Showing results by author "Ken La Salle" in All Categories

Dreaming with Open Eyes is Ken La Salle's third collection of essays from the pages of Recovering the Self. As he shares his journey in the pursuit of his dreams, he spotlights the dangers and opportunities in the journey ahead of all of us. Only when we open our eyes can we see the truth of our lives. Dreaming with Open Eyes shows us just what riches our dreams and our lives can hold.

I recently opened up my chest of childhood memories, faced a decade I had long since forgotten, and wrote these words: “It was the hippest of times. It was the funkiest of times. It was the 1970s.” And I grew up right there in the middle of it. I won talent shows. I went to camp. I fought the school bully for the honor of the girl I loved. I lost my father….

Off the California coast, sits a small town split by the Pacific Coast Highway and in this town actually stood a salmon colored Victorian home where a not so young couple first learned how to trust. This was my second marriage. I was in my forties with a divorce under my belt, a job I hated, and then this woman comes into my life making games of my fears. She came from a world I had never known, one that wasn’t so cruel and dangerous.

Good relationships take a certain kind of magic to succeed, and what Alex Petroya seems to have is the wrong magic. After his wife Stephanie leaves, Alex has one place left to go: The pink house his parents left to him in Cambria, California. After moving in, he discovers a box filled with unfinished stories Stephanie had written during their marriage. Could finishing them win her back? Alex decides to try but finds writing is harder than it looks. With help from his brother-in-law, Conner, he learns a simple incantation to increase focus.

Nine states. Two control freaks. One steering wheel. What could possibly go wrong? It may be that a marriage ends not with a whimper but with the slam of a car door on a deserted stretch of highway. Most married couples know better than to put themselves in each other's way, but in Ken La Salle's first autobiographical monologue, he tells about how he and his wife of eight years did just that on a road trip that probably should never have happened.

The World's Worst Backpacker is for anyone who has gone on a day hike, picked up a backpack, or walked for a few days in the middle of nowhere. Ken's stories are not just cautionary tales; they're the kind of tales all backpackers (and would-be backpackers) acquire if they don't stop soon enough. They're the kind of tales that leave you wondering, "Am I the worst person at this?" when you start and thankful you're not when the story ends.

Fun To Grow On presents the very first book in the series, Cookies: Sluts of the Snack World! When a cookie gets herpes, he decides to ask God for a cure. Can he find God in time? Someone fed a chocolate chip cookie equal parts of blinding self-awareness, cranberry vodka, and shrooms and asked him to tell his story. Here it is, with all the pageantry you would expect from a cookie…which is probably a whole lot less than you would desire.

Jackson is just a Wal-Mart worker from Los Angeles, far too caught up in the apathy of modern life to believe in anything. After spending one night with the daughter of a wood nymph and the man who surrendered his arm for the woman he loved, the lithesome beauty named Mari, Jackson knows he believes. And he knows he'll do anything to find her again. He follows her up the coast of California and a polar bear drives the taxi. Into the forest and through frozen mountains, he talks to God and creatures of faerie alike but the final confrontation is with the mother whose people have been wiped out by mankind.

In September 2002, Ken left his home and drove to the Grand Canyon to kill himself. The only life he'd ever known was little more than a shambles. He'd lost his wife and now he realized that he really couldn't live without her. His choices were to either continue facing it with self-destruction, drugs, and booze, or...a running start and a jump over the edge to end it all. Ken's story is filled with dysfunctional families, love found and lost, breakups, breakdowns, and remarkable hope. It's the true story of a man without love and too destroyed to think he deserves love.

Andy Hollis, ersatz instructor of art at Santa Ana High School, has won…if slightly. He has inspired a classroom of artists, leaving him to decide who will be chosen for the next work of art. Can one high school art club keep shaking the world with its creations or will the art destroy the club? Every brush stroke is crucial and Andy doesn’t know how to paint.

This collection of DC Home’s second season is the audio version of a man trying to hold back an avalanche with a distraction. After launching DC Home’s first season, I returned for a season filled with more Trump than I could bear. Nobody warned me about the pandemic. And, despite my plots, despite my improvs, despite my rants, COVID-19 took DC Home as it took the United States, painfully unprepared.

Dynamic Pluralism presents a system of ethics that is not only easy to understand and easy to use but beneficial to the lives of those who do so. It filters out the philosophical jargon so popular in academic circles and structures ethics that it is accessible to everyone. Not only does it present an understandable system of ethics but also shows the listener how they can use ethics to create a better world.

In the early '70s, in the middle of the night, on a dried-out lawn in a broken-down neighborhood in the Southern Californian community of Santa Ana, Nate Brewer’s mother held him as they watched his father leave them to an uncertain future. After that, it was every man for himself. At least, that’s how Nate and his brother, Ira, saw it. Now, Nate is 45 years old. He’s losing his wife. He lost his career. His mom is losing that same home in Santa Ana, and Nate thinks he may be losing his mind.

Politicians on Capitol Hill make sweeping decisions about vast sums of money, draconian laws, the fate of armies…and those decisions are just too big for us to experience on a personal level. But not if you ask Sherry Finn. Washington’s inability to end gun violence took her sister in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, which left Sherry to take care of her orphaned nephew, Sean. My name is Ken La Salle and I write Sherry’s stories....

On a beautiful, spring afternoon, a broken man stands at his wife's funeral and hears the words, “Heaven Enough.” Thus begins a poem about longing, about wishing for something more. "What would it be like if I had heaven enough?" it reads. Matt Murphy reads these words for the first time at his wife's funeral. After a death shrouded with mystery, it is the first time he learns that she wrote poetry. He and Diva were married for nearly twenty years, yet he did not "know" her. A poet and lover of culinary delights, she is struck by a car and killed instantly.

A young man named Joseph Arillo sits in the parking lot and paints the pavement with flowers. And Andy Hollis steps in it. As the new art teacher at Santa Ana High School, he’s too curious about Joseph’s Flowers and unravels both of their lives in his pursuit for answers. He learns that it’s all part of a rite of passage, an absurd test started by Joseph Arillo’s father, the suspiciously world-renowned artist named only Tom. Which also connects to the drama teacher at Santa Ana High, Katie Bustos. Whose daughter, Desiree, may or may not be dating Joseph. Who is putting himself in danger from a local gang, the lot’s mysterious history, and the police.

If there's one thing most people can agree on, it's that there should be rules for life. And they're right. We should have a set of rules that we can all agree on, that show us how to experience happier, more authentic lives. A set of rules that cuts through the crap of everyday life to expose what it is we can all agree is true, even if it isn't always what we want to hear.

Everything you may have heard about enlightenment, which I call Illumination, is based on hearsay derived from metaphors too out of date for most people to fully understand. That is why I have reinterpreted the metaphors for the 21st century, making your path to Illumination easier to follow than ever! But I wasn't always Illuminated. I was born a Christian, born again, brought to Atheism through critical thought, and only found my way through Buddhism after a decade of hard work.

What is success? What does it mean? How is it that we all look for this thing we call "success" while each having our own idea about what it could be? Is there one definition for success? And why does the dictionary get it wrong? Find out in Climbing Maya.

On the morning after the 2012 presidential election, Hal wakes up in his 10-year-old body to find himself somewhere in the future. His only answers come from his drugged-out, delusional, and damned 75-year-old self. But the answers aren't good enough. Why is America in ruins? How did global climate change really come to pass? And why does his elder self have this disgusting taste for dog?