The Front Porch – County Highway

Dispatch

The Bar at the End of the World

Tisa’s Barefoot Bar, only a short drive from Pago-Pago, is a place to escape the rain and gather coconuts.

Perhaps only ashes remain.

I’ll have another piña colada, please.

By David Samuels

The bar at the end of the world is a real place, that much I’m sure of. As one infinitesimally minor node in a myriad of conscious, thinking beings, connected to each other in real-time through smartphones and other mirror-like devices, my rule of thumb is that everything I can imagine is real — because I imagined it, and because it’s way too hard to keep track of things otherwise (in the greater scope of things, I’m not all that bright). Think for a moment of the sheer density of the combined realities being constantly manipulated by the script-writers whose logic is somehow directing the whole shebang. Not even they can take it all in. Which means that anything I can imagine within the confines of my tiny individual cranium exists in more magnificent and colorful form, somewhere — maybe just over the horizon. Oh, yes, it’s out there. The horizon is the limit of our vision, and a marker of infinitude. Close your eyes and the horizon will still be there, signifying the sum of the …

Fugitives

Mister Razzle Dazzle Turns 150

Happy Birthday to Jack London, Fugitive Father of California Literature and Inventor of the Road Novel

Socialist, white supremacist, tramp, shirtless billboard model

If you haven’t read ‘Martin Eden,’ get thee to a library

By Jonah Raskin

Unlike his predecessors in the field of California literature — Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frank Norris — Jack London was born in San Francisco. 1876, the year of his birth, was also the anniversary of the centenary of the United States, the nation to which he owed his unalloyed allegiance. His mother, Flora Wellman, a spiritualist and an unwed mother, thought she could communicate with the dead. I’d call her a bohemian or a proto-hippie. As a young man, Jack London traveled widely in Asia and Europe, and across both North and South America. And while he wrote about England, Japan, Mexico, the Yukon, and elsewhere, he lived most of his life around San Francisco Bay: in Oakland, Berkeley, and in Glen Ellen, too, as well as in the city of San Francisco itself. The famed author’s name at birth was not Jack London, but John Griffith Chaney. When his mother married a wounded Civil War veteran named John London, John Griffith Chaney became John London. His mother entrusted him to a …