A week before Thanksgiving at the Fort Walton Florida airport I was met by my sister-in-law Robin, a retired public health nurse who now sits on the board of a local homeless organization. The Crestview…
Posts published in “Essays”
It's Thanksgiving as I write this — the holidays will inexorably assert themselves despite our (my) best efforts to ignore them, every year like clockwork (or calendarwork, really) — and it occurs to me that…
The famed nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt, author of the seminal The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy first published in 1860, enjoined true scholars to remain at their desks rather than “congregate at conferences to sniff…
A number of the lawyers at the Office of the Public Defender have communicated certain innuendos about your trusty courthouse correspondent, namely that I am too friendly with law enforcement personnel and the lawyers from…
By the time that I arrived in the English Department at Sonoma State University in 1981 the party was largely over. No more nude encounters between students and faculty in the swimming pool, and no…
Truth and integrity, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. Behold Lake Mendocino Mobile Home Estates, a senior (55-plus) mobile home park north of Ukiah’s city limits and one of at least 60…
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, when the golden days of autumn turn to cloudy, dingy days in December an American's thoughts can yearn for the halcyon afternoons and…
When I see the travelers on the street today I think about how different it was when us hippies poured into Garberville in the early 70s alarming and annoying the rednecks with our casual airs…
In the annals of Americana there is a particularly virulent and widespread trope infecting the memoirs of boyhood, the one about the Object of Desire, its discovery, what it symbolizes, the sacrifices one makes to…