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 Marijuana Act (AUMA). Our local medical association, the San Francisco…
Posts published in “Essays”
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 the heels of crime, conceptually and institutionally, gaining some traction…
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 going on in the terminal. I would have been too.…
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 debate. Hey, that’s it—Wagner to the rescue! The main problem…
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 had gone off to college (not at 18, but a…
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.
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, known mostly to hippies who have experienced the West Coast,…
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, and require on the part of the victim blind trust…
I was 13. It was 1958. We lived at what was then the outskirts of suburban Fresno. Down the street about half a mile was a large boysenberry farm. (Boysenberries are an early 20th Century…