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Posts published in “Essays”

J. Wellington Wimpy

The New York census of 1860 described denizens of the city's Fourth Ward thusly: Mary Sullivan, 22. Ms. Sullivan's birthplace: Ireland; the value of her…

Fort Bragg As Ground Zero

I am having a very hard time understanding why this City's leaders are so hell bent on helping those who obviously aren't trying to help…

Summertime Blues, Ain’t No Cure

I don't want to poke at any sore spots — I am nothing if not sensitive to the triggers and flashpoints of the paper's readership…

The Art Of Wind

The northwest corner of Germany is called Ostfriesland and with respect to organs of recognized historic value it claims to be the most densely populated region of the world: there are nearly two hundred in an area the size of Rhode Island.

Django

On this first day of August, 2015, as darkness gives way to daylight and the cobwebs of sleep are swept away by a slowly dawning clarity of mind, I wonder what this deep silence is all about. Our thirteen-year-old cat Django is what I refer to as an alarm cat. Like clockwork, promptly at seven every morning, rain or shine, he begins to yowl for his humans to feed him. Marcia does not hear the morning yowls of our large gray shorthaired kitty, or so she claims, thus I am the human who most often rises to feed Django at the beginning of each day.

Birthdays

Obama, Percy Shelley, Louis Armstrong, Helen Thomas. These are the people with the same birthday as mine, the ones I choose to claim. Not Sheldon…

P.S. 30 Chronicles

P.S. 30 was an elementary school in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. It included grades Pre-K to 5. Mott Haven was one of…

Willits Stagecoach Robber Miscalculates

It was early on a Sunday morning, a little after dawn, in 1891, and the Eureka-to-Ukiah stagecoach was slowly working its way up a steep…

Near Miss

Monday. July 27, 2015. I’m coming home from Fort Bragg, heading south on Highway One in my little old white Toyota pickup truck, going fifty-miles-per-hour.…

The Stony Lonesome: Here Kitty

There is a particular type of addict known colloquially as a "garbagehead." I might more appropriately say that there's a general rather than particular stripe…

Hoefest 2015

For several weeks we've had nothing but blue skies, breezes, and low humidity in the Ohio Valley, and the ten-day forecast calls for more of…

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