The box arrived this morning. I knew what was in it. I’d been waiting for it for over a week — longer than that, really. I’d been waiting for it for fifty three years.

I opened it and there it was. Thumb Out. Volume One of The Spaces Between. 330 pages. Hardcover. As thick as a slab of 5 quarter inch pine. I picked it up and just held it. The thing has weight. Real weight. After years of staring at screens — at PDFs and ePubs and cover files and margin settings — here was something I could actually hold in my hand.

What I felt was a sense of accomplishment and finality. Pride in persistence, in effort, in determination finally paying off. And I’ll admit — pride that I opened it to a dozen random pages and didn’t find a single mistake.

Let me try to explain what went into it.

I’m 74. Learning Kindle Direct Publishing’s cover designer. Learning via Claude what recto and verso mean. Learning about gutters and bleeds and leading and why a chapter should always start on a recto page. Watching Claude build Python build scripts to typeset a 330-page interior with the right proportions that suited my style and preferences. Learning ePub structure. Learning all of it, in my seventies, because the book demanded it.

Three years. From the first draft of what was then called Surfing the Interstates to the book I’m holding today. It wasn’t a straight line. The book started as one thing, became another, got published, got unpublished, got expanded, got combined with a companion volume, got rebuilt from the ground up.

Surfing the Interstates turned out to be Act Two of the final book — the road itself, 7,000 miles hitchhiking in the summer of 1973. Then I wrote Boomerang — four chapters of backstory before the road, eight chapters of aftermath after it. Then I realized they weren’t two books. They were one. Thumb Out is the sandwich: Boomerang as the bread, Surfing the Interstates as the meat. Twenty-eight chapters. Three acts. The complete story of a young man in motion — what launched him, what the road gave him, and what it finally cost him to stop.

Now about that cover.

The image is a DALL-E generation, shaped over many iterations with Claude’s help. What I wanted was something that felt like a memory — and somehow we got there.

Look at the compositional line: it runs diagonally from the guitar hanging at the hitchhiker’s side, up through the outstretched thumb, right into the oncoming headlights. Your eye follows that line before you know you’re following it. And off to the left, almost hidden in the warm haze — the old farmhouse, and beside it a weeping willow.

There was a giant weeping willow over a pond in front of our house at Ledge Acres. My mother loved that tree. There’s something bittersweet about a willow that weeps. I didn’t ask for it specifically. It arrived in the image via AI magic and I recognized it immediately.

The road itself carries the quality of Byram Lake Road — the paved road at the foot of the dirt road we lived on — the one I crossed when I stuck out my thumb in the summer of 1973. The mountains in the background blend the Rockies, the Sierras, and the coastal ranges of California, all at once. The whole trip in one frame.

And the colors. That warm golden amber against the deep blue of the sky. The thumb right in the headlights, dead center. I’ve stared at this cover for weeks and it still pleases me every time.

The main thing I feel, holding this book, is a sense of having come full circle.

At twenty-one I stuck out my thumb with eighty borrowed dollars and no plan. Scared but certain that if I just kept moving, something would open up. It did.

At seventy-four I sat down to relive it, wrestle with it, understand it — and discovered I had to learn an entirely new set of skills just to get the book into print. Different road. Same principle. Keep moving. Something will open up. It did.

Even if I never sell a single copy, opening that box this morning was my payoff.

The point was never the destination. The point was the journey. The road teaches you that at twenty-one and you spend the rest of your life remembering it.

Thumb Out (Vol. 1 of The Spaces Between) is available to read in its entirety for paid subscribers ($5 per month) here on Substack (with embedded author readings) — with new chapters from Volume 2, Sahara Dust, dropping as they’re written. Volume 3, Green Mountain Flash, will follow.

Read my book !!!

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ subscribe

Someone asked me recently what the payoff was for a reader who buys my memoir, Thumb Out. It was a fair question. I thought about it seriously and gave a serious answer.

But the more honest answer is the one I gave after that.

The payoff that matters most from this book has already been collected. I collected it in the writing. Everything else — sales, reviews, readers, whatever praise or indifference the world decides to offer — is gravy.

I want to explain what I mean, because I think it matters to anyone who has ever considered writing something true about their own life and talked themselves out of it.

Writing Thumb Out was a deep dive into understanding my life. Not performing my life for an audience. Not crafting a narrative designed to make a reader like me or feel comfortable with me or come away with a tidy lesson. Just looking at the thing honestly and writing down what I saw.

What I saw was not always flattering. I was a young man of considerable privilege who took a very long time to do anything with it. I drifted. I chased a film career across three thousand miles and six years and learned, finally, that what I was chasing was hollow. I lost a guitar to a theft I partly enabled. I walked away from things I should have said something about. I spent years in rooms that were wrong for me, doing work that had nothing to do with who I was, and called it searching.

Writing all of that down — not to excuse it, not to dramatize it, but simply to see it clearly — was worth more than I can calculate. Not because confession is therapeutic, though maybe it is. Because understanding your own life is one of the rarest things a person can do, and most people never do it at all.

The book cost me something to write. There are scenes in it that required me to implicate myself, to resist the comfortable version of events, to let the people I loved be complicated rather than heroic or villainous. That is hard work. It is also the only work that produces anything true.

I am not going to pretend I have no interest in whether people read it. I do. I think it is a good book. I think the readers who find it will get something real from it — permission, maybe, to look at their own drifting years without shame, or recognition of the particular pain of a father who could have shown up and didn’t. Those are not small things to offer a stranger.

But I refused to write the book a market might have asked for. I am who I am. I cannot twist myself into a pretzel chasing acceptance. The book that gets written in pursuit of approval is never as good as the book that gets written in pursuit of truth, and I have read enough of both to know the difference from the inside.

So here is what I will tell you about Thumb Out.

It is the first volume of a memoir called The Spaces Between. It covers my years before the road, on the road hitchhiking across America in 1973, and the decade that followed — New York, California, Hollywood, and finally the return east that ended with a paintbrush in my hand and a golden retriever named Brer riding shotgun in my Datsun. It is written in a voice I have spent fifty years developing and did not compromise to make anyone comfortable.

The payoff for you, if you read it, is something I cannot fully promise in advance. That is the nature of honest books. They give you what they give you, and it is different for every reader.

What I can promise is that I did not hold anything back.

E-BOOK
KINDLE
PAPERBACK

A 50-year memoir spanning 1973 to 2023 chronicles one man’s journey from compulsive wanderer to reluctant settler—from hitchhiking across America during the last wild summer of the 1970s to finding hard-won wisdom in learning to stay put. This three-book memoir series explores the evolution from thumb-out freedom to the inevitable truth that you can’t outrun what travels in your bones.

What if everything you've been taught about freedom was wrong? What if the answer isn't in the leaving but in the staying? What if paradise isn't a place you find but what remains after everything else fails?"

Volume One: "Thumb Out”

Published April 22, 2026

Summer 1973. A 21-year-old dis-inherited French aristocrat's son “borrows” $80 and hitchhikes 7,000 miles across Nixon's crumbling America. Jerry Garcia blesses his guitar. UFOs read the Pacific's memory. A paranoid friend ends up in a police shootout. In a Big Bend canyon, fasting and alone, he receives a vision of water and a woman who moves with the wind. The road teaches him he needs the ocean.

Read More

Subscribe now

Volume Two: "Sahara Dust"

Currently being written

1982-1987, Antigua, West Indies. Building a sandcastle dream on a massive pristine beach with Thea, the woman from the prophecy. The woman born with cystic fibrosis who ignored her life expectancy, choosing to instead live “zestfully.” Paradise manifests—turquoise water, perfect wind, teaching tourists to fly. Success, international fame. Suddenly a small plane drops out of the sky before their eyes, 50 yards off the beach, hitting the water like a meteor, killing six young men instantly. Record Sahara dust storms arrive soon after. Thea’s battered lungs start failing. She dies at 37 in a NYC hospital surrounded by loved ones. Sandcastles and ashes return to the ocean, gently sprinkled from a schooner off Pemaquid Lighthouse in Maine. Hearts try to process the infinity of the loss.

Read More

Subscribe now

Volume Three: "Green Mountain Flash"

To be written after completion of book two

Vermont, 1997- 2023. Buio, his one year old golden retriever, attracts Veronica’s attention on the dirt road in front of his house. Together, they build a photography business—a self-directed and creative life. After the 2008 financial crisis they are forced into retirement. But the wanderer's ghost won't rest. 2019 he spends everything he has left on an overlanding rig that never leaves the county. Eleven seizures at 4 AM over 12 months force the stillness he could never choose. The body succeeds where the will failed. Freedom ultimately means learning to live within your limits.

Read More

Subscribe now

This Isn't Just A Memoir—It's American Mythology In The Making

From the servant's quarters of a Westchester estate to Big Sur's rainbow buses. From Caribbean trade winds to Vermont's brutal winters. From prep school damage to boarding school ghosts. From noble French bloodlines to picking Santa Rosa plums. This is the story of America's promise and betrayal, told through one man's body.

Every Paradise Contains Its Own Ending

Watch a man build and lose three different versions of heaven. Learn why the vibrant nightclub singer who gifted him the ability fly over water had to die. Understand why the dairy farmer’s daughter who had the heart to stay had to be different. Discover how nine electrical storms in the brain can be grace, not tragedy.

The Pattern Hidden In Plain Sight

Military jets violate every sacred space—F-4 Phantoms through Big Bend, A-6 Intruders over the Caribbean island of Vieques, F-35s above Vermont. The war follows him because the war is inside. Steve Ferry's paranoia wasn't paranoid. The kindness of strangers is real, but so is the cruelty of fate. Some wounds don't heal—they teach you to understand life differently.

Why Follow The Full Journey?

Because this isn't just one man's story. It's about the last generation that could truly disappear, the first generation that couldn't. It's about what happened to the counterculture's children. It's about privilege that doesn't protect you, movement that doesn't free you, and love that arrives only after you stop running from it.

The Wandering Was The Point. Until It Wasn’t.

Contact the author.

Home

Bear Pond Books has been a Vermont institution for decades — the kind of independent bookstore that reminds you why independent bookstores matter. Seeing these covers on their shelf feels like the clearest marker yet that this project has become real.

And the writing continues —

I’m currently writing Sahara Dust, Book Two of The Spaces Between, which I’m hoping to publish later this year. Green Mountain Flash — the Vermont book — will close out the trilogy after that.

If you’re anywhere near Stowe on or after May 23, stop in, pick up a copy, and tell Bear Pond you heard about it here. Supporting an independent bookstore and a Vermont writer in the same transaction — that’s the kind of wave worth catching.

More soon.

— AJ

Subscribe · E-PUB · Kindle/Paperback/Hardcover/Audiobook

Yesterday was my 74th birthday. The vernal equinox. For the first time ever, none of my five siblings reached out. Much like a Christmas card, a birthday wish has always been an expected sign of connection, however faint.

I’m not sure when I stopped expecting them to. It wasn’t sudden. It happened the way families come apart — slowly, then all at once, then a long silence that hardens into its own kind of architecture. You stop noticing the absence the way you stop noticing a wall. It’s just there.

My mother’s dying wish was that we would all get along. She said it knowing we wouldn’t. She’d spent twenty years holding us together through sheer will and chain-smoked Kents, and when she was gone, the centripetal force went with her. We scattered like shrapnel from an explosion that had actually happened decades earlier.

I wrote a memoir. Surfing the Interstates — a book about hitchhiking across America in 1973, the summer my parents’ marriage finally detonated. The book only briefly touches the family. But it touches them at the point of fracture. And in that brief touching, I mentioned something none of my siblings had ever heard: I saw our father backhand our mother in the laundry room.

I think that was the fatal blow — not to any of them, but to whatever threadbare connection still held us in orbit around each other. I named a thing they’d rather not know. Some of them probably think I made it up. I didn’t.

What I’ve learned since, researching our father’s family, is that the violence didn’t start with him. His mother Jacqueline — the woman we called “Goms” because we couldn’t pronounce “grandmère,” the devout, prim ice queen who took me to Schrafft’s for lunch and gave me sweaters from Bloomingdale’s I never wore — was, according to my aunt Niki’s autobiography, violent with her children. She beat the younger ones. She abandoned Niki to a governess in France for two years while she and her husband tried to rebuild their finances in New York after the Crash. My father was the eldest of five. After him came Niki, who would be hospitalized, given electroshock, and eventually flee into art. Then Claire, the composed middle child. Then Liz and Richard, who would both die by suicide.

Look at them. My father and his sister. Two small children in white on what looks like a summer afternoon in France, before any of it happened. Before the violence, the breakdowns, the electroshock, the suicides, before he married a poor Irish orphan girl and raised six children.

The chain is clear if you’re willing to look at it. Most of my siblings aren’t. They’ve chosen the comfortable version — the one where our father was difficult but not violent, where the divorce was just a divorce, where the family simply drifted apart the way families do. I wrote the uncomfortable version. The one that actually happened. And the cost of writing it was the last of those ties.

Which brings me to Jean Biès.

Jean Biès was a French philosopher, writer, and poet born in Bordeaux in 1933. He spent much of his youth in Algiers, where early exposure to North African culture and Sufism oriented him toward Eastern spiritual traditions. He studied Classics at the University of Algiers and later at the Sorbonne, eventually becoming a professor of Greek literature at the University of Pau. His work placed him squarely in the Traditionalist and perennialist current, drawing on René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon while seeking a synthesis of Eastern and Western wisdom. He wrote across genres — essays, poetry, travel writing, spiritual testimony — exploring Hindu thought, Christian mysticism, Sufism, and the symbolism of nature and alchemy. He is best known in English for Returning to the Essential: The Selected Writings of Jean Biès.

Biès received the High Prize of the Society of French Poets and was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1997. Catholic philosopher Jean Borella regarded him as one of the most authentic poets of his time. He retired in 1993 to devote himself fully to writing at his home near the Pyrénées. After the death of his wife, the Jungian analyst Rolande Biès, in 2012, he died by suicide in January 2014, leaving behind a large body of essays, poems, and spiritual reflections.

He wrote this:

“The hermit keeps a window open onto the sky, without which the world would perish from suffocation, ugliness and boredom.

He is the only one, along with the poet, who still speaks the language of the beyond, who makes existence sacred, who gives life this verticality without which humanity is buffeted about beneath itself.

He is a rampart against the assaults of mediocrity, nastiness, hatred that is intolerant of its opposite…

For men turned toward secondary things, his presence recalls the existence of the essential things: the order of the world, knowledge, the priority of salvation and the adoration of the Supreme, by imitating the sunflower whose heliotropism has much to teach us, who never turns away from the trisolar brightness.

A living reminder of the transcendence, the hermit teaches this world that he is of other values, those of truths other than the world’s.

Seeming to live the opposite of a normal life, he is, in fact, emancipated from physical and psychological mechanicalness. Immobile in a consecrated place, he exorcises space and turns it into infinity.

A world without vision is condemned to losing its outlook.

Hermits and anchorites are the salt of the earth who keep the earth from completely rotting.

They are the ones who, in spite of their small number and anonymity—or thanks to it—can still to a certain degree, weaken or neutralize the poisons fabricated by society in its politico-social activities (even those that have a humanitarian mask) and by all of humanity in its psycho-mental activities.

Today, these men are the last and the only ones able to stop the generalized dissolution process, to avoid the definitive crumbling of everything.

The spiritual master who has naturally renounced his name, his possessions, his ties and his ego has thus gained in inner richness; the Spirit has taken him over, has extended him to its size, has made him a being of the here and now, of everywhere and always.”

— Jean Biès

Biès writes about a man who chose solitude and gained the world from it. My situation is less elegant than that. I didn’t renounce my ties — they were severed, slowly, by decades of silence and one act of truth-telling. The hermit in Biès’s vision “has naturally renounced his name, his possessions, his ties.” I just wrote down what I saw in the laundry room.

But there’s something in this passage that resonates beyond the philosophy. Biès writes about people “turned toward secondary things” — and I think that’s what the comfortable family story is. A secondary thing. A version of events that lets everyone sleep at night. The primary thing is harder. It’s the backhand. It’s the chain of violence running from Jacqueline through my father and into the rooms where we grew up. It’s Niki’s electroshock. It’s Richard’s champagne and Tylenol. It’s Liz going upstairs at Claire’s house in Providence and never coming back down.

My mother wanted us to get along. She wanted it so badly she said it as she was dying. But getting along required not looking, and I looked. And then I wrote it down.

By any external measure, the book failed. A boarding school acquaintance who went on to become chairman of the board at Farrar, Straus and Giroux read the manuscript and told me it had no commercial appeal — too personal. He suggested I print copies privately for family distribution. The family, of course, being the very people who won’t read it. I mailed twelve author copies to siblings, old friends, people I thought might care. Not one person responded. My Substack has maybe ten subscribers. The phone didn’t ring on my birthday.

So there’s a version of this story where I wasted two years of my life writing a book nobody wanted, published it myself into a void, and alienated what remained of my family in the process. That version isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete. It measures the wrong things.

My father — the boy in that photograph, being held by his little sister Niki as they rode a bicycle together on a summer afternoon before any of it happened — that man spent my entire youth insisting I figure out what things mean. He wouldn’t let me major in film. He said I had nothing to say yet. He assigned me books. He corrected my writing. He pushed me toward philosophy, toward the examined life, toward some reckoning with the essential questions that I wanted no part of at twenty-one. I wanted to make movies. He wanted me to understand why.

I hated him for it. For decades, I carried that obstruction as the defining wound — the father who blocked his son’s artistic life. But here I am at seventy-four, and the book I just finished isn’t a film. It’s a written excavation of my own life that required exactly the tools he spent my childhood trying to give me. The depth. The discipline of looking. The insistence that surface isn’t enough. No philosophy major at Penn could have taught me what writing this memoir taught me. It took the full fifty years — the hitchhiking, the windsurfing, the relationships, the losses, the seizures, the dead ends — to arrive at the understanding he was pointing toward. He just didn’t know it would take a lifetime. Neither did I.

This is the complicated inheritance. Not the noble name. Not money — he left us nothing. Two of my sisters married into enormous wealth and sit now in multimillion-dollar homes, their husbands incapacitated by illness, unable to do much of anything. I sit in a simple home in northern Vermont with two dogs and a guitar and ten Substack subscribers and a clarity I have never had before in my life. I changed the way I eat — went carnivore, stripped everything back — and my body responded. Clearer head. More energy. Less noise. The physical transformation mirrored what the writing had already started: a shedding of skins, of fears, of the need for anyone’s approval or recognition.

I emerged from the process of writing Book One shell-shocked. The world outside isn’t reassuring — it tilts toward war, toward fracture, toward dissolution. My family has completed its own dissolution, the one that started in that laundry room in 1973. My mother’s dying wish — that we would all get along — sits unanswered, the way those twelve mailed copies sit unopened. But standing in the debris of all that, I feel more centered and confident than I have at any point in seventy-four years. Not triumphant. Lucid. The skins are off. The voice is mine. And the mission my father planted — find out what it all means — turns out to be the richest inheritance I could have possibly received: richer than any money, property or gold signet ring.

So I’m going to write the next two books. Sahara Dust — the Antigua years, Thea’s death, the paradise I built while everything I loved was dying. And Green Mountain Flash — what happens when a lifelong wanderer finally stops. The hermit at his window doesn’t open it because the view is pleasant. He opens it because the alternative is suffocation. The writing is the window. I’m not done opening it.

Subscribe · E-PUB · Kindle/Paperback/Hardcover/Audiobook

Apple Photos gathered these illustrations into a short film, and something unexpected happened — set to music, dissolving one into the next, they became more than a gallery. They became the feel of a life remembered. Not the facts of it, but the texture. The way one chapter bleeds into the next when you stop trying to hold the edges apart.

This is a different way into the story. No words, for once. Just the pictures.

My published memoir, Surfing the Interstates, covers the 1973 hitchhiking journey that started it all. The rest of the story — Antigua, Vermont, and everything between — lives here on this Substack.

I’ve lived three lives. Not metaphorically—three distinct lives, each with its own geography, its own cast, its own way of breaking me open and putting me back together wrong. When I finally sat down to write about them, I realized they weren’t three separate stories. They were a trilogy.

I called it “The Spaces Between.” The first volume, “Surfing the Interstates,” covers my summer of1973 hitchhiking journey across America, with a backpack and a 1943 Harmony Cremona guitar, sleeping under stars in the Rockies, tripping on peyote in the Redwoods, a vision quest in Santa Elena Canyon. The second, “Sahara Dust,” tells the story of paradise found and lost in Antigua—building a windsurfing school with a woman who was dying, watching five young men die in a plane crash at a birthday party, and leaving the Caribbean when the dust from the Sahara made it impossible for Thea to breathe. The third, “Green Mountain Flash,” follows the long slow landing in Vermont—marriage, entrepreneurial successes, bankruptcy, seizures, and the unexpected discovery that stillness could be its own kind of adventure.

Three lives. Three books. That was the plan.

Finding the Shape

Most memoirs bore me. I’ll say it plainly. The chronological yawn-fest—born here, went to school there, married this person, got that job—it’s a life reduced to a résumé. I didn’t want to write my résumé. I wanted to write the moments that cracked me open.

So I examined my seventy-plus years and asked a simple question: where are the stories? Not the facts, the stories. Where does the camera push in? Where does the soundtrack change? I’d spent years dreaming of being a filmmaker—winning awards at Exeter for a 45-minute 16mm film, working as a projectionist, editing television at Universal Studios—and even though that dream never materialized the way I’d imagined, the filmmaker’s eye never left me. I learned to see my life in scenes, not summaries.

Three narratives emerged. Each one had what any good film needs: a journey with real stakes, characters you couldn’t invent, and an ending that changed everything. The hitchhiking odyssey was a young man’s rebellion—eighty dollars stolen from my mother’s cupboard, a ringless twenty-first birthday, and the open road as an answer to my father’s suffocating expectations. The Antigua years were a love story disguised as an adventure—Thea’s opening line at a cocktail party was “Have you ever heard of Andre the seal?” and from that moment I was hers. The Vermont years were about what happens after the motion stops and you have to sit with who you actually are.

I wanted to write each one in first person, cinematic, present—recreating key moments so vividly that readers wouldn’t be reading about my life, they’d be inside it. Not telling. Showing. The way Paul Czaja, my mentor at Whitby School, taught me that art was civilization’s highest expression. The way the road taught me that expression meant nothing without experience.

What Book One Taught Me

“Surfing the Interstates” took everything I had. I wrote it, revised it, tore it apart and rebuilt it. I learned to select moments the way a director selects shots—what to include, what to leave on the cutting room floor, how to let silence do the heavy lifting. The book is available now on Substack, on Amazon Kindle, and as an audiobook, and I’m proud of what it became.

But here’s what I didn’t anticipate: Book One was relatively easy because so many of its characters were transient. The trucker who picked me up outside Boulder. The hippies in the communal house. The girl in the San Francisco café. They passed through my life like weather—vivid, transformative, and gone. I could write them fully because they existed only in that story. They wouldn’t read the book and call me to say I’d gotten it wrong. They wouldn’t sit across from me at Thanksgiving and wonder what I’d written about them.

Books Two and Three are a different animal entirely.

Why I Stopped

The characters in “Sahara Dust” and “Green Mountain Flash” persist. They’re not strangers on the highway—they’re people I know, people I love, people who are still alive. The Fullers, who gave us everything in Antigua. Veronica, who has shared my life for over two decades. My siblings, most of whom no longer speak to me since I began writing about our family. Writing about transient characters in a cinematic style is one thing. Doing the same with people who will read every word and measure it against their own memory of the same events—that’s something else entirely.

The cinematic approach I love—selecting key moments, recreating scenes, making choices about what’s in the frame and what isn’t—becomes an ethical minefield when your characters have phone numbers. Every scene you choose to include is a statement. Every scene you leave out is a different statement. And the people in those scenes have their own versions, their own truths, their own wounds. I found myself paralyzed not by writer’s block but by something worse: the knowledge that telling my truth would inevitably distort someone else’s.

That was the first reason I stopped. The second was simpler and harder to admit.

I did all this work—years of it—and there was no external validation. No agent knocking on the door. No reviews in the places that matter. No sales numbers that would make anyone nod approvingly. I’m not complaining; I’m being honest. The publishing world is what it is, and a seventy-four-year-old first-time memoirist with no platform and a famous aunt who overshadows him in every Google search is not exactly what the industry is looking for.

So I asked myself: if the only reason to keep writing is for my own growth, my own understanding, my own reckoning with the past—and it is—then what’s the best way to do that? Does it have to be two more books in a trilogy? Does it have to follow the same demanding, cinematic, scene-by-scene approach that nearly broke me the first time?

The answer, it turned out, was no.

What Comes Next

If you’ve been following this Substack, you’ll notice it’s organized into three sections: “Surfing the Interstates,” “Sahara Dust,” and “Green Mountain Flash.” The trilogy lives on—but not as books. Instead, these sections have become what I think of as a freeform canvas. Sketches and vignettes. Character studies. Moments that deserve their own space without the architecture of a full manuscript pressing down on them.

This isn’t retreat. It’s liberation.

A Substack post can be three hundred words about the color of Caribbean light at six in the morning. It can be a meditation on what it means to bury a dog on your own land in Vermont. It can be a portrait of Thea that doesn’t have to serve a narrative arc—it just has to be true. I can write about my father’s golden ring, the one he promised me for my twenty-first birthday and never delivered, without building an entire chapter around its absence. I can let the moment breathe.

The filmmaker in me hasn’t disappeared. I still think in scenes. I still believe that the best writing makes you see and hear and smell the world it describes. But I’ve stopped believing that those scenes need to be assembled into a feature film. Sometimes a short is more honest. Sometimes a single photograph says what an album can’t.

So here’s what this space is now: the place where three lives get told in whatever form they need. Some posts will be polished essays. Some will be raw sketches. Some will be fragments I’m still trying to understand. All of them will be true, as true as I can make them, written by a man who spent fifty years in motion and is finally learning what it means to sit still and remember.

The trilogy isn’t dead. It just learned to breathe differently.