Grinning like the Mad Hatter in a hillbilly backwoods wonderland, that’s Dr. Tom in the photograph. Perry County’s explosive jester not only sells fireworks on the Susquehanna Trail in Newport, Pennsylvania, but is a human firecracker, a walking, talking, biological bottle rocket burning at both ends as brightly as any incendiary device he sells or shoots into the air with the greatest of ease.

Dr. Tom rides Harley Davidson motorcycles and plays electric guitar, too, once handling lead vocals for the song “Hanky Panky” in a band called “The Circuit Breakers” at Susquenita High School where he and I graduated in 1969.

“Susquenita” is a word blended like local peach moonshine using the names Susquehanna and Juniata, two rivers that run through Perry County. Susquehanna comes from an Algonquian American Indian word translated as “people of the muddy river” or “roily water people.” Roily means agitated. Juniata supposedly comes from an Onondaga (Iroquoian) word meaning “people of the standing stone.”

That makes Dr. Tom and me turbulent muddy river water people, standing on Hawk Rock high atop Cove Mountain. That means both of us successfully jumped shit creek.

I put Dr. Tom into two stories in my latest book Up Shit Creek: Confessions of the Crushers Motorcycle Club and Other Stories. Like me, he fought his way through the flotsam and then some to come out clean on the other side of shit creek. It took some work, but we’re better for our diamonds-in-the-rough adventures. My book is loaded with life’s hard luck lessons, a blue-collar bible to guide sinners through the muck.

Dr. Tom will join me and my partner-in-time editor Stephanie at our Buddy Boy Winery book launch this Saturday, October 3, between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. in the Cove near Duncannon.

You’re invited.  

My book is a trip. I write what I know, what I see and what too many distracted people try to ignore. I’ve provoked and disturbed readers for decades as a newspaper columnist. I’ve upset listeners as a news talk radio host. I remain consistent as a provocative novelist, short story writer and essayist.  

Lee Sebastiani at Avventura Press has published all my regional novels set in places I’ve lived and worked: two in Central Coastal California and one in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. We now add the Cove to the list. Long-haired rebel that I am, at heart I’m just another ridge runner, an Appalachian American who grew up in the Cove from 1964 to 1973 where I knew good times and bad as profound as any time in my life.

That’s why I went home to the Cove for the stories in this book, digging up teenage memories and young adult flashbacks to create dozens of reflections and original short stories. Up Shit Creek tells true tales mixed with sawed-off fiction that blasts off more dynamically than a barrel of Dr. Tom’s bombs bursting in air. My stories are dark, funny, twisted, violent, grim, painful, sad and more, detailing some troubling human behavior with a “Purry” County edge. My dog stories might even make you cry.

Since the Crushers Motorcycle Club is make-believe, those brothers won’t make Saturday’s party. Their untamed presence is better suited between the covers of my book. The Crushers are loaded with wannabe 1% outlaw bikers most of whom will never make the grade to ride with righteous real-life one percenters like the Pagan’s where my late friend, former Cove next-door neighbor and Marine Sonny Drake headed up the Appalachian Chapter as president. Sonny’s in the book, too, playing a meaningful role in my Cove life and times as his legacy soars deep into Valhalla where his warrior spirit reigns forever.

Perry County is unique. But not everybody there acts or thinks alike. Still, some men, women and children identify with traditional country-fried attitudes about life and will fight you in a parking lot if you disrespect their beliefs. As for me, I’m just an outlaw writer who grew up on the ragged edge of the Cove and still enjoys the ride.

See you at Buddy Boy.

After a turn or two on a twisty Cove mountain road, the party for my new book is back to its original time on Saturday, October 3, at Buddy Boy Winery in the Cove near Duncannon, Pennsylvania. Between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. I’ll sell, sign and read a few wild pages from Up Shit Creek: Confessions of the Crushers Motorcycle Club and Other Stories. We’ll enjoy Buddy Boy wine, Pennsylvania beer, good food and friendship.

Big thanks to Coreena Warner at Buddy Boy for understanding our unexpected predicament.

The Crushers deserve a hand as well.

When Crushers brothers heard about the party’s delay they quickly vowed revenge against the printing company that couldn’t deliver my books on time.

Then shit happened.

Crushers spokesman “Hairball” Lutz explains.

“We was minding our own business not bothering nobody when this truck ran off the side of the road and the back doors flew open,” Hairball said. “This box fell out, right, bounced itself open and we ran over to see what was inside. And, before you ask, no, we did not hijack the truck. At least a half dozen upstanding Crushers witnessed that drunk driver mother trucker who coulda killed us. People are always blaming us bikers for shit we didn’t do.”

Thank you Crushers.

These righteous brothers prevailed and gave me the box of books my partner in time and editor Stephanie and I will bring to Buddy Boy.

You can’t do better than that, can you?

I mean, shit happens, right?

Amazon recently informed my publisher Avventura Press we can’t get copies of my latest book Up Shit Creek: Confessions of the Crushers Motorcycle Club and Other Stories delivered until after Oct. 3.

Screw Amazon billionaire boss Jeff Bezos and the space ship he rode in on.

So we had to cancel our Saturday, Oct. 3 book launch at Buddy Boy Winery in the Cove in Perry County where the stories in the book are set.

Maybe we can reschedule a shindig before snow buries the Cove. Even in a blizzard I know William and Coreena Warner will dig out. We will, too. Stephanie and I were very much looking forward to launching our book at the Warner’s backwoods hillbilly heaven and hope to do just that in the future.

To say the least, members of the Crushers Motorcycle Club are not happy.

“Shit happens,” said Hairball with a shrug.

Yeah, it sure does.

“Shit happens” is one of the book’s themes snaking its way through the stories like a mean Cove copperhead that accidently got peed on during an outlaw biker beer bash in the mountains.

So I bought the Crushers half-a-keg of Pabst and called on the spirit of my late Cove friend and Pagan’s Motorcycle Club Appalachian Chapter president Sonny Drake who plays as meaningful a role in the book as we did to each other growing up together as Cove next-door neighbors.

When I asked Sonny if he would lay down the law to the Duncannon, Pennsylvania brothers he contacted Crushers president Sarge and made it clear that up shit creek or not we still got our paddles.

For now we hold our oars steady.

We row always into the storm.

“Got it?” Sonny asked Sarge.

“Got it,” Sarge said.

As I anxiously await a new date for the launch party I sit with my madman thoughts and crank up the Red Album, Grand Funk’s 1969 release that helped provide a soundtrack for Sonny and me laughing our way through our untamed youth racing through Perry County in his gray muscle car GTO taking no shit whenever and wherever the shit storm hit.

Yeah, I know, shit happens.

Deal with it.

Nobody’s hollering “yeehaw.” 

At least not yet.

Still, my partner in time and editor Stephanie and I are raring to head back to Buddy Boy Winery where one of my favorite wines, semi-dry Cove Mountain Red, reminds me of autumn apple orchards, rugged ridge runners and homey hayrides under an October moon.

We’re equally psyched about planning a small party at Buddy Boy to launch my latest book, Up Shit Creek: Confessions of the Crushers Motorcycle Club and Other Stories. All my tales both true and fictitious are set not far from the Perry County winery in the Cove where I grew up just a few miles from the Appalachian Trail that runs down the main street in Duncannon, Pennsylvania.

Buddy Boy Winery is where William and Coreena Warner make their pure Appalachian American wines and offer old-fashioned hillbilly hospitality to anybody who makes the deep drive into the Cove.

Among other wines teaberry is a house favorite. I’ll bet you a dozen ears of sweet corn most American wine drinkers, especially California aficionados, never even heard of let alone drank teaberry wine. I chewed Clark’s teaberry gum as a Cove kid and teaberry remains high on my list of favorite ice cream flavors. Red pea-sized teaberries grow wild in the mountain hills and are good for the country-fried soul. You never ate teaberry ice cream in California, either, did you?

At 75 I’m proud to be an untamed organic, free-range Cove-raised Appalachian American boy, even if my late friend Sonny Drake (who plays a meaningful role in my book) and I grew up in the “Gateway to the Cove” beside Route 11/15, the railroad tracks and the Susquehanna River rather than in secluded Cove where Buddy Boy rules.

Nothing but nature’s pure beauty lies in between.

Driving about three miles to Buddy Boy from Schoolhouse Road and Sawmill Road where Sonny and I lived, a canopy of old leaning trees opens into wide-open countryside green in rainy summer and white in snowy winter, stretching nature’s ecosystem into fresh farmland still thick in early September with spacious corn fields. On perfect blue-sky days, snug hills roll beneath lush mountain ridges that envelop the unique horseshoe-shaped Cove, the reason some original settlers called this piece of country-time paradise Cove in the first place.

Stephanie and I can think of no better place than Buddy Boy Winery to throw a party to launch my book.

So meet us there.

Scheduled for Saturday, October 3, between 2 and 4 p.m., we’ll bring a box of books I’ll sign and sell like an old-time huckster hawking pots and pans and sharpening hunting knives off the back of my mule-drawn wagon.

We’ll enjoy Buddy Boy wine, Pennsylvania beer, good food and friendship.

Buddy Boy is easy to find just past the big pig that runs to the fence to greet visitors on Cove Road if you stop to say hello. I call him Arnold after the famous porker on the retro TV show “Green Acres” and, like me, he’s proud to be from the Cove. Green Acres might be the place to be, like the theme song says, but Buddy Boy is hog heaven, too.

Join us to find refuge in the Cove and escape the fate of drifting up shit creek.

Oink if you like drinking hillbilly wine.

Sliding his business card across the table, Sonny Drake stares at me and awaits my response.

These words are printed in bold letters on the card: “Appalachian Chapter” and “Pagan’s MC.” At the middle of the card Norse fire god Surt or Sutar (the way some club members spell the name), depicted at the center of the one-percenter motorcycle club’s patch, crouches with a flaming sword.

Overhead lights shine off Sonny’s smooth shaved head as he strokes his trimmed white goatee and asks, “How do you feel about this?”

I look up and meet the sparkling eyes I know so well.

The Pagan’s Motorcycle Club came up in conversation only after I told Sonny I had written some newspaper columns about outlaw bikers in California during the five years I lived and worked on the West Coast.

Although we hadn’t shared a beer together in 50 years, Sonny and I go way back, growing up close as next door neighbors and living our teenage lives next to a narrow, trickling stream littered with raw sewage we called Shit Creek.

We’re sitting with my wife Stephanie and Sonny‘s wife Margie at our 50^th Susquenita High School reunion. Weeks earlier I told Sonny I’d only go if he did. He said the same. So we went. I told him to save me a seat. So he did.

I pick up the business card.

“How do I feel about the Pagan’s?”

Sonny waits patiently.

I grin and say he and I share a Pagan’s brother, John Hall, my close friend of more than 50 years who led a Pagan’s chapter in New York in the 1960s. A few years ago John wrote a book that received rave reviews nationwide about his personal reflections about the club John and Sonny both revere.

“You should read John’s book,” I say to Sonny.

“I already read the book three times,” he says. “John Hall and I have never met but I hope one day we do.”

We laugh like we did on steamy summer days when we pounded the sweat out of each other as 15-year-olds, mixing it up with boxing gloves by the coal ash pile beside Shit Creek in the Cove in rural Perry County, Pennsylvania. 

We laugh like we did playing football together in 10^th and 11^th grade even after I quit the team as a senior because I decided I deserved more respect from coaches who hated my off-field anti-establishment attitude and the long hair starting to grow and show under the back of my helmet.

We laugh like we did when Sonny came home from Marine boot camp at Parris Island and told me about winning his dress blues at the top of his recruit class. We stopped laughing that day when he told me how his hardcore drill instructors acted during basic training. A recruit cut his wrists, Sonny said, and the DI made him get a bucket to hold under his arms to keep from dripping blood on the newly mopped floor. The DI told him to cut more zigzags in his wrists the next time he tried to kill himself to do a better job because he was a Marine and Marines do it right.

In subsequent years Sonny went deeper into the Corps.

As always, I went my own way.

All these years later, Sonny’s retired from a federal government military security job and serves as president of the Pagan’s Appalachian Chapter. I’m out of the newspaper and radio business, writing wild-in-the-street novels about real-life cultural dysfunction. And we’re back together again, picking up where we left off so long ago to confide in each other on the phone as we do until Sonny dies at 71 on September 14, 2023, after moving to Florida and getting sick.

Sadly, Sonny and John Hall, 78, never got a chance to meet.

My new book Avventura Press and publisher Lee Sebastiani will release later this month, Up Shit Creek: Confessions of the Crushers Motorcycle Club and Other Stories, brings Sonny and me together one more time. All 66 very short stories are set in Perry County where the Appalachian Trail runs down the main street in Duncannon just a few miles from where Sonny lived in a trailer and I lived in a rented one-story red brick house.

I call my unique collection of fact and fiction “faction.” A faction is a side. Sonny and I always took sides. Defending righteous honor is always worth fighting for.

Sonny plays a crucial role in a few of my true stories. I also inserted him as the Pagan‘s Appalachian Chapter president, what the club calls a diamond, into a few important make-believe tales that stress his leadership and loyalty.

Hard truth lives in all my stories. Contemporary human behavior defines who we are for better or worse. Our lives and the lives of future generations depend on how we treat each other and how we handle ourselves.

I learned from Sonny. Sonny learned from me. Mutual respect and love is why I carry in my wallet the same business card Sonny slid across the table at our reunion.

Sonny signed off in his last email to me with the initials PFFP which mean Pagan Forever Forever Pagan.

So I’ll sign off on this column with the initials FFFF.

Friends Forever.

Forever Friends.

From his seat at the Pismo Beach bar Jeremy could watch reflections in the smudged cracked mirror above the liquor bottles. He watched people standing behind him as Thorpe rose from his seat and began to sing the way he recently did more and more often.

Nobody paid Thorpe any attention.

Most days Thorpe stayed seated, reciting mysterious verses like the specter of a long-gone North Beach poet whose words now collect dust on shelves in the well-lit San Francisco bookstore across the street from the bar where the king of the beatniks used to drink.

Thorpe sang in a low growl.

“Jamie rounds the corner in his red Stingray Chevrolet, racing to another gig the guitar ghost must play. Ripping down the highway where forever music stays, Jamie rounds the corner in his red Stingray Chevrolet.”

In a voice rough as gravel road Thorpe took the octaves up and down with the ease of a stock car driver leaning into the curves of a dirt track speedway. For the next verse he switched from singing to reciting the lyrics.

“No one saw the sadness build behind that toothy smile. Ripping up the coastline singing music Jamie style,” he said. “No one saw the heartfelt pain he carried for a while, cruising by the ocean making music by the mile.”

Nobody in the bar but Jeremy seemed to be listening to Thorpe. Regulars pegged him as mildly mentally ill from acid trips blended with depression mixed with one or another personality disorder.

This was maybe the fifth time Jeremy saw Thorpe perform in the past two months. The bartender kept going about his business washing glasses, drawing draft beers, lighting cigarettes. Some people still smoked and vaped in Dank’s Tavern, defying state and local laws that banned smoking. Even nonsmokers put up with the thick gray poison that hung in the air. Customers considered themselves outlaws and worse. Hang out somewhere else if you didn’t like the vibe. Maybe that’s why Thorpe felt at ease, comfortable enough to sing whether his audience liked it or not. Now he slid back into singing the tune he wrote not long after hearing the bad news nobody else in the bar heard about the man in the song.

“Jamie rounds the corner in his red Stingray Chevrolet, racing to another gig the guitar ghost must play. Tearing down the highway where forever music stays, Jamie rounds the corner in his red Stingray Chevrolet.”

The song built like a stable ballad, a melody Jeremy imagined would sound best electric with a driving lead guitar, one righteous riff good for any Central Coastal California hard rock radio show. Sometimes at night when he tossed awake in bed he imagined Thorpe singing in a real bar band where people appreciated his work and applauded his spirit. Thorpe eased into the next verse, picking up the pace for a fast finish all the way to the end.

“In Yardley, Pee Ay, Nashville and in Cali-for-NI-A our guitar ghost sings rock and roll for yet another day. Paid his dues and now he’s free, he’ll always stay that way. Jamie rounds the corner in his red Stingray Chevrolet.”

Jeremy closed his eyes and nodded his head as Thorpe wrapped it up.

“Tearing down the highway where forever music plays. In his red Stingray Chevrolet. For yet another day. Yeah, yet another day.”

After a ten second silence Thorpe sat back down, finished his beer in two swallows and lit a smoke. Dull light shined from cheap silver rings he wore on both hands like brass knuckles on eight fingers. Somebody once said Thorpe packed a powerful punch in the ring when he fought in Los Angeles as an amateur boxer. When he stood to leave, he pulled the black cape he wore snug around his shoulders and moved silently through the crowd, disappearing out the door and into the shadows.

No obituary appeared online or in a newspaper when Thorpe died a week after his last performance. Dank’s drinkers didn’t miss him. Jeremy did. Word on the street was Thorpe shot himself in the room he rented by the week above the fish and chips shop near the pier by the beach.

Jeremy eventually heard talk that Jamie in Thorpe’s song had been a real person, a lifelong rocker who played guitar and did his best as a singer/songwriter more than good enough to deserve to do better than he did. Good enough to be better known that what he was. He wondered how Thorpe knew Jamie and why he paid obsessive tribute to a dead man through the power of a song almost nobody wanted to hear.

Jeremy found out Jamie shot and killed himself, too, sitting in his car in a Nashville parking lot.

The next time Jeremy stopped by Dank’s he took the seat at a table for two where Thorpe always sat. He lit a cigarette from the pack he bought that morning even though he normally didn’t smoke. Twisting a new silver skull ring he wore on his middle finger, he promised to buy and wear more rings. Standing slowly, the words to Thorpe’s song came easily because he had written them down over the past few months and practiced singing them at home.

Jeremy stood, singing for Thorpe and Jamie. Mostly, though, he sang for himself, for the courage he needed to help still cold desolation that puts guns in hands that kill hope, to help prevent raw passion from racing forever into the lifeless lane.

In a red Stingray Chevrolet.

The Story Behind the Story

Jamie and Thorpe are characters in my short story Red Stingray Chevrolet that is based on two real people I knew. Jamie and Thorpe didn’t know each other. Jeremy is pure fiction.

Writing short stories and novels involves time, reflection and imagination. In my mind all my fiction is real. The action explodes in my head so it must be real, right?

Sadly, we’re losing more and more book readers each day to short attention spans sacrificed to short videos more addictive than hard drugs. Even people who do read don’t spend the time they should trying to understand the writers they read. For readers to truly learn from literature high and low we must dig deeper into our own minds. We must decipher why fiction writers mine the depths of their psyches and share the shiny sometimes dark treasures they discover in the search. Readers weaken and lose whenever they relinquish the mental discipline it takes to face themselves in the dirty cracked mirrors symbolized by stories they read.

I’m not a songwriter but before I wrote Red Stingray Chevrolet I wrote the lyrics for the song Thorpe sings about my friend Jamie Rounds, who shot and killed himself in Nashville, Tennessee, on Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2013.

I last saw Jamie when he stopped for lunch sometime around 2004 at our California house when he pulled into the driveway in his red Stingray Chevrolet. We lived in Santa Maria and he lived three hours south in Pasadena near Los Angeles. On his way to Pismo Beach for work (selling some kind of insurance he was forced to sell to pay the bills) we ate strawberries as big as golf balls from nearby fields and fresh-picked avocadoes from our tree in the front yard. Jamie, Stephanie and I laughed when Jamie said I’d come a long way: living in a ranch home on a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood that reminded him of the 1960s TV show “Leave It to Beaver.”

I knew “Thorpe” when Stephanie and I lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the early ’80s. He sat by himself at a table in the G-Man bar where Stephanie and I met and drank, sometimes talking to himself and listening to jukebox songs he played. Thorpe wore a black cape and boots, blocky silver rings and thick, straight black hair hanging below his shoulders. Rumor had it he could fight and used to. Nobody bothered Thorpe. When he got agitated and occasionally yelled out a curse, I talked quietly with him to help soothe the pain. Thorpe always left the bar alone.

Thorpe’s dead, too, of natural causes.

Some of the lyrics Thorpe sings in my story are drawn from the song I wrote about Jamie when he killed himself. I sent the lyrics to a musician friend of Jamie’s who said he’d put my words to music. He said he wanted a writer’s credit. All I wanted was a musician to sing and share a song about Jamie Rounds and the sweet gifts he offered the world through his music. The musician never got back to me about the song.

My made-up story helps Jamie and Thorpe live through their spirits, the strong influence they laid on people who knew them. If we pay attention we pick up on golden vibes from saints and sinners who appear as sparks in our lives, igniting some darkness we all navigate the best we can. Some of us deal with shadows better than others.

Rebels like Jamie and Thorpe now travel together, continuing to light the way.

In a red Stingray Chevrolet.

Political campaigns increasingly bring out the worst in people. With fewer than 100 days remaining until the November election, mean-spirited supporters of Democratic Scranton Mayor and 8th Congressional District candidate Paige Cognetti comprise some of the worst of this bastardized bunch.

Their target?

Leila Hazou, a 58-year-old woman of Palestinian descent whose good character and reputation Cognetti’s supporters defamed even before Hazou publicly announced her 8^th Congressional District candidacy and the deadline ran out for Hazou to collect signatures to get on the ballot.

That deadline has passed.

Hazou is not on the ballot.

I’m voting for Hazou anyway, writing in her name as the best candidate to represent the people with honor and courage. So will countless other independent voters, Democrats and maybe even Republicans who recognize cruel hypocrisy in a rigged cash-fueled system and smear campaign undertaken by Team Cognetti against Hazou, a principled and authentic feminist underdog.

So-called liberal Democrats unleashed their savage backbiting against Hazou to try to intimidate her and bamboozle voters into voting for Democrats even if the Democrats are lousy candidates. Democrat Cognetti is a lousy candidate.

Technocrat Cognetti uses photos of her two young daughters in a mailed campaign brochure to draw votes as a “mom.” But she has boasted of her staunch support for sending more American public money and weapons of war to continue the Israeli genocide against Palestinian children and other innocent civilians rather than spending public money to help struggling families here at home. Cognetti cowers rather than call out ICE violence that terrorizes immigrant children and their families. Cognetti supports and trusts hyperscale AI data center developers who offer mere lip service promises to protect the health and welfare of at-risk children and their families.

No person with integrity could vote for Cognetti with a clear conscience.

Hazou stands as the polar moral opposite of Cognetti, exactly why Cognetti supporters mounted such a vicious attack against her. Ridiculed online and elsewhere as a “Trojan Horse,” a fusillade of hateful, disparaging and unconfirmed Facebook posts falsely accused Hazou of entering the race to help Cognetti’s incumbent Republican opponent U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan. Cognetti’s supporters mercilessly maligned Hazou.

Led by a rabid bevy of cultish Blue MAGA Democrats, some of whom unscrupulously vilified other opposition candidates and their supporters over the years, the uncorroborated accusations even insinuated Republicans paid Hazou to help sink Cognetti.

No evidence exists to support any such defamatory accusation.

Did Cognetti know about these erroneous smears? If so, did Cognetti approve of these libelous charges? If not, how could Cognetti not know her supporters were publicly spreading such untrue and hurtful rumors about another woman in the race?

I chose not to contact Cognetti or her campaign because neither she nor her campaign manager responds to my questions. Of course, mainstream media fails to ask Cognetti any hard questions. Still, Cognetti and her well-heeled campaign coalition are always welcome to reply to my serious concerns that severely tarnish Cognetti and her morally corrupt supporters.

Innumerable voters should reject Cognetti and her greasy Democratic Party machine politics.

Write in “Leila Hazou” as your candidate of choice in the 8^th Congressional District.

Free Palestine.

No data centers.

Abolish ICE.

Vote for Leila Hazou.

…

“Power to the people!” Che yelled, disturbing about a dozen other senior citizens dozing in the assisted living facility sunroom.

“Right on,” Cherie said. “But nobody will know the initials DLA stand for Data Liberation Army.”

Settled into the rocking chair she had outfitted with two thin cushions to comfort her always aching spine, Cherie pulled the afghan she knitted snug over her lap and waited for an answer. Che stood his ground ready to fight. At 75 his spine ached too, but he stood bouncing excitedly on the balls of his feet.

“The Establishment didn’t know what the SLA was, either,” Che said. “Until Patty Hearst made sure they never forgot the Symbionese Liberation Army. These hyperscale AI data center developers will never know what hit them when we launch our first attack.”

“Like your parents naming you Chester and you calling yourself Che,” Cherie said.

“The revolution continues,” he said, adjusting the lint-covered black beret so the hat covered his receding hairline. “Remember the Weather Underground? Well, we’re the Weather Aboveground.”

At 77 Cherie still resembled her high school senior picture. Her once stunning thick black hair now hung gray and lush past her shoulders. Cherie now served as a rebel comandante in the Lackawanna County guerrilla militia holding back the pending invasion of big tech data centers.

“So what does the DLA do first?” she asked.

“Blow something up,” Che said.

“Che, please, I’m opposed to violence,’ Cherie said.

“I don’t mean with explosives,” he said. “I’m talking insurgent psychological warfare. We detonate their plans with our creative energy.”

“We can’t waste time,” Cherie said. “Data center investors are coming here from all over the world.”

“They’re at the top of my list,” Che said.

“CalCow LLC is planning to surround our little town with 50 super AI data center campuses,” Cherie said.

“They’re cutting down hundreds of our beautiful trees as we speak,” Che said, pointing out the sunroom picture window.

In a nearby air-conditioned house trailer turned into a plush office suite sitting on recently purchased farm land, Russian billionaire Ivan Ivanov sipped a cold canned cocktail and petted his pedigreed pet Russian Wolfhound that curled up on the floor beside him.

“I love the taste of vodka in the morning,” Ivanov said.

“You’re so funny,” said Candy, Ivanov’s latest American girlfriend who had six months remaining on her crown as a local chicken wing chain’s “Miss Lip Sync” champion for her rendition of a Madonna medley of songs including “Like a Virgin.”

 “You drink too much, too, Ivan,” said Indian billionaire and business partner Rudransh Singh.

Trying to ignore the heavyweight Russian businessman, as soon as Singh looked instead at his laptop calling up the CalCow (CALcutta and MosCOW) LLC Facebook page he screamed like a thousand wild Hindustan elephants rampaging through the jungle where the pachyderms roam.

“How could you do this to me, Ivan Ivanov?”

Candy got so rattled by the outburst she spilled her espresso martini she learned how to mix at the local bartender college from which she graduated as “Vodkadictorian” after meeting Ivanov who made a contribution to the school’s liquor fund in exchange for Candy’s diploma.

The CalCow LLC Facebook page lit up with sirens, popping flashbulb images and pictures of falling red, white and blue confetti. Wearing a trucker’s baseball cap Ivan Ivanov appeared on the screen in a short video inviting his “capitalist comrades in data center country” to a “FREE all-you-can-eat beef barbecue rib feast to thank the local rural community for their super data center support.

The words “FREE ALL BEEF BURGERS!!! FREE RARE PRIME RIB!! FREE BEEF STEAKS!!!” flashed continuously on the computer screen.

Singh dropped to his knees and began to pray.

“Brahma, Visnu and Shiva forgive me,” he begged. “I am a devout Hindu who reveres and protects cows. Please, oh, please, do not cast me into hell to be reborn as cow dung.”

Singh’s screams increased in pitch so high they sounded like a snake charmer’s flute.

“Beef is sacred,” he howled. “Bad enough you make me call company CalCow, but this is the last swizzle stick.”

“You mean the last straw,” said Candy, leaning heavily on final exam knowledge she learned at bartender college after Ivanov provided her with test answers in advance.

“I did not video that video,” said Ivanov although the idea of a greasy BBQ rib fest appealed to him immensely.  

Back at the assisted living center Cherie quickly Googled the CalCow Facebook page she had doctored with what she learned in the “AI for Fun” course she took online and her daughter paid for to try to keep her mother from smoking too much medical marijuana.

“My Ivan Ivanov deep fake AI video is perfect,” Cherie said. “You can’t trust anything or anyone anymore.”

Che raised his clenched fist in a gesture of bold defiance.

“We put the Boom back in Boomer!” Che said.

Back at the double-wide Singh wagged his finger at Ivanov and said, “Our data center deal is dead.”

“If that’s the way you want it,” Ivanov said. “I forgive you. And if you want to know the truth, I do respect cows.”

Singh almost bought the ruse.

“Respect how?” he asked the oligarch to whom the KGB had taught many tactics of devious deception to win over gullible American voters and investors.

Grinning his gold tooth grin, Ivanov said, “Because I admire cows, I am always willing to turn the udder cheek.”

Candy laughed so hard she passed natural gas and blamed it on the dog.

Well oiled with Democratic Party support and money from across the country, Democratic Scranton Mayor and 8^th Congressional District candidate in the November election Paige Cognetti supports building hyperscale artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.

So does Times-Tribune columnist Chris Kelly.

Cognetti wants the government to “regulate” quality-of-life destroying data centers.

So does Kelly.

They’re free to correct me if they flat out oppose data centers as I do. But it’s clear Cognetti and Kelly also want staunch anti-data-center activists and voters in Archbald and elsewhere in the 8^th District to believe they’re on their side.

Don’t trust these two connivers.

Kelly’s 7/26/2026 column about his soft-boiled coffee klatch interview with Cognetti makes an easy argument that he might be the number one kiss-ass in line for a local congressional press secretary gig if she wins the election.

Better than working for the Times-Tribune that could fold at any moment.

Never forget that back in 2014 egoist Kelly announced he would trade his daily newspaper columnist job for a political public relations job (the height of journalistic ethical treason), publicly proclaiming his retirement from a sacred mission to sign on as a spin huckster for then-embattled Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

Until Cognetti hit town from Oregon via Washington D.C. via Harvard Business School, Kane reigned as the Scranton darling even more popular than the late political flip-flopper and gadfly Mayor Jimmy Connors.

Then Kane went off the rails, reporting to prison after a jury convicted her of nine criminal charges of political corruption.

Thankfully for Kelly he had second thoughts, staying in the newspaper business before prosecutors handed out subpoenas. Unfortunately for readers who value aggressive, adversarial reporting and commentary that exposes corruption in both Democrats and Republicans, Blue MAGA apologist Kelly remains a marionette in the Democratic Party puppet show.

Paige Cognetti now pulls his strings.

Conversely, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro pulls hers, as do other more important Democratic Party puppet masters who dictate what can and cannot be said by Democratic candidates and officeholders. In Cognetti’s chatty data center talk with Kelly I was surprised to hear her offer weak criticism of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), a crucial cabinet-level office overseen by Shapiro who chooses the secretary.

Did Cognetti or her campaign stooges get prior advice and approval of her benign critique from Shapiro or any of his lieutenants before sitting down with Kelly? Did Cognetti grovel for permission from boss Democrats before criticizing other boss Democrats?

Ask her.

You might do better than me.

As a Scranton resident whose immigrant Irish grandfather died from Black Lung after mining hard coal underground for 45 years, I am a former registered Democratic voter and journalist who once supported Cognetti in several online news columns, But Cognetti has refused to answer my written questions for more than two years. Her congressional campaign manager Anna Korman also refuses to answer my recent written questions.

Sounding more like a programmed AI chatbot than an impassioned community crusader, Cognetti prefers talking with suck-up lackey Kelly.

In Kelly’s fawning question-and-answer exchange, Cognetti offered flat, technocratic observations about protecting quality of life from data center invasion while at the same time supporting the same data center invasion as long as the business barbarians play by government rules.

When does that ever happen?

Some of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s most “beloved” elected officials, including Kane, got indicted and/or went to federal prison as former public servants who helped themselves to the public coffers at the expense of the public.

“Fighting corruption” shapes the core slogan in the Cognetti campaign, a boast that promises she’ll fight for the people as “Paige against the machine.” Yet Cognetti preens as a plastic smile mill in that same warped political machine, doing the elite party bidding without question. I invite Cognetti to provide a single verifiable example of a successful fight against political corruption since winning the mayoral election in 2019.

Neither Cognetti nor Kelly outright opposes data centers. They support “regulations,” those bureaucratic “rules” business and government never obeyed when coal was king or now as data centers threaten to kill and destroy what the coal barons missed. The bosses couldn’t have successfully pillaged as they did without politicians like Cognetti and newspaper lapdogs like Kelly.

Of course, Republican company man and incumbent Congressman Rob Bresnahan supports data centers too.

Eighth Congressional District Green Party candidate Leila Hazou opposes data centers. Hazou understands that once data centers go up anywhere in Pennsylvania the political climate makes it easier for them to go up everywhere in Pennsylvania.

If developers miss Archbald this time they’ll come for Archbald next time.

With a vengeance.

On July 17^th The Scranton City News broke the story about Hazou’s challenge, the first to report Hazou would face off against Cognetti and Bresnahan as a candidate standing against the cruel data center siege.

Until Kelly’s Sunday column Cognetti avoided answering detailed data center questions from the people and the press, providing no specific answers about how exactly she plans to help people fight back. I sent copies of The Scranton City News column to Kelly, Cognetti and campaign manager Korman. Did my column spark overweening PR man Kelly to rush to Cognetti’s defense? Did my column scare smug Cognetti and her slick handlers into creating a superficial data center position for which gullible voters might fall?

Do not sucker for so-called Shapiro-inspired regulations Cognetti and Kelly support. Do not agree to inflict this evil corporate pestilence on yourselves or on others. “Not in My Backyard (NIMBY)” is a dishonorable position. Beware of opportunistic, self-absorbed neighbors, the Chamber of Commerce and turncoat labor union members. They’ll all quickly join Shapiro, Cognetti and Kelly in selling out your dreams.

Aloof and cold-blooded, more bureaucratic manager than gutsy leader, Cognetti talks a good game. Yet she never came close to spelling out in her first public interview about data centers what minimal action she would take to even begin to regulate these environmental monstrosities. She never said what local, state and national elected and appointed officials in her own Democratic Party she would pressure to make sure devil developers play fair. Cognetti never said she would pressure anybody.

Of course, timid Chris Kelly never pushed back.

Gonzo journalism isn’t dead.

Yet the profound prose lifestyle that exploded in the Sixties era of decadence in a psychedelic haze of the late Hunter S. Thompson’s mind-blowing brilliance is on life support.

In the end we’re all headed to the end.

But, like the anthem “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” that Bob Dylan wrote and Roger McGuinn sang in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider,” the high voltage human electricity of the moment warns that “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate Ron Whitehead is busy being born again and again, decade after decade, as he continues to receive Hunter’s loud and clear message from the grave.

America’s Gonzo guru and heir to Hunter’s whirlwind spirit recently thought he might have really bought the ticket. But Ron was not yet ready to take that ride. After a stressful yet mind-bending first couple of days as the most celebrated madman about town, master of ceremonies and founding father of the four-day GonzoFest held this year all over New York City to pay tribute to Hunter’s continuing power and cultural influence, the normally high energy 76-year-old blood and guts bouncer of radical ideas and coal minefield phrases felt serious numbness in his arm.

Worried Hunter’s warning that “big darkness soon come” might be headed his way and expecting a massive stroke, he called for assistance. Paramedics quickly diagnosed severe exhaustion. With bright lights flashing in his head Ron soon made flight arrangements home and cut short his crucial GonzoFest role. Wisdom of the ancients guided him back to sacred Kentucky soil and into the strong arms of muse and love of his life Jinn Bug who has nursed him back to health on more than one occasion.

A ragtag guerrilla band of literary friends and magical mystery colleagues helped Ron travel, but he pretty much pulled off this personal mission of mercy by himself. We often need all the help we can get, but the frantic, manic Gonzo drive to create, write, breathe and ride the edge is what makes us Gonzo in the first place.

Either we go Gonzo or we don’t.

Ron Whitehead goes Gonzo.

Gonzo is an honor not bequeathed like a wet paper Burger King crown balanced on the heads of America’s limited-attention span Gen XYZ. Gonzo is a born in the USA privilege received through the disciplined, continuous work of challenging the system through writing. Gonzo is a wrathful fire-breathing god among modern-day beatniks, leftover countercultural hippies and 21^st Century philosophical anarchists like myself.

Hunter S. Thompson set the highest bar which, of course, he drank dry.

As an international foreign correspondent, national news reporter, local columnist and intergalactic commentator Hunter wrote far better chronicles of life in the lunatic lane than most of his peers. His work is unique. Despite a plethora of pathological personality disorders, his work defines him. If you only saw “the movie” you saw nothing. If you only read one of his books and not his lengthy essays you missed a ride on the crazy train and a chance to dance with the barbarians.

Hunter burned out on Feb. 20, 2005, sending the blessed cremains of his large life wildly lived exploding into space on Aug. 20, 2005, in the nose cone of a Hollywood-sponsored rocket.

Yet the unbridled spirit of Hunter’s incendiary Gonzo journalism continues.

Sadly, too many wannabe journalists and other writers don’t even talk a good Gonzo game anymore. They’re lazy. They make excuses not to write. Sad to say they’re phonies. Wordless weasels exploit intoxicating Gonzo grace while blaming their weaknesses on everything from professional mental illness to meth and martini abuse to wearing or drinking the wrong brand of cheap aftershave lotion. These frauds are as far from authentic Gonzo as Hunter was from Tricia Nixon asking him to serve as a pall bearer at Richard Nixon’s funeral and to then join her bare butt naked in the hot tub after daddy’s wake.

Not a lot of purebred Gonzo journalists exist anymore in American media. We absolutely need new generations of unholy hell raisers to keep ’er lit and let ’er rip.

Tribal elder Ron Whitehead points the way.

Defiant as a field mouse flipping the bird to an attacking eagle, he calls out the establishment. With the ease of an undefeated Old West high noon gunfighter (“crazy as nine loons” as Hunter himself once described him), Ron draws a bead on an unjust society run amok and lost in the madness of ignorance and technology.

Like the 1971 poem his legendary late San Francisco friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti called “A World Awash in Fascism and Fear” our feckless, reckless and infectious society needs Ron to provoke our increasingly dull culture. Insurgent thinkers must face devils of all ages, zombie citizens in a cruel, cruel world that walk among us trying to eat our brains and seduce writing with stupidity, timidity and self-absorbed impressions of art.

Gonzo must remain real.

Cheap imitators offer imposter self-portraits displayed like vacation photos of lounging lizards flicking obscene tongues and sunning themselves on rocks in the sweltering Mexican afternoon. Keep perpetuating imaginary Gonzo porn and one day Hunter will cast his spell from the great beyond, turning manufactured Gonzo personas into unmentionable personality disorders worse than the brain bugs these repeat offenders already endure.

Fear not.

Viking hillbilly Ron Whitehead remains our Gonzo zookeeper feeding hungry vibes that embolden golden creativity and inspire genuine Gonzo aspirants to knuckle down and get to work. Leading the poetic charge Ron storms establishment castle walls, like a Norse Berserker leader among those of us who tear it up producing original Gonzo journalism on a regular basis. Renegades and proud of it, we rebels refuse to succumb to the fickle status quo of mainstream dullness that stifles revolution.

At 75 I’m forever an outlaw, a decades-long unruly dissident and veteran Gonzo writer.

Home

I look up to very few people.

But I look up to Ron.

When he one day does disappear from our sweet Earth, as we all will, it’s easy to imagine swirling, billowing clouds forming new words, phrases and sick syllables blown together by Ron’s eternal presence, cosmic poems penned by our Gonzo ghost writer in the sky galloping across the endless horizon into an astronomical infinity with no beginning and no end.

You want Gonzo?

You got Gonzo.

Ron Whitehead is 100-proof white lightning Gonzo.