One of my favorite stories from Joseph Campbell is of a wise man introducing his young son to one of the great mysteries of life. They are sitting together under an enormous banyan tree, which is a tropical fig tree, and the man asks his son to pick a fig and cut the fruit in half.
Posts published in “Essays”
On June 18th, in an opinion piece in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Congressman Jared Huffman heroically announced that “this week,” along with other House Democrats, he’d be taking the “SNAP challenge.” The congressman from…
John is 46 but looks 20 years younger, with not a single white hair or whisker. His grungy style also suspends him in early adulthood. His mom was a registered nurse, then secretary at a…
No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…
Judging by Mark Scaramella’s front page article in the June 12th edition of the AVA, mental health issues are still an extremely hot topic in Mendocino County, leading me to believe that the Ukiah Players…
Continued from last week’s AVA, the 1937 Congressional hearing at which marijuana prohibition was discussed prior to enactment. The witness is William WOODWARD, MD, representing the American Medical Association. The AMA, most of whose members…
Like an obnoxiously drunk, loudmouthed, long-winded, overly-pleased-with-himself, vacuously ostentatious guest who refuses to leave the party even though it’s long been over, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby lingers at the local multiplex, Scotch in one…
One of my great pleasures is to look back over the course of events that brought me to my current relationship with a beloved place or person or thing, and to remember the coincidences and actions and interactions that were key steps in those journeys from there to here, then to now.
On February 22, 1998, Pete Gallagher arrived at Building 13 at Solano State Prison in Vacaville, California. It was Gallagher’s thirteenth year behind bars, and he’d already done time in Chino, Folsom, San Quentin and,…