Oh, please, take pity on us poor satirists, for reality keeps nipping at our heels and increasingly overtaking us. There was a recent report that a Sunday School teacher instructed a student to write, "What…
Posts published in “Essays”
The Northern California pot growing culture is very clubby. In Mendocino and Humboldt, it's the growers against not just the cops but also CAMP. This vigilante group, the Campaign Against Marijuana Production, believes that pot…
The rains fell so redundantly this spring that I tired of checking the forecast in the newspaper. I took to wearing a green raincoat with plastic overalls on sunny days, sweating as I carried buckets…
There are so many smellier corpses in the New York Times’s mausoleum, not to mention that larger graveyard of truth known as the Fourth Estate, that it’s hard to get too upset about what Jayson…
Everyday chaos slips closer: a scream, a senior center closing, gunshot lead-in on the five o'clock news. Outside construction workers tear up the street while mean little women let their mean little dogs piss on…
I spent every night at the Washoe House, playing cribbage with the bartender, between my sophomore and junior years of college, although I was only 20 — too young to drink legally. Tony didn’t care.…
In a few weeks my mother and I will be gone from Anderson Valley, a place I have lived in and loved for three decades
In early 1969, less than a year after his Baath Party seized power, Saddam Hussein spoke to an aggrieved family who complained that one of their number had been unjustly executed. Spurning a suggestion that…