The biggest Eucalyptus tree is not Clint Eastwood’s Blue Gum in Carmel, but the Alexander Cockburn Tree in Petrolia. A team of scientists showed up with measuring devices officially validating and registering its 56 foot…
Posts published in “Essays”
On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth last June, I was struggling to climb a near vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers…
The house that I live in is now 35 years old. It was constructed largely from the lumber produced out of a single redwood that had toppled to the ground a century before. Though the…
Fog drifts past the doorway as the sun rises and a rooster crows, like a typical Boonville dawn this time of year, though our farm is located in a river valley surrounded by the foothills…
Live long enough if you’re human, or stand long enough if you’re a building, and you’ll witness history overtake you. For the phenomenon to assume public form you must have attained some measure of fame…
The 2015 season opened last Tuesday afternoon on just the second day of school. The opponents were the Knights from Kelseyville who made the journey from smoky Lake County and arrived with a much changed team from last season. Clearly some elder students had transferred in and it turned out that they were good players too!
The electric gate wasn’t working and Ella had to get out of the truck and drag it open herself, which probably screwed things up worse and would make the gate harder to fix later, then she had to get back into the gargantuan gasguzzling Tundra that as an environmentalist she hated, drive the polluting monstrosity through the pie wedge opening, park on the outside of their property which had a steep incline just before the white line that marked the skirt of the two-lane highway – meaning some beer-drunk asshole could easily drift off course and hit her – set the parking break, get out again to close the stupid gate, and then climb back into the truck and hope the engine didn’t stall or the emergency brake didn’t slip. Rose was with her too, which made her worry even more about the beer-drunk assholes and the part where she had to leave the truck to close the gate.
Two hours into tonight’s Open Mike at Club Muse, a dumpy old pub on San Pablo Avenue in Richmond California, most of the eighty-seven patrons have ceased to pay attention to the performers—the music awful,…
When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.