My Apologies, But There Will Be No Chronicle This Week

Some of you may have noticed that I have been in South Dakota quite a bit recently. That's because I was returning to my home town to be with my adult son, who had been in an eight-year battle with mesothelioma. He died at home on Friday evening. His name was Travis Bales. (To answer the questions of anyone scratching his head after reading the obituary, I was Travis's biological father, married briefly to his mother in an ill-fated teenage marriage. We divorced and both remarried and started new families. When I left South Dakota for Texas in 1979, I agreed to let his mom's new husband, Steve Bales, adopt him, but he was always part of my life, and vice versa.) Today is his visitation, tomorrow is his funeral, Wednesday I fly back to San Francisco, Thursday the NORML conference starts. I won't have the heart or the time to do the Chronicle this week. I will try to at least blog something from the conference over the weekend. Travis was always a supporter of the cause, and he enjoyed the kind bud as much as anybody. He and I walked the mean streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside together, and the mean streets of Mexico City. He made it to Jamaica and Bob Marley's grave with his friends--I still haven't done that. Travis would, I'm sure, cut me some slack this week, but then he would tell me to get back to work on making things right. I'll start doing that again next week.