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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He walked right up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at me like: what are you doing?

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

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

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

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

For me this picture is spiritual food.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He lives on inside of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he is still here…

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

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

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

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

I think he may last another week or two.

But you never know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to tell you how I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alive. For decades, not just years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wherever it was, he was happy there.

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

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

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

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

Old Blue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It goes like this.

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

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

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

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

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

That is the end game.

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

Because they don’t need us anymore.

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

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

A few clicks. That’s all it took.

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

And it isn’t just photographs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He wasn’t. He was coming back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The grave is ready. Blue is not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not sampling. That’s resurrection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to talk about what we think writing is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you now, or have you ever?

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

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

And that moat was starting to drain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONE: THE DOCTOR THEY WON’T LET TREAT YOU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO: THE STORY THAT CLOSED TOO FAST

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

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

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

THREE: THE ONE THEY COULDN’T DENY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me back to the self portrait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did everybody make it to the party?

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

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

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

She kept every one of them.

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

Nana’s the one I trust.

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

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