We had blackout curtains on the window of our elementary school. They were supposed to protect us from the burns of the flash when the atomic bomb went off and saturated the room in a…
Posts published in “Essays”
I have rats, which I suppose is another way of saying that I have a place for rats to be, a fact for which I am surpassingly grateful. Once you’ve experienced even a casual acquaintanceship…
Historians undertake to date a building's construction and sometimes they turn to the common brick used in it. Believe it or not we’ve had history professors visit the county who make tracing the origin of…
How did I get into this? As a kid that was the inevitable question of concert day. I still ask it now and again. One of my colleagues, to be heard on violin with your…
Part 1: The Descent “Oh boy, you’ve really done it this time”, I thought to myself as I walked down the darkened hallway to the back door of the KPFZ’s Lakeport studio. I had just…
This is for all the former Marine Corps “grunts” who might have served at Camp Las Pulgas, Camp Pendleton, California, the gruesome high dry desert where we trained for the jungles of Vietnam. Not the…
I feel like one of those guys you used to see in a robe with a sandwich sign saying “The end is near.” I go from meeting to meeting, article to article, blowing my little…
People sometimes ask me if I remember the 1906 Earthquake. Not only do I remember the Big One, but, Hell, I brought it on! After leaving Northern Italy, crossing France, getting on a steamship and…