Wonderful news! The audio version of my new book The Dog Who Wanted A Person aired on January 14 on our local community radio station KZYX, streamable from anywhere in the world.
Jamie Roberts presented the first half of the audio book starring yours truly on his long-running show Radiogram. The second half of the saga will air on January 21 at 8 PM PST. And these programs are archived and available at KZYX for a week or so after they air.
In my twenty years of living here in Mendocino and being a KZYX listener and supporter, I’ve rarely been able to convince any DJ at that station to play my/our music. But Jamie plays my short stories regularly on his show and he’s been a big supporter of mine for two decades now, so I’m thrilled he loves The Dog Who Wanted A Person and wants to share the book with his audience.
The audio book of The Dog Who Wanted A Person, in which I play all the parts, is funny, touching, thought-provoking, and did I mention funny? Appropriate for humans of all ages. Even cat lovers love the book, in which there is one groovy cat and several wonderfully talkative dogs, each with a distinct and breed-appropriate accent.
The last time I had the flu was thirty-six years ago. Now I am nearing the end of Day 10 of this flu of 2026 and I am finally starting to feel pretty okay, still easily tired and not about to run a mile or even twenty yards.
Speaking of which, I thought I’d celebrate being able to walk around again by taking a stroll to the end of our street and back, a distance of roughly two city blocks. I got about fifty yards from our front gate and felt/thought Okay. That’s enough. Turn back before you keel over. So I did, and I’m glad I did. I usually walk a couple miles a day, so today’s stroll was humbling.
Yes, I got a flu shot this year. Yes, I’m 76. How did I get the flu, I who have not gone out for a meal since before the pandemic? I went out for a meal on Christmas Eve and four days later the flu took hold. Five years I waited to go out for a meal. Silly me. I should have waited six.
This is a nasty bug. I highly recommend you do not get this flu. You will regret it if you get it. Do I recommend you wear a mask when going to the bank or the grocery store or the post office from now on? You bet I do.
The predominant symptom of this flu for me was that sitting up or standing for even a few minutes at a time then necessitated laying down for an hour. My appetite was good throughout. Yay.
This flu, for me, had an arc that went something like this.
Day One: Sore throat, tired, achy, cranky, thirsty. Went to bed at nine.
Day Two: Sorer throat, exhausted, real achy, very thirsty. Went to bed at nine.
Day Three: Sore throat morphing into snot factory in head and totally clogged ears. Cough developing. What did you say? The phone is ringing? No. Profound exhaustion. Thirsty. Went to bed at eight.
Days Four and Five: All symptoms continuing, thinking if this goes on much longer… what? Went to bed at eight.
Day Six: First day with glimpses of maybe things are getting better, but not much. Aching much less. Snot factory begins laying off workers. Did a little writing. Ears still clogged. Cough lessening.
Day Seven: A couple hours of feeling not terrible amidst the napping and drinking water. More writing. Went to bed at nine.
Day Eight: Obvious improvement without feeling particularly good. Still need to lie down frequently especially in the afternoon. Major accomplishment: doing the dishes, played a little piano. Went to bed at nine.
Day Nine: Continuing improvement. Still tire easily. Three good naps. Major accomplishments: cooking supper, doing dishes. Went to bed at ten!
Day Ten: Quasi-normal. Some actual energy. Made breakfast for Marcia and guest. Started the fire in the woodstove. Chopped a little kindling. Got a wheelbarrow full of firewood moved to the wood box. Tried to take the aforementioned walk. Couple hours of writing. Lay down a few times throughout the day. Reminding myself not to overdo things or even do things.
This is my report. I spared you much of the horror, believe me. I look forward to being fully recovered by the time I write my next blog post.
Stay well, wear a mask, and pray for the end of tyranny.
Hello Dear Reader. We just hung up our two new wall calendars, one in the kitchen and one in my office. Next trip to town I’ll buy a tide chart for the year ahead to mark big minus tides occurring at good times to go walking on the beach, and then a little piece of the pattern of my future life will be on the puzzle board, so to speak.
We recently lived through a four-day power outage and are bracing for another possible outage in the next few days. We live in a part of the state where PG&E steadfastly refuses to bury their power lines in order to maximize short-term profits, and so heavy winds and/or heavy rain almost always brings outages. Such is reality in a capitalist society controlled by corporate monopolies whose operators do not give a hoot about people and only care about a profitable bottom line. Fortunately, we have a woodstove to keep us warm and cook on, and a noisy little generator to keep the refrigerator cold.
Speaking of corporate monopolies who don’t give a hoot about people, the beautiful illustrated paperback of my new book The Dog Who Wanted A Person was not available from Amazon for all of December, which is disappointing since more than half the books sold in America are bought from Amazon. Good news is the book is NOW available at Amazon and is also available from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Alibris, and many other book sources, including actual bookstores, including (last I checked) Gallery Books in Mendocino that actually had one copy on hand at the store!
I’ve heard from several people who love the book AND from people loving the audio version starring yours truly (available from Audible.)
Here are a few recent responses I’ve gotten.
I read The Dog Who Wanted A Person today and I enjoyed it so much. It was funny and sweet, and I cried too. I felt that I was on that journey with them. In so few words you brought the land and the dogs’ personalities alive. I’ll be sending it to my son and daughter-in-law who will love it. Jenna
Each character in your book, I am transported—Sterling Holloway, all those enchanting Disney animations…your reading is brilliant, a one-man-show! Wen
Thank you for brightening my holidays with The Dog Who Wanted A Person. I’m looking forward to listening to your narration. Jim
In other news, the terribly selfish greedy violent people who have taken over our national government continue to wreak havoc on the lives of millions of people in America and abroad, and every day we hear of new and dastardly plans they have to get rid of voting by mail and suppressing voters’ rights however they can so they’ll win the midterm elections. Remain vigilant. Help make every honest vote count.
Wonderful news! The audio book of The Dog Who Wanted A Person, an illustrated fable for adults and smart children narrated by yours truly is now available from Amazon and Audible, and soon, we hope, from Apple. AND YOU DON’T HAVE TO JOIN Audible to get the audio book for just six dollars from Amazon. Though it may seem at first glance you do have to join Audible, you DON’T.
On the Amazon Audio book page for The Dog Who Wanted A Personyou’ll see on the right side of the screen down the page a little, a Buy box and the price $6.08. That’s the way to get the audio book for downloading to your device(s) if you aren’t an Audible member and don’t want to become one. We’re keeping our fingers crossed Apple will soon have the audio book so you can avoid Amazon altogether if you wish to. I personally like Audible because they make it possible for me to make audio books of my published work and share them with the world.
The audio book of The Dog Who Wanted A Person is 84 minutes long (perfect for that drive to wherever you’re going) and I had a magical time narrating the story and becoming all the several dogs and one cat who star in the fable. For most of the dogs in this funny poignant thought-provoking tale, my accent changes to match the nationality of the breed and the age and personality of the dog in question.
I started telling stories to my friends when I was five, stories I made up, and when I was six-years-old my First Grade Teacher would have me tell stories to the class while she got a little shuteye. Yes, I was entertaining enough to keep a couple dozen First Graders from rioting for upwards of fifteen minutes.
This success went to my head and I became a writer and eventually the narrator of the audio books of several of my published works. I LOVE playing all the different characters in my novels and short stories and now in The Dog Who Wanted A Person. Narrating my books, with Peter Temple recording me and helping me edit my takes, is without a doubt one of my very favorite things to do.
I hope you’ll get the beautifully illustrated paperback of The Dog Who Wanted A Person or e-book or audio book, or all three. Several people have asked me if the book is appropriate for little kids. I think a sharp eight-year-old would enjoy the book, but would have to look up several words, and some of the humor might elude her/him, as would the subtle references to songs from the 1960s and 70s. But otherwise she/he would love the book and read it multiple times.
A few weeks ago I realized that the book I spent the last year writing was not something I wanted to share with the world. I had finished the five-hundred-page work, rewritten it several times, and was in the process of narrating what was to be the audio version of the book when I realized I no longer wanted to continue with this work.
For a few days after making the decision not to proceed with publishing the book I was in a state of shock. This has happened to me several times in my life, spending several months or years working on creations I ultimately abandon, but this hadn’t happened in many years because I’d become fairly astute about identifying such works before I spent much time on them.
In the wake of my decision about the big book, I wrote a long short story. And after writing two drafts of the story I realized I had written a miniature version of the book I had just abandoned. Clearly I was trying to resolve something through my writing, but I was not doing so in a way I felt would be of benefit to anyone other than me.
When I was a young writer these duds, so to speak, were a source of sorrow and disappointment for me. But as I continued to write every day, year after year, I came to understand that writing for me is a practice akin to meditation and yoga. The purpose of the practice is to practice, and to do so without forcing the practice. If I try to force myself to calm my mind, no calm will come. And if I force a yoga posture, I will very likely hurt myself.
So I have said goodbye to the big tome and the subsequent story, and a new something is flowing out, three connected stories so far. They are the children, if you will, of my marriage to that big tome. They would not exist had I not spent those thousands of hours practicing writing in the form of that novel. Will I ultimately publish the new something I’m writing? Time and more practice will tell.
Meanwhile my delightful new book for grownups and smart children The Dog Who Wanted A Person is now available as a beautifully illustrated paperback and e-book from your favorite book sources. However, several people have informed me that the paperback is currently NOT available from Amazon for some inexplicable reason, but the Kindle edition IS available there. I know the paperback is readily available from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Alibris, and other online sources, as well as from your favorite actual bookstores.
Diana Blumenfeld, a youthful sixty-two, her antecedents Ashkenazi Jews and Midwestern Methodists, pulls up in front of Wonderful Books and Things on Fremont Street in Portland, Oregon in her puke green thirty-year-old Toyota station wagon, and the world rejoices when she shuts off her unmuffled engine.
“Bon jour,” says Diana as she enters Wonderful Books and Things, a large airy store with thousands of used books in excellent condition, a few shelves of new books, a tasty selection of Impressionist wall calendars, a modest stock of stationery, postcards, art supplies, and pens, along with knitted caps, hot pads, tie-dyed silk scarves, and 100% cotton hoodies in various colors bearing the name of the store.
“We heard you coming from several blocks away,” says Marlowe Wolf, a beautiful forty-four with wavy brown hair, his antecedents German Jews and French Catholics, his attire a peach dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, brown corduroy trousers, and open-toed sandals.
Marlowe, the primary employee of Wonderful Books and Things, is standing behind the large counter at the back of the store logging a pile of newly acquired used books into the store’s brilliant new computerized cash register. The store’s elderly owner, Janet Cushing, spends most of her time in Mexico and France and only very occasionally comes back to Portland. She calls Marlowe every week and he uses the camera on his phone to show her around the store, which is really Marlowe’s store in every practical sense except for the profits, which are considerable.
Diana, skinny in a flimsy purple paisley dress, her long gray hair in a ponytail, her black-framed glasses lending a serious air to her Bohemian mien, strides up to Marlowe and says with false élan, “Marlowe, Marlowe, Marlowe. How are you on this frigid morning in late October? Excited about Halloween?”
“Tremendously,” he says, his accent mildly German. “My grandmother loves Halloween, loves seeing the kiddies in their costumes. I’ll be carving two big jack-o-lanterns tonight and we always give saltwater taffy. What about you? Dressing as a witch again this year?”
“Always,” she says, her smile becoming a frown. “Um… have you sold any of my caps or hot pads in the last week? I’m doing my usual end-of-the-month scramble for rent money and I was hoping you could advance me twenty dollars.”
“We have sold some of your things in the last week,” says Marlowe, referring to the lovely wool caps and sturdy hot pads Diana knits and sells in a handful of shops around town. “However, I’m sorry to say Janet called yesterday and told me not to advance you more money because you have yet to make back the advances we gave you in September and August. I’m very sorry, Diana.”
“Shit,” she says, bowing her head. “Shit and damn.”
“I agree,” says Marlowe, nodding sympathetically. “Shit and damn.”
“How about I give you a fantastic foot rub?” says Diana, gazing hopefully into Marlowe’s big brown eyes. “I’ll spend ten minutes on each foot. Twenty dollars.”
“Tempting, but no,” says Marlowe, getting out his wallet and extracting a ten-dollar bill. “You owe me lunch.”
Diana takes the money and says with believable sincerity, “I won’t forget.”
“I won’t let you forget,” says Marlowe, winking at her.
“Good. Don’t,” she says, laughing despite her predicament.
A moment later the air is rent by what sounds like machine-gun fire as Diana roars away in quest of more money.
“I don’t know why the police don’t ticket her. Noise she makes is criminal,” says Lester Thomas, a sixty-seven-year-old descendant of Africans and Cajuns and folks from New Orleans. Lester spends many of his mornings sitting on one of the store’s three sofas looking at books, this morning’s prize a big volume of photographs of French actresses from the 1970s.
“I think they don’t ticket her because she only drives where traffic cops are few,” says Marlowe, seeing a blinking light on the store phone indicating an incoming call. “She says if she drives over thirty her car will explode, but she can’t afford to have it fixed, let alone get a new muffler.”
“That’s crazy,” says Lester, glowering. “What’s her problem?”
“Hold that thought,” says Marlowe, answering the phone. “Wonderful Books and Things.” He smiles. “Oh hi Alice.” He listens. “Yes, we have several volumes of Dr. Seuss in stock.” He nods. “We’re open from nine to nine every day except on Monday and Tuesday when we close at six.” He listens. “Yes. Today is Thursday so we’ll be open until nine.”
Marlowe hangs up the phone and says to Lester, “In answer to your question, ‘What’s her problem?’ I would say… have mercy. She and I and you are doing the best we can right now. And right now is all there is really.”
“You’re right,” says Lester, smiling at Marlowe. “Who am I to judge someone I barely know?”
A beautiful cold sunny winter day in Mendocino, I shot this picture of Marcia and Sally enjoying the moment together while Molly and I were engaged in the serious business of flinging and retrieving a ball.
Molly is twelve now and no longer the tireless swimmer and runner she was for most of her life, but she still loves going to the beach and trotting after her ball I now fling into the shallow shallows so she need not do battle with the waves as she used to love to do.
I’m a lunatic. Which is to say, the waxing moon troubles my sleep and inspires strange dreams. Here is the nearly full moon in a purple sky at sunset promising two more days of nocturnal agitation until the blessed waning begins.
Fishing must be good right now off Portuguese Beach in Mendocino Bay, with three fishing boats working the close-to-shore waters there of late.
The last maple leaves take the morning light so beautifully.
We got a bunch of copies of my new book The Dog Who Wanted A Person, and Miruna, the brilliant young illustrator of the book, came over and signed copies to make them extra special.
Soon the last yellow leaves will fall from our blossoming cherry tree, and ere long the Winter Solstice will be upon us, the end of the year, the beginning of the year, the earth continuing to spin and fly through space exactly as far away from the sun as we need to be for maximum amazingness and life going on.
Blessings and thanks for all our friends.
fin
Todd’s hilarious new book The Dog Who Wanted A Person is now available from your favorite actual bookstore such as Gallery Books in Mendocino and numerous online sources including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
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.
fin
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.”
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.
