green light

I've lived this life for fifty years, been trying to solve it for forty-two years, and have been keeping a journal of the clues to this mystery for thirty-five. Notes on successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that surprised me, things that made me laugh. How to be fair. How to stress less. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to hurt less. How to be a good man. How to make life meaningful. How to be more authentic. Recently, I mustered the courage to sit down with that journal. I found stories I'd lived, lessons learned and forgotten, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, great photographs, and a whole lot of bumper stickers. I found a reliable idea, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, then, and still does: If you know how, and when, to handle life's challenges—how to cope with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call "catching the green light." So, I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, the story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my observations and visions, my wits and discoveries, my coldness and shyness; my grace, my truths, and the beauty of my brutality. Escaping punishment, being trapped, and getting wet trying to dance among the raindrops. I hope it's delicious medicine, two aspirins instead of a dispensary, a spaceship to Mars without needing a pilot's license, going to church without needing to be reborn, and laughing through the tears.