The other day at a red light, a Cadillac Escalade SUV sat in front of me, looming over the Toyota Cressida to its right. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had no idea what…
Posts published in “Essays”
I arrived in Ukiah a long time ago, back when stegosauruses roamed Laytonville, the Dead Sea was merely ill, and no one in Mendocino County had ever heard of marijuana. You might think these were…
The Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam, who died last week at 92, should have gotten the Nobel Prize for his role in figuring out how marijuana exerts its effects within the body. ("Elucidating the endocannabinoid system,"…
Pale-jointed knuckles grip the wheel. Squinting, trying to detect shapes of any kind beyond your windscreen. This rates as a full-bore white-out. Zero visibility. Now you’ve lost sight of those blurred red tail-lights that were…
My ad hoc midnight threnody serves as a collective farewell–– To Mark and Ina Walker and her sister Mabel Black, Mark told me how to grease a wagon wheel and sharpen a scythe, and he…
In Boonville, real wilderness can often begin a few feet from the pavement, as it does throughout the Anderson Valley and much of Mendocino County. I would hike due west from my house, down into…
The fact is inescapable; the news media landscape has changed in the 21st century. On television, cable news channels have expanded exponentially and broadcast news channels have expanded the hours devoted to news. On radio,…
I am now officially poor, having gone full cycle: from dirty hippie living on food stamps, $42 a month fifty years ago, to landed gentry pocketing $273 a month today. Being a scammer most of…
To write her most recent novel, (2022; 549 pages; $32.50; Harper Collins) her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens whom she calls her “genius friend.” In the…