Poetry brings us together, slows us down, blows our minds like fluffy puffs of dandelion becoming airborne and dancing off in all directions. In Mendocino county, poets gather in art galleries and hotel lobbies, after-hours in restaurants, and in friends’ living rooms. If we are lucky, poet/DJ/educator Dan Roberts shows up with his recording equipment […]

Local spoken-word poetry is a blessing, freely available, if you know where to find it! In Mendocino county the local poetry scene is broadcast – virtually singlehandedly – by poet/activist/educator Dan Roberts, whose biweekly poetry-world music show Rhythm Running River airs alternate Sunday afternoons from 2-4PM on KZYX & Z. Every Spring a day-long poetry […]

Thirty years I ago, while I was an undergraduate at Boston University, the USA was engaged in an illicit war in Nicaragua, an effort headed by a man who was recently ousted as head of the NRA (Oliver North). Working as a paralegal at Equal Justice Institute, a pro-bono political asylum firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, […]

I. Mendocino headlands, 6:20 a.m.  Muffled grey skies, finger-chilling breeze, salinity infusing nostrils and eyes. The rhythmic whoosh and sigh of waves engulfing, abandoning, then reclaiming landfall with the fervency of ambivalent lovers. We have one hour before the minus tide recovers a sister-world of beings left gasping in dry oxygen. My girlfriend Terry leads the […]

Climate change is anthropogenic (human-caused). This is scientific fact. We have created novel climatological disturbances that have not existed for the past 800,000 years. I’m beginning this blog post with a graphic that everyone should be familiar with. On this graph, above, “normal” lies between the dashed lines. The dashes show the maximum levels that carbon dioxide […]

Sometimes we Creative Types need to mix it up! This spring I was inspired by the Gualala Arts Center 2019 Chowder Challenge where I joined two dozen other professional chefs from restaurants up and down the southern Mendocino county coastline. Friday morning I began in the East Bay by BARTing to Oakland’s Chinatown and buying […]

During the last months of my Fulbright-sponsored PhD research with the Tado community on Flores island (eastern Indonesia), my then-spouse was a passenger on a Singapore Airlines flight that crashed upon takeoff from Taipei. He survived. Ultimately, our marriage didn’t. “Class Divisions,” my recently published essay recounting what happened, emerged after almost two decades of […]