Román Leão

Category: Blog Posts

  • 23–18 to 60: On Myth

    03–08.07.2026

    This Fourth of July marked one year since I took the Stars and Stripes down from the front of the house and put it away. The myths that had sustained my faith in our country’s leadership—which, to be fair, had been on shaky ground for some time—were proving not up to the challenge of thwarting the rise of out-and-out fascism.

    The heartbreak that I felt last year as I folded up the flag was supplanted by a low-key depression, mitigated somewhat by getting my hands dirty in the backyard garden and inventing my new favorite cocktail: The Red-headed Stranger (1 oz rye whiskey, 1 oz Willie’s Remedy+ THC Social Tonic, and ginger ale over crushed ice).

    Turning on the news for a moment to see a phalanx of Patriot Front yahoos marching in the streets of Washington DC only redoubled my resolve to sit this one out and spend some time thinking about what really matters.

    In his 1988 book The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words.”

    I started thinking about the myths that had formed the basis of my own operating system, the code, for lack of a better metaphor, upon which my own reactions and functions relied. Were they flawed as well? As the great American Harry Belafonte sang, “House built on a weak foundation will not stand, oh, no.”

    I was raised in one of the many Portuguese communities in the Bay Area of Northern California, most families having immigrated from the Azores. An important tradition they brought with them was the celebration of the Festa do Divino Espírito Santo, or Holy Ghost Festa. Every Sunday after Easter, you can be sure that some town in California is spending a week sprucing up the hall, cooking up enough soupas to feed hundreds, and getting ready for a big procession to the church.

    I think the one story that helped shape my outlook as a young impressionable seeker, one not found in the Bible, the Torah, the Upanishads, or the Jack Kirby multiverse, was St. Isabella’s miracle of the roses. Isabella was the queen of Portugal in the late 1300s and early 1400s, and was well known for her kindness and generosity (apparently to the point of caring for her husband’s bonus children from other women).

    As the story goes, Queen Isabella was feeding the poor on the down low, often hiding bread in her cloak and taking it out to the hungry and destitute. Her husband, King Denis, considered her charity a waste and thought the peasants should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Sound familiar?

    One day he caught her in the garden going out the backdoor with another load of bread and demanded to know what she had under her cloak. Isabella entreated the Holy Spirit and when she opened her garment, roses cascaded out onto the ground. The festas celebrate her compassion, as well as the divine intervention, by freely feeding anyone who wants to be fed.

    That is a story I can get behind, to me it says, take care of those that need it, no matter the cost. I’m afraid that our country, by and large, has lost its way where this sort of altruism is concerned. Between this administration defunding USAID, and cutting supplementary food assistance to the bone, millions of people who could use a bit of purloined bread are not going to get it.

    To this can only I say, “Foda-se o rei!”

  • 26–24 to 60: On Genesis, Pt. 1

    30.06–02.07.2026

    As I have been blessed with what could only be called a spotty memory (perhaps a learned coping mechanism, but I don’t really remember, so I guess it works). As I result, I can’t recall any of what my years of Sunday school and catechism actually taught. Over the years, this has led be to explore my own philosophical studies, which gradually wound their way back around to the books of the Bible.

    What struck me upon revisiting Genesis about 10 years ago, was how little of it has seeped into the general zeitgeist. I am pretty sure I would have been fascinated with the mention of a race of giants, the product of forbidden union between humans and angels. Hold on, could there have been allusions to Bigfoot in the Bible? I’ll make sure and circle back on that.

    When I wrote my second novel, Burn Your Starry Crown, I envisioned the creator as a distant CEO, the head of a Byzantine organization that hasn’t been seen around in years, but everyone fears could be back at any time. Whenever angels, members of the Upstairs Agency, referred to their chief, they used the term He/She/Them, a term I meant to indicate universal totality as well as poke a little fun at the pronoun culture wars that were raging at the time.

    The first thing that struck me upon rereading Genesis, was as God was first creating humankind in Genesis 1:26, it was written as, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” From the perspective of the second decade of the second millennium this seems to denote an inherent plurality in the creator, which to me makes perfect sense. He/She/Them surely embodied the original encompassing spirit, the OG, that Walt Whitman much later envisioned when he wrote in Leaves of Grass, “And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

    However, as anyone can tell you, it is no fun at all to hang out with people exactly like yourself. (Do not get me started on the white supremacists.) There is nothing like a living mirror to point out the things in your own personality that drive you crazy. As the creator must, by definition, embody every conceivable notion or state, can fallibility be off the list? Of course not. It is rude to think so.

    Fortunately, He/She/They quickly sees the remedy to what could have ended up as humankind’s eternal insufferability, at least from a godhead’s perspective; split up the prototype, it would certainly be more entertaining. And so we are, for better or worse.

  • 32–27 to 60: Back to the Holler

    24–29.06.2026

    Last weekend Biscuit, the missus, and I drove back to the close-knit Fairfax neighborhood that had sustained us through some pretty heavy changes from the mid-oughts through to the edge of lockdown, with caring, understanding, and a healthy dollop of humor.

    The block-long American sycamore-lined street had once been the end of the line for those escaping the chill of a San Francisco summer by rail. An electric train once ran from Sausalito to a turnaround at the end of our block. Travelers bound west to Cazadero could then jump on a steam train that entered the pastoral world of West Marin through a tunnel at White’s Hill.

    The completion of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937, along with investment in highway infrastructure rang the death knell for trains in Marin, leaving a short street of vacation bungalows built in the 1920s available for year-round suburban inhabitancy. At least that’s how I imagined it went down, all the better to explain the lack of any insulation against the very real rainy season in the Mt. Tamalpais watershed.

    We had been introduced to the pocket neighborhood by a coworker at a guitar magazine in San Rafael who had recently become dis-enamored by the semi-exposure to the winter cold and damp a non-renovated summer bungalow provided. The missus and I had just endured the opposite problem, as our second-story, south-facing apartment on Sir Francis Drake had become an unlivable human terrarium during an unprecedented 11-day heatwave in which the temperature never dropped below 100 degrees. A casual invitation to come down and join a block party in the shady glen across the way had become a matter of survival as we staggered down into the relative cool of the holler.

    I remember sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of the blocked-off street, enjoying a frosty one, when one of my new acquaintances asked, “Where did your wife go?” An extensive, village-wide search later, I found her sprawled out on the grass under the downtown redwoods, crazy from the heat. That was how we met the people who would become some of our best friends and support community for the next decade and change.

    What brought us back on Saturday, was a last chance to visit in situ with Donna and Shirley, the undisputed mavens of Marin Road who are decamping for a place in Oregon. Shirley, an expert gardener, had turned their lot-sized yard into a garden paradise over the years, one that we were lucky to end up living next to. Donna’s main love is in the kitchen—although she’ll tell you it’s not—raising vegan cuisine to a delicious art form in the interim.

    Donna, the older of the couple, has a quiet feistiness possibly born from sticking up for her sexuality in a time, even in the Bay Area, where one could get in big trouble just dancing with the same gender. Shirley, a decade younger, enjoyed the social progress made in the interim and brooked no shit from anyone that would dare to comment on any choices she may or may not have made.

    Their story is not mine to tell, but Goddamn if we didn’t have some fun, whether it was strumming guitar and sipping tequila around their fire pit, slinging tamales at roller derbies, or trekking out to their place in Idaho (along with half the neighborhood) to witness a total solar eclipse. I love them both madly and already miss them terribly.

  • 37–33 to 60: On Faith

    19–23.06.2026

    In accordance with the wishes of my father—whose own father was a Mason and a virulent anti-Catholic—I was raised in the Roman church. I went to mass every Sunday with my grandmother and sister while my mom, a convert, sang in the folk choir; this was the ’70s after all.

    In addition to the weekly service, I attended catechism once a week as soon as I was of age. The only thing I remember about it was the day we were given a sheet of paper and asked to draw what we thought God looked like. Most of my classmates proceeded in drafting the usual old white guy with the flowing beard, but I, not being savvy enough to see where this was going, drew a psychedelic mandala, incorporating ersatz Native American iconography mostly gleaned from National Geographic and Eagles album covers. Needless to say, this was not what the nuns were looking for, and so the first rift in my relationship with Organized Religion was formed.

    I did continue on, going through the rituals of First Communion and Confirmation before hanging it up. This would have been right before the first major child molestation scandals hit in the mid-’80, continuing on through the new century, and effectively putting a pin in my faith where the Church was concerned.

    This is not to say that my belief in a higher power ever wavered. Experimenting with psychedelics throughout the ’80s only strengthened my conviction that there is a force for good that runs through it all (and just maybe Jerry Garcia’s guitar solos had something to do with it).

    This is a good place to mention my grandfather on my mother’s side, a polymath if there ever was one. Born in Hinton, West Virginia, he had an insatiable appetite for learning, devouring everything from Shakespeare to Crowley, from astral projection to, in his later years, calculus (which, in retrospect, doesn’t really seem the kind of thing one can learn on your own). When I was old enough, I borrowed books on Castaneda and mushroom cults from his extensive library, the glorious result of a bibliomania that appears to be hereditary, and probably fatal.

    It was the late ’80s when I found myself taking a Comparative Religion class in college. Our assignment was to attend three separate services in religious organizations other than the one we may have been exposed to. No pun intended. It was then that I learned that my grandfather had studied Hebrew so that he might read the Kabbala in its original language, as one does as an expatriated Appalachian academic.

    He had actually worked with a local rabbi on the project and called him up to ask if he and I might visit his synagogue together. We arrived at the evening service and were lent a pair of yarmulkes to show proper respect; I would say, “to blend in,” but that was not going to happen. Unbeknownst to us goyim stumbling through reading from the back of the siddur, or prayer book, we had arrived on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when the Nazis rampaged throughout Germany, destroying as much of the Jewish communities as they could.

    One by one, survivors of the pogrom, and its horrific aftermath, stood to bear witness to what they experienced and endured. I felt as if each speaker was talking to me, making sure that I understood where that sort of ideology could lead if left unchecked.

    Finally, the rabbi stood and announced that there was a special opportunity that night. As the synagogue was new, they had written back to Eastern Europe for a torah. He explained that, as the Germans advanced toward the Soviet Union, leveling communities and places of worship as they went, they collected the typical silver ornamentation and velvet wrappings that the ancient scrolls usually wore, and tossed the naked torahs into a warehouse to be used in a “museum to a dead race” to be built later.

    The rabbi announced that this would be a rare chance to actually touch an 800-year-old scroll, as the mantle, or covering, did not reach to the bottom of the parchment. My grandfather and I watched as the object was carried down the aisle and the faithful touched it with total reverence. When they got to our pew, I deferred at first, feeling that—as an outside visitor—it was a step too far. I soon realized that the men who carried the scroll were not going anywhere and they redoubled the offer, saying that it was fine.

    As soon as I touched the edge of the parchment, I felt what I can only describe as a spiritual shock. The men just nodded like, “yea, this happens all the time,” and moved on to the next pew. In later years I learned about yogic awakening and the movement of Kundalini energy up through the chakras to the Crown chakra representing a connection to the divine. My grandfather’s Kabbala study had taught him about the Hitlahavut, or “catching on fire,” an intense burst of ecstatic spiritual passion. I’m not sure that’s what I experienced, but it was something.

    Itzhak Bentov, a Czech-born Israeli-American scientist, inventor, and mystic, wrote about how consciousness itself is an all-encompassing energy field and is responsible for creating our physical reality. A certain place or an object can amass psychic power and significance through protracted attention (I can only imagine the charge that an eight-century-old Pentateuch belonging to a community that had been through so much grief might hold).

    In quantum mechanics, as much as I understand it, this is called the Observer Effect. At the subatomic level, particles exist in superposition, or waves of probability. As soon as they are observed, the wave collapses, causing the particle to exist in a single state.

    Is faith a mechanism to create reality? Or are we the outcome of an outside observer? This bears further thought, but it’s late and I must sleep. Perchance to dream a better world.

  • 40–38 to 60: History Rhymes

    16–18.06.2026

    French president Emmanuel Macron dragged TFG* by the good ear to the Palace of Versailles to sign an Agreement to Accede, an Acquiescence, if you will, to bring a stop (a pause? a lacuna? a smoke break?) to open hostilities in the Persian Gulf that have pretty much fucked the economies of the entire planet sideways, killed thousands of innocents and less sos, and ensured that no conscious nation will never trust the United States again. I, for one, am very tired of winning.

    I am 100% certain that the import of the historical location was lost on our guy, even when he managed to keep his eyes open. Not much more than a century ago, a humbled Germany was dragged into the same room to sign the Treaty of Versailles that brought the first world war to an end and set the pot on high simmer in preparation for the next.

    Perhaps not being the alpha for a while will be good for us. America has always seen itself as the scrappy underdog, even while wearing the fat suit of empire. We could do worse than lose a few pounds. What we need to keep an eye on, however, will be those that take this international humiliation personally.

    We should look to the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 30s for a cautionary tale. Why did the postwar democratic government of Germany fail? It couldn’t have been because everyone was too busy learning Bob Fosse chair routines, could it?

    I seem to recall that rampant inflation was one reason. My German-American grandmother told me stories of citizens pushing wheelbarrows of reichmarks to go buy bread. That may have been hyperbolic—I should Google it—but regardless, the pillars of civility are already groaning under economic strain in this country.

    If people start falling through the massive holes that this administration ripped in the social safety net, the masses are going to start looking for a scapegoat. Never mind the extrajudicial police force already roaming the streets, looking for… who are we rounding up this week? Is it you? Is it me? Oh fuck, it is me, and probably you, as well.

    TFG signed national security directive NSPM-7 back in September, calling out “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-fascist” views as indicators of domestic terrorism. On any given day, I fall under one, probably two, of those categories. Three on a bad day. The ACLU slapped back, rightly stating that, “Nonprofits, their donors, and activists striving for a more equal, just, and fair country and world are core components of American civil society.”

    On Tuesday, ICE arrested 15 people in Minneapolis on spurious charges of “domestic terrorism,” stemming from their involvement in “Antifa-related” activities, while yesterday the White House posted an article on whitehouse.gov titled, “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network.”

    I’m going to say this once because I’m pissed that it even bears repeating at this point: Antifa means Anti-Fascist. It is an ideology—one that we, as Americans, should be in line with—not an organization. Seriously, if you are pulling people off the street for being anti-fascist, what does that make you?

    According to my limited, but curious, knowledge of German history, the Weimar Republic was beginning to make a go of it until the Great Depression came along and their economy, along with everyone else’s, screwed the pooch. That’s when the Hugo Boss outfits came out of the closet, so to speak.

    I would be surprised if the Democrats don’t take both houses in the November midterms, followed by the White House in 2028, but then what? Many of our former allies, as well as all of our adversaries, are tired of our shit. All it will take is one good economic downturn, and the blackshirts will be out in force, looking for someone to blame.

    Make no mistake, we’re in a tight spot, but is it too late to double down on our own humanity? I believe it was Wilbert Harrison who sang, way back in 1969, “Together we will stand divided we’ll fall / Come on now people, let’s get on the ball / And work together, come on, come on, let’s work together, now, now people / Say now together we will stand, every boy, girl, woman, and man.”

    I couldn’t put it any better than that.

    *This Fucking Guy

  • 44–41 to 60: America Jumps the Shark

    12–15.06.2026

    The country was one year past its 200th birthday in 1977. Our living room televisions, when the adults let us near them, had all of three channels, one for each existing network. Every Tuesday night, however, the dial was set on ABC to pay deference to the unifying paragon of cool for all 11 year olds: Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli from the sitcom Happy Days.

    Producer Garry Marshall had tapped into a nascent nostalgia for a bygone era that, in the middle of rampant inflation and disastrous foreign entanglements, was quickly receding in the rearview mirror. Unlike CBS’s boundary-pushing programs such as All in the Family, and it’s spin-off, The Jeffersons, or even NBC’s Sanford and Son, the trials and travails of Milwaukee’s Cunningham family was pure escapism, but even dewy-eyed fantasy has its limits.

    The three-part episode that opened the show’s fifth season found the usual suspects in Hollywood where, for some fucking reason, Fonzie had to jump over a live shark in waterskis (To be clear, the Fonz wore waterskis, not the shark, but would that be any less ridiculous?).

    The episode become synonymous for a point when, according to Wikipedia, “a creative work or entity has evolved and reached a point in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with or an extreme exaggeration (caricature) of its original theme or purpose.” Which brings us to yesterday.

    For three weeks now, visitors to the nation’s capital were treated to the erection of a 92-foot-tall, 600-ton steel canopy called, “The Claw,” on the White House South Lawn. Originally built by a Belgian stage company for music festivals in Europe, the massive structure was retrofitted with red, white, and blue and shipped across the ocean for “UFC Freedom 250,” an event ostensibly created to celebrate the country’s semiquincentennial, but held on TFG’s* 80th birthday in his backyard, so… yea.

    In addition to the planned mixed martial arts fights, the event featured stunt rider Travis Pastrana performing a backflip over the octagon on a dirt bike. Seriously, did no one think to bring a shark? And, nothing says “Freedom!” like Bud Lite and Monster Energy Drink logos flying high over greased up dudes beating the shit out of each other. Personally, I don’t follow MMA, but I’m not going to kink-shame anyone who enjoys the sport. I do have to say, however, that as a writer of speculative fiction, this timeline is starting to piss me off.

    Of course, no Whitetrashpalooza is complete without blatant racism and misogyny. After puking on himself during weigh-in, Josh Hokum went on to win his heavyweight bout, after which, apropos to nothing, he claimed, “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

    I don’t often claim to speak for America, but in this instance allow me to say what I should not have to fucking say, “You are incorrect, you rotten piece of shit.”

    Arthur Fonzarelli made his jump over the shark, Happy Days played out another six seasons, and Henry Winkler, the actor who played The Fonz went on to become a cherished American icon. In stark contrast, this weekend the country landed squarely on its own dick. It remains to be seen if we are picked up for another season.

    *This Fucking Guy

  • 47–45 to 60: When the Saints Come Marching In

    09–11.06.2026

    Taking a break from the news and the eternal doomscroll really does a mind and body good. If it wasn’t for the mysterious bug that had cut down myself and my co-workers like summer wheat, I would have had a better chance to feel rejuvenated by our road trip. At least being stuck in low gear helped ensure that I wasn’t running from pillar to post with the missus like a rainforest version of The Amazing Race. I love her to death, but the woman doesn’t not know how to sit still.

    One thing I did have time for, and have been meaning to do for a long time, was to sign up for a course with ULC, the “non-denominational religious organization,” that ordained me back in the ’90s. All of the recent talk about Christian Nationalism, and the Dominionism preached by our Secretary of Defense’s pastor Doug Wilson, has found my thoughts toward faith and the teachings of Jesus become better defined in my mind. Maybe that’s these clowns’ purpose all along, but I am positive that they don’t think it is.

    Rushing down the Embarcadero to catch my boat home one evening a couple of months ago, I was confronted by a young, overeager evangelical who fell in quickstep with me, asking if I was a Christian. I was stopped in my tracks by the question, which is not conducive to making the ferry. I had to admit, that, “No, I do not consider myself a “Christian.” He proceeded to tell me that Christ died for my sins, and the usual litany of, well… litany.

    I had to stop him, and said, “Hold on, don’t get me wrong, I dig the rabbi. I try to follow his advice on the daily. It is these people that call themselves Christians and do not listen to a single thing the dude said that piss me off.”

    My candor stopped the young man, as suddenly as his question had stooped me. I continued on my desperate attempt to catch the ferry, but upon settling in my seat, I was kind of surprised by my own declaration. I was raised Catholic, your grandma’s weird, old country version of Christianity, which, don’t get me wrong, is one of the things I think it has going for it. I always loved the statues and the pageantry, which I strangely feel protective toward all of a sudden.

    Later that week, my sister and I were at a planning meeting at the Portuguese Hall, an old school immigrant society function if there ever was. If it wasn’t for half of the group Zooming in from parts unknown, it could have been a scene from 50 or 100 years ago. After bimonthly business was finished, the conversation drifted to whatever crazy thing the administration had said or done that day. As a joke, I asked, “What are we going to do when they make carrying the flag of Portugal in our procession illegal?” Ha ha.

    Wilson has called for one better. In his vision of a Christian nation, he would outlaw “public displays of idolatry,” meaning the very Catholic statues and parades that fascinated me as a youngster. This is the same pastor that was invited to preach at Hegseth’s Pentagon.

    One of the reasons the founders of this nation inserted an Establishment Clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was to avoid the type of religious infighting that tore Europe apart for generations. We now have a fundamentalist preacher, close to the levers of power, champing at the bit to start some shit.

    At the same time, TFG* has been beefing with the first American pope for doing what popes are supposed to do, i.e., advocating for the downtrodden, the immigrant, the peace makers. I admit that it had been years since I really paid much attention to what the various popes were up to, now all of a sudden, I’m seriously rooting for Chicago’s own Leo XIV.

    We unlikely theologians have got to stick together.

    *This Fucking Guy

  • 51–48 to 60: Wagons North; or, No Sleep ’til Deadline

    05–08.06.2026

    This weekend, the missus and I took off up the 101 for some much-needed change of scenery, as well as a break from the news. For a couple of years now, when we head up to the redwoods, we have been staying north of our old Arcata stomping grounds in a campground with cabins in Trinidad.

    We met in college in the early ’90s, when Humboldt was still a state school, and it took me years to get her to want to go back and visit. Now that she is able to see the good aspects of the area—the forest, the rivers, the ocean, the slower pace—she takes joy in planning the trips and counting down the days.

    It was just short of a miracle that we crossed paths back in the day at all. I was not supposed to be admitted to the college when I was, and if I had made a different split-moment decision, things could have been very different.

    I had become the editor-in-chief of our community college paper the semester we won best-in-state and was champing at the bit to transfer to a four-year to finish off my degree. I just happened to run into Howard Seeman, the head of HSU’s newspaper program, at a journalism conference in Sacramento. He asked if I had ever considered transferring to Humboldt, and I admitted that I had not. I had seen their paper, The Lumberjack, in passing at our office, and knew vaguely where the school was located from my many fishing trips on the Klamath River.

    The California Legislature, as is their wont, had fucked the budget sideways, and all state colleges were closed to further admissions as a result. Howard said he would see what he could do and I applied, not expecting to hear anything at least until the impasse was broken. I was getting ready to go to work at Sears one Friday morning when I got a call from Admissions telling me that I had been accepted.

    Thinking it would be for the following semester, and I would have plenty of time to disentangle myself from my established life, I said, “Great! When does it start?” When the admissions woman said, “Monday,” it was with no sense of irony or dramatic flourish. When I silently counted the social excisions I would have to perform, tout de suite, she broke in with, “Do you want to go, or not?”

    I was still in a daze when I walking into the room where the operators sat. The store had its fill of management, but in reality, it was these two women that held the keys to the kingdom. If you wanted anyone or anything, it was these two that would make it happen. I stopped them in their paces when I announced, “Well, I quit.” They were delighted, however, when I told them the reason was I was going off to college, somewhat less so when I responded to their questions of when that might happen with, “Right now.”

    I do think that everyone should pack up everything that will fit in a vehicle and burn it all down at least once in their life. If for nothing else, it will give you a well-earned sense of fearlessness. A certain c’est la fuck it. Regardless, the 101 is long and dark, especially in the middle of winter, and many times I wondered if I had made the right decision.

    After crashing out at one of the sketchy hotels out on Giuntoli Lane, I made my way down to the college in the morning and met the first of what would be my newspaper family for the next couple of years. Fellow intrepid Lumberjack Jen Kinavey opened the door to Nelson Hall East and I stepped across the threshold to a new life.

    It’s crazy how many things could have gone another way, and maybe some of those timelines would have been fine, but I wouldn’t trade a minute of it. It helped make me the refined curmudgeon that I relish in being today.

    No sleep ’til deadline.

    30

  • 52 to 60: The Ghosts of ’80s Retail

    04.06.2026

    Yesterday was a strange day, crawling up and down ladders all day while working on installing the museum’s summer show was really bringing back memories of practically living on a fiberglass stairway to the stars back in the ’80s. As if summoned by my verticality, two blasts from my remote mallrat past contacted me to chat, quite out of the blue.

    Once I quit my teen-age restaurant job for the final time, I worked for Sears for the last bite of high school and all through community college. There was a gap in there between earning an AA degree and jumping into the journalistic deep end in which I thought I wanted to be an electrician and practiced electrocuting myself for the good of the company. That’s another series of painful yet humorous stories that I’ll save for another day.

    It is probably a time of one’s life where everything has added portent, but I still dream that I am working there from time to time. I never dream about the music store, the newspapers, the magazine, teaching high school (for good fucking reason, since that was a nightmare), or even the Exploratorium.

    It’s not that I was all that engaged with the work either, although I did learn a lot. I also met some great people, many of which I still speak with today. Truth be told, however, I was really hungover and/or high as fuck a good part of the time. That was really the only way to survive the late-period retail environment.

    For younger readers, Sears, in those days, was kind of like Amazon, except… a place. Instead of the internet, which wasn’t a thing, we had a printed catalog that got sent to your house that had everything you could possibly spend money on. I bought a Chevy small block rebuild kit and Moon-shaped hubcaps out of the Sears catalog.

    When Christmas rolled around, Sweet Jesus, a totally separate catalog showed up with all the good shit in it. Working the holidays was to navigate a mob scene not often seen out of hurricane relief news footage.

    I was working the Christmas Eve Eve that a small commuter plane completely undershot Concord’s Buchanan Field and crashed into the center of the mall, raining glass, burning plane bits, and melted tar down on Santa, his elves, and shoppers alike.

    I had just left the baseline madhouse and most likely was cranking Black Sabbath on the way home, trying to get into the holiday spirit, so did not hear the news until I was swept up into a house full of freaked-out relatives. To this day, upon entering any crowded building, I peep my exits, and look around for Santas. One “Ho…” and I’m out.

    I hear that our location is the last remaining store in all of California, which is crazy. I should go grab a ladder before it’s too late.

  • 53 to 60: Not Shit, Energy!

    03.06.2026

    Driving back home from the San Francisco Ferry yesterday, I passed my local gas station and the price per gallon had actually dropped from the $6.19 that it had topped out at in recent months— down to $5.99. I’m not complaining, but to me, it is just further proof that we are no longer tethered to any agreed definition of reality. Maybe we never were.

    More concerning, and talked about much less than the price of fuel, is the effect the closed Middle East shipping lanes is having, and will have, on America’s farmers. Who knew that so much fertilizer came from that part of the world, I mean, metaphorically, sure…

    One interesting byproduct of all this is learning that there are three basic types of fertilizers: phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen. Nitrogen fertilizers are primarily derived from cheap natural gas and the sulfur byproduct of oil and gas refining, two things the Middle East has in spades.* No wonder they are so explosive. The Oklahoma bombing kind of makes sense now. Not philosophically, mind you, but perhaps chemically. Maybe that was ammonia… damned if I’m going to Google it.

    Professor Rory Maguire at Virginia Tech was on the school’s Curious Conversations podcast talking about his role as extension specialist in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences as well as supervisor of the Soil Testing Laboratory. Maguire explains that our soils hold phosphorus and potassium very well, whereas nitrogen dissipates quickly and, depending on the crop, needs to be reapplied in order to maximize yields.

    Maguire points out that chicken shit is an excellent source of nitrogen-rich fertilizer, the problem is that there just isn’t enough of it.

    Perhaps someone can send him directions to Congress.

    *The nitrogen itself is derived from the air, which is 78% nitrogen, another thing I didn’t know.

  • 55–54 to 60: Rabbit, Rabbit

    01–02.06.2026

    Make no mistake, we’re in a tight spot. Moving into the twinned summer months of June and July, the country feels like it’s just waiting for the next shoe to drop. The war/not a war/war in the Persian Gulf limps along while the president said today that he “couldn’t care less” about Iran suspending peace negotiations.
    While the Strait of Hormuz remains strangled tight, TFG* cycles between saying the talks had become “very boring” and threatening to “blow them up to kingdom come” if the Iranians attempt to restart their uranium enrichment program.

    Man, it would be great if we had some sort of agreement that would allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency 24/7 access to pertinent sites and supply chains to give us the heads-up so we could make a learnèd decision before resorting to blowing shit up.

    Oh, that’s right, we did. TFG ripped it up and now he can’t be bothered to do his fucking job to negotiate another. Granted, Liberace-ing the entire White House (at least the parts you haven’t torn down) does take a lot out of a person. That and golf, those little white balls aren’t going to lose themselves.

    It almost seems as if he doesn’t want this mess to end, and why would he? He and the grifter class are making money hand-over-fist by gaming the oil futures market. Doesn’t anyone remember the 1982 Eddie Murphy movie, Trading Places?

    You tried to warn us, Eddie, and we just didn’t listen.

    *This Fucking Guy

  • 57–56 to 60: The Last Days of May

    30–31.05.2026

    Every year at this time, I have to pull out the old Blue Öyster Cult records and celebrate. Then Came The Last Days of May is the easily the most haunting song on probably the eeriest rock album ever made. BÖC’s portrayal of a true-life trio of young men who were shot in a drug deal gone bad out in the Arizona desert presages Breaking Bad by three and a half decades. The cautionary tale is the set piece around which the rest of the songs on the band’s eponymously-named album revolve—like planets around a cold, dead star.

    The song chillingly relates the ride to pick up “the stuff,” as well as the anticipation the boys feel as they imagine spending the money they are about to make. Lead guitarist Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser paints a stark, yet bucolic scene—much like the band itself—heavy with understated menace.

    Sky’s bright, the traffic light / Now and then a truck
    And they hadn’t seen a cop around all day / (What luck)

    When performing my favorite version of the tune (so far) on 1975’s live album, On Your Feet or On Your Knees, Buck drops the bit in parenthesis, leading one to wonder what would have happened if a cop had been around. Of course, as soon as the driver gets far enough out of town, the car pulls over and the trio is shot and left for dead.

    It wasn’t until the car suddenly stopped / In the middle of a cold and barren plain
    And the other guy turned and spilled / Three boys blood, did they know a trap had been laid?

    I figure I must have been around 13 when I finally got around to buying the band’s first album. I had all ready memorized every note of 1978’s Some Enchanted Evening, and of course, 1976’s Agents of Fortune was an 8-track* that you had to have in the ’70s. It was the law. As beautifully odd and varied as that collection is, nothing prepared me for the rarefied atmosphere of the first three, what us fans refer to as the “black and white” albums.

    Forsaking any pictures of the band, 1972’s Blue Öyster Cult, and Tyranny and Mutation from the next year, featured stark graphic illustrations by a mysterious artist listed only as “Gawlik” which only added to the group’s mystique. Secret Treaties from ’74 did have a pencil drawing of some cagey cretins who had apparently got their hands on a Messerschmitt Me 262.

    Who knew where they got one of those planes nearly 20 years since the last one took to the air? If I had to guess, it was from the dude with the cape and the German Shepherds. Who shot the dogs as we see on the back cover, and why? Are they in Argentina? What the hell is going on here?

    Something about the stark, yet somehow still murky recording of the first few records fits the material so perfectly. Think of R.E.M.’s Murmur, if everything was easily decipherable, would it be half as fun? Something to think about as modern artists use Auto-Tune and AI to build perfect yet soulless music.

    It’s pretty incredible that the band that fired up my young imagination are still out there doing it. They may have lost some members along the way, but the oyster boys can still deliver (hear them chatter on the tide).

    This music always makes me think of the friends I’ve lost along the way and the great times we had listening to this uncanny band. I had always interpreted the last lines of The Last Days as one of the wounded boys making peace with joining his friends soon, and given Dharma’s propensity for lyrical fatalism that would find full flower with Don’t Fear the Reaper, I can’t be too far off.

    They’re OK the last days of May / I’ll be breathin’ dry air
    I’m leaving soon / The others are already there
    You wouldn’t be interested in coming along / Instead of staying here?
    It’s said the West is nice this time of year    …

    *Ask your grandparents

  • 58 to 60: Not Dark Yet

    29.05.2026

    Paul McCartney just dropped a new collection of music that his fans are warmly receiving as a late-career masterpiece. The forever Beatle will turn 84 next month. Neil Young, the baby here at a mere 80-years-young, released a new live set with his latest band, The Chrome Hearts, today as well. Bob Dylan turned 85 last Sunday and is out on the Never-Ending Tour right now reportedly doing his most inspired playing in years. The fucking Rolling Stones, for God’s sake, have a new album coming out in July in time for Mick’s 83rd birthday, the same day as my 60th.

    I am sure that none of these artists imagined that they would still be at it this far down the road, but I am heartened by their ability to keep at it. There is something about playing music that truly feeds the soul. I was almost tempted to say “keeps you young,” but obviously that is not the case. It keeps you young at heart, perhaps, but youth itself isn’t what this is about. Now into their respective eighth decades, most of these artists look rode hard and put back wet, but that’s what gives them gravitas.

    That is a big reason that the video the Stones released for their lead single, In the Stars, is so dispiriting. In it, an AI-created ’70s-era Rolling Stones plays the song for a happy crowd of vintage clothing enthusiasts. It’s too bad because it’s not a bad song, but someone decided that the Rolling Stones looked too old to what… be rock stars? They helped invent that shit.

    The Stones have been at it a minute longer than I’ve been alive. I’ve grown up watching them go through their changes, and loving a good portion of it. I mean, I’m no longer dewy, and I’m just supposed to forget that, as far as I’m concerned, Keith and the boys have always been around? It’s disrespectful, and not in a cool, anti-establishment way.

    I hate to even think it, but once you start playing with this particular fire, you are opening yourself to the question, what else here is AI? Does the hit machine keep cranking along after our heroes can’t physically do it any more. If there was a market for it, I’m afraid that someone would make that Devil’s bargain. I think we have to be clear about where we stand as fans.

    Fuck AI. Long live rock and roll!

  • 59 to 60: It Was Later Than I Thought

    28.05.2026

    I don’t know how I always end up sprinting for the ferry every morning, but I do. My boilerplate weekday morning includes rolling out of bed at 6 o’clock, making coffee and toast, feeding all the animals, and checking in on the downfall of civilization.

    Depending on my capacity for utter bullshit on any given day, when Dana gets up, I’ll switch over to the local news before getting in the shower and taking the dog for a walk. It would be easy, but ultimately unfair, to blame her for the sense of panic that always accompanies getting on the road just before 8. It is, however, an observable fact that the amount of sniffing Biscuit feels the need to accomplish is inversely related to the amount of time we have to do it.

    The one thing that made moving back to the old stomping grounds feasible is the ability to take the boat from Vallejo to San Francisco instead of having to drive. My time on the road is best summed up as a mad, 80-mile-an-hour dash to the terminal. It is a nice straight shot and wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for… people.

    People in no particular hurry. People that don’t wait until the last minute to leave the house. People with a misplaced respect for authority and outdated speed limits (thanks for nothin’, Nixon). Basically, people who can all kiss my ass.

    I suppose it is good to know that I can run if forced by circumstance to do so. I wasn’t exactly breathless when I discovered that my transit allotment had run dry and I had to buy a ticket for the ferry, but I must have appeared weathered enough to prompt the porter to look me over and ask, “senior?”

    OK, it’s not that far off, five years and 59 days is sure to go by like a shot, but, come on, man.

    I took the discount.

  • 60 to 60: The Ride

    27.05.2026 Welcome to a vain attempt to actually write everyday (apart from working on the new novel) in which I reflect on either the day’s batshit crazy events, random memories, or how it feels to be turning 60. Spoiler alert: It often, but not perpetually, hurts. So, I have that going for me. Which is nice.

    
My father’s favorite ride at the Anaheim Disneyland was Peter Pan’s Flight, the one where, once the family was buckled in, a disembodied Pan cheerfully exclaimed, “Come on, everybody! Here we go!” I don’t know if it brought back memories of visiting the new park with his father or if it was just an opportunity to escape the Southern California summer heat for a blessèd three minutes.

    The Flight opened when the park opened, back in 1955, when Dad would have been 12. The old-old man wound up buried in Glendale’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park, a stone’s throw from Walt, so there is a possibility that he may have taken little Louie to the Happiest Place on Earth before taking the final trip to Never Never Land himself by the end of the decade.

    Disney’s far-right leanings certainly jibes with what I know about the guy. Perhaps they knew each other from German-American Bund picnics out in La Crescenta’s Hindenburg Park (later, the site of California’s first Octoberfest in 1957).

    Whatever the reason, Pan’s exhortation entered the family lexicon early on. Whenever we were gathered together to go anywhere, the clarion call was sounded and God save anyone in the way.

    As I enter the final approach toward 60, I can’t think of any other rallying cry that might drive these old bones over the line, although I admit that I am finding it hard to muster a fraction o the Prince of Lost Boys’ brio. I’m afraid that today—at best—it sounds resigned yet resolute.

    Come on, everybody. Here we go.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: My Hometown

    The 1970s were well established when I attended Mills Elementary School on the East Side of town—the other side of the tracks—that is if tracks had ever run down the middle of the quaint Main Street that effectively cleaved the town into West Side and other.

    Being the ’70s, we had a folk singer come in one day (It may have been required by law at the time), and in addition to all the ol’ chestnuts like Clementine, Rocky Top, and my personal favorite, Oh, Susanna, the woman—probably no more than a girl in retrospect—sang an original song about our town.

    Considering the set list up to that point had leaned heavily toward tunes from at least a century previous, to be face-to-knee with someone who actually wrote a song effectively blew our still-congealing eight-year-old minds. I can still remember the first few lines, as well as the melody of the tune, although all together we may have heard it twice. It went something like this:

    There’s a little town / On the map / Of Cal-if-orn-i-a-a-a-a [rhymes with say]
    And if you ask me / About this town / This is what I’ll say-a-a-a…

    I’ll spare you the details of what the song went on to list as the distinguishing attributes of our little town on the map, as if I could remember them. I am pretty sure it didn’t mention anything about rampant alcoholism, xenophobia, or a barely distinguishable sense that our best days as a town may, at that point, have been behind us.

    I’m dead certain it did say something about being the state capital for a hot minute back in the 1850s, as well as the flash point for the dissemination of the news about the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill (Our now bucolic main drag was once an adult playground of whorehouses and establishments exclusively dedicated to drinking and gambling, none of which leads to one keeping his mouth shut for very long), but that was all ancient history by the time we came around and as meaningless to us as the lyrics to Clementine.

    What the song should have mentioned, but I’m sure left out, was how great it was to be an eight-year-old and be able to explore the vaguely reclaimed post-industrial waterfront, mysterious alleyways, and open space that still surrounded our village at that time.

    It should have extolled the virtue of being able to ride your bike until the streetlights began to flicker to life without worrying that you were going to end up in someone’s basement “putting lotion on it’s skin,” the Zodiac Killer notwithstanding, of course.

    It could have sung the praises of the decent union jobs that still were out there, ensuring that a young family could get by with one working parent, and that there were enough stay-at-home moms to go around to keep most of us correct. It may have commented in passing upon a quickly-fading Johnsonian liberalism that would soon go the way of “Save the Whales” medallions, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t.

    Regardless, it did rock.

  • What I Saw On the Parkway On a Cold Autumn Morning

    Upholstered cane back chair (1)

    Dead opossums (2)

    Sheet of aluminum that is going to be a real problem when the wind kicks up (1)

    Witch (1)

  • Once More Into the Breach: 2026 Edition

    It turns out that “May you live in interesting times,” is not a Chinese curse after all, but rather—like most things that seem all neat and tidy but end up causing wide-spread pain and misery—from the English: Austen Chamberlain, older half-brother of Neville to be precise.

    Austen’s mother, Harriet, died in childbirth, resulting in his father not speaking to him for a quarter century, and in the interim, marrying the woman’s cousin, Florence, who birthed the infamous Prime Minister, so… yea, I get it.

    As we head into a year sure to be more challenging than a Chamberlain family reunion, it is going to be important to keep our wits about us. I am sure that TFG* will continue to daily operate in a way that offends any- and everyone who is not a sadomasochist. Whether he and his cohort are motivated by spite, madness, greed, or some other affliction is immaterial.

    The trick for us is to not rise to the bait of every single malaprop-laden rant or misspelled-digital screed. I will be there in the voting booth, the streets, the barricades if need be, but it does no-one any good to wear out their dopamine receptors in a constant orgy of outrage.

    There are things that I can do to ensure that I make it long enough to see this episode through to the credits, however, things to maintain mind and body at a healthy-enough level that I don’t blow a gasket when it’s time to step on the gas.

    These are mine. I suggest that you find your own and try to implement some sort of strategy to keep the knees—or if you are one of our unfairly maligned friends to the north—elbows, up.

    1. Write everyday. Somethings will be crap, a few things half-clever, but there is always the outside chance that there may just end up being something worth sharing from time to time. Doing it more will only help that to happen. Writing is also good practice at gathering one’s far-flung thoughts and distilling them down to a coherent mindset, something that most definitely will come in handy this year.
    2. Cut down on drinking. Drinking beer does not lead to a coherent mindset, it leads to… I don’t know, more beer drinking? At this point, it doesn’t even lead to bad decisions, unless napping is a bad decision.
    3. Get in shape, you fat fuck. Number two will help, number one… not so much.
    4. Play more guitar. You should be playing everyday, and not the same old shit. There is an unending supply of free online lessons, take advantage. Music helps the brain build new connections and, let’s face it, helps to blow off steam.
    5. Who knows what the hell the economy is going to do, so you should be ready. Get those costs down. Cancel all the subscriptions that you don’t need. Pay off the credit card. And for Christ’s sake, get your resume in order.
    6. This should go without saying, but be kinder to yourself and others. (I’m sorry I called you a fat fuck, you fat fuck). They call it a practice for a reason.

    *This Fucking Guy

  • The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future—Stephen March

    It has only been three years since Canadian writer Stephen March took a hard look at his country’s downstairs neighbor and found us… well, let’s just say that we aren’t going to get our deposit back. Like a tenant that has decided to start cooking meth in the kitchen at night, what the United States does affects the entire building, and March smartly surmised that the future of the American experiment would best be sussed somewhat from arm’s length.

    When one is fully immersed in the the circular firing squad of 21-century American politics, it is difficult to shift one’s eyes anywhere than your neighbor’s trigger finger. As an outsider, March peered through the front window, and what he found is disturbing.

    March walks us through traditional, and very familiar-sounding, lead-ups to civil conflict. Economic and environmental instability worsens every year? Check. Political gamesmanship overrides all other governmental concerns? Checkedy motherfuckin’ check. Under those sorts of strains, March points out that even long-established national identities can fracture with shocking speed. Iraq in 2006 had a “relatively high” Shia/Sunni rate of intermarriage. “The supposedly permanent and intractable religious rift was a relic from antiquity,” he writes. “Then it wasn’t.”

    Our Canadian judge sees the cleaving of national purpose as a done deal, a problem inherent in the very founding of the union. “There is very much a Red America and a Blue America,” he writes. “They occupy different societies with different values, and their political parties are emissaries of that difference.”

    “Democrats represent a multicultural country grounded in liberal democracy,” he illustrates. “Republicans represent a white country grounded in the sanctity of property. America cannot operate as both at once.” But, man, it is fun to point fingers. March points his own finger at media empires who make fortunes on what Friedrich Nietzsche called the pleasure of contempt. “Blaming one side offers a perverse species of hope,” March admits. “Such hopes are not only reckless, but irresponsible.”

    As a foreigner, March is in the position to say what would be unthinkable to the average American. “The U.S. system is an archaic mode of government totally unsuited to the realities of the 21st century. The forces tearing America apart are both radically modern and as old as the country itself… bloody revolution and the threat of secession are essential to the American experiment.”

    After detailing several scenarios that might touch off a conflagration—some of which, such as the movement of outside National Guard troops into another state’s territory, and assassination, albeit, still attempted and ancillary at this time—March warns that once started, civil wars are really hard to stop. He writes that in 50 years of counterinsurgency we still have not learned that “violence that imposes order to control violence produces more violence and more disorder.” You can not achieve pacification by murdering people. I think Bob Dylan said that.

    Even if you were compelled to go that route, the overwhelming force of the state is useless against stochastic resistance. “A succession of winning firefights makes exactly no difference.” Lt. General Daniel Bolger, author of Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars writes. “The local people have to run their own government.”

    March goes further, saying that it is impossible to de-radicalize the next generation while at the same time taking away their most basic rights. “It’s hard to find youth so stupid that you can kill and imprison their parents and tell them you love them afterward. It didn’t work in Iraq and Afghanistan. It won’t work in the United States.” 


    “This is the other thing that would occur,” writes retired colonel Peter Manor, “massive detention centers across the United States where people who were suspected of being disloyal… would be warehoused on a massive scale.” The U.S. is already the most incarcerated society in the world. A civil war would explode those numbers. Who would support or pay for that? Let’s not even get into the political morass of donor states vs. recipient states.

    The traditional intractability of the American populace may be the key to avoiding this scenario all together, given the hopelessness of fighting it out. “If you’re in a situation where you’re using armed force to try and quell a population, you’re either going to have to kill a bunch of them, or you’re going to pull out and let them have local control,” writes Lt. General Bolger. “You’re never going to talk them into seeing it your way.” The typical conclusion of insurgency conflicts is not victory by either side but exhaustion by all.

    Even the paperwork is daunting. March points out that uncertainty over small questions of daily life is a major reason why Scotland and Quebec are not independent nations today. Pensions, passports, national debt, dual citizenship, the military… are all things that would quickly become a bureaucratic nightmare.

    Once again, March leans into his innate Canadianess to say what an American would not. “At this point in history… much of the U.S. Constitution simply does not apply to reality. Democrats and Republicans alike worship the document as a sacred text, indulging a delirious sentimentality that was the precise opposite of what the framers envisioned as the necessary basis for responsible government.”

    He goes on, “Americans worship ancestors whose lives were spent overthrowing ancestor worship; they pointlessly adhere to a tradition whose achievement was the overthrow of pointless traditions.” March, perhaps naively, calls for a new Constitutional Convention, not understanding the very real possibility for real chaos to ensue, not grasping that there is always more to lose.

    March does understand that the failure of the American experiment, and he does claim that it is failing, would left the world a lessor place. “The world needs America,” he writes. “It needs the idea of America… [a place] where contradictions that lead to genocide elsewhere flourish into prosperity.”

    He does believe that the problems that plague our society at this point in our history are not beyond the capacity of the American people to solve. “There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times,” March warns. “It won’t.”

    “If history has shown us anything, it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations,” March sounds the alarm. “Once again, the hope for America is Americans.” Let’s not let him, the world, and ourselves, down.

  • From Big Change to Big Crime in 229 Days

    In January of this year, two days after President Biden’s Farewell Address, I flipped on YouTube to catch up, having long given up on network news. The first thing I saw is what looked to be an agricultural landscape complete with a tiny tractor slowly moving under a text overlay reading BIG CHANGE in a distressed serif font.

    Ten seconds into the video, a squeal of feedback prompted the camera to reel back revealing the metal bars of a fence while the familiar tones of Old Black, Neil Young’s signature ’53 Gibson Les Paul, bashed out a three-chord stomp.

    Big Change is coming’, coming’ right home to you / Big Change is coming’ you know what you gotta do. Heraclitus himself couldn’t have put it better when he wrote in the 5th Century BCE, “Everything changes and nothing remains still,” or the more familiar, “Change is the only constant.”

    Young’s new song threw a bit of a curveball, however, when in the very next line he sang, Big Change is coming’, could be bad and it could be good. It is in this moment of leaving room for hope that I think elevates this song beyond the myopically political. Even the most news-adverse among us could feel that we were in for a tectonic season of shift.

    I’ve heard the Biden administration described as a Restoration presidency, referring to when the English monarchy was brought back in 1660, after Oliver Cromwell’s unsuccessful authoritarian stab at a Commonwealth.

    The reinstatement of a tired form of government, in England’s case, the monarchy, in our case, the gerontocracy, was a clumsy metaphor, but one must admit that it wasn’t just ol’ Joseph Robinette, God bless him, that was looking tired.

    The whole neoliberal worldview that has provided the country’s raison d’être, and slow suicide, since the 1970s, was creaking under global pressures and the weight of all the money that a new class of oligarchs had sucked up from the shrinking middle class.

    As much as I would like for Biden to have pushed through more of a progressive agenda, perhaps things just weren’t fucked up enough for that to have been an option. Like the animatronic Peter Pan says as he eternally jumps out the window into the darkness of his signature Disneyland ride, “OK, everybody, here we go!”

    Or as Uncle Neil says, Big change is coming’, could be bad, and it could be great!

    With Vladimir Putin’s Russia driving through Ukraine for a warm water port in the Black Sea and TFG threatening to seize the Panama Canal and the soon-to-be-thawed northern sea routes around Greenland, the world was looking increasingly less like a game of Risk, and more like Rock-em Sock-em Robots.

    Smash cut to Labor Day and Putin is still bombing the bejeezus out of Ukraine despite TFG having allowed the international war criminal to fly to Alaska, a place that the dotard repeatedly referred to as, “Russia,” leading some to worry that he was going to give the state back after almost 160 years.

    Israel is still systematically destroying Gaza and its people. Oh, and TFG is sending National Guard troops to American cities to do… what, exactly? This is all to admit that the tenuous hope against hope that everything “might be great,” was… let’s just go with overly optimistic.

    Seven months and change later, Big Change has been usurped by Big Crime, as desperate and close to punk rock as this soon-to-be octogenarian has ventured in a while. Don’t need no fascist rules / Don’t want no fascist schools / Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets / There’s big crime in DC at the White House!

    Why it has once again fallen to Neil Young to strap on the Gibson and man the barricades is beyond me. This should be a golden age for angry young bands, but as Donald Rumsfeld so famously said, “You go to war with the army you have.”

    I hope that when I’m 79 that I still have the gumption (and the freedom) to rail against things that I think are wrong. I also hope that if Neil gets rounded up by TFG’s masked mall-thugs, he ends up back in his native Canada, and not El Salvador, Eswatini, or South Sudan.

    The shit is hitting the fan and leave it to Shakey Deal and Old Black to sound the clarion. No more money to the fascists / The billionaire fascists / Time to blackout the system / No more great again

  • Happy 80th, Van the Man!



    Belfast’s beloved son Van Morrison has been a recording artist longer than I’ve been alive. Them’s first, and penultimate, album—having dropped in ’65—preceded me by a full year. This is to say that the mystic blues shouter has always been around as far as I’m concerned.

    Growing up on AM radio, Dr. Don Rose on San Francisco’s KFRC must have introduced the first Morrison classic I fell in love with, probably 1970’s Domino from His Band and the Street Choir, still one of my all-time favorite records.

    Although our childhoods were separated by a good 21 years and the Atlantic Ocean, I have to think of him as a soul brother equally steeped in Blues and R&B from our respective impressionable ages. My father used to sit me down, when he wasn’t blaring Fats Domino or Little Richard’s Specialty catalog as loud as it would go, and explain what the drummers on Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s seminal First Time! The Count Meets The Duke were doing before continuing his ongoing dissertation on Jimmy Reed’s Live at Carnegie Hall.

    As a result of what the less-enlightened among us might consider prolonged polyrhythmic brainwashing, I have often felt that perhaps I was grown in a weird sonic test tube to be a Van Morrison fan. The way that our man can stretch a phrase so that it lands off the beat like a jazz singer, or drop into a shamanic trance state to rival John Lee Hooker, it was a language I was well familiar with by the time he began to eschew the easy radio hit.

    I can still remember watching Van Morrison: The Concert on PBS late one night in 1990. I think I was half paying attention, digging the traditional Irish songs that had been on his collaboration with the Chieftains a couple of years previous. A good hour into it, the band broke into In the Garden from 1986’s No Guru, No Method, No Teacher at a frenetic pace. My first thought was that they were disrespecting the elegiac beauty of the song, a meditative highlight of the album.

    And then, with the crack of a snare drum, as suddenly as we were launched into the firmament by the upward thrust of the band, we break gravity and jettison the boosters. Van touches the seventh verse (so lightly) and then slips into a gravity-free trance, repeating, “You fell, you fell, you fell,” tasting and twisting both syllables, recasting them, rejecting them, pacing the stage like a nervous panther in a cage, and finally placing them, “from the garden.” I remember walking toward the TV, and saying out loud, “What the fuck?”

    I had seen plenty of live music by then, but I had never seen someone so enraptured by the moment, in the moment, of the moment. And who the hell is he talking about? Is he singing to mankind or speaking to the angels that were cast out of heaven? Maybe he doesn’t even know. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. It’s fucking poetry, it is.

    That song still makes me tear up every time I hear and I don’t know why. Is there a primal longing to return to the proverbial garden that Morrison tapped into? I am sure that he would just remark, as he has many times, “It’s just a song. I’m just a songwriter.” I call bullshit, but OK, I get it. The creative arts, when one is open and lucky, exist in a realm of real magic. It is best not to piss off the muse by calling it out.

    I have always respected Morrison’s high regard of the muse and his willingness to follow it wherever it might lead. The two records he produced during the COVID pandemic, and subsequent lockdown, gave his critics plenty of raw meat to devour. However, after a good 60 years in a game he, himself, has eschewed in both in song and action, I felt, and still feel, that the man has well earned the right to respond to societal events however he might feel appropriate.

    One can’t be surprised that an artist who sang the following, nearly 55 years ago, might not give a shit what anyone has to say about his business one way or another: Don’t wannna discuss it / Think it’s time for a change / You may get disgusted / Start thinkin’ that I’m strange / In that case I’ll go underground / Get some / Heavy rest / Never have to worry / About what is worst or what is best

    A re-entrenchment along the lines of Bob Dylan’s two solo folk records of 1992–93, seem to have redirected Morrison’s inspiration. 2023’s Moving on Skiffle revisited the type of music he played in his youth, before the trap and trappings of fame; whereas Accentuate the Positive, from the same year, celebrated rock & roll at it’s earliest, and least calcified, incarnation.

    This summer’s Remembering Now reads at first as an aural CV of all of the genres that Morrison has explored over the years, with familiar places and themes bubbling up in the fragrant stew. The closest cousin in the Man’s deep catalog sounds to be 1991’s Hymns to the Silence, one of my all-time favorites.

    Eighty years on, Morrison’s voice sounds as strong as ever; age bringing, if anything, a resonance that was missing in the early days. Listening back, I hear the young, brash rocker of 1965–66 as a trumpet, blasting out the theme over the roar of the band, announcing the new world as it was unrolled before it. These days, Morrison’s instrument has become a tenor sax, deep and luxurious, able to evoke longing and defiance with equal strength and intention.

    Roll me over, Romeo.

  • Shit from an Old Notebook: Odds and Sods

    Sometimes when writing a long-form piece like a novel, you find yourself wandering down paths that don’t end up going anywhere, at least anywhere that helps the story.

    This one of those digressions that I rediscovered while cleaning out an old laptop that is not long for this world. I can remember where I was when I wrote it, high on a ridge over Fairfax, California, looking out the window of the little home office that I quickly threw together after the COVID pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt.

    I was lucky enough to be trapped in a honeypot where my view was across a wooded canyon. A few houses up the hill the road dead-ended at open space where my dog Biscuit and I could look down on the failure of modern civilization.

    Originally, I had the idea of making Burn Your Starry Crown a trilogy, checking in each time the tale-tail comet came back around, ultimately ending as an outer space yarn. I became disavowed of that idea as I quickly realized it was completely out of my ability to pull off. Maybe some day.

    As distinctly as I remember where I was, I have little-to-no idea what the heck I was thinking and/or smoking here. Enjoy.

    When the teacher became aware, he was cast out of a warm world of water and salt. He liked to think that he had been born of the biggest womb in the world: the Pacific Ocean. He was delivered, not squalling, but gasping for air on a pile of lava rocks; laid out like a sacrifice. But to whom should he be offered up? The teacher could think of no one.

    Nor could he imagine what chain of events led to his ignoble presentation; brined and bleeding from his corporal brushes with sharp coral. Nothing left to do but get on with it, he supposed, with very few clues as to what it might possibly entail.

    The teacher… did he always think of himself as a teacher? Did he actually have a name? He struggled to his feet and spoke the two words he remembered from somewhere; “I am.” His voice was parched and unfamiliar to him, but the intent was very recognizable. He knew he had been cast here for an important purpose, but exactly what that was might have to wait. He was famished.

    A lone figure appeared out of the dense growth surrounding the beach carrying a large polished plank with a fin attached. Perhaps some kind of shark totem, he thought. That’s a good sign, he recognized; and apparently he knew what a shark was.

    The man was tanned and had the bleached white hair of someone who spent his days in and around the ocean. When the figure saw the teacher standing naked on the heiau, he dropped his totem and spoke the two words that came to define their relationship going forward.

    “Holy shit.”

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Squid Game

    While sitting at my favorite taqueria, enjoying my tacos dorados and reading the ruminations of Billy Collins on the death of the masculine hat, I overheard this dadaist conversation:

    “Squid.”
    “Have you ever had a really excellent squid steak?”
    “Negative, ghost runner.”

    Either the conversationalists in question were spies and were sizing each other up before getting down to nefarious business, or they were really, really high.

    I’m guessing the latter.

  • Post #100—Looking Forward


    Well, the ol’ materfamilias has said a lot of goofy shit since… well, since I’ve known her, but I’m going to take this little piece to heart from now on. I think I must have been breaking her balls over Mother’s Day or something, and I prodded, “When is my day? Just because we decided not to have kids, there’s no day for me?” Of course, I knew full well that everyday was up for grabs without carpet critters running underfoot, but I could not pass up an opportunity to give her the business. She looked at me with a moment of strange clarity and said, “You have a whole month.”

    I guess I do have a month, or, at least, I’m claiming it. July is my time to shine, and shine I fucking well planned to do. If it killed me. Ever since I was a kid, the celebratory nature of July was bracketed by the Fourth and—at the tail end—my birthday, which just happens to coincide, more often than not, with the local Portuguese Festa. One of my folks favorite jokes was to tell me that they were taking me out to lunch for my birthday and, invariably we would find ourselves down at the Hall, sweating in the almost-August heat with a several hundred other souls waiting for sopas.

    This July hit different, as the kids say. Besides the fact that it was the coolest July in, if not my lifetime, at least half that long, it was oddly… subdued. Maybe it was the loss of Ozzy or the increasingly unstable political situation, but the last month felt like a demarkation of sorts and now we are all waiting for what comes next.

    I would say, “watch this space” for insightful commentary on the ongoing decline of Western civilization, but, in the immortal words of Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” In actuality, this space may be end up being part of my escape from all that noise. I am embarking on the long journey of writing another novel, and plan on posting bits and pieces as I go.

    Which brings me to a question that I have been thinking about a lot this last month: What is the point of art when the whole world feels like it is about to burst into flames?

    Talk amongst yourselves.

  • The Prince is Dead, Long Live the Prince (of Darkness)

    John “Ozzy” Osbourne made quite a career out of the moniker, “Prince of Darkness.” The guy knew a good hook when he saw (or heard) one, but he was more than that to a few generations of fans now. Ozzy was a hero to every misfit who struggled to find their place in this crazy world. He was—and I mean this with all due respect, and today, a broken heart—he undisputed King of Fuckups.

    Anyone who has read his 2011 autobiography, I Am Ozzy, knows that the man should have died about a dozen times before Black Sabbath even started, that he wasn’t killed seems to imply some sort of preternatural intervention. It’s not our place to guess the intention of powers beyond our understanding, but I am glad it seemed to work in our favor.

    I first heard Black Sabbath on a purloined 8-track compilation, We Sold Our Soul For Rock ‘N’ Roll. I don’t remember who stole it or how it came into my possession, but, in retrospect, it’s only fitting that this gateway drug appeared by illicit means.

    Ozzy’s plaintive wail of, Oh, no! Please God help me! in the titular track makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up to this day even though I’ve heard it easily thousands of times. This was a guy in serious trouble, perhaps at the end of a road that started with possession of hot merchandise before leading to… to what? I had to know!

    The second song on that collection, The Wizard, follows the track order on the band’s first album and allows a small slice of light to cut through the incessant Birmingham cloud cover. Maybe the wizard will make everything all right after all. Nope.

    It’s the third track that sealed my fate as an Ozzy fan for nearly 50 years. Skipping the needle ahead past an iconic suite of jazz-inflected proto-metal from the Black Sabbath album, Warning, comes as, well… a warning, but like in one of those Japanese horror films, if you’ve heard it, it’s too fucking late for you.

    The crazy thing is, Warning is not even a Black Sabbath song, it’s a cover of a 1967 single by The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation. The what now, you ask? And you would be right. At the time, Dunbar was hot from drumming on John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers’ A Hard Road, which featured, wait for it, future Fleetwood Mac instigator Peter Green. I swear, were there like twenty people left in England in the ’60s?

    Somehow Sabbath takes this throwaway 45 and turns it into a signature statement of intent. Geezer Butler’s bass announces the proceedings before Ozzy sets the scene:

    Now the first day that I met ya / I was looking in the sky / When the sun turned all a blur / And the thunderclouds rolled by

    And then it gets worse for our man, Oz:

    The sea began to shiver / And the wind began to moan / It must’ve been a sign for me / To leave you well alone

    I have yet to find the right vocabulary to explain what it is in Ozzy’s delivery of the word, “shiver,” but there is a realness to it. Even though he didn’t write the song, he saw that shit. You can’t convince me that he wasn’t drawing on some experience of being out there in that moaning wind, metaphorically, or not.

    The short chorus comes up fast with Ozzy lamenting:

    I was born without you, baby / But my feelings were a little bit too strong

    It’s the way he hits the word “strong” that kills me, because it is not. It is anything but, it may not even be in key, and yet it somehow incorporates all the pain and frustration of the outsider. It is not a howl against the void, but more like a capitulation with the dark.

    After a serious masterclass in band dynamics, Ozzy crawls his way back to the mic:


    Now the whole wide world is movin’ / ‘Cause there’s iron in my heart / I just can’t keep from cryin’ / ‘Cause you say we’ve got to part / Sorrow grips my voice as I stand here all alone…

    Game over. Fucking sorrow has gripped his voice, man! Has there ever been a more legitimate take on the word? Billie Holiday may have delivered one, but her voice, even at its most vulnerable, was beautiful. Ozzy’s delivery is tantamount to crying ugly.

    I remained a devoted fan through his being sacked by Sabbath and I reveled in his jaw-dropping rebirth with Randy Rhoads, Bob Daisley, and Lee Kerslake [say their names], and beyond. I have to admit that I harbored a few misguided proprietary feelings toward our man when he became a reality show until I realized that there was enough Ozzy for everyone. Until today when there wasn’t.

    If anyone has ever earned a rest, it’s Ozzy. I don’t know what else to say. There’s iron in my heart.

  • Submission (A Correspondence in Three Parts)

    (1)
    Greetings XXXX XXXXXXXX editors,

    I wanted to thank you all for sending my return envelope back; I’m just not sure what kind of message you were trying to send. Was the empty envelope a metaphor for the howling void that we all must someday face? Or perhaps my submission just left you speechless and unable to respond? I’m sure that with time, and the proper medicine, I’ll suss it out and all will finally be revealed… or, I could just ask. So, ’erm… what’s the deal?

    Yours envelopically,
    Ray Larsen

    (2)
    Hi Mr. Larsen,

    I hope you haven’t been deteriorating into madness while awaiting our reply.

    I apologize for the empty envelope and the subsequent foray into the land of unanswered questions. While I would like to claim artistic genius and expressive intent, it was sadly just a mistake. As the assistant editor (i.e. graduate student) I possess a very fine skill set for stuffing, licking and sending envelopes. Your envelope, unfortunately, missed the crucial first step. And now I must re-evaluate my postal prowess, sigh.

    Well, at the very least I can relieve your sufferings—the envelope was meant to hold a lovely blue little slip, bearing our logo and this message: “Thank you for your recent submission to XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX. Though we are unable to include your work in this issue, we are glad that you gave us the opportunity to consider it. We wish you success in placing your work elsewhere. Thanks again, The Editors.”

    It tries very hard to be friendly while inevitably informing you that we are crushing dreams. We don’t like that part of the job much and we know that you like it even less, so really, I’m quite sorry that you were subjected to the empty envelope.

    Really it’s quite a profound little piece of paper. The color is really quite nice. And the size is wonderful. I’ve spent tens of minutes in the copy room, brushing off my math skills to figure out exactly what size will fit into a variety of envelopes.

    If you would like the little blue slip that the envelope was meant to contain, I’ll happily send it along. It’s a very nice slip.

    Yours apologetically,
    XXXXXXX XXXXXX
    Assistant Editor
    XXX

    PS Hopefully this little blunder doesn’t mean you will be too incapacitated by the proper envelop-related medications to submit to us in the future!

    (3)
    Greetings Ms. XXXXXX,

    Thank you for your enlightening, entertaining, and timely response to the vacant envelope imbroglio. At no time did I mean to impugn your prowess as it applies to stuffing, licking, etc. I am sure that the sheer volume of correspondence lends itself to the occasional unintended mystery.

    Please don’t let this aspect of your responsibilities weigh any heavier on your conscience than does the slip itself. I, for one, have started an art project with the myriad beautifully colored papers that have been sent my way. I am sure that the one you have been charged with discharging is lovely.

    I imagine it to be a medium Persian blue, as was the binding of Bailey’s A Treatise on the Seven Rays, reflecting a possible theosophical bent on the part of XXX. Or perhaps it is a less esoteric, but no less historically relevant, Prussian blue—one of the first synthetic pigments ever developed, and interestingly, an antidote for heavy metal poisoning.

    I don’t want to make more work for you, however, and I will simply wait until my next submission works its way through the editorial process. I will force myself to be content with the seasonally apropos light spring green version I still hold and cherish.

    Yours in the wild blue yonder,
    Ray Larsen

  • What’s in a Name? [Pt. 2]

    I was born Raymond Andrew Larsen in late-July of 1966, closing in on six decades ago as of this writing. Raymond is a family name, after a great-uncle on my father’s side, one of five born to an immigrant couple from the Azores. I think he helped keep my father on the straight and narrow after his father was out of the picture, a task with which even God themselves had limited obvious success.

    I have long suspected that my middle name came from Andy Nickolatos who happened to own the Black & White liquor store on the corner of Main St., a block and half from the house. I can neither confirm or deny—given that all parties, apart from myself, have passed on*—that the bestowal of Andrew either settled a bet or a sizable tab. I wonder what a middle name was worth in mid-60s commodities, and what that might translate into 21st-century dollars. It was probably a dodgy investment at best.

    By all accounts, my grandfather, a Dane named Larsen was a real piece of work. He and my grandmother, Elvira, were divorced—a rarity for Catholics in the 1950s—and he died when my dad was still pretty young. To this day, I have never seen an acknowledged photograph of the guy, although after dad passed I found a souvenir Los Angeles restaurant pic of him as a young kid sitting with two uptight-looking people. Not his usual crowd, to be sure.

    I know that Larsen in Danish means “son of Lars.” Having lived in California my whole life, the only Lars I know of is the drummer for Metallica, but we are roughly the same age. It would have been nice to fall into some of that Master of Puppets money, though.

    As dad got older, he dropped more stories of his strained relationship with his pater familias, none of them all too flattering. Of course, it was Louie’s name to claim or disavow, so we’re stuck with it, a tie to a lineage I really know little about. I’ve read that, like the Portuguese, the Danes have historically been really into boats, fish, and faded empire, so they should be my kind of people. Maybe we just got a bad one.

    After living under the Scandinavian surname for a half-century, I figured my pen name should pay homage to the side of Dad’s family I actually related to. Leão is Portuguese for lion, and given that, if pressed, I identify as a double Sun sign Leo, I can get behind that.

    Part of writing under another name, is the freedom a different headspace can afford you. At this point, Ray Larsen has done all kinds of different things, but they have followed a certain, if avowedly circuitous, path. This Leão motherfucker, though, who knows what shenanigans he might get up to?

    Quite coincidentally, the statement, “I read,” is translated in Portuguese as, “eu leio.” As far as Roman goes—or incongruously, “Román,” which denotes a Hungarian provenance (I don’t remember what I was smoke… erm, thinking)—it has historically simply meant, “a citizen of Rome.” If you’ve read your Phillip K. Dick, you’d know that we are all citizens of the Roman Empire, which never really ended but manipulates our materialistic and spiritually bankrupt world to this day.

    Wow, that got dark.

    As far as I know, Román Leão has no middle name, although he may be taking bids.

    *OK, Mom is still around, but either a) those characters cooked up a story that she believed. It was pretty early in the relationship, or b) she knew the gross percentage of GDP that the tab entailed and signed off on it. Either way, she ain’t sayin’.

  • What’s in a Name? [Pt. 1]

    I was enjoying the dubious honor of teaching English to Vallejo freshmen when, while getting ready one morning, a national news program featured a fellow word warrior from somewhere in the Midwest who had been fired when it was discovered that she had the temerity to have been writing Harlequin romances on the side.

    Now, let us just set aside the injustice of high school teachers having to do anything else besides the insanely demanding job listed on their CV, and let’s hope that the woman in question was writing for the same reason the rest of us do: she had to, or burst.

    Let’s look instead at the shortsightedness of a corn-fed school board deciding that they didn’t want someone, and I fight the impulse to use all caps here, who had actually written and published books to teach their children how to (checking notes)… write.

    I have never had the pleasure of reading a Harlequin, but as a kid who devoured Stephen King, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski, I am fascinated to know how much damage the board thought a formulaic romance might inflict on a young, impressionable mind. (We aren’t going to mention Clive Barker here as there may have been some actual scarring from those stories, although nothing some Richard Brautigan didn’t smooth over.)

    My point being, one would be hard pressed to find someone who had been driven to a life of debauchery and indulgence from something they read, and if they had, good for them. Given that I was working on my first novel at the time, however, and considering the amount of sex, drugs, and… Sasquatch it contained, I started thinking that a nom de plume, might be called for, perhaps even a nom de guerre.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Open Letter to the Guy Playing James Taylor Covers at Peet’s Coffee

    I’m sorry if my wife’s inappropriate comment and our sudden departure may have upset your delicate sensibilities, but what you are doing, sir, is an affront to nature. Just because you play a Taylor guitar does not mean—under any circumstances—that you need to run through the catalog of a similarly named “artist.”

    If you were playing a Gibson would you have felt the need to play only Debbie Gibson songs? A Fender… Freddy Fender? Either one of those scenarios would have been easier to sit through. Might I suggest you trade for a Takamine?

    We did appreciate the attempt to throw in the Beatles cover. Your fingerpicking on Blackbird was nice, but you can’t just not sing the word if you can’t hit the note. “Blackbird singing in the dead of _” The dead of what? Do you see how there is now a gaping hole in the narrative structure of the song? And by no means should a flagging set list be shored up by another James Taylor song.

    You are very lucky that Mr. Taylor himself—either one—didn’t walk in, take that guitar away from you, and smack you with it.

    Good day, sir.

  • Black Cats and the Rocket’s Red Glare

    I was 10 years old in the bicentennial year of 1976. America had just been through the Watergate-spurred spin-out of the Nixon presidency, the fall of Saigon, an oil crisis, and the resulting economic stagflation. We needed a reset, something to celebrate, and along came our 200th anniversary.

    My father worked at the C&H sugar factory, across the water in Crockett, which, since the ships were coming direct from the Hawaiian cane fields, allowed for all sorts of interesting contraband to slip into the mainland undetected. Most importantly—for a ten-year-old boy—this meant illegal firecrackers: bricks of Black Cats and batteries of bottle rockets.

    One of dad’s co-workers, a Portuguese man named Frank Freitas, had been on a Liberty ship in WWII and somehow ended up with the ship’s pilot bell, which he had spiffed up with a fresh coat of silver paint for the occasion. Frank installed the bell on the back fence of our grandmother’s backyard where we were gleefully trying to blow up any and everything we could with the “Super Charged Flashlight Crackers.”

    Between the black-market Black Cats, rockets bursting in air, the cutting toll of the bell, and the guy across the street with an unlicensed shotgun, a joyous noise was made, starting early afternoon and only taking a short break for everyone to gorge themselves on dad’s famous barbecued lemon chicken before it got dark.

    As soon as the Sun went down, we all gathered on the front porch of the house my family had lived in since the turn of the century. With the cars all moved safely out of harm’s way, it wasn’t difficult to imagine what the scene could have looked like 50, 60, or even 70 years previously.

    With all-appropriate pomp, our giant box of fireworks was carried down to the sidewalk, as this was back when you could buy as much ordinance as you could afford from an alarming number of stands in town run by boosters of every stripe.

    The following ritual followed a carefully-proscribed pattern: first up were always the snakes, as the last of the light allowed us to watch the intumescent ropes of black ash grow and writhe on the cement, scarring the walk for weeks afterward.

    Snakes were followed by the ceremonial passing out of the sparklers, which we all enjoyed waving around as showers of hot sparks of potassium perchlorate, titanium, aluminum, and God-knows-what burned down the metal wire toward bare hands young and old. The first act was always capped off by some Tasmanian devil-like Ground Bloom Flowers that were sure to set the dry grass afire if you let them.

    The next chapter was possibly was the most ill-considered, and I seem to recall, the first to be banned outright. We nailed cardboard Catherine wheels ringed with angled rockets to the trees that bordered the property. Trees made of… well, July-dry wood. As the discs ignited and began to spin, sparks were hurled in every direction to the delight of everyone except perhaps the fire department five blocks away.

    The stars of the show were always the big fountains. Dad always handled the lighting of these as apparently one needed just the right levels of Olympia and gin & tonics in the blood to sufficiently steady one’s hand.

    As we got older we never outgrew the delight in patriotic pyromania. The city itself went big for many years probably in an attempt to draw the breakout flareups to one centralized spot making it easier to put out fires and haul off pugilistic drunks.

    I only bring all this up as next year is the our 250 anniversary as a nation, and we find ourselves in—if not a similar spot, one plainly as uncertain. As the explosions began last night, I could not tamp down my dismay at the state of our country at this point in history and actually broke into tears.

    The reactionary-led Congress had just signed off on a bill that will turn ICE into a police force larger than most militaries, while depriving millions of Americans of the healthcare they need to survive. SNAP benefits have been slashed, taking food out of the mouth of hungry kids to give billionaires more tax breaks.

    This time around, there hasn’t even been the feeble pretense of Reagan-era trickle-down theory. It’s piss. Everyone knows it’s piss, and they’ll have that hat as well if you don’t mind, or even if you do. Tragically, as I took in the flag on the night of the Fourth, I knew I would not be putting it back up until the current regime is out of power. I cannot support this culture of spitefulness for its own sake.

    When I think about the gleefulness with which a concentration camp was built in the Everglades, complete with “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise, it makes me sick to my stomach. Within my lifetime, we have gone from celebrating freedom with toxic black snakes to the toxic idea of using real snakes to terrorize immigrants.

    This are not the values that Frank Freitas boarded the Liberty ship to go defend. This is not the country that we celebrated 50 years ago. I only hope that we can turn this thing around before it is too late. On that day, I will gladly hoist the Stars and Stripes once again.

    Maybe I’ll even find some Black Cats.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Boomerang Fins

    There are few situations more awkward than someone who wants to collar you to tell you about their weird dream. Nothing can jinx the old water cooler vibe than an unexpected plunge into your cohort’s psyche when all you want is a cup of coffee. That said—bear with me, now—this one was a doozie:

    A neoteric visionary had collected hundreds of boomerang tips—just the very ends of the boomerang wing—and hot glued them to his car so that they stood up like little shark fins.

    His rationale was: if he got lost, tired, or too drunk to drive, he could just climb in the backseat and the car would find its way home.

    Hang on, is that actually how those Waymo self-driving cars work?

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Springtime Haiku

    I had been student teaching 12th grade English at a high school in Vallejo for a couple of weeks. It was a relatively new campus built close to the last vestige of green hills left in that part of the Bay Area. To celebrate the first day of spring, the master teacher took her classes, with me in tow, out to the back of the school to soak up the seasonal vibes and write a haiku.

    I was tickled to see that the view included the very same craggy rock cliffs that my best friend Pat Kennedy and I rode our bikes—all the way from the neighboring town of Benicia—to explore when we were kids. In those days, that area was still pretty rural and an angry bull chased us when we had the temerity to cut across his field.

    Here was my example:

    The smell of new grass
    and really fresh manure
    Here comes the bull, run!

    I was quickly becoming inured to the utter indifference of senior English students, so when one kid slowly raised his hand, I jumped on the opportunity to… well, teach.

    “Mr. Larsen,” he started, his face a curious mask of confusion and wonder, “you got chased by a bull… in Vallejo?”

    I told him, “yes,” which didn’t close the matter, but only caused further consternation to play upon his eager young countenance. I could tell there was a follow up in the works, so I employed my soon-to-be-patented “raised eyebrow“ technique, giving him the floor. The boy seemed to be struggling with how to phrase his question, before finally just blurting it out.

    “Did y’all make your own clothes back then?”

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Dancing with Mr. D

    So, I’m sitting on the patio of a coffee shop in Arcata… and I know what you’re saying, “Of course weird shit is going to happen, it’s Arcata,” and that’s fair, but hold on.

    I’m outside with my wife and the pup, just kicking it after a stunner of a day, and who comes out, does an over-theatrical stretch, and stands there looking out at G Street? Death.

    It’s the most beautiful day I’ve ever seen in Humboldt County, I’m enjoying my coffee in the waning sunlight, and fucking Death shows up. Now, I’m well aware that it there’s a chance it was some person dressed like Death—the flowing robes, the big white skull for a noggin, gloves (which is surprising since I always had Death pegged for a hands-on kind of guy)—but I have to ask, yet again, would that any less weird?

    Being the curious—and occasionally not very bright—type, I ask, as many would, “What up, Death?” Big mistake. Big D was just waiting to tell someone that we were on the cusp of something called Walpurgis Night. Death read the blank look on my face and offered, “It’s like another Halloween.” Fair enough. Is there candy? “’Erm… no.”

    Death went on to explain that it’s more for witches than the more inclusive “All Spirits” kind of affair. Traditionally there are wild dances, bonfires, and orgies… and that’s when Death acknowledged the awkward conversational turn. “We probably won’t go that far tonight,” Death back-peddled.

    OK, Death, if you’re reading this, sorry we slipped out, but you know, shit to do and all that. As busy as you must be, I’m sure you understand. Catch you later (way later, I hope). I’m sure you’ll end up with the opportunity to screw me before it’s all said and done, just not right now.

    But, I’m sure that’s what they all say.

    Art/Praetorius Blocksberg Verrichtung, Johannes Praetorius, 1668

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: The Future of Music

    The music magazine where I used to work once received a questionnaire on the future of music from a group of college students doing some sort of art project. Somehow it fell to me to fill it out and send it back. I approached it in my usual flippant manner, but later realized that I had come pretty close to what I actually think.

    1) What is music?

    Music is our small attempt to tap into the power of the cosmic vibrations that make up all matter and reality. By imposing an agreed upon order to that small part of the spectrum that humans can sense, we can use these vibrations to mimic certain emotional states and thus communicate with each other via a deeper meta-language.

    2) What is your favorite song?

    “Beat on the Brat” by the Ramones

    3) Is Rock and Roll dead? Why?

    No. Jerry Lee Lewis still walks the earth.*

    4) How will music change in the future?

    I think “Western” music will rely less on false Eurocentric measurements and begin to get closer to true expression of individual soul states with little-to-no commercial value.

    At some point, the Rolling Stones will be replaced by cloned versions of themselves and people will still pay hundreds of dollars a ticket to see them.**

    5) How has music affected your life?

    It has made me taller.***

    *Tragically, this is no longer the case. Is it pure coincidence that everything has gone to total shit since we lost The Killer? You cannot convince me of that.

    **Hundreds? How innocent we once were.

    ***OK, not by much, but I am the same size as Bobs Dylan and Marley. In the words of Lindsey Buckingham, That’s Enough for Me.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Somewhere Under the Rainbow

    It was our last morning on Kaua‘i and I was determined to get a photo of the sunrise over the beach at Kapa‘a. I set the alarm on several other occasions, only to awaken to the sound of rain—which, for Kaua‘i, is not wholly unprecedented, unexpected, or unwelcome.

    This was my last chance. I listened for a moment, and not hearing falling sheets of water, I pulled on a pair of shorts, grabbed my camera, and jogged down to greet the day. I staked out a spot on the sand and waited for the sun to break over the horizon.

    The dawn began to color the bottoms of the clouds pink, then orange, and then… an interloper, an older, bandy-legged gentleman with a massive camera setup, staggered down to the water’s edge just in time to stand right in front of me as the sun exploded into dazzling light.

    My first thought was, “What the… ? Buddy, you’re wrecking my shot!” To be quickly followed by, “He doesn’t look like he has many sunrises left, let him have this moment.” I ceded the beach and turned around to go grab a much-needed cup of coffee when I was given this gift.

    Everyone else on the strand was focused on the arrival of the Sun, and I stood facing the “wrong” way—basking in the spirit of aloha.

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Beset by Slugs

    I got home from band practice tonight and found that in the four short hours I was gone, one of the tomato plants I have growing in an EarthBox had fallen over on its side. Upon closer inspection, I found a friggin’ slug munching on the base of the plant.

    After picking it off and grinding it into the cement with my boot, I realized that I know absolutely nothing about the life cycle and habits of the the gray field slug; commonly called the gray garden slug, or Deroceras reticulatum.

    OK, I know one habit: munching tomato plants, but how the hell did it get there? The Earth Box is an outdoor hydroponic setup—totally contained, even down to the neoprene shower cap that completely covers the soil except for holes for the plants to poke though, and apparently, for slugs to munch at.

    The beauty of the self-contained nature of the box is that one could grow things anywhere, even on the second landing of a ’60s-era apartment building’s cement staircase.

    Which brings me to my question. Where the fuck did that slug come from? There was no slimy trail leading up the stairs, and anyway, wouldn’t climbing two flights of stairs take, like, two years in slug time?

    Having no empirical evidence, I felt like a medieval scientist trying to explain away things with magic, spontaneous generation, and evil curses. Have I been beset by slugs because of my errant ways?

    That’s gonna take a lot of stompin’.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Love is… Car Bombs and Margaritas

    When a milestone birthday approached like a runaway Peterbuilt on the downhill grade from Tahoe, my soul-daughter Annalise decided to either try and lessen the impending impact by helping me create a protective layer of fat, or mercifully take me out of the equation all together by means of a massive myocardial infarction.

    To this end she drove down from Ft. Bragg with a platter, a plethora, a platoon of the most amazing, delicious, and decadent to the extent of actually being depraved, cupcakes I have ever had the pleasure of stuffing into my gob.

    The bulk of my bulk will have been made of the incredible Irish Car Bombs—named after the drink which includes, as does the cupcake, Guinness stout, Bailey’s Irish cream and Bushmills Irish whiskey.

    When we illegally parked behind the Kentfield police substation for the handoff of these lil’ beauties (the last place the revenuers would look), the treats were still off-gassing enough alcohol fumes to warrant a breathalyzer test had I been pulled over.

    The unholy trinity of Guinness/chocolate cake, an actually explosive whiskey/chocolate “ganache” filling (which I have since learned is French for jowl, those goddamned French), and a Bailey’s buttercream frosting perfectly combine to warm the heart, and bloodstream, of any good Fenian gourmand.

    Unsatisfied with planting a giant plate of chocoholic IEDs in and around my personage, the payload came with a smaller satellite stack of margarita cupcakes. Just as strong. Just as tasty. Is this numbness in my arm bad?

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: One Man’s Manifesto, #1–36

    About 10 years ago I endeavored to jot what, if anything, I had learned in almost a half-century of not dying. Looking back, I think these “life squeezin’s” have not only held up, but are now cask-conditioned for your edification and/or pleasure.

    Contents may have settled. Objects are much, much closer than they appear. Personal application may cause serious rash and/or burning. If swelling, discoloration, or bleeding occurs, put down the list and notify your physician.

    #1 There is a line of energy from the center of the earth that travels through you and out to the stars. Stand up straight.

    #2 Do not eat anything out of a vending machine. Ever.

    #3 Original sin is a racket. Don’t take blame (or credit) for anything you are not responsible for. This makes you a dupe (or an asshole).

    #4 Everything in moderation. Except meth—that’s just a bad idea all around.

    #5 Sugar is poison. Use sparingly.

    #6 Whisky, despite the name—water of life—is also bad for you. Slightly less moderation, however, is called for.

    #7 Breathe.

    #8 Only travel with folks who think it’s funny when you fart yourself awake.

    #9 You aren’t drinking enough water, or Scotch, for that matter (see #6).

    #10 Know how to drive stick.

    #11 Do not blurt; think before you open your mouth. No one is called an idiot for carefully considering a well-measured response.

    #12 Declarations of love (or friendship, or solidarity), however, should not be postponed. Life is short.

    #13 Things that should never be lent out: guns, knives, and guitars… actually, anything that can kill or maim if used correctly.

    #14 Don’t curse so much, God damn it! What the fuck is wrong with you?

    #15 Be kind to others—even if they’re rude pricks. This will either show the error of their thinking or get them to drop their guard so you can punch them in the neck.

    #16 Admit when you are wrong. Eat crow, it will not kill you (although it could use some hot sauce).

    #17 Always carry a bottle of hot sauce.

    #18 Don’t subscribe to negativity. Bear witness to others’ pain but don’t make it your own, and—for fuck’s sake—don’t spread it around.

    #19 If you need to be somewhere out of your range at a particular time, bring a map. Don’t rely on technology or the kindness of others; they’re both fine but flawed.

    #20 If you have time to kill—get lost.

    #21 Stairs are nature’s Stairmaster. Use them whenever possible.

    #22 Always carry some cash, hidden even from yourself. Something between $20 and $50. Although nothing bigger than a $20, you won’t be able to break it when you need to.

    #23 Choose a day—Sunday’s a good one—and every week get rid of 10 things. Give them away, recycle them, set them on fire; it doesn’t matter. Live like the plane is going down. It’s time to jettison cargo.

    #24 A grown man needs a muffin like he needs a heart attack. Have some fruit you fat fuck.

    #25 Don’t be so hard on yourself, have the muffin once in a while.

    #26 Sweatpants are for sweating. Wearing them away from home for any other reason sends the signal that you’ve completely given up or are ill. Go change.

    #27 Coffee is magic.

    #28 Never trust a man who wears shoes with no socks, unless in the tropics, then avoid sock-wearers at all cost.

    #29 If asked to leave a job, do not burn it down on the way out; all parties may become desperate enough to revisit this relationship.

    #30 Do not, under any circumstances, return. This rule applies to women and bands* as well, only more so.

    #31 Pretend that you belong somewhere, and people will usually assume you do.

    #32 Never. Call. The. Cops. There is no bad situation that cannot be made worse by the addition of the authorities.

    #33 Stay limber. You will be glad you did when the cops show up and/or people finally realize that you do not belong.

    #34 For fuck’s sake, keep your hands off of your fucking face! Stroking your chin in a pantomime of deep consideration is, in reality, anything but. This is how you get sick all the time. (Wow, this one really played out.)

    #35 I was a smart kid but not very wise. Now, I’m wise as hell but still do things that aren’t very smart. Endeavor to be both and see where you end up.

    #36 There is a reflection of the divine in even the biggest ass hat you’ll ever meet. It is up to you to recognize it.

    *Unless you’re Ozzy, but you’re not.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Pour One Out For the 24

    Before the pandemic shook the world like a snow globe full of goat piss and tears, I was enjoying being chauffeured practically door-to-door from our home in the Mt. Tam watershed to the Big City and back by the 24 bus.

    Taking public transportation to and from San Francisco every day affords one a unique perspective on fellow travelers. Buses are, by nature, pretty big, but maybe because they’re so damn ubiquitous—like the proverbial elephant in the room—no one sees them.

    A casual glance out the window and down rewards even the mildly curious (or bored) rider with a veritable cross-section of humanity—a good portion of whom at any time will be engaged in every type of ill-advised behavior for a person operating a motor vehicle.

    Once I started leaving the truck back in the holler, I witnessed “drivers” texting, shaving, cutting their hair, doing their makeup, eating cereal, reading the paper, reading a book, and exchanging “pleasantries” (wink) with their passenger(s).

    This particular morning, however, took the cake. While rolling through the tony enclave of Ross, a driver pulled alongside the bus and started smoking dope off a piece of tinfoil with a blowtorch.

    I couldn’t tell what he was smoking, or which way he was headed—up or down—but he was actually driving better than eighty percent of folks on the road, so I’m guessing some kind of animal tranquilizer cut with raspberry ketones. It was Ross, after all.

    The thing about torches, however, is that they don’t go out if you drop them. Let that one sink in. That driver probably came through everything unscathed, the 24 didn’t. Once society lurched back to life after lockdown, the county pretended like it had never rolled at all. And don’t get me started about the 25.

    Perhaps it was all just a crazy dream.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: I Wish…

    Buried among my collection of black T-shirts emblazoned with sardonic sayings, an old favorite surfaced the other day. The well-worn shirt has a small graphic of a penguin helplessly flapping its wings while underneath it reads, “I wish I could fly.”

    I pulled it on without a thought before walking into town with the dog. I don’t know what it is about my sartorial sensibility—or overall personal vibe—that seems to invite comment, but I seem to encounter a disproportionate number of people who take an intense interest, and/or umbrage, toward what I wear when leaving the house.

    On this trip, I ran into a woman waiting at the ATM who turned to me, looked me up and down, and asked, “Do you?”

    Do I? I thought. Well that depends. Primarily on what the hell you are talking about. I might. Then again, I might not.

    “Excuse me?” I asked, not entirely sure if she was talking to me. It’s hard to tell, what with Blueteeth and schizophrenia both running rampant on the street these days.

    “Do you?” OK, now I’m pretty sure I don’t, whatever it is, and if my dog wasn’t currently rolling around at your feet, I’d have her drive you off. “Do you wish you could fly?”

    What the… ? Oh, the shirt. “’Erm… sure, doesn’t everybody?”

    “Hmmmpf.” The woman turned away dismissively and ended the odd little philosophical tête-à-tête. Was that the wrong answer? Do I really wish I could fly?

    After walking and ruminating on it, I have to admit that, no, flying isn’t really on my short list of things I wish I could do. Understanding my fellow humans, for instance, would best flight in a heartbeat, although I realize that it is slightly less likely to actually happen.

    What do you wish you could do?