Two hours into tonight’s Open Mike at Club Muse, a dumpy old pub on San Pablo Avenue in Richmond California, most of the eighty-seven patrons have ceased to pay attention to the performers—the music awful,…
Posts published in “Essays”
When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.
I have been in the county almost 20 years now. It has probably been the most challenging 20 years of my life. It's been very difficult at times and really tested every character trait and every emotion that I could probably come up with and more — being in this county and coming into contact with the people who live here.
Behind the crumbling Anderson Valley High School, Billy Lee held a scuffed football on a weedy field that resembled an over-grazed cow pasture. It wasn’t going to seed, so much as becoming a miniature desert. The ground was harder than the parking lot out front but not nearly as smooth, pocked with gopher holes and tufts of star thistle. Nobody would call this crap turf.
Garberville's Blue Room Bar has a sign on their front door reading, “No Patchouli”. The 'necky' older crowd of loggers, cowboys and country folk seem to find peaceful solace together inside the Blue Room in…
It's Burning Man time again. I'm not going, again. I'm going to say something critical about it, again. And will be mostly ignored and/or vilified, again.
A spokesman for one of the police departments currently under scrutiny for summarily executing illegal lane-changers had this to say in his trigger-happy officer's defense: "Our number-one priority is always going to be officer safety."…
I was put in mind of my friend Elgin this morning when I heard the unmistakable sound of an old Volkswagen Beetle going by. Elgin and I met in 1966, my junior year of high school. He was a massive six-three, a formidable football player, grew up in wealthy family, had his own horse, a new VW Beetle, hunted, drank whiskey, and hung out with other football players and their cheerleader girlfriends.