Mark E. Johnson · Nashville → St. Croix → the carpool line
Doofus
Dad
Stories for dads, about dads
I’ll provide the funny stories. All you have to do is read ’em and laugh. It’s OK. I’ll wait for the game to end.
The headliner · A serious novel
Mr. Ledbetter’s
Boots
A 95-year-old Tuskegee Airman sets out to become the oldest person ever to walk the 40 miles to Everest Base Camp. His boots are hiding something.
Fair warning, since you probably came here for jokes: this one is not a dad-humor book. There are laughs in it, because I cannot seem to help myself, but it is a novel about war, race, memory, and a debt that took seventy-five years to come due. If you want me falling over on a mountain, that is the Everest book further down.
Seventy-five years ago, an 18-year-old named Raymond put his P-51 Mustang into the Austrian Alps and walked away from it. The escape became legend, and it launched an obsession with mountains that never let go. Now, in open defiance of the laws of aging, he wants to see Everest with his own eyes and reach it on his own two feet.
Hiking beside him through Nepal’s Khumbu is Joe Vogler, a young journalist chasing his first real story in social-justice reporting. Joe has no idea that the old man’s boots hold a piece of history that will turn the whole trek on its head.
Novel · Hardcover, paperback & Kindle · Serious book. Occasional jokes. Only one yak mishap.
Also on the bill
Two more, if you liked that one
Blow the Man Down
Memoir. A gangly North Carolina farm boy talks his way into the 1980s music business and somehow ends up on an island of ill repute. Doc Savage novels, Christmas tree fields, then music, then girls — and an odyssey through the fickle Nashville club circuit and sun-blasted St. Croix as a working songwriter. There is also an audiobook, and a sea shanty I recorded myself.
Read an excerpt →
DD Does Everest Base Camp
Travel humor. A middle-aged dad with questionable cardio walks to the foot of the tallest mountain on earth, and writes down everything that goes wrong on the way. Yaks. Altitude. Bathrooms you have to see to believe. The trip that started the whole Everest habit.
See the book →
The guy at the keyboard
Hi. I’m the doofus.
Doofus Dad blogs and books are written by future Pulitzer Prize winner Mark E. Johnson, who writes about any and everything from the perspective of a bumbling, beleaguered, slightly inept father of three. Not that this reflects real life in any way.
Today’s dads get a rough deal in the media. Watch any commercial. We’re the punchline. In my case it’s fair, but I doubt it’s accurate in yours. You work hard, you show up, you set the example. It’s OK to laugh once in a while. Dads of the world unite — right after loading the dishwasher.
The back catalog
