Monthly Archives: May 2026

Silly Little Adventure of Earth

I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and I wanted to share one more passage that stood out to me. In this scene, during a massive going-away party for the character Japhy, held in Berkeley, California, the narrator, Ray Smith (Kerouac), reflects on people and existence:

“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought was this and that, ain’t this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?”

My battered copy of The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

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My Books Arrive

My first shipment of books from McFarland & Company arrived yesterday. I’m so glad to see this book become a real thing—not just an idea in my head—because the project took more than 10 years to complete.

“Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood” is a coming-of-age story about identity and self-acceptance, told through the lens of my journey to adulthood after being diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was 15 years old.

The contains about 40 black-and-white photographs, medical records dating back to 1984, and diary entries from the early 1990s and beyond. It’s also loaded with sports and pop culture references from the ’80s and ’90s (e.g., Doug Flutie and The Cure).

I’m scheduled to give a reading at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 23, at Jervis Public Library in Rome, where, as a youth, I discovered my love of books and was introduced to authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. I hope I won’t be so nervous that I ramble and babble.

A certificate for my participation in a summer reading program at Jervis Public Library in Rome in 1976.

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Writing in the Morning

An early spring morning.
The refrigerator hums
in the kitchen
and sunlight streams
into the living room
while I write in a spiral notebook,
the sound of the ballpoint pen tip
scratching against the white paper.

In this moment
I realize the act of writing—
the mechanical activity
of jotting down
one word after the other,
leading to verbal connections
and accumulated sentences—
delights me and uplifts my spirit,
even if the words I write
add up to nothing.

And I will keep writing
without knowing the result,
having no expectation of success,
because I must—
because stopping is impossible,
since writing was never a choice for me—
instead, it’s an involuntary exercise
with the pen moving across paper
providing evidence of my existence.

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Buddha Bliss

I haven’t had a chance to blog in a while because I had to finish proofreading and indexing my forthcoming memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. Producing a back-of-the-book index was an exhausting, onerous project—especially because my book is loaded with medical terminology and pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s. Example: U2 see also The Edge, The Joshua Tree, Mullen, Larry Jr.

My messy index in process.

To avoid having to write an index for my follow-up memoir, I’ll make it 97 percent fact and 3 percent fantasy and call it autofiction.

But that’s not why I wanted to post today.

I am re-reading the autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which I think is a very underrated Kerouac work.

One passage caught my attention, and I wanted to share it.

The narrator, Ray Smith, has traveled from the industrial wasteland of Los Angeles to Riverside, California, as he tries to make his way to North Carolina to visit his mother. He camps for the night in a bamboo grove.

“And then I thought, later, lying on my bag, smoking, ‘Everything is possible. I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things. I have all the time in the world to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.’”

And I know this is a quote I will revisit during stressful times. Have a good weekend, everyone.

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