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Posts published in “Essays”

Coast Hospital: Prognosis Grim

Mendocino Coast District Hospital's (MCDH) Board of Directors has canceled its monthly Planning Committee meeting for May. It strikes this observer as odd to cancel a chance to express a clear vision of future planning…

Homeboy Dave

On a scale of one to ten, I admit that when it comes to governance, my confidence in the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors is zero. Nada cum zilch. For decades, county roads have equaled…

Old Skills

Growing up in Anderson Valley in the late 1950s and 1960s meant learning a few skills, maybe not for everyone, but certainly for my siblings and me. We were living at my parent’s summer camp,…

Imperial Pomp

No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…

Bad Boys

The Time: Autumn, 1958. The place: the playground of the Washington Consolidated School, Washington, Connecticut. A big crowd of kids are in a circle around two fighting boys. Jimmy Tompkins has his arm hooked around…

Secret Assassins

"The Lottery" is a famous short story by Shirley Jackson about an annual small town drawing whose winner is stoned to death. The story makes the point that small towns can be mean places. Lately,…

Painful Lessons, Part 2

I've taken my share of beatings in my life; more, really, given that the average beating occurrence among Americans is probably not much more than zero, beatings being pretty finely distributed among very specific demographics…

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