Adventures with the Bull

I have called my son Daniel "The Bull" since the day he was born. Some nicknames you choose; this one chose him. He came into the world with a kind of unstoppable force to him, and the name stuck the way true things do.

When Daniel was small, the weekends were ours. We called them our adventures — never anything elaborate, just the two of us going out to meet the world and see what it had for us. To a six-year-old, a parking lot can be a canyon and an afternoon can last a year. I didn't know then how much I was memorizing those days. You rarely do.

Then I went away.

I spent five years in federal prison for white-collar crimes. Daniel was six years old when I left, and we were best friends. That is the plain fact of it, and there is no softer way to write it that would be honest. The hardest part of being gone was not where I was. It was where I wasn't — I wasn't there for the adventures, and the adventures were the thing.

So I made a way to keep going on them.

From inside, I imagined a place where Daniel and I could keep adventuring — not in a car on a Saturday, but remotely, in a fantasy world I could build for the two of us. That idea became Adventures with the Bull. It was how I stayed his father across a distance that was designed to make that impossible.

I wrote the stories by hand. Over roughly a thousand of them, in pen, in the composition journals I bought from the prison commissary — page after page, night after night. And I built the app itself on a contraband, rooted Android phone, teaching myself as I went, because the work was the one place they couldn't keep me from him.

Adventures with the Bull is, first and most simply, a graphic-novel reader. You enter each story through a postcard. Inside, illustrated panels and prose sit side by side, and you move through it page by page — the way you'd move through a place you were seeing for the first time.

But underneath the format, it is a love letter from a father to his son. Every story is an adventure I wanted to take Daniel on and couldn't — so I built the world instead and sent it to him the only way I had. If you are reading this before the first story, that is the context I would want you to carry in with you: that these were written toward someone, by someone who wasn't allowed to be there, and refused to be gone anyway.

Welcome to the adventures. The Bull goes first.