by Todd Walton
“When we express our true nature, we are human beings. When we do not, we do not know what we are.” — Shunryu Suzuki Planting sugar snap pea seeds yesterday, I was thrilled to find the raised bed rife with earthworms, young and old. We garden in soil known hereabouts as pygmy, which left to [...]
by Todd Walton
“Humor is just another defense against the universe.” — Mel Brooks Once upon a time, so many years ago it might have been another lifetime, I got two kittens, a boy and girl, and after much thought and research named them Boy and Girl. Boy was an orange tabby, Girl was a gray tabby, and [...]
by Todd Walton
“Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.” — Blaise Pascal Marcia and I watched the movie Source Code last night and I loved it. I very rarely watch American movies and almost never watch films containing [...]
by Todd Walton
When my father died five years ago, my siblings and I did not hold a memorial service in his honor. We were each of us so wounded by our father’s incessant criticism and disapproval of us that his death unleashed our long suppressed anger toward him, and being so angry we could not see our [...]
by Todd Walton
Yesterday brought an email from a friend with the subject heading Data Plague, with a link to an article from the New York Times about Big Data, a hot topic in the world of computer science and technology.
by Todd Walton
Reading Bruce McEwen’s tragic Hug A Kid, Go To Jail, I thought, “My God, there but for the grace of luck and chance and (in my system of belief) the intervention of angels, I, too, might have been arrested for child molestation and been sent to prison and labeled a sex offender for the rest of my life — on several different occasions. What? How?
by Todd Walton
The calendar says it is springtime, but the tempera ture and relentless rain say winter continues apace, this being the second year in a row that a very wet March will save Mendocino and Northern California from terri ble drought.
by Todd Walton
I was the only child of elderly parents. They both died the year before I evolved out of puberty, and I was left in the care of a diminutive maiden aunt. She had absolutely no short term memory and even less money. My bedroom was my haven, my black and white television my constant companion. [...]
by Todd Walton
“Pleasure is spread through the earth in stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.”— William Wordsworth Long ago in the Santa Cruz of 1972, I was a member of a large commune occupying a grand old abode on the edge of the sea. A former stagecoach stop, hotel, brothel, and motel, the three-story [...]
by Todd Walton
Sandy calls to say she’s gotten permission to harvest rabbit manure from her friend’s rabbit barn. So I load my wheelbarrow and a big shovel into my little old pickup and head for Fort Bragg. A sunny spring morning, the angry winds of the past few days in abeyance, I roll along the Comptche-Ukiah Road at forty miles per and try to remember if over the decades of gathering manure for my various gardens, I have ever scored more than a baggy of rabbit manure. Horse, mule, cow, sheep, goat, chicken…but never a truckload of rabbit poop, until today.
