It’s such a surreal day for me. Today is the day that Penguin is launching their trade paperback version of Hippie Boy nationwide. In some ways, this day is about fifteen years in the making. Ultimately, it took my degenerative eye disease to teach me that I needed to write my story to release the emotions I’d carried around inside me for years—and also to remind me that life is short, that all we have for certain is now, and that we’d better make NOW count.