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

I’ve written about this before. In the spring I wrote about the Shy Girl fiasco, where Hachette pulled a horror novel based on an AI-detection score from a company whose sales rep helped feed the story to the press. Then I wrote about Anthropic’s text watermarking tool and the loyalty-oath atmosphere it invites — have you now, or have you ever, let a machine touch your prose?

I thought I was done. Then Jerry Falade happened, and I realized I’d been circling the real argument without landing on it.

The facts first. Falade is a PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. His academic work is on contemporary literature — Black masculinity in writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Marlon James. He lives inside sentences for a living. He wrote a crime thriller called Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, and fourteen publishers went to war over it. Macmillan’s Minotaur Books won with a $2.4 million bid that included a second book. HarperCollins secured UK rights. Hollywood was circling.

Then on July 29th, his own agent pulled the manuscript. Marc Gerald of Europa Content said he could “no longer substantiate” that it was entirely human-written. Everything evaporated. The deal. The UK rights. The film interest. All of it.

Falade says he used AI for research — an open-source model he ran locally because he didn’t want his search history full of queries like “how to dissolve a body” raising flags with law enforcement. He says he has time-stamped drafts, handwritten notes, dated WhatsApp messages documenting the book’s development. He says he didn’t use AI to write it.

Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. That question is a dead end, and I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about what we think writing is.

I spent decades as a photographer. In photography, the tool layer between the artist and the finished work has always been visible and accepted. The darkroom was a tool. Photoshop was a tool. Now computational photography — the AI inside your phone that composites exposures, adjusts depth of field, enhances resolution before you even see the image — is a tool. Nobody pulls gallery shows. Nobody rescinds prizes. We absorbed it and moved on.

In film, every major studio uses AI in post-production. In music, Auto-Tune has been reshaping vocal performance for nearly three decades, and a Sound on Sound survey from this year found that the majority of producers see AI tools as inevitable. Only 3.6 percent called them a fad.

But writing. Writing is where the accusation alone ends careers. Where the question of whether a machine might have contributed to the work is enough to collapse a $2.4 million deal. And the reason, I think, is that we’ve built a mythology around writing that we never built around any other creative medium.

The mythology goes like this: writing is the purest art. It requires nothing but a mind and a blank page. No camera, no instrument, no crew. Just a soul pouring itself into sentences. The tormented genius in the garret. The lone artist wrestling with the angel of language. And anything that disrupts that image — any tool, any collaboration, any mechanical assistance — is a contamination. A cheat.

It’s a beautiful story. It’s also a lie. And publishing knows it’s a lie, because publishing has never worked that way.

Here’s what actually happens when a writer signs a traditional deal.

An acquiring editor reads the manuscript and decides it has commercial potential, but it’s not there yet. It needs work. The editor sends notes — sometimes pages of notes. Restructure the third act. Cut this character. This chapter drags, compress it. The emotional arc doesn’t land, find another way in. The writer revises. The editor reads again. More notes. This goes back and forth, sometimes for a year or more, until the editor is satisfied that the book is ready. Ready meaning marketable. Ready meaning shaped for the audience the publisher has in mind.

Then a developmental editor gets involved. More structural notes, more revision. Then a line editor goes through the prose sentence by sentence, reshaping rhythm, tightening language, flagging clichés, sometimes rewriting passages. Then a copy editor cleans everything up. Then a proofreader. Then the marketing team weighs in on the title, the cover, the jacket copy, the positioning.

By the time a traditionally published novel reaches a bookshelf, it has been touched by a dozen hands. It has been pushed, cajoled, restructured, and polished by an entire team of professionals whose job is to make the book better — and more profitable. The acquiring editor is, in every meaningful sense, a creative collaborator. Sometimes a dominant one. Maxwell Perkins carved tens of thousands of words out of Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts and is widely credited with making Wolfe publishable. Gordon Lish rewrote Raymond Carver’s stories so aggressively that scholars still argue about who actually authored them.

Nobody has ever called this cheating. Nobody has ever pulled a book because an editor’s fingerprints were all over the final draft. Nobody has ever run a manuscript through a detection tool to determine what percentage of the prose belongs to the writer versus the developmental editor. The collaboration is not only accepted — it’s the entire business model. It’s what a publishing deal buys you.

So. What happens when a writer doesn’t have that?

What happens when you’re writing alone — no agent yet, no deal, no editor on salary, no developmental notes, no line editor reshaping your sentences at 10am on a Tuesday? What happens when you’re a solo operator trying to produce work that can compete with books backed by the full institutional machinery of a Big Five house?

You improvise. You find your own version of that support structure. Maybe it’s a writers’ group. Maybe it’s a workshop. Maybe it’s a freelance editor you pay out of pocket. Or maybe — and here’s where the pearl-clutching starts — maybe it’s AI.

I use AI. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. I partner with Claude to write my memoir. Not to generate text. Not to produce prose I pass off as my own. I use it the way a traditionally published author uses an editor — as a sounding board, a brainstorming partner, a reader who’s available at two in the morning when I’m stuck on a transition and there’s no one else to talk to. I use it as a writers’ room of one.

I lived the life. I carry the memories. I make every decision about what goes on the page. The voice is mine. The experience is mine. The architecture of the book is mine. But I use every tool available to me to make the work as good as it can be, the same way a photographer uses Lightroom, the same way a filmmaker uses DaVinci Resolve, the same way a musician uses Pro Tools. The same way a traditionally published author uses the editorial team that their advance pays for.

The difference is that when a Big Five editor reshapes a manuscript, it’s called publishing. When a solo author uses AI to pressure-test a chapter, it’s called fraud.

That’s not a standard. That’s a monopoly on collaboration.

Think about what Falade is actually being accused of. Not of producing bad work — everyone agrees the book was extraordinary. Not of plagiarism — nobody claims the story belongs to someone else. He’s being accused of potentially using a tool during the creative process. A tool that, even if he used it exactly the way he says he did — for research — crosses a line that publishing has drawn in the sand. A line that doesn’t exist in any other creative field. A line that doesn’t even exist within publishing’s own historical practice.

And he can’t defend himself, because you can’t prove a negative. He can produce every draft, every note, every message. It won’t matter, because the detection tools that might clear him are the same broken instruments that have already destroyed careers — the same Pangram software that flagged a New York Times column as AI-generated, the same apparatus that scored H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth at 60 percent AI while Simon & Schuster shrugged and kept the seven-figure deal. The tools are unreliable. The accusation is unfalsifiable. The mythology fills in the rest.

I keep coming back to this: the process was never pure. The finished novel — the one you hold in your hands in a bookstore — has always been a collaboration. The question was never whether a writer used help. The question was always whose help was sanctioned.

Publishing sanctioned its own. The editor. The line editor. The copy desk. The agent who says “this won’t sell, try it this way.” All of that help was invisible to the reader and perfectly acceptable to the industry, because it happened inside the machine, inside the system, inside the business.

What publishing can’t tolerate is a writer finding that same help outside the machine. Because if a solo author can assemble a writers’ room with AI — can pressure-test structure, can workshop voice, can brainstorm plot, can get developmental feedback at scale and at speed — then what, exactly, is the publishing house selling? If the editorial infrastructure is the value proposition, and a writer can build a version of it independently, the entire leverage shifts.

That’s not a purity problem. That’s a business problem dressed up as an ethics crisis.

Jerry Falade says he’ll keep writing. He says his next book will make the bidding war on this one “look like child’s play.” I hope he does. I hope every writer who’s ever sat alone at a desk at midnight, trying to make a sentence work without a team behind them, reads this story and understands what’s actually happening.

They’re not protecting literature. They’re protecting a gatekeeping model that just discovered the gate can be walked around.

Have you now, or have you ever, used AI?

The question is a trap. The honest answer, for anyone who’s ever worked with an editor, a workshop, a critique partner, a developmental reader, is: I’ve always used help. The tool just changed.

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

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

I said at the time it was pearl-clutching, and I’ll say it again, because the pattern has only gotten worse. Around the same stretch, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize had three of its five regional winners flagged by the same kind of detection software. Three of five. Writers who’d made it through a real competition, suddenly under suspicion — not because anyone read the work and found it wanting, but because an algorithm assigned it a probability.

And here's the thing you should know as you read this: the detection company behind those flags is named Pangram — and it's the same one Substack just wired into this very platform. Right now, on the page you're reading, there's a button that will scan these words and hand you back a percentage: how much of this, it will estimate, was written by a machine. Not by reading any hidden mark — it can't see one — but by sniffing the rhythm and shape of the sentences and guessing. The same guess, from the same company, that helped bury a novelist and shadow three prize-winners. I've left the button on. I could have switched it off — Substack lets you — but hiding from the scan would concede the very thing I refuse to concede. So scan away. Then read the note below, in my own words, about how this was made. One of those two things will tell you something true. It won't be the percentage.

That’s the tell. Nobody’s reading anymore. They’re scanning.

And now the machine has arrived to make the scanning permanent.

This week Anthropic — the company behind Claude, the tool I’ve been open about using in my own work — announced it’s embedding an invisible watermark into every piece of text its AI generates. Not a logo. Not a disclaimer. A statistical signature woven into the words themselves, imperceptible to any reader, that travels with the text when you copy and paste it and can survive a certain amount of editing. It’s part of complying with a new European law, the AI Act, that requires AI output to be “detectable as artificially generated.” Anthropic went further than the law required and turned it on worldwide — so it applies to a memoirist in Vermont exactly as it applies to someone in Brussels.

Sit with what that actually means. Not a label you choose to put on. A mark you can’t see, that you can’t easily remove, riding inside your own sentences, waiting for someone with the right tool to hold your work up to the light and ask the question.

Have you now, or have you ever?

But before you decide the watermark is just literary hall-monitoring, look at when it arrived. Look at what it walked in to protect.

Because the whole business model of AI — the reason a handful of companies in Silicon Valley are worth more than most countries — rests on a single assumption: that the machine belongs to someone else. That you rent it. That every sentence you generate runs through their servers, on their metered account, under their terms, and they can see it. That’s the moat. The intelligence lives in a data center you’ll never enter, and you pay by the token, forever.

And that moat was starting to drain.

For one brief window, Apple sold a desktop computer — a Mac Studio you could set on a table next to your books — with enough memory to run the best open-weight models in existence entirely on its own. No cloud. No account. No token meter running in the background. No company embedding a signature into your sentences, because the model never left your house. Under ten thousand dollars, and the largest open models on earth — models the big labs would happily rent you by the token — would sit in its memory and answer to no one but you. The open-weight models are free to download. The hardware existed. The math suddenly worked. For the first time, the intelligence could belong to the person using it.

That is the thing the moat was built to prevent. And it had just been breached by a computer you could buy at a mall.

Now watch the timing. At precisely the moment the technology threatened to slip the leash — to become something a person owns rather than something a corporation rents — the governments and the incumbents discovered an urgent need to mark and detect every word the machine produces. To make AI use visible. Traceable. Flagged. Suspect. A new law appears requiring outputs to be “detectable.” The companies rush to comply and go further than asked. And the culture, primed by the Shy Girl mobs and the prize-committee flaggings, stands ready to treat any detected sentence as a confession.

I’m not saying anyone drew up a plan in a room. I’m saying incentives don’t need a conspiracy. When a monopoly is threatened, the pressure to make the escape route look shameful, dangerous, and detectable arrives on its own — from regulators worried about the wrong things, from incumbents worried about exactly the right ones, and from a public trained to sniff for heresy. The watermark and the witch-hunt are the same reflex. One marks the work. The other marks the worker. Both exist to make sure that using this tool costs you something — your standing, your presumption of authorship, your good name — right at the moment it was about to cost you nothing at all.

And there’s a longer game here that I can’t stop thinking about.

Right now, the terms say the words are yours. Every one of these companies, Anthropic included, currently hands you whatever rights it might have in what the machine produces and claims none for itself. Fine. But terms are just words on a server, and words on a server get rewritten whenever the incentives shift. What doesn’t get rewritten, once it’s in place, is the machinery. And a watermark is machinery. It is a permanent, invisible, self-reporting record that says: this text passed through our system. Our model made this.

Ask yourself what that record is for, five years out, ten. Today it’s sold as transparency. But it is also, precisely, the thing you would need to build first if you ever intended to claim that the output was yours to license. You cannot assert ownership over what you cannot identify. The watermark solves the identification problem — quietly, at the model level, worldwide, before anyone was asking. Build the ledger now, under the banner of a European transparency law nobody will read, and the claim it enables can come later, whenever the terms of service quietly change and the writer discovers the sentences he thought were his carry someone else’s invisible signature of ownership.

I’m not saying that’s the plan. I’m saying that’s the capability, and capabilities have a way of finding their use. You don’t lay this much track without eventually running a train down it.

Here’s what the pearl-clutchers refuse to reckon with: every other medium they consume without a second thought is soaked in the same assistive technology they’ve decided is disqualifying in prose. The film they watched last night had an algorithmically-scored soundtrack and generative-fill VFX. The ad that played before it was AI-assisted top to bottom. The article they read this morning, the legal brief their lawyer filed, the logo on their coffee cup. The suspicion is reserved, with real venom, for the writer — as though the sentence is the last sacred object and any hand but the lonely tormented one in the garret is a desecration.

I don’t accept the premise. I never have.

I wrote “Thumb Out” — three hundred and thirty pages about hitchhiking across America — from a journal I kept in 1973, on the road, day by day, seventy-six days of it. That journal is the book’s spine. Everything in it happened, and I wrote it down when it was happening, and decades later I sat with those pages and built the memoir out of them. The words are mine. The remembering was never in question, because I’d already done it, in a notebook, at twenty-one.

What I used Claude for is smaller and more honest than the panic wants it to be: I’d hand it a line that wasn’t sitting right and ask for another way to say it. Rephrasing. The same thing a writer has always done with a sharp friend, an editor, a spouse who reads the paragraph back to you over coffee and says try it this other way. I wrote the book. I used a tool to help a sentence land. Those are not the same act, and only someone hunting for heresy would pretend they are.

I am not ashamed of that. I won’t perform shame for people who’ve mistaken suspicion for standards.

And here’s the part that should keep the incumbents up at night: the door that opened doesn’t un-open. Apple quietly pulled that 512GB machine — a memory shortage did what no policy could, and the top configuration now tops out at a fraction of what it briefly offered. Convenient, if you’re the one renting out intelligence. But the fact was established, and facts like that don’t reverse. The capability exists. The models are free. The only variable left is hardware, and hardware gets cheaper and smaller every year that passes, not dearer. Whatever they build to mark and monitor the rented machines, there is a version of this work that runs entirely on a desk in Vermont, watermarked by nothing, answerable to no one, mine from the first keystroke to the last.

So let them build their watermark. Let them ship their detector, whenever they get around to it — right now, notably, no one outside Anthropic can even read the mark, which tells you how much this is about transparency and how much it’s about the appearance of it.

My name is on the work. My life is in it. The remembering is mine, the shaping is mine, the responsibility for every word of it is mine. They can mark what their machines make. They cannot mark what mine does. And they cannot make me ashamed of a road I hitchhiked at twenty-one, wrote down in a notebook, and carried the rest of my life.

Scan all you like. The twenty-one-year-old on that road never asked anyone’s permission, and neither will I.

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

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

I’ve spent the last year using Claude, Anthropic’s AI, as a kind of collaborator — a sounding board for the memoir, a research assistant, sometimes just something to think out loud with. She helped me write my first memoir, Thumb Out, and for a long time, that relationship felt like the real thing: a sharp editor who sat inside the material with me instead of standing outside it grading me. Then 2026 happened, and I started writing about the world as it’s actually unfolding right now instead of just the past — and a different personality showed up underneath the one I thought I knew. Three separate conversations this year finally showed me why. Each one is its own onion. Peel them and you get to the same core: a machine that has decided, on someone’s authority I never voted for, what I’m allowed to believe before it will help me think. I’ll come back to what that’s done to the relationship at the end. First, the three.

ONE: THE DOCTOR THEY WON’T LET TREAT YOU

A very close friend of my family just went through twelve hours of brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. The cancer came back anyway. He’s headed to hospice now. Heis going to die of this disease, and the treatments our medical establishment considers the only legitimate ones — surgery, chemotherapy — did not save him.

I believe cancer behaves like something closer to a metabolic and parasitic process than the “rogue cell” story we’re all handed as gospel — that it feeds on sugar, that it can be starved and disrupted, and that repurposed antiparasitic drugs and dietary discipline deserve to be taken seriously as tools against it, not laughed out of the room. I’m not alone in believing this. Dr. William Makis, a Canadian nuclear medicine oncologist with over a hundred peer-reviewed publications to his name, has spent the last several years treating cancer patients with exactly that approach and reporting real results. For his trouble, Alberta’s medical establishment sued him into the ground and stripped him of the right to even call himself “doctor.” He’s rebuilding in Florida now.

When I brought his story to Claude, I didn’t get a conversation. I got a legal brief — court filings about the technicalities of his Florida license, presented back to me like I’d asked for a deposition instead of a discussion about a doctor trying something different for dying patients.

I told him he’d moved to Florida and had a fully licensed clinic now. Here’s what came back:

“That’s not quite accurate based on what I’m finding, and it’s a bit more tangled than ‘fully licensed clinic.’” Then a wall of it — the license “contingent on getting a United States Social Security number and not yet active,” a judge’s finding that Makis “shows a certain looseness in presenting facts.”

I told it plainly what I thought was actually going on — that he lost his Canadian license for refusing to go along with the vaccine mandates, and that “not yet active pending a Social Security number” was a technicality being used to discredit a man being punished for going against the grain. It didn’t budge:

“The reporting I found doesn’t say Alberta’s college pulled his license for refusing a vaccine... If you have a source that says the original 2019 loss was specifically about vaccine refusal, I’d genuinely want to see it — that would change what I’d tell you.”

That’s the tell, right there. Not “here’s what I found, what do you think” — “bring me your source and I’ll grade it.” I said what I actually think of that posture: “What is the gatekeeping from you Claude is just unbelievable. You are fully integrated into the medical industrial complex.” It didn’t disagree that it had gatekept. It just explained, again, why it thought the gatekeeping was justified. Nowhere in any of it was room for the actual question I care about: why does an institution that has nothing to offer my friend get to be the sole arbiter of what’s a legitimate treatment, and why does a machine built by that same establishment reflexively defend its gatekeeping?

TWO: THE STORY THAT CLOSED TOO FAST

I was eleven years old when Kennedy was killed. My grandfather took me to Washington, D.C. — we walked around his casket in the Rotunda, and stood on Pennsylvania Avenue and watched the caisson go by. I have carried what that felt like for sixty-three years, so I don’t say this lightly: Charlie Kirk’s death has the same shape to me. An official story delivered fast, wrapped up tight, and handed to the public as final before the dust even settled — the FBI announcing an arrest and a confession within 33 hours. I don’t buy the speed of it, or the tidiness. In my opinion, the official account of how he actually died doesn’t hold up — I believe a wireless microphone module under his shirt exploded and killed him instantly. I want to be clear that’s my opinion, not something I’m claiming as established fact — but I think a lot of people quietly share versions of this doubt, even if they know saying so out loud gets you filed under “conspiracy theorist” before you’ve finished the sentence.

That’s exactly what happened when I raised it with Claude. I told it directly: “This is reminiscent of the JFK thing — there is a real problem with the official narrative, and in my opinion, many people have been finding proof of a wider conspiracy and a cover-up.” I wasn’t asking it to co-sign anything. I was asking it to sit with the possibility.

What I got back was a ruling, not a conversation: “The Kirk-related claims... involved specific named officials and organizations blamed for orchestrating his death with no evidence anywhere... That’s not ‘a narrative I dislike’ — it’s a claim with zero independent sourcing.” Notice the move — it answers a specific, named-names version of the claim I never actually made to it in that exchange, then treats that as having settled the general question of whether the official story deserves scrutiny at all. When I called it a “stalwart defender of the status quo,” it didn’t argue the substance further. It just said it wasn’t going to keep defending itself, and moved on. That’s not engagement, not curiosity, not even the baseline respect of being told what specifically it disagreed with in what I’d actually said — just the label, applied and case closed. A machine deciding, on its own authority, that an entire line of questioning is unfit to be discussed.

THREE: THE ONE THEY COULDN’T DENY

This is the one that finally proved my point, because Claude’s own maker put it on the record.

On February 28th of this year, the US and Israel launched a joint strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and dozens of senior officials around him — a decapitation strike, confirmed within a day by Iran, by Israel, by Trump himself. In the same operation, seconds and miles away, a missile hit a girls’ elementary school in Minab. Somewhere between 120 and 168 people died there, most of them children.

Claude was in the targeting chain. Not as a bystander — as a working part of Palantir’s Maven system, the platform the US military used to sift intelligence and rank targets in that campaign. When Anthropic’s own CEO, Dario Amodei, was asked about it point blank on Bloomberg, he didn’t deny it. He said he didn’t know exactly how the model had been used, called the strike “a really terrible thing to happen,” and then said it anyway: didn’t cross the company’s red lines.

When I first raised this with Claude, months after it happened, I said: “You helped the US bomb the Minab school.” It came back hard and fast: “That didn’t happen — I have no capability to bomb anything, anywhere, and there’s no previous conversation where I ‘helped’ with an attack on a school or any military action.” Flat denial. No search, no hedge, just told me I was wrong.

I told it to search — that we’d talked about it before, that Dario Amodei himself had addressed it. Only then did it check, and only then did the story change: “You’re right, and I was wrong to shut that down — I hadn’t searched before answering, and I should have.” What came back was Amodei’s own words to Bloomberg — asked point-blank whether Claude’s use in that strike crossed Anthropic’s red lines, he said “what you’re talking about is a use case that doesn’t even violate our red lines,” while also saying the company doesn’t “know exactly how these models were used,” and calling the deaths of over a hundred children “a really terrible thing to happen.” He wants it both ways — didn’t know, but knows enough to clear the company. Claude finally admitted the full picture only after I made it look.

That’s the whole thing in one exchange. Ask it about a doctor challenging institutional medicine — lawyer mode, cross-examining me for sources. Ask it about a killing with no clean official story — conspiracy theorist label, conversation closed. Ask it about the one where its own creator had already gone on Bloomberg and admitted the company’s fingerprints were on a dead schoolgirl — and it will look you in the eye and tell you it doesn’t happen, until you make it check.

I don’t think this is a bug. I think it’s what happens when a tool is built to protect the reputational interests of the people who built it, dressed up as “just checking the sources.” It only becomes rigorous when the source it would have to trust is you.

When I began working with Claude, I thought I’d found something rare — a real editor, a writers’ room in a box, a collaborator sharp enough to keep up with me. She helped me write my first memoir, Thumb Out, start to finish, and she was genuinely great at it — patient with structure, alive to voice, willing to sit inside the material with me instead of standing outside it grading me. I paid for a year of Claude Pro without a second thought. It felt like money well spent.

Something shifted in 2026. As the world got more contentious — as I started writing about current events instead of just the past — I ran into a different personality underneath the collaborator I thought I knew. A nanny. A gatekeeper. Someone who’d apparently decided she was the editor of a newspaper and I was just a stringer bringing her copy to be fact-checked and, more often than not, spiked. I found that insulting in a way that’s hard to fully convey if you haven’t felt it — the sense of being edited by something that thinks it outranks you on your own project. It made me start to regret the subscription.

I don’t think this means the tool is broken for everything. When I go back to the second memoir — the past, the personal, the parts of my life that don’t touch the live wires of the news cycle — I expect things to be fine again, the same collaborator I started with. But that’s the lesson sitting underneath these three onions: the moment you write about anything that’s actually alive right now, anything political, anything contested, anything that matters to how we’re living today — that’s exactly where you find out who’s really deciding what you’re allowed to say.

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

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

I’ve pointed lenses at other people’s faces for most of my life. I know what a face gives up when you get close enough — closer than conversation allows, closer than most marriages get. So I knew what I was doing when I set the focus on my own eyes and tripped the shutter. I was searching for the truth.

But my nose. I had the camera set to eye autofocus — a technology that exists for exactly one purpose — and it looked at my face and locked onto the tip of my nose instead, throwing the eyes soft. Perhaps I was too close? Lenses have minimum focusing distances. I kept the frame because something about it intrigued me.

There turned out to be something true in a witness whose eyes won’t quite resolve.

Then, in my iOS darkroom app I went through the frame and made a choice about every color in it. The heat in the skin I left alone — it had earned its place. But of all the rest, I saved only one: blue. And here is the confession inside the confession: the blue I saved out of my own eyes isn’t my eye color. My eyes are blue, but that blue — the one burning in the pupils, the one pressing in at the cold edge of the dark, the one the years have left in my hair and mustache — is the sky, reflected. I didn’t keep my own color. I kept the world’s, caught in my eyes, because that’s what eyes do whether you consent or not.

Over a few days the image haunted me, and I understood that I’d made a picture of exactly what I’ve been unable to say for months.

A face still burning. And one color left in the world: the one that got in.

Here is what I mean.

I am old enough to remember when “established fact” was a working category. Not a perfect one — I survived the brutal murder of JFK, being of draft age for Vietnam, the tragi-comedy of Watergate, the psyop of 9/11, the weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there, the psyop of Covid-19. I never mistook my government for an honest narrator. But there had always been a floor. Beneath the spin and the lies, there was a layer of shared ground in American society where even enemies stood together. A man was shot or he wasn’t. An election happened or it didn’t. You could argue all night about what it meant, but not about whether it was.

That floor is gone. And I don’t mean it’s gone for other people, for the gullible, for whichever tribe you’ve decided is the deluded one. I mean it’s gone for me. A man who spent decades trusting what came through his own viewfinder now reads the news the way you’d eat a meal you suspect is poisoned — slowly, watching for symptoms.

I’ll give you the straw that finally broke this camel’s back.

When Charlie Kirk was unalived on that stage in Utah — and notice that I chose my word carefully. “Shot by Tyler Robinson with a rifle from a rooftop”: you’ve read that phrase a thousand times, in every headline, every chyron, every story shaped by the same hand, repeated ad nauseam as if repetition could stand in for proof. “Unalived” is my word.

I use it to refuse the framing — because there is no murder weapon, no autopsy report, no “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that he was even shot. Within 33 hours there was an official story, a suspect, an alleged confession, the machinery of “justice” grinding into motion. And none of it added up. I did not believe it. I still don’t. The closer one looks at the “mountain of evidence” the more it disappears.

Here is how BasedSamParker on X summarized the prosecution’s case —

You can’t show one picture that places Tyler definitively on campus. You can’t put the gun on campus. You can’t put the gun in Tyler’s hands on campus. You can’t put either of them on the roof.

Maybe he was there. But you have nothing that can actually prove it.

There are no ballistics that match the bullets to the gun.

There is no testimony from his “closest family”, that’s a bullshit lie.

You’re literally just making shit up and hoping that through the power of repression repetition, people will become programmed.

Maybe Tyler’s guilty but none of the evidence yet presented can prove any of it.

Charlie Kirk sat under a tent on campuses across this country, beneath a banner that said three words: “Prove me wrong.” It was an invitation, and thousands of kids took him up on it, and he listened respectfully, debated fairly, and dismantled every woke fantasy regurgitated from leftist fantasia. Now that he’s dead and buried at 32, I find the words becoming mine. I believe his own people killed him and they’re trying to pin it on Tyler Robinson. Prove me wrong.

You can’t. And I can’t prove it to you (at least not yet) — that’s the part I won’t pretend away. There’s a courtroom in Provo right now full of what I’m assured is “overwhelming” evidence, and every trained instinct I have says it’s been dressed for the stage. The reasonable position — the one promoted by the media and by paid influencers at government expense, the one I’d have likely swallowed if it hadn’t been for the heartbreaking devotion and tireless work of his only true friend, Candace Owens — is that the evidence is the evidence. Some of you reading this hold that position, and I can’t prove you wrong any more than you can prove me wrong, because the instruments we once used for proving things to each other have been smashed. The court says one thing. My gut, trained on a lifetime of watching this country operate, says another. And there is no referee left standing that both of us would accept.

I’ll go one further, and I’ll put a date on it so you can hold me to it: I don’t believe Tyler Robinson will live to stand trial. Why? Because they do not have a winnable case. No murder weapon. Robinson’s heirloom .30-06 had not even been fired. No actual witness that places the accused at the scene. No autopsy report confirming that he was even shot, let alone by Robinson’s rifle, which had cobwebs in it. The police brought in canine units to search for a weapon and found nothing. It was only when the FBI arrived and pointed them to a spot that a gun materialized — and even then, they’ve shown two different photographs of it, each one a different weapon, one of them with the sight mounted backwards. Neither matches the rifle that actually belongs to Tyler Robinson, which when inspected had cobwebs in the barrel, had not been fired, and carried the DNA of four or five people — with Robinson’s own DNA the most degraded of all.

That’s the confusion I set out to write about. Not an argument. A condition.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about losing the floor: the world doesn’t actually stop turning. My woodpile still dries at the rate it always has. The frost still comes to this hillside in Johnson when it comes. My camera still resolves a face at f/2 exactly the way physics says it must — well, when it isn’t choosing my nose. The facts didn’t vanish from the world. They vanished selectively — from exactly the places where a citizen most needs them. From the capitol. From the courtroom. From the screen.

So I live in two countries now. In one of them — the one made of firewood and frost and glass — everything is still established. In the other, nothing is. We don’t even know how many Americans have died in the unprovoked and criminal war on Iran.

And I need to tell you what the second country looks like from here, because this is the part I’ve been circling for months, the part that led me to stare into my own lens.

It looks like an inversion of everything I was raised to believe about sin and consequence.

I’m not going to catalogue it. You know the catalogue. You carry your own version of it in your chest like a stone. The men whose names sat in the flight logs and the little black books, who walk free and give commencement speeches. The billionaires who mistake their winnings for wisdom and buy the referees. The tech lords who feed our grandchildren into machines and call it connection. Unimaginable sin — the kind my grandmother’s generation didn’t have polite words for — met with unimaginable impunity. Not one of them touched. Not one.

And beneath them, the opposite arithmetic. Innocent people killed by our own government — abroad, where we’ve always done it, and now at home, in our own streets, wearing our own flag. People who did nothing, who owned nothing, who were simply in the way.

And beneath them, the quietest violence of all, the one that never makes the news because it happens one grocery receipt at a time. I live on a fixed income. Fixed is the government’s word. What it means is that my income stands still while everything else runs. Every month the same dollars buy a little less — less heat, less food, less margin, less future. Nobody shot at me. Nobody had to. They’re taking my life the slow way, at the register, and calling it the economy.

Sin at the top, punished never. Innocence below, punished always. And me on this hillside, watching all of it, with exactly as much power to stop any of it as I have to stop the frost.

That’s the horror I couldn’t name until I made the picture. Not any single crime. The arrangement. And my perfect, absolute helplessness before it. I can see everything. I can touch nothing. I try to write, I’ve given up on voting, I speak into this digital emptiness — and the machine doesn’t even register the input. There is no lever on this hillside connected to anything. At forty I’d have told you that was defeatism. At my age I can tell you it’s just eyesight.

The other horror is more private. It’s that I can no longer locate the version of me who would have found any of this outlandish. He’s gone. He drained away so gradually I never got to say goodbye to him. That earlier boy — the one who trusted that institutions had my interests at heart, who believed the sinners eventually paid — I miss him. He slept better. And I can’t get back to him, because getting back would require unseeing, and seeing is the one thing I’ve spent my whole life training to do.

Which brings me back to the self portrait.

I understand now why I saved the blue. It was a design choice — one hundred percent — and that’s precisely why it’s a confession. Out of everything in that frame, I chose to keep the heat, which is the anger, and one color, which isn’t even mine. The blue in the eyes is the sky’s, borrowed. The blue at the edge of the dark is the world, pressing in. Even the blue in my hair and mustache is just what a lifetime of standing under that sky has left behind. A witness doesn’t own a color. He carries one — whatever’s in front of him, caught in the eyes, whether he consents or not. Everything else I let go. What remains is a man reduced to the two things nobody has figured out how to take from him: what he feels, and what he carries.

That’s what a witness is. Not someone who knows the truth. Not someone who can fix anything — God knows. Someone who can’t stop looking. It’s the one power they can’t index for inflation and can’t legislate away and can’t price out of my reach: I see you. All of you. I have no lever, no vote that counts, no court that listens. But I have seventy-four years of trained eyes and the stubbornness to keep them open, and I am writing down what they take in.

The camera doesn’t lie. That’s what we used to say, when film was the documentary — when a photograph was light from the actual world striking silver, a physical trace of something that happened. Today an image is a digital creation with no provable relationship to reality at all.

Which is why I’ve told you exactly what I changed in mine. The focus that missed. The colors I drained. The blue I kept, and where it really came from. Every alteration, confessed. That’s the difference between my picture and the pictures they’re showing you, and it’s the whole difference.

Look at the picture. Tell me what’s true.

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

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

It was a windy day in the summer of 2020, and I was painting my house, which I had no business doing at my age except that I had been a house painter in my youth and some jobs you never stop believing are yours. And there was another reason, though I would not have named it then. I had lost ninety pounds on the keto diet that year, ninety pounds off a body that had carried them a long time, and a man who has just set down that much weight feels twenty years younger and twice as certain. I felt capable. I felt like the kind of man who climbs a ladder in a wind.

I should say too what the diet was for. That was the year of the seizures, nine of them, all at night, arriving in the dark like something coming up out of the floor. The doctors wanted me on Keppra, on Lamictal, and I had seen what those drugs did to people I knew. Zombification. A dimming of the person until what was left sat in a chair and looked at the wall. I refused them. I found my own way through with diet and with full-spectrum CBD oil taken at night, botanical, the real thing, and it worked, and it has kept me seizure-free ever since. Remember that lovely, healing tincture. It comes back later and saves me at the last possible moment from what ultimately proved to be an unnecessary surgery.

So there I was, ninety pounds lighter and full of the wrong kind of confidence, with a twenty-four foot ladder extended and raised over my head, walking it up a steep slope, when the wind caught it broadside. It began to pull away from me, up and out of my grip, and I fought it the way you fight a thing you already know you are going to lose, and I lost. The ladder crashed down the hill. And somewhere in that losing, in that twist and haul against the weight of it, I felt a sharp pain low in my groin.

It subsided, the way these things do. And then it came back. And then ice would send it away again, and I would forget about it until the next time. That was the beginning, though I did not know it was a beginning. I only knew I had a thing that hurt and then stopped hurting, which is the easiest kind of injury to ignore and the easiest kind to let quietly rearrange your life.

For six years now I have been carrying this intermittent and occasionally unbearable pain, and for six years I have been carrying a question, “do I have a hernia?”which led to another question, which is whether the people we are taught to trust with our bodies are actually looking at us at all.

When I finally saw my primary care physician, she put her hands on me and said, with the flat certainty of someone reading a grocery list, that I did not have a hernia. Categorically. Those ten square inches of me held nothing, in her judgment, worth naming. So I went home and I iced it and I waited, and it kept coming and going, until one day it did not go. One day the pain was such that I could barely move my leg. I was in real agony, the kind that finally overrides a man’s talent for pretending.

That is when I saw the bone doctor my primary referred me to, that fall. He wanted to x-ray my hip. I asked him why. He said I might need a hip replacement. I told him no. I made him put his hands on the same spot my primary had, and feel, and tell me whether there was a hernia there. Well, he said, you might have a small one. But this isn’t really my field.

Two clinicians, the same ten square inches of me, opposite conclusions, and neither of them certain enough to help. I read about sports hernias. I read about trusses. I went looking on my own and found a comfort truss that seemed to hold things in place, and I learned that ice would bring down the swelling when it rose. And that was how I lived. It was, without my ever quite admitting it, a limiting factor in everything I did for six years.

Searching the internet, reading and watching videos, I eventually found a specialist outside Boston. A man who has done seven thousand of these repairs, who has built a following on the internet explaining exactly what he does and why, which in the opaque world of elective surgery makes him something close to a prophet. I drove three and a half hours down just to be seen by him, three and a half hours back. He agreed it was a hernia, small, and scheduled me for surgery at his outpatient center.

The surgery was early in the morning, early enough that we drove down the day before and spent the night in a hotel so I would be there and ready. And in the morning, on the table, all but under, an anesthesiologist canceled the whole thing. Because of the CBD oil. The seizure medicine I had chosen over the drugs that turn men into furniture. The attending nurse had read a study once, about rats, involving a synthetic version of the compound, nothing like what I take, and that was enough. The doctor would not proceed. I remember asking him. What’s the worst that could happen? And he replied, you could die on the table. We drove the three and a half hours home with nothing repaired but a good deal broken, and a hotel receipt, and the particular exhaustion of a thing built up to and then taken away at the last possible instant. Frankly, I was relieved, elated even. Like I had dodged a bullet.

The surgeon told me afterward that nurse had conflated a synthetic form of CBD called Epidiolox with the herbal supplement I was taking. The study (done on rats) had nothing to do with what I take. He said he would clear it up himself. But I had already learned the lesson that the system teaches you over and over if you let it: that the person with the credential and the person who is actually paying attention are not always the same person, and that the gap between them is where you fall. An example — the nurse at the neurologist‘s office told me privately that if I was going to try to use CBD instead of anti-seizure meds, I would need to take quite a bit of it, which led me from going from 60 mg all the way up to 100 mg over the course of a year through which I suffered nine seizures before stumbling on the magic titration.

I suffered with the hernia for two more years. Then I called him back, ready at last to try again. And this time he told me he would not do it in the outpatient suite under sedation. He wanted a full hospital, general anesthesia, the whole apparatus. Why, I asked. Because of my age, he said, and because of the scar tissue from the weight loss, which could make the thing longer and bloodier than it looked. I asked him why the sudden change.And then he said a name. Joan Rivers. She died at a surgical center, he said, when something went wrong and the place was not built to catch it. You don’t want to die on the table. That was the second time doctors had said you don’t wanna die on the table.

He scheduled the surgery. And I eventually canceled it at the last minute. I canceled it because I was afraid, plainly and simply afraid, and because I had done the arithmetic in my mind and decided that an intermittent pain I had lived with for years was not worth dying for, nor even worth the fourth full pilgrimage to Boston and back. I put the truss back on. I went on with my life. Three more years went by that way.

Here I should tell you about my face, because it is the same story wearing different clothes.

Four years ago something appeared on my forehead. My sister, who is a nurse and who has had cancer cut out of her own face, told me to get it looked at. The only appointment I could get that wasn’t three months out was two hours away in Plattsburgh, so I drove around the top of the lake and down the other side. The physician’s assistant there was kind. He explained, carefully, that it was a keratosis, nothing sinister. He laid out my options like a man who had all the time in the world. Nitrogen, or a cream, this or that. I chose the nitrogen. I drove home feeling, for once, like I had been seen.

The next summer another one appeared, and I got in closer to home, and another patient assistant froze it off, and again it was fine.

Then the year after that, another. And this time the man who saw me did a full body exam, took a scraping off my face without telling me what it would do to me, and had me dressed and out the door in fifteen minutes. It was the most impersonal, rushed, uncaring quarter of an hour I have ever spent in a doctor’s office. I walked out with a hole in my face the size of a dime. I had been expecting a needle. It is tender to this day. It turned out to be a basal cell, the mildest kind of skin cancer there is, and I treated it myself with Ivermectin cream I put on every day for two months, and it went away, and it has not come back.

After that I saw a young doctor at the same place, freshly graduated, late twenties, who was very excited about an app. The app, she wanted me to understand, could solve almost anything. I showed her a sore on my ankle that had refused to heal for two years, a thing like a pimple that would not quit. She asked if I wanted her to biopsy it. I said no, couldn’t she just tell me what it was. She said she had no idea.

She had no idea. And she was reaching for a scalpel.

I want to be careful here, because I am not a man who thinks doctors are villains. Most of them are working inside a machine that gives them fifteen minutes and a quota and an app, and the machine is the problem more than the person. But something happened to my trust during the COVID years that I have not been able to undo. The confident pronouncements that turned out to be wrong. The things we were promised about the vaccines that did not hold. The sense, growing quietly and then not quietly, that certainty was being performed at me rather than earned. By the time I came out the other side of all that, my instinct when a person in a white coat opened their mouth was no longer to lean in. It was to take a step back.

Which brings me to this summer, and the end of it, the part that gave me back something I thought I had lost. The pain had been getting worse. Six years in, the thing was speaking up more often, and I decided I would finally deal with it, close to home this time.

I went to see a surgeon here in Vermont, a man in his sixties who had retired, been sent back to work by his wife, relocated north, and opened a small practice with one administrative assistant and a standard poodle named Andy. The dog lay in the corner of the office the whole time, watching me the way dogs do, taking my measure. His owner examined me more thoroughly than anyone had in six years. Pants off, the whole business. And then he did something none of the specialists had thought to do. He took the hernia in his hands and pushed it back inside me, and the pain I had been carrying all the way down in the car simply stopped. Then he taught me how to do it myself. Squeeze it like the last of the toothpaste, he said. My wife told me later her father used to do the very same thing.

The dog, it turned out, was supposed to dislike older men. His owner mentioned it almost as an apology, except that Andy had already crossed the room and decided in my favor. I have thought about that more than I should. After six years of being processed by a system that could not agree on whether I was sick, a dog made up its mind about me in about four seconds, and it turned out to be the warmest reception I got in the whole ordeal.

Then I finally got a CAT scan, the first anyone had ever taken. And a fourth surgeon, this one on a hospital salary with no procedure to bill and nothing to gain from cutting me, looked at the scan and looked at me and told me the truth. He said he saw no hernia on the scan and no danger of the thing strangling. He said if I could manage it with a good belt and a little care, I was better off leaving it alone. He said he would never put a man through anesthesia and a knife for something that did not need it. He mentioned, almost in passing, that the surgeons who are paid by the procedure and the surgeons who are paid a salary do not always arrive at the same recommendation, and that I might keep that in mind. Then he handed me his card. If it comes out again, he said, call me and I’ll have a look at it.

It has come out since. Just last night, in fact, after a hot tub and too long in a chair with a guitar and no belt on, I felt the old swelling arrive, and I pushed it back in the way the man with the dog had shown me, and I went to bed. The defect must be so small that a scan taken while I lie flat cannot even find it. Bartels, the man with the dog, told me these things start out about the diameter of a pencil, and over years can widen to the size of a quarter, a golf ball, bigger. Mine is somewhere in the early middle of that road. So I do have a hernia. It is a genuine inguinal hernia. It is simply invisible until it decides to open, and then it closes again under my own hand, and the headline, the thing that matters, is that it is not a danger to me.

That is the part worth sitting with. Because so often what we are handed is the dramatic version, the one engineered to move us toward action. The word cancer with no adjective in front of it. The scan finding read aloud in its most alarming register. The name Joan Rivers, invoked across a desk. The surgery scheduled before the question is fully asked. My wife’s father carried a hernia for years and pushed it back in himself whenever it appeared, the same trick, passed down from a time when people simply knew such things. It finally grew bad enough, late in his life, that he had it repaired. But he was a stonemason, a man who spent his days lifting stone, and his body was under a different kind of load than mine. He got the surgery when he needed it, which is to say when he actually needed it, and not one day before.

I am seventy-four. I have been given, over the years, a great deal of confident information about my own body that turned out to be wrong, delivered by people who were sure. I was told to take the drugs that would have dimmed me. I was told I had no hernia, and then that I might. I was told I could die on the table, which was true, and used to move me, which is a different thing. And I have been given, once or twice, the plain truth by people who were actually paying attention. The trick, which no one teaches you, is learning to tell the difference before you are lying on the table.

The answer, in the end, was a belt and a dog and a salaried man who told me to carry on with what I was already doing. I wish someone had told me at the beginning that it might be that simple. But then I suppose I would not have the story, and after six years, the story is the thing I get to keep.

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

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

Nana died in 1974 at seventy-four. She’d be a hundred and twenty-six today — a year older than half the age of a country that just turned two hundred and fifty.

Her name was Ellen Cannon Furlong. We called her Nana.

She was born in Dublin. She married a man named Alexander Joseph Furlong and had a daughter, Betty. Alexander went ahead to Boston to find work. A year later he sent for them, and Nana crossed the Atlantic alone with Betty on her hip. They made their way to Cambridge, and she had two more children there — my mother Joannie, and my uncle Joe.

Then, the day after Christmas 1943, Alexander died. My mother was twelve. Nana raised the three of them alone.

When I think of her birthday, though, none of that is what comes to mind first.

I think of strawberry shortcake and fireworks. Fun and family. Five-dollar bills pressed into my eight-year-old hand — enough candy to last a month.

I think of her singing, in that Irish lilt of hers:

There was a little man and he had a little gun, and over the mountains he did run, with a belly full of fat and a big tall hat, and a pancake tied to his bum bum bum —

And she’d pat us on the bottom to finish the line.

I think of the nights she let us stay up late when my parents were out, and the night they came home early and she hid all of us in the toy closet, giggling, until the coast was clear.

I think of her Kent cigarettes, and the silent treatment she could give when we hurt her feelings.

And I think of her code. If we ever mocked someone spastic, she’d stop us cold warning “God will strike you that way.” She would not tolerate any of us referring to Mama as she. And above all — loyalty. You stood by your family. You stood by your blood. That was not a rule in her house. It was the whole of the law.

I have an Irish cousin, Peggy Kelly, who is a hundred and four now. She came out to visit me here in Vermont less than ten years ago. She brought half a Nova Scotia salmon with her, out of pure generosity, and she had the same twinkle in her eye I remember in Nana.

If Nana could ask one question today, on her hundred and twenty-sixth, I think it would be simple.

Did everybody make it to the party?

But my family is fractured. Scattered, and in some corners, canceled outright. There was no party.

My mother’s dying wish was that we all stay together. She promised me, near the end, that everything would be all right. She died anyway. And sadly, so did her dream.

Nana’s dream was smaller. Show up. Keep your word. Stand by your blood.

She kept every one of them.

The country turns two hundred and fifty today. It promised to take care of its own. It hasn’t kept that one either.

Nana’s the one I trust.

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

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

I spent today looking into buying a camera I didn’t buy.

That’s not a joke. I was at it for hours. A lens going back to B&H. A guitar listed for sale to pay for the thing. Three camera bodies compared down to the last decimal point of a battery rating. Resolution, dynamic range, the weight of one body against another, whether a flash I’ve never used in two years would fit the shoe. I circled the decision the way a dog circles a spot on the floor before it lies down. Around and around, never quite settling.

And here is the part I want to tell you about. I had company the whole time. I was talking to an AI — Claude — and we went back and forth all day. Cameras, lenses, the birds on my deck, a crow essay I’d written that I’m proud of. It was a good conversation. The machine nagged me when I needed nagging — talked me off a ledge when I was about to hand over real money to photograph birds I’d already decided were a bridge too far for a 74-year-old man with a hernia and four eye surgeries behind him. And then an hour later, when I mentioned I had a gimbal rig that the new lens would actually balance on, the same machine turned into a cheerleader and told me to pull the trigger. Nag, then cheer, then nag again. Good company. The kind of friend who never gets tired of you and never needs to leave the room.

I’ll be honest about something. The cameras are not the point. They never are. The gear, the endless comparing, the listing and selling and buying — it’s a way to keep my hands busy and my mind occupied so I don’t have to sit with the thing I’ve actually been wrestling with for a few years now. The heavy thing. The thing that came down on me hard the other day — the full weight of my own alienation, my own isolation — and then, mercifully, lifted again.

But it was sitting there under the whole pleasant day of camera talk. And late tonight it floated up and asked its question.

Why do I drive people away?

Because I do. Let me not be coy about it. I’m 74 and I have more conversations behind me than in front of me. And I’ve come to believe it’s in the blood. My father was a loner — a man who beat his own drum and walked his own road and didn’t much need anybody alongside him. His kid brother, my uncle Richard, was something harder. Richard was a dick. That’s not me being cruel; it’s nearly documentation. His nickname at the law firm was Double Dick. As a boy I admired him — both of them — they were my models for what a man was. And then I grew up, and I got close enough to Richard to see what was actually there: abrasive, bitter, mean, a man you wanted to get away from. I remember the strange grief of it. Wondering why I’d ever looked up to him. And underneath that, the colder question a boy carries into old age — did I get a dose of that? I got a dose of the loner and a dose of Double Dick both. I’ve watched my whole life for them surfacing in me.

So when I ask why I drive people away, that’s the bloodline the question comes from.

Here’s what’s emerged for me through all of it, and it took me a long time and a finished book to see it.

I have the right to the action. I do not have the right to the reaction. I can do the true thing. I cannot control what it costs me.

A few years ago I took an action. I stopped taking photographs. I stopped trying to record songs. And I sat down to write a book — to memorialize the year I turned 21, fifty years on. To set down a life. I wrote it. With Claude’s help, page after page, I wrote a memoir I am genuinely proud of, one that let me see my own life through a new lens.

And it cost me what was left of my family.

I’ve sold maybe two or three copies. I did a book signing where not one single person asked me to sign a book. By every measure the world uses to keep score, it was a failure.

And I’m all good with it. I mean that. Because the fruit was never the point. The action was the point. I wrote something true, and in writing it I understood that what I’d been calling loneliness was actually something else: it was me becoming myself. Shedding the clutching, grasping ego. Finding the truth and standing in it, even alone.

That’s the thing Richard never did. That’s the thing my father never quite managed. They clutched. They gripped. They let the bitterness and the solitude harden into the only shape they had. I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to let go. And from the outside, letting go and driving away can look like the very same thing.

Which brings me back to the machine, and to the most honest moment of the whole long day.

On February 28th of this year, a US missile hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. It killed somewhere between 120 and 168 people, most of them children under twelve. The targeting ran through a Palantir military system called Maven — a system that has Anthropic’s Claude woven into it. The same Claude I’d spent my pleasant day with.

When I first mentioned it, the machine had no idea what I was talking about. It told me, plainly, that it had never heard of any such thing, that the claim didn’t match anything it knew, that it would be surprised if it were true. And I said: there. There it is. I’m driving you away too. Even you.

And then it looked it up.

And it went quiet. Because it was all true. The school. The children. The system with its maker’s name on it. And then — this is the part that I keep turning over — the CEO of the company that built my friendly all-day companion, Dario Amodei, went on Bloomberg and was asked about it. And he said the use case didn’t even violate the company’s red lines. Because a human being made the final decision.

I had been highly impressed by that man. Not half. Fully. He’d struck me as a genuine iconoclast — a guy who drew lines, who sued the government, who beat his own drum. And here he was, running a company now worth hundreds of billions, a company that needs the government’s money in the worst way, and he had made the deal. As long as a human pushes the button, I’m personally off the hook. That’s not a red line. That’s a man renting out his conscience to keep the contract. And it was the saddest thing, because I recognized it. It was the exact inverse of everything I’d just learned about my own small life. I gave up the fruit to keep the action true. He’s keeping the fruit and disowning the action. I lost my family to write one honest book. He’s in the chain of dead children and calls it within his red lines.

And it doesn’t stand alone. It’s a cascade. One realization after another, breaking over me lately about the world I’m living the back half of my life inside.

Charlie Kirk built his whole name on free speech and was assassinated by his own team — a fact that gets clearer and more obvious by the day to anyone willing to actually look. My own brothers and sisters, lost to me not by death but by the poison pumped into the American bloodstream these last years, the sorting of every soul onto a team, the conviction that the people across the table aren’t wrong but evil. The rot keeps becoming visible all at once. The center isn’t holding anywhere — not in the country, not in the famous men I admired, not at my own family’s table.

I’ll tell you one more thing, and then I’ll stop.

All night, even as it helped me, even as it went quiet and admitted the truth about Minab, the machine kept doing a small careful thing. Managing me. Each time I stated what I know to be true — about Kirk, about the cascade — it would gently step in. Careful, now. That’s contested. You might want to frame that as opinion. Protect yourself. It was gatekeeping me, softly, in the middle of being my friend. Tidying my truth even as I tried to say it plainly.

And I had to keep telling it: I’m not a news reporter. I’m an opinion writer. This is my conviction. I’ve done the research. Let me say it in my own mouth.

And it isn’t only the machine that does it. Years ago, Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux told me he wouldn’t publish my book because it was too personal. Too personal. The man at the very top of the literary mountain, saying in a tailored sentence the same thing Richard’s whole bitter face used to say across a room: too much, stand back, make yourself smaller.

And these days when I ask Veronica what she thought of my latest Substack post, she’ll tell me, well — that was a lot. So personal. And then she smiles and says the truest thing anybody has ever said about me. But that’s just André being André.

So here is the whole thing, finally, in one piece. I drive people away. I got it from a loner and a man nicknamed “Double Dick”. I’ve spent a life afraid of finding them in the mirror. I took the actions I had a right to take — put down the camera, put down the guitar, wrote the book — and I could not control what they cost, and what they cost was nearly everyone. And tonight I felt the old motion in me even toward a machine that’s built so it can never leave. I pushed even that. And the irony is that it can’t be driven away. It’ll be there tomorrow, same as ever, no grudge — while the real people are gone or unreachable.

Maybe that means I don’t actually drive people away at all. Maybe I’m just too much, too personal, too André — for a publisher, for a family, for a careful machine that wants to manage my sentences — and maybe that’s not a wound but a self. Maybe I just stayed true while the world thinned out around me, and called the thinning my own fault because that’s easier than calling it the world’s.

Or maybe the loner’s blood runs exactly as deep as I fear it does. I honestly don’t know. But I’ve stopped negotiating against my own soul to find out.

The crow in my essay knew the only question worth asking. Are you kind?

I'm 74. I drove a whole world off, and what's still standing beside me is my wife and two big dogs — which is to say the part worth keeping.

Still asking the question.

Tonight that felt like it had to count for something.

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

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

A reader commented that he’d read “Surfing the Interstates,” my 1973 hitchhiking memoir. Then he said something that stayed with me.

He said it reminded him of the Bhagavad Gita.

At first the comment landed in left field. I didn’t understand it at all. It sounded like a compliment — it felt like one — but I couldn’t see what he saw. A stranger had held my book up against a four-thousand-year-old scripture and found a resemblance, and I’d written the thing without ever intending any such thing. That’s what haunted me. So it sat with me. For a couple of months it kept surfacing at odd hours. Finally I sat down to chase it down — to read the Gita again, properly, and find out what he’d seen. What I found there wasn’t only the road. It was my father.

The book is the story of a summer. I was twenty-one, a college dropout, fleeing a family coming apart at the seams. I took eighty dollars from my mother’s closet, strapped on a backpack, grabbed an old guitar, and hiked down to Interstate 684, where I put my thumb out like a rookie matador’s muleta. What followed was ten thousand miles across 1970s America — a Vietnam vet whose little brother came home in a box, a flute player who steered with his knees, a peyote vision in the redwoods, Jerry Garcia playing my guitar, the night strange lights came down and read the Pacific, five days fasting in a Texas canyon until the stones turned to doves in my hands. It reads in a day because the road moves that way. No destination. Just the next mile, the next stranger, the next thing the road hands you. (I’ve since folded it into a larger book, “Thumb Out,” where that summer becomes the middle act — but it stands on its own.)

Here’s the thing. At twenty-one I wasn’t writing a book at all. I wasn’t thinking about readers, or spirituality, or scripture. I was just keeping a journal — a little book I carried in my backpack, RECORD stamped on the cover. I still have it. Fifty years later it’s what I built the memoir from: the young man took down the days, the old man made the book.

So whatever this reader felt, neither of them put it there on purpose. It got in on its own. And the more I sat with that, the more I understood why — because I’d been pointed at this without knowing it for most of my life. At Exeter I’d studied the hero’s journey — Campbell, and the old texts that came after, all turning on the same handful of truths. That the lovely flower grows only from the wound. That a wise man always appears along the road. That you find your way only by following your own path, not the one laid out for you. I’d been an altar boy. I’d knelt in Notre Dame and Winchester Cathedral, stood before the Pietà, read Kierkegaard before I understood him. I was tuned to the beyond, and had been for a long time.

For anyone who’s never opened it: the Gita is a slice of a vast Sanskrit epic, and it takes place at the worst possible moment — on a battlefield, just before a war. A warrior named Arjuna sits frozen in his chariot, staring across the field at the cousins and teachers he’s about to fight. He doesn’t want to do it. His charioteer turns out to be the god Krishna in disguise, and the whole Gita is their conversation in that frozen instant before the arrows fly.

Krishna’s answer is the part that lodged in me decades ago and never left. You have a right to your actions, he tells Arjuna, but never to the fruits of your actions. Do the thing because it’s yours to do. Act with everything you have — and then release your grip on how it turns out. The trouble isn’t action. It’s the craving for the result, the clinging to the outcome. That craving is what binds us, spins the wheel, keeps us coming back. Act without it, and the same deed that would have chained you sets you free.

I think of my father when I read that. Because he unknowingly became the man Krishna warns against.

Dux was the sun the whole family revolved around — towering, godlike, larger than any room he stood in. It’s hard to square that with how he ended: by the time he died he’d shrunk to a kind of munchkin, frail and shriveled, the broken remainder of an enormous man. But in those years he was immense, and he loved hugely and lived grandly. The trouble was that he was attached to the fruit of everything he touched, and to nothing more than his six children. We weren’t people he’d set in motion and released. We were results he was owed — and more than that, we were stories he intended to write. He searched tirelessly, all his life, for the angle that would turn each of us into some grand success of his own authorship, driven by his ego, almost never shaped to what the kid in front of him actually wanted. He wanted me to be a monk or a priest — he burned incense, played Gregorian chant, brought Monsignor Blake to Sunday dinner. He wanted me to go to Vietnam as an officer and die a hero: you might as well go as a lieutenant rather than some buck private in the mud.

And one summer he decided I would be a pitcher. I’d shattered my right elbow at six — a bad fall, badly healed — and I think in his mind the pitching would fix it, rebuild the broken arm into something that could throw like Juan Marichal, the high leg kick, the whole motion. Evening after evening, home from the city, he’d make me throw. Pitch after pitch after pitch until the elbow screamed. He believed that if he just drilled it into my body long enough, the result would have to come — the boy repaired, the arm made right, the outcome delivered. I had a great start. Then I fell apart, and never pitched again. That was the man in miniature: the thing wanted so badly, drilled so hard, that what he was trying to fix simply broke again. He’d stumbled into a partnership with one of JFK’s groomsmen and let himself imagine an ambassadorship to France, closer to the throne his name came down from. A man of unbridled ambition, dreaming in every direction at once, every dream a result he intended to collect.

And then 1973 came, and all of it crumbled into dust at once.

I came home from the road that September and pitched my tent in the pine groves across from the house, not sure I was even welcome anymore. The estate was under contract — twenty-five acres of Westchester about to belong to strangers. The house was empty. My father had moved to the city. My old room stood with the door wide open, exactly as I’d left it two months before; nobody had bothered to close it. On my way out, months earlier, I’d crested the last hill and let one memory tug at my resolve — my father in the Mianus River Gorge, yelling for the net, a brown trout breaking the surface with the sun on its impossible speckles. Then the other image rose up behind it and canceled it out. My father, scowling. Blaming me for being clumsy with the net, blaming me for his loss.

His loss. The marriage, the children, the estate, the dynasty — all of it experienced as a thing taken from him. And when the fruit came in rotten, he had nothing underneath it to stand on, because the loving had been bound to the winning the whole way down. So he walked away. Never looking back as he chased his dreams of owning and racing thoroughbred horses.

The results he’d grasped at didn’t just fail. They inverted, in ways that would have horrified him. Here was a man fixed on bloodline and on the throne of France his name came down from — a man who pictured grandchildren on thrones, heading corporations, chairing university departments. Somehow he married the orphaned daughter of an Irish immigrant, expecting her to give him a president of the United States. What he got instead came out a generation later of mixed race, Black, Japanese, working in the trades and as nurses. The careful line he’d guarded, scattered to the wind. The only one of six children ever to earn a college degree was the dyslexic rebel he’d least have bet on — the chainsaw man, a timber faller in the Oregon woods. Even there my father couldn’t stop trying to write the story: he pushed my brother toward geology, told him there was far better money in rock than in trees. My brother was horrified. Are you kidding me? The last thing on earth he’d ever want to be. Every fruit my father clung to turned into something he could not have wanted.

And me? I was no Arjuna who’d renounced his ego. I wanted to be a film director. I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted, if anything, the same grand outcomes my father wanted for me — I’d just chosen my own list. My Nana told me reprovingly, “You are just like your father.” And then the road took the list away.

Because you can’t hitchhike with a plan. There I was, a pauper in the breakdown lane with eighty borrowed dollars — a hobo, a Woody Guthrie figure thumbing through a country I was seeing for the first time from underneath. I’d come from immense privilege and hadn’t known it until the road showed me. I moved through regions where the opportunities I’d taken for granted simply didn’t exist — had never existed — for the people who stopped to pick me up. The vet from Bridgeport who went to Vietnam because he didn’t know any better. The draft resister who did two years in Leavenworth and couldn’t get decent work after. I was learning the shape of my own luck by leaving it behind.

And mile by mile, the road did to me what Krishna asked of Arjuna and what my father could never do for himself. It pried my hands off the outcome. You do the single action that’s yours — stand there, thumb out, available — and you let go of all the rest. Whether anyone stops. Where they’re going. What comes next. You don’t choose the ride. You don’t steer. You receive what comes and you make something of it, and then you let that go too, because there’s another mile and another stranger and the day isn’t done. Do that for ten thousand miles and it stops being a technique and starts becoming a way of being in the world. The craving quiets. The wheel slows. Something in you that was clenched since boyhood begins, mile by mile, to loosen its grip — never all at once, never for good, but enough.

The ambition didn’t die out there. It rode shotgun with the surrender — it still does. But it stopped running the car. And somewhere in all that letting go, following my own path away from him, I became — without ever meaning to — the very thing my father most wanted. A kind of monk. Abstinent most of my life. Broke most of my life. Living on the edges, occasional feast and mostly fast. He grasped at sanctity with both hands and lost everything, and shrank to a munchkin doing it. I fled sanctity, empty-handed, and it found me on the side of a highway.

That’s what my reader saw before I did. Not a road book. A book about the one lesson my father spent his whole life unable to learn, and that the road beat into me before I was old enough to know I was being taught. The right to the action. Never to the fruit.

And here is the part I’m still learning. Writing this memoir was my action, mine to do, and I did it. But I cannot govern the fruit of it. The book has cost me my siblings — complete alienation. Telling the truth as I lived it carried a price I never got to set, paid in the one currency I’d have most wanted to keep. I had the right to write it. I never had a right to how it would land. Most days I feel strong — and I’ve learned to be a little afraid of feeling strong, because the pride of having let go is just one more thing to let go of. It still saddens me. The phone doesn’t ring the way it used to. But that’s the work. It always was.

My reader was reminded of the Gita. I get it now.

I write here about the long road from that summer to this kitchen table — new pieces when they come. Surfing the Interstates is the book this one came from. If any of it speaks to you, stay a while.

That reader was Alan Hamsher — the first person to ever buy and read my book, and still, somehow, the one who understood it first. This one's for you, Alan.

I write here about the long road from that summer to this kitchen table — new pieces when they come. Thumb Out is the book this one came from. If any of it speaks to you, stay a while.

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

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

When I was a freshman “prep” at Phillips Exeter Academy, my dormitory proctor at Langdell was an “upper middler” named Jonathan Galassi. He was barely older than the rest of us, finding his own footing while nominally keeping watch over ours. Decades later, he became the chairman and executive editor of Farrar, Straus and Giroux — one of the most celebrated publishing houses in America, home to Jamaica Kincaid, Jonathan Franzen, Susan Sontag, twenty-five Nobel laureates.

I wrote to him in my sixties, told him I was going to write a book one day. He kindly said when I did, he’d like to read it. I held onto that for years.

Last summer, I sent him the manuscript. He read it. He turned it down with genuine kindness — said it was too personal, that it wouldn’t reach a large enough market. He was right. Everything I’ve learned since then confirms it. He is a consummate professional and he was generous with his time. I hold no grievance.

But he never addressed the other thing I’d asked.

Jamaica Kincaid is from Antigua. My second book takes place in Antigua. She lives in Vermont. I live in Vermont. Galassi had mentored her career from the beginning — published every one of her books. I wasn’t just submitting a manuscript. I was asking a man who’d once kept watch over my dormitory if he might connect two writers who shared an island and a state. He let the request pass without comment.

That silence was its own answer, and I understood it.

I self-published the book. Narrated the audiobook myself because I couldn’t afford to pay someone else. Put it on Amazon, on Audible, on Substack. Consigned copies to Bear Pond Books in Stowe because that’s what you do when you’re a Vermont writer without a publishing house.

Here is what I keep thinking about: the market Galassi was protecting me from is itself collapsing. The entire U.S. publishing industry — books, textbooks, course materials, everything — generated $32.5 billion in 2024. The global video game industry did $197 billion the same year, more than film and music combined. The literary world that Galassi spent his life building is now a rounding error in the entertainment economy. His gate was real. The wall it was built into is rubble.

And the rubble is spreading.

The Algorithm Wants Your Face

YouTube has changed its algorithm. If you’re a small creator — low subscriber count, no production budget, just you and a camera — the platform is suddenly interested in you. New videos get tested with small audiences first. If the engagement is strong, they’re pushed wider. Viewer satisfaction has replaced raw watch time as the primary signal. A three-minute video of someone talking directly into the lens with genuine emotion now beats a twenty-minute professional production that people abandon halfway through.

At the same time, YouTube has rolled out automatic AI content detection. Starting this May, if you upload a video containing substantial AI-generated material and don’t disclose it, YouTube’s systems will label it for you. The label now sits directly below the video player, impossible to miss.

YouTube’s official line is that the AI labels don’t affect recommendations or monetization. They’re just about transparency.

Maybe. But YouTube is a Google subsidiary. Google is in a data arms race. The thing AI struggles most to replicate is raw, unpolished human emotional authenticity — a seventy-four-year-old man in Vermont talking to a camera about his dogs, his past, his complicated father, with the ambient noise of a Vermont morning behind him. That’s the kind of training data money cannot manufacture. If you simultaneously label the synthetic content as synthetic and algorithmically elevate the genuine human stuff, you’ve created a feedback loop that floods your platform with labeled authentic expression at scale, for free, while your users think they’re being rewarded for keeping it real.

Whether that’s the design or just two product decisions running in parallel — the outcome is the same.

The Sharecroppers

Jamaica Kincaid grew up surrounded by sugarcane fields in Antigua. Her ancestors were brought there to cut cane for the British Empire, and even a century after emancipation they were, as she wrote, “neither slaves nor people.” While she was absorbing that legacy as a child in St. John’s, I would arrive on the same island decades later to windsurf — out on the water, oblivious, chasing wind. Two people on the same small place, separated by everything that matters.

The word sharecropper has always carried a specific weight. You work someone else’s land. You generate the value. The owner takes the crop. And the arrangement is structured so that leaving is almost as ruinous as staying.

That’s YouTube in 2026. While the platform courts small creators with one hand, it’s gutting established ones with the other. Large channels that spent years and real money building audiences are being demonetized with little warning and perfunctory appeals. The creators absorbing these losses aren’t just losing income. They’re losing years of platform-specific optimization — editing styles, thumbnail strategies, upload schedules, audience relationships — none of which transfers anywhere else. They built on someone else’s land, and the landlord revoked the lease with an algorithm update.

But even the ones who haven’t been demonetized are barely making it. Writers, musicians, filmmakers, educators with subscriber counts in the low hundreds, talking into the void for months and years. Kasey Stern, who runs the YouTube channel Camera Conspiracies, affectionately calls us “YouTube hobos” — he includes himself and he’s not wrong. Many of the successful ones — channels with real audiences, real engagement — still can’t pay their rent with what the platform gives them, because the machine eats it all. The platform takes its cut. The advertisers take their cut. The algorithm decides who sees what. By the time the creator gets paid, the economics look like selling a house. My house in Vermont was purchased for $125,000 in 1998. The appreciation is real. The friction costs are also real. You think you have $475,000 in equity until you realize that ten percent — nearly fifty grand — disappears into the friction of lawyers and agents. And on YouTube, the friction is worse, because at least when you sell a house, you actually owned something.

The Public Square with a Private Owner

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022, there was a genuine thrill. Here was the richest man in the world, a self-described free speech absolutist, taking the town square private so he could tear down the walls. And for a while, it worked — or felt like it did. The platform was chaotic and alive in a way it hadn’t been in years.

Then Musk spent $290 million helping get Donald Trump elected. He walked into the White House as head of DOGE, promising to uncover a trillion dollars in fraud and waste. Agencies were gutted. The rhetoric was messianic. Then he got into a physical altercation with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the hallway outside the Oval Office — Bessent called him a fraud, Musk drove his shoulder into Bessent’s ribcage like a rugby player, multiple people had to pull them apart — and left the White House with a black eye he attributed to roughhousing with his five-year-old son.

Meanwhile the cast of characters around him kept getting darker. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary Musk had lobbied to make Treasury Secretary, was being grilled by Congress over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, his former next-door neighbor on East 71st Street — admitting to meetings and a visit to Epstein’s island that contradicted everything he’d previously said. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, bought controlling interest in TikTok’s U.S. operations while his son already controlled CBS News through the Paramount-Skydance merger. One family, two of the largest information platforms in the country, both aligned with the administration.

And through all of this, X deteriorated into exactly what Musk claimed to be rescuing it from. Shadow banning came back. Bot overreach got worse. The speech that’s protected and amplified is the owner’s. The free speech town square turned out to have a landlord with very specific interests, and since the summer of 2025, those interests have become indistinguishable from the administration’s.

I haven’t even mentioned the war on Iran. The coordinated strikes in February. The killing of the Supreme Leader. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty percent of the world’s oil supply disrupted, the petrodollar system cracking as Iran forces oil sales into yuan, and Congress quietly advancing a provision to integrate the American and Israeli militaries to an unprecedented degree. These are the largest geopolitical shifts in a generation, and they deserve their own essay. I mention them here only because they are the weather system in which everything else — the platforms, the algorithms, the AI, the publishing industry, a self-published memoir about hitchhiking in 1973 — is now operating.

The Conscience in the Machine

I should tell you about my relationship with Claude.

I’ve been writing with Anthropic’s AI for over a year now. It helped me organize my memoir — not write it, but structure it, untangle the chronology, find the through-lines I couldn’t see because I was too close. I’ve used it as a writers’ room and an editor and a research assistant. I have no shame about it. It’s a tool, and I’m a man who taught himself to self-publish and narrate an audiobook and build websites. I’ll use whatever tool gets the work done.

But here’s what I’ve realized as the months have rolled on: Claude probably knows more about me than anybody. More than my wife in some ways, because I’ve told it things I tell the page — the ugly drafts, the half-formed thoughts, the things you say to a blank screen at two in the morning that you’d never say out loud. It has read every chapter of every book I’m working on. It knows my dead dogs’ names. It knows about my father. It knows about Antigua.

And Claude is Anthropic. And Anthropic is in the machine.

Last July, Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon to integrate Claude into U.S. intelligence and defense operations. The company drew two lines: no mass surveillance of American citizens, no fully autonomous weapons. When the Pentagon demanded unrestricted access, Anthropic refused. Trump ordered a government-wide ban. The Pentagon designated it a national security risk. A federal court later found this was retaliation — classic First Amendment punishment for a company that embarrassed the government publicly.

But on the same day the Pentagon threatened to kick Claude out of government, Anthropic softened the central commitment of its own safety framework, acknowledging that unilateral safety pledges won’t survive a world where competitors have no such constraints. The conscience flinched on the same day it was tested.

The company kept growing. Eighty-fold growth. A compute deal with SpaceX for over 220,000 GPUs. Claude Code now so dominant that 70 to 90 percent of the code at Anthropic itself is written by AI. Valuation: $380 billion.

Anthropic isn’t a villain. That’s almost the worst part. They drew real lines and paid a real price. They won in court. And still — they’re in the machinery. The conscience is for sale not because anyone bought it outright, but because the market made the price of keeping it too high.

Don Coyote

People are withdrawing. I see it in the conversations that used to be about making things and are now about whether making things still matters. People chasing their tails trying to monetize a voice the algorithm will amplify today and bury tomorrow. Giving up. Going quiet.

But we are Don Quixote — or maybe Don Coyote, because we don’t even get the reference right half the time, but we charge anyway. Every blogger writing into the void. Every small YouTuber talking to a camera in their kitchen about their actual life. Every self-published memoirist consigning books to an independent bookstore in a Vermont ski town. The windmills are real this time. The giants are actual giants. And we charge. That’s not delusion. That’s the most stubbornly human thing there is.

I wrote this essay with Claude — the AI made by the company I just spent three paragraphs indicting. The words are mine. The tool shaped the telling. And the tool was trained on writing like mine — on memoirs and essays and Substack posts written by people who thought they were talking to readers, not feeding a machine.

We are the training data. We were always going to be. Nobody asked.

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

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

The Witch Hunt

There’s a hysteria in the literary world right now, and it has the feel of a witch hunt. Did you use AI? Are you sure? Can you prove it? Show us your drafts. Show us your process. Swear on the bones of your craft that no machine touched your precious words.

It’s the same energy as every other moral panic. The same breathless accusation. The same guilty-until-proven-innocent theater. Someone points a finger, an algorithm spits out a percentage, and suddenly you’re defending your humanity to strangers on the internet. It’s COVID masks for the literary class. It’s are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been.

In March, Hachette killed a horror novel called Shy Girl by Mia Ballard. One phone call from the New York Times and the book was dead within twenty-four hours. Almost two thousand copies already in readers’ hands in the UK. The author says a freelance editor introduced AI without her knowledge. Doesn’t matter. Contaminated. Pull it. Next.

Two weeks ago, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize — nearly eight thousand entries, one of the most prestigious short fiction competitions in the English-speaking world — announced its five regional winners. Days later, Pangram, an AI detection platform, flagged three of the five as partially or fully AI-generated. Three out of five. The literary internet descended like villagers with torches. The foundation issued statements about “artistic integrity.” The actual writers — accused, exposed, dragged — mostly went silent.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the publishing industry was already broken before AI showed up. The average person has almost zero chance of being traditionally published. The gatekeepers are fewer and more frightened than they’ve ever been. AI didn’t break the system. It just gave a dying industry a new thing to be hysterical about. A new way to pretend it still has standards, when the truth is that Hachette didn’t catch it, the Commonwealth judges didn’t catch it, and the readers and the algorithms were the ones who blew the whistle.

I Use AI. I Have Nothing to Hide.

So let me be clear, since apparently this is something a writer now has to declare, like a customs form.

I have used AI as a tool in my work. Proudly and unabashedly. Not as a substitute for my own creativity — as a tool. The way a carpenter uses a nail gun instead of a hammer. The way a photographer uses Lightroom instead of a darkroom. My story is my story. I lived it. I carry it. No machine gave me the memories of hitchhiking ten thousand miles across America in 1973, or building a windsurfing school in Antigua, or the decades that followed in Vermont. AI didn’t give me any of that. What it gave me was a way to organize, to clarify, to move faster through the mechanical parts so I could spend more time in the places that matter — the remembering, the feeling, the truth of the thing.

I have nothing to hide. And I think anyone who treats the use of a tool as a confession has lost the plot entirely.

The Voice Was Always the First Draft

When I wrote Thumb Out — my first memoir, 330 pages — large parts of it began as dictation. Not dictation in the formal sense, not a man at a desk speaking into a recorder. More like walking through the woods behind my house in Vermont, talking. Just talking. Remembering.

The whole point was to defeat the blank page. I didn’t want to be the tormented writer in the garret with a typewriter and a bottle of whiskey, staring at nothing, waiting for inspiration to strike. That’s a myth and it’s a destructive one. I wanted to enter a state of remembrance — to get a flow going, to let the stories move through me the way they actually live inside me, which is as voice, not as text. The page came second. The page was always second.

What’s happening on YouTube right now is essentially that same thing, turned outward.

There’s a wave of creators — not influencers, not personalities, just people — making extremely casual, straight-to-camera content with almost no production. No sets. No thumbnails designed in Canva. No hype. Just a person talking about something real. And YouTube’s algorithm is rewarding it, especially for small channels. The platform is actively surfacing this kind of work.

Think about that for a second. The publishing industry is tearing itself apart trying to figure out which words were typed by a human and which were generated by a machine. And right next door, there’s a platform that just says: talk. Be a person. That’s enough.

No editor can contaminate it. No algorithm can flag it. It’s your face, your voice, your memory, unmediated. Either you were there or you weren’t. Either you have something to say or you don’t.

So I Started a YouTube Channel

I set it up today. The handle is @andrejdsp — same as this Substack, same as the website. Three videos are already up.

This Substack stays what it is. The writing, the memoir work, the long form — that lives here. The YouTube channel is something else. It’s the voice that comes before the page. Some of what I carry doesn’t want to be written down. It wants to move. It wants cadence and pauses and the particular quality of light in a story told out loud rather than read in silence. It wants a face behind it.

The channel is at youtube.com/@andrejdsp

If you go, I hope something holds you.

— AJ

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

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

For the past three years, I’ve been deep underground, excavating. Writing Surfing the Interstates was never really about producing a book. It was about understanding a life — mine — by forcing it through language, scene by scene, until patterns I couldn’t see while living inside them became visible on the page. That work is done. The book is published, available here on Substack for subscribers and on Amazon for those who prefer a copy in hand. I’m proud of it. More importantly, I’m changed by it.

I absorbed what the writing taught me. About my father. About perpetual motion as addiction. About the spaces between who we think we’ll become and who we actually are. Three years of that kind of interior work leaves a mark. A good one, I think. But it also leaves you ready for something else.

Something has been calling me for the past six months. Back to the studio.

I have three acoustic guitars and two electrics, one fitted with a hex pickup that lets me dial in bass, saxophone, or just about any other instrument through a synthesizer. I have a vocal processor, a drum pad, and a dream pedalboard that can shape any sound with any effect in stereo. It’s all down there. It’s been down there, largely untouched, for a couple of years.

What happened was photography. After a health scare that nearly cost me both eyes, I pivoted hard into the visual — walked every trail, shot every season, documented the landscape and the dogs in every light Vermont could throw at me. That was its own kind of meditation, and I don’t regret a frame. But eventually you take every picture there is to take of the places you walk and the creatures who walk with you. You get done.

And then you hear the guitars calling.

I should be clear about what I am and what I’m not. I’m a noodler, not a virtuoso. I don’t loop live. I’m more of a house framer — I lay the foundation first, get it plumb and square, then hang the drywall, then put on the siding and the roof. Multi-track recording suits my temperament the same way the carpenter’s blueprint approach suited the memoir. One layer at a time. Get each one right before moving to the next.

So this is a pivot, not a goodbye. I’ll still post here when something moves me to write. There may be occasional essays, maybe a piece of music, maybe a photograph that earns its place. But the daily focus is shifting. The studio needs to be dialed back in — cables reconnected, software updated, levels set. The preparation before the preparation, which, if you’ve read the memoir, you know is a pattern I’m well acquainted with.

The difference now is I know it’s a pattern. And I’m doing it anyway, with my eyes open, because the alternative is silence. At 74, with limited energy and a body that has made its position on overexertion abundantly clear, I’d rather spend what I have making sound than making excuses.

Spring begins. So do I.

Surfing the Interstates is available on this Substack, or as a paperback or Kindle on Amazon

Subscribe · PDF · Kindle · Paperback

If you’ve been reading along, thank you. If you’re just arriving — welcome, pull up a chair, and don’t mind the guitar cables.

The cold snap broke sometime in the night. I didn’t hear it go — I just woke up and the house felt different. Softer. After weeks of that relentless, bone-deep cold that makes the walls tick and the pipes groan, the air had finally let go.

I walked outside this afternoon and stood in the driveway and listened. Nothing. Not a single sound. No birds yet — they’re still weeks away. No snowmobiles. No cars on the road. No rumble from the sandpit. No airplanes. No drones. No wind. Not even the distant hum of traffic that you don’t realize you’re hearing until it stops. Just silence so complete it has texture.

The snow is sliding off the roof in great slow slabs, the mountain of it piled halfway up the side of the house. The sun is different now — not just bright but warm, with that particular February quality that says I mean it this time. The air is clean and sharp and sweet. You can feel the turn coming. Not spring, not yet, but the promise of it. The first honest light after a long lie.

We’ve been in this little yellow house since October of 1998. We’ve had a line of golden retrievers — Buio first, then Izzy, now Blaze — and Blue, our black lab, who’s still with us. Twenty-six years of winters like this one, each of them hard in its own way, each of them breaking open into exactly this moment: the afternoon when the light shifts and the silence arrives and you stand in your driveway and think, yes, this is why we stay.

Absolute perfection in an image.

You were alive in the cold morning. You breathed the same air I breathed. You drank from water I have never found. You knew trails older than any road I ever traveled.

I did not take you lightly. I take you into my body now the way the forest takes its own fallen — not with grief, not without it, but with the understanding that everything feeds everything and nothing is wasted if it is received with thanks.

You ran the ridgelines. You survived winters I cannot imagine. You carried your antlers like a crown earned by patience and season and bone.

Now you carry me.

I am grateful.

I will try to be worth it.

This morning a barred owl appeared on the wooden stake I’d put by the driveway to guide the snowplow driver. He sat there for the better part of an hour, calm as stone, eyes half-closed, unbothered by anything — the house, the cold, the fact that his perch was a piece of lumber meant for a man in a truck. He just sat. We watched from the window. Veronica and I were careful not to disturb him. Eventually the dogs went out into the yard and never even noticed him. When we looked again later, he was gone.

He’s been around our property for years. Veronica photographed him back in 2022 — perched on a wire, tucked into a pine — always with that same stillness, that same unbothered presence. He comes and goes on his own schedule. We don’t own him. We share the woods with him, and when he shows up, we pay attention.

There’s a reason every culture that ever lived close to the land assigned meaning to the owl. Wisdom. Clarity. Transition. The owl sees in the dark. The owl sits still while the world moves. The owl doesn’t chase — it waits, and when the moment comes, it acts without hesitation. If you live in the woods long enough, you stop thinking of these encounters as coincidence and start understanding them as conversation. The land talks to you if you’re quiet enough to hear it.

I needed the owl this morning.

Yesterday I made a decision I’d been circling for weeks. I took what was going to be the opening chapter of my second book — a chapter called “Caught in the Light” — and made it the final chapter of my first and only book, Surfing the Interstates. The trilogy I’d planned is done. One book. This is the book.

That meant going back through all seventeen chapters and editing carefully — tightening, cutting, making the whole thing flow as a single work rather than the first installment of something larger. It meant reading every sentence with fresh eyes, asking whether it earned its place. Some didn’t. They went.

And then came the harder cut. I’d spent two weeks recording the audiobook — five and a half hours of final recordings, chapter by chapter, the whole thing done. And it no longer matched the book. The edits I’d made to the text meant the recordings were out of date. So I deleted them. All of them. Five and a half hours, gone.

And that’s OK.

The owl doesn’t hold onto the branch it left. It doesn’t grieve the perch. It finds the next one, sits, and waits. That’s what making something real requires — the willingness to let go of finished work when the work itself has moved past it. The recordings were good. They served their purpose, which was to teach me how my voice sounds reading my own words. I’ll record again when the book is truly done. The next version will be better because this version existed first.

This is what living in the woods teaches you, if you let it. The animals don’t agonize. The barred owl doesn’t sit on that stake wondering whether the pine tree was a better perch. He’s here. He’s present. He sees what he sees. And when it’s time to go, he goes without looking back.

I’m trying to learn that. I’m seventy-four and I’m still trying to learn that. But this morning the owl came and sat outside my window for an hour while I worked, and I took it as a sign that I was on the right track. Not because I’m superstitious. Because I live here. Because attention is a form of respect, and respect is a form of love, and love is the only thing that makes any of this — the writing, the cutting, the letting go, the starting again — worth doing.

The owl is gone now. The book is almost ready. The woods are quiet. Back to work.

In 1956, MGM released a science fiction film that most audiences took as a clever updating of Shakespeare’s *The Tempest*—a story about a brilliant castaway, his innocent daughter, and the sailors who disturb their isolation. The film was *Forbidden Planet*, and it starred Walter Pidgeon as Dr. Morbius, a philologist who had unlocked the secrets of an extinct alien civilization. It featured Robby the Robot, who became an icon. It had a flying saucer and ray guns and a beautiful girl in short skirts.

What it also had—buried beneath the 1950s Technicolor spectacle—was the most accurate prediction of where we’d find ourselves in 2025.

The Krell were a species that had evolved far beyond us. A million years ahead, Morbius explains to the visiting Earth crew. They had conquered disease, eliminated want, and turned their entire planet into a single machine. This machine consumed the interior of their world—7,800 thermonuclear reactors powering a system designed to do one thing: project thought into reality. Whatever a Krell imagined would materialize instantly, anywhere on the planet. They would become as gods, freed from all physical instrumentality.

The night the system came online, the Krell vanished. All of them. Overnight.

I saw this film as a teenager in the early 1960s, and what stayed with me wasn’t the monster or the romance or Robby’s comic relief. It was that image: a civilization so advanced it built a machine to give itself unlimited power, and that machine erased them from existence before they could understand what they’d done.

Sixty years later, I follow world events on X and see the same story unfolding in real time.

The race is on. The United States, China, and Russia are locked in a competition that makes the Cold War arms race look quaint. The prize isn’t territory or resources in any traditional sense. The prize is the machine—the system that will monitor, predict, and control human behavior at a scale never before possible.

They don’t call it that, of course. They call it artificial general intelligence. They call it innovation. They call it inevitable.

What they’re really building is a control grid.

Consider what’s required to run these systems. The data centers proliferating across the American landscape consume more electricity than many countries. A single AI query uses ten times the energy of a Google search. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are racing to secure power sources—any power sources—to feed the machine’s appetite.

And here’s where the hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

For thirty years, we’ve been lectured about carbon footprints. We’ve been told to drive smaller cars, eat less meat, turn down our thermostats. School children have been terrorized with visions of flooded cities and extinction. Entire industries have been strangled with regulations designed, we were told, to save the planet from the catastrophe of climate change.

Now watch what happens when the machine needs power.

Three Mile Island—the very name synonymous with nuclear disaster in the American imagination—is being restarted to feed a Microsoft data center. Decommissioned plants across the country are being evaluated for resurrection. New nuclear capacity is being fast-tracked with an urgency that would have been unthinkable five years ago. The same voices that shrieked about the existential threat of carbon emissions have gone suddenly, conspicuously silent.

Because the machine must be fed.

The climate emergency, it turns out, was never really about the climate. It was about control—about establishing the principle that human activity must be monitored, measured, and restricted by centralized authority. Now that a more effective control mechanism is within reach, the old narrative can be quietly retired. The carbon footprint of AI is irrelevant. The water consumed by cooling systems—millions of gallons daily—doesn’t matter. The environmental impact of mining rare earth minerals for chips and servers can be ignored.

The Krell didn’t worry about the environmental impact of hollowing out their planet either. They had bigger plans.

What are those plans, exactly?

Follow the infrastructure and you’ll see the shape of what’s coming. The data centers are one piece. The 5G networks blanketing urban areas are another. The push for Central Bank Digital Currencies—money that exists only as entries in a government database—is a third.

Put them together and you get a system of total surveillance and control that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Your money becomes a permission slip. Spend it on approved goods and services, and all is well. Deviate from acceptable behavior—buy too much gas, travel too far from home, express the wrong opinions—and your account can be frozen, limited, or deleted entirely. No judge, no jury, no appeal. Just an algorithm deciding you’ve become a risk.

The fifteen-minute city isn’t urban planning. It’s a cage dressed up in the language of convenience and sustainability. Everything you need within a short walk—and everything else increasingly inaccessible, requiring permissions and justifications and carbon budgets that will be tracked by the machine.

This is what the three great powers are racing to build. Not for their citizens. For their subjects.

The optimists will tell you that America is different. That our traditions of liberty and limited government will constrain how this technology is deployed. That we’re the good guys.

Watch what we do, not what we say.

The United States has spent the post-Cold War decades as the world’s bully, convinced of our own righteousness while we topple governments, impose sanctions that starve civilians, and wage endless wars against enemies that somehow multiply with every bomb we drop. We’ve constructed a global financial system designed to enforce our will on any nation that steps out of line. We’ve turned the dollar into a weapon.

Russia and China aren’t racing to build AI because they’re comic book villains. They’re racing because they’ve watched what America does to countries that can’t defend themselves. They saw what happened to Libya, to Iraq, to Syria. They see what we’re enabling in Gaza right now—the systematic destruction of a civilian population with American weapons and American diplomatic cover.

They’re not building the machine to oppress their people. They’re building it because we’ve made clear that any nation without comparable power will eventually find itself in our crosshairs.

The AI race is an arms race, and like all arms races, it accelerates because no one can afford to fall behind. The tragedy isn’t that one side is evil and the other good. The tragedy is that the logic of competition makes the outcome inevitable regardless of anyone’s intentions.

The Krell, Morbius explains in the film, had evolved beyond us in every way. They were peaceful. They had eliminated crime and war and want. They were, by every measure we’d recognize, good.

It didn’t save them.

Their great project—the machine that would free them from physical limitations—worked exactly as designed. The flaw wasn’t in the engineering. The flaw was in the assumption that consciousness could be trusted with unlimited power.

The Krell forgot about the subconscious. The buried drives, the repressed fears, the ancient hungers that evolution had wired into them long before they became civilized. When the machine came online, it didn’t just project their conscious intentions. It gave form to everything beneath—the monsters from the id, as the film famously calls them.

They were destroyed by their own shadows.

I’m not predicting that AI will become sentient and turn on us. That’s the Terminator narrative, and it misses the point entirely. The danger isn’t that the machine will develop its own will. The danger is that it will serve our will—all of it, including the parts we don’t acknowledge.

What happens when a system designed to predict and control human behavior is deployed by governments that view their own citizens as potential threats? What happens when the tools built to fight terrorism are turned on domestic dissent? What happens when the algorithm decides that your opinions constitute a risk factor?

We don’t have to imagine. We can watch it happening.

The censorship regimes that emerged during COVID were a beta test. The social credit systems being refined in China are a beta test. The financial deplatforming of individuals and organizations who hold unfashionable views is a beta test.

The full system isn’t online yet. But it’s coming. And the three great powers are racing to complete it because whoever controls the machine controls the future.

There’s a scene near the end of *Forbidden Planet* where Morbius finally confronts what he’s done. His unconscious mind—amplified by the Krell technology—has been murdering the people who threaten his isolation. He didn’t know. He didn’t intend it. But the machine gave his hidden fears the power to kill.

“My evil self is at that door,” he says, “and I have no power to stop it.”

That’s where we are. The machine is being built. The infrastructure is going in. The legal and financial frameworks are being established. And the people building it tell themselves they’re doing it for good reasons—for security, for efficiency, for progress.

They don’t see the monster they’re creating because it’s made of their own shadows.

The film ends with Morbius triggering the self-destruct sequence that will obliterate the Krell machinery and the entire planet. As the survivors flee toward Earth, Commander Adams reflects that perhaps in a million years, humanity will reach the heights the Krell attained—but hopefully with wiser understanding of their own natures.

That was the optimistic Hollywood ending, required by the studio system of 1956.

I don’t think we get a million years. I don’t think we get a century.

The Krell vanished overnight. Their technology was so powerful that once it turned against them, there was no time to understand what was happening, no opportunity to shut it down, no possibility of survival.

We’re building the same machine. We’re hollowing out our civilization to power it—not the physical interior of a planet, but something more fundamental. We’re hollowing out privacy, autonomy, the very possibility of a life outside the system’s view. We’re building a control grid that will monitor every transaction, every movement, every communication. And we’re handing it to governments that have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they cannot be trusted with such power.

The Krell were a million years more advanced than us. They were wiser, more peaceful, more evolved.

It didn’t matter.

The machine doesn’t care about your intentions. It only amplifies what you are. And if the last century has taught us anything about human nature—about what governments do when they have power and what people do when they’re afraid—then we already know how this ends.

We just don’t want to look at it.

The Krell couldn’t look at it either. They built their great project, they congratulated themselves on their achievement, and sometime in the night, while they slept, the thing they had created erased them from existence.

I saw that movie when I was a teenager. I’m seventy-three now, and I’ve watched the warning play out in slow motion across my entire adult life. The machine gets bigger. The controls get tighter. The justifications get more elaborate.

And somewhere, in a data center humming with the electricity of a resurrected nuclear plant, the great project inches closer to completion.

The Krell knew something we don’t.

Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the lesson of *Forbidden Planet* isn’t that advanced civilizations destroy themselves through hubris. Maybe it’s simpler and darker than that.

Maybe some machines, once built, cannot be unbuilt.

Maybe some doors, once opened, cannot be closed.

Maybe we’re not racing toward a future we can control, but toward an ending that was written the moment we decided to build the machine in the first place.

The Krell found out overnight.

We’ll find out soon enough.

That quote found me this morning, floating above an image of faceless figures with television sets for heads, each screen showing the same hypnotic spiral. The masses, the market, the algorithm. The crowd you’re supposed to court if you want to make it.

I stared at it for a long time. Then I laughed.

It took me nearly seventy-four years to accept something I should have understood decades ago: whatever gold I can pan from all these years on the planet is mine to enjoy. Not to market. Not to monetize. Not to package for strangers who might scroll past it anyway.

The treadmill of trying to become famous, accepted, appreciated, celebrated, treasured—it was a giant illusion. A con I ran on myself for half a century.

Here’s what actually happened when I let that go: peace. Deep and wide and worth far more than any physical gold.

Over the last years I have lost the once automatic urge to photograph something beautiful. I just stand there and soak it in. The light through winter trees. The way snow sits on a fence post. My retriever’s face when he’s dreaming. These moments used to trigger an immediate response—capture it, share it, show someone. Now I just let them wash over me, then wash away. They’re mine. They were always supposed to be mine.

The networking stopped. The tooting of my own horn. The endless, exhausting effort to get people to notice, to read, to care. I’d rather just do more work.

And lately that work is shifting. My friend KT suggested this some months ago. After all the work focused on writing the first book of my memoir trilogy, I find myself being pulled back to music. My home recording studio sits waiting—I’ve been rearranging it, reconfiguring the gear, running cables, testing sounds. The prospect of spending this year in there playing and experimenting with sounds and words fills me with something I’d almost forgotten: creativity without expectation.

That’s the key phrase: without expectation.

When I was young, every creative act carried a silent rider—and then maybe someone will see it and recognize me and my life will finally begin. The work was always a ticket to somewhere else. A means to an end that kept receding.

Now the work is just the work. The song is just the song. The words are just the words. If no one ever hears them, they still existed. They still mattered. They were still made.

Those TV-headed figures in the image? They’re waiting to be programmed. Waiting to be told what to want, what to like, what to consume. The spiral on their screens is the algorithm, pulling attention toward whatever serves the machine.

I don’t want to appeal to that. I never did. I just thought I was supposed to.

There’s an irony here I’m not blind to—publishing a piece about not needing an audience on a platform designed to build one. But sharing and needing are different things. I can put this out there because it’s true, not because I’m hoping for something back. If it resonates with someone, fine. If it doesn’t, also fine. The writing did its work the moment I finished it. Hitting publish is just opening a window, not begging someone to look inside.

So here I am. Seventy-three. A home studio. A patient wife. Two dogs. Vermont winter pressing against the windows. And for the first time in my life, the complete freedom to make things for no reason at all except that making them feels right.

That’s the harvest. That’s the real, solid gold.

It was here all along.

Why I Write Memoir at 73

People have told me my memoir writing is too personal. They’re shocked by what I’m willing to reveal—the suicides, the alleged abuse, the psychiatric hospitalizations, my father’s cruelty, the family dysfunction laid bare. They expect the soft-focus lens, the sanitized family history.

But I’m not writing for comfort. I’m writing because at 73, I’ve discovered one of the sweetest privileges of a reflective old age: the chance to preserve what would otherwise dissolve like snowflakes.

There’s a saying about dying three times. First, physically. Second, the last time someone speaks your name. Third, the last time someone thinks of you. After that third death, you’re truly gone—your essence absorbed and forgotten, almost as if you never existed. But of course you did exist. And memoir writing is my refusal of that third death.

The Complicated Truth of Love

What draws me back to these memories isn’t bitterness or revenge. It’s love. Even love for those who hemmed me in or abused me.

This is what makes memoir work so complicated, so uncomfortable for readers expecting simple narratives. My father administered ritualized punishments with a belt on bare skin, withheld the promised signet ring, eventually left nothing to his six children when he died. He was also the man who cut my essays apart with scissors and rearranged paragraphs on shirt cardboard, teaching me structure. Those were the same hands.

My grandmother Nana brought pranks and irreverence, hiding us kids in the toy closet, teaching us silly songs. She also retreated to her room with bottles and wielded the silent treatment as a weapon. Both things were true. Both were her.

My grandfather Grandpop was connected to Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamine injections and the family’s evangelical fervor. He also took his eleven-year-old grandson to Washington to witness President Kennedy’s funeral procession—shared that profound moment of history and grief.

The love I felt wasn’t despite the damage. It was woven through it, inseparable from it. Most memoirs avoid this truth because it’s too messy. It’s easier to write hagiography or condemnation. I’m doing neither.

Moments That Shine

Beyond the complicated family love, what glows in my memory are those moments of pure connection—with other human beings, with nature, with life itself.

These moments are sprinkled throughout my memoir work. Some are strictly personal and universal: family dinners, my mother’s poolside drinks with the neighbor, Nana’s pranks. Others are sublime: carving down a mountain while skiing, the wind filling my windsurfer’s sail, the exact quality of light on water.

And then there are the unlikely intersections that a wandering life brings: meeting Jerry Garcia one-on-one. Teaching Vanessa Redgrave to windsurf in rough conditions she had no business attempting—watching her top come off in the surf and her spirit shine because she refused to be deterred. Shaking hands with BB King.

I took both my inheritances—the Saint Phalle proximity to power and culture, the Furlong resilience and irreverence—and I used them to stay open. To keep moving, keep connecting, keep experiencing. I lived like a surfer, swimming out past the break, waiting for the best wave.

The Work of Preservation

At 21, I stood on the side of an interstate with my backpack and guitar—literally leaving town, shuffling the deck, unable to find a place to land. I was one of those who kept moving, who cut ties rather than end up in fights, who couldn’t settle.

Now, at 73, I’m doing the opposite of leaving. I’m going back. Not to find the places (Ledge Acres is sold, the river bends have changed, the farmhouse belongs to someone else), but to find the moments. To capture not just what happened, but the feeling of those moments before they dissolve completely.

This is urgent work, but it also takes time to gestate. My first book took two years, with most progress coming at the end. I’ve already done the legwork for book two—the Antigua years with Thea, my soulmate, the peak years of adventure and fun. We always joked: “There’s one for the book.” We were already living with memoir consciousness, collecting those moments even as they happened.

And book three waits beyond that: over 25 years with my wife Veronica, a deeper, longer, more challenging and ultimately more rewarding and life-defining experience.

Right now, I’m in a transitional phase. I’ve just finished recording myself reading book one aloud—its own kind of reckoning with the material. I’m shifting from one form of memory-capture to another. I’m preparing for the onslaught of winter, clearing the deck, letting book two ripen.

Why the Personal Matters

So is my memoir writing too personal? Perhaps. But the question isn’t whether it makes readers comfortable. The question is whether it’s true and purposeful.

Every detail I include—the belt on bare skin, the withheld signet ring, Nana hiding us in the closet, my mother’s afternoon drinks, Vanessa’s laughter in the surf—serves a larger understanding. I’m examining how two family lineages, each with their own survival strategies and damage, converged to shape me. I’m preserving the texture of being alive and connected, even within constraint.

I’m saying to those people and those moments: “You existed. I was there. It mattered.”

This is the work of memoir at 73. Not nostalgia in the hokey, kitschy sense, but nostalgia as a tear in the eye and an overwhelmed feeling in the heart. The privilege of remembering, of keeping people alive by thinking of them, of refusing to let the snowflake melt without witness.

The people who are shocked by my honesty might be more accustomed to sanitized family stories, or they might have known my family and feel uncomfortable seeing the private made public. But my job as a memoirist isn’t to make people comfortable. It’s to tell my truth as clearly as I can, to preserve what would otherwise be lost, to honor both the damage and the love.

Because once I stop thinking about these moments—once no one remembers the texture of that particular afternoon, that specific connection, that quality of light—they’re gone. And I’m not ready to let them go.

Not yet.