Full Moon Retail Edition November 2023

I walk most every day for exercise and meditation. Friday the choice was the Main Street route, up to the library, east to A Street, north to Helman, west back home. Main Street was really crowded. You could barely make your way.

“What’s going on?” I asked a guy at the corner while we waited for the light to change. “Black Friday,” he said. “Demonstration?” I said. “Yeah, retail,” said he. Ah, I get it. Commerce, greasing the wheels. I should do my part.

I’ve written three books in the last few years, two memoirs and a dystopian novel. I’m not very skilled or active in promoting them, but it is the season after all, so here goes. They are good, I’ll say immodestly. Any of them would make a nice gift.

What It Was: Growing Up When the Music Mattered is an actual physical object you can hold in your very own hands. Or give to someone else. It’s the story of my time as a columnist for The Denver Post where I covered Sixties rock ‘n’ roll and the counterculture, that amazing time of Jimi and Janis and the Who and the Stones, all of whom make appearances. Roy at the Book Exchange HERE still has a few copies and like everything else in the world, you can buy it on Amazon HERE.

So, too, Cascadia: A Future Fable of Destruction and Redemption, which is serialized HERE. It’s about a major disaster in the Pacific Northwest and the eventual dissolution of the United States. It was inspired by the 2016 presidential election and I assumed by now it might be dated, but bad pennies keep turning up and it perhaps is more relevant than ever. It comes to you in episodes of three or four thousand words each, of which there are some sixty posted and more arriving regularly.

Where We Were: Adventures in the Last Best Place is being serialized in a non-sequential manner behind a paywall HERE – the same place this newsletter issues from every two weeks. Another chapter posted last night. The memoir and a lot of other material appear pretty regularly for a very modest fee.

The story it tells is about Montana in the 1980s, living and working with the Blackfeet Tribe, residing for years at Gary Cooper’s home on the mighty Missouri River, meeting some of the everyday folks and some of the iconic characters of the last best place. It’s become the basis of a class I’ll be teaching in 2024 called Mythologies of the Modern West, an examination of growing up in that metaphysical land: the American West.

The western United States is so much more than just a geographic place and so much larger, too. It’s a mythological realm that has captured the imagination of the world and fostered a belief system that has persisted for centuries. It’s the Origin Myth of our country that tells us a lot about ourselves and what we choose to believe.

Thanks for shopping with me and Happy Holidays!