I have made my fondness for the summer solstice as clear as can be. Officially, summer begins in these parts at precisely 3:24 a.m. today.
I love when the sun rises at 5:05 a.m. If I had my way, we would not “spring ahead” and the sun would rise at 4:05 a.m. today. I don’t care when the sun sets; most days I’m tired by then anyway.
We are scheduled to have about 15 and a half hours of daylight today. I am very fond of daylight.
The reason I’m singin’ dem ol’ Summer Solstice Blues is that starting tomorrow, the day will be a few seconds shorter. This, this day right here, is the longest day of the year. Next thing you know — well, on Sept. 22 — we’ll have 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night — and on Dec. 21 we’ll have 15 and a half hours of nighttime. Fooey on that stuff.
The forecast says that the sun will be shining for much of the morning and it will get cloudier as the afternoon progresses, but I don’t care. It’s the summer solstice, and the distance between sunrise and sunset is the farthest it’s going to be in 2026, and that’s good enough for me.
On second thought, never mind the blues, they can wait until December. Let’s celebrate all this daylight.
It has now been one year and three days since I last published a book. See the World! has been out there since June 10, 2025. I browsed through the pages Friday afternoon and saw that a few of the prose poems I selected for the next book are already in STW! I will have to consider that as I approach the final edit.
I’ve been collecting blog posts into books since 2010, when I gathered a group into Refuse to be Afraid. See the World! is my 10th such collection. I also have seven books of fiction in print-on-demand and ebooks. I don’t exert a lot of energy on marketing, and so my 17 books each sell zero to a half-dozen copies in any given year. Who would have thought? If you build it, they will not come if you don’t point the way.
Like the nine books that preceded it, See the World! is a roughly organized group of these reflections I share every day. This particular grouping is 72 entries including the Introduction and post-concert Author’s Note, one entry for each year I had lived as of June 10, 2025, but that’s only interesting as a number, it wasn’t intentional.
Perhaps I am not a famous author because, as I admit in that introduction, “There is little rhyme or reason to what I share.” You never know, when my daily post drops at 3 a.m. Central, what sort of content you will find, so I don’t appeal to any specific target audience. Still, continuing my introduction from a year ago —
“… I do have a couple of themes.
“First, I want what I write to encourage, enlighten, and/or entertain.
“Second, I want to reflect what Jesus said were the two greatest laws on which all of his teaching was based: Love God and love our neighbors, and by the way everyone on Earth is a neighbor.”
I have found, especially with my books from the last six years, that you can open them to any page and find something that will expound on one or more of those themes.
For that matter, you can just scroll back through this blog and find the same thing for free, but spending a modest number of dollars will give you a “Best Of” collection or two, or 10. (One of the titles I considered for the next book was Please Buy This Book, I Could Use the Money, but I think readers might expect that to be a humorous book, and sometimes I’m not [intentionally] funny.)
My books are all less than 20 bucks in print (except for Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, but hey, you would charge more for a 700-page book, too) or less than 5 bucks in ebook form (even Myke!), and so you could read my entire canon for less than 85 bucks, less than 375 bucks if you spring for the paperbacks.
This post, for now, is as much marketing as I ever do. Did it work? Go to your favorite online book store, search for “Warren Bluhm,” and find some light summer reading — either “Buy It Now” or, even better, take the information to your favorite real book store and have them order it. You should have the book(s) within a couple of weeks.
And if you’re not enticed, let me know why — really. I do want to improve my “pitch” to potential readers.
Satchell Paige is supposed to have asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” It’s a sweet question.
Some days I would be 73 years and 16 days old, maybe even older. But then there are the days when I’m 14 again and being dazzled by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — imagine hearing “A Day in the Life” for the first time, and now imagine it’s 1967 and you’re hearing sounds you never expected to hear in a pop song and that amazing final crescendo and what the heck is a House of Lords?
Or walking through a patch of wildflowers holding hands — surely I’m twentysomething from the feeling in my heart, but there’s something old and wise in my head whispering, “Enjoy this while you can.”
I know how old I might want to be if I didn’t know how old I am, but that nagging reminder — I think it’s my bum knee — keeps tugging at my psyche and telling me to the day how old I “really” am, and that skews my perception.
I do know one wonderful thing: When I say to myself, “Make believe you’re not this old” or “You’re only as young as you feel,” something lifts inside me and I remember what it was like to be 14 or 22 or 31 or 44 or 56 or 68 or holy cow it can’t be 2023 already, I’ll be 70 then — how terribly strange.
The songwriter poet who wrote in his twenties, “How terribly strange to be 70,” is now in his mid-eighties. I wonder how he’s feeling today.
