In a land in which food has become a secular religion I have chosen to become a heretic and a non-believer. Once upon a time, I lived to eat. Now I eat to live. Not…
Posts published in “Essays”
The Savings Bank of Mendocino County published Rainfall amounts on a small card several years ago. I look at this card often due to a long rainy winter this year. The total amounts are high…
I still don't know why I blew through that checkpoint outside Mazatlan on my last drive North up through Mexico even though the police went out in the middle of the road with his machine…
Just arrived in the mailbox is a book called Dangerous Grounds, which recounts how coffeehouses set up near Army bases became hangouts for soldiers during the Vietnam War era. I started the first such enterprise with Donna Mickleson and Devorah Rossman —the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina— in the fall of 1967.
Sharon Amos was short and sad and gray. Even when she was dressed in vivid reds and yellows she seemed to suck the life out of everything around her. If birds fell dead out of…
During any melancholy evening, no child with a vivid imagination, lying face down in bed with an open atlas, has hesitated to sail through every blue sea with the tip of his index finger, or advance with reckless abandon deep into the most dangerous jungle. With his mind filled with pirate ships, treasure chests, lions, and the tusks of elephants, there comes a moment in which the child detains his finger over some point on the map — the most exotic place possible, and thinks: “One day, when I’m older, I will go there.”
There’s no more knocking back a few drinks and chowing down at the monthly “Cannibal Feed” in Ukiah. After 44 years the end has come for a male-only ritual that in its heyday drew hundreds…
He invented frivolity as aesthetic attitude to life and determined that the essence of things is merely in the packaging. This designer was Andy Warhol, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, son of a coal miner who was a Slovak migrant. After being baptized in a Byzantine Catholic rite, the youngster contracted Saint Vitus Dance at the age of 13, which caused his four limbs to move uncontrollably.
In 1979 my father sat at the kitchen table in the log house he, my mother, and paternal uncles constructed by hand. He stared in consternation at a four page document that had to be…