It's tough enough for a stage comedian to make you laugh out loud; more remarkable still when a supposedly comic movie does so. Rarest of all is an author achieving such result in print. A…
Posts tagged as “essays”
This year marks the 25th annual version of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, and its 13th year in Boonville. Begun in 1994 in the foothills of the mountain range it's named for, the organizers…
For the last two years, I have, like most folks, immersed myself in the daily (political) news, steeping in the vile stew and concocting a bitter brew indeed. Indignation, disbelief, horror, scorn, frustration, and sorrow…
Tim Moellering, history teacher and baseball coach at Berkeley High School, died on a Tuesday in 2011, after a lengthy struggle against cancer. Moellering's Berkeley High career followed nineteen years cross town teaching and coaching…
It was the summer of Woodstock, and Henry and Patsy were going. They asked Sheila and me to go but we heard the weather was going to be shitty. We decided to hop in the…
The Big Red pickup truck. Bright red with huge wheels that lift it high off the road. Guy moves in next door with this monster, parks it on the street with a "club" on the…
Beginning in the 1980s but gathering steam in the mid-to-late 1990s, American doctors turned millions of their chronic pain-suffering patients into opiate dependents. There was nothing ill-intended or illegal about it; pain relief had become…
Time travel has become a familiar enough subject to us by way of innumerable fictional treatments that we're all pretty conversant with the (contrived) ins and outs of it, the various scientific gymnastics and logical…