When I was a child, I wrote “I hate Daddy” on the flowered yellow wallpaper above my bed in my room in Baltimore. When my friends asked why and how I'd gotten away with this,…
Posts published in “Essays”
For the past couple of months this column has been following a young man from the Mendocino Coast named William and his encounters with Mendocino County’s mental health system. William suffers from schizoaffective disorder and…
Del Berg, of Tuolumne County, is the last known member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, one of the nearly 3,000 Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain in the opening years of World War II.
Even though Mom used to warn against women who laughed too loudly, my cousin Monica and I cultivated our “cackles” and had fun doing it. It could be pretty noisy with the two of us…
More than one friend, when told I was reading the “definitive” new biography of Charles Manson, said “Why would anybody want to read that?” It's a reasonable question. The Manson murders, almost 45 years ago,…
Today I was riding a bike around a neighborhood, or “quarter” as they call it here. I’m looking for a house to rent for just Yvonne and me. I hear strange banjo music. I stop…
Konrad Lorenz famously defined aggression as “the fighting instinct in beast and man which is directed against members of the same species.”