The Front Porch
The farm at the bottom of the road belonged to Millard. By the time I knew him, he lived with his daughters. His wife had died years ago, but he couldn’t bear to part with the house where they made a life and raised a family.
Every day, when the weather was good, and often when it wasn’t, Millard would drive his old beige Chevy back over to the house, park in the driveway, and wait for someone to come talk to him. Everyone in the area knew Millard. In his nineties now, he had purchased the house on the corner as a young man in his twenties. He had kept cows and other animals on the land for nearly seventy years.
Farm work had been beyond Millard for a while. It was a wonder that he was still permitted to drive his old Chevy. Still, he did everything he could to hold onto the land and stay close to his house. He rented out his lower fields to a neighboring farmer for a pittance as grazing …
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.
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 …
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
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 …
