Tom Darby is a Nevada-based writer, wandering philosopher, amateur historian, professional observer of human foolishness, and a man who appears to have made it his life’s mission to determine whether the world has finally gone completely insane or whether it was always this way and nobody bothered to tell him.
Armed with a keyboard, a suspicious sense of humor, and an almost pathological appreciation for irony, Tom spends his days documenting humanity’s curious behavior, occasionally improving reality by making it considerably funnier. He is particularly fond of Mark Twain, presumably because he recognizes a kindred spirit in a man who understood that civilization is largely held together by string, ignorance, and the occasional well-placed insult.
Tom has traveled enough to discover that two states, three counties, four restaurants, five towns, and a questionable bathroom can all be experienced within 48 hours, provided one has sufficiently low expectations and a functioning automobile. He has wandered through the Nevada desert with knowledgeable companions, investigated unattended campfires, encountered suspicious donkeys, contemplated bears wandering around Klamath cabins, and somehow lived to write about all of it.
His adventures suggest Mother Nature has a peculiar sense of humor and may have personally selected him for entertainment purposes.
He is fascinated by history, politics, forgotten news stories, strange inventions, peculiar people, and the general deterioration of common sense. He has an abiding interest in the past, partly because people back then were every bit as ridiculous as people today, but had the decency to do it without smartphones.
His literary interests range from Mark Twain’s irreverence to the dark imaginings of Clark Ashton Smith, cosmic horror, and the restless ramblings of Jack Kerouac. This means that on any given afternoon Tom might be writing a satirical essay about government stupidity, a supernatural account of an unsettling dream, or a tale about some ancient warrior who has just discovered that leadership is considerably easier when somebody else is thinking.
Tom believes humor is essential, irony is unavoidable, history is worth remembering, and almost anything can become a story if you live long enough to regret having witnessed it. He also cannot leave a perfectly good sentence untouched until it is rewritten, polished, made funnier, given a better title, and subjected to the literary equivalent of a congressional investigation.
He has no known plans to become respectable. Respectability, after all, is generally what happens to people when they stop paying attention.
In short, Tom Darby is a wandering Nevada curmudgeon with a writer’s imagination, a historian’s curiosity, a satirist’s disposition, and the unfortunate realization that the world keeps providing him with material faster than he can write it down.
And somewhere, Mark Twain is probably looking over his shoulder, shaking his head, and wondering who gave this fellow a typewriter.