Posts published in “Essays”

Weinstein’s wife is crying. They just made love and she is crying that soft silent way women cry when what is wrong, or what’s right for that matter, is not yet a wordful thing. Weinstein…

Buck Clark admits to having been an occasional participant in what he called “the fightin’ and the fussin’” during the county’s logging boom of the 1950s, but it never got in the way of a…

Continuation of  “Working the Mare Island Nukes.”  Three men in their early thirties, James, Kevin and Gerry, are telling a reporter about defueling and refueling nuclear submarines. The “head” is the top half of the…

There were plenty of two-legged heroes, of course, though they too relied heavily on four-footed stalwarts and tended to live their lives on the fringes of human society. The Lone Ranger got into my soul…

I know it’s early. I get that. But there’s enough of a sample size now to be able to predict that this year’s version of the San Francisco Giants baseball team falls somewhere between promising…

Watching Steve Talbot’s new documentary, The Movement and the "Madman," reminded me of my own opposition to war, and also that over the past 75-years, US soldiers have gone into battle and died on distant…

After several weeks of hesitation, it appears spring has finally sprung in Northern California. The seemingly endless rains of this winter have finally ended and the temperatures are warming, though frost remains a possibility. In…

For at least as long as people have talked about the weather, they have made music about it—from rain dances to pastoral symphonies, from the paleolithic powwows to Prince’s Purple Rain. Even if the climate’s…