The dogwood tree outside my bedroom window is exploding with white flowers, in contrast to the redbud in the backyard. The forest edges are painted white, purple, and green, as mustards bloom in all the…
Posts published in “Essays”
Until a short time ago I, like many, had never heard of Sites or even what or where Sites was. A little research indicates that Sites is in Colusa County, California and was established in…
Last year, handguns killed forty-eight people in Japan, eight in Great Britain, fifty-two in Canada, twenty-one in Sweden, and 10,728 in the United States. I was listening to the Giants sweep the Dodgers and feeling euphoric and glad when I received the email with those handgun death statistics, and I was reminded of a dharma talk I attended many years ago in Berkeley.
Back in the days right after the extinction of the dinosaurs, when I was still new to New York City, it was a pretty frequent thing to spot Robert Christgau riding his crappy-looking bike around…
Candy Bergen has just published a memoir called "A Fine Romance." According to the New York Times, the actress "parses the nation’s infatuation with the CBS sitcom 'Murphy Brown,' in which she starred for a…
Backstory: Confluence Vineyard was always George H. Bush’s preferred single vineyard Pinot from Goldeneye, and the year before I worked harvest there, the last thing the interns got paid to do was handbottle and wax…
First off, I was raised in Humboldt County by tweakers in a town called Rio Dell. Not only were my parents tweakers but so were my aunts and uncles. So growing up I had a…