When I lived in Seattle in 1977, I played basketball almost every day in a gym at Seattle University, the alma mater of the great Lakers star Elgin Baylor who took the Seattle Chieftains (now the Redhawks) all the way to the NCAA championship game in 1958 before turning pro that same year. As a resident of Seattle, I was invited to use the gym and swimming pool of that esteemed university for a small annual fee, which made me feel like the luckiest guy in the world.
Posts published by “Todd Walton”
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”— William Shakespeare My friend Scott made a good part of his living…
Staying with friends was the only way I could afford to make my trip to New York in 1976 last more than a week or so, and I wanted to stay in or near Manhattan for at least three weeks. When I left for New York, I thought I had two places to stay, one in Newark, New Jersey with Dan and Janka, and one on West 83rd Street in Manhattan with Scott and Richard, but when Janka’s mother learned I was planning to stay in the area for several weeks, she invited me to use the guest room in her apartment on West 94th Street, three blocks from Central Park.
In 1976, when I was twenty-six and working as a landscaper in southern Oregon, my big dream was go to New York and meet my literary agent Dorothy Pittman for the first time, and also say hello to the magazine editors at Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Gallery who had bought my short stories; and to rub shoulders, I hoped, with others of my kind.
Do you earn $400,000 of taxable income in a year? Have you ever earned $400,000 in a single year? Do you have friends who earn or have ever earned $400,000 in a year? I thought not; nor do I have friends earning that kind of money, though I do know some certifiably wealthy people.
“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” -- Toni Morrison They haunt…
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” — Jack Kerouac More than fifty years after his novel…
Dave Smith’s invaluable Ukiah Blog Live pointed me to a sobering presentation by Guy MacPherson on YouTube entitled Twin Sides of the Fossil Fuel Coin. MacPherson is a prominent conservation biologist who argues clearly and concisely that the only hope for the survival of humans beyond another couple of decades is the complete collapse of our global industrial society right now, today, and even that probably won’t be soon enough to stave off fast-approaching human extinction and the extinction of virtually all living things due to increasingly rapid global warming.
1. RAY, a slender man of eighty-two, his white hair sparse, gazes out the bus window at the passing fields. He is lost in thought,…