Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author

We had so much fun I thought I’d run it by you again in case you missed it.

Two sessions - the Ladies Who Lunch chat cheerfully among themselves, review Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner, and dish about me in my absence. In another session, they ask me questions, most of which were not embarrassing.

Click here to replay!

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“As a nomad, I follow the path of least resistance while honoring the joy of climbing mountains and navigating the jungle.”

Quinne Brown Huffman’s book is a lifelong reflection to the point of embracing her purpose, summoning courage and enthusiasm for her next steps. The title might imply finding her roots, which she does recounting formative events of her childhood, tweens, teens, and motherhood. But it’s also a process of growing a spine as an adult — and as the winged image on the cover suggests — taking flight as she celebrates her uniqueness as an individual as well as her mission as an active member of community.

“Following the path of least resistance” might seem to go counter to purposeful living, but for Quinne it’s about maintaining a mindset, being open to possibilities that are greater than you can imagine or specify. When you realize the value of unexpected opportunities, you can embrace them.

Finding My Bones: A Fantastical Memoir of My Endless Metamorphosis and Lessons Learned by Quinne Brown Huffman

Her story tells of her childhood in South Africa, along with family outings there, then her own adventures “collecting my bones” in London, Glasgow, San Francisco, and returning trips to South Africa. Today, she is a practitioner of metaphysical and healing arts, recently settled with her family in Southern California.

The heart of her emergence has been the transformative experiences of childbirth and motherhood, which she has extended as a doula and compassionate counselor.

Her storytelling waxes poetic at times, and the shifts to what reads like free verse are seamless. So, it’s lyrical. (Perhaps she will sing the audiobook?)

It’s a delight and an inspiration. I suspect she might have written it for her daughters, but consider yourself a family member.

Find Quinne Brown Huffman on Substack here @quinne, and as well as minding the store at Sunset Park Provisions in Santa Monica.

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Two chatty, high-spirited podcasts dish it up about Harry’s misadventures in Kenya(Names changed to avoid consequences)

Book club party cohosts Val, Courtney, & Lisa review the tender-hearted novel Harry Harambee's Kenyan Sundowner, which tells the story of a lonely widower’s “second-chance romance.”

The My Perfect Romance podcast discusses all things romance — they discuss books, movies, and interview real couples as well.

It’s set in the intriguing locale of a luxury seacoast resort in Kenya.

But perfect? Hardly. Harry worries:

Is corruption a fact of life everywhere?

Is all love transactional?

Am I being scammed? (If I’m enjoying myself, should I care?)

Am I a tourist or a citizen?

Listen to the Book Review

These ladies are having great fun. You’re a fly on the wall. They get only slightly more serious when eventually they start talking about the book.

These three stifled their giggles just long enough to introduce Gerald for a soul-searching interview:

Listen to the interview

The author reluctantly admits that Harry’s misadventure is a fictionalized memoir, but he refuses to say which incidents actually happened to him when he lived for two years in Kenya.

Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner is available in paperback, Kindle/EPUB, and audiobook (on Audible, Apple, Google Play, BN, Kobo, and other popular platforms).

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What if everything you believed about your childhood turned out to be only half the story?

Rich had been talking to me about the book he wanted to write for what seemed like a very long time. Recently, the improvements in audio transcription software made it possible for him finally get it done. As he describes it:

“For ten years I tried (and failed) to write this book, until a good friend told me to just do what I do for a living. Talk. Tell the story into a microphone. And transcribe it later. So that’s what I did.”

So, veteran broadcaster Rich Boerner had his audiobook “in the can” before he had a manuscript. The story goes:

When he boarded a flight to New York, it wasn’t just to mourn his mother—it was to unearth the truth about his entire life. He takes his audience on a heart-stirring and often hilarious journey through grief, memory, and stunning personal revelation. What begins as a bittersweet mission to clean out his late mother’s apartment quickly transforms into a life-redefining odyssey, as long-buried family secrets begin to rise to the surface—one box, one drawer, one photo at a time.

The Not-So Only Child: My True Story by Rich Boerner (YourStorybyYou.com).

Told with warmth, self-deprecating humor, and unflinching honesty, Rich revisits his childhood as a self-proclaimed only child, raised by a spirited single mother in a cramped Queens apartment. Through deeply personal anecdotes, he shares the tender joys of a mother-son bond steeped in musical theater, baseball games, and private jokes—an oasis of love in his otherwise male-absent world. But when an unexpected discovery reveals his late mother’s secret romance with a long-time coworker, Rich is forced to reconsider everything he thought he knew about his father—and himself.

Rich’s mom shared her enthusiasm for music, dance, and baseball with him. (Book illustrations by Dr. Christopher Zeineh.)

As he navigates the emotional chaos of this revelation, Rich stumbles into something even more unimaginable: a sibling he never knew existed. Through a series of letters, chance emails, and transcontinental phone calls, Rich builds a connection with his newfound sister, a woman who grew up just a few miles—but a whole world—away. Their unfolding relationship adds a new layer to Rich’s journey of self-understanding and familial connection, showing how sometimes the truth we seek arrives decades late, but just in time.

Rich's voice, rooted in his career as a radio professional and audio storyteller, lends a distinct cadence to this memoir—like sitting across from a friend who makes you laugh while breaking your heart. The Not-So Only Child is a celebration of the redemptive power of truth, the resilience of love, and the beautiful, chaotic mess that is family. It reminds us that life doesn’t always give us neat answers—but when it does, they often come wrapped in the most unexpected packages.

About the Author

Rich Boerner is a Webby, NAACP Image, and Broadcast Radio Award-Winning Audio Creator / Producer / Talent whose successful journey has taken him to Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Orlando. His resume includes working for and with A-List talent and major networks, including Spotify, Audacy, FOX, and CBS Radio. Rich has also been the voice of several regional and national ad campaigns. Boerner also directed and co-created a film-fest honored web TV series, and as a youth, cohosted the first national Cable TV Pay-Per-View Concert, featuring Ozzie Osbourne.

He’s most proud of, and impressed by, his three children. Grateful to be able to spend his days with his golden-hearted wife.

Finally, as a champion of the underdog, Rich continues to be deeply obsessed with The NY Mets, NY Jets, and LA Clippers.

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His insight is on the forefront of neuroscience. His plot, as before, is the weaponization of same.

I hold Dan Brown in high respect. If you have viewed my interviews posted here, I have extolled the wisdom of his advice:

Keep making promises to the reader.

The Secret of Secrets: A Novel by Dan Brown (Doubleday)

He shares this advice in his Masterclass interview. Before I saw that session, I assumed he would be coaching writers on how to craft cliffhangers, of which he is a master. True, he did. But wrong, his advice wasn’t about cornering protagonists in locked rooms and devising clever means of escape. Those latter examples I call “Bulldog Drummond” perils. The (male) hero and his (usually female) sidekick get trapped in a closed room. In one episode of the famous old movie serial, the walls are moveable and begin to close in, threatening to crush them. In other plots, water begins to flood the space, and there is no apparent way out.

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Nevertheless, Dan Brown is a master at crafting those kinds of scenes. And these tight situations inspire the “eye-candy” that makes patrons of movie thrillers breathless.

The revelation promised by The Secret of Secrets title will be hardly a surprise to students of recent scientific theory. Brown does not save the reveal to the very end. No, he repeats it early and often: “Consciousness is nonlocal.”

What does nonlocal mean?

Nonlocal is a technical term now used widely among theoreticians to describe physics that are not well understood, nor explainable by empirical means in a contained local environment. Among researchers in neuroscience, the controversial split is between materialist and noetic explanations of human consciousness. Materialists such as Ray Kurzweil, preeminent researcher at Google and author of the recent book The Singularity Is Nearer, nothing goes on in a human brain that can’t eventually be explained by local physical processes. So, if you build a computer that is complex enough, it will become conscious. Therefore, everything humans experience—our thoughts, our emotions, and even our sense of the timeless—occurs entirely within our own skulls.

A contrary view is expressed by the noetic scientists, typified by neurologist Christof Koch in his book The Feeling of Life Itself. Koch believes he’s investigated all possible local processes in the brain that could produce what we experience subjectively as consciousness. He finds no satisfactory explanation by applying laws of physics as presently understood. He speculates, therefore, that consciousness may be a pervasive and fundamental property of the universe. All sentient beings share in this experience to the extent that our individual bandwidth of perception permits.

Fundamental. Universal. Shared. That’s the meaning of nonlocal.

And not just Koch. None other than preeminent linguist and semantic theoretician Noam Chomsky speculates that the origin and inheritance of language is nonlocal—not arising simply from complexity of brain structure—but somehow received as shared intelligence, perhaps from what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Chomsky’s cohort of theoreticians contend they can be specific about when humans began to speak—about 125,000 B.C., among primitive Bushmen-Pygmy groups.

And music and dance came first! Then not speech—but clicks!

Now to the spoiler. Hang on to your topknot lest you blow your lid:

Ultimately—hardly a surprise considering the novel’s genre—the secret is the way nonlocal consciousness has been, perhaps is being, exploited by the three-letter intelligence agencies.

Fans of Dan Brown will understand that he is not only a consummate storyteller—he is also a pundit and a prophet. In his The Da Vinci Code, his villain is a follower of the secretive Catholic cult Opus Dei. Few news feeds will tell you that Leonard Leo, the billionaire who helped pack the Supreme Court, is a follower of that organization, as are several members of the high court. In Brown’s Inferno, years before the outbreak of Covid, he describes a worldwide pandemic unleashed by a research scientist who fears the main threat to human extinction is overpopulation.

In the frontmatter to The Secret of Secrets, Dan Brown states emphatically:

All artwork, artifacts, symbols, and documents in this novel are real.

All experiments, technologies, and scientific results are true to life.

All organizations in this novel exist.

Be afraid? Be very afraid?

Buddhist masters will perhaps claim that nonlocal consciousness is no new discovery.

But the notion that human brains are receivers rather than generators of our experience will be a revelation to the rest of us.

Dan Brown was a student of Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive private school where his father taught mathematics. Like J. K. Rowling, who studied classics at university, Brown was schooled in “dead white men’s literature.” These days, young scholars may encounter this tradition only in their novels.

Brown’s advice to continually make promises to the reader is basic. End a chapter when a question arises and before you give the answer. The reader will expect to get a reward by turning the page.

Remarkably, the chapters in this novel are short, scarcely more than a few pages. There are 141 of them (including Prologue and Epilogue). Just right for snagging the next promise while waiting for a bus or your food.

If I have a complaint about Brown, whether in this one or in his body of work, it’s his belaboring of those perilous Bulldog Drummond situations.

But, hey, those action sequences are the favorite fodder of moviemakers. Enjoy! (Just don’t expect the movie to venture very far into the deeper stuff.)

As of this writing, checking IMDBPro, the novel is not yet in preproduction. Don’t doubt it will be!

How about a dose of theology and metaphysics with your crime?

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Host KTown reached out to find out what Gerald knows about Project Blue Beam.

Mysterious Radio with KTown website

AmperWave Player (Generic)

Our discussion of this conspiracy theory led back to the Church Comission investigations of the early 1960s and a well-documented plot to overthrow Fidel Castro with a spectacular false-flag operation.

Rumors abound today about Project Blue Beam, presumably a secret NASA program.

My wide-ranging talk with KTown touched on all kinds of Deep State gossip - including how to hide the truth by publicizing it shamelessly - which figures strongly in the plot of Preacher Stalls the Second Coming, fourth novel in the Preacher Evan Wycliff mystery series.

KTown offered the insight that warnings in fiction should command our attention as much or more than stories in the 24/7 news cycle.

For example, did you know that Dan Brown warned us about Covid in his novel Inferno - published years before anyone but scientists thought a worldwide pandemic was a serious and imminent threat?

Winner of BookFest Gold and New York City Big Book Silver - in Mystery.

Have you been waiting for the audiobook?

Among my fourteen novels, Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner might be my sentimental favorite. I figured, “Hey, I’m an experienced podcaster. I can narrate this!”

Arduous lessons learned. But I’m very proud of the result. Released through distributors worldwide just last month.

Amazon / Audible

Google Play

Kobo

Second-chance romance? Harry Gardner wonders why they tease him with the nickname “Harambee,” and he frets about whether he will be a tourist or a citizen.

You may have noticed that the text chapters of Clifford’s Spiral - serialized on this site for Paid subscribers - just concluded. You can find all chapters on the Home page of Thinking About Thinking. Find previously serialized audiobooks on the Podcast tab.

Thinking About Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To access premium content such as serialized audiobooks, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Chapters are serialized here for paid subscribers.About This Novel

In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:

Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?

Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. What’s left for Clifford?

Chapter 23

How to get Myra to care deeply for him — the problem burned in Clifford’s brain more than the structure of the universe or the nature of consciousness. More than the meaning of spirals or the elegance of math. Those questions were mind games for geeks. Admittedly, he was one. Or had been. But who would pay attention to him now, even if he could or would speak? Other more accomplished theorists would get Nobel prizes for puzzling it all out someday.

He thought the spiral thing was important. Hawking said the notion of the corkscrew could have made a difference way back when. But mathematics must have evolved well enough, having progressed according to a different point of view from the one Clifford was suggesting. After all, this math got astronauts to and from the tiny International Space Station with regularity.

Hawking surely had it right about women, though. Make the lady laugh. You didn’t need to be a Nobel winner to figure that one out. But — break his vow of silence? Language would be essential, fundamental, to any successful plan. Fart sounds and burps might amuse but wouldn’t get him the quality of attention he craved.

The question was now unavoidable — could Clifford speak if he wanted to?

He had told himself he’d been withholding speech. It took a Herculean strength of will to resist the diagnostic prodding and poking, to remain passive and unresponsive to all those cleverly devised stimuli.

Have I outwitted their tests or simply failed them?

* * *

Read more

Chapters are serialized here for paid subscribers.About This Novel

In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:

Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?

Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. A miracle? Why not?

Chapter 22

Jeremy generally dreaded airline flights when he had to travel on business. But when it came time to pay another visit to Willoway Manor, he actually looked forward to the trip. Even though there might be nothing he could do to improve his father’s prognosis, he would be doing a son’s duty. He would be checking on the treatment plan and the list of medications — including any reported side effects. He would cross-examine and harangue the attending physicians and caregivers — not to alienate them, but at least enough to command their due diligence. And he would be paying the bills.

He was in charge of the finances now, and he flew First Class. He rationalized the option because he needed a wheelchair with an attendant on the jetway. The attendant would lift him from the chair and carry him through the hatch and into his seat. Booking a seat close to the front of the plane avoided the inconveniences of being carried down the aisle like a big, floppy piece of luggage.

Far from being embarrassed by this procedure, Jeremy regarded it as royal treatment. He’d grown used to the typical reactions of the other passengers. Most would look, then glance away, then stare back to study him when they thought he might not be looking at them.

Jeremy figured their behavior would be no different if he were George Clooney or Elon Musk (ignoring the fact that neither of those celebrities probably flew commercial anymore).

Ever since he’d first required such assistance, he preferred the attendants to be women. But as he grew older and bulkier, the job required a larger and more muscular person. And perhaps because their work was more strenuous, the bigger folks didn’t smell as nice. When he was lifted by a strapping guy — Jeremy imagined them to be dedicated weightlifters — the fellow’s touch and stance were surer. Jeremy was not as afraid he could get dropped.

Life was so much easier when you trusted your caregivers. This aspect of Jeremy’s logistical challenges made him appreciate how much Clifford’s day-to-day comfort and wellbeing depended on the dedication of a small army of professionals.

Another thing delighted him about flying First. They took your coat and hung it up. Jeremy always traveled in a sport coat. He liked having concealed pockets for his pens and his glasses so he didn’t advertise his geekdom. And whenever he went Back East, he insisted on carrying an overcoat, or at least a convertible raincoat. To his mind, Southern Californians who didn’t sufficiently fear the rigors of cold weather (rainy, snowy, or goddamn slushy) were just plain foolish.

This time, besides graciously accepting his navy blazer and gray Harris-tweed overcoat, the flight attendant efficiently found a way to store what Jeremy had come to call his sticks.

* * *

Read more

Chapters are serialized here for paid subscribers.About This Novel

In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:

Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?

Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Why not confer with your fellow wizards?

Chapter 21

On Clifford’s television, Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about the size of the universe. The accompanying animated illustration started with a micro view at the atomic level, then spiraled out — there was the spiral again! — expanding the view over and over until the entire known universe, a network of filaments containing more than two trillion galaxies, fit on the small screen.

Appalling to Clifford, the immensity of the universe was beyond words. Not just for him, for any breathing human. Certain mathematical notations can express its unimaginable size, but it’s a useless abstraction unless all you want to do is more math. He remembered some of his science lessons from the 1950s. At the time, students learned about the solar system. And lots of people understood that most of the stars in the sky were other suns. But no one had the data to calculate — much less imagine — the size of the universe as it has become known based on deep-space observations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. And now that new telescopes and sensing arrays were being stationed a million miles from Earth — how much bigger, in our calculations if not in our minds, could it all get?

Read more

Chapters are serialized here for paid subscribers.About This Novel

In Clifford's Spiral, the stroke survivor’s past is blurry, and his memories are in pieces. He asks himself:

Who was Clifford Olmstead Klovis?

Stroke sufferer Clifford Klovis tries to piece together the colorful fragments of his memories. Can Jeremy prove it actually happened?

Chapter 20

Data drilling was Jeremy’s favorite thing. Within his own lifetime, it had become possible to query the collected wisdom of the human race in seconds — on any subject. What was Sandy Koufax’s batting average in 1952? What is the average annual rainfall in South Sudan? How do you add metal links to an expansion watchband? What makes the holes in Swiss cheese? Why did the ancient Mayan civilization disappear so suddenly?

During his day job, Jeremy developed and then fine-tuned algorithms for conducting searches of online databases. He’d built on a scheme known as binary trees. When a search engine finds a new piece of information, it stores the path to it as a sequence of directions through the networked information maze of cyberspace. Choice of direction at each junction, or node, is binary — left or right, one or zero. The path to the South Sudan rainfall result might involve a billion such choices: left-right-right-left-right-left-left-left, and so on. Before anyone ever searched for the information, finding the path to it took a while. But once the path was stored (as when a Web crawler hunted down a new keyword), traversing it again to receive the result typically took less than a billionth of a second. But in Jeremy’s world, even those billionths can add up and snarl the works. His persistent goal was to make searches shorter and therefore more efficient. Doing so would make it feasible to search ever-larger and more complex databases — and collections of databases.

Jeremy’s specialty as a programmer was the balanced binary tree. With all those left-right branchings, search trees tended over time to become lopsided, having many more nodes on one side than the other. But in a network of branches that is roughly symmetrical — having as many choices on one side as on the other — the time required to traverse any branch is a short as it can be. The tree at that point is said to be balanced, or tuned. Jeremy had found ingenious ways to rebalance binary trees in the background — performing his balancing act between searches, invisibly. His job was like a mechanic’s on an old Jaguar sports car — the kind with manual rather than hydraulic valve lifters. The newer hydraulic lifters were forgiving, but sloppy. The mechanical type were precise, but fussy. Due to wear, weather, and changing oil viscosity, the valve timings kept going out of adjustment, requiring an expensive visit to the shop every few weeks. And in the days before electronic diagnostic equipment, the veteran mechanic had to develop an ear — like a piano tuner’s — for the sweet spot when the engine was humming at its peak performance.

Jeremy thought of his job as a quest for the sweet spot. His goal was an elusive thing of beauty, all the rarer and more wonderful because few people — not even his colleagues, and certainly not their system users — would ever notice his invisible magic.

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