Tag: life

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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Mother Knows for Better Clothes — And I Hated Every Damn Minute of It

Mother knows for better clothes… it’s back to Robert Hall again.
That jingle was the soundtrack of doom every August of my childhood. You couldn’t escape it. Radio, TV, store speakers — like they were trying to brainwash us into being happy about summer ending. I wasn’t fooled. I hated it. Hated the jingle, hated the reminder, hated the whole back‑to‑school circus.

Summer was freedom. Bare feet, scraped knees, long days that didn’t care what time it was. Then suddenly some cheery voice on TV starts singing about “better clothes,” like that was supposed to make me excited to go sit in a classroom again. Better clothes? Who cared. I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I just wanted one more week of sun, one more night of staying out too late, one more morning where I didn’t have to drag myself out of bed.

I remember telling a good friend of mine once — I said, “I hated going back to school. I hated summer ending.”
She looked at me like I’d confessed to a crime.
“But I thought you were a good student?”
And I told her the truth: “I was a good student. I still hated it.”

People think being good at something means you enjoy it. Not true. I was good at school the way some people are good at shoveling snow — you do it because you have to, not because you love it. I could read, write, answer questions, get the grades. Fine. But the whole ritual of “back to school” felt like being marched back into captivity.

And that damn jingle didn’t help.
It was like a warning siren: Fun’s over, kid. Get your notebooks.
Even now, decades later, I can hear it clear as day. The bright, chirpy voices. The fake cheer. The promise of “better clothes” like that was supposed to make everything okay.

It never did.

Summer always ended too fast, and school always started too soon. And Robert Hall — with their bargain pants and their relentless advertising — made sure you knew exactly when your freedom was about to be taken away again.

So yeah. I hated hearing it.
I hated going back to school.
I hated summer ending.
And I still think that jingle was one of the most effective pieces of psychological warfare ever unleashed on American children.

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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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    Eleven Days in September

    A few thoughts here are hard for me to write, because they force me to relive some of the worst days of my life. I’m sharing them because maybe it helps the healing, and because it’s more than Mother Nature and her climatological shenanigans that make me hate September. I’ve never been a fan of the month anyway. And I know I’m not the only person who has been — or is — going through tough times. When you mix difficult life issues with a chemical imbalance called SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), life can become a Ulyssean train wreck of emotions, senses, and befuddled thinking.

    SAD is a mood disorder tied to seasonal changes, usually showing up as depression beginning in the fall and lasting through winter. It’s caused by a disturbance in the body’s circadian system. My condition is minor compared to what some people I know experience. I once worked with a woman who could cry at a funny joke — and she wasn’t pretending. And then there are the doubters who say things like: get over it; it’s not real; don’t let things get you down. This piece is for anyone who’s heard that too many times. I often think of James Joyce’s line: “Your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.”

    In June of 1997, summer — the season of good times and hope — shattered into a million heart‑piercing fragments. After a misdiagnosis that let her cancer grow unchecked, my wife finally learned the truth. By then, the prognosis was treatable but not curable. It would one day take her life.

    So we began living six months at a time. From one blood test and body scan to the next, we held our breath, never knowing if this time would be the last. We did that every six months for fourteen years.

    Jennifer began thirty radiation treatments in a row. The burns were third‑degree. She would lie curled on the floor outside the treatment room, in pain from the day before, waiting for the next round. I was always with her — holding her as tightly as I could, sometimes curled beside her on that cold hallway floor, trying desperately to absorb even a sliver of her agony.

    After radiation came two weeks of intensive chemotherapy. And then, almost a year later, as her body began to heal, she developed severe panic attacks. She couldn’t leave the house or be left alone. Once, I was gone for no more than fifteen minutes. When I returned, she was clinging to her chair, sweating, crying, begging me never to leave again.

    Jennifer was not a coward. She was strong. Brave. But the disease was killing her in ways no scan could measure. I had already quit my job in broadcasting. There would be other jobs — or not. I wanted to be home so she would never feel alone.

    By the end of 1997, we had at least put cancer in remission. With good doctors, counseling, and Jennifer’s relentless determination, she resumed what passed — at least to the outside world — as everyday life. Inside our home, we cocooned, believing that if we locked the world out, nothing could get in to harm us. The two of us were enough. And that’s how we lived — six months at a time, always together.

    I had my own ways of coping — music and writing. I learned to live not just one day at a time, but sometimes one minute at a time. I didn’t yet realize how deeply life was carving its marks into me.

    By the summer of 2009, traditional chemotherapy stopped working. Our six‑month reprieves ended with the doctor’s quiet words: “There is no more we can do to beat cancer back; it is spreading rapidly now.” I cried that day. But the worst day was still ahead. Suddenly, six months felt like a long time.

    One last treatment was available: a Phase 1 clinical trial. Jennifer agreed to try it. She said she knew the drugs probably wouldn’t save her life, but maybe someday they would save someone else. She joked that lab rats had better lives than she did.

    Jennifer had always been grateful that chemo hadn’t taken her long, beautiful blond hair. But these new drugs were brutal. Her hair came out in clumps on her pillow. I watched her body change from the vibrant ocean swimmer she had been to someone frail and barely recognizable. The woman who could outwalk and outswim me now needed help to move from one room to the next. The end was closing in. This would be our last summer together.

    And this is where a question began — one I still carry today: What did Jennifer suffer quietly, never telling me?

    I know she hid things. Not because she didn’t trust me, but because she loved me. She curled her pain inward so I wouldn’t have to carry all of it with her. I think about the fears she must have swallowed whole. Not the obvious ones — not the fear of cancer or dying or treatments that burned her skin and hollowed her bones. Those she faced openly. Those she let me see.

    It’s the quieter fears I wonder about — the ones behind her eyes.

    Maybe she feared becoming a burden. Maybe she feared watching me watch her suffer. Maybe she feared losing herself long before she lost her life — the swimmer, the walker, the strong woman who once outpaced me on any beach. Maybe she feared the shrinking of her world, the panic that made the front door feel like a cliff’s edge. And maybe — though she never said it — she feared leaving me alone in a house that once echoed with two voices.

    There was pain she hid too. The physical pain, yes — the burns, the nausea, the exhaustion that made her bones feel hollow. But also the humiliation of losing independence, of needing help to move from one room to the next. She tried to stand straighter when I entered the room. She tried to smile when she was breaking.

    I wonder what thoughts she kept from me in those last months. Did she count her remaining days? Did she lie awake listening to her own breathing? Did she realize before I did that we would not grow old together?

    I will never know. Her silence wasn’t distance — it was devotion. She protected me from the full weight of her fear, even when she was too weak to lift her head. That was her last act of love.

    Sometimes I wish she hadn’t. Not because I needed to know, but because she shouldn’t have had to carry any of it alone. I would have held every fear, every pain, every trembling thought. I would have carried it all if she had let me.

    But she didn’t. She was always like that — even at the end. Protecting me quietly, suffering quietly, loving quietly.

    And so the question remains — the one I will carry for the rest of my life: What did she endure in silence so I wouldn’t have to?

    I’ll never know. And maybe that’s the shape love sometimes takes — the part that remains unknowable.

    On September 14th, 2011, the hospice nurse who visited us daily said, “Maybe it’s time for inpatient hospice care.” She tried to soften it with “it’s not always a one‑way trip,” but I knew it would be. And so did Jennifer. Sometimes I wake up at night trembling, tears flowing down my cheeks as I follow the red taillights of the ambulance taking her on her last road trip. I have traveled every mile of that trip in my mind, and always will.

    I spent the next eleven days in hospice, sleeping with my arms around my dying wife, waking to the sound of her breathing or gently pressing my lips to hers to check for air. And sometimes, I heard the sound that still echoes in my head at night — the death rattle.

    On the morning of September 25th at 7:28, I didn’t have to check. Something felt different. The room felt hollow. Jennifer’s soul was gone. She had quietly slipped away sometime in the night. I wondered if she whispered goodbye and I didn’t hear. Knowing her, she probably didn’t want to wake me. Seminary never taught me this: the human soul is real. And hers had left the room.

    The first three years after her death are a blur. I drank — sometimes fine scotch, sometimes whatever I could afford. I wrote poems deep into the night and listened to music until morning. A neighbor joked that I was channeling Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe I was. My doctor prescribed tranquilizers, antidepressants, and sleeping pills. A shrink told me I had PTSD. I snapped: “You’re nuts. PTSD? I haven’t been in a war.” They explained that I had been in a fourteen‑year battle against an enemy I couldn’t see — and that I lost the one person I couldn’t bear to lose.

    I stopped the pills nine years ago. I stopped drinking ten years ago this December. I understand now: the dreams and flashbacks are part of a condition I’ll likely carry for life. And September will always be the hardest.

    My first major break — the first time I truly lost my grip — was when a little white cat named Chloe died. The cat Jennifer had loved so much. The last living, touchable thing I had of her. The day I lost Chloe, I melted down. I nearly wrecked the exam room. Two friends explained to the staff what was happening, and they kindly said, “Let him go. We’ll clean up later.” Chloe’s body became Jennifer’s. Just like that morning in hospice when I had to be pulled away from my wife.

    The most recent time was a few years ago, when Jennifer’s sister Gayle died. No one knows how important Gayle was to me. But in short: if there had never been a Gayle, there would have never been a Jennifer.

    Every day, I try to be happy. I made a poster I look at each morning: “The dream lives; you were her dream; be happy.” I was loved. Deeply. Fiercely. And she would want me to be happy. I try. I really do. But then September comes, and the battle intensifies.

    Still, I try to be as brave as she was — the woman who curled up on a hospital floor and still found the strength to fight. The woman who joined Phase 1 trials not only for herself, but for someone she’d never meet. She wanted us to grow old together. She wanted me to be happy.

    But damn you, September. Your fall beauty hides your cruelty — the short days, long shadows, lonely nights, and memories that never fade.

    I’ve survived fifteen Septembers without her. I will survive this one. And the next. Because carrying the weight of those years means I’m still carrying her.

    And I know I’m not the only one who has traveled this road. Grief has a thousand faces, and none of them walk alone. I hope that by writing this — by laying out the bumps, the breaks, the nights that nearly swallowed me — it might help someone else get over their own rough patches and keep on keeping on.

    I know if I can, they can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Hunter S. Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    July 16th, 1945, The Big Boom and Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    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.

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    Archibald the Mystical Mouse

    I’ve been thinking since March 5th of 2026, when I published my book, that I should rewrite it — not because I expect sales to suddenly skyrocket, but because I left out some things, explanations that would have mattered. Like the fact that I have this mystical mouse named Archibald MacLeish who shows up in the beginning. I just assumed everyone would sort of get it, and then it started occurring to me, over and over again, that no, not everyone does get it. What’s the big deal about the mouse?

    So let me say it plainly.

    In my book, I talk about this make‑believe mouse named Archibald MacLeish. He’s a small, mystical presence who slips in and out of the story, but the name itself comes from something real in my life. Back in school, my science teacher kept a classroom mouse, and he named that little creature Archibald MacLeish. At the time, I didn’t know much about the man behind the name, but my teacher did — and he believed in giving things names that meant something.

    Later, I learned who the real Archibald MacLeish was — an American poet who wrote about democracy as something you do, not something you admire from a distance. He believed in dissent, in thinking for yourself, in the dignity of choosing your own path.

    So the mouse in my book is that mouse — the one supporting my dissent. Not just the classroom mouse, and not just the poet, but the whole chain of belief behind it: a teacher who saw something in me, a poet who stood for freedom of thought, and a reminder that even the smallest presence can carry a big idea.

    That’s the namesake. That’s the reason. That’s why the mouse is Archibald MacLeish. That’s why he shows up at the induction center.

    And I should have explained that as an introduction to the little guy — why he’s there and given him the honor and the dues he deserved. I think folks would have felt the depth of his presence.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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

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