I became an EMT because of natural disasters I witnessed in the Bay Area. In 1989, I was in an office building near the epicenter…
Posts published in “Essays”
Leonard Nimoy, known to hundreds of millions of people as Spock, died recently at the age of eighty-three. My brother was a huge fan of Star Trek, the television show, and is a gifted impersonator of movie and television celebrities. In high school, he founded the student club STUD—Star Trek Underground Devotees. STUD meetings were essentially showcases for my brother to perform his original wacky versions of Star Trek episodes in which he imitated with uncanny verisimilitude every member of the crew of the starship Enterprise. His Spock was virtually indistinguishable from Nimoy’s Spock.
Our “educational” tour of Cuba in early February 2015 was celebrating the “lifting” of the economic blockade by President Obama. When we landed and saw…
In 2010 I was experiencing a period of sobriety and employment and so consorting with my sober friends, one of whom is local (Fort Bragg) man-about-town bon vivant and impresario Joseph Sverko. Joseph is the motivating force behind the annual Footlighters show and as such its writer, director, producer, costumer, and star. In addition to using an established group of amateur thesbians, he regularly enlists his friends to both act in and labor for the production although perhaps “enlists” does not really capture the spirit of force majeure that Joseph employs in his hyperzealous conscriptive efforts; “Shanghai” comes to mind, or maybe “press gang.”
The blanket of snow lingers on into March, with nights dipping below zero, so I have temporarily abandoned the plan to construct a solarium on…
Thomas grows crops in several areas around Mendocino County including his main crop, Lavender. You will find him almost every Saturday with his kids during the season at the Ukiah Farmers Market selling the products he makes from lavender.
For some of us it is hard to believe that World War II ended seventy years ago. I am not quite old enough to have…
A lot of younger people seem to be under the impression that baby boomers are the selfish “me” generation, who, after a brief flirtation with…
When I was a kid we used the word tons to mean lots. I have tons of baseball cards. You have tons of friends. This week, however, I really did move tons of books, eighty big heavy boxes, of my self-published opuses Buddha In A Teacup and Under the Table Books, from the warehouse where I was paying to store them, to our house, which now resembles a UPS shipping center.