Join us for this beautiful event!

On Friday, July 22, at the Hyatt Regency’s Grand Ballroom, I will be discussing Listo Love, my latest novel, my life project, at the San Francisco Writers Conference “Writing for Change” event.

Please join lots of Loved Ones from 7-10 p.m.! You can find more information here:

Writing for Change 2022

“Writing for Change: Literature of Love”

Always in all ways all Amor Eterno.

With humility, but with certainty, I assert that Amor is the ultimate change, transformation, and revolution of the universe. Writing with Amor is the best I can do.

I have written with art, intelligence, ugliness, hate, and much more, so I know that nothing changes, really changes, without Love. No matter how smart, slick, powerful, and vain I can be in my writing or in my life, I wake up humiliated and frustrated at 3:00 o’clock in the morning.

I am a writer, and so is everyone in this world where we are reading and writing more than any other generation in human history.

Text is even more powerful now, but it is nothing without Love.

If I am witty or artful or literary in my writing, and that is all I am, then I am nothing, not even a vanity of who I pretend to be, especially since I do not know myself, and I never will. No freedom, no liberation, no scary spider symbols will save me from myself.

These words are simply spider symbols. They bite and poison us while we are stuck in their web. Then they suck our blood.

This is the best we can expect and hope for with words alone.

Spirit matters most.

Here is the transformation of spirit I have gained through writing.

Barrio Bushido: The Code of the Streets.

Pura Neta: Street Spanglish Slang for Pure Truth.

Listo Love: It was a dog, a Pit Bull dog, that gifted me the energy of Amor when I needed it most.

I have been troubled my entire life—from being born into the old Army Street Highrise housing projects to living Vida Loca on the San Fran Frisco City Streets to front-line combat in the Marine Corps to lust and greed and ugliness and hate, and sometimes to Amor, too.

It was Love and that alone that always kept us going in spirit.

Listo Love, my new novel, is the story of a man and his best friend, an American Pit Bull Terrier—the best and worst of all animals, the noblest beast, the deadliest devil. In heaven and in hell, this dog of velvet and steel will be your Brother, all of everything that that means.

The literary idea for the novel was inspired by a 1914 book of poem short stories entitled Platero and I by Nobel Prize Winner Juan Ramon Jimenez. In that beautiful book, Jimenez wanders the world with his silver donkey. The love, tenderness, and wisdom in it, made me reflect on my own noble friend.

The Pit Bull.

It has been a blessing to share life with these animals that are more moral than me. They have helped and healed me.

In 1993 I got out of the Corps, after fighting as a grunt in war and training to kill all around the world. I was angry, confused, and scared, yet couldn’t even admit that to myself. Instead of accepting shame, I hid it by drinking, by being vicious, by being a Sav on the streets.

I needed something, someone who could be my Brother and push me to play all the way. That is when I got my first Pit.

Vida Loca. We lived that life that was full of adventure and heart-break. Listo, the Pit in my new novel, is stronger than any human being.

We like to imagine we humans would enter into life and death with as much Gameness as these creatures of our own Atomic creation—the Pit that goes beyond instinct and nature. There is no other animal so much like us, partnered with us, bred by us, living with us, that will fight and win and fight and die.

In this fiction, Listo, the American Pit Bull Terrier, gives me hope of spirit that I can never understand.

Most humans would choose to escape rather than fight dead-game in the Box.

My fingers have gone numb from writing. I have a big forearm muscle from scribbling on paper! But for what? Entertainment, intelligence? I have been on that hype, and all it does is get me more stuck in the web of Nothing, which is not even a word.

Without Amor, writing is just an escape.

Listo means Reddy. Listo Love, therefore, is Love that is always Reddy.

Change is right now inside of Listo Love.

Change, transformation happens when we write with Amor.

It does not need to be complicated or difficult. When we text our Loved Ones, we can write each word with Amor. When we post on social media, we can write with pure Love.

If everyone on planet Earth wrote and actioned with the purity of Amor for just one hour straight, we would have solved all the problems of the world.  

This is a logical, irrefutable argument that sounds like fiction, but it is not. It does not make sense because we are so indoctrinated into hate, we are blind to the beauty and grace of Amor.

You can begin now. Write one sentence with All Amor. Send it to a Loved One, who can even be an enemy. I guarantee you that if you feel it with all your heart and soul, there will be a Change.

Always in all ways all Amor Eterno.