DAVID GREBOW
DAVID GREBOW
Welcome to"Comfort Thomas" to be published
Summer 2027
Dear Reader,
what is Comfort Thomas all about?
It’s about a quest ...
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Comfort Thomas is a coming-of-age novel set against the political and spiritual turbulence of early-1970s America. F Red, an anxious, idealistic young man overwhelmed by war, violence, and cultural collapse, leaves Cambridge and everything familiar behind to join a small back-to-the-land commune deep in the wintry woods of Maine. Drawn by the hope that living differently might encourage others to change the way they spend their time on Gaia, he arrives at Comfort Thomas searching for refuge, meaning, and a way to quiet his fear that the naked apes are headed toward self-destruction.
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At first, the commune feels like a revelation—shared meals by firelight, music, ritual, spiritual exploration, psychedelics, and the promise of a more compassionate way of living. But as daily realities intrude, idealism begins to crack. Conflicts over power, sex, ideology, and violence expose the limits of communal dreams. Central to this tension is Big Jim, a charismatic and dangerous counterforce who believes that change comes not through inner transformation but through confrontation and force. As the outside world presses in and divisions between them deepens, F Red is forced to confront the uncomfortable truth that neither escape nor ideology can save him—or the world.
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Through moments of disillusionment, risk, and hard-won clarity, Comfort Thomas traces F Red’s journey from fear and certainty toward humility and inner evolution. Rather than offering easy answers or utopian solutions, the novel explores what it means to live ethically in a broken world, suggesting that real change begins not with grand movements or charismatic leaders, but with the difficult work of self-understanding, connection, and compassion. Both intimate and expansive, Comfort Thomas is a reflective portrait of a generation searching for meaning—and a reminder that hope, while limited, is still possible.
Cheers,
F Red ​
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What happened in the Maine woods in 1971?
Scared Shitless
Leaning against the white tiles, taking what I believed was my last hot and steamy shower, my fear about what I was about to do had me sobbing, my tears merging with streams of hot water. After toweling off, I used her hair dryer to warm air dry my pits and crotch. Carefully climbing into bed, naked with Kate the Great, spooning against her soft rear end, I gently polished her bare back.
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“Just try and remember, my love,” Kate sleepily whispered before dropping off to dreamland, “everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”
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I sincerely doubted it was everything.
There was something in the air, a moment crying to be born.
A Winter Wonderland
There were many reasons why I’d come to Comfort Thomas. Most were obvious. I wanted to get away from all the struggle and divisiveness. Then there was the one that no one at the farm could ever guess.
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I was in search of the next evolution. I believed there was “something in the air” a moment crying to be born, a new, fuller understanding of what it meant to be human. To understand that we were here for such a short time on this amazing bright dot of a planet, alive together in this place we called Earth. And knowing that truth could create a profoundly positive change. I couldn’t describe it. I just knew it was coming: a slow but inexorable evolution. All the events and movements from the 60s had coalesced in 1971 and would unfold in unforeseen ways in the future.
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I knew Comfort Thomas would be part of that evolution.
Strange directions are dancing lessons from the Gods.
Postcard Wednesdays
My idea was simple.
Send out postcards to 36 people I knew, and others I always wanted to meet, even if they were total strangers, and invite them to come up to Comfort Thomas for a day or even a weekend retreat. Come up to the dance! Experience the hippie life. The communal way. Organic food from the garden and cove. Sustainable living. Come up to the dance I would tell them. I was already working on the list of invitees in my head. I explained it all the Big Jim.
He stopped reading Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" for a moment and looked up at me.
“Do you even know 36 people?”
“I don’t need to know all of them. I just want them to come to the farm.”
“Like who?” he asked as the washing machines slowly sucked the water out of the clothes and started noisily spinning.
“Well, let’s see,” I quickly started listing names as I walked over to one of the machines getting ready to heave armfuls into the dryers. “There’s Baba Ram Dass, Maya Angelou, Wavy Gravy, Bobby Seale, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Timothy Leary, Jerry Rubin, The Dalai Lama, Stokely Carmichael, Alan Watts, Kurt ...”
“Whoa. Wait a minute, stop,” interrupted Big Jim “You’ll never get those people up here, they’re all famous." He added, “Even if you know them.”
“So?” I countered. “A really interesting postcard might get them so curious they’ll come up to see what it’s all about. These are strange times. Before I left Cambridge, I spoke with Kurt Vonnegut, hoping he could talk me out of this trip. Instead, he said strange directions can be dancing lessons from the Gods. So they’ll get these postcards and think the invitation to the dance is a strange direction and a traveling lesson from the Gods.”
Big Jim looked at me as he started to put the laundry into one of the dryers. He stopped for a moment staring into the black hole that was half-full of wet clothing of all colors.
“What the fuck. It’s not any crazier than many of the other things happening these days,” he told the black hole of the waiting dryer.
“I cannot sing, nor find directions to the place where poetry lives.
So I wrote this book”
David Grebow
