We Interrupt This Program...

..to bring you an important bulletin.

Nearly two years ago, while Bob was visiting from Japan, he and I were sitting out on the back deck of my home in Desert Hot Springs, just shootin' the breeze, reminiscin' about our past adventures, drinkin' a little yellowtail, one memory-salvo triggering another like fireworks on the 4th of July until the wee, wee hours of the morning. Then one of us - Bob, I think - said, 'This is such great stuff. We should do this online, start a blog site where we send it all out into the blogosphere, rather than having it blown away by the desert wind and end up as a dust storm in the Mojave.'

'Hell, yes,' I said, 'Let's do it. We'll call it The Blog Brothers, and we'll start with our earliest memories, and one after another, we'll swap stories just like we're sittin' out here on the deck; except you'll be on one side of the planet and I'll be on the other. After all, with the internet, who needs geography?' Thus was TBB born. The first post, called First Press Conference, was published on October 14, 2005, and included a photo of the two of us taken early in our hellraising careers.

The basic idea was that each of us in turn would gather together as many of our glittering memories as possible and present them in a somewhat linear, chronological way, without being too constrictive. At times the collaboration felt like a ping pong game in slow motion; one volley following another in close succession. The trajectory began with some of our earliest memories, and proceeded forward in time fairly consistently for quite a while.

Then, from out the blue, I suddenly rocketed forward in time by posting the first of my tales from a war zone called Manhattan, where I drove a cab in the late sixties. I knew it was pretty intense stuff, but I felt I had to get it out before my memories had faded. They were a bit fragile, as you will see. After the second installment, I began to think I had somehow changed the focus of the site, and by the third, I was certain that I had. It was as though I had taken a bone-jarring hairturn in a speeding yellow cab. Sorry, folks.

Since then, Bob and I have been discussing where to go from here. The original focus was supposed to be on our years together, and there were still many more tales to be told before those days ended. We both agreed that it would be best to pull the Instant Karma series off TBB, leaving behind links to a site where that part of my story will continue. The story gets pretty harrowing, and would leave a kind of radioactive dust over all the earlier, fonder memories. So, as of today, we will resume the tales of our adventures up to that fateful day when our trails led us in very different directions.

I'm actually looking forward to that day myself. I'll finally begin to learn a bit more about Bob's later adventures around the globe, some of which I haven't heard to this day. In the meanwhile, let's get back to the mythical city of Albany, capital of the Empire State. There's a lot to do, and there's no big hurry. As I said to Bob on the phone the other day, the only deadline we have for this project is that it has to be finished before we die. Now that's a deadline I can live with.

The Instant Karma series will now continue on a new site, called KarmaDance. Enjoy (if that's the right word); I'll be updating it as I get the stories done.