I had gone to bed secure in the knowledge that tomorrow would be Saturday and the prison would be on its free and easy weekend schedule. A light breakfast wouldn't be served until 7:00 AM and if you wanted to sleep in, there would be a brunch at 10:30. I was rudely awakened at 3:30 AM with a firm shake of my foot by a black, female duty-guard.
Posts published in “Essays”
Before the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors got down to the equivalent of a bake sale on the Titanic's poop deck last Tuesday, a group…
After last week's County Redistricting Committee meeting was adjourned, Supervisor Dan Hamburg ambled in to privately discuss the Committee’s work with a few of the…
Clover never lived in Ukiah, but remarkable circumstances resulted in her life beginning and ending in Ukiah. It began in Ukiah because salesman Perry Young…
The months following my discharge from John's employ were hard ones, on me and those around me. I was living with an engaging and bright woman in San Francisco, estranged from my wife and family, and I was floundering.
County CEO Carmel Angelo informed the Supervisors that the County’s ever-larger debt is again ever-larger. “Complicating the budget picture is a change in accounting methodology…
Having spent many weeks amidst the Strauss-Kahn case listening the locals assert that America's justice is superior to France's, we're now pitchforked into the next…
Following the breakup of CCR, John kept me employed for another four years or so. We moved out of the “Factory” and set up shop in a temporary office on San Pablo Avenue in Albany.
Determined to see another example of mural art by Ben Cunningham, the artist who painted the mural in the Ukiah Post Office, I trekked to…
As Americans prepared to celebrate Independence Day, inmates in solitary confinement at California's Pelican Bay State Prison are standing up for their rights in the…
I am reading The Collected Stories of Frank O’Connor for the third time in twelve years. Enough time has passed since my last reading of his remarkable stories so I have forgotten sufficient details and plot twists and endings to make the stories new to me again; and in some ways they are better than new because I know them now as I know favorite pieces of music or beloved paintings, and in this further experience of them I discover more and more of the genius they contain.