Having just completed a class in “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Wolf’s classic, I do understand why the lighthouse is always there, never goes away and eternally beckons. That’s what lighthouses do. And there’s a Jeffrey pine in my life that does exactly the same thing. Gentle Reader, you’ve heard it all before. How I never made it to the lighthouse, sorry, the pine. Not during my ambulatory life, that is. But the pine is looming still, even getting closer. Because after a modest Read more [...]

OK, Gentle Reader, I must stand corrected. Falling corrected would be more like it. Sitting corrected simply doesn’t work syntactically…so let’s get on with it and join the throngs thronging their way to Civic Center, San Francisco, United Nations Plaza, USA. But we have to join them theoretically because they just weren’t.  Never mind APEC, the global Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that has long been touted as mind blowing and traffic stopping and all the rest. No crowds Read more [...]

It’s the strangest thing about writing. There are certain basic, timeless words that apply. Like practice. Regularity. And a few phrases like write every day. And they are all true. And recently, I really haven’t been putting pen to paper. Or voice to microphone in my case. Because. Well because what? The fear of the blank page. Which is loosely connected to the fear of failure. Which is very close to the fear of death. And speaking of which, I confess to a fear of Death Valley. Yea, though Read more [...]

I am arriving at the Civic Center BART station and rolling toward the elevator, my niece Eva and her boyfriend Patrick in tow, when I realize something is wrong. There is that sense of an out of body experience, or maybe too much of the wrong drugs in the 1960s, now making itself felt…or maybe just the effects of not have gotten out quite enough recently… but something is wrong.  Or maybe right. Because the unhoused, unwashed and unloved are not visible on the platform. Nor are their Read more [...]

Watch Danny Kaye bicycle across the silver screen in the opening of his 1958 “Merry Andrew” singing Everything Is Ticketty-Boo…and you’ll get the idea. I was feeling splendid setting out on my gravity-assisted journey down the hill, and hither and thither, to Canyon Market and on, you guessed it, to Cup. This very morning. And it was a fine morning, this one, not a cloud in the sky nor a trembling on the San Andreas Fault. Ticketty-Boo. Because it’s true. The best things in life are free. Read more [...]

It was on the Bill Maher show, of all places that I heard an AI expert sketch our modern condition as follows: Paleolithic brain + medieval institutions + 21st century technology. And at age 76, and knocking hard on the door of 77 (December), I will miss much of the unfolding of these circumstances. And come to think of it, will I miss, i.e., regret, not being here for the heat death of the planet? Oh, I suppose the answer is yes. Strange, we humans. The Paleolithic brain characterization Read more [...]