The world is alright today is a book of short stories I wrote over a period of years. My favorite, or one of my favorites, is 0. This guy smokes 20 cigarettes and when he finishes the last one he’s going to blow his head off with the gun he holds in his lap. We follow the dude and his thoughts as he puffs away waiting for that final puff. Guess what. He doesn’t do it. Something sea lions and the way they look at him from the beach down below the cliff.

I always wanted to write like John Steinbeck. I took the pseudonym Fargo Kantrowitz as a sort of joke, but it caught on a little bit when I won an award, started a radio show under it, then a blog and then a podcast. I wondered where my desire to write pictures went just like Steinbeck did but better.

Alas, no man is Steinbeck. I can just imagine how much fun he had writing the letters that he did in order to ride his imagination into joy. I imagine there is something about being able to ultimately figure it all out that appealed to me and the journey that it took you on on a journey into yourself and others and all.

Beauty was always a consideration whether it was physical beauty or musical beauty or art. Life and landscape and light and hue. Poetry! Yes, even that. What is our purpose if not to experience the wide expanse of feeling that is beauty’s alone. We seek beauty at all time even as we toil for others with nary a return to be had. Being forlorn does not rescue us from our desire to feel true life again, just like we remember we once thought we had a right to.

Writers’ imaginations were like paths into the sky, along the way we look down on the worlds, like Gods, a witness true emotion as if we were on a rollercoaster ride. Dipping down here, dipping down there, seeing, hearing, hearing more then seeing again.

And we remember the beauty, the moment we knew! Ah, sudden. We add our faults to the skies that others will see when following us. But if we get to go then they get to go and i wonder sometimes if maybe my journeys are as exciting as Steinbeck’s. I gulp at the thought.

But hope, also, because I don’t have the time to wait around to see if I could compare to Steinbeck. I want to go on the ride and see where my stories carry me and if my respect for the skill of reciting his dreams so well as did Steinbeck possess has always been great then, well, I would hope that I could too see and feel something of the inherent magic.