi when Camille decided to make her entrance.

It wasn’t a fancy place. Just one of those Gulf Coast motels with a flickering neon sign and an air conditioner that rattled like it was trying to escape the window frame. We were just passing through, same as always. A night or two, then back on the road. But storms don’t care about your itinerary.

Camille came in fast — too fast. No slow buildup, no polite warning. Just a sudden shift in the air, a pressure drop you could feel in your teeth, and then the wind started talking in that voice storms use when they mean business.

The kids were restless, Joanie was pacing, and I kept looking out the motel window like I expected the Gulf itself to come walking up the street. The rain hit sideways. The walls shook. You could hear things outside breaking — metal, wood, whatever wasn’t nailed down well enough. Camille didn’t knock. She kicked the damn door in.

People talk about the storm surge — 24, 25 feet of water rolling in like a moving wall — but what I remember most is the sound. A freight train mixed with a scream. A kind of roaring that makes you understand, deep down, that nature doesn’t give a damn about you or your motel room or your borrowed life.

And here’s the part that matters:
We survived because that motel sat on a hill — just enough elevation, just far enough inland, to keep the surge from swallowing us whole.
If we’d been a quarter‑mile closer to the water, or down on flat ground, this story might’ve ended differently. But luck — or fate, or whatever you want to call it — put us in a place that stayed above the worst of Camille’s rage.

When the sun finally crawled up, Biloxi looked scraped clean. Boats in places boats shouldn’t be. Houses shifted off foundations. Debris everywhere. Camille had come through like she owned the place.

Later storms would come — Katrina being the big one — but for a long time, Camille was the yardstick. The one everyone measured fear against.

And for us, it was another chapter in that wild, dangerous, beautiful stretch of life with Joanie and the kids — the years when we lived on nerve, instinct, and whatever the universe handed us. Camille didn’t stop us. She just became part of the story.

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October 7th, 1955: Allen Ginsberg Howl‑ed

HOWL didn’t debut in some polished marble hall. It broke loose in a raw little San Francisco room — the Six Gallery — on an October night in ’55, a place so new it still smelled like paint and half‑formed dreams.

Kenneth Rexroth — older, sharp‑eyed, already a force in San Francisco’s underground — was the one who pulled the whole night into shape. He wasn’t a Beat, not by generation or temperament, but he had the instincts of a man who knew when something dangerous and alive was about to happen. Rexroth organized the Six Gallery reading, gathered the oddballs and live wires: Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac drifting in like a man who’d already seen tomorrow and wasn’t sure it would treat him kindly.

And the poem Ginsberg brought — Howl — wasn’t some polite little verse. It was a long, lung‑bursting cry from the underside of America: madness, jazz, sex, sorrow, angels, broken streets, and the machinery of the country grinding people down. It was Ginsberg grabbing the world by the collar and saying: look at what’s happening to us. The lines were huge, meant to be taken in one breath, like a wave hitting a seawall. Raw, unfiltered, dangerous enough that the room tightened before he even started reading.

Nobody in that cramped, smoky room knew they were about to witness the birth of the Beats — not the myth, not the bumper‑sticker version, but the real thing: young men with too much fire in their chests and no interest in slowing down.

Ginsberg was 29, had never done a reading, and probably felt his heartbeat in his teeth. He started quiet, almost cautious, like he wasn’t sure the words would stay upright. Then he found that long, rolling breath — the Whitman lung, the jazz lung — pulling in air like he meant to swallow the whole West Coast and spit it back out in lines that didn’t ask permission.

Kerouac sat cross‑legged on the floor, chanting “Go… go… go…” like some beat‑up guardian angel trying to shove a friend through the door of destiny. And the crowd — half drunk, half holy — felt the room tilt. Something was happening. Something big. Something that didn’t give a damn about polite America or its tidy fences.

By the time Ginsberg finished Howl, the place was electric. Not applause — something wilder. The kind of noise people make when they realize the world just shifted under their feet.

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Falls Moodiness, Nostalgia Overload, Ramble

Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin — a place with wide skies and long horizons. But his best line, the one about enjoying the ice cream while it’s on your plate, hits even harder when you’re standing somewhere a little less poetic. Somewhere like Mass Ave as it empties into Cambridge, right where the city exhales and the old bars used to be.

There was a time when that stretch was its own kind of chapel — neon lights humming, doors swinging open, music leaking into the night air. Places where people fell in and out of love, made promises they meant for at least an hour, and told stories that got better every time they were retold. Most of those bars are gone now, replaced by whatever the future thinks we need. Still, if you pay attention, the ghosts walk beside you, connecting past to present.

And that’s where Wilder’s line lands:

“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.”

You hear that on a street like Mass Ave, and it stops being a clever quote. It becomes a truth you can feel in your chest. Because that whole stretch — the old bars, the new storefronts, the people drifting toward the river or the Red Line — it’s all a reminder that nothing stays the way it was. Not the places, not the people, not the nights you thought would last forever.

But the moment you’re in?

That’s still yours.

Maybe it’s the way the late light hits the pavement.

Maybe it’s the memory of a bar that isn’t there anymore.

Maybe it’s just the simple fact that you’re alive enough to notice any of it.

That’s the ice cream.

That’s the sweetness he meant.

I’ve spent decades trying to decode the “why” of things — why this turn, why that loss, why the road bent instead of straightening. But walking Mass Ave toward Cambridge, you realize the road doesn’t owe you an explanation. It just asks you to keep moving, to keep noticing, to keep tasting whatever small sweetness is still on your plate.

Not asking why.

Not asking whither.

Just letting the moment be what it is — fleeting, imperfect, and somehow beautiful because it won’t come again.

Mass Ave in my memory.

Cambridge in my heart.

And the two of them — the street I haven’t seen in years and the city that still knows my name — they slide together and become part of the ice cream on my plate.

Because even if they’re yesterday’s places, they still melt into today — a little sweet, a little sad, the kind of taste you don’t forget.

And that’s enough to carry me forward, even from here.

And for this day, that’s enough.

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Peanuts

Peanuts first hit the papers 65 years ago today, back in 1950, when a quiet kid from Minneapolis named Charles Schulz finally got his shot. He’d been “Sparky” once — the smallest kid in every room, skipped ahead so fast he never quite caught up, the kind of kid other kids pick on because they can. His kindergarten teacher told him he’d be an artist someday, and Sparky, being Sparky, took it seriously. By first grade he was drawing Popeye like he’d been born with ink in his veins, and he figured, well, that’s it then — cartoonist or bust.

School didn’t do him any favors. Shy, timid, failing something every year, he gave up on college before college could give up on him. He signed up for a correspondence art course — the kind where you mail your dreams in an envelope and hope someone mails them back improved.

Then 1950 rolls around and Sparky walks into a big syndicate office with his best work under his arm. Eight papers pick him up. Eight. Not exactly the stuff of legend — until it was. Peanuts goes from those eight little papers to more than 2,600 in 75 countries. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy — suddenly they’re everywhere, like old friends you didn’t know you had.

Schulz worked like a man who didn’t trust luck. Every morning started with a jelly doughnut, then he’d sit there waiting for an idea to show up — sometimes in minutes, sometimes after a long, lonely stretch. He did everything himself: script, art, lettering. Wouldn’t hire an inker. Said it’d be like a golfer hiring someone to make his putts. And he meant it. In fifty years he took one vacation — five weeks for his 75th birthday. That’s not dedication; that’s devotion.

On February 12th, 2000, Schulz died quietly at home. The next morning, the final Peanuts strip ran. Snoopy on top of his red doghouse, typewriter in front of him, reading a farewell letter from the man who’d drawn him into existence. Schulz wrote that he’d been fortunate — almost fifty years with Charlie Brown and the gang — but he couldn’t keep up the daily grind anymore. And he said something simple and perfect: his family didn’t want Peanuts continued by anyone else.

How could he ever forget them, he wrote.

And you know what? None of us ever did.

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My Book

Good morning everyone

And the rest of the story now available at https://a.co/d/0iCnPaNX

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Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey’s birthday rolls around today — kid came squalling into the world out in La Junta, Colorado back in ’35, but he really grew up wild in Oregon, the real Oregon, not the brochure. Him and his brother Chuck tearing down the Willamette River like they were trying to outrun the sun. Swimming, fishing, wrestling the rapids, wrestling each other, wrestling life itself. The guy was built like somebody who didn’t mind getting punched in the face if it meant a good story later.

In high school they tagged him “most likely to succeed,” which is funny, because Kesey’s idea of success was never the one the guidance counselor had taped to the wall. He goes off to Stanford to study creative writing — sure, fine — but then he ends up at the VA hospital in Menlo Park making seventy‑five bucks a day letting doctors pump him full of LSD and whatever other alphabet‑soup chemicals they were cooking up. Seventy‑five bucks in the early ’60s! That’s rent, groceries, and a couple nights of trouble.

He stuck around afterward as a night attendant in the psych ward, wandering those fluorescent hallways while the world slept. That’s where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came from — not theory, not academia, but the real deal: human beings cracked open, stitched together, trying to make sense of the noise in their heads. The title came from an old kids’ rhyme: “One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” Simple, spooky, perfect.

Pauline Kael said the book had the whole damn era packed inside it — Vietnam, campus revolts, drugs, the counterculture — all before the country even realized it was about to blow its gasket. Kesey wasn’t predicting the future; he was already living in it.

And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, he fell in with a little San Francisco band called the Grateful Dead. They weren’t legends yet — just a bunch of long‑haired kids with amps that hummed like beehives and a drummer who looked like he’d been born in a thunderstorm. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters pulled the Dead into the Acid Tests, those wild, neon‑soaked nights where music wasn’t just played, it was summoned. The Dead became the house band for the psychedelic revolution, and Kesey was the ringmaster, the guy stirring the punch bowl and the consciousness of everyone in the room. Garcia once said Kesey didn’t just open doors — he kicked them off the hinges. And Kesey loved the Dead because they weren’t trying to be stars; they were trying to be free. It was a friendship built on noise, color, and the belief that life could be bigger than the box it came in.

Then Hollywood got its hands on Cuckoo’s Nest in ’75, and boom — six Oscars. Jack Nicholson grinning like the devil in a denim jacket. Kesey didn’t love the movie, but that’s another story for another windy day. He wrote Sometimes a Great Notion — big, wet, logging‑town epic — and later Sailor Song, which reads like Alaska got drunk and decided to tell you its secrets.

Kesey was one of those American originals — the kind you don’t get anymore. Half cowboy, half mystic, half troublemaker. Yeah, that’s three halves, but Kesey never fit in the math anyway.

And then there’s the interview — the one I watched again this morning. Not Merv Griffin. Not some slick 1960s talk‑show host with a shiny desk and a band in the corner. No — this was Charlie Rose, 1992. Rose in his suit, leaning forward like he’s about to ask the meaning of life. Kesey sitting across from him, older now, beard gone,hair gray at the edges, wearing a simple dark shirt, no blazer, no tie‑dye, just Kesey as he was — a man who’d lived through the noise and come out the other side with a grin that said he still knew a few secrets the rest of us hadn’t caught up to yet.

It’s a collision of worlds — Rose’s studio polish against Kesey’s Oregon mud. Rose wants to talk literature; Kesey wants to talk life. LSD, rivers, kids, stories, the whole messy American experiment. You can see Rose trying to keep it tidy, but Kesey keeps slipping out of the frame, like a fish that refuses to be caught.

That’s the beauty of it — two men, one chasing understanding, the other chasing freedom. Kesey’s grin says he’s still riding the rapids, still hearing the music under the noise. And somewhere in that studio, between the questions and the laughter, you can feel the ghost of the Willamette River rolling through the lights.

The link to that interview https://youtu.be/BJjNIoODO2k

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Joe Hill: The Man They Tried to Kill but Couldn’t Shut Up.

Joe Hill wasn’t just a labor organizer — he was the kind of guy who could walk into a room full of scared, exhausted workers and make them believe they mattered. A Swedish immigrant, a wandering worker, a songwriter with a knife‑sharp tongue, he wrote the songs that turned picket lines into something like church: The Preacher and the Slave, Casey Jones, There Is Power in a Union. Songs you could shout over factory noise or sing under your breath when the boss walked by.

Hill joined the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies — the union that didn’t care about your race, your job, your skill level, or whether you had two nickels to rub together. If you worked, you belonged. That alone made him dangerous to the people who liked their workers quiet and scared.

In 1914, Hill was arrested in Utah for a murder he almost certainly didn’t commit. The trial was a mess — no motive, no real evidence, just a man the state wanted gone. And they got their wish: Hill was executed by firing squad in 1915. But here’s the thing — the man refused to die properly. His last words were basically, “Don’t mourn. Organize.” And that line became a fuse.

His ashes were scattered in every state except Utah, because the Wobblies figured he’d already spent enough time there. And every time workers stood up — miners, factory hands, farm laborers, nurses, teachers — Joe Hill was the ghost in the room, the voice saying, You’re worth more than they tell you.

That’s why Joan Baez could stand on the Woodstock stage in 1969, pregnant, rain coming down, and sing Joe Hill like she was calling him out of the ground. And the crowd — half stoned, half soaked, all alive — felt it. Because Joe Hill isn’t a man anymore. He’s a reminder.

You can kill a person.

You can’t kill an idea.

And Joe Hill was the idea that working people deserve a life.

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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.

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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