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Posts published in “Essays”

Late For San Pedro

Bumpy Ride, late landing at LAX. Stateside pilots talk about “a little rough air.” In Mexico, they’re more honest and refer to una zona de turbulencia. Fog, air traffic, gate delays. Due in San Pedro…

Another Person’s Amtrak [1999]

I don’t want to mention any names, but the author of a recent AVA article describing diddling woes and decrying Amtrak travel seems a tad shortsighted, excusable perhaps, as is the naiveté of a novice.…

COVID: Down But Not Out

I’d been hearing and reading about it for a couple of years and then finally it hit me. I took it personally, though I also knew I was one of many millions of humans around…

The Vegan

“You mind not smoking?” It was the girl with the bags and the stony gaze. I looked for a NO SMOKING sign. There was none. She said, “It kills my eyes.” I put my pipe…

The Ramparts Malcontents

Into the happy assemblage that made up Ramparts Magazine I began to infiltrate dissenters, longhairs, and general shit disturbers who disrupted not only the decorum of the Keating Building, named after the wealthy publisher, but…

Gonzo Flourishes [2005]

I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I’m the same age as him, but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of…

A Last Farewell To Summer

This year we set out on the last weekend of September for our annual trek from Ithaca at the south end of Lake Cayuga to Watkins Glen at the south end of the next Finger…

All Through The Day [1965]

Let’s see how a day looks in San Francisco. To those who bend over a desk or a hot stove for eight hours, I guess a day in San Francisco is pretty much like a…

O Israel…

At the tender age of 19 I boarded an Athens-bound train at the Gare du Nord station in Paris. I was on a train because my mother was appalled that I had been thumbing my…

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