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AMONG MANY OTHER THINGS, IN MY NEWEST MEMOIR ONE WILL...

1.  Read my vivid memory of the time I had amnesia.

2.  Read about how a captain-to-be was drummed out of the Mexican army when he blew off his hand with a giant firecracker.

3.  Read as I savage Prentice Hall/Regents for discontinuing my book.

4.  Read and watch me lay waste to tall country crooners and their ridiculous hats as well.

5.  Read of smashed dreams and a sunken Swedish freighter.

6.  Read of how a devout Baptist was accidentally sent to Catholic heaven for four hundred years!

7.  Read how my parents followed a trail of blood and found me at the end of it!

8.  Read about how my dentist was afraid that he and I would be shot down together over Taiwan.

9.  Read how a cowboy bass player had classmates who liked to hunt while he only wanted to write poems about the animals.

10.  Read about how the same bass player started the  Paul is Dead  rumor in 1969.

11.  Read how my third grade teacher destroyed a classmate for outing me as an atheist.

12.  Read and learn that a frog pond isn't really a frog pond when it's a palm frond.

13.  Read about the whale and the popsicle sticks.

14.  Read about the hallucinogenic properties of heavily hopped India ale.

15.  Read about the demise of the green sunfish in Arizona.

16.  Read of how a girl sold a song to Bing Crosby when traveling in the family car.

17.  Read of how my brother discovered the legendary Samuel Eddy Crappie Hole.

18.  Read how Sonny Bono and I both got fired with the same telephone technique.

19.  Read how I broke my carburetor cable while flying a Cessna 150 over Texas.

20.  Read how to have a  Hemingway conversation  by using expressions like,  "You're a worthless rummy, aren't you?" "You're a miserable rotter."  Christ on a crutch, you bastard!  and "You say the most bloody awful things!"

21.  Read of the overwhelming fear publishers had that allowed me to sell them my books in the 1990s.

22.  Read about mysterious eels lying on the sand.

23.  Read about how the ukulele is the most underrated instrument.

24.  Read how I wrote down the introduction to Hoagie Carmichael's Stardust  in every key at the same time.

25.  Read a comparison and see examples of my father's penmanship at age eleven and mine!

26.  Read about fairy shrimp swimming in the rain-filled hoof prints of steers.

27.  Read about Gammarus desperatus a new species of amphipod found in Roswell New Mexico.

28.  Read about how Ranger Doug toured as a singer for nine months after losing his voice to a mysterious malady.

29.  Read about how I twisted myself into a pretzel in kindergarten.

30.  Read the shocking tale of what happened in kindergarten when I dug up an earthworm.

31.  Read how I was to shoulder a tremendous responsibility in kindergarten!

32.  Read the perfectly logical reason why I sent 17 letters to fictional people with names like Colin Haunchsquat and Rose Fish who lived on streets with names like Brisketslapper Avenue, East Spaghetti, Chillipunch Street, and Ferris Wheel Avenue.

33.  Read about how I sang  Prairie Lullaby  to Grammy winner Woody Paul because he couldn't remember the words to his own song!

34.  Read how I played my song  "Lorelei!"  to John Denver's guitarist who liked it so much that he invited me on stage to sing it with him!

35.  Read how I made Grammy award winner Joey Miskulin puff up in joyful pride with a single well-placed compliment.

36.  Read about how an alien from outer space put an end to bullfighting.

37.  Read of the Yaqui church in the desert that I found and found again forty years later burned to the ground.

38.  Read about a man who was always embarrassed because his crazy parents named him Jesus!

39.  Read about how I got in hot water by buying a stuffed iguana in Mexico when I was twelve.

40.  Read how a drawling drugstore cowboy fiddler wrote "Inertial, Viscous, and Finite-Beta Effects in a Resistive, Time Dependent Tokamak Discharge." to get his Ph.D in plasma physics from M.I.T.

41.  Read how God screws up big time and says,  No, no! It is I....I who should apologize! 

42.  Read of how a mysterious cassette tape of Herb Jeffries magically appeared in my guest bedroom and transformed my life.

43.  Read how I almost won a class prize but was disqualified for playing with my milk carton.

44.  Read about a student who thought that somehow her teacher had married the entire Parent Teacher Association.

45.  Read about the lyrics I made up in third grade for a song in class that weren't used and how I was finally able to share them with a classmate 54 years later.

46.  Read of how our business failed because we couldn't get ant lions to mate.

47.  Read of the remorse I felt after I had stepped on and killed forty cockroaches on a Mexican dock in 1963.

48.  Read about a treasure hidden in the desert.

49.  Read about an ancient 24-foot dug-out canoe that fetched loose off some lonely beach in Baja and drifted across the Sea of Cortez and onto the Mexican beach in front of our house.

50.  Read about my friend who disappeared one day never to be seen again.

51.  Read about my six-foot-six impostor from Alberta, Canada.

52.  Read of how snapping shrimp drove me out of the water in Guaymas, Mexico in the 60s.

53.  Read about the 90-year-old park ranger who liked to sing and who had a  treasured  friendship with my dad.

54.  Read about how I told a dental surgeon that he had bad Karma.

55.  Read about the blue-eyed man who was too black to be white and too white to be black and had to darken his skin with makeup to be the lead singer of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

56.  Read of how a schizophrenic French girl wrote an absolutely perfect description of the very same recurring dream that I have.