Greetings! As I write this, Easter, 2023, has just gone by, and now that Spring is finally here, it feels like a good time to share a few updates with those who subscribe to the Substack page(s) or follow along at the website(s).
Friends and regular readers know I operate two websites – “Essential American Wisdom” & “Hermit Chronicles” – and one Substack account with two separate sections, each titled accordingly. However, if you come by this accidentally, be aware that Essential American Wisdom is effectively a collaborative effort between me and my writing co-conspirator Vassar Bushmills. Vassar operates his own website titled “Vassar Bushmills,” and I provide tech support for him when he gets into trouble.
Sometime in 2017, at the suggestion of my oldest granddaughter, I got talked into creating a website I decided to call “Unwashed Philosophy” (trust me, that’s a long story in and of itself). After a time, I invited Vassar, with whom I have been friends for many years, to join me at the new site and cross-post any material from his own website that he felt was worth sharing with an additional audience. One thing led to another, and we eventually talked each other into putting together a book we ultimately titled “Unwashed Philosophy: A User’s Guide For Our Imperfect Union,” which we published in late 2020 on Amazon.
When we were done, I got back to the business of focusing on my first love, “Hermit Chronicles,” which I started not long after I lost my eyesight in 2014 (mostly for the purposes of rehab and creating an outlet for myself to prove I still had it in me to pursue a writing career now that I’ve been forced into retirement) and which has become that place I go to tell what I lovingly refer to as “mostly true Tales of a Hermit Life,” where I step away from the serious world of Culture, Society, and American governance and can focus, instead, on entertaining and amusing-with a little salty language-and otherwise poke fun at myself and everyone with whom I come in contact in my daily Adventures out amongst the human Riff Raff I am forced to interact as I traverse this spinning little blue ball in the cosmos.
No sooner had I gotten back to my work trying to put together a manuscript to publish for Hermit Chronicles than I got dragged back into putting together a collection of essays, along with Vassar, because of the Havoc the Biden Administration was wreaking on the American people? Effectively a follow-up to our first book, I chose to rebrand “Unwashed Philosophy” and call it “Essential American Wisdom” for what I hope are obvious reasons. That book, “Essential American Wisdom: Observations On A Troubled Republic (Vol. I),” was released to Amazon in late fall of 2022. With that done, the holiday season is behind me, and Myriad technical issues are finally resolved; I am now scrambling to finish the Hermit Chronicles book, knowing the next presidential election season will suck all the oxygen out of my creative writing activities.
All of this is to say that I hope you will follow along wherever is most convenient for you:
Essential American Wisdom on Substack
Essential American Wisdom on the WWW
I apologize for not publishing more frequently… I’m a long-form essay kinda guy, and, given my visual challenges, it takes me about four times as long as a normal person. I promise I will be trying to publish more frequently in the days ahead, so if you want notifications that new content has been published, please subscribe to the Substack pages so that you can receive an email when something new is available for your entertainment or edification… And by all means, feel free to share the whereabouts of my humble little corner of the internet with anyone you think might see value in it. You never know… Routinely, the best things in life are free:-)
