In AT THE HOUSE, I have just finished working a three-month contract-writing job and saved enough money to stay at home and write a book. I write my dream book, about driving around the state, from Key West to Pensacola, then over to Jacksonville, then back down to Delray Beach, with a side trip to Lake Okeechobee.

I write about growing up in Florida, going to school, serving in the Air Force, majoring in archeology, marrying my wife of 40 years, Brenda, having two children who are making a living playing bluegrass music, Owen and Balder, cooking fresh seafood, raising backyard chickens, keeping a hay-bale garden. Our yard is planted with native flora that attract butterflies and songbirds. It looks neglected. We're just a couple of old hippies.

The hippies were right. Nixon was wrong. Bush was Nixon.

On BookTV, I see that there is a Restored Edition of A Moveable Feast. I buy it, reread it, and compare myself to Hemingway, starting out, and at the end.

I'm better off than he was. He took one too many blows to the head.

At the end, I get a call about a temporary technical writing job at the last place I worked. This will get us through December, as Merle Haggard says.

Beloved folk poet of the honky-tonks.

AT THE HOUSE is about writing, drinking, combining writing, work, and family, for decades, without success. It contains poems, prose vignettes, interviews with myself, letters, literary criticism, literary theory. Advice on how to stay sober. War stories.

57,000 words. Posted at The Daily Bulletin, daily, as I wrote it.

I replied to reader comment in the book.

85 pictures and line drawings inserted as jpg files.

Adult situations, language. An equal opportunity offender.