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Posts published in “Essays”

Long Drive Home

I took this photo on my drive home from work last night. I was dog tired. So tired that even my teeth and toes ached.…

Clearing Some Smoke

We write to provide some perspective on Proposition 64 from California's medical associations. The California Medical Association has endorsed Proposition 64, the Adult Use of…

Not The Worst Criminal

I don't know who first coined the phrase "crime does not pay." I'm guessing that some morality play from the early 20th century, coming on…

Red-Haired Cop

The fat red-haired cop was talking to the attractive blond woman who was working at the Swissair information desk. He seemed oblivious to everything else…

If Wagner Scored The Debates

I have felt more refreshed sitting through five hours of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung than I did after the excruciatingly slow ninety minutes of Monday’s long-dreaded presidential…

Murder On Peachland Road

This is a sequel to my story about the burning of Lone Tree. Maybe ten or twelve years later, along about 1993, my daughter Wendy…

Home Court

I have been enjoying the occasional stint in the Mendocino High School gym assisting coach Jim Young with training his most promising basketball players. The ambience of the indoor court takes me back to my two years as a gym rat at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960s when that university was only a few years old. I was not much interested in academia, and when I wasn’t writing my fledgling fiction or throwing a Frisbee or hunting for pianos to play, I could be found in the field house playing basketball.

Watermelons Come Full Circle

High pressure lingers over the Ohio valley, finally, after the most humid summer I can recall. Mildew and insects thrived. The yellow chanterelle mushroom harvest,…

Hurts, Don’t It?

Children love to play pranks on one another, and the more painful and humiliating, the better. They are ridiculously transparent ruses, for the most part,…

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