Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Essays”

The Great Homo Hunt Of 1998

Official Mendocino County is awfully slow to adjust to contemporary realities, as the startling ordeal of a gay Ukiah man named Marc Tosca illustrates. In December of 1990, Tosca and his late partner, Harry Kirkpatrick,…

Practicing The Past

Often when I practice the organ I’m immersed in the immediacy of each successive moment of music-making. Act and sound conjoin in the uninterrupted present. The best concert performances remain in that heightened state, but…

The Rise And Fall Of The Marijuana Industry

How did we go from hippies sucking on the Green Nipple in the Roaring Eighties to the scene today with large legal pot plantations, surviving mainly by breaking the rules and selling weed on the…

Me & The Yips

Many seasons ago I was dragged into service by a softball team I’d never heard of to play a position I’d never played. It went poorly. For the second time in my life I was…

Teenage Wasteland

I was midway into my first cup of coffee one long-ago morning when my 16-year-old daughter plopped her one-gloved self (it was the height of Michael Jackson mania) down at the kitchen table and informed…

Wolf Creek

Memories of Wolf Creek are etched in my mind forever. I will never forget my first trip. We drove north from Boonville through the giant redwoods. The bright day almost turned to night as the…

The Second Coming

For an elder, (or for anybody in fact) contemplation of the tableau of US history can become a habitual 4th of July conversation.. As commonly told and commemorated on Independence Day, our nation’s story begins…

-