Tag: fiction

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

Leave a Reply

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

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.

Subscriptions are free.

Leave a Reply

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

Fay “Honey” Knopp: Quaker, Abolitionist, Prison Visitor

And She Was My Friend

I still remember the first time Fay “Honey” Knopp walked into the visiting room at Danbury FCI, carrying this strange little bubble of gentleness into a place built to crush it. Visiting rooms in federal joints all smell the same — burnt coffee, disinfectant, old linoleum, and the quiet hum of resignation — but Honey had a way of making the air feel different, like she’d opened a window nobody else could see. She wasn’t dramatic, wasn’t trying to save anybody in some big cinematic way. She just sat down across from me with her notebook and her Quaker calm, and suddenly the place didn’t feel quite so much like a cage.

Those visits mattered. They still do. They were a lifeline tossed across concrete and razor wire, and I grabbed on like a drowning man. And here’s the thing Honey didn’t just visit me. She visited all of us — the war resisters, the conscientious objectors, the ones who refused to pick up a gun and got locked up for it. She made her rounds like a minister of mercy, and she didn’t care if the world thought we were troublemakers or traitors or fools. She showed up anyway.

And when I came out — when I finally walked out of Danbury with that strange mix of relief and disorientation that hits you the moment the gate clanks shut behind you — Honey threw me a coming‑out party at her home. Imagine that. A party. For a guy just out of federal prison. She did it for all of us, every war resister who stepped back into the world blinking like we’d been underwater too long. Her house became this unofficial harbor, a place where you could breathe again, where you weren’t defined by your inmate number, where you could sit at her table and feel human.

Years later, when I learned more about her life, I realized I’d been sitting with a legend and didn’t even know it. Honey Knopp wasn’t just a kind soul with a notebook. She was born in Bridgeport in 1918, valedictorian, art school, New School, UCLA — a whole life of curiosity before she ever set foot in a prison. She found her calling at a Quaker peace demonstration in ’39 and never stopped walking toward the fire: pacifism, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, all stitched together by this stubborn belief that human beings could be better than the systems we built.

By the mid‑50s she was visiting imprisoned conscientious objectors. By ’62 she was in Geneva telling the world to stop poisoning children with nuclear fallout. And in ’68 — the year the country was tearing itself apart — she co‑founded Prisoner Visitation and Support, the very program that eventually brought her to me. She built a national network so people locked away by the government wouldn’t disappear into silence.

Then came the ’70s, and Honey started talking abolition — real abolition — before it was fashionable or even understandable to most folks. She wrote Instead of Prisons, a handbook that basically said: stop building cages, start building communities. Reduce the population. Replace punishment with something that actually heals. She pushed restorative justice before the term had any traction. She worked with sexual offenders, too — not because it was easy or popular, but because she believed you couldn’t help victims if you pretended offenders were monsters instead of broken people who needed treatment.

Honey didn’t flinch from the hard stuff. She walked straight into it with her notebook and her faith and her unshakeable belief that mercy wasn’t weakness — it was the strongest force on earth.

There’s a school named after her now, and the Safer Society Foundation still carries her torch. But for me, her legacy isn’t in the institutions or the programs. It’s in those quiet afternoons in Danbury, and in that coming‑out party at her home — the one where she welcomed me back into the world like I was a long‑lost nephew instead of a guy fresh out of federal custody.

Honey Knopp walked into prisons with nothing but compassion and walked out leaving seeds behind — seeds she planted in people like me. Seeds that still grow. She showed up when the world said we were disposable. She showed up when it mattered.

And I’ll never forget it.

Leave a Reply

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

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.

Subscriptions are free

Leave a Reply

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

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.

Leave a Reply

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

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.

Leave a Reply

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

Subscriptions are always free:

Brigitte Bardot: The Timeless Beauty Who Fought for Animals

Born today, September 28th, 1934 — Brigitte Bardot, the woman who once lit up my quiet Staten Island nights and later proved her beauty meant something because she fought like hell for animals.

I used to sneak out to the TV room late at night when we lived on Staten Island, moving slow so the floorboards wouldn’t betray me. The whole neighborhood went silent after dark — that deep suburban hush where even the refrigerator sounded like it was breathing. I’d keep the TV turned down low, just enough to catch the outline of her. Brigitte Bardot. My first lust, my first love, the first woman who made something warm and confusing rise in my chest before I even knew what desire was. I never got over her. You don’t get over the first person who teaches you that beauty can hit like a wave.

She’d appear on the screen like she wasn’t entering a movie but stepping into the room with me. Even in black‑and‑white she carried her own sunlight. Bardot didn’t act — she existed, and you felt it. She moved with that loose, natural confidence, like she didn’t care whether the world approved or not. And I’d sit there in the dim glow, the whole house asleep, watching her with the kind of focus only a kid discovering something powerful can have.

There was a quiet sensuality in her, something that made you lean forward without meaning to. Not loud, not cheap — just a presence that pulled you in. The way she held her face, the way her eyes lingered, the way she carried herself like she knew exactly who she was. She made those quiet Staten Island nights feel bigger, warmer, more alive. She made me feel alive.

As I got older, I learned the rest — the fame, the storms, the way she walked away from the industry at the height of her power. But what stayed with me most wasn’t the movies. It was the stand she took for animals. When she left acting behind and threw herself into protecting creatures who had no voice, she showed a different kind of beauty — the kind that comes from conviction. She fought hard, loud, and without apology. That mattered to me. Still does. There’s a strength in choosing compassion, and she chose it over and over again.

Now, at this point in my life, I can say it plain: I’d want a woman with a body that carries its own kind of beauty, sure — but also a good heart. Someone with that mix Bardot had: presence and principle. Warmth and backbone. A person who doesn’t just look good in a photograph but stands for something when it counts.

Even now, when I see an old photo of her — that tousled hair, that steady gaze, that sense she was already halfway to someplace freer — I feel that same quiet heat again. That first spark. That first awakening. Some memories fade. Some loves soften. But Bardot, in her own way, stayed.

Leave a Reply

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

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.

Leave a Reply

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

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.

See less

Leave a Reply

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

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.

Leave a Reply

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

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.

Leave a Reply

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

White Hall Station

Sometimes a chapter needs another walk around the block, and this one did. I went back, rewrote it, and finally gave a little mouse named Archibald MacLeash the explanation he deserved. If you’ve read the book, this fills in the cracks. If you haven’t, well—welcome to the neighborhood.

The night before my induction, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, looking for answers. My heart pounded like I’d just run the 40‑yard dash. A drumbeat I wasn’t sure I could march to — too fast, too loud, too soft, and definitely its own rhythm. But I knew exactly where I did not want to march.

I tried everything: counting breaths, replaying old football games, thinking of my girlfriend, even astral projection — maybe I could end up on some tropical island, safe and away. I wanted to be anywhere but, in that room, in that bed, wondering where I might be tomorrow night. But dread snuck in under the door and settled in my brain. I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of disappearing — of becoming a number, a uniform, a cog in a machine I didn’t believe in.

The draft lottery — America’s twisted game show of fate — wouldn’t begin until 1969. But in 1964, the draft was still run by local boards, deferments reviewed by hand. At eighteen, I burned my college deferment card, thinking I was making a statement. I wrote letters to President Johnson and to my Staten Island draft board, asking to be reclassified 1‑A. You can’t refuse what you haven’t been offered. And I was tired of hiding behind loopholes, even if I hadn’t meant to hide in the first place.

By ’69, they granted my wish. I was 1‑A — fit for service, next in line to toe the line, or not. Five years of business schools and seminaries had led me here. From the gridiron to leg irons.

And then the morning came.

I was up by 6 a.m. — not that I’d slept. I left a note for my mother saying I’d gone to visit friends. I wondered how long I’d really be gone. I took the bus to the Staten Island Ferry, crossed the Hudson, and walked the two longest blocks of my life to Whitehall Station. Even writing about it now, I can feel that god‑awful sickness in my stomach. I can’t do this.

Fight or flight? Mine was freeze and sit. No exit. Just a heart pounding like a drumline on speed. I was about to jump off a cliff and couldn’t see the bottom. Compared to this, the Coney Island Parachute Jump was a kiddie ride.

Whitehall Station sat in lower Manhattan like a bureaucratic bunker — the place where boys became soldiers or tried not to. It shut down in 1972, two days before my birthday, while I was in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. I’d wanted it torn down. I’d done my best to see that happen.

As I climbed the steps, I saw Mr. Harold Jones waiting outside. My eighth‑grade science teacher — but more than that. Over the years, he’d become my confidant, the one adult who understood what I was feeling. He made science feel like storytelling, helped along by a fictional mouse named Archibald MacLeish who lived in his coat closet. I never saw him, but I saw him. Still do.

Mr. Jones said he named the mouse Archibald MacLeish after the poet — “because even a mouse can carry big ideas,” he told me once, tapping his temple like he was winding up a thought. MacLeish wrote about truth, about standing your ground when the world tries to bend you, about the kind of dissent that isn’t loud or showy but stubborn and necessary. He believed democracy wasn’t something you admired from a distance — it was something you practiced, even when it cost you. Jones figured a mouse could teach eighth‑graders more about courage and conscience than any textbook. The beret, the cane, the red bandana — that was all me. That’s how I pictured him: a tiny philosopher with a rebel’s wardrobe, the kind of creature who’d whisper, Don’t let them turn you into something you’re not. Archibald showed up whenever I needed him — not as a hallucination, not as a joke, but as a reminder that dissent can be quiet, steady, and small, and still shake the world.

Mr. Jones didn’t say much that morning. He didn’t have to. He told me to stay who I was. Said it was something to be proud of.

Inside, the induction ceremony began. The room smelled of sweat. The air was thick with the breath of boys pretending not to shake. The recruiter’s voice was flat, rehearsed, like he’d stopped listening years ago.

“Please repeat after me…”

“I do solemnly swear…”

Repeat. Repeat? Hell, I could barely breathe.

“…that I will bear true faith…”

And suddenly I wasn’t in Whitehall anymore. I was back on the football field, hearing my coach yell, “Go in hell‑bent for leather, Little Sandy!” My dad was Big Sandy. The coach used that nickname to rile me up. Hell‑bent for leather — without fear.

My heart picked up the chant until it drowned out everything else.

Then came the words: Step forward.

I sat down.

The recruiter blinked, confused. Thought I was sick. I stood, breathed, sat again.

“I’m not moving,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I could even if I wanted to.

The sergeant’s face turned fire‑engine red. My heart was a jackhammer. I was frozen in defiance — or fear. Maybe both. I prayed he wouldn’t hit me. If he did, I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from hitting back. I may be a peacenik, but I know myself. Anger lives in me too. If I struck him, I wouldn’t be going to jail for trying to end a war, but for starting one.

Two MPs grabbed me like a sack of potatoes and hauled me to a holding cell. I expected that part. I was prepared. No blows were thrown. An Army lawyer came in to make sure I knew what I was doing. I asked if he knew what he was doing — and what he was part of. He accepted my yes and left.

Then came the police car, the ride to Staten Island, and my first night in jail. Five miles from the gridiron. A lifetime away.

As they carried me out of Whitehall, I refused to walk — part of my plan for total non‑cooperation. Mr. Jones stood on the grimy sidewalk. He smiled. Gave me a thumbs‑up. I flashed him a peace sign from between a cop’s holster and his arm.

And behind him — I swear — I saw Archibald MacLeish strutting down the sidewalk, beret tilted, cane tapping a rhythm only I could hear. He paused near the induction center door, tipped his hat, and whispered, “Courage isn’t loud. It’s the quiet refusal.” Then he vanished into the crowd.

Mr. Jones arranged to bail me out, though I was released on my own recognizance. I spent the rest of the day at his home — resting, recovering, trying to make sense of what had just happened. And what would happen next. To my mother, I was simply visiting Mr. Jones. I was old enough to say, “Don’t call my parents,” and the authorities obliged.

A trial date was set for April. The weeks leading up to it blurred into paperwork, legal advice, friends’ advice, and panic. I walked Manhattan like I always had, but now I memorized the cracks in the sidewalk, the rhythm of subway trains, the smell of roasted peanuts from corner carts — anything to anchor me.

Oddly, I’d always found the Financial District peaceful on a Sunday morning. Wall Street’s insanity gave way to silence. I walked it a few times in those last days. And Times Square — the lights of Broadway weren’t going to shine on me, but they still shine inside my memory. So do the beaches of Staten Island.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. Only that it wasn’t in New York anymore.

And so the city’s noise faded behind me. The cracks in the sidewalks, the drumbeat of the subway, even Broadway’s lights became part of a memory I carried but could no longer live inside.

What I needed was silence. Steadiness. A place where the ground didn’t demand allegiance.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could still hear Archibald’s cane tapping — that quiet rhythm he kept for me when I couldn’t keep one for myself. He’d been at Whitehall, and he’d be on the mountain too. Courage travels light.

Emily’s mountain was waiting. Quiet, immovable, patient — just like she was — offering refuge without question.

Leave a Reply

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