Saturday morning early I pulled into the Fort Bragg McDonalds to get a shot of joe. It had been a hard strange week. The boys were sitting around on the concrete sidewalk outside smoking and laughing…
Posts tagged as “essays”
This year marks 50 years since nineteen 67 and it seems everyone in San Francisco is filled with nostalgia for the Summer of Love. A lot of our cultural institutions are celebrating with hippie themed…
I only ever deliberately killed another animal once in my life. It was in the mid-80s and I was working on a farm/nursery in Durango, Colorado, where the mistress of the concern poisoned several semi-domesticated…
Getting my first computer was inspired by a visit to AVA regular Jim Gibbons, in the hills outside of Willits. He was on solar power and had a Mac Plus hooked up to an inverter…
As our politicos creep deeper into a legalistic wilderness hunting for phantoms of Russian collusion, nobody pays attention to the most dangerous force in American life: the unraveling financialization of the economy. Financialization is what…
While the current versions of newspapers in Fort Bragg and Mendocino rarely cover stories outside of the myopically local, their progenitor, William Heeser, reported on news from around the state, the nation, and the world…
The logic of the rich? - want more, get more. But there's never enough. Towers all over the world with your name emblazoned in big gold letters, proclaiming, extolling celebrating...ME. If billions of dollars and a constant torrent of publicity and attention don't satisfy, what is left? Power - what else? Whenever it was that the president of the United States started being called the Most Powerful Man in the World, as a kid who had grown up reading Superman comics, I knew, felt strongly, that something wasn't right about this. POTUS had become a comic strip character. Somewhere I had read that the desire for a position of authority and power ought to be the primary disqualification for the job.
I am a busy man. Busy, busy, busy. Beaver, bee, one-armed paperhanger: choose your preferred symbolic figure for a chap in a condition of constant occupation. Not complaining, mind you, just saying, and in fact…
Professor Don Foster's 1999 book "Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous" solves what the editor of "The Letters of Wanda Tinasky" grandly called "The Literary Mystery of the Decade" (the 1990s). It's also an…