The 151st running of the Kentucky Derby took place on Saturday, May 2nd. That also meant that it was my birthday. I was born on Derby Day. The pic is my Grandfather Ohashi and me.
I don’t know what got into me, but I realized I should be better at staying in touch with people I’d met over the years: family members, classmates, former colleagues, and near strangers.
My devices are full of email addresses that organically accumulated over the past 32 years. The number is around 5,800.
Email wasn’t widely used until the 1990s, which was about the time I moved from Lander, Wyoming, to Boulder, Colorado.
It took me a few hours, but I cleaned up my address book this week. There were people I had known during my various lives on the job and in the community. Some people had died. I’ve stayed connected with many of you, and now social media has become a more popular way to find out what you’re doing.
Ships passing in the night. For most of you, though, we were acquaintances who drifted in and out of each other’s lives as our circumstances changed.
Maybe you were a student intern, a client, a customer, a social media user, or a fleeting friend.
We could have been volunteers together in a nonprofit organization. We could be friends who met on social media.
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What is the purpose of this newsletter? It will be like a holiday update, but more frequent, probably monthly. About my creative projects, new stories I’ve written. Since I have acquaintances who range from the far left and far right, there won’t be perspectives on current political events.
What have I been doing lately? I’ve been making documentary movies and writing books. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent my time in self-isolation resurrecting my writing.
I’ve written 10 books since 2020 and started a publishing company for emerging writers, Best Chance Media.
My first novel, A New Dawn at Libby Flats, which takes place in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Jersey, is a reverse coming-of-age story.
My documentary movie, The Arapaho Covered Wagon Redux, stalled during COVID. It finally saw the light of day in 2024 and screened at the Boulder International Film Festival in March 2025.
If you have any story ideas that the world should know about, I’m open to new ideas for books and movies.
I’ve been uncluttering. My cyberworld was getting cluttered with too many domain names. and consolidated all of my websites to converge on this one, Boulder Community Media.
I also noticed that I have 48,000 emails and have no idea why I’ve been hoarding them. Trashing those may be a project for another life.
My analog world also needed to be downsized. There was an urban wildfire that destroyed 1,000 homes east of Boulder on December 30, 2021. Most people lost everything.
That’s when I sold all of my collectible memorabilia in 2023. I still suffer from separation anxiety. I took photos of my best baseball cards and retained the memories. It’s time for others to get some enjoyment out of my junk.
I almost died in 2014. An exotic lung disease almost took me.
Life is short, and so far, I’ve been waking up on the right side of the grass to face another day. I was in the hospital and rehab for six weeks and housebound for another two months.
This is the only picture that I took while flat on my back.
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