ALVA,
IT IS NOT JUST THAT YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE COMMAND OF ENGLISH.  IT IS A THOUGHT PROVOKING BOOK AND AS YOU SAY A CONFESSION OF SORTS.  I THINK ALOT OF IT WAS BECAUSE OF THEIR CHOICES AND HOPEFULLY IT HELPED THEM ALONG THE ROAD THEY ARE TRAVELING.
MANY PARTS I COULD RELATE TO AS MUTT IS SO MUCH LIKE JACK WAS AND DID MANY OF THE SAME THINGS.   ALMOST A CARBON COPY AT TIMES.
LUV YA
MISS GEORGIE

Alva we require nothing from the book's writing.
It is a commentary on the things we lived by, and yes it could be a confession.
I think it is safe to say that neither Tracy or myself care what anyone things.
There is a pint to the story as there will be a sequel. 
Once you read that piece the purpose of Convoking Hell will make sense.
In the mean time, we again have our hand's full at Rescue Staven,
The process of drawing the brain trust together is at hand.  Tonight Rachel and Layla will be
joining us at Staven. The process of leaving RI and coming to CT is almost complete.
It has been a wonderful summer here in Orange, but as the fall comes the departure must happen.

Tracy has a new feeling about being in her house...
she tells me she likes it again.
We will be making it a home and for all of us that has been a reality we have gone without
for quite some time.

And today I am back at power washing the house needing painting.

Ruff you.

A confessional is a good way to describe the book. That's not all that it is, but
it is a part of it.

The book is the truth, in a nutshell. Of course, as the disclaimer of the book states;
it's the truth as far as we can say that it is. Memories are flawed and we may have
mixed up a date or a name here and there, but the recollections contained within the book
are accurate to our memories.

Is it a cautionary tale? Could be. Is it a declaration of intention for the future? Possibly.
It is.... simply what it IS. It's a tale of two lives lived. Whether they've been lived well or
lived badly.... that, I suppose is up to the individual reader to decide if they chose to
judge us characters.

personally I call it a liberation...
I should probably get serious about politics...
whatever it is... this Convoking Hell
or whether or not people even finish the read...
they'll walk away with a whole different thing to consider, wonder or even debate.
More important than  On The Road?

Oh Yeah....

Ruff You

'on the road' doesn't hold a candle to 'convoking hell', not at least in this reader's opinion.

i admire the authors of this book. you two put your whole lives out on public display without appology and let a world of complete strangers examine your souls. it would have been easy i think to write the book differently with all kinds of rationalizations for your actions and appologies for them and to have sugarcoated all the screw ups and bad decisions and hurts and all that, but you both chose not to do it that way. you just set it out on the table for inspection and shrugged. i think that is beautiful. neither of you seemed to find it necessary to justify your actions or choices and didn't have to tell us whether or not you'd learned from the experiences, and you didn't try to come off as saints in the end who would never make another mistake or tread into dangerous territory for foolish reasons again because that would be fiction right there. and you're not fictional characters you are two real human beings who now seem much more real than many of the people i actually see in my life.

i've read other biographies and autobiographies before but i've never been this moved and this intrigued by any other. it's mind boggling that the two of you got together to write this. the two different styles of writing meshed very well together and complimented each other. one is a very raw and gritty style with a voice that tends to laugh at its own foolishness and the other voice is very smooth and refined despite the harshness of the situations being written about. both very emotionally evocative and the read is a real rollercoaster. so for whatever 'reason' you both wrote it - you were very brave and this reader says thank you.

Indeed !
That's why I did not do that sort of critic ... I imagined you did not care of what anyone thinks !! LOL

Now seriously...
I always defend family values since I believe man has been designed that way. But defending family does not mean "you create a family and do not worry for anything else", no. It's unuseful to create a family and then the members all that family do not do their duties, do not behave in a given way. The "human machine" is not designed for having his own family as the cause of his problems and pains. That's obvious in the case of Tracy.

Some, specially liberals, attack family using a false argument based on partial examples like "my father made my life impossible". Actually that father is not following family values, no matter he's married and have sons, if he does not behave as father, that family becomes a disaster. The same happens with the mother and the sons.

So when parents pass on their duties, that family becomes a hell, the contrary of family, and deeply damage the formation and future of the sons in the most interior.
In my job, I am used to see some cases of fathers that are stuborn in economically damaging their sons, with statements like "do not sell those fornitures to my son", which is amazing and antinatural. Needless to say that father and son do not talk since many years ago, the father has a shop, and the son a shop in front, at the other side of the street.

We all have had friends living in nightmare homes, that were wishing to get running out of home as soon as possible, and not seeing their parents never again. Violent parents, alcoholic parents, crazy parents, abusive parents, destroy family armony, and the kids grow deeply injured, with psicologic wounds. Parents that do not provide what man needs, peace at home, that confort from external menaces, that tender love that man needs to become adult and love others in an ordered way. The contrary brings disorder, chaos into the mind of the kids.

And then those kids spend life trying to solve that chaos, looking for that they had not. And that becomes uphill cause they have not the tools to do that, those tools they were supposed to have gotten at home. So they spend many years first trying to make the tools by their own, which is a hard path, full of faliures, mistakes, a bitter experiences ...

[oooppps, too late, I've met, have to go running, laters] ...

Thanks for the post, Alva. I completely agree about family values and the chaos that ensues when those values are not held to. "Home" and "family" is where we are supposed to learn what "normal" is and develop those tools that you spoke about. And, when those tools are not realized in those formative years it is much harder to get them on our own later in life. I hope that Convoking Hell serves as a wake-up call for at least a few people, letting them know the damage that can be done - damage that last lifetimes and is very difficult to overcome.

Back ..

Results from those unbalanced and hellish homes are depressions (suicide), promiscuity, homosexuality, sex obsessions, hedonism, drugs consume, alcoholism, school droppings, violent character, passivity, madness, inferiority complex, unability to have goals and get them, mind dispersion, isolation, unability to love and being loved, and etc ... It's hard that a kid had them all, but can occur several of them.

Those fatal effects themselves hamper the healing, and bring more troubles and obstacles in the path. It's very hard for an alcoholic man to keep jobs for long, bringing an economical shortage that feeds other problems that bring more alcoholism for forgetting the past faliures. Homosexuality brings an empty life, a steril love, and far from being normal, it's a fountain of troubles and wounds. Passivity, when a man does not feel owner of his life and expects for impossible miracles and magical solutions. Depression, that is living being dead. Hedonism, in which a man just looks for pleasure (or the removal of pain) at any cost, seeing in his fellows just sexual objects that can provide that, and not caring of the damage to those others. Violence, attacks of angryness and rage, result from faliures and anguish. Mind dispersion, a man is unable to concentrate in a given goal. Promiscuity, a man is unable to find an stable lover with a common goal for long and then start a family........ All those individual hells that can happen here on the ground.

I believe christianity can offer great help to that army of suffering people, army of unhappies. Christ specially came to rescue them....

******************************
I agree with you Tracy..

By the way, I found great humor hits from you both too ...

Like when Tracy speaks of her visits "the air conditioner man" and so on ....
Or that Mutt's story on "Dr. Goldfinger" ... or that story about that woman that was a witch ...
LOL LOL LOL ..

More than the content, the way you both express those stories is hilarious ....

Mutt, you have the same humor-writing as a journalist I did read (died last summer at 87) that sent weekly
"Letters from Paris" in his political columns ... and they were hilarious ...

thanks ..

Thanks, Alva. One of the most important things in life is the ability to laugh about things, even the most dire of circumstances can hold humor. And sometimes we're left in situations where the only two choices are laugh or cry and I will generally chose to laugh.

Sense of humor is a gift...
There are people out there that start to talk and provokes laughter for anything.
My brother and a cousin are that way, they do not want to provoke laughter, but they do, for the way to talking and the words
they use. So, in any family matter I keep to sit near ...