In a city that honors the new and newness, islands of the past disappear almost every day. In spanking new neighborhoods like Dogpatch, where glass and steel buildings tower over the streets, the past hardly…
Posts published in “Essays”
It’s early on Sunday morning at the Brushless Car Wash and I’m surprised at how many people are already here sitting in those horrible plastic chairs all facing the same way (backs to the sun).…
This first musical nickname tagged him to the city of his birth: the Newark Flash. To a club called Lloyd’s Manor in Wayne Shorter’s hometown came Sonny Stitt in 1951. Stitt hailed from across the…
The other day at a red light, a Cadillac Escalade SUV sat in front of me, looming over the Toyota Cressida to its right. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had no idea what…
I arrived in Ukiah a long time ago, back when stegosauruses roamed Laytonville, the Dead Sea was merely ill, and no one in Mendocino County had ever heard of marijuana. You might think these were…
The Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam, who died last week at 92, should have gotten the Nobel Prize for his role in figuring out how marijuana exerts its effects within the body. ("Elucidating the endocannabinoid system,"…
Pale-jointed knuckles grip the wheel. Squinting, trying to detect shapes of any kind beyond your windscreen. This rates as a full-bore white-out. Zero visibility. Now you’ve lost sight of those blurred red tail-lights that were…
My ad hoc midnight threnody serves as a collective farewell–– To Mark and Ina Walker and her sister Mabel Black, Mark told me how to grease a wagon wheel and sharpen a scythe, and he…
In Boonville, real wilderness can often begin a few feet from the pavement, as it does throughout the Anderson Valley and much of Mendocino County. I would hike due west from my house, down into…