Thomas Fuller's Hawaiian shirt

Today's the Big Day!

The book party for Monsieur Ambivalence--A  post literate fable by Thomas Fuller.

I picked up Tom Fuller at SFO last night. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, so he looked pretty much the same as the last time I saw him, a year or so ago. I thought Tom might look different since he'd been in Kansas for so long taking care of his father.

The first thing we talked about was about getting old. He's had to put his father in a rest home--there was no other choice--just as I've had to put Aunt Lois in a rest home. There had to be some good way to get old, some better way than the way our loved ones had gotten old, but maybe not

Then we talked about the N.S.A. surveillance, about the violation of civil liberties, the creepiness of the whole governmental enterprise, the complicity of communication corporations like Google and Facebook and Yahoo, whose headquarters we were dangerously near as we drove north on 101. We both think Edward Snowden is a hero and a patriot.

I told Tom that Candlestick Park was going to be blown up after the 49'er football season. We could see it from the freeway. He didn't seem at all surprised."Of course," he said, "something new is always much better." He didn't know the 49'ers were moving to Santa Clara, he'd been out of town too long, in France and Kansas.

The first book party is this evening, 6-8 p.m. at The First Republic Bank in The Presidio. Tom's reading and signing books. Like a few other writers I know, Tom can be really charming when he wants to be and the complete opposite of charming when he feels like it. There's no programming him. He's like his new book Monsieur Ambivalence--completely straight-ahead, sans bullshit in a non-linear way, so individual that there's nobody in the world like him.