Spread out along the bay, Nice was an old fashioned city with a certain dilapidated look to it. It had become a kingdom of blue-haired grandmothers and deeply suntanned old men, all wandering the English…
Posts published in “Essays”
Feliz Creek today, where it passes beneath Highway 101 at Hopland is, in the summer, a parched expanse of dry streambed that is barely discernible as a watercourse. Only when it comes alive in the…
You can all breathe a sigh of relief— I'm not about to start belaboring the particulars of whatever it is I've been up to of late. Even I grow weary of the patterns of debauchery,…
On June 7, 2016, Mendocino County voters approved Measure V, declaring intentionally-killed and left-standing trees a public nuisance. At issue was the local timber industry practice of poisoning millions of trees and then leaving them…
As humans we are hardwired to quickly detect when another person’s behavior appears outside the norm. It’s an aspect of human intuition that is instantly recognizable but hard to put into words. But if you…
In the interest of full disclosure, yes, I was a hippie, and yes, I was at Woodstock. I’ve spent most of the intervening half century pissing off the hippies and making fun of the grandiosely…
The last car my grandmother bought herself was a new 1984 Toyota Tercel. I thought it was too small and an ugly color, but she loved it. Every time we walked up to it she…
During my first trip to New York, just as if I had been a Syrian arriving in Nero’s Rome, it was necessary to fulfill certain unavoidable rituals: see Picasso’s Guernica at MOMA; cross the Brooklyn…
In the spring of 1906 I was finishing my junior year at the University of California at Berkeley. I was living on College Avenue about a block from the university. On the morning of April…