One hundred seven years ago this spring, my oldest uncle, Jack Macdonald (then 18), woke in the house he’d grown up in here at the family ranch. He ate his breakfast hours before dawn, packed…
Posts published in “Essays”
When Pebbles Trippet showed me her letter to the AVA (March 27, 2013), I mentioned that Lester Grinspoon, the PC (Pro-Cannabis) Harvard Medical School Professor emeritus of Psychiatry, abjured the use of butane lighters. She…
My uncle David Walton died in China on March 8 at the ripe old age of eighty-seven, just a week ago as I write this, yet I have already received an email with photographs from…
I read Bruce Patterson’s recent letter to the AVA with interest, particularly his reference to the possibility of Mendocino Redwood Company turning one of their stagnant mill sites into a biomass fueled power plant. MRC…
It was in early adolescence that I first began to feel as if I were disappearing — actually discorporating. At times I felt insubstantial, airy. I thought I could feel wind blowing through me. My…
Last Saturday about a half dozen naked men came biking down the street towards Golden Gate Park. Two had skimpy jockey shorts on, another had a backpack on, and one had only a hard-on, and…
The dog that wouldn’t die and the dog story that won’t quit — that’s what is currently bedeviling the Fort Bragg Police Department. The good news: a long time flophouse/drug house has been cleaned up…
As I peruse the many articles decrying the ruination of towns and independent businesses by big box stores such as Walmart, and I read about Ukiah groveling at the feet of Costco and wasting millions of precious dollars to bring that destructive horror show to town, I recall that the largest assault on the remarkably diverse and egalitarian America of the 1960’s (egalitarian compared to America in 2013) was the construction of the Interstate Highway System