Here's what I've learned about doing time: you can't do years. Well, in retrospect you can, easily — that is, after you've done 'em. They're a snap. Looking back they don't seem a huge deal.…
Posts published in “Essays”
Staying with friends was the only way I could afford to make my trip to New York in 1976 last more than a week or so, and I wanted to stay in or near Manhattan for at least three weeks. When I left for New York, I thought I had two places to stay, one in Newark, New Jersey with Dan and Janka, and one on West 83rd Street in Manhattan with Scott and Richard, but when Janka’s mother learned I was planning to stay in the area for several weeks, she invited me to use the guest room in her apartment on West 94th Street, three blocks from Central Park.
Each summer during the 70s, there were basketball camps which sprung up in the frozen windy tundra tri-state areas of Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa (the hockey states playing the Canadian league!). Their aim? Making steady…
Two items from the first week in January that barely registered faint blips on the media radar: First, Huell Howser has died. If he is unknown to you, I’m sure PBS stations throughout California will…
I saw an old-school “punk rocker” on the street the other day — one with the full spiked-out mohawk hairstyle, in addition to the beat-up, torn, paint-spackled, button-strewn black jacket and pants and boots. “How…
In 1976, when I was twenty-six and working as a landscaper in southern Oregon, my big dream was go to New York and meet my literary agent Dorothy Pittman for the first time, and also say hello to the magazine editors at Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Gallery who had bought my short stories; and to rub shoulders, I hoped, with others of my kind.
A simple twist of fate has set President Obama’s second Inaugural Address for January 21, the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. Obama made no mention of King during the Inauguration…