It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in Ukiah, and I have just finished watching the Nicolas Cage/Shirley MacLaine film Guarding Tess for the umpteenth time, this time with new insights into the parallels between the plotline…
Posts tagged as “essays”
Friends of ours recently told us that their twenty-five-year-old son, a bright personable college graduate, but no techie, found the job market so grim he signed up for a seven-year officer training program in the…
There’s not a month that goes by that someone doesn’t ask me, “Why do they call you Chili Bill?” I feel the time has come to answer this question in a simple, straightforward manner to…
My good buddy Taylor Stoehr just died and I’ve been leafing through the bulging file of his letters to me, reading passages at random and marveling at the clarity of his prose and the generosity of his spirit.
Editor: My name is William Joseph Newport CDCR#K14307, aka “Bongo Bill.” This letter has been a long time coming. I was a homeless man who had a more or less meager form of existence in…
A year ago this week I wrote about a then obscure independently produced documentary called Searching for Sugar Man, about a Detroit singer/songwriter who disappeared into the dustbin of the American corporate music business in…
Marcia and I had breakfast on Wednesday morning at Ravens’, the wholly vegan restaurant at the Stanford Inn, our meal courtesy of a gift certificate Marcia received for officiating at a wedding. I especially enjoyed the coffee and orange juice and the view of Big River Beach.
I bought an old ’67 Volvo Sedan for $75.00. It belonged to a fella dock mate at the Berkeley Marina, a Pagan witch named Eldrie, who lived on our former boat, the Desiderata. Eldrie had,…