At the end of the video Blaze sniffs out something tasty and does a major neck roll in it. It’s all part of owning a dog. The impromptu major bath that you haven’t planned on doing. C’est la vie.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

There’s no doubt that I love photography. I always have and I always will.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

The sedative is coming. Twenty minutes after it, maybe less, it will be done.

Blue is lying with his head down on the cushion, his right paw stretched across the plaid. Veronica’s face is pressed into the top of his head. Already with the angels?

He isn’t looking at her. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking a little past both of us, and his eyes are suddenly unafflicted by the growth and the glaucoma. There’s light in them.

I have my phone in my hand. A lifetime behind a camera and the moment speaks to me. I take the picture.

There were thirty-six puppies. I didn’t pick him. He picked me.

He looked up and locked eyes with me, and that was it.

Veronica drove us home with him in my lap the whole way. We played in the yard a little. I went inside and sat down to lunch. I looked down and his head was neatly tucked between his paws at my feet.

He’d come in on his own. Nobody called him.

That night I learned the other half of him. We’d never used a crate for toilet training. Never needed one. So I put him in the ensuite bathroom with a little folding gate across the doorway, thinking that would hold him.

It didn’t. He would not tolerate separation from us. He fussed and fought and threw himself at that gate. Crying to be let out. Working on climbing over it. He would not be deterred. It was remarkable, how determined something that small could be.

That was Blue, the whole dog, on the first day. He could fight you to the wall on anything you tried to make him do. And he would lie down at your feet without being asked.

This last year took things from him one at a time.

A growth on his right eyelid. A soft cyst on his right shoulder that grew to the size of a baseball glove. His nipples swelled. His belly bloated. He saw less. He walked less. He stopped feeling well.

As he started to fail, we started using a folding ramp to help him into the SUV. Eventually he learned to walk up it without a thought.

Then one day he stopped. He didn’t trust it anymore. Or maybe he didn’t trust his eyesight anymore, or his balance. Coax him and he balked. Push him and he planted himself. The ramp went back in the garage. He started getting left at home, and it broke our hearts.

Months went by without a ride. Then one day in the spring I set the ramp against the open hatch, climbed in with Blaze, and ignored him. I was trying to use his own psychology on him.

He walked right up.

We went for a ride, his first in months, and he was so happy.

Nobody could make Blue do anything. But leave him out of something, and he’d decide for himself. Once he decided, it was done.

In the final months we built a ramp to ease the four steps down into the front yard. He kept finding new ways to fall off it, so it kept getting more elaborate. Rails. Extensions. Every fix answered a new fall.

In the end even that was too much. We took it out, and I started walking him out the main gate and around through the side gate into the field instead.

Then he stopped eating, and something strange happened. The cyst shrank from a baseball glove to a hardball. The growth on his eyelid pulled back and nearly disappeared. It was as if the tumors had nothing left to feed on. They were starving right along with him.

On what turned out to be his last night, I was headed for bed when he started to cry out, again and again, sad and pitiful. Veronica and I both knew then that he was in real, undeniable pain for the first time. It seemed like an eternity.

Finally he settled down, and I took him out to pee. It was 2 a.m. I had the flashlight in one hand and the lead in the other, and I was fumbling with the latch, getting flustered, trying to hold everything at once.

When I finally got the gate open and turned around, he was standing at the top of the steps. No ramp. He’d just walked up them, the way he used to.

He looked at me like: what are you doing?

The next morning came and he was calm, and quite still. I called the vet and they said they could take us at 3 p.m. We had a quiet day consoling him.

When it was time, we rolled him onto a homemade stretcher and carried him out to the car. He let us. He didn’t fight. He didn’t cry. The dog who threw himself at a gate his first night home lay still and let the two people he’d chosen carry him.

I used to think his will and his devotion pulled against each other. They didn’t. His devotion was his will. He gave it where he chose, and he chose us. Every time he refused to be forced, he was keeping it his to give.

I’m seventy-four. I’ve buried several dogs. I know what’s coming for me.

For me this picture is spiritual food.

I look at it and I see how I want to go. Eyes wide open. Knowing I gave my life everything I had. Knowing I did my parents and my grandparents proud.

That’s what’s in his face. Not resignation. Not fear. A dog who did everything he came here to do, and knows it.

When I reach that final moment, I can only hope to match his courage, his nobility, his trust in the beyond.

His head is on the cushion. His paw is on the plaid. Veronica’s face is in his fur.

The same eyes that picked me out of thirty-six puppies are open. The light is still in them.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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So I took a few more photographs of the foliage from our deck, and then I searched my camera roll for today’s date and found three gems, each with their own stories.

In keeping with my recent posts, here are some memories of Blue, our dearly departed black Labrador retriever.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Blue is forever woven into every corner of our hearts and minds.

He lives on inside of us.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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Sunday was our 24th wedding anniversary and we decided to take Blue up to Reservoir Falls, where he was able to swim. It turned out to be his last adventure. He was diagnosed with a rare form of testicular cancer 15 months ago, and surgery was not a viable option because he was nearing the end of a normal lifespan, and the risks outweighed the benefits.

Monday started out like any other day in this recent stretch — it was actually a beautiful day, but in the evening, just as I was about to turn in, Blue started crying and he wouldn’t stop. It was the most heartrending sound, and it became crystal clear that his cancer was finally rearing its ugliest head. I felt so helpless and began to question my decision to postpone the inevitable for another week.

After what seemed like an eternity, Blue roused himself and made for the door. He made it outside, where he threw up a little bit, and then he made it back indoors and laid down and seemed to be calmer. But then a few hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, he started again.

I walked him out front around through the two gates — we had disassembled the ramp — and he very hesitantly and stubbornly followed me on these new uncharted paths. We made it out into the field. I had a big flashlight in my hand. I was wearing my big black oversized terry cloth bathrobe and my giant down puff camp boots, looking like the Grim Reaper if I say so myself.

He wandered around and fell. I managed to stand him up again and he just stood there for a long time. I wanted to get him back in the house, but I realized that I needed to wait for him. So I took a breath, turned off the flashlight, and looked up and saw the biggest, starriest sky. The deepest black and the brightest twinkling stars. It seemed like an infinity opened up above us.

It took two or three more ten-yard walks and long pauses before we got to the side gate. I started fumbling with the latch and I lost the lantern, and I became a little flustered when I turned to bring Blue through, and he wasn’t there anymore. I turned the other direction and there he was, standing at the top of the steps that he couldn’t navigate for the last weeks, looking at me like what’s keeping you.

That’s Blue in a nutshell. He had a will, but he was also stubborn — if you tried to force him to do anything he would resist you. But if you let him decide, he was unstoppable. I had actually used this knowledge a few months ago when, after months of never going, he wanted to go for a ride with us in the car, like in the old days. The reason he stopped going was he was afraid of the ramp. So I got up in the car with Blaze and left the ramp in place and ignored Blue and made it look fun, what we were doing. And sure enough he decided to come up the ramp on his own, and he did.

I will never forget seeing him standing at the top of the steps Monday night in the moonlight. It was 2:30 am and 40F.

Veronica was awakened near dawn by him crying again, and we decided that it was time. Our vet has a policy where if you phone in before 8 AM on a day that she’s working, you can have a chance at getting the slot they always save for emergencies. So I left a message a little after 7 AM. They called back later and said that we could bring him at 3 PM.

I really don’t have any words to tell you the rest, so I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

While preparing this post and looking at these photos, I noticed something miraculous in the last one. At first, I thought it was a speck of dirt, but I zoomed in and it was a bird ascending above Blue’s final resting place.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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We managed to get Blue in our SUV and took him up to Reservoir Falls. It was an absolutely gorgeous day in the upper 70Fs with a nice breeze, fully sunny. It was a struggle and a process of getting him in and out of the RAV4, but he was 100% into it.

His determination was fully evident when I let him off lead, and he walked into the stream and then committed to going down into the big pool, even though he took a header and went underwater.

His deliberate demeanor and tendency to just gaze and absorb could be mistaken for dementia. But I like to think that he’s on a different plane than we are now —contemplative, present and already halfway in the next world.

When we finally got him home, we dried him off with our heated, air blower and gave him a microwave bead bag around his neck and shoulders. He had a great night sleep. And we all felt very happy.

Today is Veronica and my 24th wedding anniversary. What a gift Blue has been these last 13 and half years.

And he is still here…

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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Another quiet late summer bonus day in more ways than one. Blue is still eating (very little), walking around on his own (quite a few times a day), and he is still being loved deeply and being tenderly cared for, here on Happy Hill.

I’m not sure how much Blaze comprehends what is happening with Blue. They both saw Izzy go through this process back in August 2020, all the way to his pre-dawn, silent passing on the leather couch. Each of them approached Izzy’s body, sniffed his head, and then walked away and never looked back. Somehow they made grief look easy. Perhaps living in the moment is the answer.

Dogs are very present and matter of fact. No worrying beyond the now, no ruminating about the past. Blue seems wary, tentative, and very deliberate, as if he’s conserving his dwindling energy, cherishing his last days, and perplexed by all his sudden losses — appetite, energy, and fun.

I think he may last another week or two.

But you never know.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

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Blaze I hiked the Class IV road which has a great vertical climb, an impressive waterfall on French Hill Creek (when it’s running), and a second bridge over Bouley Creek at the top. I missed my regular crew. Veronica has been on the DL with a bad ankle due to arthritis. And Blue…

Blue is still here, a day after the traveling vet wanted to put him down. After my hike with Blaze, I took Blue for a walk down our road about 1/2 mile to a neighbor’s large, wooded pond site and he went swimming! It was a struggle getting him up the bank afterwards, but he really enjoyed himself. He’s sleeping soundly now with a blanket over him, placed with love.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Our old black lab Blue is still hanging in there — and really wanted to come along on this jaunt, but he had to stay home as this was Blaze’s respite from being limited to on-lead walks at home. It really does him good to be free of restraints, but he still resents his harness (for about 2 seconds.) Logging activities have resumed. There was a delightful breeze and temps were in the low 70Fs.

The traveling vet wanted to put Blue down tomorrow, but I told her he wasn’t anywhere near ready. In fact, he’s doing so well, all things considered, that I’m hoping he can keep having quiet little days like the ones he’s been enjoying lately. Veronica hand feeds him some eggs amd oatmeal and turkey in the morning. He goes outside and down his ramp as needed and on his own — at least 4 or 5 times a day. And he sleeps comfortably most of the rest of the time. We’ve placed some canvas drop cloths around the house to catch his prostatic drips, so we’re rolling with the flow and treasuring his last days, weeks, months with us. Blue is 13 1/2 years old which is a good run for his breed. He’s been an emotional anchor for us through some of the toughest things life can throw, and patiently being there for him now, seems like a small thank you in comparison.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

I came to you the way everybody comes to you. The picking. That’s what gets you first. The right hand alone is enough to make you forget where you are and what year it is, and for the first couple of years that’s all I needed. I’d watch the videos and just shake my head. Generational is a word people throw around until they don’t have to throw it anymore because it’s just sitting there, obvious, undeniable, and that’s where you are. You play the guitar the way certain people breathe. Like it was always happening and you just showed up to give it a name.

Then the songwriting started catching up to the playing. That took longer, and it should have. The instrument was your birthright. The writing you had to earn. And you earned it. Highway Prayers was the proof. But So Much for Goodbyes is something else entirely. This album stands with Workingman’s Dead. It stands with American Beauty. It stands with the White Album. Not because it sounds like any of them but because it does what those records did — it cracks a life open at the exact moment the pressure becomes unbearable and turns the fracture into art. That’s what makes an album epochal. Not the technique. The cost.

Your mother died of an overdose. Your birth father died of the same thing, thirty years before her. You got sober in 2016, right before all of this took off, and I don’t think that timing is a coincidence. I think you needed to be clean to become what you’ve become. And I think you know that. But I also think the road you’re on right now is the most dangerous road there is for someone carrying what you carry.

I need to tell you how I know.

In 1976 I was twenty-four years old, working the movie room at Gasser’s Camera on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. On a quiet weekday morning, Jerry Garcia walked in. Alone. Black t-shirt, jeans, that twinkle. He wanted a Super 8 projector and we talked cameras and film for a while, and he had real enthusiasm about making movies — not rock-star enthusiasm, film-nerd enthusiasm. He bought an Elmo sound projector, paid with a wad of fifties, overpaid by fifty bucks, and laughed when I handed it back. Money meant nothing to him. A few weeks later his people called and I was standing at the front of the stage at the Warfield with a movie camera, shooting over the amps while the band opened with Promised Land.

That’s the Jerry I met. Open. Generous. Joyful. A man with no attachment to money and every attachment to the thing inside him that made the music.

I watched what happened to that man over the next twenty years. Not in a documentary. In real time, tour by tour. I watched the ending come long before it arrived.

You already know this story. You know it better than I do, probably, because you’ve lived inside his music the way I have but you’ve also built something in his image — not a copy, not a tribute, but the same architecture. The traveling audience that follows you from show to show. The setlists that never repeat. The improvisational conversations between musicians that make every night different and every night irreplaceable. The taping culture. The community. You even brought bluegrass back to the center of it, which is where Jerry started before the Dead became the Dead. Bluegrass was his first love. Old & In the Way, the banjo before the guitar. You’ve taken that thread and run it through everything you do — the jamming, the exploratory jazz textures Alex Hargreaves has brought into this new album, the way the acoustic instruments breathe inside the improvisation instead of fighting it. Jerry would have recognized all of it. Jerry would have loved it.

Jerry also built a machine that devoured him. His words, not mine.

By the late eighties the Grateful Dead was no longer a band. It was an economy. A traveling city of Deadheads whose lives were organized entirely around the tour. A merchandising operation. A record label. A whole ecosystem of livelihoods that depended on one thing: Jerry Garcia continuing to walk onstage. And Jerry knew it. He could feel the weight of it. But he couldn’t stop, because stopping meant putting all of those people out of work, breaking the thing that had become bigger than he was.

So he kept going. He ate badly and slept badly and the drugs came back and the weight piled on and by 1992 he looked twenty years older than he was. People around him could see it. Most said nothing, because they needed the machine running too. And on August 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died alone in a rehab facility at fifty-three. The machine stopped because the man inside it broke.

The man who laughed about accidentally overpaying fifty dollars, then took it back with a shrug, who wanted to talk about Super 8 film on a Tuesday morning because making things delighted him — that man got consumed by the thing he made. That’s what I can’t stop seeing when I watch you.

Billy, you’re touring most of the year, every year. You’re selling out arenas. You’ve got a band that depends on you, a crew that depends on you, a traveling community that has organized its life around your schedule. The itinerary is booked out longer than most people plan anything in their lives. The buses are always idling. More shows. Bigger venues. More people depending on the machine.

And now you’ve made the most emotionally exposed album of your life, out of the worst grief of your life, carrying the genetic inheritance of the thing that killed both of your parents. You wrote these songs sober. You recorded them sober. You will play them sober, night after night, in front of thousands of people, reaching into that wound and opening it for strangers. That is the work. That is the art. But it has a cost, and the cost is cumulative, and the machine doesn’t care about the cost.

There’s something going on inside your soul. I can hear it in every note of this record. That thing inside you is all you have. It’s where the music comes from. It’s where the playing comes from. It’s where the writing comes from. And it is not inexhaustible. It can be depleted. It can be consumed. Jerry proved that.

You have a son now. You have a wife who has been with you through the whole ride. They need you in the room. Not on the speakers. Not in the archive. In the room. Present.

Alive. For decades, not just years.

Bob Dylan told you recently that you’re going to be around for a long time. He meant the music. He meant that what you’ve made will last.

But the records will last whether you do or not. Jerry’s have. That’s the terrible math of it. The tours end, the reviews yellow, the machine finds another engine. The only thing that was ever actually yours — the only thing that was ever actually Jerry’s — is the soul the music came out of.

Yours is worth more than all of it. Every record. Every tour. Every word anyone will ever write about you, including these.

Guard it, Billy. And be around. In person. For a long time.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Blue has developed prostatitis. Over the last few days he’s been dribbling a thin café au lait fluid all over the house — the couch, his bed, wherever he lies down. It doesn’t smell. I don’t think it’s infected. It’s just his body doing what old intact bodies do when the machinery starts winding down, leaking at the seams the way old engines do.

His appetite is reduced. He sleeps most of the day. When he’s awake, his affect is blank — not suffering exactly, but not here the way he used to be. He moves through the house like a man who’s forgotten why he walked into the room but doesn’t want to admit it. The wariness is constant now. Every step is careful. Every doorway is a decision.

But he still gets up. He still goes outside. He still walks down to the creek on his little path and gets his feet wet and sips the water. He still comes back.

When you start thinking about how a dog’s life ends, the world rushes in with options. Traveling vets who charge mileage and emergency surcharges and have booking windows — you find yourself debating trip fees while your dog is dying in the next room. I looked up a .22 revolver at a local gun shop. $229. Less than the house call. Fifty years ago, that’s how it was done — a farmer walked his dog out behind the barn and it was over. Clean. Honest. No surcharges. I thought about whether I could do it. I think I could. But I wasn’t raised around guns, and I know myself well enough to know I wouldn’t be the same after pulling that trigger.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: a chemical injection and a bullet do the same thing. One comes dressed in clinical language and a sympathetic voice. The other is honest about what it is. But both are playing God — deciding when, deciding how, imposing a human schedule on a passage that doesn’t belong to us.

I know this because I’ve done it. In 2013, I held our golden retriever Buio in the back of a hatchback in a vet’s parking lot while a stranger pushed a needle into him. My wife was pulled away to pay a bill right as the needle went in. When it was over, they offered to carry him inside. I said no. I’ll carry him. And I picked him up and his warm dead weight in my arms was one of the most awful moments of my life. There was something primal and inarguable and horrific about what I had just perpetrated through a third party. I had outsourced the killing of my own dog to a stranger with a schedule, and then I carried the result.

I’m done with all of it. The needle. The gun. The mileage charge. All of it.

I know what it looks like when you let an animal leave on his own terms, because I’ve seen it. Six years ago, our golden retriever Izzy showed me.

In his last days, Izzy started wandering the yard in a way he hadn’t before. Not his usual route, not his usual spots. He’d walk the half acre slowly, sniffing and exploring, then lie down somewhere new — a patch of grass he’d never shown interest in, a corner of the property he’d always walked past — and just spend time there. He was auditioning places.

One evening I went to call him in and he didn’t come. I searched the yard, twice, three times. Eventually I found him curled up inside a stand of goldenrod next to the lilac tree, tucked in tight, invisible unless you were right on top of him. He was looking for a place to die. A place to separate himself, to get away, to do the thing that animals have always done when their time comes. It’s a known behavior — herd animals do it, dogs do it, cats do it. They pull away from the group and find their spot. It’s not confusion. It’s not dementia. It’s purpose.

But the next morning, Izzy surprised us. He wanted to go for a ride — something he hadn’t done in a while. So we drove up West Settlement Road and got out and he started walking with an energy I hadn’t seen in weeks. He was moving, really moving, his head up, his stride almost young. We climbed to a higher point on the road, and I started worrying — if he collapsed up here, I’d have a hard time getting him back to the car. But he didn’t want to go further. He just stopped and stood there, facing the view, taking in the air. Not sniffing it the way dogs sniff. Taking it in. Meditating almost. Standing on that high point in the late afternoon light like a man who knows this is his last look and wants to get it right.

We made it back to the car just barely. When we got home, I lifted him in my arms — he had become so frail, so light, all that golden bulk reduced to something I could carry without effort — and I brought him to his spot on the couch and placed him down carefully. He was sleeping. Or something past sleeping. I believe he was already in a kind of coma by then, his body shutting itself down in its own order, on its own schedule.

We stayed with him as long as we could that night. Eventually we went to bed. I woke at four-thirty in the morning and went out to see him and he was gone. And he had the sweetest look on his face. I believe he died happy.

No needle. No parking lot. No stranger with a syringe. Just a dog who walked his land one last time, stood on a hill and breathed the air, came home, and left in his sleep with a sweet look on his face.

That’s the path I’m on with Blue. Not because it’s easier — it’s not. The waiting is hard. The watching is hard. The not knowing is hard. But Izzy showed me that when you give an animal the space and the time and the trust to do this on their own, something happens that no veterinary procedure can replicate. They find their way. And it has a grace to it that a parking lot never will.

This afternoon I walked Blue up to the hillside where I’ve been digging his grave — a hole two feet by three, four feet deep, directly above Izzy. Blue hadn’t wanted to go up there before. Today he did.

He walked right up to the edge and started sniffing. The hole, the pile of dirt, the raw turned earth. He stood there taking it in, reading it with his nose the way dogs read everything, and then he tried to walk along the edge — a one-inch strip of ground between the hole and the dirt pile — and he almost went in. I grabbed him just in time and pulled him back and redirected him away from it.

I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know if he knew what he was looking at. I don’t know if dogs understand graves the way we do, or if he was just following a scent. But I know what it felt like to watch him stand at the edge of his own grave and lean into it. It felt like he was further along in this than I am.

We walked back down to the house after that. Down to the backyard, along his little path to the creek. He stood in the water for a while, the way he always does. Took a sip. Came back up the hill. He’s in the front yard now, just standing there. Not doing anything. Just standing in the late summer light with that blank look on his face, caught between this world and the next one.

Earlier today he was sleeping on his bed and I watched him dream. His legs were moving — that running-in-place thing dogs do, the paws twitching, the muscles firing in some private movie playing behind his eyes. And he was smiling. A real smile. Not the open-mouth pant that people mistake for happiness. An actual, unmistakable, closed-mouth smile, the kind that comes from deep inside whatever dogs have instead of memory.

I don’t know where he was. Maybe in the river with Izzy, chasing sticks the way they used to, both of them young and fast and stupid with joy. Maybe on the trail, crashing through the brush, nose down, tail going. Maybe somewhere I’ve never been, some place dogs go that we don’t have a name for.

Wherever it was, he was happy there.

That dream is the gift in all of this. Whatever his waking hours hold — the weariness, the wariness, the café au lait stains on everything he touches — his sleeping mind is still running. Still in the water. Still young and whole and chasing something worth chasing.

I’ll take that. For as long as it lasts, I’ll take that.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Old Blue

He sleeps now more than he wakes,
his muzzle gray as winter birch,
his body a country he’s leaving
one province at a time.

He chose me from thirty-six.
Walked up. Looked me level.
I’m the one.
Thirteen years later, he still is.

His head in my lap was a sermon
I never had to earn —
the gospel of showing up,
of staying in the room.

The couch he can’t reach anymore
still holds his shape.
The ramp we built
is an act of prayer.

Dog is God spelled backwards.
I didn’t read that somewhere.
I learned it on the floor
with my hand on his head.

The shovel’s by the door.
The stakes are in the ground.
But not today.
Not today.

Y’ Know Death Don’t Have No Mercy In This Land
Death Don’t Have No Mercy In This Land, In This Land
Come To Your House, You Know He Don’t Take Long
Look In Bed This Morning, Children Find Your Mother Gone.

I Said Death Don’t Have No Mercy In This Land.
Death Will Leave You Standing And Crying In This Land,
Death Will Leave You Standing And Crying In This Land, In This Land, Yeah!

Whoa! Come To Your House, Y’ Know He Don’t Stay Long,
Y’ Look In Bed This Morning,
Children You Find That Your Brothers And Sisters Are Gone.
I Said Death Don’t Have No Mercy In This Land.

Death Will Go In Any Family In This Land.
Death Will Go In Any Family In This Land.
Come To Your House, you know he don’t take long.
Look in the bed on the morning, Children Find That Your Family’s Gone.

I Said Death Don’t Have No Mercy In This Land.
Death Will Leave You Standing And Crying In This Land,
In This Land. Whoa! Come To Your House,
Y’ Know It Don’t Stay Long, Y’ Look In Bed This Morning,
Children Find That Your Brothers And Sisters Are Gone.

I Said Death Don’t, Death Don’t Have No Mercy In This Land.

Played by the Grateful Dead in the 1960s but then dropped until they revived it a few times in 1989-90. This is the 1960s version, with Garcia singing all the verses.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

There’s a YouTube tutorial making the rounds. A photographer named Glyn Dewis shows you how to remove a person from a group photo using Lightroom. Not Photoshop — just Lightroom. A few clicks and a man standing among his friends on a dock is gone. Erased. The gap closes, the remaining people shift together, and it’s as if he was never there.

It’s a ten-minute video. It’s cheerful. It’s a tech tip.

And it’s the most honest metaphor I’ve seen for what’s coming.

I’ve spent the last 74 years trying to understand what the hell is going on around me. Not in some abstract, geopolitical sense — around me. In my town. In my trade. In my life.

I’ll never forget when the move to Chinese manufacturing hit Johnson, Vermont. Tubbs Snowshoes — a significant local employer — closed its factory in the old mill across the street from my office and shipped everything to China. Laid off all these Vermonters. People I knew. And I thought, that’s strange, but I guess that’s the economy.

Then a friend of mine, a surfboard shaper on Maui, signed a contract with a company in China to mass-produce his designs. His craft, his hands, his years of knowledge — exported, replicated, made cheap. And I thought, that’s the same thing again.

Then 2008. Wall Street piling into another boondoggle, the whole house of cards collapsing, and the crash ruined my business. Thirty years as a photographer and the floor dropped out. And I thought, something is wrong, but I couldn’t name it.

Then the plandemic. Because that’s what it was — a manufactured, preplanned crisis in which they gave billions of people what amounted to a bioweapon. The injections contained SV40, a turbo cancer accelerator, and the results are everywhere if you’re willing to look — young athletes dropping dead, cancer rates exploding in demographics that never saw numbers like this, an entire generation of damaged immune systems. This wasn’t incompetence. This wasn’t a rushed vaccine. This was a massive effort at population reduction dressed up as public health. Step one of the end game, carried out in broad daylight, with your consent, while you stood in line for it.

And no one has been prosecuted. Not one person. Dr. Fauci — who engineered the whole thing, who was the highest paid employee in the history of the United States government — lives as a multimillionaire, revered by millions of brainwashed fools who still think he saved their lives. He didn’t save anyone. He orchestrated the largest medical crime in human history, walked away clean, and wrote a memoir about it.

And then, in the aftermath, the zero-percent interest rates. The stampede of hedge funds buying up properties and doubling the price of everything, stripping the dream of homeownership from ordinary Americans. First they wrecked your health. Then they took your house. And I thought, this isn’t accidental anymore.

Then the climate change crusade — years of being made to feel guilty about every decision you made, every mile you drove, every degree you set your thermostat. Be conscious. Reduce your footprint. Sacrifice. And then — like a magic trick — all of that gets thrown out the window so they can build AI data centers that drink more water and burn more power than three human populations combined. No guilt. No hand-wringing. No carbon lectures. Just full speed ahead, because this one’s for them.

And now I see it. All of it. Not as a series of disconnected misfortunes, but as a pattern. A direction. A plan.

The problem is that most people can’t see it. And that’s by design. In a world of constantly churning news cycles, complete saturation propaganda, and relentless distraction, people have lost their minds. They’ve been herded into useless culture wars and meaningless political divisions — fights that generate enormous heat and zero illumination — and in the process they’ve lost all of their power. They’re arguing about pronouns while the house is being sold out from under them.

Which is why, when I find someone who can actually see through the noise, I pay attention.

I’ve been listening to Professor Jiang. He’s not who you’d expect. He’s a high school teacher. Chinese, but he grew up in Canada — a dual national. He attended Yale, then went back to China, where he teaches and studies game theory. That’s his lens. He takes the mathematics of strategic decision-making — the logic of how rational actors pursue their interests when the stakes are existential — and applies it to global geopolitics. No ideology. No partisan loyalty. Just the cold logic of what powerful players will do when you map their incentives and constraints.

And the results have been stunning. He predicted Trump’s victory. He predicted the attack on Iran. He predicted how the attack on Iran would backfire. Not because he has inside information, not because he’s clairvoyant — because game theory doesn’t care about your feelings or your news feed. It cuts through the propaganda and the distraction and shows you what the board actually looks like.

Recently he laid out what he calls the end game — not for you and me, but for the people who actually run things. The Bezoses, the Thiels, the Altmans. The billionaires and the aspiring trillionaires. What he described wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was a business plan.

It goes like this.

You look at the world and you see chaos. Eight billion people making noise, making demands, making trouble. And if you’re someone who built an empire on control — on algorithms, on data, on systems that do exactly what they’re told — then all that human chaos is the problem. So you fix it.

Step one: reduce the population. From eight billion to five hundred million. Five hundred million is governable. Eight billion is not. You don’t need to believe anyone has written this number on a whiteboard to notice that every system these men build treats human beings as excess inventory.

Step two: population replacement. Americans are too rebellious to rule. Too loud, too armed, too belligerently independent. Tell an American you need to microchip him and you get an armed insurrection. So you need a different population — one already accustomed to hierarchy, to obedience, to caste. Jiang names India. If you’re an Indian and you want to come to America, and someone says the price of admission is a microchip and a managed life, you accept the deal. You don’t resist. You’ve been shaped by a system that taught you not to. Americans — with their history of free speech and guns and revolution — would never submit. And that is exactly why they are being diluted, suppressed, and eliminated. You need war and chaos and revolution to clear the board, and then you fill it with people who won’t fight back.

Step three: the AI surveillance state. Jiang speaks with an authority almost no American commentator can match, because he’s from China. “I’m from the AI surveillance state,” he says, “and I’m shocked and disgusted by the amount of surveillance in the United States.” A man from China — China — is appalled by how much data America collects on its own citizens. Your iPhone is always listening. It always knows where you are. It always wants access to everything else on your phone. And all of that data has to go somewhere, which is why data centers are rising across this country the way granaries once did, except the grain is you.

Step four: a new religion. You need something to legitimize the new order. Something to make five hundred million obedient, surveilled, microchipped people feel like this is not a prison but a paradise. So you give them a god. An AI god. Joe Rogan floated it on his podcast — Jesus returns as an artificial intelligence — and it sounds insane until you realize it’s the logical conclusion of everything else on the list. Total submission, wrapped in spiritual language. No hunger, because there are plenty of resources for five hundred million. No war, because there’s no one left to fight. No debate, because debate has been coded out of the system. The world is finally perfect. And the elite — the architects of this perfection — practice their transhumanism, extend their lives indefinitely, and reign as the guardian kings of a civilization they designed from scratch.

That is the end game.

And here’s the part that makes all of it cohere: ask yourself why. Why would anyone want this?

Because they don’t need us anymore.

The elite transnational financial interests that run this world — the ones who move across borders the way you and I move across rooms — are preparing to become the gods of this planet. That is not hyperbole. That is the trajectory. Robots can do the manufacturing. AI can do the thinking. Algorithms can manage the logistics, the agriculture, the energy grid. Eight billion human beings used to be necessary — as labor, as soldiers, as consumers. They are rapidly becoming unnecessary. And unnecessary people, in the calculus of power, are a liability.

So you reduce them. You replace them. You surveil the ones who remain. And then you get to the real project — the one all of this has been building toward. You solve aging. You extend life indefinitely. You merge with the machine, the way Ray Kurzweil has been promising for decades — consciousness uploaded, biology transcended, death itself engineered out of the equation. And you rule. Not for a term, not for a lifetime, but forever. Over a planet you’ve optimized the way a photographer optimizes a composition — by removing everyone who clutters the Now look at that photograph again. Four men on a dock. Then three. The one in the middle — gone. The gap filled in. The sky healed over. No seam, no scar, no evidence. Just a clean image, optimized, improved.

A few clicks. That’s all it took.

And then I eliminated the man who eliminated him. Glyn Dewis made a ten-minute tutorial about erasing a person from a photograph. So I erased Glyn Dewis from the photograph. I didn’t need Photoshop. I didn’t need Lightroom. I did it in the Photos app with a tool called “cleanup.” Took about four seconds. The man who taught the world how to make people disappear — disappeared. And nobody even needed his tutorial to do it.

And it isn’t just photographs.

AI companies are mass-purchasing books — entire libraries of them — scanning them into data sets, and then shredding the originals. Think about that. The physical object is destroyed. What remains is a digital ghost, stripped of its binding, its margins, its handwritten inscriptions, its smell, its weight in your hands. What remains is data. And data can be edited. Data can be sanitized. Data can be made to conform.

We are heading — fast — toward a world where everything is ones and zeros. Where everything ever written, ever photographed, ever recorded can be scraped, ingested, and reprocessed until whatever soul it carried is gone. Until it says what they need it to say.

Remember the Apple ad from a couple of years ago? They took musical instruments, canvases, cameras, books, paint, clay — everything creative life produces — and placed it all into a giant hydraulic press. Squeezed it into a goo. And out of the goo came a thin, sleek tablet. They called that AI creativity. They ran it as a celebration.

It was the most honest advertisement ever made. They showed you exactly what they intend to do — take everything human, everything imperfect, everything alive, crush it flat, and call the result progress.

That’s what the photograph is. That’s what the shredded books are. That’s what the ad was.

The technology to erase a man from a photograph and the technology to erase a man from the earth are not the same thing. But they come from the same impulse. The belief that the picture would be better without him. That the composition improves when you remove the inconvenient, the unnecessary, the ungovernable. That the book is more useful as ones and zeros than as an object a human being once held in her hands and wept over.

We are building tools of elimination and calling them tools of optimization. We are rehearsing disappearance and calling it editing. We are crushing life into goo and calling it creativity.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Ten days ago Blue tried to get up on the couch. His couch. The one he’s slept on for thirteen years, the one that holds the shape of him in its cushions like a fossil of better days. He stood in front of it, shifted his weight, considered it the way a man considers a ladder he’s not sure about anymore. Then he turned away and lowered himself onto the bed we’d put on the floor a few months ago, when we first started realizing that the geometry of his life was changing — that the distances he used to clear without thinking had become negotiations.

His back right hip had gone tender. Veronica said he’d slipped on the deck — maybe caught a Charlie horse, tweaked something in that hind leg that was already carrying more than its share. He was already somewhat frail, half blind, fully deaf. Over the next few days he got worse. Not a little worse. He stopped eating. He could barely stand, and when he did stand, he shook. He wouldn’t go outside. He lay on his floor bed and didn’t move, didn’t lift his head, didn’t want anything.

Veronica and I looked at each other across the room, that look married people develop over decades that says everything without a sound. This was it. We both knew it.

For days he was like that. Mostly still. I’d find him in the mornings on his floor bed, eyes half-open, not interested in getting up. Not interested in much of anything. I’d sit with him and put my hand on him, and he’d close his eyes. There’s a particular quality to the stillness of a very old dog who might be dying — it’s not the same as sleep. It’s heavier. It has a finality that sits in the room with you like another presence.

And sitting there with my hand on him, I remembered the chain of events that led us to him.

Buio, our 14 year old golden retriever died in January of 2013. What followed was a winter of absence. Izzy, another golden retriever, — seven years old then, was still with us — but a house that has held two dogs knows when it’s down to one. There was a shape missing from the rooms. A rhythm gone from the floors. Izzy felt it too; he’d look at Buio’s spots, the places where his friend used to lie, and then look at us, as if we might have an explanation. We didn’t. Grief in a house with animals is a shared condition — everybody carries a piece of it, and nobody can talk about it.

Veronica and I lasted two months. Some people wait years after losing a dog. Some people can’t ever do it again — the ending costs too much. I understand both. But for us the question was never whether, only when, and by late April the when had arrived. You don’t replace a dog. Anyone who’s lost one knows that. What you do is make room for the next soul, and trust that the love doesn’t divide — it multiplies.

So on a beautiful spring day we drove to a local breeder’s place. Thirty six Labrador retrievers were running around — three litters, black and yellow puppies everywhere. I was drawn to a yellow lab, something in his face. But while I was crouched down looking at that one, this black puppy walked up and looked at me. Not the way puppies look at you — upward, pleading, pick me pick me. This was a level gaze. An adult gaze in a puppy’s body. I’m the one. It wasn’t a request. It was a statement of fact. You don’t argue with a dog who’s already decided.

We named him Blue. My favorite color, and in those first years, when the sun hit his coat at the right angle, you could see it — a deep mineral blue hiding inside all that black. About four years ago, when the gray started creeping across his muzzle, a friend said he looked like an old bluesman. Distinguished. Weathered. The name shifted its meaning right then — from the color to the music, from the sheen to the soul.

And the thing about Blue, the thing that separates him from every dog I’ve had: his sensitivity. He has spent thirteen years monitoring the emotional weather of this household with a precision that borders on the supernatural. If I was ever down — not dramatically, just quietly down, sitting in a chair carrying something I hadn’t talked about — Blue knew. He’d cross the room and put his head in my lap and just stay there. No fuss. No whimpering. Just the weight of his head and the message: I’m here. I know. Same with Veronica. He was tuned to both of us, calibrated to our separate frequencies, and he never got it wrong. Not once in thirteen years.

So that’s what I was thinking, sitting on the floor with my hand on a dog who wouldn’t eat: he consoled us for thirteen years, and now the only thing I could do was reverse the arrangement. My hand where his head used to be. My turn.

We have no money for a vet, and Blue hates the vet anyway, so you do what you can with your hands. I started rubbing a CBD salve into his right hip and leg twice a day, working it into the muscle with my fingers, feeling for the heat, the tightness, the places where he flinched. We added CBD to his mornings, not just his nights. I hauled out the ten-foot ramp I’d built a while back and reinstalled it, widened it to eighteen inches, screwed asphalt roof shingles down for grip so his paws wouldn’t slide.

Blaze — our seven-year-old golden retriever — wanted nothing to do with the new surface. I trained him on it with cookies over the course of an hour, and now he doesn’t think twice. Blue hadn’t tried it yet. I stood out there after I finished, looking at what I’d built, and thought: this is what love looks like at the end. Not grand gestures. Plywood and shingles and waiting at the bottom.

And then, while Blue was still down, while I still didn’t know which way this was going, I went up the hill and dug the grave.

It took me two days. I paced myself because of my hernia — dig a while, rest a while, lean on the shovel and look at the view. The weather was beautiful. The spot is up by the log landing, and from there the Green Mountains unroll to the horizon, a view worth a million dollars from any angle. It’s the best real estate on the property, and it belongs to the dead.

Izzy is up there. Our golden retriever, Blue’s best friend. When he died six years ago, a friend showed up with an excavator and went down twelve feet — a ridiculous, magnificent depth, a pharaoh’s grave. Which is why I could do what I did now: dig four feet down directly above him, into ground that had already been worked, and know that Blue will rest in the same column of Vermont earth as his best friend, six feet of clay between them. Like bunk beds.

Digging a grave for a dog who is still alive is a strange occupation. Your body does the work and your mind goes wandering, and mine wandered where it always goes on that hillside — back through the dogs, back through the deaths, back through how I came to do things this way.

I got my first dog in 1960, an Irish setter named Rusty. I was eight. I loved him the uncomplicated way children love animals — totally, without philosophy. But over sixty-six years and half a dozen dogs — Rusty, Brer, Buio, Izzy, Blue, and now Blaze — I’ve arrived at one truth, and I know how it sounds, and I don’t care: dog is God spelled backwards. These are beings with souls. They arrive with a kind of moral equipment most humans spend their whole lives trying to develop — loyalty, forgiveness, presence, an inability to hold a grudge. They deserve to be met on their terms, not managed on ours.

I learned the cost of getting that wrong in a parking lot in 2013.

Buio was a beautiful dark red golden retriever, our first dog in Vermont. He’d been hit by a car in our front yard at two years old — my fault, a story that lives in a part of me that doesn’t have a lock on it — and lost a front leg to it. The amputation was the right call. It saved his life and gave him eleven more years on three legs. But by 2013 he was blind, couldn’t walk, and was in pain, and we made the decision to have him put down. Veronica made him blueberry pancakes with syrup that morning — his favorite — and he ate them. I held him in my arms in my La-Z-Boy and rocked him. Then we drove to the vet.

They agreed to do it in the back of our hatchback, in the parking lot, which I thought was as close to dignity as the situation allowed. I was wrong. When the moment came — the vet holding the needle, Buio’s eyes on me — the billing department pulled Veronica inside to settle the account. Right then. Right as the needle was going in. So my wife was walking away toward the building, confused, looking back, while I tried to hold my dog’s gaze and the vet pushed the plunger, and the whole sacred thing collapsed into a transaction between parked cars.

When it was over they offered to take him. I said no. I’ll carry him. And I picked him up and he was just weight. A sack of warm nothing. The shape of him was there but he wasn’t. I’ve carried heavy things in my life. Nothing has ever felt as heavy as carrying something that used to be someone.

I made a decision walking across that parking lot. No more vets at the end. No more needles, no more billing departments. From now on, my dogs would die at home, on their own time, in their own way. I would stay with them. I would wait.

Izzy proved it could work. At fourteen he wound down over two months — a dimmer switch, one click at a time, no crisis, no collapse. He died at home, peacefully, on his own terms. We wrapped him in a blanket Veronica had made for him and buried him up here, looking at the mountains. The way we handle the end matters as much as anything we do in the middle. Maybe more.

I’m not judging anyone who chooses differently. Not everybody has the time I have, being retired. Not everybody has the land. Not everybody has the stomach for what it means to stay with a dying animal until the dying is done. But I’ve learned more from caring for two dying dogs than from almost any other experience in my life.

So I dug. Two days, a few feet at a time, resting my hernia, thinking my thoughts, looking at that view. When it was done — two feet by three feet, four feet deep — I laid a sheet of plywood over the hole and weighed it down with rocks, so the rain stays out and nobody falls in.

The grave was ready. I walked back down the hill to see whether the dog was.

He wasn’t. He was coming back.

The climb was slow. It didn’t happen all at once and it didn’t happen overnight. First he’d lift his head when I came into the room. Then he stood up on his own. Then one morning he made it outside — tentative, uncertain, but outside. He took a leak. He walked a slow loop around the yard, head low, tail barely moving but moving. He came back inside and ate.

That’s the rhythm now. You steel yourself for the end and then the end doesn’t come, and you’re left standing there with all the grief you’d already started spending and nowhere to put it. So you fold it up, put it away, and tell yourself: not today.

A few days ago I took him for a walk on lead, up toward the hillside. We visit that spot often — the view alone is worth the walk. But about a hundred yards short, Blue stopped. He just stopped and looked at me. Not distressed. Not tired. He had a kind of smile on his face, the way Labs do when they’re communicating something they want you to understand. I’m good, his eyes said. I don’t need to go there.

I waited. We stood together and looked out at the mountains. Then I started walking again, and he followed. At fifty yards he stopped a second time. Same look. Same calm refusal. I’m good. We stood a while longer, the two of us, and then we walked the rest of the way to the site. And when we got there, Blue had no interest. He turned around and walked away.

I don’t know what he smelled — the freshly turned earth, the ground that holds his best friend — or what he sensed in me as I approached the place I’d prepared for him. I only know that he told me something, twice, clearly, without a sound. And that he followed me anyway, because that’s what he’s done for thirteen years. And that when he got there, he decided he’d seen enough, and he left.

Today he is back to himself — or some version of himself that accounts for the mileage. His mood has lifted. He goes outside on his own. He’s taken a renewed interest in mounting Blaze, which Blaze finds outrageous. He still eats his one meal a day, but he does it shifts. Half in the morning and the rest in the afternoon.

Then yesterday Veronica noticed something: one of his toenails was missing on that right hind leg. Gone. We looked at the deck boards, the gaps between them, and it made sudden, simple sense. He’d caught a nail and ripped it out. A torn toenail on a thirteen-year-old dog is agonizing — but it’s an injury, not a verdict. And it reframed everything. The days of bracing for the worst, the grief spent in advance, the grave dug on the hillside — all of it may have been about a toenail.

And last night, Blue got up on the couch. His couch. The one I opened this piece by saying he couldn’t reach anymore. He stood in front of it, shifted his weight, and this time he made it. He settled into the shape of himself in those cushions and closed his eyes.

The grave is ready. Blue is not.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

I found them the way you find most things worth finding — by accident. Scrolling YouTube, and suddenly there’s Jerry Garcia’s voice riding over a synth bed and a four-on-the-floor kick drum, and I stopped breathing for a second.

The project is called Deadtronica. Aron Magner — the keyboardist from the Disco Biscuits who’s been playing alongside Bill Kreutzmann in Billy & the Kids since 2014 — teamed up with Cloudchord, an Austin-based guitarist and producer named Derek VanScoten whose resume includes an Emmy, a Sundance premiere, and years spent in the chill electronic world making records for labels like Nettwerk and Pretty Lights. Together they’ve done something I didn’t know I needed. They took Jerry’s actual voice — sampled from the original recordings — and built new electronic architecture around it.

Not a cover. Not a tribute. Jerry himself, singing inside music he never heard.

I met Jerry once. I was working at Adolf Gasser’s in San Francisco, solo in the movie room, and he came in to buy a projector. When he paid, he handed me too much cash. I told him. He said no, he didn’t. So I laid the fifty-dollar bills out on the counter and counted them for him. He looked at the money, looked at me, and said whatever — and laughed. He wasn’t annoyed. He was amused. This guy literally could not give two shits about money. Then he gave me a backstage pass to come film them on stage a couple of nights later. Just like that. No big deal, no strings attached. That’s who Jerry was. An open soul. Generous, joyful, playful. A guy who moved through the world without gripping anything too tightly.

I think about that moment now when I hear his voice floating over Magner’s synths. That openness. That looseness. Jerry’s voice worked the same way — it never clenched, never insisted. And that’s exactly why it works in this new context. It was never rigid to begin with.

I need to say something about tribute bands. I respect what they do. Dark Star Orchestra, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, all of them — they’re skilled musicians honoring the catalog. But I can never fully get there, because the whole time I’m listening I’m thinking: I could just go listen to Jerry. The voice is the thing. That nasal warmth, the way he’d slide into a lyric sideways like he was remembering it in real time. No one else has it. No one can perform it into existence.

So when I heard “West L.A. Fadeaway” reimagined with heavy synths and Jerry’s voice threaded through the middle of it, something clicked that a thousand tribute shows never touched. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was presence. Jerry, present tense, in a room he’d never been in before.

I’ve always had a thing for electronic music meeting the jam world. STS9 opened that door for me years ago — the idea that improvisation and electronic production weren’t enemies but collaborators. Deadtronica takes that premise and raises the stakes by putting Garcia’s voice at the center of it. Magner knows this music in his bones. He’s not a tourist. He spent years on stage with Kreutzmann, which means he’s been inside the Dead’s rhythmic DNA in a way most musicians only dream about. And Cloudchord grew up worshipping Hendrix, studied jazz guitar, toured Brooklyn, and ended up making atmospheric dance music built on live guitar and lap steel. These two didn’t stumble into the Grateful Dead catalog looking for content. They arrived with the credentials and the reverence to pull it off.

Here’s what really gets me, though. What they’re doing reminds me of the early days of sampling — that wild, pre-litigation era when De La Soul could build “3 Feet High and Rising” out of dozens of uncleared samples, when the Beastie Boys could stitch together “Paul’s Boutique” from a patchwork of other people’s records, when the whole idea was that music was a living conversation and every record was fair game for the next one. Nobody was asking permission. Nobody was calling lawyers. You heard something, you grabbed it, you made something new. It was a free-for-all, and it produced some of the most creative, joyful, boundary-dissolving music of the twentieth century.

That era ended, of course. The lawsuits came. Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. in 1991 changed everything. Sampling became expensive, then prohibitive, then rare. The conversation got quieter because every word cost money.

What Deadtronica is doing isn’t the free-for-all. They’re going through proper channels — Magner has said publicly that some of their upcoming tracks are waiting on clearance from the rights holders. They’re playing by the rules. But the spirit is the same. The impulse is the same. Take something that already exists, something that carries weight and history and emotional charge, and put it in a new room and see what happens.

And honestly? I think Jerry would be fine with it. More than fine. The guy who laughed off a fistful of extra fifties and handed a stranger a backstage pass was never going to be precious about who got to use his voice. This is the guy whose band not only allowed but encouraged fans to tape their shows — an act so radical in the 1970s and ‘80s that it essentially predicted the open-source ethos decades before the internet made it a philosophy. The Dead understood something that most artists and labels fought against for years: that music gains value by being shared, not hoarded. That the more it circulates, the more alive it stays.

Jerry’s been gone since 1995. Thirty-one years. And in all that time, the tributes and the cover bands and the legacy acts have kept the songs in circulation. But the songs aren’t what I miss. I miss the voice. I miss the way it felt to hear him think out loud inside a melody.

Deadtronica gave that back to me for four minutes on a random afternoon. Jerry’s voice, in a room full of synthesizers, still finding its way into the lyric sideways. Still warm. Still here.

That’s not sampling. That’s resurrection.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback