Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published by “Steve Heilig”

Very Questionable Food

My earliest memory is a hazy but lasting one. I was around five years old at most, with my father, fishing on the beach where we so luckily lived. He caught one, a big silver…

Dreaming Of Brautigan

The seventh-grade classroom fell silent, before I noticed it and then it was too late; the teacher was standing over me and all the other kids were staring. Some were smirking. “Give me that little…

W.S. Merwin, US Poet Laureate

Well over 200 people came to West Marin from far and wide on a recent Sunday to hear United States Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin give a rare reading in West Marin. His appearance was arranged…

Living Musical Legend; Unlikely Sex Symbol Willie Nelson

Halfway into his recent nonstop 2-hours-plus set at San Francisco’s fabled Fillmore, Willie Nelson eased into one of his more romantic hits, “You Were Always on My Mind.” Begging for another chance with a neglected…

Grateful for the Dead

The Grateful Dead? Those guys and their fanatic, tie-died, permanently stoned followers? The band that made interminable music which a noted poet and writer I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle called “unspeakable, self-indulgent dreck”?…

The Holiday Spirit?

(Caution: There may be some blasphemy in the following message, although it is certainly unintended.) This past cold Christmas morning I took a traditional dogwalk through San Francisco’s fabled Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It was pretty much…

The Summer of Smoke?

“The Summer of Love, protests to be civil and a rainbow of counterculture. Whether you started here or put flowers in your hair, grabbed a drum and hitched a ride on a painted minibus, Camel…

-