Wonders of Wonder!

Ms. Wonder joined me for breakfast this morning, and it brightened my mood. This is the way to start a new year, I thought: a weekday breakfast with my alter ego, the one person guaranteed to tell me the truth. I knew she’d have something useful to say, and I was eager to hear it.

“I have a question for you,” she said.

“Let’s hear it,” I said without hesitation. A question from her is usually the gateway to some sage advice—something I don’t get enough of.

“Are you happy?” she asked.

I admit the question took me by surprise. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, and even less sure how to answer it. I paused, intending to give it mindful attention.

“Did you hear the question?” she said.

“I heard it,” I said, “but it’s not an easy question to answer. It requires careful thought.”

“It’s an easy question,” she said. “You’re either happy or you’re not.”

“Well, if it’s so easy,” I said, “what’s your answer? Are you happy?”

“No,” she said, “but we’re not talking about me. I asked you first. So what’s your answer?”

“No, I’m not,” I said, and I said it with some topspin.

“Why not?” she asked.

This was the part I hadn’t wanted to visit over breakfast. Still, I decided to take it to the limit. One more time.

“Frankly,” I said, “I’m madder than a wet hen. There, I’ve said it. I don’t like saying it, and I know you don’t like hearing it, but nothing else says it quite as well.”

“Rem acu tetigisti?” she said, remembering to stress the italics. “But why are you so highly peeved?”

“Why? You know why," I said, showing my agitation. "I constantly struggle with Princess Amy mucking about with my emotions. It’s maddening. Everyone keeps telling me to get help, but the only help I find is the fleeting kind. I don’t seem to make any real progress.

“I meditate, I exercise, I practice tai chi, I work with therapists, and each of the above makes me feel better temporarily. Then Amy tells her little minions to start randomly throwing switches on the neurotransmitters.”

“And what are you going to do about it?” she said.

“Do?” I shrugged. “By the way, very well done with that rem acu thing," I said. "How do you come up with these things?”

“It’s a knack,” she said, “but don’t change the subject. What are you doing about your problems?”

“I’m working on my Evil Plan,” I said. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“Ah,” she said, “but is working on the plan actually doing something about the problems?”

Right about now, if you're new to this blog, you’re probably thinking that living with someone like Ms. Wonder, who sees through the fog and cuts to the quick, isn't always as easy as it first seems. Talk about holding you responsible! Talk about taking you to task when the task must be taken. She works in mysterious ways her wonders to perform.

“I see now,” I said. “I see what you’re getting at. It’s that old thing about taking action rather than over-thinking it, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” she said. “Forming a plan may be important in the great scheme of things, but even more important is actually taking the steps.”

“But don’t I need the plan before I take action?”

“New plans usually don’t work very well at first and must be amended after some action. The planned events and results must be updated with the actuals.”

“And so taking action while I’m formulating a plan should result in a more efficient process—one feeds the other.”

“One informs the other,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what I meant to say. It amazes me the way you can come up with these things on the spur of the moment.”

“And so what are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m going to take action,” I said. “I can’t think of exactly what I’ll do, off the top of my head, but I can tell you that I’m taking some sort of action.”

“It’s not what you do that’s most important,” she said. “Doing something—anything—is more important than what you actually do.”

“Didn’t Wen the Eternally Surprised say that?”

“That’s what you told me,” she said.

I looked at her across the breakfast table, my coffee cooling, the day waiting just outside the window.

“Then stand back, Poopsie,” I said. “I’m taking action, and it just might get messy. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.”

She smiled. “I’d suggest proceeding with caution,” she said.

And that's how I came to begin writing and living the book, the one I call Genome's Book of Life, for lack of something better to call it. I've started the outline. Give it a quick look-over and let me know what you think in the comments:

The Book of Life

            The Meditation
            You are perfect the way you are...
            And you could use a little improvement.

~~ Shunryu Suziki

OK, I know it's not much, but it's a start, and Wonder assures me that's the most important part, and I had to begin somewhere. Wonder's words were a blessing: move forward, start small, keep going.

As I cleared the dishes and stood up to meet the day, I realized I might not be happy yet, but for the first time in a long time, I felt genuinely hopeful and already moving forward.

Greatest Band of All Time

I should tell you upfront that the new Rolling Stones album, Foreign Tongues, hasn't been officially released yet. It's currently in the hands of reviewers only, professional critics, industry insiders, and, through a chain of contacts I'm not at liberty to identify, yours truly.

Princess Amy raised a questioning eyebrow when the tracks first appeared on my laptop.

"How exactly did you come by these?" she asked.

"I have people," I said.

You have one person, she said, and that’s Ms. Wonder who has no music industry connections. I’ve asked her.

I neither confirmed nor denied this, which is the mark of a professional.

“Foreign Tongues”: A Review by Someone Who Was There

I've been a fan of the Rolling Stones since the summer of 1965, when "Satisfaction" came out of a transistor radio and rearranged something in my central nervous system that has never quite settled back into place. I was young. The world was loud and new. Keith Richards had written that riff in his sleep,  on a bedside tape recorder, which tells you everything you need to know about a man who has lived as though tomorrow is someone else's problem.

That, in the end, is what I love most about them. Not the catalog, extraordinary as it is. Not the longevity, miraculous as that is. What I love is that for sixty years, these men have looked the future squarely in the eye and decided, collectively and without apparent discussion, to ignore it entirely. They have lived for today with a commitment that most of us can only admire from a safe distance.

Foreign Tongues, their 25th album, is proof that this philosophy has not wavered.

The opening notes of "Divine Intervention" made me sit up straight. It's a cheery song, and I mean genuinely cheery, about ignoring the apocalypse. In the song, Mick confesses he once consulted a Hollywood psychic about end times. 

"Through the gloom, I asked her, 'What's my future?' Well, she threw up." The chorus announces that even as the world ends, "Dystopian values are too hot to handle, and I'm going out in a blaze."

Princess Amy, who had been characteristically skeptical and critical of my review up to this point, said: Now THAT is a man who has his priorities straight.

I couldn't argue with her. Ronnie Wood's bluesy solo on that track is worth the price of admission by itself, and I've chosen it as the album's standout. Not bad for a band that some people, never me of course, suggested might be running out of road.

"Ringing Hollow" is a loping country rocker and, improbably, a love letter to America. "I was madly in love with you before we ever met," Jagger sings. "I saw all your movies. I smoked your cigarettes." But Lady Liberty, he notes, is wearing a frown these days. When the Stones see injustice, they're going to shout it down. It’s that brave and reckless spirit of the late 60s, and I love it.

Amy was speechless, her rarest characteristic, when I placed the Spotify needle in the groove of "Never Wanna Lose You," a disco heartbreaker featuring Bruno Mars on cowbell. Bruno Mars on cowbell. I want you to sit with that for a moment before reading more.

Is that Bruno Mars? she asked.

"On cowbell," I confirmed.

She considered this. And yet it works, she said with a dreamy look in her eye. That's the Stones for you.

The guest list runs deep across the album, just as it did in Hackney Diamonds: McCartney, Patti Smith, Steve Winwood, Benmont Tench of the Heartbreakers, but the most affecting appearance belongs to Charlie Watts, gone from us since 2021, who turns up on "Hit Me in the Head," recorded that same year. The late, great Charlie Watts, who was, in my firmly held opinion, the reason the Stones always sounded like themselves and not like anyone else. Hearing Charlie in the pocket one more time is the kind of gift you receive quietly and don't talk about too much afterward.

And then there is the ending.

The album closes with Mick and Keith,  friends since the age of five, inseparable across wars and decades and the particular chaos of being the Rolling Stones, singing Chuck Berry's "Beautiful Delilah."

It’s a full-circle moment of the highest order. Jagger was carrying Berry records under his arm when he ran into Richards at the Dartford train station all those years ago. Their very first single, as a band that barely existed yet, was a cover of Berry's "Come On." For four minutes, they were Blues Incorporated again. Their first band. The original spark.

Jagger has said that each new album might be the last. If Foreign Tongues turns out to be the final word, it’s a worthy one. It’s an album that lives up to everything they promised us back in 1965, when a guitar riff came out of a transistor radio and permanently altered the course of at least one young life.

Their fidelity to the blues, to R&B, to early rock and roll, remains intact. More than intact. Alive.

Ms. Wonder, when I told her about the review, said quietly, "They really are incredible, aren't they."

It wasn't a question.

"They really are," I said.

And then, because it was that kind of afternoon, I played "Satisfaction,” just to remember where it all began.

Downtown Camelot

Survival instinct drives a cat to seek safety in the high places far above the vague perils that lie hidden in lower levels. At least that’s the word on the street. Abbie Hoffman, for example, often views the world from a place of safety atop the kitchen cabinets, knowing that any hullabaloo arising below can't touch him.

For those who're new to The Circular Journey, I should explain that Abbie Hoffman in this story is not one of the Chicago Seven. This Abbie, a.k.a. Abracadabra, is a stylish cat, always dressed in black and white formal wear, who adds a dash of elegance to the laid back atmosphere of Chatsford Hall.

Downtown Wilma rises several feet as it climbs away from the Riverwalk and up into the middle of downtown. It must have been an instinct shared with Abbie that sent me up into the Brooklyn Arts District this morning

From Egret Café, the elevated view looks out over the shops and restaurants lining the Cape Fear River and continues out past Memorial Bridge until it reaches the gates of Chatsford Hall on the edge of Brunswick Forest.

The change in elevation did nothing to lighten my sultry, overcast mood. The drought that plagued the countryside in recent weeks was washed from memory by the current week-long string of thunderstorms that had rushed in from the Atlantic and now refused to leave. The lack of sunshine gives Princess Amy the pip. If you haven’t met her, you’re most fortunate. She’s that small cluster of brain cells, disturbing my sangfroid like a spoiled brat in a royal household.

As I was saying, the city was shrouded by a sullen sky and had taken on a brooding atmosphere, much like my mood, which was in the third act of a festering bipolar sketch.

I stepped into Egret Café, hoping the atmosphere inside was brighter than Princess Amy’s forecast. As I moved to the order here spot, Amy remarked, Pointless to try lifting the spirit on a day destined to end in frustration and anxiety.

Still, as I’m sure you’re aware, we Genomes are made of sterner stuff than the standard model.  Chilled Damascus steel is how my grandfather Claudus put it. I placed my order for a double cappuccino with a flourish I perfected learned in the caffès of the Holy City, near the Spanish Steps but not too near the fountain. Then I chose a small table near the window but not too near the door. I played Jimmy Buffett tunes on Spotify. 

I was the only customer in the cafe and the barista seemed bored with nothing to do other than watch the early morning dogs walking their people. She decided to take steps; the kind that generate diverting conversation. She wasn’t a buzzer, bless her heart, and lacked the skill to follow Michael Jackson’s advice to start something. 

"Out for a walk this morning," she said.

"Yes," I said. I knew it was lacking a certain something but I thought it best to warm up slowly.

"It's muggy out there, isn't it?" she said and her words stirred Amy to ask, What the hell is this? Conversation about weather? Again?

For my part, I was silently praying, Oh no! Please, God, deliver me. What I actually said was, "I try to get a good walk in every morning.”

"Do you like exercise?" she said and I remember thinking at the time, Where the hell is this conversation going?

 "Me?" I said. "Are you kidding? I don't know when to stop." I was sure the remark had given me the home field advantage.

"Are you a runner then?" she said. And if I was a little confused before, I was astounded now. What was this young geezer thinking? "I love running. Five miles every morning. What do you do for exercise?"

"Oh, exercise," I said. "That explains it then. I thought you asked me if I liked extra fries."

Her face took on an expression worn by someone who felt strongly and had much to say. I couldn't hold in the laughter. I came close to slapping my knee and shouting 'Huzzah!' This hard-working tiller of roasted coffee beans may not be a buzzer but she'd started something anyway.

"I can see why you were confused," said a voice behind me.

"Oh, I didn't hear you come in," I said.

"I overheard the conversation," she said. "And I'm like you. I run like a herd of turtles is chasing me."

This comic relief appealed to the barista and she burst into laughter like a paper bag exploding.

When she caught her breath, she asked the newcomer, "So you only run when you're being chased?"

"Let me put it this way," she said. "If you see me running, you better start running too because whatever is chasing me is nothing you want to be introduced to."

It was magical. Suddenly it mattered little that a storm was brewing outside. Inside it was sunny and set fair.

"I think I love you," said the barista.

"I know," said the newcomer.

In all of the Carolinas, there is no sweeter spot than the districts of downtown Camelot. Looking out on the world through the windows of Egret Café, I felt as safe and cozy as viewing the world with Abbie Hoffman from atop the kitchen cabinets.

Mindfleet Contagion

The dashboard metrics spiked in June of 2025, about one week after posting the first episode of Mindspace: Into the Melancholy Nebula. In my line of work, a sudden steep incline on a traffic chart usually means one of two things: a server script has gone rogue and is trapped in an infinite loop, or a botnet in Eastern Europe has developed an inexplicable, burning passion for my vintage vocabulary.

I waited for the page to freeze or the blog to crash. Neither happened. The number of viewers just kept rising, with the calm indifference of a tide with no particular place to go.

Naturally, an investigation was required. Why had all of you suddenly decided to congregate inside The Circular Journey Cafe? The forensic analysis confirmed the numbers were clean. It marked an organic, honest-to-goodness surge of actual human eyeballs. Viewers became followers. Followers became a real audience. Writing into the digital void is the accepted standard formula, but having the void respond with enthusiasm is a joyful plot twist that exceeded my expectations.

To those of you who hit the subscribe button, forwarded a link, or simply lingered long enough to finish a paragraph, I am over-the-top grateful. Thank you.

The Viral Spike

The analytic evidence points to episodes having a few recurring themes that seem to have done the heavy lifting. Here is how the numbers broke down, and the storylines that prompted the universe to ratchet up the viewer response.

The Captain’s Stardate Log

A massive portion of the new crowd arrived because of Captain Amy, the highly critical, easily alarmed commander of my internal mindship, the FMS Coastal Voyager. Amy is tasked with leading a volatile crew of Mindfleet Academy officers through the roiling emotional storms of the Melancholy Nebula. Think of this series as a mashup of the original Star Trek television series and Pixar's animated movie, Inside Out, and filtered through the sensibility of someone who has read far too much and slept far too little.

In a perfectly neuro-stable universe, the amygdala, that almond-shaped cluster of brain cells responsible for threat assessment, is supposed to maintain calm during emotional turbulence. Amy’s preferred protocol, however, is to bypass the logic gates entirely and open fire with emotional phasers on full scatter-shot.

Apparently, a remarkable number of you deeply identify with having a reactionary commander shrieking unhelpful, panicked orders from the command console while the ship-wide alert system flashes pink. Why pink? Because Amy decided it was a far more psychologically catastrophic color for an emergency than conventional red. None of the other bridge officers were consulted.

The Amazing Ms. Wonder

Then there is Ms. Wonder who maintains the calm, unflappable anchor of reason, logic, and absolute level-headedness to every crisis Amy touches. When the Captain screams Abandon ship!, Wonder quietly materializes and solves the problem.

She is, in every meaningful sense, the Jeeves to my utterly bewildered Bertie Wooster. She extracts me from whatever existential tight spot Amy drags me into and restores order with the composed efficiency of someone who has never once lost her car keys.

A legion of you came, and stayed, simply to watch her effortlessly clear the structural wreckage left behind by the rest of the internal crew.

Some of you, I suspect, are lingering in the comments section hoping to get the secret recipe for her magical restorative elixir. I am reasonably certain it contains Blenheim's ginger ale, a dash of citrus, and something else that cannot legally be named in a public forum.

Whimsical Wilmawood Logistics

You clearly enjoy the misadventures that Amy and I fall into while traipsing around Hollywood East, whether we’re hunting for production crews filming The Summer I Turned Pretty or blindly submitting to the low-to-the-ground chaos of a GPS that has made very different plans for our afternoon.

In my ongoing effort to satisfy your appetite for this particular brand of local mayhem, I’ve learned a profound literary truth: a rogue, stowaway ferret named Reginald is the ultimate narrative hook. If you are ever struggling to hold a reader's attention, just add a ferret. Amy says it “ups the stakes,” and I’m telling you, it works every time.

Addendum

This blog has always been an exercise in looking at the mundane through a slightly warped lens. Knowing that this particular cocktail exploring neurodivergent life, through observational irony, and creative non-fiction has actually found a permanent home in your inbox makes the late nights, the existential parsing, and the extra coffee entirely worth it.

The surge is organic. My gratitude is immense. The journey remains circular, and as Amy would say while white-knuckling the armrests of her captain’s chair, we’re just getting started. Engage!

All That’s Fit to Fetch

The morning was one of those that arrive with a sense of divine instruction. The Universe, speaking in the language of blue skies and a light southerly breeze off the lagoon, said plainly: Come out of the house, Genome, and be among my people.  

It seemed an odd phrasing but, as someone once said in a previous century, ours is not to question but to obey. Shakespeare perhaps?

I obeyed by ankled down to Brunswick lagoon, the one with the gazebo, not the fountain. A great blue heron stood motionless in the shallows with the serenity of a monk who has achieved enlightenment and no longer requires breakfast. 

Two Mockingbirds conducted a bilateral summit in the Live Oaks. Somewhere behind me, a dog was offering its unsolicited opinion about, what I presumed was squirrel business.

It was the kind of morning that seems to have had me in mind when the new day dawned.

And then I noticed someone coming toward me on the path. He was of a certain target demographic age, purposeful in his stride, wearing the expression of a man who has recently come to a decision and feels quite happy about it. As he drew closer, he looked up. His eyes met mine. His face broke into a wide, warm smile.

"Hey!" he said. "Here he is!"

Well, I ask you.What was I supposed to do? I’m not made of stone. The man was smiling at me and had announced our meeting as though he’d been looking forward to the moment for some time. 

"Good morning!" I said, matching his energy and perhaps raising it slightly. "Wonderful day, isn't it?

He didn’t slow down and strode on past me as though I were the idle wind.

"No, no," he continued, gesturing broadly, "I told you already, the eleven o'clock doesn't work for me." 

I noticed, as he passed within arm's reach, the small white capsule lodged in his left ear, trailing a wire so fine it was nearly invisible in the morning light.

I processed this. I recalibrated. He was not talking to me. He had never been talking to me.

That ‘Here he is’ remark was intended for someone on the other end of a telephone call, someone who apparently was hoping for an eleven o'clock appointment; someone, decidedly, not me.

I watched him continue down the path, still talking, still gesturing, entirely unaware that he had just caused the internal clockwork to slip a gear in a man who had come out specifically to feel connected to the human race.

Well, said Amy, from somewhere in the vicinity of my left temple. That was something.

"Not a word, Amy" I said to that snarky little cluster of gray cells that serves as my limbic system.

I'm just saying, you really committed to it, didn’t you? 

She seemed to be enjoying herself enormously.

"Anyone could have made that mistake," I said. "The man smiled and made direct eye contact with me. Mine was a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the available evidence."

She giggled when she said, I want to make sure I have this right. You said to him, ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it?’

I made no immediate reply, which she correctly identified as a victory and celebrated accordingly.

The heron had not moved. It occurred to me that herons never have this problem. They simply stand quietly in the shallows, magnificent and unbothered, and let the world conduct its business at a safe distance.

Perhaps, I thought, the correct response to a world full of people talking to invisible companions is to become more heron-like.

I considered how the philosophy might be developed into something that could anchor a short TED Talk.

"Excuse me,” said a small voice.

I looked up. A woman with an expression of silver-haired wisdom, walking a small dog that appeared to be mostly ears, had stopped on the path. She was looking directly at me. Both ears were empty of electronic capsules. Her ears, I mean, not the dog’s.

"I couldn't help noticing," she said, nodding at the lagoon, "that heron has been standing in exactly the same spot for the past twenty minutes. I find it here every morning. Just thought you might find it interesting; you seem to be another admirer."

And there it was.

Not a grand revelation. Just a woman and a dog stopping to share a heron, the way people have always shared herons, when they happen to find themselves in the same place and time, paying attention.

"I did find it interesting," I said. "Very interesting."

She nodded, smiled and walked on. The dog looked back once, with the expression of a creature that thinks he’s seen it all and reckons it’s time to draft the memoir.

When I got home, Ms. Wonder was in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, wearing the expression she reserves for my return from a morning constitutional.

"How was the walk?" she asked.

"Instructive," I said, settling onto the stool at the counter,"I think the problem with modern life is not that people have stopped talking to each other. It's that they've made it difficult to tell who they're talking to."

She considered this with the focused attention she brings to all my announcements, however dubious their origins.

"Either that," she said, "or just maybe not everyone, smiling in your direction is making a personal connection."

"Wonder,” I said dispprovingly, “I am simply eager to engage with the world. I prefer to think of myself as enthusiastically available.”

She smiled and handed me a steaming cup of Jah’s mercy. It was, I noted with relief, the correct temperature.

Some days, that's all we need.