Hi there! We found each other. That’s great!
I’m happy you are here. It’s where you’ll find a brief summary of me, my books, my two podcasts, my travel videos, and an important announcement about money. Let’s get started!
About Me
I am a former rock & roll guitarist, classic car restoration mechanic, tropical fish tank cleaner, and business consultant with IBM. I split my time between Italy, Türkiye’s turquoise coast, and the road. I am the author of five books, scads of short stories, the host of two podcasts, and creator of other mad musings. I have three children and seven grandchildren. I share my life with the tattooed pirate lady, Fabiana Capuano.
My Books
Far and Wild: A Travel Memoir
My most recent book is one I co-wrote with the pirate lady. Called “Far and Wild,” it tells the story of how Fabi left her pleasant, small-town life in Italy and started to wander. For the next twenty years, she traveled through 100 countries, experiencing ship sinkings, vampire heads, ocean crossings, curious hyenas, mutinies, smoking volcanoes, manipulative men, and other jaw-dropping tales from the sea and land.
“Far and Wild” shows how a single woman can explore the world on her own terms, without fear, and with her eyes always on the horizon. But more than anything, this book is about the power of friendship and love.
Subscribe to Fabi’s free Substack to read excerpts from the book, plus see photos and videos from her journey. Better yet, pick up a copy from Amazon. The ebook is only five bucks!
Blue Skyways: No job. No house. No wife. A little money and 12 months of free airfare. One man answers his soul’s calling.
For Christmas 2018, my brother, a pilot with American Airlines, gave me a gift that became the experience of a lifetime: 12 months of free travel anywhere American Airlines flies.
Thus began a year-long journey that took me from the rocky coasts of Portugal to the hot sands of Morocco to the mangrove swamps of Panama, with many places beyond and between. In cheap hostels and the backwaters of the nomadic milieu, I discovered a treasure chest of colorful and fascinating people. I tell their stories and a bit of my own.
The trip became as much a spiritual and emotional journey inward as it was a literal outward one, and found me in a place those of you who are in the second half of life are likely to recognize.
With references to the philosophies of Carl Gustav Jung, Jesus, Bob Dylan, and the Buddha, Blue Skyways is an international romp by a man in his 60s with little more than a pack on his back, and still much to learn.
Making the Second Half Man: How I Became the Ogre-King
I was born in 1956 when most of the second half of the 20th century lay before me. It was a time when my country, the United States, was in crisis. Political assassinations, an aimless war, outrageous rock and roll, civil unrest, the sexual revolution, the hippy movement, feminism... these were all agents of change common to that time, and that affect how men like me show up in the world.
Men grow up in the shadow of our fathers, the Ogre-King we must eventually battle to become who we are. This is the story of my life, of my father’s, and of the men who entered the second half of life in the second half of the 20th century.
This book is published on Substack, and includes photos. You can read the first few chapters for free — subsequent chapters require a paid subscription.
Coming Up!
Coming up this year, I’ll re-release my first book, a novel called “Map of Dreams,” as a serial on Substack, available to paid Subscribers.
To investigate Carl Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious, a PhD student uses the Internet and advanced data mining software to gather and analyze dream journals from around the world. His research reveals odd, unexplainable patterns. Where one dream ends, another begins…even though the dreamers are strangers. Unique objects appear in one dream and reappear in another. When the student discovers the dreams interconnect to form a map pointing to a lost object, he is murdered, leading his deadbeat brother and estranged wife on an international race to recover the map's treasure. Along the way, the troubled couple are opposed by murderous forces of the religious underworld who want the map's secret lost forever.
Follow me on Substack to learn more!
My Podcasts
I’ve hosted two. The most recent (final episode posted in May 2025) is called the “How to Tour America Through Her Music” podcast, and the older one is called “Dance Past Sunset.”
The Music Podcast
Each episode takes the listener to a different region of the United States, where I feature the music and musicians who originated from that area. It’s a little bit of history, a little bit of politics, and a whole lot of music. It’s all Americana, and it’s all good.
The Death Podcast
The older podcast is called “Dance Past Sunset,” which had the mission to:
“Learn about death, a perfectly natural and unavoidable process, in a lively and open way so we are better able to accept it, plan for a beautiful one, and most importantly, embrace every precious moment of life as a miraculous gift to be savored and cherished.”
Every show featured an expert guest, including:
One who taught me how death shaped the lives and music of the Beatles;
Several who instructed me on the greenest, most environmentally sensitive way to handle remains;
A Wiccan mortician who taught me why we cannot be destroyed when we die;
A university trained linguist who taught “Spock” from Star Trek how to say death proverbs in Klingon;
A veteran hospice nurse who taught me how to recognize when someone is actively dying.
You’ll find all of those shows, including a list of my favorites, from the big orange button below.
Travel Videos
I post these on YouTube — lots of 60 second shorts about the places Fabi and I visit, and a few longer ones.
About Money
Most of the content I create (podcasts, blogs, music, books, films) is available online for free. The exceptions are all my books except “Far and Wild,” which I co-wrote with Fabi. For those, I ask what I think is a fair price.
I donate 100% of the proceeds from my book sales and paid Substack subscriptions to charitywater.org and Doctor’s Without Borders.