When I chose to quit college in 1969, the economic reality in America was very different than it is today. By living frugally without a car or health insurance (doctor visits were ten dollars) I could cover my housing and food for around eighty dollars a month. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about eight hundred dollars today. Part time “menial” labor jobs abounded in 1970 and paid two to four dollars an hour. Thus ten hours of such work a week sufficed to support me and allow me lots of time to pursue my writing and music.
When I sold my first short story to Cosmopolitan magazine in 1975 for a thousand dollars, after giving my literary agent 10%, that nine hundred dollars financed an entire year of my life. My share of rent for a small apartment in Eugene, Oregon was thirty dollars a month, and my food cost ten dollars a week, so my story money gave me time to write two novels and several short stories.
Then I moved to Ashland, Oregon where I rented a room in a house for seventy dollars a month and worked part-time as a landscaper for six dollars an hour. When my boss got a contract to landscape a freeway overpass in Medford, fourteen miles from Ashland, I moved into a bunkhouse at my boss’s place in Medford for forty dollars a month inclusive of food, and worked full-time, six days a week, at state wages of $10.50 an hour for seven weeks and made 3500 dollars!
I was rich. Never having met my literary agent, I decided to travel to New York and meet her along with the few brave editors who had been so good as to buy and publish my short stories. I stayed with my composer friend in his rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan and saw several Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, which were inexpensive in those days.
I spent three months roaming around the East Coast, decided I wanted to write plays, and when I returned to the West Coast I moved to Seattle to give city living a try. And I still had over two thousand dollars from the freeway overpass windfall!
I was able to live a fulfilling creative life in those days because rent and food and healthcare in America were affordable. I didn’t own a car and didn’t need health insurance, which is why I believe if we had free universal healthcare and excellent public transportation and affordable housing for average income earners, America would experience an economic and cultural renaissance that would ultimately save the world.
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Todd’s wonderful new book The Dog Who Wanted A Person is now available from your favorite actual bookstore such as Gallery Books in Mendocino or numerous online sources including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
At long last I can announce the publication of the handsome paperback of The Dog Who Wanted A Person, an illustrated fable about a charming one-year-old dog named Huleekalabulee.
On his quest to find a person or people to live with and love, Huleekalabulee meets several remarkable dogs (and one groovy cat) who help him on his way. In the course of his exciting and humorous adventures he learns many valuable lessons about life and love while overcoming hunger, danger, fear, and loneliness to ultimately discover what is most important to him.
The beautifully illustrated paperback can be purchased from the usual online book sources and you can order the book from your favorite Actual Bookstores!
Here are links to the book from online sellers we know have the book ready to order. The Dog Who Wanted A Person from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Alibris, Abe Books, Bookshop. More online sellers will have the book soon.
I believe if Actual Bookstore owners see and read The Dog Who Wanted A Person they will want to have stacks of copies near the cash register for bountiful sales. The trick, of course, will be getting said bookstore owners to see the book.
I’ll let you know when the e-book edition debuts in a few weeks, and when the hilarious audio version starring yours truly comes out around then, too.
If you live in England or Australia or Canada or myriad other countries outside the United States, you can order the book from your favorite book source there and your bookseller will get you a copy.
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The History of The Dog Who Wanted A Person begins in the year 2020 when I wrote and posted on my blog the first iterations of the eight episodes composing The Dog Who Wanted A Person. To my surprise and delight, nine people contacted me to say they loved the story. Among those nine were three people who had never contacted me before.
Nine people may not seem like very many people to you, but when two people let me know they’ve enjoyed one of my blog posts, I consider the post a huge success. When nine people let me know they loved The Dog Who Wanted A Person, I considered the story an international blockbuster. And then I promptly forgot all about it.
Five years went by. One day I got an email from my friend Doug Fields saying he hoped I’d do something with that story about the dog looking for a person. I only vaguely remembered the story and couldn’t remember the title. Nevertheless, I searched through various archives, found the eight episodes, made them into a single manuscript, read the totality, and decided to spend a few days rewriting the story before giving the manuscript to Marcia to read.
To my surprise, Marcia loved the story and encouraged me to publish the tale, which is a kind of children’s book for grownups and smart kids. The vocabulary is fairly sophisticated and there are some racy parts, so the story doesn’t really qualify as a children’s book, though if I had readThe Dog Who Wanted A Person when I was ten, I’m sure I would have read the story a bajillion times.
Why was Marcia’s reaction surprising to me? Well… though she generally enjoys my writing, she has never raved about anything of mine as she raved about The Dog Who Wanted A Person.
All we needed were eighteen terrific illustrations and the book would be ready to publish. I inquired of my friend Vance who illustrated my book Open Body: Creating Your Own Yoga, (Avon) and my chapbook Of Water and Melons. He said he was busy until the end of time and declined the gig. I then inquired of several artist friends if they knew any likely illustrators, and I queried a number of artists-for-hire online. The upshot of these inquiries was that illustrators whose work I liked wanted a thousand dollars or more per drawing, whether the drawing was used for the book or not, and I needed eighteen drawings!
Feeling over-matched by the fees demanded by illustrators, I gave up my search and turned my attention to publishing my novel The Farm at the East Cove Hotel.
Then one cloudy morning some weeks later I decided to walk to town to run some errands. I got about a quarter-mile down the hill from our house and realized I’d forgotten my wallet. So I hiked back home, got my wallet, and resumed my journey. The extra time spent retracing my steps is crucial to the outcome of this saga.
In town I ran my errands and started for home, but rather than walk home the way I usually do, I decided to take a longer route to see some sights I hadn’t seen in a while. And just as I reached the corner of Lansing and Ukiah Streets, who should come walking along but Marcia and our charming friend Marius Constantin, the locally renowned singer possessed of enviably curly hair. They were on their way to the Goodlife Café for coffee.
I crossed the street to say hello and let Marius know The Farm at the East Cove Hotel was just out and he had a cameo in the novel. And then Marcia proclaimed, “But wait until you read Todd’s new book about a dog seeking a person to call his own. It’s fantastic.”
And I said, “Problem is I can’t find a good illustrator I can afford.”
To which Marius replied with his charming Romanian accent, “Well you know my daughter Miruna draws, and she is quite good.”
My first thought was I wonder what he means by quite good.
Nevertheless, trusting our unexpected meeting was arranged by the universe to aid the cause, I sent Marius a copy of the manuscript to share with Miruna. A few days later, Marius and Miruna, who was fourteen at the time and is now fifteen, came to my house and Miruna presented me with an early version of the drawing that graces the cover of The Dog Who Wanted A Person. Huleekalabulee! Exactly as I imagined him. Miruna’s drawing style was exactly what I wanted. We agreed on a per-drawing fee I could afford and she felt was fair, and we agreed she would receive 25% of the profits if by some miracle there are any.
Several months later, fitting her illustrating work into her busy school/life schedule, Miruna completed the last of the eighteen pencil drawings and I then had a graphics artist clean the drawings up in Photoshop. Then I placed the illustrations where they belonged throughout the manuscript, and after a frustrating series of printing snafus spanning a few more months, the book was born.
I hope you’ll get a copy. If you do get a copy and you love the book, I’d love it if you’d spread the word and help me break my current record for copies sold of one of my self-published books: 53.
Here is a brief excerpt from the book.
Coming down from Bullwinkle Butte, Huleekalabulee encountered two mutts blocking his way. One of the mutts was small and brown with enormous ears, the other a huge dirty blond.
“Slow down,” said the dirty blond. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To the beach,” said Huleekalabulee. “I’m questing for a person of my own.”
The two mutts found this so funny they laughed for a long time until the brown mutt said, “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Huleekalabulee,” said Huleekalabulee.
This made the two mutts laugh again for another long time until the dirty blond said, “What are you… Hawaiian?”
“Not that I know of,” said Huleekalabulee. “My mom is mostly Golden Retriever and my father, according to my mom, was a big brown mutt of uncertain ancestry.”
There once was a king who took the reins of power rather late in his life and ruled his large kingdom with great cruelty and shortsightedness, his entire purpose self-enrichment and the enrichment of his cronies and sycophants.
For reasons unclear to the majority of the king’s subjects, a sizeable minority of the population thought the old king had magical powers and therefore they would not turn against him even though his decrees caused them terrible suffering.
So the old king continued to plunder the kingdom and deprive many of his subjects the basic necessities of life while his corrupt parliament and judges did not dispute his cruel decrees.
And verily things might have gone on like this for many more years except the old king was fast losing his marbles and it would soon be impossible to disguise his demented state from his subjects.
The old king had never made much sense when he spoke, but at least he had known where he was and what he was doing from one minute to the next. Now he was starting to show the unmistakable signs of brain rot, and most of what he said seemed insane to even his most ardent supporters.
The cartel of cruel and greedy lords who supported the king were keenly aware of the king’s deteriorating mental condition and they began discussing how to deal with the fast-approaching moment when the king would no longer know who he was or where he was or what was happening around him.
“He will be no use to us as a doddering old fool who can’t remember anything,” said one of the evil lords. “In fact, he might possibly be a threat to us, especially if he becomes paranoid and senile. What if he decides we are his enemies and orders our heads cut off?”
“I’ve got it!” said another of the lords. “The old king will fall seriously ill, and with death approaching he will anoint a successor. Then the old king will die and we will hail him as a martyr for freedom or something equally ironic, and his successor will do our bidding and we can continue plundering the kingdom.”
And so it was decided the king would be given a potion to render him weak and sickly. He would then be put to bed from where he would name the new king to carry on his glorious rule. And then the old king would conveniently die.
Verily this plot might have come to pass, except the old king still had a few of his marbles left and guessed what the evil lords were planning to do. With the last of his strength and cunning he had those plotting against him beheaded, and thereafter the old king became a babbling idiot.
Then his subjects did rise up and dethrone him, and a strange and marvelous new idea took hold throughout the kingdom, a thing called democratic socialism, a system of governance in which every citizen of the kingdom was treated with kindness and respect and afforded what they needed to live safe and meaningful lives.
Halloween 2025 was the twentieth anniversary of my arrival in Mendocino. My friend Bob Smith drove the big moving truck from Berkeley, and I followed him in a little old Toyota station wagon I’d just bought from a friend. I hadn’t had a car in seventeen years, but I would need one for my new life in these hinterlands.
We arrived at the house I was renting a few miles to the east of town just as darkness was falling, and my landlord greeted us with the news that she had belatedly discovered her previous tenants were secret smokers and she was having the place thoroughly detoxified before I moved in. She had arranged for us to spend the night at the Mendocino Hotel until I could move in the next day, and when we arrived at the hotel on Main Street there were several little kids in costumes trick-or-treating in the lobby.
The next day we moved my stuff, including my piano, out of the big truck into my new digs, and my new life began. I was fifty-six and knew almost no one in Mendocino, but trusted I would eventually find my way into the society here.
Twenty years later, the Mendocino Hotel is closed and crumbling, bought buy a large corporation in no hurry to re-open the once thriving hotel. Large corporations have bought many of the inns and hotels in the area in the last decade, many of the stores in Mendocino are vacant, and many of the houses in and around Mendocino are owned and left vacant by people who purchased the houses as investments and don’t want to bother renting them, which exacerbates the already deplorable rental situation.
Even so, Mendocino is mobbed on weekends and in the summer by visitors from near and far, though the town these visitors walk around in is nothing like the town I moved to twenty years ago. The legalization of marijuana ended an era here when many people made lots of money in that illegal trade, and all that cash fueled the local economy in a very big way for several decades. On the heels of legalization and the collapse of the local marijuana economy came the pandemic, which caused many shops and local businesses to close while creating our new retail reality in which most people are now habituated to buying things online rather than from small retailers.
In my twenty years here, nineteen of those years with Marcia as my loving companion, I’ve written sixteen novels and dozens of stories and hundreds of songs. And I’ve posted a thousand blog entries, most of which are archived and accessible to you. I’ve learned to grow things in big tubs, having finally conceded defeat to the redwood roots that make growing things in the ground in our neck of the woods nearly impossible.
And, of course, I’ve seen the rise of the cell phone and social media culture, which I have nothing to do with except as an observer from afar. That new media culture, more than anything in my life, has made me feel like a stranger in a strange land.
When I was in my early twenties and living in a commune in Santa Cruz, I and a few of my commune mates made a trip up to Mendocino, circa 1973, to pick apples at a farm somewhere around here, and I loved this area so much I vowed to one day live here. My vow took thirty-three years to become reality, and I have now lived in this lovely part of the world longer than anywhere else I’ve lived during this incarnation.
The Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa wrote, “There is the wisdom of all-accomplishing action, in which speed does not have to be included in one’s working situation, but things fall into your pattern.”
This is an intriguing idea and suggests that hurrying is unwise, as is worrying about how long something takes to accomplish. This idea also suggests that if we surrender wholly to our creative process, whatever that process happens to be, things will fall into our pattern of creativity. Which is to say, if we don’t force the creative process, we will find our needs being met.
And this reminds me of my favorite Buckminster Fuller statement. “I assumed that nature would evaluate my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing it in promising ways, permitted by nature’s principles, I would find my work being economically sustained.”
Both Fuller and Trungpa believed in a universe that responds to our actions. They believed universe is the instrument of karma, and karma is the manifestation of universe reacting to what we do, what we think, and how we feel, individually and collectively.
Of course, if you agree with Trungpa’s and Fuller’s ideas, you must also believe universe is aware of what we do, that we are in a mutually conscious relationship with universe. For some people this seems obvious, and for many people this seems absurd.
