Early in 1968 Josh Gould and friends opened a coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, offering a respite from the Army to GIs stationed at nearby Fort Hood. Dissent within the ranks was being expressed in myriad…
Posts published in “Essays”
Bad regimes are in the business of making us forget. More than anything they want to cancel our feeling for the impossible that twists some of us into impractical romantics. Teenagers tend to pass through…
Just south of Healdsburg on the east side of Highway 101 was the Campbell Ranch. Almost every resident of Healdsburg and many on the North Coast knew the ranch with the friendly two-story house sitting…
So many cubes of braised tofu, countless Hunan broccoli specials; turned out they could legitimately be written off and called research. Frequenting of Sino-American eateries, from an IRS perspective, had been strictly recreational — until…
In my mind’s eye, I see Jerry running along the fence line, snapping at the tolerant Malamute neighbor. An incongruous pair, Jerry is a 12-pound short-legged Jack Russell with a coat somewhere between broken and…
The internet cannot convey how big the New York Times played the story headlined "Beneficiary of Electroshock Therapy Emerges as its Leading Evangelist" in the January 1 print edition. The top half of the page…
Prisoners, like the elderly and latter-day Luddites, are traveling way, way off the information superhighway. Me even employing a zero-currency term like “information superhighway” tells you just how far off the beaten path me and…
Some of you may have already paid your property taxes in full, some may have sent in half, with another half still due in the new year. Odds are the vast majority will pay by…
Fishing was a big part of my father's life, from his childhood in Minnesota onward, and he made it part of mine too. By the time I was born we lived right on the beach…