Raving about Joe: What if grandad showed up at a rave? You’d probably be smart to dip out of the nearest exit and find your kicks somewhere else that night. Or maybe you could just…
Posts published in “Essays”
The shoe-boxes we carried on our laps on the flight to Maui contained our parakeets, a little anxious and aflutter about their surroundings and the strange goings-on. But there was Barney, an English budgerigar slightly…
Media interest in the dog-mauling case was intense, salacious, and international. The Press Democrat accurately described it as “San Francisco's O.J. Case,” and many of the reporters knew each other from having covered the trial…
During all the long years of my fulltime corporate employment I had a skewed view of the world. Not because of boardroom policies or existential questions about who or what benefitted from my 50 or…
In pre-Covid times a hungry American was on a tour of a monastery. A familiar smell from the kitchen drew him away from the rest of the tour group. In the kitchen he spotted a…
Well, it's been a longer journey than I anticipated through my recollections and reminiscences warehouse 49 years of residence in Navarro has provided me. My original plan was three articles; this one is number ten.…
Berkeley, CA, August 10, 2020 – Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” is an angry book. If you’re not angry after reading it, the reason may lie in the subtitle. Are you part…
My dad's motto was, "If you're going to do something, do it right." He had a thousand inspirational clichés, but that was the one that stuck with me the most. "If you're painting the wall,"…
It is an odd thing to live in the United States right now. The greatest empire in the history of the world has devolved into a twisted, macabre, grotesque caricature of itself, and the world…