This is what the Table of Contents looks like:

The first three frames are the contents of the original first edition, the last, “Part Four” is the new material, 10 pieces I consider my best writing from 2005 until now.

And here’s that 4-across treatment of one of the pieces in Stories, “Because the Stars Incline Us,” in which I imagine traveling back in time to provide succor to Oscar Wilde at the very lowest moment of his life, as he was being transported to prison. Part of it is in the voice of Wilde, which I think I nail, frankly.

I often call this my favorite piece of mine ever, but I often also say that about “Lost” and “Mr Olmsted Regrets” as well, and let’s not forget “Reflections on Surviving Survival.” So it made me a very happy camper to figure out a way to include them all. Most of them are either thematically linked to the content in the original Ink, two more childhood memory pieces, “West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company” and “Clean Windows”, the post that landed me the GQ article that very almost changed my life, “Breaking Brokebad: A True Gay Crime Story I Would Never Have Believed if I Hadn’t Lived It,” and “Icarus”, in which I tell the tortured tale of those 36 months when my story was optioned by Warner Brothers but did not get green-lit. “Lost” and “Mr. Olmsted Regrets” are just pure fiction, but first-person and autobiographical-ish, and fans of my writing will definitely enjoy.

At the risk of being politically incorrect, I have found Chatgpt very useful for this second edition. It hasn’t a done a whisker of writing, but it’s a good proofreader, catching small grammatical errors and the occasional typo. But mostly it helped with formatting, which is not at all a simple thing to do so the finished product looks 100% professional. (I wanted to do it myself this time, rather than take my sister hostage for untold unpaid hours, making use of her InDesign expertise.)

In addition, “Chuck” (Chatgpt) has walked me through “next steps” so that I do this relaunch right. The first suggestion was to go ahead and spend some money for a Kirkus review, because it is very well-respected and if I have a good review (and I will, I am sure of it) it greatly increases the chance of getting into bookstores and libraries, which is my main goal now (especially libraries.) So I sent it in to them yesterday, and will be getting the review back no later than October 26th. This will hopefully be closely followed by another percentage payout from the Boy Scout settlement that will allow me to invest a bit in some visibility and selling tools for the book. (Kirkus has these advertising platforms that look promising.)

Now I can finally turn back to writing Opposite Shores. I might as well take maximal advantage of a slowdown in work, which is made more depressing by two very overdue checks for work already done that are sorely needed. Every year freelancing in the localization industry gets harder and harder. They pay half what they used to and then take twice as long to send a check.

Back when I got the last chunk of the Boy Scout settlement, I scheduled a trip to visit my dear friend Michael in Mason City, Iowa. We’re going on a sub-trip to La Crosse, WI, because I’ve always want to see the Mississippi. But mostly we really enjoy spending time together, we LOVE watching some of the same classic camp B&W movies at night, and doing a little art during the day. David is on a family cruise to Alaska for the week, celebrating his mother turning 90, and I declined to join, because it felt more like an immediate family thing. But I didn’t want to be alone here for 10 days, so booked my quirky Iowa vacation. (Even these short absences make me dread the day that one of us will one day be a widower. If it’s me, then my “plan” is to take an upscale sailing vacation for older gay men, and when I come back, get a dog. If it’s him, well, I guess he’ll be the one to realize how much more he misses me and our life together than he thought he would.)

As for Mahmoud, his ear is better. So much so that he was able to go swimming in the ocean - although even that can draw the attention of the IDF, as last week, when they shot up a beachside cafe for absolutely no conceivable reason and killed 6. And now, Defense Minister Katz has angrily issued orders to consider kite-flying a threat. KITE -FLYING. One of the only escapist pleasures for Gazan children, and they could get strafed for it.

The capacity of Israel for absolute dehumanization of Palestinians is as horrific as any we have seen in history, not the least of which is how Nazis thought of the Jews. It’s beyond words.

He is able to manage his day-to-day expenses with the solar panel, but I sent him the rent for September. Thank you Claire, for your gift. Helps a lot.

This is what Mahmoud saw this morning. It makes it impossible for any Gazan to have one serene day, or even a morning.

MCO 2026

Of course it would make me happy if you became a paid subscriber, but that’s not in everyone’s budget, especially these days. However you can always buy me a cup of coffee instead. Thank you.

So he is pain-free now, thank God. Just surviving day-to-day requires a herculean effort, doing it with an earache would put him in another circle of hell. (That’s how I think of Gaza now - circles of hell. Our help to Mahmoud had allowed him and his family to move to the outer circles of hell, but it’s still hell. And all those with no benefactor abroad—the vast majority—live many circles in.)

Something very interesting has happened though. But first, if you don’t know of him, let me introduce you to this British reporter who you may have seen covering stories from all over the world for ABC news, James Longman.

His analysis is always top notch, and he uses his personal platforms to cover in depth issues that ABC News may only barely report, like the pogroms of settlers on the West Bank Palestinians, which is getting worse and worse. On one of those posts, I thanked him for his coverage, and asked him if he might be interested in doing a story on an American who adopted a Gazan family, and with the help of his friends, have kept them afloat for over a year and a half. To my great surprise, he dm’d me and asked for the bare bones of the story, which I texted him, and he said he would indeed be interested in setting up a three-way call between Mahmoud (and Nada), him, and me, and as he speaks fluent Arabic (such an accomplished man, really) so he could translate.

I proposed it to Mahmoud, who is absolutely open to it. He had just finished one of his few “trauma dumps,” when he unloads his despair about life in Gaza, the gritty, prison-like feeling of living in a cramped, hot tent, and his lack of hope that he will ever be able to get married and start a family. “I don’t want to get married in a tent.” He also said he had no money for a wedding, which is a very big thing in Palestine, in most Arab countries as far as I know. I sympathized as best as I could, while countering that he is in the same position as a few hundred thousand single Gazan men and women, and didn’t they have a right to find a spouse and start a family, even with a bare-bones wedding the only possibility? Even if he grudgingly agreed, the whole process for finding a match occurs through parents networking through extended families, and not only is his father dead, but extended relatives have all been dispersed. All he can really offer is that he is an intact, kind young man who is industrious and willing to work hard. But even if that was enough, adding a new bride into his “cramped, prison-like tent” is really not even an option. I joked that he should date around instead, and get to know a few possible brides, and he thought it was a great idea, but we both knew this is about as likely in Gaza as vacationing on Mars. He can’t even talk to an unrelated girl without worrying about a visit from her older brothers.

War alters a lot of social conventions though, so who knows what’s in store for this culture. I do hope it gets less conservative, because Mahmoud said about the current system where bride and groom are mostly chosen and they barely know each other at the altar, “There are a lot of loveless marriages between two spouses who grow to hate each other.” Also, gay people need a different experience than what they currently live in Arab culture, that is certain. Progress on one front would entail progress on the other. Israel has made any progress impossible, survival is the first and only priority.

Anyway, I am awaiting for the schedule of Mr. Longman to allow for our call, and I’m hoping to encourage all who watch to give more to organizations that help Gazans, and respond to some of the many Gofundme posts from individual families. Whether to go as far as I have gone — well, you should probably have a much bigger income than I had/have. But my greatest hope is to be part of the process of humanizing Gazans, of getting listeners of all political stripes to think of all of the people there as individuals as different from each other as you or I. They are enduring horrific enforced poverty and war, with hopes and dreams that are being deferred and outright crushed. Because once you connect with them as people reacting to violence and oppression just as you or I would, you will see start to “see” Palestinians one human being at a time.

I don’t really have to note what anybody with eyes can see. James is awfully good-looking, which is technically neither here nor there, but combined with his severe smarts and excellent sense of humor (you have to see some of his other posts on Instagram) there is a touch of vicariousness in how I see him. One of my alternative lives (the ones that live in my head) was definitely as an international reporter with a degree in Arabic, plus the same fluency I have in French and other languages. Though had I gone that route, (30 years ago) I wouldn’t have been openly gay, like James, though I certainly would have had an extremely cute boyfriend, like his husband Alex. But NO, I had to live a story so hard to believe that GQ wrote about it. (I have a lot of new followers who may have no idea how I got to prison, so this article explains everything.)

I have posted rarely of late because I am doing a really close edit of the second edition of Ink from the Pen, finding and correcting little errors, and sometimes rewriting passages of the stories. (While also sticking in a subtitling job here and there.) It is a great joy because—can I tell you a secret—I love the book, I love my writing. I’m truly amazed at rereading the almost daily dramas that just stepped up and played themselves before me in prison. This edition I’m sending to Kirkus Indie for a review. It will cost $450 and take 8 weeks, but they actually give fair reviews and do not give raves just because it’s paid for. I should be finished with the edit this week, and then will send it along. I will delay the upload to Ingram/Sparks until I get a review back that might give me a great pull quote for the cover. October is my birthday month, so it seems a great time for a book launch.

I was also away for a week in Seattle visiting family. It was another perfect visit, seriously, including a day on a boat crossing the Puget Sound. So fun, so needed. My great-niece and three great-nephews are turning into capital human beings. (Though their parents generally would prefer they’re not on the internet, so no pix. But my 13-year-old great-niece, in particular, is turning into such a beauty.)

Instead, here is one of the results from a fabulous day of art caving, made by me.

MCO 2026

P.S. Of course I’d love a paid subscription, but most people are cutting back from that on Substack, because it’s a bit overwhelming. But if you appreciate this post, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee. It helps me help Mahmoud. And pay the rent.

The wave of Islamophobia in reaction to Mamdani and now El Sayed is sickening, and reminds me a bit of the reaction to Jackie Robinson that was so tenacious, even from his own team’s fans.

My relationship with Islam has changed so much since I became so close to Mahmoud and his family, despite being no fan of organized religion, and objecting to an Islamic culture that is problematic in relationship to women and certainly gay people.

But I came to realize fairly soon that focusing on those issues allowed me to not see Muslims as individual human beings with whom I have far, far more in common than anything that differentiates us. The love of family is very strong with me, but with Palestinians, it is exists on a whole other level, especially the adoration of children. Young men stay at home until they are married -- they don’t chafe at this tradition, because they love being with their family. I’m not nuts about the hijab, but my mother never went to church without a hat, and the mother of Jesus is never seen with her head uncovered. We pray to her. I had to look at a judgement I was holding about that I could just let go of it. (Though certainly support any Muslim women who don’t wish to wear a hijab.)

Friendship is almost as important to me as family, and much of the energy young Westerners pour into chasing the opposite sex is channeled into friendship in the Arab world, particularly between young men. I daresay that’s why gay Arab men feel less lonely than, say, a kid in the Bible Belt. Affection between men is perfectly normal and friends are extremely devoted to each other. (Which is why Mahmoud has interceded on their behalf many times and I have helped.)

Though religion plays no role in my life, it plays an important one in Mahmoud’s. It sustains all Gazans through the hell they are going through. Islam means “surrender” and I’ve seen the Shaats manage to live through the intolerable by constantly citing the will of Allah. This thinking used to rub me quite wrong, now I see it as a tool of continual acceptance of reality exactly as it is, and it allows them to continue living past even the most crippling grief. Turning their victims of war into martyrs comforts mothers in the same way American mothers were comforted by their boys “dying for their country” in World War II. Why should I begrudge them these beliefs? The Black Church uses “God’s Will” l in the same way, and it is actually a spiritual survival system of remarkable power. I may not believe in God, but I believe in the power of acceptance.

But it is the little things that I needed to see we have in common, above all the need to laugh and desire to make others laugh. Even through the tortured modality of translated text messages, it is clear that for both of us, laughter is paramount. But how often have you seen Muslims depicted as people who laugh as opposed to people who live to kill Jews and Westerners, incapable of even a smile?

Why the emergence of Mamdani and El-Sayed is so important is that here are two men who have allowed their personalities, particularly their senses of humor, to be on full display as they became public figures. They are extremely likable. (So is Ilhan Omar, in my opinion, but between misogyny and a general American inability to look past the hijab, she never broke through to the general public the way these men have.) Suddenly millions of Americans who know no Muslims in their personal lives have the feeling they are actually friends with two of them, and the impact of this humanization and individualization can’t be understated. It reminds me the effect it had on so many Americans to see gay characters on television they found funny and charming – there is a direct line between Will and Grace and the legalization of same-sex marriage, in my opinion.

Because of the racist backlash of the demographobic white majority, fearful that their coming shift into minority status will lead to the loss of economic and political power, (i.e., they fear being done to them what they did to others) all the phobias and isms are toxically surging, the efforts at mass deportation being the worst result. But time and culture are simply on our side. Hate and fear of the “other” seems to afflict few of Gen Z or even Millennials, who are very likely to have relationships across color and ethnicity. Muslims are still lagging behind other groups in being seen as individuals first and of a certain faith second, but that is definitely changing.

Whether or not El-Sayed wins in November, his campaign has kept the needle moving that Mamdani started pushing. It can only pick up steam. I’m reminded of how almost everybody cynically scoffed at the idea that the first black President was at hand (although we were delighted to be wrong.) Change has always been a process of two steps forward and one step back in this country – we are just in the middle of a big step back. If we can actually survive Trump’s attempts to extinguish democracy, our two steps forward look to be gigantic. And Americans who happen to be Muslim will be a huge part of that.

MCO 2026

P.S. Homophobia in places like Gaza is real, but nothing and any front has been able to evolve positively under Israeli occupation. It was not a given. I know three gay Muslims in L.A. personally, (one secular) and they (and husbands) are fully accepted by their family. I also know a gay Lebanese man here (and husband) also perfectly accepted by his family. Muslim culture can absolutely evolve on this particular issue, but this will have to be a function of political liberation first, whether in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan or any other Muslim nation.

Also, we have no way of knowing how many Muslims have come out to their families and remain loved and accepted by them. By definition, it remains a secret. One must remember that America in the 50’s and 60’s was a hellish closet for most gays and lesbians. Change can happen very fast and unexpectedly in the most conservative societies.

Conjugaisons

Je suis

Tu es

Il est

Nous sommes

Vous êtes

Ils sont

As we do a post-dinner walk

in Issaquah,

I introduce by sister-muse

to the joys of conjugating French

as you do something else,

like exercise or take a shower.

What a fast learner she is,

finding it instantly addictive.

I remember my teacher mother

walking through class

conjugating verbs.

How often I imagined

myself taking the professorial path,

and now, like so many other choices

I did not make,

it must live as a periodic fugue in my head.

I strongly suspect had I taught high school,

I would now now be burnt out,

and wondering why I did not pursue

my writerly dreams.

Je serai

Tu seras

Il sera

Etcetera, etcetera.

The ultimate conjugation, that.

We start with “I will be” when young,

and end with “I could have been,”

and in between, many doses

of “I should do this”

and then “I should have done that.”

But really, there’s no proof that you could have done

anything different than what you did, is there?

Regret is pointless,

but forgiving yourself is not.

The French use le passé simple

in literary expression.

Je fus, tu fus, il/elle fut, nous fûmes, vous fûtes, ils/elles furent.

I was, you were, he/she was, we were, you (plural) were, they were.

What an ironic name for a tense,

the past being anything but simple.

They should call it le passé compliqué.

MCO 2026

(This is a memory piece about my father I’m considering adding to the second, revised edition of Ink from the Pen. I like it very much, but the reaction of both sisters and a close friend were on the neutral side. So I’m hoping to get some more positive reactions from some more readers. I worked on it so much I could have conceivably over-edited it - I am not sure.
And yes, I cheated a bit by putting in pictures in the Substack version.)

When I was getting my meds one day at LA County Jail, my ever-observant gaze landed on the small brown box that dispensed the flat paper cups which, unfolded, served as receptacles we filled with water to down our pills. On the box, I read “Westvaco,” which was a Fortune 500 paper products company that my father used to work for in the 60s and early 70s. I smiled, thinking I would bet a pile of money that no one besides me in that sorry jail, past, present, or future, could tell you that Westvaco was once called the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. (That was its name when my dad started working there in 1961, and Westvaco was its name when my father stopped working there ten years later.)

When asked what his job was, my self-deprecating dad tended to say, “I’m a garbageman.” (He marketed the company’s large industrial refuse bags to factories and manufacturing plants.) I’m sure he had one of those anodyne titles like “Regional Sales Manager” that were ubiquitous in corporations in the 1960s, before globalization and computers made so many middle-management jobs extinct. It helped to have a college degree, but not necessarily-- my father only had an associate’s. More important was his ability to fit in with the grey flannel suit set, men whose frames of reference were the Second World War and the movies they grew up watching, in which their favorite leading men spoke in tautly constructed sentences, and except for the occasionally necessary monologue, generally did not go on about anything. (Effusiveness was the province of women.) These men rarely expressed strong emotions except under the influence of alcohol, when everyone could pretend the next day that nothing too personal had been shared. Talking about sports was their lingua franca, which my unathletic father did not speak fluently, but he knew enough to check the sports pages and memorize a few scores before getting to work every morning.

In fact, one of my father’s colleagues at Westvaco was Bobby Thomson, famous for hitting the walk-off three-run homer for the New York Giants in the bottom of the ninth in the 1951 playoff for the National League Pennant, otherwise known as the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” I couldn’t grasp at the time why my father thought that such a feat was an albatross around the neck of the former baseball player. Perhaps he witnessed the look on Mr. Thomson’s face when asked to retell the story for the umpteenth time and detected the wince of someone who had tired of being defined by one moment in his life, however stupendous.

There was a flip side to the same story, expressed by my dad on the occasion of our high school musical Guys and Dolls. The production’s director had cast an unlikely actor for the title role of Sky Masterson. Earl was a nondescript student, on the shy side, who came to the audition to accompany a friend. Somehow, he was cajoled into trying out, and Mr. Randall discovered he had a voice that, with a little coaxing, could carry a tune that reached to the back row of the auditorium. Over the weeks of rehearsals, Earl evidently developed a previously unsuspected stage presence, as well as a natural comic timing. He stole every scene he was in, earning him a standing ovation. My father remarked, “This is the greatest night of his life.”

I protested, annoyingly, as only a know-it-all ninth grader can. “C’mon Dad, he’s going to get married one day. Probably have kids. I’d say those will be bigger days for him.” But my father, who had never been the lead in the school play nor hit the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, and who would cite the birth of his children as highlights of his life, was nonetheless certain. “No, son, I promise you, he’ll remember this in a way he won’t remember anything else.”

Of course, we don’t know what kind of life Earl went on to live, but having been around the block a bit, I’d wager that my father’s certainty was merited. And he was probably right about Bobby Thomson, too.

We moved to Rockville, Maryland, in 1963, and for six idyllic years we lived in a brand-new development that had sprouted amidst former farmland, in proximity to woods and a creek and a field in which you could find golf balls that had been overshot from the bordering Lakewood Country Club course. My parents loved Washington, D.C., as well, and took us in to see museums and monuments regularly. They also began to meet a more cosmopolitan set of friends, who had lived and traveled in Europe and had often been born there.

My father was a bit of an anomaly, having a job unconnected to the U.S. government or a foreign embassy. He would have loved to do something more glamorous than marketing three-foot-tall garbage bags, but he had five kids and a wife to support and thanked his lucky stars he wasn’t selling encyclopedias door-to-door like he was when his fourth child was born only a few years before. (That would be me, in 1958, when we were at our very poorest.)

My father never found his calling in life, despite being an autodidact interested in just about everything. His difficulty in finding and pursuing a dream no doubt had everything to do with the day in 1944 when his own father, in a cemetery caretaker’s garage in Brookside, New Jersey, attached a hose from the tailpipe to the front seat of his car and breathed in carbon monoxide until he died. He left no note. He was a successful, happily married engineer with a paid-off house in the lovely town of Harrington Park, so his motivation in taking his life was not evident.

The cause of his suicide was primarily attributed by his older sons, my uncles Donn and Peter, to chronic pain from the permanent damage to his body caused by an accident he’d suffered decades before. In fact, because of that fall into a grain elevator in 1919, he’d recuperated at Bellevue Hospital in New York, where he increasingly enjoyed the ministrations of one nurse in particular, my grandmother, Hazel Beebe. They would marry two years later. So, the same misfortune that may have eventually killed him was also the cause of his greatest happiness -- a loving wife and the four children to whom he was a warm and affectionate father.

There were other theories about why he committed suicide, though, depending on which of my uncles you asked and how much they had to drink when you asked them. What is clear is that the uncertainty around why his father took his life, on top of the grief itself, wounded and disoriented his youngest son profoundly. Stephen was very much in need of a father’s guidance to successfully complete high school and continue on to a good college – where he would have unquestionably thrived.

He could only conclude that his father’s love for his family was not enough to endure whatever he was going through. Stephen took it personally, as only a 15-year-old can. Angry at his father and the world, he did poorly at Tenafly High School, cutting classes and getting into trouble. Finally, after much pleading on his part, my grandmother signed the papers to allow him to join the Navy at 17. The war was over, so he would be in little danger (his brothers had served and survived), but she hoped the Navy would give him the discipline and order in his life she couldn’t.

The Navy seemed to do the trick. After his honorable discharge, he got his G.E.D., then took coursework at Rutgers. Then, crucially, he went to Europe on the GI Bill. He fell in love with the continent, above all, France. But it was in Austria that he met a French woman on an international student camping trip, and that woman would become my mother.

It was not love at first sight, or second. By third sight, two months later, she was pregnant with the child of another American who’d been on the same camping trip, a man with whom she was not in love nor had any wish to marry. (Neither did she believe in abortion.) In a series of maneuvers worthy of a melodramatic and not very believable novel, my father turned into the white knight my mother desperately needed. He returned to the States and arranged a transatlantic marriage by proxy, so her son would not be illegitimate, and she would not be an unwed mother ineligible to teach.

The correspondence between my parents continued far after the arrangements were completed. Three years later, he proposed. She joined him in Chile, where he was working, and they married. He adopted her son, my older brother, as his own.

My mother married on the rebound (a romance only discovered by me from letters inherited after her death) and I don’t think her love for my dad really came to her until she gave birth to my brother Luke, followed a year later by my sister Sandra. There is something so beautiful and serene that emanates from the photos of him in Santiago, the handsome young father, so visibly at ease with these perfect small creatures. Those three years in Chile were a halcyon time my parents often spoke of with great affection, like an extended honeymoon.

Eventually they moved to the United States, where I was born, and then my little sister Erica.

Those early years were the happiest of my parents’ marriage. But providing for five children crowded out all sorts of dreams, and my father never went back to get a college degree. Without it, he could only climb so high at West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company or any other corporation.

We loved our house in the bucolically-named Glenora Hills, the neighborhood, the schools. And my mother had found a job as a translator for Comsat that she found very gratifying. So, when my father was promoted to an executive position and transferred from Maryland to New York in 1968, rather than uproot us, for the rest of the school year my father flew down to Dulles every Friday night and back up to LaGuardia every Sunday night, staying in a corporate apartment in Manhattan during the week.

I was happy to see my father on the weekends, but not terribly unhappy when he flew back to New York, at least consciously. So it came as a complete surprise when I woke up one night around 11 p.m., unable to stop crying. My mother rushed to see what was wrong. I remember quite distinctly feeling a complete disconnect between what I felt consciously and what my mouth was uttering. “I miss Dad,” I blubbered, over and over. My mother was equally taken aback. My attachment to her was well documented, my attachment to my father, had it been necessary to prove in court, would have lacked Exhibit A, much less B or C.

My mother tried calling him in New York. There was no answer. I imagine my father was out doing what he did most nights. After work, rather than watch TV in his hotel room, he went out for dinner and drinks with co-workers. Or perhaps he became a regular at a few watering holes, or just one, and drank alongside the other regulars. He was still young enough to manage a hangover the next morning at the office; probably joked about it with others having the same. I doubt very much he was ever with another woman, but he must have been to more than a few parties where the social lubricant flowed freely and the guests behaved accordingly.

When I was in college, my dad told me on one such occasion he had been propositioned by another man. I’m not sure what my father expected or hoped my reaction to be. Gratitude that he hadn’t hit the guy? (He made clear he had turned him down.) Were I to insert the scene in a novel, I would imagine a hesitancy before his refusal, stemming partially from a natural curiosity, partially from sheer loneliness.

I suppose telling me about this encounter was his awkward attempt to have the same kind of conversation we might have had about women had I been straight, but of course no one likes to imagine their parents in a sexual light, no matter with whom, so it made me uncomfortable if only for that reason. I appreciated the Kinseyan window into behavior between corporate white men in the late ‘60s, though.

The move to New York was probably long planned for the start of the Fall 1969 semester, but for years I’ve imagined it had something to do with my crying jag that night. Mount Vernon was a suburb on the northern border of the Bronx, with a “New Yawk” vibe in stark contrast to the genteel Mason-Dixie feel of Maryland. But there was no more NY-DC shuttle for my dad, in fact he now had a breezy commute to work. It was a 10-minute walk to the Columbus Ave. station on the New Haven line, then 33 minutes down to Grand Central, followed by an eight-minute walk up Park Avenue to the brand-spanking-new Westvaco building.

Once he left an important folder at home, and it must have been spring break or something, so I wasn’t in school. I was charged with taking it down to his office and returning on my own. This was an utterly cool errand for me, for I was already imagining myself 10 years hence, living on my own in “the city.” I loved the glass tower he worked in, looming so majestically among the other skyscrapers. I especially loved the sleek red macron over the “a” in Westvāco. I wanted so badly to be in one of the crisp suits worn by the handsome men with brylcreemed hair glancing at their watches as they made it through the revolving doors.

I enjoyed seeing my father’s office and being shown off to the secretaries, managing even to make them laugh, for I was that kind of 12-year-old. Then I descended in the fast and silent elevator, stepping briskly across the marble lobby and back out onto stately Park Avenue. My dad told me to make sure to take a good look at Grand Central station as I walked toward it, because it was one of the finest buildings in New York, a city very beloved by my father. (I had yet to see Central Park, which was an even greater source of family pride, given that Frederick Law Olmsted was practically his great-uncle, if you didn’t squint too closely at the genealogy.)

My dad was laid off in 1971. One sister says along with the whole division, the other sister is not so sure. Either way, he put out his own shingle as a “manufacturer’s representative” rather than seek to get another job with a large corporation again. I think he recognized that he lacked the sharp elbows required to rise into upper management nor did he have any taste for the office politics that only got more lethal the higher you rose. And he dreaded the inquiry for the transcript confirming his bachelor’s degree, which a mere decade before was considered merely a desirable qualification rather than a prerequisite.

His last stab at achieving a meaningful mid-life career change was running for Mount Vernon comptroller in 1972, this in a city politically dominated by Italian Republicans since the Second World War. I still remember the mustache he bore staring out from the brochures we helped him pass out door-to-door. Because he hitched his fortunes to a popular County Executive running for re-election, he somehow convinced himself he had a chance.

He lost by a wide margin. It was a before/after moment in his life, and no doubt had everything to do with his theory – told to me after a fair amount of bourbon years later – that his father had killed himself because he was “a failure.”

Before that election, my mother never really noticed her husband’s drinking. Afterwards, she began to. (It took us kids a little longer. Only years later did we realize that many of the aspects of his personality we rolled our eyes at were a function of how many glasses of wine he’d had.)

My mother had already started teaching French and Latin in Mount Vernon High School, which all of her children attended, sometimes taking her classes. She was the primary breadwinner thereafter. My father was responsible for fewer expenses, like paying the mortgage on a small cottage in the Berkshires, where we spent the summers for 30 years. The first thing he did was build a seven-sided gazebo on the lawn, because “no one builds anything with seven sides.”

He was right, it is exceedingly rare. I imagine him still at Westvaco, sharing about his weekend project with the execs around the conference room, and them looking at him quizzically, unable to grasp the utter quixotic charm of such a mathematically challenging endeavor. They would pretend to be intrigued, while thinking, couldn’t he just talk about the Yankees?

He also discovered a love of old books and bookbinding in his later years, which may have partially stemmed from the beautiful, limited editions Westvaco gave its employees every year at Christmas. They were genuine collector’s items of classic literature, printed on specialized papers with singular fonts and ornately designed covers and interior illustrations.

I have also come late in life to a love of book design, and I wish I’d found this hobby alongside him, when I still lived in New York. But I was in my 20s and thought of little more than my hyperactive social life.

My father kept up enough contact with the company to keep a steady supply of those giant industrial paper bags in the house. All the neighbors envied us because you could fit three regular grocery bags full of trash in each one before dragging the one huge bag out to the curb. They were so sturdy that my father once placed three of us as toddlers into one bag while he filled it up with a water hose. Which is probably the cutest super-8 film ever made in the history of super-8 films.

It has long been a family debate whether that was the most inventive use of the bags, or whether that adjective belonged to the time my dad came to the rescue of my harried mother one Halloween, for having no institutional memory of the holiday, she never thought to plan for this festive occasion in advance. My parents turned the bags upside down, cut holes out for our eyes and arms, then drew colorful faces and exotic appendages all over. Out we marched to collect candy in these otherworldly outfits, the envy of all the neighborhood children with mere store-bought costumes.

MCO 2026

This was the post on my friend G.’s Facebook page, which sort of surprised me because I thought I had unfriended every pro-Israel cheerleader I knew by now. I wanted to leave a comment, but I knew it would be an essay, and I didn’t want to deal with the swarm of his pro-Israeli friends who would have attacked me. I unfriended him, thinking to put it out of mind, as I try to avoid arguing pointlessly on the internet with people who are usually incapable of changing their mind on Israel, but it’s bothered me for two days. Whether he reads it doesn’t matter, it’s the argument he makes that I need to challenge, because I know there are a lot of liberal American Zionists who feel the same way, and some of them may be reading, and could be influenced.

Gay men have always been rankled when evangelicals claim to “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” Here, my ex-friend does the opposite -- he hates the sinner, but loves the sin. He thinks that by condemning Netanyahu, he can still embrace the state of Israel, as if one is somehow not a reflection of the other.

All young people in Israel (except for the Haredi, though that is changing) serve in the Israel Armed Forces. Almost all of them do some of their service on the occupied West Bank, and tens of thousands of them have now fought in Gaza, whether in the infantry, Navy, or Air Force. In addition there are hundreds of thousand of members of the reserves who have been called up for service in Gaza.

So virtually every single family in Israel has at least one member who has seen for him or herself what the army has wrought in Gaza, most being part of the destruction themselves. They know exactly what Israel is doing, for they have done it. The lucky ones may have managed not to pull any triggers, but they have seen the dead bodies, the starving children, the blown up houses. No doubt why the suicide rate of all veterans after coming home is quite high, and almost certainly under-reported.

So I assume, G., that loving Israel means loving Israelis, correct? You hate Netanyahu, but how about all of the Israelis who have voted for him over and over? How about all tens of thousands of members of the IDF who have implemented the war crimes I assume you decry – how do you feel about them? Only a tiny proportion of them have denounced the war and renounced having fought there. They accept the veneration Israeli society heaps upon them. They do not go on Israeli media to declare that they regret what they did in Gaza or on the West Bank. No, the death of 100,000 civilians is simply not addressed in Israel.

Do you love the 750,000 settlers who have made any prospect of a Palestinian state on the West Bank impossible? Who do you think they vote for, politicians who question their right to settle there or politicians who call the West Bank, “Judea and Samaria?” Do you love the settlers who have been torching Palestinian villages, taking their land and water and uprooting their olive trees, some hundreds of years old? How about the Israeli soldiers who stand by and watch, and sometimes protect them?

The Israel you love was founded on the theft of hundreds of thousands of square miles of land from the native population, who had been there for hundreds of years. In order to do this, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and turned into refugees. Do you think of those first colonists as brave fighters for a Jewish homeland because you saw Exodus? (And I do understand that for many displaced survivors of the holocaust, immigration to Israel felt at the time like their only option. But that doesn’t make their participation in the theft of Palestinian land and property right.)

Do you love the Israelis who are in Peace Now? That organization is defunct. The leftist parties have shrunk to less than 10% of the electorate. There is virtually no one in Israel willing to consider the option of a Palestinian state, as the almost-universal post-October 7 sentiment is “we sobered up”. There is almost complete indifference to the death toll of Palestinians, which is now 59 times the number of Israelis killed on October 7. 20,000 of the Gazan dead are children. Do you believe that one Israeli life is worth the lives of 59 Gazans? Do you love the Israelis who do?

I suspect you grew up in a reform Jewish milieu in which it was easy to love the sun-tanned Sabras in the land of milk and honey, to be completely seduced by the Hasbara propaganda that the most “moral” army treated the occupied Palestinians fairly and justly. (I grew up in the same milieu.) Did you ever hear about the conditions in Israeli prisons? (The American press was complicit in not reporting them, so it was easy not to.) Are you aware of them now? Do you know that innocent woman and children are often held indefinitely, starved and tortured? Do you love the Israelis who do this, or ignore it, or call it “blood libel” despite overwhelming evidence that it is all true?

You may have beautiful memories of a summer spent on a kibbutz – I don’t know. But if you went to Israel, I’m certain you never spent any time on the West Bank, where Peter Beinart, the Jewish progressive, reported it took him three hours to completely change his perspective on the occupation. There are seven million people between the river and the sea, and almost half of them have no say in their lives, have no right to vote. Arab-Israelis do have it better off, but are still treated very much like second-class citizens, given much fewer resources than Jewish Israelis. Their cities and neighborhoods are neglected, they have a sky-high crime rate and rates of poverty. At present, they don’t feel able to protest about Gaza, because they are afraid of ending up in one of those hellish prisons, and their silence is taken for acquiescence by the Israeli media.

So do you support the Israel that is basically an apartheid state, a system almost none of the Jewish population seems to object to?

The Israel of your youth no longer exists. Rabin couldn’t get elected dog-catcher in today’s Israel. It has become a mean-spirited place with a militaristic culture that has soured a people mired in grievance and self-righteousness, insulated from any perspective that challenges their sense of entitlement. The fact that it is nominally a Jewish state simply proves that Jews, being human beings above all, function as any group does with too much power and dominance over another group.

It’s quite the irony that their own behavior is what most disproves the tropes that undergird anti-Semitism. Nothing about being Jewish inoculates the Jewish people from becoming bullies of the worst order, despite their self-image of it somehow being behavior they are incapable of because they were once the most egregious victims of history’s very worst bullies. (Although that narrative is fading because Jewish victimhood does not gibe with the Israeli self-image that is incompatible with it.)

I too love the United States but hate the current regime. But those of us who oppose Trump are very much in the majority, and a great many of those who voted casually for him have woken up, and some of the base as well. Israel, however, may be on the verge of re-electing Netanyahu. When I argued with a Israel-apologist friend over a decade ago, I said that if I was Israeli, I would be on the far left, just as I was here. But you make no such distinction. You just wrap yourself in the Israeli flag, asserted blindly “I proudly and wholeheartedly support Israel.” Reminds me of those American bumper stickers one would see on truck bumpers during the Vietnam war that read:

No country who behaves genocidally should get a pass just because you remember how cool it was to your eyes that summer of your youth. It is a completely narcissistic political opinion that has no place on the social media page of a supposedly thinking and informed person. (I’ve read your other posts.)

Wake up, G. And everybody that is so attached to an old idea of Israel that it blinds them to reality of the current oppressive state.

MCO 2026

More was sent to me than Saint Barbara’s $500, but I am saving that for end of the month rent. The “I am grateful to you for everything” text you see cut off there was the beginning of several effusive texts directed at anyone who has given, and especially me, which make me blush so I’m not sharing. But it warms my heart every time and it should warm yours.

I told him to treat the family to a nice lunch with chicken, because I knew it had been a while. Two days later:

(Hala is the one with the adorable little daughter. Shahd is married, but childless. I suspect she and her husband are waiting, for obvious reasons.) Hala’s trepidation confirmed the reports I read every day indicating an uptick in Israeli violence. I am convinced they are trying to make the population feel so besieged and desperate that if they open the Rafah gates, hundreds of thousands will flee through them, forcing Egypt to create refugee camps in the Sinai desert. Of course, the continuing genocide-in-slow motion could just be sheer habit on the part of the IDF. Cruelty can be so addictive.

But this was the beautiful meal they made. It’s a famous Palestinian dish, Maqluba.

You can find plenty of recipes on line. Here’s one.

https://www.themediterraneandish.com/maqluba-recipe/

Just for fun, I asked AI to imagine me as a 27-year old Palestinian soccer player:

I know, hot.
So of course, I had to do the same with Mahmoud.

and then I asked if he wanted me to do it for any friends, and he said yes, for his friend Adi.

I like the idea of him flashing this to friends on his phone, as they gather to watch the final on Sunday. (If it is not postponed because of the smoke from the Canadian fires. It seems to me obvious that they should play it somewhere else, but I understand that it’s a very difficult decision.)

Wiping out 3/4 of my credit card debt is a dangerous thing because need is everywhere. You may remember Fouad Khader, he is a musician single-handedly creating and keeping a music school together, but his family has all kind of survival challenges. He is an amazing person, so I try to help occasionally. If you care to:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/rebuilding-my-life-studio-after-losing-everything-in-gaza

Personally, there is a real lull in work so I have really been at it editing the pieces I am going to include in the revised second edition of Ink from the Pen. When I write for 5 or 6 hours as day, it produces the most sublime high.

I am so lucky and have such a beautiful, easy life. Keeping in touch with Gaza makes it impossible to not feel that way.

MCO 2026

P.S. A few of you actually made a pledge to be paid subscribers when I turned on that option, but you haven’t actually done so. I would be so happy if you did. And if you’ve considered it, it’s always a good time.

(Illustration: Off The Fallen Angel (1847) by Alexandre Cabanel.
Window photo: Sandra Moreano)

(This is a reprint from a Huffpost I originally wrote in 2016, but the sentiments stand up and I wanted it as part of my Substack oeuvre. It’s on the angry side and was directed at certain Facebook post-ers, which doesn’t make my typical reader the target - so please forgive the use of “you.” These ICE killings have angered me so, and at their root is an inability of these officers to see these men they chase down and kill as equal human beings. I see this as part and parcel of a mindset that elevates one’s personal experience as somehow fundamentally different from the experience of most of humanity. It isn’t.)

We’ve all read these posts on Facebook you know, the ones in which the updater not only proclaims a hatred of cancer, but wants you to share it on your page too, enforcing his insistence with the guilt-inducing and completely invented (but truthy-sounding) statistic that “93 percent of you won’t repost this.” I have seen this less and less with time, thank God, as people have caught on to a) how blatantly manipulative it is; and b) how it does absolutely nothing to actually fight cancer. It just feeds the embarrassingly adolescent notion the poster wants to have of himself; that he is one of those few brave souls willing to go out an a limb and hate this deadly disease, dammit, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

This nonsense was taken to a whole new level this morning when I read an added phrase I hadn’t seen been before: “I know many of you do not give a hoot about this message because, of course, cancer has not touched you.” Oh yeah? You know that, do you? Have you polled all of your 593 friends? I doubt it. Because I can’t think of one person I know -- not one -- who hasn’t lost a loved one to cancer; been close to a cancer survivor; or survived cancer him or herself. In fact, the vast majority of everyone I know has had multiple run-ins with cancer. Given the fact that over 1 in 3 adults will get cancer in their lifetime, and over 1 in 5 will die from it, anything else would be virtually impossible.

But let’s say it was somehow true that even 20 percent of your friends were miraculously young or lucky enough to have not yet had a close encounter with cancer. What if we throw in AIDS, heart disease, drug overdoses, suicide, serious car accidents and Alzheimer’s? Obviously, we easily reach 100 percent coverage here. Are you seriously telling me that it is somehow more painful to be close to someone going through chemo than it is to change the diaper of a parent who can’t remember your name? That getting the call that your cousin has finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer is somehow more wrenching than hearing that your brother just shot himself?

I get that you may feel a pressing need to unburden yourself on Facebook when you’ve just left the bedside of someone who’s suffering though a disease that might very well be terminal. I get that you could stare out of the hospital window and see people going about their business and feel waves of irrational anger, thinking: “Don’t they know how hard this is? Doesn’t anybody care?” To which I say: Grow the fuck up. That person in the bed is going through hell, not you. Do you really think this is about your pain? When your friend finally checks Facebook, do you really think she wants to read about how bad you feel about her hair loss, or rather about how much you love her and why? What conceivable good could it do to shame people with the frankly stupid contention that some of them don’t feel bad enough about cancer?

Irritation at this kind of inane post might seem very last year, but at this present moment we are confronting the acute real-world consequences of a narcissistic culture in which people demand empathy while not extending it to others. That’s the logical extension of “I know many of you do not give a hoot about this message because, of course, cancer has not touched you” -- the supposition that we can only understand that which has personally happened to us.

That’s not only bullshit, it’s dangerous bullshit. The willingness to imagine the experience of others counts. It counts enormously. I’m not black, but I take the time and effort to imagine what it’s like to be black in this country, and in so doing, it changes how I perceive black lives. I see why #blacklivesmatter is necessary, and I get why I should vote for this candidate and not that one. Similarly, I have never had to cross a border illegally, live on a few dollars a day, or been homeless; and I have certainly never been bombed or tortured. But I have survived AIDS and buried a brother because of it, watched cirrhosis kill my father and seen dementia destroy the mind of my mother. (Should I mention my stint in prison? Nah.) These are my particular “greatest hits,” but the truth is that we can all extrapolate enough from our own experience to at least take a walk, if only in our minds, in another person’s shoes.

Right now we have millions of Americans who won’t even try to imagine what it’s like to flee for their lives with the clothes on their back, who can’t possibly conceive that praying to the Prophet in Cairo, Egypt is essentially the same thing as praying to Jesus in Cairo, Illinois. They’ve actually convinced themselves that they are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than by a gun-wielding American, despite one being 1,000 times more likely to occur than the other. This fear and dehumanization of the dark-skinned and the accented starts from the subjective delusion that the specifics of our individual experience somehow count far more than the reality of our common humanity. It leads to suggestions of “registration” and “mass deportation” that cause the poll numbers of pathologically-lying politicians to rise instead of fall. (Although the tide is turning on this, enormous damage will have to occur first, including at least a million deportations, many deaths and immeasurable trauma.)

It’s true that some leaps of the imagination require more effort than others -- but it doesn’t really matter if what we imagine falls short of their reality. What matters is our willingness to try; because it changes how we treat other people and how we urge others treat them. Understanding what it’s like to nurse a sick loved one with a deadly disease, however, usually requires no leap at all -- for most of us, it’s a recent memory. So, please, don’t post cut-and-paste tropes that feed a false narrative that we can’t really understand things we haven’t personally been through. The very notion of empathy is enough danger in this country as it is.

MCO 2026

P.S. I will never be able to accurately grasp what Mahmoud and his family are living through in Gaza. But even the poor approximation in my head has been enough to spur me into action. If I didn’t do that, I never would have sent more than a token, guilt-alleviating $25.)

I have been coming up with rent, and will continue to, which still leaves a shortfall of $300/month. Which is why I got a text like this. (He says “shy”, but the word in Arabic can probably mean “embarrassed,” “afraid” or “ashamed”. )

All this to say, all contributions welcome, but cumulatively, the need is much less than what you were sending before. (Of course, sending that much is fine, too, because $300/mo for me is no picnic. But the entire $600 on my own would mean charging up the credit cards again and I am loathe to do that.)

After this text, was a recording of a drone that is constantly flying over his neighborhood, looking for any excuse to shoot a random Gazan - a daily occurrence there. (I can’t manage to upload a sound clip, but it’s chilling.)

MCO 2026

@markolmsted at paypal. Venmo: Mark-Olmsted-4

This letter is from my father to his kids in the summer of 1969, when my mother took all five of us kids (8-16 in ages) to see her family in France. My father stayed behind in Manhattan to work (at Westvaco Paper Company, as you can see from the letterhead).
I wanted to share it, in these dark days, as evidence of thoroughly decent, tolerant, loving American father who was created in the very same cultural soup that forged our unfortunate President. It was a very curious and observant man who could spend all of July 4th walking through Manhattan and then writing his kids about it; proud that he was making sure they grew up knowing all kinds of different people, teaching them to observe and enjoy all the lovely texture in the world made by all of its diversity and difference. This letter serves as a reminder that most of our day-to-day experiences come overwhelmingly from our relationships with the people we love and who love us, and what remains under our control no matter who is in the White House is how kind we are to each other.

July 4, 1969

Cher Tous,

As I sit in my garret contemplating the wondrous photos of your Ulyssien voyage, I know that your view on life will be much broader that mine. To know that you know and love France as a (presque) native, know Africans as friends, black Americans and friends and even Republicans gives me a feeling of accomplishment.

I hope you are all learning a love of the non-material essential – to put it another way – if the warehouse where your things are stored burns to the ground – you will still have what’s in your mind and hearts. Have a ball and make sure everybody around you does too – especially my Simone.

Today I walked 12 miles from mid-Manhattan to its tip through deserted streets – asphalt canyons with a side of rococo architecture – streets which are usually filled with lemmings dashing to and fro in pursuit of de quoi vivre. Each block from my pad to the Battery slowly changes from textiles, to furniture, to lamps, hardware, clothing hippies, plumbing, sewing machines, banks, lawyers and high finance – interspersed with parks to finally the Staten Island Ferry and a view of the Statue of Liberty, On the way back I strolled through Greenwich village, which is full of escapist authors selling to them and those left in the old dilapidated houses who fail to understand today’s youth. Those who are less prepared to understand bear the greatest burden. For them the world is lost.

But here and there are people trying to improve and bring flowers to society – and it’s sometimes not the flower children. e.g, and Washington Circle (NYU) there were 4 over-30s who were planting flowers and a garden. There may be hope yet for the over 30s.

Knowing that I am loved by all of you and that I am trying my best in my job (I could do more off this job) gives me an inner security – which has resulted in others asking my advice (unjustified or not) –- which brings me to the lesson of Mom –- do your best for yourself – you will be a better person and the world will be better for it.

I suppose I’m trying to say, my dear children, is learn, take and grow to your fullest now – it will make me and Mom and you better and who knows, happier.

Your everloving, swinging (?) Papa or Dad.

SBO 1969

MCO 2026

I researched on Chatgpt, and it was confirmed that Gaza is on the list of places where sending crypto is scrutinized, because it needs to be guaranteed to their satisfaction that the intermediary receiving the crypto is not giving it to Hamas. Since Gaza is closed to the outside world, there is no way for a compliance office to investigate any intermediary, or someone like Mahmoud, who was the eventual recipient. For all of its wild west dark net libertarianism, the crypto-kings are infected by the same narrative propagated by Israel; all Gazans are either members of Hamas or supporters of it, and all Gazan children are future terrorists. They are all guilty until proven innocent, and yet there is no mechanism through which to challenge such an absurd lie. (Binance is run by a man who was pardoned by Trump, by the way.)

All these months, not wanting to get on any list, I sent money to Mahmoud’s contact in Britain, (who had set up the original GoFundMe page) and he forwarded it to Mahmoud via Paypal (which I couldn’t do from the U.S.) Then Paypal transactions were shut down by Israel as well, so Ajay (the Brit) started using crypto. So far, it’s gone through – perhaps he sent much smaller amounts that didn’t trip any alerts in Britain, as my $4000+ did here.

A friend of Mahmoud’s is desperate to receive money from abroad, but Ajay will have to be the intermediary for him. I can’t try crypto again. I don’t need the FBI knocking on my door.

Then I got this text from Mahmoud:
Yesterday I was at the beach. Two people were swimming next to me. When they came out of the water to rest on a bench, they were attacked by a drone right in front of my eyes. The horrific scene made me dizzy and gave me a severe headache.

He did have the presence of mind to film the aftermath, though apologized to me afterward for sending me something upsetting. Upsetting? I want this to upset people. I want everybody to continue to be very upset at what Israel is doing. There is no conceivable justification for the random strafing of people desperately trying to find a little bit of peace at the beach. The cruelty is unfathomable.

On the left a map detailing the reduction in the border of the Warsaw Ghetto., and on the right, one showing the continuing strangulation of Gaza, The Nazis might have settled on the final solution, but if any countries had willing to take the Jews of Europe, they would have gladly let them all emigrate. The Israelis plan to expel the Palestinians from Gaza, but if no one will take them, don’t think they are considering their own final solution, via starvation, or a few convenient epidemics. After all, why waste such a good head start?

On a brighter note, David and I had a truly lovely weekend in San Diego going to his brother’s step-niece’s Sweet Sixteen, and also having a night out on the town in Hillcrest. Much needed fun. Unfortunately the day after our return, I got a nasty case of pink eye that has both eyelids swollen and is very unpretty. I’ll spare you a picture, but it is improving with an antibiotic ointment.

MCO 2026

The first chapter imagines the second meeting of my parents, while flashing back to how they first met, on a international student camping trip in Austria two months prior to this scene. My mother has just discovered she is pregnant with a man she met on that trip — not my father, who she didn’t view romantically yet at all. Since it’s all on the first page, it’s no spoiler to say that she went right from the doctor’s office to a flea market - “in a complete daze” is how she told the story, and ran smack into my father. Without this fateful meeting, I wouldn’t be here today — nor me nor my sisters nor their children and their children. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“What an idiot!” she lambasted herself, as she made it her way down the hallway. “What were you thinking?” She hadn’t been thinking, of course, which was such an odd thing to say about herself, who was nothing if not a thinker. She thought obsessively, analytically, psychologically – and most would say, far too much. But when she was on the cusp of passion, the opposite was true-- rational thought had been known to abandon her completely. This had certainly been case with Rip, but far from an adequate explanation for why she chose to visit his tent in July in the first place, knowing full well they would make love.

I thought this scene was going to be three pages, and it just kept expanding, not just outwardly but inwardly, meaning instead of just adding plot, I also kept adding emotional and sensory detail. The magical thing is how easy I found it to experience the thought process of these two individuals, who were years from becoming my parents so really must be thought of as characters. It is impossible to know how close I got to the way it actually was, the important thing is that the reader experiences it as believable and authentic. But it doesn’t hurt that I had scores of conversations with my mother about this time, plus I’ve always understood how she thinks — because it was very similar to how I think.

I spoke less about this time with my father, but there were snatches of conversations, and occasional anecdotes that proved very valuable. He was three years younger than Simone, far less self-assured than he wanted to be. But I think if he read this he would say, “Yes, that’s exactly how it was.”

Steve had spent the spring at a language school in Grenoble, but was far too restless to see more of Europe to stay in one place. He’d preferred to bicycle from charming village to picturesque town, keeping his expenses down by offering help to a farmer here and there for a day or two, in exchange for food and a bed for the night. He would be amazed at how delicious the most simple peasant fare was -- a basic potato-leek soup, tomates farcies and a roasted chicken would be typical fare. The wives got quite a kick at being complimented as if they were grand chefs, indeed to be complimented at all. Around the dinner table, he found it nearly impossible to parse the impenetrable regional accents, but they loved Americans, both for liberating them from the Germans and the Marshall plan that saved them from penury and starvation.

It helped that Steve was the quintessential jeune homme sympatique. He had an absolute gift for entertaining little children as well, happy to take them for rides on his shoulders or read them a story before bed, making intentional mistakes so they could delight in correcting him. He learned more French reading those stories than he would have in any language school.

So those little teasers are to explain my relative silence of late. I’m writing!

Mahmoud is well, he says he’s making enough money to manage, including being able to buy this gift of fruit for his cousin’s wedding.

Through all this, I’m trying to start the process of getting Ink from the Pen on the Ingram/Spark distribution platform, which is a precursor to writing libraries and asking them to add the book to their collections. I don’t know why I didn’t take this step years ago. Say what you want about Chatgpt, it is very helpful for laying out the steps for this kind of undertaking. It de-intimidates process. (But I won’t use it for any creative writing.) Getting it in libraries will be transformational. (It’s already in two, in Oregon, which was completely unbeknownst to me! I think a Facebook friend got them in there. But she passed three years ago, so I can’t ask.)

I had subtitling work all week, made so much easier because I can watch the World Cup in the background, which I so love every four years. But I have an unexpected respite from work this weekend.

My to-do list awaits.

MCO 2026

(The tranquil sunset does not indicate actual results of this path)

The prompt started with an example of four paragraphs, each a mini-short story around a particular person or subject. (Hers was four mothers.)

This was mine.

Four Roads Taken/Not Taken

Road Actually Taken:

My mother wants me to spend my senior year in high school in a French lycée, to gain total fluency. She thinks I am brilliant enough to pass the “Bac” at the end, which would count for 2 years of American college. She doesn’t know I am gay, and I agree to go because it will be easier to keep it a secret there. But I end up meeting a 28-year-old man, and when my mother comes to visit, all is exposed with maximum drama. I use that as the basis of my award-winning junior narrative at NYU Film school.

Road not Taken #1:

I don’t tell the ridiculous lies in letters home that René is Renée, nor do I leave the cool (if crumbling) apartment in downtown Montpellier to live with him, and our relationship doesn’t screw me up for years. I stick it out in the lycée, staying a second year to eventually pass the Bac. When I return, I jump right to Junior year at Stony Brook, then get a doctorate at Yale and end up as full French professor at an Ivy League college. Coming out to my parents goes much more smoothly at 21 than it did at 17.

Road not Taken #2:
I push back against my mother’s plan and counter with one of my own. I will go to Yale, which I have the grades for, and improve my French in courses for two years, before doing my Junior Year Abroad in France in Aix-en-Provence. But I will major in Theater, and apply to the Yale School of Drama graduate program. I will teach French in the early, lean years, but eventually have a Tony Kushner-like career as a playwright and screenwriter.

Road not Yet Taken but Still Possible:
I write a novel premised on the fantasy that St. Peter gives me a do-over, in which I can relive my life aware of all the mistakes I made in this one, so I can avoid them. The fictional me lives a hybrid of Roads Not Taken 1 & 2. In my new life, I make just as many mistakes, just different ones, but I realize they feel foreign to me. So I start making as many old mistakes as I can over again, because I feel more myself with my old regrets.

It becomes a bestseller.
—————————————————

(I realize my visual doesn’t really accurately represent the last possibility, but “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda” is a trio one can’t break up.)

And I did make a stab at the last alternative, but as a short story called “Mr. Olmsted’s Regrets” that some of you may remember. I do actually think it’s a great premise for a full novel, though, and one commenter agreed with the encouraging words, “Write it!”

She is one of my favorite regulars of this group, her prompt answers are excellent and she’s always very supportive of mine. How could I take umbrage at her comment? So I just responded, “It’s #5 on the list.”

At the risk of sounding churlish expressing what went through my head, I have heard “Write it!” so many times - coming from my very well-meaning husband, for example, more times than I can count. What it implies is that I’m flailing around, looking for an idea, and the last bit impeding my taking action on this giant project are the right words of encouragement. That is never the case.

The reasons are complicated that I have not actually written another book since Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir. Three years were tied up in the optioning of the GQ article, and my pursuit as well of writing umpteen drafts two screenplays. I wrote a children’s book and collaborated on two others. But mostly I have been working 40-50 hours weeks for the past 5 years, just to keep my head above water financially. (And Mahmoud’s, as it turned out.) Arguably, I should have spent far less time blogging for Huffpost, Medium and now Substack over the past 2 decades (though getting the Master’s at Mount St. Mary’s was wholly productive and quite time-consuming), not to mention my time was questionably spent on all those countless hours on various social media, especially Facebook. But as someone who will never go door-to-door getting signatures or working the phones, writing is how I oppose the increasingly toxic political direction of this country, and I am driven to do it. I wish I’d broken through to a wider audience, but I didn’t. The closest I came was this meme I created which got reposted fairly widely. (Viral? Not sure it was that, but really don’t know how far and wide it went.)

Oh yeah, I also love coming up with amusing observations and witticisms on Facebook, because the “likes” give me instant gratification I get for no other writing. Sue me.

Lastly, I am a terrible TV addict. After a day of subtitle editing, my brain is pretty taxed, and I like to relax with David choosing between the best of network, cable, Netflix, HBO, Apple TV etc. (I choose shows for the good writing, and study it.) Often enough, after dinner, I have to go back to my paying work, but not often enough do I get up from the TV to work on a short story, or the ongoing grand-family-memoir, or screenplay. Mea culpa on that. (I do my reading listening to audiobooks at the gym, which is never time wasted considering what both do for my physical and mental health.)

But there is no lack of belief in myself or in my talent as a writer. There is a frustration that the need to work so much as I have has made it impossible to write on a daily basis with any regularity to achieve momentum, the kind I found absolutely indispensable to the completion of Ink from the Pen. I’m trying to rectify that now, and have actually been working on “Opposite Shores” at least 2 hours a day. I have to be very no-nonsense with myself, while remembering that slow and steady wins the race.

Whether these are reasons or excuses I leave to you to decide, but what I definitely am not is a forlorn wannabe writer who just needs someone to give me a nudge. I have never lacked motivation, and certainly never ideas - of which I have, if anything, too many. But I do absolutely fall short in the discipline department.

And yet, when there is a deadline and a paycheck attached, I have been known to work on an urgent subtitling project until 2 in the morning. What can’t I do that for my own writing?

The truth is, I had expected at this point in my life to have an agent, an advance to live on while I worked on the next book or screenplay, or at the very least, certainty that whatever I was writing would be shopped around and seriously considered. I would have been on a book tour, had reviews in Kirkus or even the Times. I’d have royalty checks from a streaming series, and a helluvalot more paid subscribers to my Substack. (If you’re not, please consider an upgrade) I find it very hard to find the discipline with no certainly that what I’m working on will be any more than a self-published volume that sells maybe 700 copies and gets 60 Amazon reviews. (Very good reviews, but not exactly The New Yorker.)

It is my greatest fantasy to be able to write 4-6 hours a day and put out a book a year, perhaps get a screenplay optioned or produced every other year. It is my ultimate Road Not Taken Yet.

Against all odds, this ultimate realist/pessimist still believes it can happen.

MCO 2026

P.S. And I don’t think you’re a subscriber, but if you are, A., please don’t be hurt that I went off on a little on your comment. I greatly appreciate your support and understand exactly how you meant it. I am a bit defensive because I am 67 and made a lot of bad choices that mean I am not the literary success I know I could have been. (Although, ironically, it was the consequences of the worst choices that got me what literary success that I have had. Oh life, you are a playful devil.)

So here’s a gander at this beautiful thing, slightly damaged but 70% working. (That’s Mahmoud’s shadow taking the picture.)

This shows what it does. (The battery was also quite extensive.)

Mahmoud made $20 the first day, $30 the second, then $32 and $36 in the two days following. I think at full capacity, he might be able to make up to $45, maybe $50 a day. Of course that’s working non-stop for 10 hours or so and extremely tiring, so I suggested he hire one of his friends every other day for five hours or so, to give him a chance to nap or go shopping or just be able to run to the bathroom. If he paid them $10 for the shift, that’s enough to buy the bare minimum in food for a family, so he can be a godsend. And they’ll get their phone’s charged free of course.

After listening to Peter Beinart on his substack read a letter from a friend in Gaza about the horrific conditions there, I had this exchange with Mahmoud. That’s me in green.

It breaks my heart that he would be “embarrassed” as if somehow it is his fault. But I am grateful that he allows me to imagine a better version of the life than they are actually enduring. It’s not as if I haven’t done all I can possibly do at the point. I am powerless over what the world and the United States are allowing Israel to do to Gaza. And even that rage I have to let go of or it will consume me.

So I concentrate on how happy Mahmoud is to be working and making money, and what enormous financial pressure has been lifted from me. My glass is indeed more that half full.

And I have been writing every day on Opposite Shores, and I hope to share the opening chapter soon. So my cup actually runneth over.

MCO 2026

But writing three hours non-stop and getting into that buzzy creative flow where everything around you disappears and there is only the story -- that hasn’t happened since writing Ink from the Pen, which practically wrote itself in 6 months that I remember as a beautiful blur, when I wrote every day.

Creators of all kinds will know this feeling well. It’s the opposite of Writers’ Block, or Painter’s Block, or Composer’s Block or whatever block you might suffer from, hopefully temporarily.

There is a lull in work but money in the bank for a little while. I intend to take full advantage.

For creative inspiration, I went ahead and designed a book cover with a working title (not at all locked in.) The cover is probably far too busy, (I got a bit carried away) but it gives an idea of the world I intend to create, and putting it together serves as a kind of chapter outline, at least in my head.

MCO 2026

P.S. Mahmoud has his solar panel but spent the day setting it up and so will have to take a picture tomorrow, when it’s sunny (our tonight). I think this benchmark deserves a dedicated entry.

The other story he told was of his incomprehension that any gay person could wear a “Queers for Palestine” t-shirt, because “don’t you know they throw gays off buildings there?” Admittedly, it is not possible to be “out” in the same way we are in the United States, (except in the Bible Belt, where it is increasingly difficult and always has been) but we actually don’t know how many queer Palestinians are quietly out to their families and still loved and accepted. Queer people find each other, as they always have, everywhere. And I would point out that in the 25% of the Israeli population that is Haredi or Orthodox, there is zero ability to live openly as queer person. They will be shunned or exiled if they even try, even though it is well known that within Yeshivas relationships between boys exist in the same way they did in English public schools in the last century, (and still do.) But just as is common in the Bible Belt, they try to ignore or suppress their feelings, thinking marriage and family will “cure” them. We simply don’t know how many have left their communities to be “free”, it is a taboo subject the religious community will not address. We don’t know how many married men furtively continue to meet other men or have ongoing relationships. (Some of Mahmoud’s texts to me are sometimes so tender, but I don’t think he’s gay. Certainly there is affection between straight men we don’t see in the west, and I think that allows many gay men to feel an outlet for their feelings.)

But the image of Israel as a paradise for gays is seriously overblown. Particularly as it does not apply to gay Palestinians who live in Israel or are part of the undocumented there. What Mossad does to gay Palestinians is blackmail them and turn them into informers. (see the article below) So much for “paradise.”

Lastly, we’ll never know what kind of Palestinian society might have evolved absent Israeli occupation. Within the Palestinian diaspora, there are many out queer people, particularly in the United States. Being Muslim is not determinative, and even conservative parents end up adopting the mores of their new countries, like the U.S. and Britain, for example. There is also an underground scene in Iran, Iraq and Jordan, even Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, lesbians and gay men find each other and enter marriages of convenience. A Palestinian state may have been massive strides toward enlightened attitudes had it been allowed to exist, just as Israel itself did.

This post dismantles “pink-washing.” (It is well-researched and footnoted.)

DAGGERS

They were here. They were Queer. Free Palestine.

I’ve been seeing drag queens in their sequins and bodices running around pride parades asking queer people if they are Pro-Palestine and if they are, how could they be queer and support a country that is so anti-LGBTQ. Then they bomb (ironic) the attendees of pride with facts about how progressive and pro-LGBTQ Israel is, that Tel-aviv is gayer than New…

Read more

a year ago · 84 likes · 8 comments · DAGGERS

Now for the good news. My check came in and along with your unexpectedly stupendous generosity, (over $3,000!) we will be able to send Mahmoud enough for the solar panels. However getting on a crypto exchange and getting money from the bank into the crypto exchange has required a very steep learning curve, and jumping through so many hoops you have no idea. I thought I was “there” and then my bank declined a crucial transaction. The basic problem is that banks have become hell bent on preventing fraud and evidently crypto of any kind immediately raises a red flag. (I have done so many two-factor identifications I swear I’m going have arthritis in my fingers.) Tomorrow I have to brave a possible long wait time on the phone (I gave up after 45 minutes today) and find out what the hell is going on with the transaction denial. Then I will have to send a small tester, then somewhat more, making sure the middleman hands each portion owed to Mahmoud. (I’ll send $100, then $500, then $1000 etc.) So I think it should take a week all told. (The time difference makes it a little more complicated, as well, as work projects can come out of nowhere and have a very tight deadline.) After that I will only use the account if some unexpected emergency arises – like a hospitalization. But I’m glad I figured out the basics. (Well Chatgpt and Binance customer service were quite helpful. Just time-consuming.)

There was a day of fasting Eid al-Adha (the “Festival of Sacrifice”), commemorating the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son in obedience to God. And after these observances, there is gift-giving and relative-visiting. Nada received these clothes from Mahmoud, but really from us. I love her so much. Mahmoud’s like a son to me, and she’s like a granddaughter. I hope to send her to medical school somewhere one day.

MCO 2026

Fortunately, enterprising Gazan middleman have successfully set up crypto accounts, and this is the modality with which I can continue to help Mahmoud. Crypto makes me nervous, but it will be a one-time thing, as my long-awaited second chunk of Boy Scout settlement money will be appearing in my bank account any minute. As I have shared, I will finally be able to send Mahmoud enough to buy a solar panel and battery that will set him up in the business of charging cell-phones – a vital service for Gazans, and very lucrative for the few who have been able to buy panels or had them before the war began. Concurrently, he is learning how to cut hair (his “tuition” will be charging clippers and the salon owner’s cell phone for free). So he will have two sources of income (the hair will take a while) surpassing what you and I have been sending him, hopefully by a lot.

The cost of this panel is quite substantial. We kept hoping Israel would let more in as part of humanitarian aid and prices would go down, but that has not happened. On top of it, the crypto middleman’s fee will add 20%. So: $4000 for the panel and battery that goes with it, and $1000 for the crypto middleman. In total: $5000.
I just don’t see any other way. I can’t keep spending $1500 or so a month (which is killing me), nor can I cut them off and put them in an immediate, life-threatening crisis. Neither is a choice I am willing to make. Doing this is far less stressful. (And in 20 years Gaza will hopefully be rebuilt and thriving and I will visit Mahmoud and his wife and children and they will treat me like an absolute king. And any of you, too, if I tell him you’re a friend of mine who gave during the darkest time they ever knew.)

Excepting five recent donors, (Kevin, Nance, Helaine, Erica and Barb), I am asking anyone who has never donated or already donated to give one last time. And it will be the very last time I ask, as Mahmoud will finally be one of the rare Gazans who actually has a sustainable source of income. He is unbelievably excited at the prospect. Apart from a very understandable desire to work for a living, he is extremely anxious to never have to strain the finances of the utterly crazy spiritual uncle in America (and his friends) who he still can’t believe adopted him, his sister, mother and (disabled) brothers, and sometimes whole sets of cousins or friends in dire need. (I can’t believe it either.)

I’ll never know what would have happened to them without our help, but I do know we were the difference between an existence that would have been like hell every day, and one that has been more like hell with occasional air conditioning. (Speaking of which, he is hoping to find a fan he can run with this solar panel to make the summer in a canvas tent a little less oppressive. Last summer was really torture.)

I’ll be very happy to raise at least $1000 and any more than that, I’ll be ecstatic. It will still be a heavy lift, but because this settlement is to compensate me for being abused in the Scouts, it’s different than money I might have earned from my own hard work. It feels like I’m sageing this money by using it to help the Shaats rebuild their lives. (Don’t get me wrong, I deserve every penny, but somehow sharing it this way helps expiate any remaining trauma that still resides in me.)

If you are unable to help again, please enjoy knowing that your past gifts have helped lead to this moment. If you have considered giving but held back for whatever reason, I hope you relent. (Affection for me is plenty enough reason. I love you, too.) There’s also the option of upgrading to paid subscriber, which would help enormously.

Below, I am reposting the Thank You song I had made for all the people who donated last year, along with its lyrics, in hopes of making you feel all gooey inside.

To anyone who gives, know I will create a personal song for you or a loved one, (they make great birthday gifts) or create artwork that inserts you or your loved one in a classic painting. This offer is good for as long as we are both on Facebook.

Whether or not you can donate, if you pray, please add to your prayers that Mahmoud’s family not be the victim of Israeli artillery or air attack. I am skeptical about the power of prayer, but humble enough to admit I could be totally wrong. It sure as hell can’t hurt.

Paypal: Markolmsted@gmail.com Venmo: mark-olmsted-4

P.S. If you think I am being grifted, I am not, but that’s okay. I might also wonder the same thing if I were you. But to grift me this well would have take a million dollar budget to pull off. It is simply not what happened. I have way too much video.

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Now, for some lighter fare. The Stunning Sentence exercise for this week was to write three economical but rich sentences. The examples were from a Issac Babel short story, In the Basement.

#1 In my boyhood, I was prone to lying.

#2 I came from a penniless and senseless family.

#3 Simon-Wolf’s copper voice was plugging up all the crevices of the universe.

These are the three I came up with:

#1: I was in the fourth grade before I realized my mother had an accent.

#2: Her homeliness transmuted into beauty the moment she stepped on stage.

#3 Madame Brest-Litovsk tried to get through the roll call, but the laughter coruscating through the dorm proved fatal to her composure.

The first got lots of reaction because “accents” is a good topic to incite a conversation. And almost everyone was pleased, in the third, by the unfamiliar but delicious word “coruscating”. (I had “ping-ponging” there, and then decided to consult a thesaurus. I was inspired by Nabokov, who sends me to the dictionary so often when I read him.)
What I thought for sure someone would remark upon, but didn’t, was the inspired name for the French headmistress, “Madame Brest-Litovsk,” which came from the treaty of the same name that ended hostilities between Russian and Germany in World War I. Doesn’t it just conjure up a battleaxe matron who the students never see laugh, until this moment when she just can’t hold back?

MCO 2026

I was approached three times in the past year, and I almost fell for it each time. The following account might help you avoid getting lured in by similar pitches.

#1
The first time, a certain “Krew Stafford” wrote that he had cultivated a significant circle of dedicated lovers of memoir, and he could raise the profile for my book, “Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir” by getting these readers to post reviews of it on Amazon. (In exchange they would get “free” copies of my book via a .pdf I would send.) I could choose three levels of engagement, but basically, more money from me would equal more reviews from this circle of trusted readers. (I told him I already had 50 reviews, but he assured me that if the reviews did not keep coming in regularly, it would not pump the algorithm necessary to get me listed on far more “Customers Also Bought” cross-recommendations seen at the end of every book purchase – the key to more sales.) “Krew” wrote very persuasively, in the tone of someone who’s life passion was reading and promoting lesser-known authors. (I didn’t recognize the AI-voice yet, but this was year ago.)

I was initially seduced, but have been around the block of life just enough to be minimally skeptical. I asked where he found these readers. (Evasive) Did he pay them? (No). Most damningly, why wasn’t he on social media? The only “Krew Stafford” I could find was a dormant Facebook account located in Vietnam, which fit no literary profile. (Could there really be two Krew Staffords in the entire world?) There was no Instagram, no website. Why not? He gave me some song and dance about wanting to be able to cite enough successes before setting up his website. I asked him to send the names of some books he had boosted, and he offered to put me in touch with some high-selling, prominent authors. They, or their publishers, would simply not have hired him for 20 or 30 more reviews when they already had hundreds on Amazon. He offered to give me their emails, and I imagined some confederate in Ho Chi Minh City with two invented addresses responding with alacrity to my requests for confirmation that they were clients – written by AI, of course.

I told him his operation did not feel legit, and declined to communicate further. But I probably gave him too much information on why I didn’t trust him, which he no doubt took into account when he approached me again after six months or so had passed.

#2

This time he tried with a different book of mine. (I did not, at first, realize it was the same person.)

“How Pear Pierre Got Unscared” is my children’s book that was also independently published, and he proposed a campaign to “strategically position” it on Goodreads. Again, AI furnished him with flattering prose about the book’s quality, and it was easy to agree it did not sell up to its potential. This time I was immediately suspicious, for the simple reason that no one was likely to find that book on Amazon without specifically being directed to it. (He had to have been researching my other titles, specifically.) Another element also stood out. He signed his name “Micheal Rogers.” Micheal not Michael. Though not impossible, this was a spelling I had never seen and hinted at a non-native English speaker inventing it.

The signature on the email was accompanied by a photo of a hairy-armed looker that was very conveniently attractive to a gay man, but when I right-clicked to save it, the label was “professional” – suggesting a stock photo plucked from the internet, or conjured by AI.

And beneath it, was a footer: Micheal Rogers writes honest, emotionally grounded stories, about life, growth, and the quiet battles we all face. His work speaks to anyone learning to heal and become who were they were meant to be. And yet, no one title for that author, spelled that way, showed up in an Amazon search.

There was no doubt by then this was another scam, but I was enjoying gathering evidence, so I clicked on Micheal’s full email, (the one between the < >) and I read MichealRongers @ gmail.com. Rongers, not Rogers. I’ve seen many people adopt quirky first name spellings, but misspelling their last name? Even five-year-olds named Kowanieczki will manage to spell their family name right.

I told him I had no budget right now for his service, but thanks for reaching out. Only then did it occur to me that this might be Krew Stafford 2.0. I had been just initially receptive to the first pitch that he might have felt if he only got a little slicker, and targeted a different book of mine, he could hook me.

#3
Last week, (so 6 months after #2, and an entire year since #1), he targeted Ink from the Pen again, and he had definitely upgraded his entire pitch. He used the name of a real organization, Share a Book, Find a Friend, in Virginia, that he “worked with”, and told me one of his Zoom book club meetings had discussed Ink as that week’s book— but months before. How he reeled me in emotionally was by telling me that in subsequent book club meetings, Ink from the Pen kept getting brought up by readers, mentioned for its “humor, compassion, and characters they kept thinking about.” Hmm, intriguing. People would keep bringing up a previous book in meetings discussing a new book? How flattering-- or a huge red flag. But he followed it up with a doubt-dispelling offer. Would I like to be the subject of an “author’s spotlight,” via Zoom, so I could meet these supposed fans who couldn’t get my book off their mind? That felt quite tangible.

I didn’t see how this could be a set-up for his financial gain, especially as he had said at the outset there there would be no cost to me at all. We agreed on a date in June, and I went to sleep thinking about being bathed in compliments by the readers who were so affected by my writing.

When I woke up, though, my spidey senses were tingling again. Why, for example, hadn’t he invited me to appear when the book club had originally chosen Ink as that week’s selection? And when he had asked me for some “promotional material,” (which he could easily just get from the Amazon book page) he prefaced that request with a phrase I always find suspicious. “To be honest …” followed by utterly pedestrian information. Why “to be honest”? It was the language of a conman, taking you into his confidence with that arm-around-the-shoulders intimate tone.

Dreams of “Author Spotlight” glory fading, I looked up the Share a Book site, in Alexandria Virginia. Real enough, it’s a book club that meets periodically in a rotating series of cafés. But all of the books were high profile – mine would have never been chosen. And there was no “Author’s Spotlight” feature. The group was run by a man name “Mikhail” (no last name.) For some reason that struck me.

And then the very last clue clicked. There was something familiar about the odd spelling of this guy’s first name, “Micheal”. I did a search in my emails for the specific spelling. Sure enough, the last pitch, from six months prior, showed up. Even in the most generous imagining, it was mathematically impossible that two different men named Micheal with with an “ea” spelling would be approaching me to promote my book. All doubts about his legitimacy were put firmly to bed, or rather, laid out in a coffin.

For fun, I cut and pasted his emails into Chatgpt, which pointed out all of the language classic to these grifts – especially the cloying flattery that most writers, particularly the modest-selling, are very vulnerable to. It also warned me to watch out for special requests for which I might be asked to spend money. One of them included “requesting promotional materials.” Check. (I found this exchange quite ironic, as “Micheal” had no doubt used Chatgpt to craft all of his pitch material in perfect English. It might even have invented the entire scheme.)

I wrote him a long email pointing out all of the suspicious elements in our communications, then thought better of sending it, and replaced it with a much more succinct and curt email. Why should I train him to avoid all the mistakes he’d made this time, so he could fix them for the next indie author he targeted? The guy had shown he was capable of improving his grift with each iteration. His next attempt on somebody else was much more likely to work with my feedback.

I was, however, unable to resist pointing out the really amateur mistake of posing as two different people, both named “Micheal”. And I couldn’t resist ending it with a flourish: “If you’d really read my book, you would have known why I went to prison, and you wouldn’t have tried to grift a grifter.”

Still, someone with a street-wise background like mine came fairly close to parting with some cash-- three times. My ego almost blinded me to the many clues, and I could easily have signed on to Zoom at 4 pm on a Saturday afternoon in June and discovered myself utterly alone, with no host even starting the meeting, and completely ghosting me as I tried emailing him. Who would I have have complained to? Zoom’s non-existent fraud division? (Still not sure how he would have made money off me, only that there would have been some request at some point.)

Apart from my need to get this experience off my chest, I thought I might save someone from falling for one of these scams. It takes owning one’s vulnerability to being told your book was way better than its sales would indicate. What indie author doesn’t think that? (It might even be true.)

MCO 2026

1. Write a story about something drastic happening. Go ahead, let it be a meteor falling through the roof!

2. Start your story with the drastic thing. Just launch right in! Then let us know the upshot, the aftermath.

3. This prompt asks you to write something thrilling. So give it a shot. Thrill me.

It is late, his husband has gone to bed, but he is still on the computer in his bedroom. A one-man Cessna arrows through his apartment roof, plunging right into his 2^nd floor living room, lodging in his floor as if it had aimed specifically for that spot.

It’s impossible to describe what that kind of shock feels like. In a millisecond, a drastic new reality supplants another.

The next few seconds move in slow motion. Mark doesn’t quite scream so much as take huge gulps of panicked breaths while emitting a sort of unearthly half-yell.
Some force outside of himself gets him out of his chair, just as his bleary-eyed husband comes out of his bedroom. In unison, they cry out, “What the fuck!?” Mark barks, “Get dressed, quick!” David runs into his room to do so.

Mark moves down the hall fearfully, sees there is a pilot passed out at the plane’s controls. Just as he gets close enough to touch him, David yells from behind.

“What are you doing, he’s dead! C’mon!”

“Maybe he’s not!” Mark yells back.

Suddenly, they both hear the sound of trickling fuel. “C’mon!” David repeats urgently, before he bolts down the stairs, telling himself Mark is right behind him.

Mark reaches out and feel the pilot’s neck for a pulse, finding one. He tries to shake the man awake-- but he only moans. Mark glances at the door, back at the man. He has the thought that the pilot’s kind of handsome, which no doubt has something to do with his desire to save him. Mark pays a very high price for pausing to notice the square-jawed good looks, as two seconds later, the leaking fuel explodes.

Fortunately, Mark’s death fulfills completely the fantasy he’s always had about how he’d most want to die. He is front page news, a hero, no less, for having at least tried to save the doomed, handsome pilot. And they use good photos of both men, thank God. Facebook is finally good for something.

What’s unexpected is that David makes a surprisingly articulate and telegenic widower, and with news cameras and microphones in his face, tearfully chokes out lines that Mark himself might have scripted: “You have no idea what we lost. He was such a generous and funny person. And a brilliant writer. Brilliant!”

David eventually gets a huge settlement from Cessna, but he lets profits from the giant jump in sales of “Ink from the Pen” go to Mark’s sisters. They would trade all the money to have Mark back, of course, but it sure does ease the pain.

MCO 2026

I get the objections to Democrats like Clinton, Biden and Harris from the left -- the insistence that they are basically corporate centrists who spout progressive rhetoric but would never really challenge the status quo of deep income inequality that is at the root of American decline. (I’m simplifying, but that’s the basic thrust.) Also, they accuse them of supporting foreign policy that remains fundamentally imperialist, and in the case of Gaza, genocidal.

What I don’t get is the recoil from the right that led so many Trump voters to conclude that they had little choice but to vote for Trump yet again. Over and over, you hear his statements like: “I didn’t like Trump, but I couldn’t vote for a Democrat, so I chose the lesser of two evils.”

Evil? What is it, exactly, they hate so much? Biden passed a ton of really good, useful legislation - extending Obamacare subsidies, the child tax credit, (that unfortunately had a time limit), and giant spending on badly needed new infrastructure-- including extensive investment on fighting climate change. No ruinous tariffs, and he got us out of Afghanistan (badly, but did American’s really care about the plight of Afghans?) True, sloppy immigration policy, but compared to turning ICE into the Gestapo, a humane dream.

He also delivered an overall thriving economy and very low unemployment. True inflation became a problem because of the effects on the supply chain of the epidemic, but was going down. Did they really forget living through Covid, and how much better Biden handled that than Trump? Harris should have sailed through in a landslide, just by promising more of the same.

And yet Republicans have managed to convince 40+ percent of the country that Democrats only want to tax you more and spend it all on on foreign aid, PBS, and welfare spending on the undocumented. Twenty million Americans were covered by Obamacare, which is finally popular, but no connection seems to be made with this being solely a creation of Democrats. Jesus, it has Obama’s name on it!

Every pundit chastises the Dems for bad messaging, warning them that can’t just attack Trump, they have to tell the voters what they are for, and in doing so, not to fixate on policies that make the eyes glaze over. Even Obama scolds Democratic candidates not to speak “gobbledy-gook.” I watch MSNOW almost constantly. Please name the politician who does that. Booker? Warren? Whitmer? Buttigieg? Talarico? Newson? Sanders? Crow? Murphy? (I could go on.) Who hasn’t got that simple-speak memo? Tell me. I contend that the goobledy-gook-speaking Dem politico is an urban legend dating from the days of Dukakis, but is no longer true for many years.

Trump had to get us into a ruinous war for millions of voters to “consider” voting for Democrats, but many, clearly grudgingly. Polled as a party, the Democrats are just as unpopular as the Republicans. What actual Democratic policies did they find so objectionable? Not giving tax cuts to billionaires and lowering the defecit? A rural health clinic within a half-an-hour’s drive? Aid to Ukraine? FEMA working? Reduction of insulin cost? Expansion of Medicare benefits? No government shutdowns? A well-functioning Social Security and IRS? No, they think that decent government they benefit from just happens magically – they don’t really think this their tax dollars at work.

The problem is good government is invisible, and its value only recognized when it is suddenly eviscerated. It is very, very hard to make sexy while it is working.

And if it weren’t for the filibuster, and Joe Manchin blocking its removal, we could have restored full voting rights, and passed other really transformative legislation. But the Democrats get no credit for that, because most Americans still could not tell you what the filibuster is if you put a gun to their head.

Again, I get what the left doesn’t like – funding and arming a genocide will be a bloody asterisk on both Biden, and, to a lesser extent, Harris, and I will never forgive or forget that. But who on the right objected to Israel’s bloody savagery? Three years in, some murmurs, finally, but most red-state voters still can’t find Gaza on a map, and only object to foreign wars if Americans are directly involved. Israel could never have murdered several hundred thousand Gazans without American taxpayer dollars, but that is down on the list of why they hate Democrats.

There’s a perception that foreign aid, writ large, accounts for a huge portion of American spending, when it’s a small fraction, and pre-Musk, was saving millions of lives. All foreign “aid” is not alike – but red voters throw it all in one big bucket, and never object to ridiculously high defense spending that is increased every single year. I don’t know how Democrats can explain all that without being accused of speaking gobbledy-gook.

Yes, it can’t hurt to find better ways for the Democrats to message. But the huge swing likely in the midterms is not going to be due to Democratic politicians finding a smarter way to communicate, it will be due largely to the implosion of Trump, and the Vichy Republicans who remain in his thrall. It will be due to the amount of damage they will continue to inflict that is so grievous, it almost seems intentionally designed to wake up red America and finally convince them that Trump is as toxic to the country as we have been telling them he is since 2015.

MCO 2026