It is that time of year.  It has dawned on me...although this is hardly the right expression.  The night has advanced into the afternoon, evening now much like the black construction paper that materialized around grade school Halloweens.  It is cold, this is part of what's happening.  There is hardly any cold in the central Californian cold, I concede this.  Still, there is enough of it to force one away from the windows.  Particularly mine, single-pane glass dating Read more [...]

Things were very confused round about August, 1969.  I had come to Britain for a short-term visit.  How long could the thing last, after all, but a few months?  I had traveled about the Continent.  And now there was this confusion about my going home.  Was I going or was I staying?  The latter had seemed preposterous only a few weeks before.  But somehow I already had London connections, family connections of all things...unexpected and baffling.  And as though Read more [...]

It has been the Addled Era, a time of being consistently disturbed and off base, my thoughts corkscrewing around nothing and everything.  Take the garden.  There is something happening there, and having to do the simplest Archimedean principles of volume and displacement, and yet the whole thing obsesses me.  I take pride in having brought to a halt, more or less, the grinding and flushing of kitchen scraps down the sink, a.k.a., garbage disposal.  For a year or more virtually Read more [...]

One can put too fine a point on the concept of the 'haunted house.'  The old place my father bought in the center of a small desert town certainly had the weight of years about it.  It also had the weight of the future about it.  For after his divorce, my father told me that he had been planning for this all along.  His office downstairs, living accommodation upstairs.  At the time, this seemed to me very adult and prescient.  Now the arrangement appears defeatist and Read more [...]

A bad sign that the 8:39 morning express to San Francisco is running late.  This rarely happens on Caltrain.  Save for the occasional suicide, locals hurling themselves upon the tracks in frightening numbers...a sign of the times, one cannot say.  The times one can count on being of the daily schedule variety.  I have an appointment.  I need to see a woman about my book.  Yes, there is one.  I have seen the cover.  I have seen the beautifully designed pages.  Read more [...]