THERE IS MUCH VALUE IN friendships – even more so in those that are decades long. In 1986, I began working at the Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire’s fencing booth. Dubbed the privateer ship “Cardiff Rose” (after the Roger McGuinn…
Tag: people
Ones I have known, if even tangentially.
That Look
THERE IS AN OCCASIONAL EXPRESSION on the faces of those with whom I converse, which makes me wish for a trap door to disappear into: “I’ve finished talking – and now it’s YOUR turn.” Ever since I was a child,…
We’re All Americans, Dammit
I’VE SAID THIS BEFORE, BUT it’s more important now than ever: “I pledge allegiance to the Constitution Of the United States of America And to the ideal on which it stands: One nation of individuals Indivisibly intertwined With liberty, justice,…
False Economy
SO THERE I WAS, PEEPING through the window of the Eureka, California post office, waiting for my elusive boss to enter her across-the-street cafe. The year was 1988 – a time of great personal upheaval, both good and bad. Through…
Silence is the language of God. Everything else is a poor translation.”
— Rumi
Pithyism #5a
OPPOSABLE THUMBS ARE TO HANDS as language is to brains.
“Room 101 Amusement Park”
RELAXING IN PUBLIC CAN SOMETIMES bring unexpected consequences. Seated in the Walnut Creek BART station in the spring of 1980, I was reading my well-thumbed copy of 1984. So engrossed was I in Orwell’s pessimistic prose that I didn’t hear…
LAUGH. SEE?”
— J.R. “Bob” Dobbs
Audiomobile
“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…” So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent…
The Zine Scene
A LONG TIME AGO, IN a post office far, far away, our mailbox was fraught with wonder and excitement. In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines,…
First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio
PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky. Galileo recorded his…
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick