Illustration: Susan Bearden

Tom McCabe was a successful young San Francisco columnist–still single, his well-constructed life in perfect equipoise, despite the pandemonium of wild parrots living in a bowered niche by his bargeboard cottage on the twilight side of Telegraph Hill. As if cast out of paradise–where the bluebird of happiness sits on your shoulder and wild parrots fly overhead–trouble finds us all, even McCabe. In the hills and hollows of the city which he thought he knew so well, an inchoate presence was seeking him out…

When many of his closest friends are laid off from his newspaper, they hatch a plot to use public campaign financing to start a new publication, and in order to qualify, run McCabe for mayor of San Francisco. Down the conspiratorial rabbit hole he tumbles in a wine-fueled odyssey that takes him through the portals of a peculiar form of quantum-pulsed Buddhism and the two-way arrow of time, evanescent visits to the Beat generation and the psychedelic 60s, exploration of the foundations of journalism, immersion in the peculiarities of running a rogue newspaper enterprise, all of it leavened by a three-way relationship with his shape-shifting campaign managers, Noë and Zoë.

Ultimately, from the electoral mayhem of the race for mayor, rises McCabe, an older and wiser man…

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