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Posts published in “Essays”

Dumpster Diving with Burt Bacharach

About ten years old, my best friend Scott and I have big plans. We awake long before dawn in our little Southern California beach town of Corona Del Mar, the “Crown of the Sea” indeed,…

One Percenters’ Dirty Laundry

King Lear laments that “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” He’s referring to his daughter Goneril in the first act of King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s best known…

Hallmark Holiday

It was the day before Valentine's Day and I had no prospects, but I didn't care, I'm used to it. My friend really wanted a date so I sorta steered my other friend toward her…

If I Can’t Have Her, Nobody Can Have Me

A back page blip announcing an unnatural death rattled around in my head for a long time before I exorcized it by giving it a prose toe tag. In the November 9, 2005 edition of…

David Harris (1946-2023): Good Guy

In an obit published on February 7, 2023, The New York Times called David Harris “an unlikely avatar of the antiwar movement.” That’s a ridiculous statement. Harris was as likely an avatar as anyone else…

Super Drought Super Bowl: The Goddess Sings

The land was parched, its people too. The rivers that had raged through the Nation’s once-wild Southwestern desert shrank in their canyons. Vast man-made lakes shriveled to puddles behind massive dams, cathedrals of leisure, irrigation…

A Day Home From School With Burt Bacharach And My Mom

Parts of the day are as clear as the lines on my face. Other aspects are more obscure and faded, harder to access across the decades. And many years have passed since that day in…

The DNC As Criminal Enterprise

The Editor rails against the Democratic National Committee and says, in despair, that there is no ‘left’ in the US. I know what he means and feel the same, but we’re both wrong. There’s always…

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