“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott’s famous metaphor, the last line of “The Great Gatsby” applies to motorcycle touring, for much of…
Posts published in “Essays”
The city council met Monday and the city was subjected to a nuclear option power play by Linda Ruffing and the city machine. They played it to a packed house of preordered supporters, mainly social…
Anybody reading this has recently survived another Thanksgiving holiday. Too much food of course, to the point of gluttony and beyond, and the undercurrents of celebrating incipient genocide of Native Americans, not to mention innocent…
Nothing – not drones, bombs, apps, or awards – stops the white male North American intellectual in his quest to nail the nature of the times in which we live. Super-intellectual soars again and again,…
Most of my friends in Fort Bragg are considerably younger than me. This is not necessarily by design, except insofar as my seriously arrested development leads me to seek out others of around my own…
Henry Abbot is not in the habit of picking up hitchhikers, though until eight years ago he very much enjoyed giving rides to strangers and dropping them at the best hitchhiking spots in Fort Orford.…
Carol Doda’s death came to me via the same mechanism as so much news comes to me these days – Social Media. It was Veteran’s Day when I saw the article on SF Gate. I…
The four Stephen brothers and sisters, children of the biographer, editor, and mountain climber Leslie Stephen, lived in Kensington and were educated in the mummified manners of Victorian society until, upon the death of their parents, as a form of repressed rebellion, they moved to the district of Bloomsberry, a decadent neighborhood full of impoverished students and divorced couples.
Do you sometimes look back on your life and recall those turning points that made you the chiropractor you are today instead of a tax attorney, a real estate agent instead of a dance instructor, a massage therapist instead of a taxidermist, a school teacher instead of a stockbroker, a hedge fund billionaire instead of a white water tour guide—or vice-versa?