Ford Knows What’s What
’s Departures is up and running!
“A supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning.”
Wilder Thorne has lived with a supernatural ability to know the exact date when every person he touches will die. He’s lived with this curse since he took a mind-altering ayahuasca trip in his early twenties while backpacking through South America. It’s only the date and he’s never been wrong. He’s never been able to prevent a single death in 45 years despite his best efforts.
Currently Reading: Liberation of Being by Dr. Dylan Shanahan
I first encountered Dylan’s story through
’s Unfixed project, both her Substack and YouTube channel. His ALS diagnosis has left him unable to move or speak except through eye-tracking technology, which he will soon also lose the ability to control.When his book reaches most readers, Dylan Shanahan, as many have come to know him through his stories, essays, and interviews with his friends and family, will be gone.
But, as he reminds us in the chapter of Liberation of Being titled, “Be More, Do Less,” energy can be neither created nor destroyed. This book is just one piece of the legacy Dylan leaves behind—a passionate case for the beauty and meaning of life apart from what we can produce or provide.
Liberation of Being is not just about survival, but about resilience, innovation, and the indomitable spirit of the human soul.
Dylan’s message is clear: when we accept our life as it is, without judgment or fear, not even the horror of a declining body and loss of autonomy can deter our purpose.
Available in paperback or ebook.
Start at the beginning:
We Regret to Inform You | Lamb ♣ 01
Room for Dessert
♣ ♣ ♣ 19 ♣ ♣ ♣
By the time he was twenty-eight, Lamb still had never had a real boyfriend—that is, someone who lasted more than a month, at least long enough to say “I love you” and mean it. I think he was starting to feel like there was something wrong with him, even though I tried to tell him that it didn’t mean anything.
I was still single too, although I’d dated a couple guys—one for about six months, and another for about a year—Mikey. He was a waiter up in Mill Valley at some swank restaurant, sexy as hell, and we did fall into a sort of comfortable rhythm of weekends and sleeping over, even took a trip to Puerto Vallarta together.
Funny—I think it was the “I love you” that did us in; we tried it on for size, and realized it was a bad fit almost immediately. He liked to call me “Wall Street” because I worked on Montgomery downtown—Wall Street West—I think he looked down on my career ambitions, confusing my need to be gainfully employed with some sort of moral failure.
“Capitalist.” That’s the last word he threw at me over the phone when we broke up, not even in anger, just some weird dismissal he needed to put me behind him.
Anyway, I said to Lamb, “The best way to get into a good relationship is to stay out of a bad one,” and I meant it, especially after all the funky near-misses he’d had—Elmer, Arthur, David the sleepy turtle boy, and of course Buck the pedophile.
“Any red flags?” I’d ask him whenever he mentioned a new guy, and he would list them off, and I’d give him my song and dance. “You get what you settle for,” I’d say, and he’d go off and things would fizzle.
So Randy. I guess you really can’t blame someone else for your own problems, or in this case Lamb’s, but it did seem like things went downhill during and after their relationship. Randy was much older than Lamb—twenty-one years older, so pushing fifty. I can’t say he wasn’t charming, and sort of cute in a chubby Tom Selleck kinda way—tall too, I think that was one of the attractions because he was almost as tall as Lamb, maybe taller since Lamb had such a terrible slouch.
They met at The Club, the bar where Lamb worked, on a quiet night mid-week when it was mostly empty, and Lamb was glad to have someone who actually wanted to sit and talk with him for an hour or two. It happened fast, as I recall, like they were dating one minute, and the next, Lamb said he was moving in with Randy in this little in-law cottage he was renting behind a Victorian on Duboce Park.
They had that European connection in common: Randy went to boarding school in Switzerland; he was the son of some hotshot shipping executive with Aristotle Onassis’s company back in the day. Randy implied his mom and dad had been friends with Ari and Jackie O, that he met them briefly at a party on a yacht when they went on vacation in Greece.
Whatever glory days he once had with his parents were long over, though—his dad dropped dead of a heart attack in the seventies and left his mom with massive debts. Anyway, Randy lived in London for a long time working in a variety of galleries, which is how he came to have this odd collection of art and furniture—lots of midcentury stuff, Noguchi this and Heywood Wakefield that, a Clarice Cliff dinner set, and all these other little gewgaws.
It was one night when they invited me over for dinner so me and Randy could get to know each other a bit better that I first started having some real worries about Lamb. I mean, he worked at a bar after all, and I never heard of him getting into trouble, getting drunk at work or whatever, but that night at the “Fairy Cottage” (Randy called it that) was a trip.
First of all, it started off with “Happy Hour” which is a funny sort of thing to call drinks before dinner at your own house, but it really was a solid hour of gin and tonics—like, I had to say no to the fourth one I was offered because I was getting hammered, and Randy had five bottles of wine set up on his fancy blond wood sideboard “breathing” before dinner so I knew it was going to be a whole thing. He was a fantastic cook, actually, no problem there—Lamb was definitely eating well with his new boyfriend—but there were other things.
For one thing: “COCKTAIL table!” Randy corrected Lamb like three times when he said “coffee table” including one time when I was the one who said it but he admonished Lamb like we were a single uncouth unit.
Lamb had a new haircut, pretty conservative standard issue, and no crazy colors or anything. Also, he had a whole new wardrobe, seemed like—and that night he was wearing a sweater, which I’d literally never seen him wear before in my life. We used to joke about “sweater queens” as in a “kill me if you ever see me in a cardigan” kinda way, and don’t even get me started about the car coat Randy picked out for him, like something your mom puts on to go to the grocery store.
And then there were the Italian shoes, these super narrow, pointy-tipped jobbies that Randy actually pointed out.
“How do you like my boy’s new shoes?” he asked as we were drunkenly melting into the giant kidney-shaped swimming pool of a white sofa, and before I could answer, added, “I finally convinced him to spend more than fifty dollars on a pair of shoes.”
“$400,” Lamb confessed when I asked him about all this later.
“Do you have that kind of money to throw at shoes?” Not really, apparently—he was running up some hefty credit card bills since they’d gotten together. Bearing in mind that he had been wearing combat boots from the Army Surplus on Market Street since college days, this was a pretty drastic change.
Dinner was all candlelight, linen tablecloth and napkins, and this enormous arrangement of hydrangeas big as a beachball that Randy refused to move because “it’s just so pretty!” I couldn’t really even see Lamb on the other side of the table and it ended up just Randy talking at me through the whole meal because we were sitting across from each other. At some point Lamb actually moved his chair around the corner of the table so we could see each other, which solved the problem but how strange.
The oddest moment of the evening, though, came after dinner—and yes, we went through all five bottles—when Randy started marching me around the house to explain all his collectibles and art.
There was the red-headed French showgirl leering down from over their bed, some vintage Art Nouveau poster he found at a Paris flea market; the Miró lithograph; the Liberty sterling candle sconce; the Wiener Werkstätte chess set—nothing especially valuable, but all of it “precious” if you get my drift.
The finale, though, was this enormous painting taking up an entire living room wall—it wasn’t a big wall, but it was a big painting—and that’s when Lamb, hanging in the background as I’m being grand toured around the house, disappeared into the bedroom. I sort of stopped and turned toward the bedroom door expecting him to reappear and rejoin the lecture, and Randy physically took me by the elbow and steered me back to stand in front of the painting to hear his spiel.
He dropped some German artist’s name—“Jewish, surrealist—an acolyte of Chagall’s, he met him in Berlin when Chagall exhibited there”—and mentioned how he spent every dime he had and ate Campbell’s soup for three months after he bought it. The gallery he worked for had secured the sale of a cache of the artist’s paintings bricked up in a basement during World War II and only rediscovered in the eighties.
He went on like some kind of docent: “Notice the four figures, two men and two women—but no, just one man and one woman—through their own and each other’s eyes. On the left, a cavalier as the man sees himself, caped and daring—but beside him, the clown, as the woman sees him. And a great lady seated with her elegant fan as the woman sees herself; but behind her, the harlot, as the man sees her.”
I’m not saying it wasn’t a cool story, but by the time he finished, I was ready to keel over. And that’s when Lamb came out of the bedroom, reeking of weed, and I was just … puzzled, I guess. I mean, we smoked weed all the time, or used to anyway back in college, so it was really strange to me that he had stepped out of the room like he had to hide it or something. Or maybe Randy wasn’t into it? I have no idea, but it was the first time it occurred to me that he was going down a darker path—like four or five cocktails, a couple bottles of wine, AND weed?
It was a lot, but it was the sneaking that stuck with me.
By the time Randy announced, “I made a Pavlova!” I was ready to puke.
Anyway, I’ll just mention one other incident at the Christmas party they threw that year. I was in the kitchen talking to Randy when his friend Steve arrived and came in to say “hi.” Super annoying dude with a lot of teeth wearing some crazy ass five-in-one Christmas sweater like he couldn’t decide which one to wear so he wore them all.
He says to Randy, “And so—how’s your not-so-little project coming along?”
Randy glanced at me so of course I instantly knew he was talking about Lamb.
“It’s fine—great actually.”
But Steve was one of these dicks who likes to keep pushing buttons. “Miss Doolittle’s responding to her education then?”
At that point I just turned and walked back out to the party.
They lasted just over a year. Lamb put on a fair bit of weight, but he was “in love” supposedly so he really was shook when he came home early from work one weeknight because the bar was slow and he wasn’t feeling well—he walked in on Randy with some random dude’s hand up his ass and a big pile of cocaine chopped up on the Noguchi glass COFFEE table.
Damn. Another character, Randy, who I want to punch in the nose!
This is so well written Troy. You pull us into place and set the scene, the hydrangeas and the weirdness of it, the art, the bottles lined up to breathe. It's as if I was in the room with the guys.
This is a fun sequel to read. I found it quite accidentally when the first episode was published and have been coming back ever since. I want to know what happened next. ; )
I also sometimes like to write (though I'm more of a visual person: photographing, drawing).
Here's one shorty:
https://theoddshortstories.substack.com/p/a-forest-tale-turned-to-something-else