Revenge is an airborne disease in prison, one that seeps beneath the skin and pervades the atmosphere like a deadly fog. An inmate’s honor, once impugned, seems to require action, and the most common method…
Posts published in “Essays”
“U.S. food prices are on the rise, raising a sensitive question: When the cost of a hamburger patty soars, does it count as inflation?” — Ben Leubsdorf and Jon Kilsenrath The sentence above opens a…
The mouse sniffed its way through the dark. Rejecting the wild pea vines, it scurried past the oak barrels full of strawberry plants. Been there, snipped that, tucked away in its nest. The mouse knew…
That last tour with Charlie Musselwhite was pretty brutal. Sharon and I wanted to have kids, and this is where we wanted to have them, so we moved back home to Ukiah in 1974. I…
The Republican convention of July 1952 was the first televised national convention. Although my younger brother Hugh was only four years old, he sat, transfixed, for all five days. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Earl Warren,…
Say what we will about the silliness of Hillary Clinton claiming to be dead broke when she and Bill exited the White House in 2001 to make way for George “Picasso” Bush, at least her ridiculous boast brought to light the collective insanity of the obscenely wealthy.
"I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. ....It is the use of paranoid modes of…