“I hate my hair!” Who hasn’t heard a woman utter this grievance at one time or another? In prison, it’s a universal complaint, a woeful acknowledgement that, whether curly, straight, kinky, or gray, most women…
Posts published in “Essays”
It started out as a simple enough road trip plan. We were going to drive to Oregon to ride on two tourist excursion railroads we’d never ridden before. It ended up being a 2,100 miles…
Recently listening to fascinating interviews with Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange, I was struck by their repeated use of the expression American Exceptionalism. The expression as they used it had geo-political connotations, but I think American Exceptionalism also captures the essence of the most popular operating system of the individual American psyche.
I was born in western Pennsylvania, in McKeesport, a steel mill town outside of Pittsburgh. I was the youngest seven kids and my dad was in the ice business, delivering ice to homes and businesses for their “ice boxes”. That was a business clearly headed for obsolescence. Shortly after I was born, he sold the ice business and bought a Mobile gas station.
With two games to go, AV remained in second place, just one point behind leaders Roseland Prep, who, given their opposition, would almost certainly finish with two wins to clinch their fifth regular season title…
When traveling, one can't help but make comparisons between what one knows and what one sees for the first time. The experience can be disorienting, especially if travel includes a foreign country. In my case,…
I met with Judy Long at her wooded home in Rancho Navarro which she shares with her husband Garth. She warned me not to come to the house if I had allergies so I was not surprised to be enthusiastically greeted at the door by a tail-wagging tangle of pets including her giant yellow lab Tanner, her tiny Toy Fox Terrier Sassy and her very fluffy cat Spike. We all tumbled into her kitchen together to sit at the bar for our chat.
With four games remaining in the regular season, if AV were to win the title then they would have to win all of these and hope that Roseland Prep drop a point by drawing one…
August, 1875 — While my great-grandfather John Robertson was herding every sort of livestock from oxen to turkeys overland from Little Lake (Willits) to Mendocino Coast boom towns like Pine Grove, a fellow Scotsman named…