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Posts published in “Essays”

Panther Soccer 2015

The 2015 season opened last Tuesday afternoon on just the second day of school. The opponents were the Knights from Kelseyville who made the journey from smoky Lake County and arrived with a much changed team from last season. Clearly some elder students had transferred in and it turned out that they were good players too!

A Sin To Stay Down: A Boont Noir (Chapter 4)

The electric gate wasn’t working and Ella had to get out of the truck and drag it open herself, which probably screwed things up worse and would make the gate harder to fix later, then she had to get back into the gargantuan gasguzzling Tundra that as an environmentalist she hated, drive the polluting monstrosity through the pie wedge opening, park on the outside of their property which had a steep incline just before the white line that marked the skirt of the two-lane highway – meaning some beer-drunk asshole could easily drift off course and hit her – set the parking break, get out again to close the stupid gate, and then climb back into the truck and hope the engine didn’t stall or the emergency brake didn’t slip. Rose was with her too, which made her worry even more about the beer-drunk assholes and the part where she had to leave the truck to close the gate.

Ida Four

Two hours into tonight’s Open Mike at Club Muse, a dumpy old pub on San Pablo Avenue in Richmond California, most of the eighty-seven patrons…

Sleeping & Waking

When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

Deputy Orell Massey Interviewed by Barry Vogel

I have been in the county almost 20 years now. It has probably been the most challenging 20 years of my life. It's been very difficult at times and really tested every character trait and every emotion that I could probably come up with and more — being in this county and coming into contact with the people who live here.

A Sin To Stay Down: A Boont Noir (Chapter 3)

Behind the crumbling Anderson Valley High School, Billy Lee held a scuffed football on a weedy field that resembled an over-grazed cow pasture. It wasn’t going to seed, so much as becoming a miniature desert. The ground was harder than the parking lot out front but not nearly as smooth, pocked with gopher holes and tufts of star thistle. Nobody would call this crap turf.

A Horse Walks Into A Bar…

Garberville's Blue Room Bar has a sign on their front door reading, “No Patchouli”. The 'necky' older crowd of loggers, cowboys and country folk seem…

Burn On, Burners!

It's Burning Man time again. I'm not going, again. I'm going to say something critical about it, again. And will be mostly ignored and/or vilified, again.

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