PUPPY SAMPLER
Hi! I hope you are happy and healthy.
My very first book is called Fearless Puppy On American Road. If you are unfamiliar with it, check out all the 5* reviews on Amazon. We are moving toward that time of year when folks in the Western world buy holiday gifts for their friends and co-workers and relatives. Being as all the author profits from all my writing will be donated, I have no hesitation about shamelessly promoting this book as the perfect gift — and doing it early.
A couple of short samples follow. If you know someone who would enjoy this kind of writing, please buy them a gift of this book for the holidays. Do you think they’d like something just a little less wild and a little more esoterically spiritual? If so, they would probably thank you for gifting them the second book, Reincarnation Through Common Sense. It also enjoys many 5* Amazon reviews.
If you don’t know anyone that still has an attention span strong enough to read a whole book, these two may be ideal for them. They each feature a continuous story of around 80+ short chapters, many of which can stand by themselves. Avid readers can buzz right through these page-turners. Our short attention span friends can stop and start without missing a beat.
If you haven’t seen these Fearless Puppy samplings yet, I hope you enjoy them. If you have, I hope you enjoy them again.
Thank you for reading and thank you for clicking the backlinks.
Be well. Love, Tenzin
p.s. As always, if you find the reading at all enjoyable, please — it literally takes only seconds — click one or more or all of the highlighted backlinks following this paragraph. This simple process is completely without risk, cost, or difficulty. All it does is bring you to the site that is highlighted. Each click is a big help in pushing Fearless Puppy up in the Google rankings. Whether you browse the sites or close the windows immediately, your help has been delivered when you click. Thank you!
To buy the book or send as gift, click on the Amazon links below
FEARLESS PUPPY ON AMERICAN ROAD/AMAZON PAGE
REINCARNATION THROUGH COMMON SENSE/AMAZON PAGE
New York Was, New York Is
Coney Island may historically be the world’s most famous playground. To me it was just The Neighborhood. I grew up within a five-minute walk of ocean, roller coasters, and Nathan’s famous hot dog emporium. Nathan’s has since gone the way of the chain/franchise but back then it was the one and only Nathan’s restaurant in existence.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, before corporate mania, marketing, and God-as-economics took over the world, the franchising of Nathan’s could not have taken place. Any attempt to minimize the sacred and unique nature of an institution as beloved as Nathan’s would surely have resulted in a solid beating for the Madison Avenue weasel who came up with the idea.
Times have indeed changed with and since the long series of mind-numbing assassinations and very hostile takeovers that erased the America we knew. Now that the inmates indeed run the asylum, that very same Madison Avenue weasel is a glorified hero instead of a despicable villain. In the America of my youth, it certainly would have been different. Now that the manufactured fear of the Russians has been replaced by a very justifiable fear of ourselves, the “American Dream” has gone further astray. Back then the country was an open road both figuratively and literally.
Coney Island is at the southernmost part of New York City — the feet of the metropolis, if you will. All the city’s nerve endings originate and end, as they do in any body, in its feet. The New York City subway system was the most spectacular and efficient mass transit system in the mid-1960s world. All its West End lines originated then, as they still do, in the Coney Island terminal across the street from Nathan’s. From Brooklyn’s ocean playground one could get to anywhere in the city and make connections to anywhere in the world. Transportation to several million miracles of educational outreach were accessible for the same price as one of Nathan’s hot dogs.
Why would a 15-year-old boy with a New York City native’s knowledge of transportation systems shun both public and private transport to spend the next thirty-five years hitchhiking throughout North America? Why would anyone bypass the relative ease and safety of bus, train, or personal car and open himself to all manner of possible disasters by braving the whims of fate and the moods of passersby?
I’ll tell you why.
I’ve attended eight different colleges and universities. I have learned more in other people’s cars.
Truth or Consequences
To a boy from the northeastern part of America, the Southwest looks like Mars-as-a-work-of-art. Breathtaking red clay buttes are spotted with green, brown, and yellow vegetation. Most of this vegetation would be very confused if it lived in the Northeast. It seems to be neither tree nor bush but something in between.
Technicolor canyons and solitary rock formations look as if they’d been dropped onto the flat desert face from some far away galaxy.
Abandoned ghost towns are more eerie in person than their artificial backdrop-for-a-western-movie counterparts could ever hope to be. Shattered wooden shutters slap back and forth against the rotting clapboards even on windless days, as if propelled by the breath of actual ghosts in this former frontier. The spirits of those that failed to make a life in this desert two hundred years ago seem to be warning newcomers of the difficulties they can expect. These spirits had hoped this place would be their heaven, their Camelot. Instead it became a cemetery for their dreams, and in many cases for their families. They inhale attachment and exhale despair. They never get to move on.
A normal breeze doesn’t have the otherworldly smell that air movement in a ghost town does. It is the fragrance of history. It is the odor of a momentary hope, glory, and demise gone by so long ago that no one alive remembers the occasion. These scents rise up from the ether every now and then to frighten the stagnant atmosphere into movement.
Despite the emotional gravity of ghost towns, they are really no more than a short misplayed note in the majestic symphony that is the Southwest’s desert. Vast expanses of scenery too beautiful for humans to have possibly built were here long before these now abandoned settlements were a twinkle in a wagon train’s eye. They will be here long after the mini-malls and fast-food troughs are gone.
Giant cacti are camels-as-vegetable-matter. They store a whole year’s supply of liquid life in their bodies while surrounded by rock and sand that long ago died of thirst.
An occasional lone ranch house stands amidst several thousand acres of nothing, testifying to the strength and sheer audacity of the human will — but for the most part this land looks much as it did before humanity existed.
The Southwest is also one of the few areas in North America where the continent’s original human inhabitants are still readily available. These Natives have suffered a painful fortune that even Caligula’s heartless imagination would not have been able to fathom. In some places, they survive the harsh result of the human cruelty inflicted upon them with the same fortitude and grace they employed to survive the harsh natural environment for millennia before their holocaust. In other places, Native survival is more reminiscent of the bone chilling decay of a ghost town’s clapboards, and the breeze of lost souls that moves the shutters of its former windows.
Nights are a little bit colder than days back in the northeastern states. It gets a lot colder at night in the southwestern desert. Moonlit cacti host lizards, rodents, and snakes on their evening hunting trips. Coyotes in packs define clever and resourceful by their cooperative survival efforts.
The harsh majesty of the Southwest will exact a price, even from its survivors. It is a dog-eat-dog world. Danger and beauty abide together under the cruel sun, and often under the same rock.
One must master the truths of this environment — or one will surely suffer the consequences.
About the Author
Doug “Ten” Rose may be the biggest smartass as well as one of the most entertaining survivors of the hitchhiking adventurers that used to cover America’s highways. He is the author of the books Fearless Puppy on American Road and Reincarnation Through Common Sense, has survived heroin addiction and death, and is a graduate of over a hundred thousand miles of travel without ever driving a car, owning a phone, or having a bank account.
Ten Rose and his work are a vibrant part of the present and future as well as an essential remnant of a vanishing breed.
Follow him on Facebook, Doug Ten Rose
Travel Adventure Books can be an excellent gift to your friends and family, buy from Amazon.com
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Many thanks to our wonderful friends at Pema Boutique Hotel for their help and support.
The books Fearless Puppy On American Road and Reincarnation Through Common Sense by this same author are also available through Amazon or the Fearless Puppy website, where there are sample chapters from those books. Entertaining TV/radio interviews with and newspaper articles about the author are also available there. There is no charge for anything but the complete books! All author profits from book sales will be donated to help sponsor an increase in the number of wisdom professionals on Earth, beginning with but certainly not limited to Buddhist monks and nuns.
If you missed the Introduction to the new book that will be titled Temple Dog Soldier, or would like to see several chapters of it that are available for free online, go to the Puppy website Blog section. This is a book in progress. You will be reading it as it is being created! Just like you, I don’t know what the next chapter is going to be about until it is written. As the Intro will tell you, this is a totally true story — and probably the only book ever written by and about a corpse journeying completely around the world!
