I was born with control. I take two awful hot baths a day. I keep movin’ all the time on the diamond — and I eat nothin’ but fried food. Why does my arm last…
Posts published in “Essays”
Cactus Smuggling and Other Adventures… I stood alongside two Mexican tourists looking through a chainlink fence at an enormous hole in the ground. Somewhere near the New Mexico/Arizona line it was maybe half a mile…
Water is a frequent image in Bach’s music. Placid rivers sing the praises of enlightened monarchs. Other streams rush by, murmuring their eternal truths of earthly life’s fleeting nature. Elsewhere, storms rise up, from strafing…
Denny’s restaurant, longtime cornerstone of Highway 101 and Ukiah’s busiest road into town, closed a couple years ago. Nothing was done to prevent it being destroyed by various vagrants, criminals and druggies who infest the…
Are you ready for some hopeful news? “Hundreds of military children who are students at Defense Department schools across the globe walked out of class Thursday to protest book bans, curriculum changes and restrictions on…
We were standing in the lobby waiting in the popcorn line, and we noticed a smartly dressed black teenager in front of us. She wore familiar teen couture: distressed jeans so tight she’ll need a…
The removal of 381 books from the US Naval Academy Nimitz library last week was flashback-inducing for your correspondent. When Sen. Joseph McCarthy was at the peak of his power in March, 1953, Dashiell Hammett…
If the organ is the King of Instruments, its monarchy is built on deception. The largest, most technologically complicated, most tonally diverse, and most visually stunning of musical objects, the organ was often held to…