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Posts published in “Essays”

Those Wild Pot Tax Revenue Guesses

How do you estimate the commercial value of Mendo Mellow? What do you count? Plants? Processed bud? It's a bit like counting grains of sand on the beach.

Stage Fright

Lauren's Restaurant should be packed to the rafters this Saturday night when Nahara, Boonville's fledgling songbird and healing arts masseuse, takes the stage for her first live performance as a professional singer. Nahara has performed…

Caught in the Crossfire

Everyone in a position to know says this is another banner year for the marijuana cultivation business, Men­docino County franchise. Sheriff Allman says simply, “It's everywhere.” And it's drawing people from everywhere. Last year law…

The Fall of Obama

The man who seized the White House by fomenting a mood of irrational expectation is now facing the bitter price exacted by reality. The reality is that there can be no “good” American president. It’s…

A Couple of Truths: Tuli Is Better Off Dead

Tuli Kupferberg is better off dead. My friend and countercultural icon had been suffer­ing from a couple of strokes, hospitals, breathing tubes, feeding tubes, anemia, infections, blindness, catheter, hearing aids, wheelchairs, psychosis, memory loss, dia­pers,…

Culture of Narcissism

“Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathol­ogy, which express in exaggerated form its under­lying character structure.” — Christopher Lasch A few weeks before my second novel was to be pub­lished in 1980, I…

Mooney & Billings: Framed!

It was an unusually hot July day in San Francisco. There was a parade on that day in 1916 — a “Prepared­ness Day” parade organized by local Republican businessmen. It was intended to drum up…

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