I set out from Haight Street for a night’s walkabout anticipating end-of-the-world spectacles. It was New Year’s Eve, end of an even thousand years if you calculate things by Anglo ways of reckoning, the last…
Posts published in “Essays”
Let’s pause a moment before we head for the exits. I’m talking about the spectacular, the ludicrous, the humiliating and uproarious discomfiture of the Y2K doomsayers. How deliciously wrong they were! We’re dealing here with…
Somewhere around mid-November the Y2K whimpering died down out of sheer exhaustion. Humboldt county is calm. A couple of weeks ago I asked the amiable Jim, proprietor of Western Chainsaw in Eureka, how many generators…
The Butterfly has landed with a thud heard round the Northwest. On Saturday December 18, Julia Hill, aka Butterfly, descended from her aerie in a redwood near Stafford, California, touching ground for the first time…
Seattle has always struck me as a suspiciously clean city, manifesting a tidiness that verges on the compulsive. It is the Singapore of the United States: spit-polished, glossy, and eerily beautiful. Indeed, there is, perhaps, no more scenic setting for a city set next to Elliot Bay on Puget Sound, with the serrated tips of the Olympic Mountains on the western skyline and hulking over it all the cool blue hump of Mt. Rainier.
SEATTLE -- Tuesday evening, this city is under martial law. National Guard helicopters are hovering over downtown and sweeping the city with searchlights. There was a 7pm curfew flouted by thousands -- those same thousands…
After nearly a year of being bound and gagged by legal constraints arising from a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed against the City of Fort Bragg by Dominic Affinito
This morning in the supermarket parking lot, I was assaulted by a loud, unpleasant sound coming from the wide-open door of a shiny new sport utility vehicle. The sound was a commercial music recording played…
Goodbye, Georgia-Pacific. Or should we say ta-ta “The Timber Company”? — the pretentious name G-P gave its publicly traded timber division after spinning it off from the main group at the end of 1997. Last…