Are the turkey vultures circling me or just, you know, circling? It is one of the pleasant oddities of living up the main canyon of Inverness, California, that one can actually look down on gliding buzzards. And glide they do, dipping and swooping over the green hillsides where bay laurels still give their convincing imitations of tufted broccoli spears. Sometimes the vultures slip by at tantalizingly close range, the red of their heads and flared effect of their wingtip feathers clear and prominent. Read more [...]

And then the sun decides to come out, as though it has the right to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. As though I don't matter. And in the matter of this sun emergence, why am I always the last to know? As a consumer, one can only feel a great and consistent disappointment in the solar performance of Inverness, California. And it has gotten worse, that is the thing. Despite the investment of several decades of summers, not to mention autumns and even the occasional winter, the sun has underperformed Read more [...]

The Psychologist I Happen to Bump into on Mondays put it this way.  For me, lying sleepless in bed has a particular quality of physical helplessness.  An individual oddity of my disabled state, the physical merging with the psychoemotional in a way that is all mine.  Raising interesting questions about why on a recent night, having awakened at 2:40 in the morning and some gnawing anxiety vibrating on and on...that I go on and on supine in the bed.  For there is a known antidote, Read more [...]

Ordering at Peet's, I change my mind at the last minute, opting for an espresso con panna to go.  Oh, I do hang about long enough to get a quick sense of the nation's decline, wondering how Paul Krugman can stand to write about this stuff day after day.  Then I am off, or back, to be more precise.  Back home, back to work, back against the wall.  For truth to tell, I have been in some state of fear.  Better than in the state of Texas, I must admit, where the prayer-mongering Read more [...]

When I wander out there now, it is with the seasoned and settled eye of a grandparent detachably amused by his own offspring and pleased at their progeny.  The garden, of course.  I seem to be largely on top of matters there and oddly accepting of botanical disappointments.  Naturally, one is drawn to the latter.  The brussels sprouts are hanging on like the Russian army bivouaced for the winter.  Which is what a snow-loving organism does when the morning air has acquired Read more [...]

John Chiang and I have been exchanging letters.  He sending me one, me sending one to him, then back, then forth, and what does it all mean?  It means that deep beneath the fiscal dysfunctions of a waning empire in its self-devouring stage, there are miniscule events, blockages in the capillaries of the body politic.  Which is why John feels obliged in his guise as Controller of the State of California to send me a tax bill for $14.81.  Which I duly pay online.  After which Read more [...]