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

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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

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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.

Apart from having a complicated last name, I also have a very famous aunt. As a result, it’s hard to find me on Google. I’ve been working on search engine optimization and I thought maybe these pictures might give Google a leg up. For those of you who are confused, there was another Andre de Saint Phalle— he was my grandfather. And there was yet another Andre at the beginning of the family line in 1240 A.D. My father John, was the older brother of the artist Niki. This makes me the nephew of world-famous artist Niki de Saint Phalle. It’ll be interesting to see if any of these pictures pop up on Google search results anytime soon.

On another note, Google seems to be unaware of the fact that my wife and I closed our wedding and portrait photography business in 2012.

Pausing on a big grade, I look into the forest. The canopy is fully deployed, ferns spread like a soft feathery cushion. I see paths, creeks, and glimpse into that land of the heart and soul—full of ghosts and memories and smells and animal scat.

It seems uninhabited, but everywhere life is going on. Salamanders crawl across fallen logs. Deer flies ready themselves for their murderous rage, coming any time the heat returns. Soon this place will become unwalkable. Mosquitoes lurk, waiting. Snakes hide in the underbrush. Elk roam these woods, along with deer and bear—I've seen all of these up here, though not often. The bear was just a cub, halfway up a big tree, staring at me terrified. I thought about his mother possibly being nearby and backed away quickly.

But this is a quiet place, and the cool air makes my exertion tolerable. The lack of mosquitoes or deer flies buzzing around my face is a massive bonus.

In dog years, Blue is effectively eleven years older than me, and Blaze is going to be thirty-five, half my age more or less. So Blaze does what his name suggests: blazing his own trail. Blue steadily keeps pace with me, usually ten yards ahead, sometimes three, occasionally a little behind. Just like our aging golden retriever Izzy, who died five years ago this summer, old man Blue is starting to exhibit the same signs— pausing, staring off into space, sniffing the air, seemingly lost in reverie, perhaps triggered by scents on the breeze.

My wife used to say that Izzy was getting Alzheimer's, but I like to believe he was just pausing to remember, a memoirist in his own way. Like the last time we took him to the waterfall—he was too weak to scramble down the bank, so I carried him. He was down to nothing but skin and bones, half of what he used to be. I sat him down in the shallow water. It was so hot that day, July 18, 2020, a month before he died peacefully in the wee hours, resting comfortably his spot on our leather couch.

Izzy and I had a deep bond around water. I remember when we'd swim in the lake—I would plunge my cupped hands and make big booms. He would try to bite the water as it erupted. If I had a hose, he would try to bite the stream, going almost nuts for it. That last day, I gently splashed some water toward him, and he looked at me like, "I remember, but I can't do anything right now, Dad. But I remember."

As we age, memory is all we have left. There are no more wild blue yonder dreams, just that space you can find on a deserted class four dirt road in Johnson, Vermont, early on a cloudy morning.

Father's Day 2025

Sitting here at the top of an amazing waterfall, watching my dogs navigate at their different ability levels—Blaze getting into all kinds of trouble, Blue just taking it all in from the edges.

I remember my father. When he would telephone me, or when I called him, he always answered the same way: "André, my boy." There was definitely still affection there right to the end and I regret our estrangement.

He died three years ago this month at ninety-four. It had been just shy of fifty years since the sale of our 1865 farmhouse on 25 acres on a dirt road in Armonk, New York. During the first twenty-one years of my life, he was a dominating figure. Then he more or less disappeared.

I think we both held wounds we couldn't forgive. But I always felt his shadow through those fifty years of estrangement—that judging voice. It was the voice of a trainer disappointed that his yearling didn't turn out to be the champion he'd hoped for. He looked at me as someone who had broken a trust, maybe.

All our issues came to a head after I dropped out of the college he made me go to instead of the college I wanted. He told me, "André, if you ever go back to school for a year on your own and get a B average or higher, I'll pay for it."

Five years later, when I got into USC after attending San Francisco State for a year on my own—working full-time, earning a B-plus average—I contacted him to see if he'd help like he'd promised. He said he had no money.

Meanwhile, he was buying racehorses, had hired a trainer, was living in a really nice place in New York City. He shortly moved to one of the cushiest suburbs of Seattle, bought a huge place, tried to become racing commissioner. He had the money. He just wanted to punish me. We human beings can all be like that, petty and vindictive, with a long memory.

It's taken me three years after his death to see this and forgive him. But I was just a child when he did all that to me. Even though I wrote him a long letter in my forties detailing all my issues with him and “forgiving” him—because I was told it would be healing—he wrote back saying he'd been busy raising six kids, blah blah blah. Now, looking back, I realize that must have been awful ordeal for him too.

It was just a bet he'd made, raising six kids, and when it didn’t pan out, he simply walked away. Despite it all, I have a renewed sense of sympathy and love for my father—we're all human. We all have sensitive parts of our souls and hearts that, once bruised, don't seem to bounce back.

Giving each other forgiveness and space, trying to walk a mile in each other's shoes, goes a hell of a long way toward finding peace in our own hearts—not letting this stuff eat us alive, push us into addiction, or worse, self-harm and violence.

Nature has a deep heart, and I'm in the middle of it here with my dogs at the top of a beautiful waterfall. I thank the universe for this moment because it's rich and deep and priceless. You can't order it online, can't download it, can't really give it away. You can try to share it, but I have it. It's mine. It's my moment of peace.