Response to a letter encouraging me to read a study on marijuana: It seems like you’re trying to give me a sales job on marijuana — which I find odd, because you may recall that I usually refused it even back in the early 80s. For the record, I started smoking it in 1967 and […]
I haven’t read a novel for three or four years. It came to a point where I’d get halfway through a book, see the formula at work, and lost interest. What happened is that I’d encountered a bunch of lousy novels. There are plenty of them out there. There was a time when I could […]
San Francisco-Maui, June 1979 — I boarded the plane carrying two guitars, a bag of clothes, and a gram or so of methamphetamine loosely wrapped in a dollar bill and spilling into my shirt pocket. As I walked down the aisle, the floppy straw hat and Mexican embroidered shirt I was wearing, along with my […]
Internet shopping — I confess. I did it. Sort of. My old Mac Plus is still a good typewriter, but it’s not internet-capable. (In fact, until today, the spell-checker on this thing didn’t know the word “internet.”) So when I encountered two old friends who are now techno-geeks and won’t communicate except by online means, […]
In my father’s day, people who did specialized, skilled things were called engineers. He was an electronics engineer. He maintained the radar apparatus at Chincoteague Island, watching for German U-boats. Later he designed circuitry for guided missiles. He taught a night class for beginning engineers. His tendency was to call skilled people engineers of one […]
I was going to say “extreme” right but that would have implied nazi salutes and torch marches. This is the mainstream right, which isn’t that far from extreme any more. It was interesting to read about Marilyn Davin’s visit to Jerry Philbrick, and to note that politics were not really discussed. Philbrick came off as […]
Elvis Presley shot the TV when Robert Goulet’s face came onscreen. That’s how I feel when I see Trump’s phony-baloney face makeup, fake tan and hairdo. Luckily I don’t have a gun. Trump seems to be sticking with places like West Virginia and Mississippi, where inexplicably there are still people who believe his bullshit. Now […]
This is the story of Shirley and Spike, as much as I know and can recall. A very odd couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was 1967 or so and my band was playing at at the Blue Moon, a Mafia-run club in Lowell, Mass. We had long hair but were far from being hippies. […]
After all the attempted thefts and failed installation of cameras and night lights – including a motion sensor that activates an obnoxious flashing light on the front bumper, and now, in the middle of construction of a fence behind which to hopefully, finally, conceal the Big Red Truck, the truck is wrecked, totally. The irony […]
Conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke, who used to butt heads with Molly Ivins on TV, came on the Tonight show once and explained right wing logic: “If you weren’t a liberal when young, you had no heart. If you’re not a conservative when older, you have no brain.” Tell that to Chomsky… or Molly Ivins’ ghost. […]
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 steering wheel to prevent theft. Someone tries to steal it anyway, here in the land of the big macho truck. […]