​When I was in college, they always told us to "write what we know." I always felt deflated by this advice. First of all, I was young and curious by nature and very aware that there was tons I didn't know, and I wanted to find out. Secondly, it's pretty much why, as David Foster Wallace said, why all the graduated writing students' oeuvre of work can be summed up as "my interesting life in a small college town."
 
When you ask the internet – that repository of vast information but little wisdom – who said “Write what you know"? It gives us Mark Twain. Or maybe William Faulkner. Personally, I’m super disappointed it wasn’t Ozzy Osbourne.
 
So, yeah. “Write what you know.” Said Mark. Or William.  
 
I really honestly don’t know that much about William Faulkner. I think I had a large brick doorstop of short stories around at some point, but it always smelled as dry as someone else’s nostalgia. His locus of operations, the South, the homey small town with its intrigue and local patois, I just don't have those cultural reference points. By contrast, Twain wrote about the South, but he wasn’t of it. He approached it more as a social excavator, using the characters and the language to get at something distinctly American. Something humble, youthful and self-aware without be self-involved. I share Mark Twain’s affinity for the West as well as an appreciation of the adolescent virility and unbreakable optimism of the American spirit. Plus, Mark Twain was funny. I like that arguably the most iconic writer in U.S. history was funny as hell. I like that he saw the best in us, even when he was making fun. There’s something distinctly likeable and American about that. I like Emerson, too, but not so funny. Hawthorne, Hemingway, Steinbeck, not funny. Poe, really not funny. Henry James – too much of an ex-pat to be even truly American.
 
But Mark Twain was, is and shall remain funny.
 
And this doesn’t mean he was a lightweight. His acute observations of the human condition, and the forces that grind us to pumice, were spot on. Probably some of the most memorable characters and passages in the American Literary history were written by Mark Twain. Among my favorites, Roughing It – the passage about him and his camping partners accidently setting the hillside on fire and watching the mountain burn while they sit in a rowboat out on Lake Tahoe comes to mind, as well as his description of seeing water from the point of view of a riverboat captain, in Life on the Mississippi. He says that once you see the currents of water you can never see just water again. You can't unknow what you know.
 
I know what he means about three things. I can't unknow what I know about Win and Water. Music. And advertising.  
 
But what a spinner of tall tales. He made a living out of lying.
 
“Write what you know,” indeed.
 
            ***
 
Mark Twain never went to college, and I don’t know if he would have appreciated it. He left school in 5th grade to become a printer’s devil, a colorful term for an apprentice. Interestingly enough, Benjamin Franklin had the same basic education – they worked as printers.
 
To be around words gives you something to read.
 
Samuel never went to Alaska, though he would have appreciated it. It’s sort of the American West, in overdrive.
 
If Marty Godsil and Sam Clemens were drinking together, at some point, my Dad would interrupt Sam and say “Just a minute, hold ON!, Hold on. Be quiet for a second.” And to silence everyone in the room he would then do that thing where he hits the glass with a spoon. Ding, ding ding! And then Dad would start to tell his story, starting slow and picking up steam like a half-crocked locomotive and not even Mark Twain, or James Joyce, the Pope or Moses himself hefting stone tablets fresh from the mountain could derail him.
 
Maybe he would tell you the story of how he and his brother Mike had to bury the dead cow on Vashon Island and how when they got all done there was just one hoof sticking out of the ground. Maybe it would be a story about the Olympic Regatta on Lake Pontchartrain in ’71 and how they tried to sleep in room in the French Quarter with no air conditioning, with cockroaches crawling all over them all night. Or maybe he we would tell a story of tribute to his mother Alice, who raised five children on her own during the Great Depression, and of how he was the first child born in Fairbanks Alaska, on January 22, 1932, if that gives you any idea of how many women were getting pregnant in Fairbanks, Alaska during that particularly dark cold piece of history. Regardless, my Dad would have no problem shutting down Mark Twain, bulldozing him under and telling his story. Because who gives a jumping frog’s ass what Mark Twain has to say, when Marty Godsil is holding the floor?
 
            ***
 
And if in the course of the evening, Mark Twain or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Tyson challenged my father to arm wrestling, my father would easily win. And if in retaliation Mark or Arnold or Mike, because he had been shown up, shut down and otherwise cajoled into submission, hoisted my Dad’s wallet and glasses in a bucket to the top of the mast of the sailboat my Dad would easily shimmy to the top, hand over hand, and get the bucket and bring it back down, slap everybody on the back and they would laugh and have another drink.
 
You know all those jokes about what a badass Chuck Norris is, right? My Dad never heard those jokes or heard of Chuck Norris. His film heroes were of an ancient and entirely higher order. John Wayne of course. Gary Cooper was a favorite. Randolph Scott. Will Rogers. But even though my Dad wouldn’t have known Chuck Norris from Chuck E Cheese, if Chuck asked nicely, my Dad would give have generously offered to show him how build a deck, disc sand the bottom of a racing yacht, build an outhouse, snake a drain and generally give him lessons in how to be a man. 
 
 
            ***
 
My Dad was the original, prototypical primeval giver of zero fucks.
 
            ***
 
So yeah, the other thing about ye olde “writing what you know”? Can we ever really know anyone or anything? How do we know we know?
 
We don’t know much about my Dad’s early years in Fairbanks, Alaska. Actually, it’s sort of embarrassing. First child born in Fairbanks, January 22, 1932. There was a picture of him and his brothers on a dog sled going to school. He also once mentioned that he really liked going out on the lake in a boat in the summer with his brother and maybe that’s where he and Uncle Mike’s love of the water started. My Dad was a completely obsessed racing sailor. My Uncle Mike spent his retirement sailing around the world in a boat he built himself. He was the second oldest and first loudest of 5, three brothers and one sister. The youngest was still a bun in the oven when my Grandmother took all the money from the till and headed south to the Seattle area – Vashon Island, actually. My Dad’s Dad, Dennis Godsil, Sr. was a terrible drunk and my Grandmother – though she never stopped loving him, it’s said, had had enough.
 
My father never mentioned his father once while I was growing up. I never even knew his name until I was maybe in my 30’s. I never saw a picture of him until maybe I was in my 40’s. And yet, all the stuff about the Godsil name, and the pride of the Irish. All my near-sighted moody Irish genes gave me, was asthma, a vicious allergy to alcohol, and a huge chip on my shoulder.
 
The luck of the Irish.
 
So I gotta say I’m kind of embarrassed that I don’t know a little bit more about Alaska. I just called my sister actually, to see if Dad had talked about Alaska at all. He told his story to Adam and Ava, my sister Dorothy’s kids. General stuff. The bugs were big. The winter nights were as long as the summer days. The Midnight sun makes big cabbages and mosquitoes to match. Being kids, playing with marbles and sticks. As my sister was saying this, memories of a summer I spent on Biorka Island outside of Sitka came to me. Everything was like the Pacific Northwest, but more so. Big mosquitoes. Big Douglas Firs. Big slugs. Even the raindrops seemed bigger. I travelled there with my Grandmother Alice. Uncle Mike who I guess was part of the Army Corp of Engineers was there with a small group of people maintaining a Coast Guard beacon for shipping. It’s off the coast from Sitka, which itself, I didn’t realize this, but is on a larger Island. All part of the journey up the coast – it’s actually even with parts of Canada; the province of British Columbia. Part of the set of islands that dangle down from the main body of what we think of Alaska on the map. If you want to, look up Biorka Island on Google maps. That’s what I do sometimes when I’m reading a book and it mentions a place I haven’t heard of.
Hotels, archeological digs in the middle of the Russian Steppe, Capybara Cafes in Tokyo.
 
Biorka Island has one rating, 5 stars.
 
I guess the Drunken Patriarch was tailor. Grandma Alice told me he could feel any fabric and tell you the thread count. That, and he was a drunken bum. Not much of a legacy. I guess they went to Alaska to seek their fortune, missed the gold rush by a couple decades, the depression hit the world, grandpa hit the bottle and Grandma bailed with four kids (Michael, Martin, Dennis and Susie) and one bun in the oven (the youngest, Pat). It went down like this. Alice emptied the till at the Dennis Godsil’s Menwear shop, jumped on a passenger ship down the coast. My father remembered them taking the inside passage, as cruise ships do today. They must have left about 1942 when he was about ten.
 
So Uncle Mike was the oldest. Quiet. My Dad always did the talking. So they were in effect, the same age and I believe my father because of his personality became the de facto number one. When they got to High School in Portland, OR my Grandmother intentionally split them up, so that Michael would find his own way. He went to Benson Polytech while my Dad went to Grant High. Uncle Mike had jet black hair all of his life, kinda squinty black eyes that gave very persistent rumor to the notion that my Grandmother was half Ute Indian. In second grade, when we were talking about our ancestry, I said I was an Eskimo, because I knew my Dad was born in Alaska and that my Uncle – to my eyes, anyway – looked like an Eskimo. The class laughed uproariously, and for the first time I felt the joy of making a crowd laugh. I wasn’t sure what they were laughing at, but I just went with it. For 54 years. My second grade teacher, Ms. Kimball, brought to conversation to a point by asking us all to go home and ask our parents who our “Aunt-Sisters” were. So I sat on the stairs and asked my mother who my “Aunt-Sisters” are. My mother said you have either aunts, or sisters, but not both. Probably said something like, do you mean cousins. No, teacher wanted us to ask you who our aunt-sisters are. Well, Aunt Karen is my sister, but she’s your Aunt. So this went on for what seemed at the time like an hour, or a few days. A long time. No, teacher wants us to ask you where we came from, where are Aunt-Sisters are from! Oohhhhhh Ancestors.
 
            ***
 
So my Dad was son #2. And then there was Dennis, #3. In a weird way, I always felt like I had more in common with Dennis than with my Dad. Dennis was named after Dennis Sr, probably not a great sign, as it foreshadowed a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol. Dennis was a high school teacher of English, often quoting Shakespeare, a man who loved literature and the outdoors. A little bit of a lost soul, but some of us like being a little lost sometimes.  In the Summer he would drive around in an older pickup truck that was kept in shape by the kids in shop class at the high school. It had a rather ingenious two-bunk homemade fiberglass camper on the back, laid up by Uncle Mike in his spare time.
 
Uncle Mike was an engineer. He spent his time building a 40 foot cruiser. It seemed like he was always building the same boat. When he got it done, he wrapped his career at the Army Corp of Engineers or whatever government outfit takes care of navigation beacons on remote Alaska Islands, and he set of cruising. He and his wife sailed the South Pacific for years. He finally settled down the Sea of Cortez, all the way up the end, where the Arizona desert and Colorado River gently tap this inland Sea. His black hair never grayed and stayed bristle straight and thick to the end.
 
Maybe all that time alone makes a man crazy. The internet got to him and he'd forward off-color conservative jokes. We didn't know what happened.
 
I'll remember his wife's name in a second.
 
When I was a kid my sister and I would spend summers with my Aunt Susie, (sibling #4 and the only girl), uncle Marcio and my Grand mother Alice up in Glenwood, Washington and Denny would show up there. Like me, Denny had asthma as a kid. Like me, he smoked cigarettes. Unlike me, I don’t think he every quit and his health was atrocious as he aged. I think he tried to get sober near the end and maybe he did. In his prime, he was a bushy eyebrowed, deep-voiced poor girl’s Cary Grant. ( My Dad’s description.)
 
If there's anything I've learned from observing sober guys in my cohert and then, I don't know, Brad Pitt? (positive) and my alcoholic uncles (not so good), you gotta take care yourself as you age. When Tracey and I first married we lived in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego. I'd see all the gay guys going out together at night. The middle aged ones looked okay, better than the cis-gender slobs at home watching football and complaining about their wives. I resolved to that I would never let myself go.
 
So, yeah, Glenwood Washington. Heard of it?
 
Glenwood, Washington is in the southeast part of the state of Washington. Beautiful, and under populated. Glenwood is in the shadow of Mt. Adams, which is shaped a lot like a Jr. Mt. Rainier, not quite as famous and not quite as tall. Still, 12,280’. It has twelve glaciers that have shrunk by half since 1904. Aunt Susie was the librarian at Glenwood Elementary and I’m very grateful for the exposure that this city boy had to the ways of the country. I learned to fish and make tunnels and forts in the bales of hay in a barn (peak life experience) and rode my bike in a small town parade. Nevertheless, I was perpetually homesick and depressed.
 
I remember reading a book about how the sun will burn out in such-and-such billions of years. For some reason, this triggered one of my life's first depressions. It made the death of everything I loved to permanent. Seems sort of embarrassing and silly, but a childhood depression when you have no one who takes you seriously is every bit as vicious as an adult depression.
 
When he wrapped up the school year for the summer, Uncle Denny used to show up in his 1966 Twin-I-Beam v6 Ford with the camper on the back. He was a high school English teacher and was a bit of  free spirit; he would even go pick fruit along with the seasonal workers. Very Steinbeckian, which confused me.
 
The Cat Story.
 
There was an infestation of cats feral cats and I think about the only thing that my Aunt Susie and my Uncle Denny had in common was that they were both allergic to cats. There always seemed to be some sibling-flavored tension between them. My Aunt Susie would spot a cat at about a quarter mile and let out a sneeze big enough to shame the wolf that blew down the pig’s house. Ahhh-CHOOOOO! Like, I have allergies, poor me. This was my perception as a kid anyway. I would have traded my asthma for an itchy nose in a heartbeat.
 
My Uncle Denny didn’t sneeze and whine but would get a little tiny silver glint in his eye and go get the beebee  gun and shot the cats as they ran from the old dilapidated garage. For an eleven year old boy, his method seemed to make a bit of sense, but I’ve always been sort of gentle and squeamish in my way, even with a young boy’s hardwired fascination with war and guns and all that heroic bearcub stuff. I guess at one point one of the feral cat mom’s had a litter or something, or maybe Denny just somehow lured the cats regardless he had all of the cats in a bag. There was a bag of cats. That much is true. And there was much discussion around what uncle Dennis was going to do with the cats, something humane of course, maybe the idea was to take them down the hill to Goldendale or something to the humane society. Grandma Alice said more than once that Denny was too gentle, and he gave the cats away but sometime later we stopped to get Fried Chicken and these huge fried potato wedges and stood out on this high stone bridge over the Klickitat River and he told me as he smoked a cigarette and we waited for our food to be ready, this is where I threw that bag of cats off.  I looked down into the rushing rapids a hundred feet or more below. It was a long way down.
 
Can we ever really know someone? Does a mother know her child? My Dad said he and Denny used to argue and their Mother would say to just take it outside and they would go out in the backyard and just beat the crap out of each other. Denny grew faster and he was bigger than my Dad at one point. I would posit that we can never truly know our children. Children can’t know their parents. But your brothers and sisters can never unknow you as hard as they may try. But we went through the same exact shit.
 
When I was about fifteen my Uncle Denny wrote and invited me to go to Ashland, Oregon for the Shakespeare Festival. It was something he did every year. He would meet his friend Peter and car camp. I wrote back and accepted in a very formal way. I think maybe I read too much into it and he even said something at one point, but maybe because of his divorce his kids had sort of moved on – were a little older, and my cousin Susie (later Colleen, why does no one like the name Susie?) was a girl and had her friends. All I know about it was that when we drove by the ex’s house, there were raised voiced on the front stoop and then when he threw the truck into gear, he said “fucking bitch.” And maybe we were both filling a void for ourselves. When I was younger still, when Uncle Denny had been in town, he’s taken me to see a double feature of Captain Blood and Errol Flynn. At an actual theatre. My Dad never, ever, EVER went to a movie, concert or play. Cowboys movies and football were the extent of his spectating and it was done on the couch, at home. My mom said he went to the symphony exactly once early on in their marriage and my Dad snored loudly through the whole thing. If it was a movie, and not a cowboy movie, he would wake up intermittently and say in a slushy, impatient voice, “What’s going on? Huh? What’s happening? Huh? This movie doesn’t make any sense.”
 
So I have super vivid memories of Ashland, Oregon. Ashland and Lithia Park are one of the truly magical places on planet earth as far as I’m concerned.  I fell in love with Ashland and Shakespeare and southern Oregon. I still read Shakespeare nearly every day and I have a Rockwell Kent illustrated complete works on my desk with the following inscription from my Grandmother on my Mother’s side:
 
December 1980
 
Dear Max,
            I hope that you will enjoy this book all of your life. The “Bard” is a great source of humour, relaxation, and many times, of wisdom – He is never boring –
Love,
Gran Ma Dorothy
 
My Uncle wasn’t a continuous or maintenance drinker but a periodic. One night while we were in Ashland ducked into the local bar. A couple kids my age picked me up, and we went driving and I got sooooo stoned. I mean, it must have been laced with something. I’ve never been more stoned before or since. I literally couldn’t talk. I’d smoked weed before but I was completely incapacitated. When I met Uncle Denny later. He walked out the bar, looking no worse for wear, took one look at me and said, “you’re stoned. Where did you get that?
 
The next day, back at the campsite, he pulled out a tobacco pipe that I imagine he had for the purpose and said something to the effect, any time you want to get share, the pipe is right here. Here was someone very much like my Dad, I mean, a lot like him, sharing mannerisms and about 50% of their DNA asking me I wanted to get stone. It’s not that my Dad would have necessarily disapproved. It’s just that it would never have occurred, it was as foreign as mulligatawny stew – it just wasn’t part of his world. The pipe sat their on the picnic table for a  days, invitation extended, and I remained as mute as one of those characters in the shows we binge watch nowadays where you think – why does’t he just say something! But then it wrap the whole series about 4 episodes earlier.
 
One time uncle Denny showed up so drunk at our house he literally couldn’t stand. He sat on the floor, a drunken slovenly slushmouthed slurring repetitive mess. I don’t know if this was before or after we went to Ashland. I think it was before maybe because the way he appears to me is through a sort of adolescent cloud of unknowing “what’s this/this is not my problem/never seen anything like this before/where’s my Dad?” and where the fuck was my Dad? My mother didn’t know quite what to do with him. I took off to go get stoned and do other important things with my friends. I had my own drinking and stoning to do. My Mom later she said she was mad at me for leaving, but again, where the hell was my Dad? On a sailing trip, probably. It was summer.
 
So like I said, my Dad never said a word about his Dad. He was an open book and had a ready opinion on everything else under the sun and moon, but not on he who’s name can’t be mentioned. As my alcoholism and drug addiction started to manifest itself in my teenage years, it became even more taboo. Both my parents known what alcoholism looks like, up close and personal, and they were well-acquainted with that fact that it’s a hopeless, hapless, progressive state of affairs. The numbers aren't good. My mother and father each have four siblings. Of those, two out of five are alcoholic, on my Mother’s side full-blown. Everyone except me believes that my Dad was an alcoholic – maybe he was at the end. But I do know two things: 1) Unlike me, he could stop or moderate, if given sufficient reason. It was a battle and took all of his will-power to control, and he was an obnoxious ass to be around, and that’s probably one reason I moved 1,000 and then 3,000 miles away, but he wasn’t like me. I’d say two out of four grandparents were alcoholic, and my Grandfather drank enough to give himself Type II diabetes and be an old shuffling wreck of a man by the age of 71.
 
My Grandmother on my Mother’s side was orphaned as a child when her parents drove off a bridge drunk and into the Spokane river, killing themselves and their baby twins. Alcoholism doesn’t run in my family, it drives off bridges.
 
Denny was one of those that I would count as an alcoholic. Once he mentioned going to meetings to me, and then when I asked him about it again, he denied that he had said anything about Alcoholics Anonymous. But drunk or sober, the guy could tell a story. Here’s one:
 
I was walking through downtown Portland. It was a hot day in the summer. I was downtown, right around Chinatown and I stop into a bar to get a drink. And I hear this voice, my God! That voice. That unmistakable baritone somehow unmarred by the years. I look over. It’s my father. Hairy, unkempt, holding court with some other skid row lowlifes. I walk over and introduce myself. It takes him a moment, but of course he recognizes me. I’m Dennis, Jr, his son. And he’s the grand old man of the bar. He’s drinking but somehow lucid. After a round or two, I extricate him from the bar and ask him if he’s like to have dinner and a meal and maybe meet his Grandkids, Michael, Aaron and Susie. Why of course he would. So I take him home to meet the wife and the grandkids. And I gotta say that it’s a miracle. He’s a mess but he manages to pull himself together. He cleans up and stay sober. He really hits it off with my wife Linda and he loves seeing the grandkids. He stays with us, moves in. He has a new lease on life. He has something to live for. But then Labor Day came and we had a trip planned. We didn’t feel great about leaving him at hope, but the plan was to go see relatives and it wouldn’t have worked. I never told mom. We were only gone two days, but we got back, we found him drunk and delirious – a complete mess. We took him to the hospital, but it was too late. He’d had too much and internal organs just gave out.
 
            ***
 
So we don’t know much about Alaska and we know even less about what passed for Dennis Godsil, Sr. between Fairbanks Alaska, and the streets of Portland, Oregon. I saw a picture of him once – maybe it’s even around here somewhere.
 
But we do know this: Dennis, Sr. was drunk. My dad was talkative. There was no doubt hiding and running from the drunken and enraged father. There was no doubt Michael and/or Marty standing up for themselves, their mother and the younger kids. There was no doubt bruises and smashed furniture and shattered promises. There was no doubt a tree where they sought refuge while the drunken father screamed threats and stumbled around while the neighbors looked on from behind curtains. My father never said a damn thing about his father, but he did say ominously that he would never raise a hand to a child, and believed it was wrong for anyone to do so. We can surmise that there was some abuse and that gives good reason for them to leave Alaska, but my Dad to never mention it.
 
All I know is that that's all I now.
 
 
 

Back when Stuart Smalley was in his hey day, he started a book of affirmations. Started off with good intentions on January 1, and then didn't write again until January 22. So how are those New Years Resolutions going? 

What if we lived in a world where the sun, moon and stars took random diurnal paths, dropped themes only to pick them up again days, weeks or years later? Instead, the years, days and months spin on with near-mechanical predictability (despite our new age obsession with quantum physics) and only my mind is able to be in two (or many) places at once. 

Here, however is one thing as predictable as day follows night, and pounds follow pound cake:  
People (alone and in groups) are so comfortable in their own ruts, that they would rather stay safe and miserable than take a risk on being happy. 

Anyway, I'm starting something new. And I think I just can't do the substack thing any more. It's further fragmenting my already fragmentary consciousness, as being both alive and dead, a particle and wave. 

I'm actually really excited about my next project. 

From Utopia to Dystopia: A History of the Future from Thomas More to the Present

I know, I know. Sounds like a barrel of laughs. But I'll keep it light. 

The Genesis of the idea: As a semi-pro marketer in the field of Communication Arts, I've become addicted to a theory that the stories and art forms are the collective unconscious of a culture. That our movies, books, films, tv, ads and yes bulletins from the Camp Pencramp Camp Counselor (aka blog post) are our dream life. The expression of our deepest desires, fears and obsessions. I mean this literally. 

And I've been increasingly interested in the fact that we no longer create castles in the air, cities on the hill, but just bleak visions of how we're going to navigate the inevitable collapse. 

When I say words like "hope" why does everyone say "yeah, right?" 

I know it's going to be as tough as taking the ring to Mordor. But let's see, how should I say it - if I was reaching into my copywriting back of tricks? 

Introducing Optimism. All-new, for 2026. 

"Watch this space."