The hippies grew up in my backyard. I did not find them good neighbors. It was nothing personal. I thought it terrific, in the early days of the Haight-Ashbury, that love children could put a…
Posts published in “Essays”
There is “town vomit” on the streets of Elsinore (Helsingor in Danish), a mere cobblestone’s throw from Hamlet’s castle. Depending on your temperament the stench might evoke either a medieval morosity or a renaissance joie…
Fort Bragg Chronicle, November 25, 1913 — Like a chapter from the “Old Sleuth” series of dime thrillers or a page from the history of “Doc” Standley, Mendocino County's redoubtable fighting sheriff, reads the story…
Five days after Ishi’s arrival in Yuba City Kroeber took him out for a Sunday drive through the city. Their initial destination was the ocean, about which Ishi had heard. He had already crossed the…
One of the things Mendocino County taught me was the value of being a conscience-free liar when useful and/or profitable. People have been coming to Mendotopia for years and decades, and a fair percentage of…
Daniel Ellsberg, who recently announced that he has pancreatic cancer and doesn’t have much longer to live, sent out an email in which he wrote, “It is long past time--but not too late!--for the world's…
At one point in my tumultuous Executive Editorship of Ramparts Magazine in the 1960s, it seemed time either to retreat or send in reinforcements. So I bludgeoned Larry Bensky, the current victim on the sacrificial…
Wasting time, money, and energy on The Marijuana Highway… (What's done is done and all I can do is look back with regret but that's not helpful so it's time to just move on but…
California, percentage-wise, has the most human beings living in poverty of all 50 states. Its economy is foundering as techies search ever more fruitlessly for toe holds in an economy based substantially on fanciful, clickable…