I buy a lot of stuff from them. Books, batteries, Bose earphones, travel alarm, anchovies…it’s a brilliant operation  — quick, simple, low-cost. But lately I’ve been backing off a bit. Yesterday I went into Builder’s Booksource in Berkeley and bought 2 books — Cracks in the Asphalt – Community Gardens in San Francisco, and Steal Like an Artist, which George, the owner showed me, plus 2 copies of Dwell Magazine (which I think sucks — going to write something about them soon).

   I read a while back about people finding books in bookstores and ordering from Amazon on their phones right then. Hold up here! Is low cost the only criteria? How about supporting the bookstores so they can stay open and you can go in and browse and talk to book-loving personnel?

   I’ve switched to ordering all my photo equipment from BH PhotoVideo in New York. To find an item like a Canon battery charger with fold-out (rather than cord) prongs, I talked to someone at BH, who directed me to the item I wanted right away. One time a guy there turned me onto a nice little card reader that he used himself. Their prices are about as good as Amazon. If you’re into photography and in Manhattan, go there — huge place — like 50 sales people at the digital counter — (take a number like for sandwiches at Whole Foods).

  Thirdly, I’ve been buying tools lately at Jackson Hardware, an employee-owned super tool and hardware store in San Rafael, Calif. Yesterday I bought a Makita model 4350T jigsaw, and it cost me $25 more than at Amazon. But the sales guy walked me through Makitas, Bosch’s, Dewalts and how to work the controls on the Makita for 4 different cutting actions. I ended up buying this top of the line one for $199. (At my age, it’ll last me for the –ulp! — rest of my life.)

   There’s a prevalent argument for buying everything from Amazon because they’re cheaper. I’m sayin that the almighty lowest cost ain’t all there is to it.

Mony Mony by Tommy James & The Shondells on Grooveshark

Stevie at 12 years of age.  This song was written for Stevie by Clarence Paul and Henry Cosby. Many of the other songs he did early on were covers of Ray Charles songs.

This is the 29th book I’ve done in 44 years of publishing, and something different has happened here.

   Our output is slow because we put books together 2 pages at a time. Grown-up publishers get a book totally prepared — text and graphics — before starting production.

   I collected materials, for about a year, stored both on the computer and in old-school 5th-cut file folders. Once it got to a tipping point, we started production. I’d pull out the best stuff, do layout with a cheap color copy machine and scotch tape. Our artist-sometimes-in-residence, David Wills, would tune up the designs, whenceforth they went to Rick Gordon for InDesign/Photoshop preparation for printers. Lew Lewandowski unearthed a lot of this material, and designed a bunch of pages. Evan Kahn contributed in various ways. The book assumed its form, with categories, 2/3 of the way through its production.

   Bob Easton and I developed this seat-of-pants method of production out of necessity with Shelter in 1973: we only had maybe half of the materials ready, so we just started. I continued to shoot photos, write, and edit the book while it was in production. Photos kept coming in from contributors. Still our M.O.

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Tiny Homes has been selling so well that we have to do a speedy 7th reprinting. I just wrote to Rick and Lew — regarding our 3-man team needing to converge Monday to get the changes done — and said “All hands on deck Monday.”

  Which brought to mind Procul Harum’s “A Salty Dog,” an epic of the sea which starts out with seagull cries and “All hands on deck…”

   Which I’m playing now, still amazed at this masterpiece of a rock opera. Wonderful still, 45 years later…

WELL! In retrospect I think it was sheer exhaustion. Finishing the new book after a speeded-up schedule, too little sleep, too much caffeine, 3 major trips back to back — I don’t do airplanes/airports well at all — and I got to Hawaii — long anticipated, oh boy, warm water — wrote a blog post the first morning there about how rich my life was, and keblam, the next day folded like a limp hot air balloon…Long story short — it’s been about 2 weeks of feeling like shit + severe neck pain and I’m finally on the other side…I recognized a couple of things during this episode: (1) I’m a total wimp about  being sick. It’s the end of my world; I don’t suffer feeling bad or low-chi gladly and (2) I haven’t had sufficient empathy for people that are ill or in pain. The neck thing made me realize what people who have say, back pain, are going through. Holy shit! Well, a big fat (800 mg) Ibuprofen cured the neck pain — voila — plus there was a music documentary of George H. W. Bush’s 1989 inauguration — blues, baby! — and a killer version of “Hey Bo Diddley” with Bo and Ronnie Woods that was extraordinary — and I started to move my neck, and sweet Jesus, I feel alive again, and ready to get on with my life. I might even jump on my skateboard this afternoon.

   Whenever things break down like this for me, I can count back to at least 6 dumb things I’ve done, in combo. Here there were like 9. Look at the amount of stuff I was carrying — no checked bags — plus I was walking up all the stairs, not using escalators, in airports, to get a workout. Yes, yes…