My reputation as a brooding intellectual blossomed in junior high then flowered in high school. It was a period in my life when I hauled around thick books on serious topics by profound authors for…
Posts published in “Essays”
Is Vladimir Putin a freedom-hating madman bent on conquest regardless of the human cost? Why did he invade Ukraine? The incontrovertible fact is that Putin's action came in response to prior US actions. Without those…
Needing assurance it was still in business, I pushed the Forest Club door open, took a stool and called for a cold can of Coors. Good choice, this, I told myself. Last time here I…
Picture the following age-old scene: a writer sitting at a kitchen table, pretending to work. Set it 40 years ago. The Reagan/Thatcher Conservatives are in power and everything is broken, but our subject is the…
There is something to be said for the disadvantages of Catholic education, at least as it was in San Francisco of the logy, foggy 50s. For one thing, in grammar school I learned about ransoming…
Have you ever taken Ecstasy? Is that what they call “Molly”? I never have, never wanted to, figured I never would, but now I’m wondering. I have a friend living in the boonies far away…
I was on my way to the Lodge one Saturday morning to pick up a six-pack for later that night when the bar’s door suddenly banged open and a small, wiry young man came flying…
Not a Fat Tuesday, but a Fat Weekend. On Saturday morning the Metropolitan Opera simulcast of Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff. On Sunday night a home viewing of The Whale. Both are all about fatness. The…