My mother and I didn’t get along. It wasn’t her fault; I can’t explain our problem because that would violate her privacy. She was stuck with me. Staunchly pro-life, she couldn’t have had me aborted, and everyone knew she was pregnant with me, so she couldn’t have given me up for adoption. In the last…
The pain of cashews and broccoli
February 23, 2014
About two weeks before Mom had her cancer surgery on April 4, 2013, she began to starve herself. I’ve written before why she did it. The law of unintended consequences bit us all in the ass: Mom, her parents, the nuns, Tim, me—everybody. Collectively, we were screwed. There’s no recourse. It happened, and it can’t…
Memories no longer hurt
February 16, 2014
For most of my life, memories were torture. They were like pitiless satires of my aspirations, mocking everything I’d ever attempted. All I had to do was try to sleep, and I’d be flooded with memories of disaster, horror, pain, humiliation, and failure. Around 2007 it started to change, as I realized that each catastrophe…
More evidence that Mike Albee is a fraud
February 11, 2014
Before I hired Mike Albee and Lura Dold of Sandpiper Publicity—the two frauds who conned me out of $40,000 by exploiting the suicides of my parents—I didn’t know much about book publicity. Now I know a lot more. Today I had a long phone conversation with a real publicist, a friend of Scott Thunes. He…
Excised Snippet Number Four
February 6, 2014
This is the fourth passage from my novel Invisible Idiot, which became Chasing the Last Whale, Volume Two of the Ghosts Trilogy. It was necessary to remove these scenes, but since I like them, I’m publishing them here when I get the urge. Mike Albee and Lura Dold of Sandpiper Publicity—who defrauded me of $40,000…
An age of wonderment
February 1, 2014
Scott Thunes is in the hospital. His situation isn’t to be minimized. However, he picked one of the best times in history to have a significant health issue. We live in an age of wonderment. In the last two decades, the global poverty rate had been cut in half. It appears that the trend will…
Introducing my two favorite con artists
January 23, 2014
I’d like to introduce you to my two favorite con artists, Mike Albee and Lura Dold of Sandpiper Publicity. Stand up, kids! Don’t be shy. Mike also runs another fake company, Magnus Publicity. Let’s give Mike and Lura a hand! Mike has a long history of defrauding people. Unfortunately for me I didn’t see this…
The calm before the storm
January 17, 2014
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the day Mom and Dad took their first steps on the journeys that removed them from my life. Tim and I didn’t commemorate it in any special way. We commemorate our parents daily, talking about what they did and why. The one favor our parents did us by dying…
White privilege in action
January 16, 2014
I haven’t seen Lone Survivor, the movie about former US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. But I read LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson’s review of it. In her review, Nicholson says the following. As the film portrays them, their attitudes to the incredibly complex War on Terror, fought hillside by bloody hillside in the Afghan…