MojoWriter Blog

I’m sitting at my neighborhood pub, drinking a “pickle Schlitz” and eating Zapp’s “Voodoo Heat” potato chips. The Offspring is playing over the sound system and on the TV is some movie where a girl is killing people and chopping them up. She’s taking all the pieces and sewing them together to make a friend.

I avert my eyes. I don’t want to see the rest.

Outside lightning is striking and thunder is making terrific booms. Various phones are making that high pitched keening that warns of severe weather.

Across the well used and seasoned wood, across from my little portable keyboard where I’m typing this into a word processor on my phone, there is a stack of coasters next to two packets of something called “Beer Clean.” Directly across from me is the large metal door to a large walk-in refrigerator where all the beer is, and on the silvery surface are probably 300 odd beer caps. I don’t know if they’re magnetically attached or glued. To the left of them is a collection of stickers. They’re beer related but the light is too dim, and they’re too far away from me, to read what they say — except for one: MONON.

Next to the industrial sized refrigerator door is the line of taps, ten of them, all with different handles. Above them are more stickers, and to each side are eyes. Giant googly eyes.

Hanging from the ceiling above the corner of the beer taps is a plastic human foot, severed, with painted blood and a section of bone projecting from the ankle. It’s affixed to the ceiling by a thick chain with a manacle — it looks like whoever it belonged to chewed off his own foot to get away.

Below that, facing away from me, toward the other section of the L-shaped bar, is a head in a jar. It kind of looks like a Howdy Doody mask and the liquid surrounding it is slightly red, as if blood had eked out of the head and tainted the supposed formaldehyde.

Directly behind me, hanging from the ceiling, is what looks like a full-sized human who’d been caught by a giant spider and wrapped in webbing, like real spiders do to flies. I don’t remember if there’s a giant plastic spider up there or not. I don’t want to turn around to look —

I was just interrupted by a tornado warning. We’ve been told to go into a shelter immediately. No one is doing so. No one cares. No one believes it.

We’re all too used to false alarms. Someone just went outside to check. Another person says there is a tornado by one of the local groceries stores.

I’m going to pay my tab and go home where I have a basement.

20 minutes later, tornado sirens still going off. I have gathered all three cats into the basement with me, and they are freaked out. Except for the oldest and smartest one, who is stoic about it all.

An hour later, and everything supposed to have been over and done with, the tornado sirens keep going off again. I have let the cats back upstairs, but now they want to come back down into the basement because it’s more interesting down here.

When I started this blog post I thought it was going to be a boring one. Strange how things turned out. As far as the storm is concerned, it’s past, and I now have a really nice sunset.

It’s a nice one, and I got a great deal on it because it’s used. I had been thinking seriously about getting a bike for over a year. Then, while I was out taking pictures along one of the local riverwalks, I met a guy who looked younger than me but was significantly older. He was on a bicycle. We talked for a good 45 minutes, and all the while, I was ogling his bike.

His was one of those electric-assist bikes that you have to pedal — it’s not like a moped — but it senses when you’re struggling and gives you some help, especially up hills. What made his bike special was that it didn’t use a chain but instead used a belt, and all the gears were inside the back wheel hub or drum.

I was sold. But after researching the prices and reading horror stories about the cheap ones, I balked. I could make that investment, but only if I knew I’d actually use it. So, I made myself a deal: if I got a regular bike and actually used it for a year, then I’d splurge and get one of the fancy electric ones.

At the local bike shop, I found a bike with the belt instead of the chain, and the gears all internal — everything low maintenance with no derailleur to break and no oiling required. Even better, it was used, so it was half the price of a new one.

I took a test ride, loved it, and bought it. They put a more comfortable seat on it, and I’ve been riding it around enough to become saddle-sore. On a whim, I bought one of those noseless padded seats, hated it, and immediately took it back off. I’ll tough out the saddle soreness. After all, I need to harden my backend anyway.

This is the first time I’ve been bike riding in over a decade. The last time was on rented bikes in a forest in Finland. Before that, we’re looking back over 30 years to when my ex and I would go bike riding with our kids.

My goal is to get in better shape, and this will definitely help with that. My secondary, more nefarious goal is to get to the point where I can bike ride to my neighborhood pub and not have to worry about driving a car home afterward.

You have to go with what motivates you, you know.

I know I announced a new book in January, my science fiction adventure All Things Strange and Dangerous, so having me release yet another new novel in early 2024 makes it seem like I’m amazingly prolific. The truth is, I work on fiction projects in batches and then take a break before doing them again. This will no doubt be my last one for a while.

This magical realism novel features Iris, the Goddess of Rainbows.

She’s a messenger of the creator, the All-Father, the god of gods. She’s coming out of a centuries-long deep depression after having her heart broken by Zephyrus, the god of the west wind. The All-Father has given Iris her first assignment since Shakespeare was a new thing, sending her to an Earth that has changed beyond all recognition.

And then there’s Cody Shane, a lowly agent of an unnamed secret government organization tasked with national security against supernatural threats.

He’s been assigned to track down an enigmatic old woman who’d committed an act of terrorism in San Francisco before disappearing into thin air — literally vanishing, caught on camera — and avoiding capture.

Following up on reports of “unusual rainbow activity,” Cody thinks he’s on yet another wild goose chase until he has a run-in with Iris, and the two realize they’ve been sent out after the same person.

The terroristic incident in question happened in another of my books, Eleven Days on Earth, where an old woman throws running chainsaws off the top of a San Francisco skyscraper. Several characters from that book make cameo appearances in this one.

The stakes are high. It turns out there are multiple ways our world could end, all of them happening at the same time, and there’s only one way to stop them. Iris chooses Cody as her earthly champion, and they team up to do exactly that.

Save the world.

She Comes in Colors is my 11th book of fiction, and with this one, I’m branching out into new formats. Not only is it available as an ebook and in paperback, but you’ll be able to listen to it on Audible as well, and — soon, if not already — it’ll be in hardback too.

Here’s the Amazon link: She Comes in Colors by Jerry J. Davis

So what else is happening?

I’ve invested in a new type of camera, an Insta360 One RS, which takes 360º images and video. Primarily for use in my day job, I’ve found it not only mind-blowingly amazing in its capabilities but also incredibly fun to use.

Having built-in AI image processing, it erases itself from reflections, and also erases its own selfie-stick and tripod, so that the images appear to have been taken by some sort of floating anti-gravity drone.

You can take one single picture with this camera, and then get a nearly infinite amount of various still images out of it, from just about any angle or direction. If you use it for video (which a lot of Tiktok and YouTube creators are doing) it’s the same, you take that one video and grab multiple shots, and get video shots that are almost impossible from any other type of camera.

Lord help me, I may start vlogging again on YouTube just because this camera is so fun to use.

New Storefront Coming Soon

The GroovyMojo web domain is being pulled away from Substack and I’m building a new website with it for GroovyMojo Media. Besides featuring signed copies of my books — which have been removed from my main website — it will also have custom notebooks, and other fun things. I’ll post another message when that is ready, so you can check it out if you’re curious.

I’ll also feature a backstock of proofs and advanced reader’s copies of my books, which I’ll be practically giving away, as they’re full of typos. They’re all signed and some are marked up from when I was editing. I’m not sure if anyone will actually want these, but I find it hard for me to bring myself to throw them away. I’d rather hand them out to anyone who wants to pay for postage.

Thank You!

In wrapping up, it’s evident that there’s a whirlwind of activity in my world, from the release of another new book to my branching out into new creative endeavors. I’m excited to bring you along for the journey. Keep an eye on your inbox for the release of my new website, and perhaps a peek into my newfound vlogging adventures. Thank you for your unwavering support and curiosity—it fuels my ventures into the unknown and the magical. Here’s to uncovering the extraordinary in the everyday together.

I am excited to announce my new novel is out: All Things Strange and Dangerous

I wanted to write a story that feels like something out of the golden age of science fiction, full of danger, adventure, romance, and comedy — reminiscent of grandmasters Jack Vance and Clifford D. Simak.

Desmond, poet son of infamous space adventurer Rumlan Clews, inherits his late father’s starship and, fleeing an arranged marriage, takes off to explore the galaxy — not realizing what he is getting himself into. Galactic drug smugglers, sentient atomic bombs, lethal alien robots, and unexpectedly, the love of his life.

One thing I accomplished in 2023 was finishing the first drafts of two new novels and then extensive rewrites of one of them. That one may or may not be out before the end of the year.

This smart and somewhat dodgy lawyer reveals a path for Desmond to escape his predicament, albeit fraught with legal ambiguities and the daunting prospect of navigating the perilous, uncharted expanses of the galaxy.

Embracing this gamble, Desmond defies his family and takes off in his father’s starship, deciding to follow in his father’s infamous footsteps. However, this proves far less glamorous and way more complicated and dangerous than he’d ever imagined, as this odyssey leads to dealing with ruthless smugglers, android assassins, deadly alien creatures, and most unexpectedly, love.

So yeah, that should be out either by the end of December 2023, or at least in early 2024.

There is the possibility that there also may be another book in 2024, but we’ll see. I have a sequel to No Such Thing as Mermaids started, but I’m not sure if it will be done next year. I have all the research done, the settings noted, and the cast of characters set, but I have restarted the beginning three times now. Before I can continue, I have to find the one that feels like the story I want to tell.

Alright, that’s what’s new! Two books are on the way, maybe even a third. I can’t wait for you guys to read them. Thanks for riding along with me on this wild writing journey. And let me know if you’d like to see some new short stories … I’ve been thinking of writing some of those in 2024, too.

The little girl woke up to see a man standing in her doorway.

It was dark in her room, and there wasn’t a lot of light from beyond the doorway. All the little girl could see was an outline of the man’s figure. He came forward into the room and spoke her name, and his voice was familiar. It was the voice of her favorite uncle. “How is my little sweetheart?” he asked her.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Okay,” she told him.

Her uncle came closer, but not too close. “I’m sorry to wake you up, but I wanted to say goodbye. I’m going away for a while, so I’m not going to be able to see you so often.”

“Oh.” The little girl didn’t like that news. He was the one who always brought her candies and new dolls. “Where are you going?”

“On a trip.”

“Are you going to be a long way away?”

“A very long way away. That’s why I woke you up, sweetheart. I wanted to say goodbye before I leave.”

“Okay.” She was just a little girl, and didn’t know what to say. “Goodbye.”

Her uncle seemed to want to come and hug her, but wouldn’t allow himself to. This was odd. He sounded very unhappy, too. “Goodbye my little sweetheart. You take care of your mommy, now. Okay?”

“Okay. Bye-bye.”

“Goodbye. You go back to sleep now.”

“Okay. Goodbye.”

“Goodnight.” Her uncle backed away from her, edging toward the door.

The little girl settled back into her bed, and glanced for a moment at the clock. She could just barely make out the time. It was after 11:00 PM, very late indeed. When she looked back up at the doorway, her uncle was gone.

The little girl went back to sleep.

In the morning, her mother was unusually silent, and spent a lot of time staring off into space. She’d burnt their breakfast eggs. While the little girl was eating, she suddenly remembered her uncle’s late visit. “Mom,” she asked, “where is uncle going?”

Her mother seemed shocked by the question. “What?”

“When he was here last night, he told me he was going away. Where’s he going?”

“Uncle was here? Last night?”

The little girl nodded.

“When?” There was an edge to her mother’s voice.

“It was really late. My clock said after eleven.”

Her mother went pale, and her mouth hung open. It took her a few moments to say anything. “Your uncle loved you very much. I don’t doubt he stopped by here to say goodbye to you.”

“Where’s he going?”

Her mother fumbled with a pack of cigarettes, pulling one out and putting it in her mouth. Her hands were trembling when she lit it. The flame wiggled and she had a hard time keeping it at the tip of the cigarette. “Your uncle went to heaven, honey.”

“Heaven?” The little girl didn’t understand.

“He was killed in a car wreck last night.” Her mother began crying, and so did the little girl. It wasn’t until a few days later, after the funeral, that she overheard her mother telling relatives in a hushed voice about the late night visit from the uncle. The other relatives gaped at the news, astonished, and gave the little girl strange glances. It was then the little girl learned that her uncle had died at about 7:00 PM that fateful evening, while driving home from a restaurant. The person who had come into her room at 11:00 PM could not have been her uncle, unless it had been his ghost.

That little girl was my mom. She’d told me this story several times. It was the first ghost story I’d ever heard, and it scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. Even now it gives me the willies, especially sitting here, alone, at a word processor at 4:00 AM … in a house that may be haunted. I’m feeling a chill as I type this, and little prickles all over my arms and at the back of my neck.

Is my Mom’s story true? She told me it was. Beyond taking her word for it, however, there’s no proof. That’s the problem with ghosts.

I was a kid when my grandmother on my mom’s side passed away. We were out camping at the time, so word didn’t get to us until we returned from the trip. My mom was devastated. Her mother had choked on a chicken bone during a midnight snack, and Grandpa didn’t find her until the following morning.

Years passed and the tragedy faded. We moved from Arizona to California, ending up in the bay area. We were there for about a year, and then moved inland to Stockton, which is at the heart of California’s central valley. I remember this part clearly, because we were living in a duplex. At least three, probably four, years had passed since my grandmother had passed away.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, my dead grandmother arrives via parcel post.

I don’t remember a whole lot about this grandmother. She’s only a vague image in my memory, because she passed away while I was so young. Being that she was only 14 years older than my mom, she didn’t feel she was old enough to be called “Grandma” so I was instructed to call her “Nana.”

Nana and her husband, my mom’s stepfather who they all called “Spud,” were only occasional visitors. I mainly remember them from Christmas mornings. Grandpa Spud is especially vivid in my memory because of the year he dressed up as Santa and scared the holy hell out of me.

So, years later, Nana shows up at our duplex in California in a white box. She’d been cremated and these were her ashes. Obviously they didn’t wait this long to cremate her, but I’m at a loss for why it took so long for the ashes to reach us. I’d hate to think they’d been lost in the mail all that time.

The ashes arrived addressed to my father, because Nana’s will stipulated that she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes spread via airplane over a specific forest in Oregon. My father, being a pilot with his own airplane, was the logical choice. They had all lived in the same area up in Oregon in the 1950’s, back when my dad was in the lumber business. I guess this forest was someplace dear to Nana; perhaps that’s where Spud had proposed to her. My father was familiar with the place. The idea of flying up there and taking care of Nana’s last wish wasn’t a problem. However, it wasn’t a priority either. After all, she was already years dead, and my father was a busy man.

Nana’s ashes, still securely sealed in the white cardboard box, sat around the house for a while. It would spend some time on the dining room table, or the coffee table in the living room. Or I’d occasionally see it sitting on the kitchen counter. Finally during a frenzy of housecleaning, Dad took the box and put it on a shelf in the garage. There it sat for quite some time.

It was after Dad put the white box in the garage that Mom started noticing weird things going on. She’d be cooking dinner, and have the oven set to a specific temperature. She’d turn away and take care of some other detail, and turn back to see the oven temperature knob was not where she’d set it. Puzzled, she’d set the knob back to the proper temperature, then later discovered someone moved it again. This was unsettling, especially since she was the only one in the kitchen the entire time.

Then Mom noticed that someone kept changing the temperature on the air conditioner. This also was odd because it was happening while my dad was at work and I was at school. There was no one else in the house.

These things had been going on for a while before Mom finally mentioned it. She didn’t seem frightened; she seemed bemused, almost comforted. It was familiar to her, because it was exactly the kind of things that would happen when Nana was around. Mom and Nana always argued about what temperature to set the stove or oven, and Nana always wanted it colder or warmer in the house than Mom did.

This talk of Nana’s ghost being in the house scared me, but I didn’t see any of these inconsistencies of temperature settings with my own eyes. I was 10 or 11 years old at the time. My toys weren’t moving around, and I wasn’t seeing anything strange. Nana wasn’t appearing to me in a doorway or anything like that. So I didn’t really believe it. It still gave me chills but it was fun to go along with it. Mom had always believed in ghosts. Ghosts were fun. Being scared was fun.

This changed when our little dog, Taffy, started getting involved. Taffy was a long-haired Chihuahua that my dad used to call “Ten pounds of love in a five pound package.” She was a tiny little thing, but she thought she was a ferocious attack dog. Taffy had no fear, and she was on guard at all times to protect her family. She’d bark at the mailman, at other dogs and cats, and especially at visitors that she didn’t recognize.

Suddenly Taffy had begun to bark frantically at things that no one could see. Especially in the late evening, she’s suddenly start growling and barking for all she was worth at a corner in the dining room, or at a spot in the hallway. It didn’t seem to be that she was barking at something she heard or smelled, because she had her eyes fixed on a specific point and all her attention was right there, right in front of her. She was barking and snapping at thin air.

This is something I witnessed personally. It was very freaky. I remember that it even disturbed my Dad. “Taffy!” he’d say. “What the hell are you barking at? Taffy! Stop!” He’d have to bend down and pick her up, and carry her away from whatever had her so upset.

Finally, there was the time when my dad was gone on an extended business trip, and my mom and I were up late and watching the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. We were sitting together on the couch, with Taffy at our feet, and Taffy started growling. By this time she’d gotten a lot less frantic about the whole thing, having become more familiar with whatever it was that upset her. She’d just stare and give a low warning growl.

On this night, she did more than just stare at a spot in front of her. Very slowly her head turned as she was growling, as if she were watching something cross the room from left to right. It was weird. I remember sliding over closer to my Mom. Taffy suddenly stood up, still tracking something with her eyes. She was pointing toward Dad’s rocking chair.

As we watched, and as Taffy continued to growl, the chair moved slightly. Just a little bit forward, and just a little bit back, like something was trying to rock in it. I remember the look on Mom’s face. She turned toward me to make sure I was seeing the same thing she was seeing.

I didn’t have to convince her to let me sleep in her and Dad’s bed that night. We slept with the lights on. As soon as my dad got home from the business trip, Mom told him that he needed to get Nana’s ashes spread over that Oregon forest. He needed to do it now.

Dad agreed. He took me along as copilot. Back then he had a single-prop Cessna 192 and it took a while to fly all the way up to Oregon, but he navigated us via familiar landmarks to where we needed to be and then had me open the white box. Inside was a thick plastic bag. I’d expected the ashes to be white and powdery, like the ones in the fireplace, but they weren’t. They were strange flat chips colored black and gray. After all those years, there was Nana — and now, as I’m writing this, when I think about Nana this is all I can see. Not her face or her voice, but these strange looking ashes.

In an airplane, you can’t just crank down a window and toss something out. The only part of the window that opened was this little five-inch hatch, and when Dad reached across and flopped it open, the wind made an unbelievable wail and it was like a tornado had been let loose inside the cockpit. I had a hole cut in the plastic bag, and I shoved it up against the open window hatch as my dad dipped one wing low and circled. Most of Nana’s ashes made it out the window, but a good percentage of it swirled around us in the cockpit. I even got some in my mouth. My dad was yelling and the airplane bucked and jumped. The ashes stung my eyes.

There was a sudden THWAK, and the window sucked the last of the ashes out along with the plastic bag. I shut the little hatch, and continued spitting out ashes. Dad leveled the airplane, and after a few moments began laughing. We turned south and headed back home.

After that day, Taffy no longer barked at invisible things, and the air conditioner and oven ceased changing the settings on their own. That cinched it for Mom. For her there was absolutely no other explanation than it being the ghost of Nana haunting the duplex, waiting for us to fulfill her final wishes. I think my father was convinced, too.

Me? I’m not so sure. I just remember those ashes swirling around me in the cockpit of the airplane.

Back in the mid 1970’s, during a period when my Dad’s business was going full blast, we had an office down in San Diego that was being run by a crook. We didn’t know this at the time, but we should have. As Dad liked to brag, this was “one of Nixon’s old dirty-tricks guys.” He enjoyed having one of Richard Nixon’s dirty-tricks guys on the payroll. I don’t remember his real name, so let’s just call him “Dick Headley.”

I hated the guy the moment I met him, and that’s a rare thing for me. He was somehow oily, slithery, in a social way. Smarmy and smart-ass. I could just tell that everything he said was a lie. He was the type to talk to you like a best friend and then insult and make fun of you the moment you walk away.

Dad realized there was something weird going on when a big check showed up at the office for work we had no record of performing. Another thing we noticed, is every time my Dad left to go down there, our office manager would call Dick Headley and let him know Dad was on his way. She did it, said another office assistant, even after my Dad told her not to.

We found later that this office manager was having an affair with Headley. We also suspect Headley was slipping her money under the table. It was a fact that she was spying on the main office for him.

What my father suspected was that Dick Headley was running side operations, using our employees and equipment, but pocketing the money. The check sent in for work we didn’t perform had actually been performed, on the side, and the innocent customer had sent the check to the wrong place. According to Headley, business was slacking down there. During one “slack” week, my Dad called me into his office, and with the door open, said, “Hey son, how’d you like to go trout fishing with me up in Oregon?”

I gave him a funny look. It was a Wednesday. He wanted to go trout fishing? In Oregon? “Um,” I said, “sure, I guess.”

“We’ll fly up tonight,” he told me, saying that we’d stay at his friend’s ranch. “I need to get out of here and relax.”

When we left for the airport, my Dad explained what was really going on. He wanted me to go with him down to San Diego, and sneak around without the office manager tipping Dick Headley off we were in town. I was going along to photograph evidence.

I’d never seen Dad so paranoid. He acted like Headley might have spies everywhere. We got into his plane, took off and flew North as if we really were going to Oregon, but after we got away from town he made a wide circle round to the south, and we followed the coastline down to the bottom of California. When we landed, it was at an airport he never used.

We rented a car that no one would recognize.

Dad got us a hotel room and we ate in, watching TV, and then he made some phone calls. One of the calls was to Headley, telling him he was up in Oregon and would be incommunicado for a few days. Still no work? No? Got any promising leads? Yes? Great! Go get ‘em!

The next morning, we started snooping around. Dad made phone calls to some of our established customers to see if there was any work going on. Nothing was brewing, although some said they’d have work for us later in the month. Then one of the people he spoke to said he’d seen one of our trucks working at another site. My Dad inquired where and when they’d seen the trucks working. They were working that very day, down in the San Diego shipyards.

Dad and I piled into the rented car and zoomed out there. We drove up and down the shipyards until we spotted one of our white vacuum trucks, removing sandblast sand out of the inside of a ship. Dad had me sneak up and take photos of the truck and the workers with my telephoto lens. I got a lot of shots, from several angles. I recognized the guys who were working.

Then Dad walked right past me, out in the open, and crossed the yard to where they were working. I followed, feeling nervous. What was he doing? I’d thought this was supposed to be a covert mission.

Dad asked them how the job was coming along. The guys looked freaked — they all had that “Oh shit!” look on their faces — and Dad poked around and asked how long they’d been working on this job. They all gave different answers, but it was clear it had been going on since Monday at least.

“Well, keep up the good work,” Dad told them, and he walked back toward the car. He was walking so fast I had trouble keeping up with him.

He drove in a rush across town to the local office, which was a small warehouse in a shabby business park. The place was closed and locked, and Dad’s key didn’t fit — Dick Headley had changed the locks. There was a window open, though, up on the second story. “Can you get up through there?”

“Uh…” I looked it over. “Yeah,” I told him, and started climbing. I had to get on the roof of a lower building and work my way over the top of a large sliding door. Swinging one leg through the window, I found … nothing. There was no second story inside. The inside wall, however, wasn’t finished — there were beams and supports that I used as rungs to work my way down inside. I unlocked the door and let my Dad in just as someone pulled up. It was one of Headley’s guys, a shop mechanic, coming back from lunch.

“Hey!” he yelled. “What do you think you’re doing! I’m going to call the cops!”

“Excuse me,” my Dad told him, “but I own this business.”

“What?” He looked unsure. It took him a few minutes, but he changed his tune, and afterwards was following my Dad around helping him.

Dad was confiscating all the paperwork. The receipts, the ledgers — everything. He went through all the drawers in the office, all the file cabinets, all the desks. When the guy asked him what he was doing, Dad said, “I’m performing an audit.”

We piled it all into the trunk of the car, and locked it up. Before we could leave, though, Dick Headley himself came driving up, very fast, like there was an emergency. Apparently, he’d gotten a call from one of the guys at the job sight. The car slid to a stop in the gravel driveway, and he jumped out. “Jim!” he said to my Dad. “I thought you said you were in Oregon!”

“I thought you said we didn’t have any work.”

“We just got some today. I was about to call you.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dick Headley was desperately trying not to lose his cool, quick-talking a mile a minute. Dad wasn’t listening. At one point, Headley began getting belligerent, like my Dad had no business sticking his nose into what Headley was doing. Dad, in one of his rare shows of restraint, just rolled his eyes and told me to get into the car.

Dad had an accountant go over the papers and receipts, and as it turned out, there were two separate ledgers. This didn’t surprise the accountant — this was common. Usually it was one real ledger and one for the IRS. In this case, it was one for the company and one for Dick Headley. Dad was able to take this down to the DA’s office and get a warrant. They used my pictures as evidence, too.

Dick Headley went to jail. At least, he ended up there for a few hours, only long enough to get himself bailed out. He still had some strong political ties, as strings were pulled and he was let off, after paying back part of the money he stole. It was only a small fraction, though, and then Headley walked away. Smirking.

We didn’t get a chance to fire the office manager who was spying. She quit the moment she heard what had happened. She was gone by the time we got back.

This is an excerpt from my book, All This and a Bucket of Toads

Some of you who may read my articles on Medium (or are friends with me on social media) probably know I just underwent major surgery to remove cancer. I’m still recovering, and on top of that, I came down with pneumonia, also from which I’m still recovering. The pneumonia was probably a complication of being under anesthesia.

I’m okay, though. Just have to heal and do my physical therapy. It hasn’t stopped me from writing. I have almost completed the first draft of a new science fiction novel and have a new magical realism novel planned after that.

For anyone who’s signed up for my newsletter, it’s … well. Broken. When I moved it to Substack, it was just supposed to be a newsletter service with a few extra features, but since then Substack has tried to become another entire … thing. And I’m not happy with it. To make matters worse, the domain name I use for the newsletter was migrated to another platform, which broke all the settings, so I can’t even get to it now.

Needless to say, even if I can fix that mess I’m going to end up going in a different direction. I mean, really, why is a “newsletter” better than subscribing to my website news feed and getting updates via email? I’ve been told that it’s better but I just don’t see why. To me it’s the same thing, but without having to depend on yet another service.

In a world that’s getting ever more complicated, I just want to simply. What better mantra for this chaotic day and age? Say it with me now:

Simplify.

Simplify.

Simplify.

I don’t know about you, but I feel better already.

Summer mornings, my 11 year old self would awaken and jump out of my bed, eat a bunch of sugary cereal, and then jam on down the street toward the train tracks to meet my friends. I had a Stingray bike with a tiny front tire, a banana seat, and a tall sissy bar. 5-speed, straight shift. Front wheel had a drum brake like a motorcycle.

The bike was “boss.” It “burned rubber.”

I’d race down the dirt of the levy road, dodging shadows and fallen branches, then leap over a mound of dirt and rumble down a rocky trail to the tracks. Turning north I’d follow the tracks to the second bridge where the creek was wide and deep. Usually I was the first one there, but not every time.

Randy would show up, sometimes with his neighbor Philip. Sometimes Larry would be there. Other friends came and went; I don’t even remember their names. All us boys were in-between the 4th and 5th grades. Lizard hunters, proto-motocross riders. Creek swimmers. Train challengers.

The railroad bridge was a quiet place. Overgrown with trees and brush, the creek ran gurgling at a good pace. There were mini-rapids both upstream and downstream, but right around the oily, wooden bridge supports it was almost a pond. Deep enough to swim in, and if I stood it would come up to my neck. Because of broken glass, swimming with shoes was mandatory.

There were always new things to see or find. We’d catch at least one snake a day, but rarely do anything besides hold it for a while then let it go again. Only exceptionally cool snakes would be taken home so that they could escape and scare the bejeezes out of our moms. But there were also alligator lizards, and skinks (with really pretty red or blue tails), dozens of bluebellies, massive bullfrogs, and the occasional swimming turtle. They had the tendency to bite, though.

The really fun stuff was more dangerous. One of our favorites was to jump our bikes into the water. I only did this when I brought my second “junk” bike out. We would zoom down the short hill from the tracks, up a big lump of dirt, and fly 15 feet through the air and into the creek. Another favorite was to huddle under the bridge as a train went by. There was talk of actually lying down in the middle of the track and have the train go right over us, but thank God no one actually tried it.

Then one day we found the hiding place of a genuine railroad hobo. Abandoned during the day, apparently this hobo returned at night to sleep in a corrugated metal pipe that ran under the tracks. There were clothes, cans of food, bottles of water, blankets, and a pile of really nasty, dirty magazines. They weren’t like Dad’s Playboy magazines. They were true porn: lurid and sleazy; wide open and shocking. We were fascinated, like deer unable to look away from oncoming headlights.

We didn’t know what to do with this forbidden treasure. We were afraid if we simply left it, it would disappear. But no one would dare take it home. We could all imagine the nightmare of it being found. So, it was decided we had to find a new hiding place for it.

We searched the surrounding area for a likely place. There were stacks of old railroad ties, and boards under grass, and areas strewn with piles of concrete. Finally we found what we thought was a perfect place: another corrugated metal pipe on the other side of a barbed wire fence, right below a small tree. It was perfect. It was about a foot wide and hidden by the tall grass.

The next day we came out and yes, the treasure was still there. We’d all pour over it, joke about it, ask each other question which none of us truly knew the answer (though it didn’t stop us from bluffing and stating our guesses as fact). We were boys trying to fathom the mysteries of women. We were trying to integrate our knowledge of our mothers, sisters, and girls next door with what we’d learned from the dirty magazines. It was difficult and ultimately frightening.

I think we were all a bit relieved when several days later we came out to find the pipe holding our forbidden treasure was under water. As it turned out, the field was a rice field, and the farmer had come and turned the valve, flooding the area with water from the creek. The water had carried the magazines out into the acres of rice paddies and they were obviously ruined and lost. Our only consolation was that the next day we were treated to the joyous show of a biplane flying right over our heads, dropping sprouts into the fields of water. The daring of the pilot earned our undying admiration, especially after he waved at us from about ten feet off the ground.

After that it was back to normal at the bridge. Snakes, lizards, bicycles, and swimming. Seeing how long we could stand on the train tracks while a train bore down on us. Stupid boy things like that. I’m sure we spent the whole summer out there, but when school started again and the weather grew colder, the place wasn’t as much fun. Things changed, bulldozers pushed the landscape around, and the old wooden railroad bridge was replaced by a new, modern, concrete one. And for some reason they cut down all the surrounding trees.

It was over. The next summer the tracks didn’t hold the same magic, and it took many years to find a place like that again. By that time, I was a teenager in a different crowd of friends, and girls were involved, and there was not much innocence left. People had jobs and responsibilities. Car payments had to be made. It was different.

We were doomed to grow up.

This is an excerpt from my book, All This and a Bucket of Toads