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I met Tim Glancey with a tap on the shoulder. His tap, my shoulder. I was leaning on a palm tree outside Capt. Tony’s Saloon watching a couple of women try to throw coins over their shoulders and land those coins in the mouth of the fish hanging over Capt. Tony’s door. I’d landed in…
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This? It’s one big thank you note. But it’s also about this: Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way, the story of how Jimmy Buffett made Margaritaville, and how Margaritaville made Jimmy Buffett. Due May 9 from Touchstone Books. You can preorder at Powell’s or Amazon. The way Hayes Carll describes it, Crystal Beach, Texas was a little like Margaritaville.…
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Margaritaville’s various social media feeds have alerted me to the fact that today is National Escape Day. If ever a nation needed an escape day, today is probably the day. Until tomorrow. In the spirit of elsewhere and faraway, here’s a throwback all the way back to December 1976. Jimmy Buffett was interviewed in the…
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Have you been reading the news? I’ve been reading the news. Anyway, here’s a photo of folly chasing death in an old cemetery in Mobile, Ala. where a man whose story blends fact, fiction and fun is buried. His name is Joe Cain. He features in Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way, out May…
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Winter, which barely ever exists in Portland, has sucked in Portland. I was warmer when I took this in 2015, on the beach behind the Margaritaville Hotel in Pensacola, Fla. “This must have been a fun book to work on,” people say. It was. Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way, the story of…
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Forty years ago, as Washington D.C. prepared to welcome President Jimmy Carter, jackhammers were employed to chip ice from the parade route. Republican senator Ted Stevens invited the president-elect to move the inaugural festivities to his home state of Alaska, where it was warmer than in the nation’s capital. But the weather sucked everywhere —…
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Two photos taken 364 days apart. On the left, the first blank page of a book as I sat down to begin writing exactly one year ago, on Jan. 4, 2016. On the right, that book–almost finished–on the far end of the year and as it arrived yesterday in the mail from the good folks…
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Once, at Key West’s sunset celebration in Mallory Square, I watched a large man somersault through a small hoop. Writing a book is a little like that. You set out to accumulate as much information as you can and winnow it into a manuscript. Your editor winnows it more. In response, you jam a bunch of…
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Bruce Springsteen was talking about compromise last night. Adult compromise, as viewed by the kids startled to first discover Mom and Dad had hopes and dreams. The world takes some of those away. You choose to let go of others. These aren’t easy choices. What the kids don’t see, Bruce said, are “the blessings of compromise.”…
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A few days after Christmas, my dad and I were browsing the Powell’s on Hawthorne when I noticed a copy of the first Harry Potter book illustrated. “Stell might be old enough to dig that,” I said. Then I looked at the price tag. At $40, she could wait to enjoy it. Dad being Dad, he…
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