My first few weeks living at Waldo Point made me realize that I wasn’t going anywhere else anytime soon. I liked hanging out on the Sausalito waterfront, meeting Becker’s friends and neighbors, mostly boat people,…
Posts published in “Essays”
“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.” Yes, those were the words spoken by a man who was Governor of California and President of the United States, a man revered by millions of People With Small Brains. I stumbled upon that example of Reagan’s snotty idiocy while hunting for cogent things people have said about waste, and though Reagan was rarely cogent—and the world might be a better place had he, in his youth, sat for a few hours at a desk under which was stored a year’s waste from a nuclear power plant—his remark struck me as an apt preamble to the problem I want to discuss with you.
A new movie recreates the March 7, 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama that was violently suppressed by law enforcement and shamed Congress into passing a voters' rights bill. Howard Zinn had spent time…
Here at the Stony Lonesome offices, high atop a glittering skyscraper rising majestically heavenward from the undulating dunes of Abu Dhabi, we are nothing if not brutally, transparently honest. Just this morning Vicki, my gorgeous…
My Greyhound Bus ride from Milwaukee to Madison cost one dollar and ninety cents. The date, according to my old journal, was March 24, 1969. Madison was the first leg of my journey to California.…
Steve has been many things to many people over the years living and working in and around Ukiah. As a musician, he plays Upright and Electric Bass, Trombone, Trumpet, and other brass, and has played for many years with local favorite Will Siegel and Friends band. He is also a familiar face as maitre d’ of Ukiah’s popular and beloved Oco Time Restaurant in downtown Ukiah.
The tropical warmth enveloped us as we exited the aircraft. I resisted the temptation to emulate the papist act of kneeling down and kissing the tarmac. I had already established my eccentricity with our pleasant Costa Rican guide by asking her to translate the Spanish masthead of your beloved weekly newspaper. (It turned out to be a common slogan in the land where Che Guevara has been all but deified.)
Reading about the murder of twelve people and the wounding of eight others at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the continuing violence as the murderers have taken hostages in two locations in Paris, I recall Satan in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger saying, “No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.”