Balmy weather has persisted in the Ohio valley throughout the month of January, with heavy rains and temperatures rarely dipping below 40 degrees. Grass is sprouting, to the delight of our chicken flock. Tree branches…
Posts published in “Essays”
After over a hundred years as the premier circus in America, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey will present their final performances in May of 2017. High operating costs and declining ticket sales made continuing the massive operation unprofitable. With the phasing out of elephant acts due to ferocious criticism from animal rights groups, ticket sales dropped dramatically.
A couple of corrections from last week's piece. The four to five stacks of lumber usually present, and visible out to sea, in the Mendocino of 1879 were piled south of Ukiah Street, between Rundle…
I'm not in the habit of issuing disclaimers here; way I sees it, you pays your money, you takes your chances. Life is a crapshoot in all its many aspects, and opening and perusing a…
I saw the worst candidate of any generation elected
by a minority, lying shouting tweeting,
dragging our poor nation into the swampiest of backlashes
with a hostile takeover of democracy,
I wasn't born a crazy, radical, hippie. I had a lot of help getting here over the years. My mother passed her bipolar gene on to me but I haven't had a problem with manic-depression in almost twenty years. PTSD is my biggie. My first major trauma occurred while I was still a very impressionable teenager with an Above Top Secret clearance in US Air Force Intelligence in Germany in the late 50s.
Eden, the original field of human thought, contains two fruit-bearing trees. One brings life and the other brings death. One fruit is digested and the other gets caught in the throat.
When William Faulkner was already a grand figure and John Kennedy was collecting such objects to adorn some of his private dinners, the writer received an invitation from the President for one of these events in the White House. At this table had already sat many of the Great: Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, and the Sinatras, to name a few. Pablo Casals and his cello had aggrandized some of the exquisite desserts.
Irony is the not-so-new normal. Somewhere back in the swirling dry-ice mists of history, round about the time of the one-and-only Clinton Administration, this venerable figure-of-speech stretched its wings and its brand and became a…