“We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective." — Kurt Vonnegut
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“We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective." — Kurt Vonnegut
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In the early 1970s, I landed back in San Francisco. For three years, me, my partner and her two children had been living a gypsy life, traveling from one collective household to another, from San Francisco to the Colorado Rockies, to western Massachusetts and finally, back to San Francisco. Read all about it in The…
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We lay in bed, listening to the wind scream around the sturdy little cabin
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Nineteen sixty three unfolded into a year of beginnings. After years of post-adolescent frustration, I had sex for the first time. Having grown up in New England in the 1950s, nobody had told me or anyone else about the mysteries and techniques of copulation. There was no Joy of Sex, literally or figuratively. My parents…
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The buddha smile will follow you.
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All I can safely say is… no one was killed.
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We met at the bottom of the crater and began to hug each other and dance.
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As the 1960s sunk into the next decade, I decided to leave San Francisco, to “get my head together.” A friend knew I had carpentry skills and suggested I contact a woman who owned property in the Colorado Rockies above Boulder. She needed a handyman. A cabin was available. That seemed attractive. To get away…
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I wanted to join that company.
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Where did our community go?
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You can't talk about the end until you talk about the beginning.
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Both my partner and I often express our desires to return home. Each has a different version of home, having been born in widely separate locations, economic stability, and cultural surroundings. My wife is from Manhattan. She was born in Greenwich Village and, when her family moved to a larger apartment uptown, she continued going…
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Be here now, baby.
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I think we could write this retro Retro piece in synchronous serendipity, so I won’t dwell on a nostalgic past. But Retrospect fills an enormous need and has created a deep and profound community where none had existed before. The timing could not have been better. I joined Retrospect on the eve of the 2016…
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As with most mountain lions in our region, P-22 was born in the Santa Monica mountains, probably in 2010. As of 2016, the National Park Service had caught, collared, and released 12 pumas, male and female. They roam in the relatively wild areas of the Santa Monica Mountain National Recreation Area. There, protected by law,…
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For three weeks I lay immobilized...
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The world shook beneath my feet and I loved it.
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Sometimes, feathering your own nest nearly thrusts you into the next nest over.
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I usually begin my day with a cup of coffee and a microdose of psilocybin. A microdose is defined as 80 micrograms of the carefully grown and prepared mushroom. I also take a dropper full of lion’s mane, a mushroom that, like psilocybin, has restorative properties in the cognitive realm. Eighty micrograms is a holistic…
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A soft, blue velvet regaled The Los Angeles night. The concentric circles of the Hollywood Bowl’s procenium glowed with a warm, eggshell white. White-jacketed waiters served last suppers on trays and scuttled away. Onstage, two microphones bracketed a single, straight-backed chair. Without announcement, a man in white tie and tails walked from stage right, carrying…
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I’m not much for magic, although I love “believing” the magician, probably out of sympathy for the performer. I don’t try to figure out his or her tricks, and I don’t feel cheated. I tried to watch Guillermo Del Toro’s adaption of Nightmare Alley, an epic novel about the rise and fall from grace of…
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I smelled the rubbery stink of an overheated engine.
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Antofagasta is a northern port city in Chile.
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The Brown family, a farming family with roots in the American Revolution, invited my family to watch the McCarthy hearings on television. We didn’t have a TV and, like most of the established families in our little Massachusetts town, the Browns wanted us to know they didn’t like Joe McCarthy and his witch hunt one…
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I write to change the world. Why do I want to change the world? Because it needs it.
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Please note that the word "justice" never appears in this broadside.
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He never talked to me about girls or women or sex or marriage...
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It was a cool gig, for sure.
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A woman holds a child in a paint-scabbed bunker beneath a burning steel mill. She is surrounded by children made oblivious by trauma. I try to imagine the shock waves from exploding bunker buster bombs that must travel through the reinforced concrete and steel floors and collapsed factory roof above her head. I can’t imagine…
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I’m connected to you. Intimately. I don’t just stick my viral tongue down your throat and dive into the gooey mucus of your lungs. I don’t just rabble rouse such a riot among your antibodies that they rise up and blindly attack their host, your body. Your own rogue antibodies kill you. Go figure. I…
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A picture is worth a thousand words... unless it isn't.
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I don’t know if I’ve cheated at cards. I never progressed much beyond ‘go fish’ and blackjack with the deck of fifty-two. I can’t remember if I ever kept excessive change dealt out by a storekeeper. I found $400 dollars in tightly rolled bills in a baking soda can, stashed in the demolished darkroom of…
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All time is fluid in human experience. At times, the minutes, hours, years fly by. At other times, they drag down the road like zombies. In our search for logic and meaning we measure time — from the billions of years it takes for light to travel from a distant galaxy to the time it…
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I’m handy. I began early, learned how to use hand tools from my father, a hands-on electrical engineer who designed and built prototype instruments to measure outcomes of physics and biology research projects. I’ve constructed everything from mercury barometers to mine shafts to cherry wood cabinets, from stage sets and circus rings to birch plywood…
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Music plays a grand role in my life. My first memory involves me discordantly playing harmonica to a blues player on a 78-rpm record. I must have been three. My mother often played the piano while I drifted into sleep. I could hear her playing the same Chopin Preludes, haltingly, but with enjoyment, on the…
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I come from a long line of galoots. They began American life in 1849 as farmers in Pennsylvania. They fought on the Union side during our first Civil War and then headed west to Placerville, California, where my great-great grandfather, John established a frontier business as a harness maker and soon opened a boot shop.…
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Photos of families, couples, and mobs, shuttered or pixilated images preserve decades of life, love, and memory, chaos captured, order performed. Random or planned, group photos reflect group purpose. We gathered to chronicle the choking, smoke-filled days and siren-screaming nights of ’92, to project a cinematic family photo, to replicate violence against a lone black…
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Excerpted from Rocked in Time, a work in progress.
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Early in this new year, I resolve to take a walk on a quiet byway down to a river. On my way, I’ll find a stick dry enough to snap from its source and large enough to see at a distance. When I reach a bridge, I’ll walk halfway across and lean over the downstream…
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Well, another year has rolled over and threatens to play dead. Congrats to all who survived to read this —you’ve lived long enough to cross into the netherworld between the second and third year of our worldwide pandemic. We haven’t lost too many friends. Most of us believe epidemiologists who deny that the wonder vaccine…
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I love to laugh. Most of us love to laugh. Laughter is the crazy glue of existence. As a kid, my friends and I could make each other laugh until we rolled in convulsions on carpets, lawns, beaches, or hayfields. I remember building circles of out-of-control giddiness that, if interrupted, puzzled teachers and parents. We’d…
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Maybe male chauvinism had forced Lily and Carmelita to become the better monopolists.
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“It may not come when you want it / But it gets you there right on time.”
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I spend time inundated by regret. I spend = and opposite time beset by anticipatory dread, a phrase taught me by JE. I am happy to be free of JE. I sadly miss JE. Freedom. Loss. Regret for the past, dread for the future. But wait! I can be here now. Zip! No regrets. No…
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I live on a cul-de-sac in the less extravagant environs of the HOLLYWOOD hills. Although the neighboring street rushes with traffic, our dead end remains quietly Mediterranean with its cypress trees and terra-cotta tiled roofs. In fact, the little street is so insignificant, we don’t have street-cleaning days, leaving only the 72-hour limit that applies…
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Mist. Mist outside my window...
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How do you remember what you never forgot?
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I look back along the gently curving corridor of my life...
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Sometimes dates aren't dates and aren't full of sweet nothings.
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How shall I kill him? Poison knows ancient success, the weapon of choice for women, Shakespeare, and Russians. Guns are all-American. What shall it be? Poison? A gun? Maybe I should be thinking access — and egress — first, not weaponry. The West Wing boasts a dining room, a long cold room when empty. Could…
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I didn’t much give a damn for wearing glasses.
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The neighborhoods are beginning to welcome Paayme Paxaayt back into their lives.
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Sometimes you have to work with them. Then, separation is impossible.
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I can’t stand the sight of my cell phone...
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"We must all swim in the same sea. Right?”
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We each float at the center of a separate, outwardly radiating helix.
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Hey, catcha cobia, Hey, catcha valentine, Hey catcha co co bia, Eyes cold valentine bia. I listened to that jingle for years. The damned thing became an ear worm. An ear worm can be a snatch of rhythm, a melodic phrase, a whole tune. First, they just crawl around your ear, but eventually they become…
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Jamaica Plain housing project — age 3, going on 4
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Mardi Gras 2020 — The last night out
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I like hats. Hats can provide protection, inspire intrigue, and serve as typical or atypical representations of a hat wearer’s persona. I don’t often wear hats. I don’t think I look good in most hats, and I never know where to put them down when I’m not in the immediate need of a hat. Today,…
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I like to think of history in astronomical terms of spiraling orbits. In the same way the sun hurtles through space and our planets spiral along behind it, forever trying to catch up, history doesn’t move in cycles, it moves in spirals. I’d like to offer the possibility that — with our most recent inauguration…
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...they didn’t request tapes or photos.
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I’m writing to you from a time far beyond your own.
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Doggedly, I record signs of the coming light.
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Recently, a flurry of studies, books, anecdotes, and urban legends claim that swearing is a sign of authenticity, honesty, and even intelligence. I don’t know. In most instances, I find that swearwords, used judiciously and with the all-important element of timing can be expressive and effective. I don’t recall when I began swearing, but it…
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I began this story in response to last week's "volunteer" prompt but quickly realized I was generating a Retrospect twofer.
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I didn’t notice when Suzanne first showed up. We unloaded the stage, carried it into the theater, and assembled it behind the proscenium, a stage upon a stage. First came the wine barrels, then the interlocking frame, and finally the wooden platforms. We lashed the backdrop to the uprights and, with a shout from cast…
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As a musician, actor, writer, and part-time carpenter, I had grown tired of planning how I was going to buy my next pair of shoes, so I unpacked my diploma and went looking for a job. I had three criteria — the job had to (1) involve writing, editing, and publishing; (2) take place in…
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I do love me my shoes. When I was a little kid we went to a shoe store that featured an x-ray machine that you could stick your feet inside and radiate the hell out of them. It made your bones glow. Scary, how little they knew about radiation back then. Despite my fascination with…
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I wrote this piece for the Retro prompt "Gardens," but I've posted it here to celebrate the salmon that reinhabited the Mattole watershed as a form of recycling.
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“Don’t sweat it,” I said. I couldn’t get the “brother” part out; it stuck in my craw.
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I awoke with a familiar mixture of covid emotions, sadness and gratitude...
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Not much to say on cursive, although I had perfect cursive writing scores in third and fourth grade. I liked how beautiful it was, all the curves and the way the style let you keep your number two pencil on the page when you finally got to write whole words and sentences. Now my handwriting…
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Mao Tse Tung, Uncle Ho / Dow chemical has got to go
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Damn, I thought, this guy has to be a musician...
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If an event happens once, it can — and probably will — happen again.
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What a strange and terrible time to feel at one with the universe.
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Once past the gate, I lit a cigarette and noticed that my hand was trembling.
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For a time, I remain convinced that I am awake.
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So now we have a messenger.
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What does care mean when you can say goodbye? And when you cannot?
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One can only imagine the glories and horrors...
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Don't agonize... Organize! — Mother Jones
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That 'Cliffie who had a crush on me who I blew off as a pest and lived to regret it...
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In the womb of this arcane atmosphere, my imagination flourished...
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...too complicated to categorize
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(as reported in The University Times)
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My friend Hirth died five years ago, today. I don't think he'll mind if I bring that up. Whatever I did, he was down with it; whatever he did, I was down with him.
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More and more these days, I been working overtime in an attempt to channel this little guy. I have a lot to learn from him. I think my old man took this picture with a giant Speed Graphic just before we moved from the federal housing projects in Boston’s Jamaica Plain. We relocated 30 miles…
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The wheel felt woozy in my hands and the truck began to float.
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...the house felt huge, empty and swept by onshore winds that buffeted the old frame building.
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Professor watches amazed as 16 students disappear into broadband stream
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I had to hold onto the steering wheel to reach the pedals.
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Revenge is a dish best served cold.
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Genuine, hopeful retreat is possible.
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“Que lastima,” says a delicate-featured little girl. What a pity.
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The great river of class, culture and convictions afforded me a way out.
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Don’t try to brush aside a death in the family. It won’t work.
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That year, summer vacation released us into the unknown.
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My antiwar writing began in a theater. I was working on a new play and the antiwar movement of the 1960s came up in conversation. Several of the actors expressed amazement that there had been a determined movement to stop the war. One actor said something like “Wow! We just thought that all…
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When I first saw this Retro prompt, a David Sedaris essay* came to mind. Here, Sedaris laments the lack of worthwhile accessories for men. “[Accessories” for men aren’t nearly as interesting as women’s,” he writes. “I have no use for cuff links or suspenders, and while I’ll occasionally pick up a new tie, it hardly…
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Now we can begin anew.
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I wasn’t smitten by love or lust, but fame, especially when well-deserved, can be, well… awesome.
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I had no idea that part of me had come from this place, a California boardwalk town in the northern Sierras. I’d grown up in Massachusetts. Save for one trip to California when I was 10, I knew California as a distant, colorful place that gift packages materialized from, sent by my West Coast aunts…
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The darkness stretches away in a perfect circle.
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. . . a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already gone past. — Marcus Aurelius
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You can't go home again... or can you?
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Is this retirement? I ask. Nah.
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"Oh, I think the Haitians know how to take care of themselves."
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Season after season, he perfects his crop amidst civilization's sturm und drang.
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Extropy — an evolving system of tools, methods, and techniques guided by values and standards intended to improve the human condition.
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The boy rocked in time to the music, rump bouncing against the back of a ruptured easy chair. He pushed a mouth harp across tiny teeth, accompanying a blues singer over the pops and scratches of a fast-revolving 78-rpm record. The harmonica’s discordant moan caught the rhythm, modality, and feel of the music and bounced…
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Reuniting with an unrequited spirit
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He nodded the beak of his perfectly molded, authoritarian-style trooper’s hat in my direction.
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Like matter, gravitational energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
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Duck and cover seemed the height of folly, and I'd never felt immortal.
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You can make up your own play from scratch. It’s different from interpreting other people's words.
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We were going to a-go-go and the devil be damned.
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That was then; this is now.
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Doing original theater is very different from dredging up the old chestnuts. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but laugh.
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Then, the ecstatic carnival of scientific exploration halted. But why?
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I’m writing this because somebody asked me about faith and I don’t have any.
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Seeking motivation, the author opened his current lit file and scrolled past folder after folder, doc after doc. Jesus, he thought, this is one big pile of writing, all these little black characters wiggling across a white screen. He recognized travelogues from Cuba, some published, most not; sketched-out narrative postcards about growing up absurd in…
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exploring chauvinism felt like tumbling through surf
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What was I doing with this new scheme? Was I planning to…settle down?
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I’ve never been big on sin. Sin belongs to a god thing full of good, evil, and punishment, straight-jacketing people with shame, and excommunicating so many nice things. Regardless of my godless stance, at age 11, I helped myself to three temptations. First, I sought out pictures of naked women in magazines, stolen from my…
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My head snapped back and hit the wooden booth.
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...sometimes there would be fresh snow, sparkling white on the granite steps.
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— I — Tables sag with provender Prime ribs, suckling pigs, purple pomegranates Chewed-on, puked up, wasted detriti Litter the Persian carpets, lounging, waiting not caring Whisked up by a brown man in a white coat Armed with dustpans and broom Club chairs and sofas gleam with silk and gold fabric Pilfered from global’s…
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Turn your skills, your craft, your art into a weapon.
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Death? Perhaps I’ve seen plenty of death, although we can never get enough. We’re not allowed to; the damned thing just keeps on comin’. And I doubt that we are morbid by nature; we simply have no control over the end of life beyond the magic and ministrations of good medicine from CAT scans to…
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...the woman ascending has never visited the devil.
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"Welcome to the American Dream, old man. Not so fast…"
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"...one band, one club, and one gig."
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“Heck,” my partner suggested “Go back to school. Who knows? — maybe you'll even learn something.”
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I had been swallowed by the perfect madness of the wilderness.
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I am a historian on the interstellar environment Samsara, circa 3200. I explore the many time capsules that were loaded aboard the craft before we departed earth. The capsules were loaded helter-skelter in the pre-launch rush, but I take great delight in randomly sampling their contents. Today I found several intriguing artifacts that had worked…
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How do you reconcile heartbreak and fear, sadness and jeopardy, and the sense that everything is ending? You don’t.
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The princess lost her startled expression, nodded, and looked deeper. I could see her think, Is this guy for real? How does he know about German expressionism? He’s a musician, for chrissake!
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Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and all the other nasty little Neo-Cons… Feel free to add to the rubbish list. It all goes into the dustbin of history.
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Winter Sun was unloading its guitars, the Fender keyboard, PA speakers, and microphones into my Andover Street garage. It was about 3 a.m. and we had just done a free gig to benefit the Dore Street Garage, a woman’s auto repair collective. This all happened in San Francisco when feminism’s second wave was rising strong,…
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I grew up in rural New England and, altho my dad was a scientist who worked in Boston, I spent my school years in a small public school that embraced equal measures of college prep students and shop kids. Many of my friends were the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics. Out of family…
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I had just returned from a tour of Alaska with a rock and roll band. It was June, 1980 and we were about to descend into the Reagan Era. The glow of the late 1960s had contracted into the dire and apocalyptic 70s and promised to flow headlong into Iran Contra. Our friend Carmelita, one…
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Asshole bosses often don’t realize they’re assholes because they’ve been assholes all their life. Like a frog who doesn’t grok that he or she is slowly parboiling in a pot of hot water, asshole bosses have usually been considered assholes since infancy. Consequently, most assholes develop early defenses to assure themselves that asshole behavior is…
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Ever lose somebody without saying goodbye? A friend goes off to war, he wasn’t drafted, he enlisted, it’s been awhile, you’ve gone in opposite directions. No rancor, just divergence, then gone. A girlfriend slides into her father’s car to drive home too late. You lean down, kiss her through the window. She’s so pretty, her…
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Then: Waiting in the railway crossing shack with the gate keeper, hoping for a Boston & Maine diesel to come along. Now: Wishing I could feel the earth shake as a steam locomotive rolled past with a full load of freight, throttle wide open to make the grade. Then: Watching my mom crank the…
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I don’t keep much. Yes, stuff clutters my life but not from way back. Family things went into diaspora after my father died. My mother wisely refused to become the widow Degelman in our little New England town. She sold the house and left for New York University to begin a new life. My personal…
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I wrote this piece in 2016 for the Retro prompt Altered States. I hope you enjoy this '60s tale of a little white pill. — CD
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I was too short to play basketball. I wasn’t that great at baseball, although I love the game. Our little high school couldn’t afford a football team. Then along came soccer. Soccer was affordable and — so they thought — less dangerous than football. Soccer was perfect for me. I swam in summer and skied…
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Back in the early days of the Internet, I wrote for a short-lived interactive startup in Santa Monica. I was a practicing jazz musician at the time, so of course I needed the money. Before the interactive outfit folded I happily researched and wrote a brief musical history of Mozart, a jazz jukebox, a classical…
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I never knew my grandparents. They died long before I was born. My father died before he could describe them to me. Given the circumstances surrounding his time with them, I doubt that he could have told me much. Therefore, my fact-or-fiction report springs from primary source materials including pictures, letters, and newspaper articles and…
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Ever confuse coincidence with causality? It can be fun. Somebody you meet on a demo in Madison, Wisconsin shows up at a concert weeks later in San Francisco. Wow! The ex-girlfriend of a city radical materializes unannounced on your rural commune. Both of you are amazed… too weird! People once directed me to the sleeping…
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I’ve never been much of a tourist. From my days residing in the Haight-Ashbury to my thin-air existence in the Colorado Rockies, from my street musician days in North Beach to my current residence under the Hollywood sign (nope, not homeless), I’ve been an objet du tourism more frequently than I’ve been a tourist. Nothin’…
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Some say death can be your ally. Yeah, maybe… If you’re an Inuit shaman or a Yoruba priestess. Some days I can dig it. Mostly I doubt that death teaches us anything. Today marks the year-one anniversary of ZL’s death. I first met Z when she ran into a theater rehearsal and shouted “they’re gonna…
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Television came to our house late in the form of a used 10-inch Motorola with a cabinet as big as the Ritz. Sunday night was family night. Except for dinner, we weren’t big on family rituals but Sunday night was an exception. I’d be called inside to watch “The Ed Sullivan Show” (with varied interest…
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Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mister Jones — Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965 As a teenager I participated with the Quakers to ban the bomb. I celebrated the March on Washington and survived Mississippi Freedom Summer. I learned to play blues and folk…
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RURAL MASSACHUSETTS, 1960ish — Over the past year, the girls had shot up… and out. They stuck pink plastic combs into their bobby sock tops and made rude remarks to the junior high girls who had stuffed tissue paper into their bras. Beyond the scent of cologne, deodorant, Clearasil, and cliquish anxiety, the girls were…
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Hair. Always been a big deal to me. I accomplished hormonal lift-off at 11 and immediately shifted into hyper hair-awareness mode. I simultaneously stumbled upon my first rebel role model — James Dean. I became fascinated with him, not for his work in film — Who knew what a method actor was? — but for…
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I still own a pair of black Can’t Bust ‘Em dungarees that I wore while working as a timber cutter at the Buckshot mine in Eldora, Colorado. I don’t wear them anymore — I’m a little beyond a 1970 waistline — but the rugged old pants still sport the brass buttons sewn onto the beltline…
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We lived at the edge of a forest in Massachusetts. The hay field across the road served as a planetarium surrounded by stone walls and maples. From there, the night sky unfolded for us: an unusual moon, the northern lights, an eclipse, but now. . . who could predict? “Tonight!” My old man shouted. “Sputnik!…
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Baking Digger bread had only one stipulation — you had to give it away for free.
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Old Dog
Prompted By Writer's Choice
/ Stories
“We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective." — Kurt Vonnegut
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Piercing the Solstice
Prompted By Tattoos and Piercings
/ Stories
In the early 1970s, I landed back in San Francisco. For three years, me, my partner and her two children had been living a gypsy life, traveling from one collective household to another, from San Francisco to the Colorado Rockies, to western Massachusetts and finally, back to San Francisco. Read all about it in The…
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The Zen of Perfect Stillness
Prompted By Silence
/ Stories
We lay in bed, listening to the wind scream around the sturdy little cabin
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1963 — The Beginning
Prompted By 1963
/ Stories
Nineteen sixty three unfolded into a year of beginnings. After years of post-adolescent frustration, I had sex for the first time. Having grown up in New England in the 1950s, nobody had told me or anyone else about the mysteries and techniques of copulation. There was no Joy of Sex, literally or figuratively. My parents…
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breathe, smile, move slow
Prompted By Meditation
/ Stories
The buddha smile will follow you.
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...never, never, never step on laughter.
Heading North — West is Left; East is Right
Prompted By Turning Points
/ Stories
All I can safely say is… no one was killed.
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A Sub-Saharan Spirit Rave
Prompted By Daydreaming
/ Stories
We met at the bottom of the crater and began to hug each other and dance.
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Support Our Troops / Bring Them Home
The Chicago Hot Blast
Prompted By Fire
/ Stories
As the 1960s sunk into the next decade, I decided to leave San Francisco, to “get my head together.” A friend knew I had carpentry skills and suggested I contact a woman who owned property in the Colorado Rockies above Boulder. She needed a handyman. A cabin was available. That seemed attractive. To get away…
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Engagement, Commitment, and Fresh Air
Prompted By Art’s Impact
/ Stories
I wanted to join that company.
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Alone Together: From Solitude to Isolation
Prompted By Isolation and Solitude
/ Stories
Where did our community go?
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The Big Bang or, Our Cosmic Dawn
Prompted By Dawn
/ Stories
You can't talk about the end until you talk about the beginning.
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Be It Ever So Humble…
Prompted By Can You Go Home Again?
/ Stories
Both my partner and I often express our desires to return home. Each has a different version of home, having been born in widely separate locations, economic stability, and cultural surroundings. My wife is from Manhattan. She was born in Greenwich Village and, when her family moved to a larger apartment uptown, she continued going…
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Breathe in… Breathe out: Buddha and the Time-Space Continuum
Prompted By Ceremony
/ Stories
Be here now, baby.
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Carrying Retrospect Forward
Prompted By Retrospect Retrospective
/ Stories
I think we could write this retro Retro piece in synchronous serendipity, so I won’t dwell on a nostalgic past. But Retrospect fills an enormous need and has created a deep and profound community where none had existed before. The timing could not have been better. I joined Retrospect on the eve of the 2016…
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A Eulogy for P-22, a Directionally Challenged Puma
Prompted By Directionally Challenged
/ Stories
As with most mountain lions in our region, P-22 was born in the Santa Monica mountains, probably in 2010. As of 2016, the National Park Service had caught, collared, and released 12 pumas, male and female. They roam in the relatively wild areas of the Santa Monica Mountain National Recreation Area. There, protected by law,…
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The Prescient Pre-Trumpian Dental Fiasco
Prompted By The Dentist
/ Stories
For three weeks I lay immobilized...
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Standing at the Crossroads*
Prompted By Changed My Life
/ Stories
The world shook beneath my feet and I loved it.
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An Ode to Joy
Prompted By Feathering Our Nests
/ Stories
Sometimes, feathering your own nest nearly thrusts you into the next nest over.
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Fear and Loathing in Hollywoodland
Prompted By Drugs and Alcohol
/ Stories
I usually begin my day with a cup of coffee and a microdose of psilocybin. A microdose is defined as 80 micrograms of the carefully grown and prepared mushroom. I also take a dropper full of lion’s mane, a mushroom that, like psilocybin, has restorative properties in the cognitive realm. Eighty micrograms is a holistic…
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From Yo Yo’s Hand to Johann’s Ear
Prompted By Memorable Performances
/ Stories
A soft, blue velvet regaled The Los Angeles night. The concentric circles of the Hollywood Bowl’s procenium glowed with a warm, eggshell white. White-jacketed waiters served last suppers on trays and scuttled away. Onstage, two microphones bracketed a single, straight-backed chair. Without announcement, a man in white tie and tails walked from stage right, carrying…
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The magic’s in the music…*
Prompted By Do You Believe in Magic?
/ Stories
I’m not much for magic, although I love “believing” the magician, probably out of sympathy for the performer. I don’t try to figure out his or her tricks, and I don’t feel cheated. I tried to watch Guillermo Del Toro’s adaption of Nightmare Alley, an epic novel about the rise and fall from grace of…
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The Great Arkansas Freeze Plug Blow Out
Prompted By Car Trouble
/ Stories
I smelled the rubbery stink of an overheated engine.
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The Two Sisters of Antofagasta
Prompted By What I Own That's Older Than I Am
/ Stories
Antofagasta is a northern port city in Chile.
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Men in Suits
Prompted By Broadcast News
/ Stories
The Brown family, a farming family with roots in the American Revolution, invited my family to watch the McCarthy hearings on television. We didn’t have a TV and, like most of the established families in our little Massachusetts town, the Browns wanted us to know they didn’t like Joe McCarthy and his witch hunt one…
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Why do I write?
Prompted By Why We Write
/ Stories
I write to change the world. Why do I want to change the world? Because it needs it.
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Lost in Translation
Prompted By Lost in Translation
/ Stories
Please note that the word "justice" never appears in this broadside.
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Conversations with my old man
Prompted By What My Father Told Me
/ Stories
He never talked to me about girls or women or sex or marriage...
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Busting a Banned-Book Barbecue
Prompted By Banned Books
/ Stories
It was a cool gig, for sure.
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A Zig Zag Confusion
Prompted By Refugees
/ Stories
A woman holds a child in a paint-scabbed bunker beneath a burning steel mill. She is surrounded by children made oblivious by trauma. I try to imagine the shock waves from exploding bunker buster bombs that must travel through the reinforced concrete and steel floors and collapsed factory roof above her head. I can’t imagine…
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We’re Here, We’re Queer…
Prompted By Pandemic, Year Three
/ Stories
I’m connected to you. Intimately. I don’t just stick my viral tongue down your throat and dive into the gooey mucus of your lungs. I don’t just rabble rouse such a riot among your antibodies that they rise up and blindly attack their host, your body. Your own rogue antibodies kill you. Go figure. I…
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Camera Obscura
Prompted By Photo Booths
/ Stories
A picture is worth a thousand words... unless it isn't.
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Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
Prompted By Cheating
/ Stories
I don’t know if I’ve cheated at cards. I never progressed much beyond ‘go fish’ and blackjack with the deck of fifty-two. I can’t remember if I ever kept excessive change dealt out by a storekeeper. I found $400 dollars in tightly rolled bills in a baking soda can, stashed in the demolished darkroom of…
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Time Keeps on Slippin’…
Prompted By Time
/ Stories
All time is fluid in human experience. At times, the minutes, hours, years fly by. At other times, they drag down the road like zombies. In our search for logic and meaning we measure time — from the billions of years it takes for light to travel from a distant galaxy to the time it…
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Los Mechanicos*
Prompted By Some Assembly Required
/ Stories
I’m handy. I began early, learned how to use hand tools from my father, a hands-on electrical engineer who designed and built prototype instruments to measure outcomes of physics and biology research projects. I’ve constructed everything from mercury barometers to mine shafts to cherry wood cabinets, from stage sets and circus rings to birch plywood…
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Don’t Think Twice
Prompted By One Song That Moves Me
/ Stories
Music plays a grand role in my life. My first memory involves me discordantly playing harmonica to a blues player on a 78-rpm record. I must have been three. My mother often played the piano while I drifted into sleep. I could hear her playing the same Chopin Preludes, haltingly, but with enjoyment, on the…
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Newspapers, the fourth estate, and galoots…
Prompted By Newspapers
/ Stories
I come from a long line of galoots. They began American life in 1849 as farmers in Pennsylvania. They fought on the Union side during our first Civil War and then headed west to Placerville, California, where my great-great grandfather, John established a frontier business as a harness maker and soon opened a boot shop.…
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Los Angeles on Fire
Prompted By Group Photos
/ Stories
Photos of families, couples, and mobs, shuttered or pixilated images preserve decades of life, love, and memory, chaos captured, order performed. Random or planned, group photos reflect group purpose. We gathered to chronicle the choking, smoke-filled days and siren-screaming nights of ’92, to project a cinematic family photo, to replicate violence against a lone black…
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Fifty-Four Hours*
Prompted By Highways and Byways
/ Stories
Excerpted from Rocked in Time, a work in progress.
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Resolved: Time and the River
Prompted By Resolutions
/ Stories
Early in this new year, I resolve to take a walk on a quiet byway down to a river. On my way, I’ll find a stick dry enough to snap from its source and large enough to see at a distance. When I reach a bridge, I’ll walk halfway across and lean over the downstream…
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My Holiday Letter
Prompted By Holiday Letters
/ Stories
Well, another year has rolled over and threatens to play dead. Congrats to all who survived to read this —you’ve lived long enough to cross into the netherworld between the second and third year of our worldwide pandemic. We haven’t lost too many friends. Most of us believe epidemiologists who deny that the wonder vaccine…
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Laughter: Research & Development
Prompted By Comic Relief
/ Stories
I love to laugh. Most of us love to laugh. Laughter is the crazy glue of existence. As a kid, my friends and I could make each other laugh until we rolled in convulsions on carpets, lawns, beaches, or hayfields. I remember building circles of out-of-control giddiness that, if interrupted, puzzled teachers and parents. We’d…
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The Cheating Paramours
Prompted By Dice
/ Stories
Maybe male chauvinism had forced Lily and Carmelita to become the better monopolists.
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The Mystery Train
Prompted By An Attitude of Gratitude
/ Stories
“It may not come when you want it / But it gets you there right on time.”
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Lao Tzu! Wait Up!
Prompted By Regrets
/ Stories
I spend time inundated by regret. I spend = and opposite time beset by anticipatory dread, a phrase taught me by JE. I am happy to be free of JE. I sadly miss JE. Freedom. Loss. Regret for the past, dread for the future. But wait! I can be here now. Zip! No regrets. No…
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Dickless Kenny and the Cul de Sac
Prompted By Parking
/ Stories
I live on a cul-de-sac in the less extravagant environs of the HOLLYWOOD hills. Although the neighboring street rushes with traffic, our dead end remains quietly Mediterranean with its cypress trees and terra-cotta tiled roofs. In fact, the little street is so insignificant, we don’t have street-cleaning days, leaving only the 72-hour limit that applies…
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I’m a very focused person…
Prompted By Attention Span
/ Stories
Mist. Mist outside my window...
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Ghosts of Fallen Towers
Prompted By 9/11 Twenty Years Later
/ Stories
How do you remember what you never forgot?
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Senior Moments
Prompted By Senior Moments
/ Stories
I look back along the gently curving corridor of my life...
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Rain on Eucalyptus*
Prompted By Dating
/ Stories
Sometimes dates aren't dates and aren't full of sweet nothings.
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How Shall I Kill Him?*
Prompted By Guns Then and Now
/ Stories
How shall I kill him? Poison knows ancient success, the weapon of choice for women, Shakespeare, and Russians. Guns are all-American. What shall it be? Poison? A gun? Maybe I should be thinking access — and egress — first, not weaponry. The West Wing boasts a dining room, a long cold room when empty. Could…
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Humbug, or Sightless in the Circus
Prompted By Can't Leave Home Without It
/ Stories
I didn’t much give a damn for wearing glasses.
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Recycling Tongva
Prompted By Recycling
/ Stories
The neighborhoods are beginning to welcome Paayme Paxaayt back into their lives.
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One man, one computer
Prompted By Separating the Art from the Artist
/ Stories
Sometimes you have to work with them. Then, separation is impossible.
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This is the one, my old man says.
The Portrait of Dorian MacDOS
Prompted By Technology Tribulations
/ Stories
I can’t stand the sight of my cell phone...
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Organize your Cave*
Prompted By Inequality
/ Stories
"We must all swim in the same sea. Right?”
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Covidream 3.2 — Circles
Prompted By One Year of the Pandemic
/ Stories
We each float at the center of a separate, outwardly radiating helix.
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Hey, Catcha Cobia
Prompted By Advertising Jingles and Slogans
/ Stories
Hey, catcha cobia, Hey, catcha valentine, Hey catcha co co bia, Eyes cold valentine bia. I listened to that jingle for years. The damned thing became an ear worm. An ear worm can be a snatch of rhythm, a melodic phrase, a whole tune. First, they just crawl around your ear, but eventually they become…
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Harmonica Boy — RetroFlash
Prompted By First Memory
/ Stories
Jamaica Plain housing project — age 3, going on 4
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My Covid Valentine
Prompted By Valentine's Day
/ Stories
Mardi Gras 2020 — The last night out
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I like hats
Prompted By Hats
/ Stories
I like hats. Hats can provide protection, inspire intrigue, and serve as typical or atypical representations of a hat wearer’s persona. I don’t often wear hats. I don’t think I look good in most hats, and I never know where to put them down when I’m not in the immediate need of a hat. Today,…
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Spiraling toward Sunrise
Prompted By Inaugurations
/ Stories
I like to think of history in astronomical terms of spiraling orbits. In the same way the sun hurtles through space and our planets spiral along behind it, forever trying to catch up, history doesn’t move in cycles, it moves in spirals. I’d like to offer the possibility that — with our most recent inauguration…
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The San Francisco Mime Troupe Gorilla Marching Band performs in the San Francisco Saint Patrick’s Day Parade
Prompted By Good Trouble
/ Stories
...they didn’t request tapes or photos.
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Dear Charlie…
Prompted By Letter to My Younger Self
/ Stories
I’m writing to you from a time far beyond your own.
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In a dark time…
Prompted By Hello Darkness
/ Stories
Doggedly, I record signs of the coming light.
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The Day I Crashed Pacifica
Prompted By Interviews
/ Stories
Recently, a flurry of studies, books, anecdotes, and urban legends claim that swearing is a sign of authenticity, honesty, and even intelligence. I don’t know. In most instances, I find that swearwords, used judiciously and with the all-important element of timing can be expressive and effective. I don’t recall when I began swearing, but it…
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The Spelling Volunteer
Prompted By Spelling
/ Stories
I began this story in response to last week's "volunteer" prompt but quickly realized I was generating a Retrospect twofer.
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Yes, we would celebrate.
Suzanne — RetroFlash
Prompted By Chance Encounters
/ Stories
I didn’t notice when Suzanne first showed up. We unloaded the stage, carried it into the theater, and assembled it behind the proscenium, a stage upon a stage. First came the wine barrels, then the interlocking frame, and finally the wooden platforms. We lashed the backdrop to the uprights and, with a shout from cast…
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Cell phones and the world-wide web
Prompted By Life Before Computers
/ Stories
As a musician, actor, writer, and part-time carpenter, I had grown tired of planning how I was going to buy my next pair of shoes, so I unpacked my diploma and went looking for a job. I had three criteria — the job had to (1) involve writing, editing, and publishing; (2) take place in…
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X-Rays, Motorcycle boots, Cuban heels, and Jimmy Choo
Prompted By Shoes
/ Stories
I do love me my shoes. When I was a little kid we went to a shoe store that featured an x-ray machine that you could stick your feet inside and radiate the hell out of them. It made your bones glow. Scary, how little they knew about radiation back then. Despite my fascination with…
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Totem Salmon — reinhabiting the Mattole River watershed
Prompted By Recycling
/ Stories
I wrote this piece for the Retro prompt "Gardens," but I've posted it here to celebrate the salmon that reinhabited the Mattole watershed as a form of recycling.
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Full Circle
Prompted By Lost and Found
/ Stories
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. I couldn’t get the “brother” part out; it stuck in my craw.
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Covidream 2.1
Prompted By Pandemic Summer
/ Stories
I awoke with a familiar mixture of covid emotions, sadness and gratitude...
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How beautiful it was…
Prompted By Cursive — Curse or Blessing?
/ Stories
Not much to say on cursive, although I had perfect cursive writing scores in third and fourth grade. I liked how beautiful it was, all the curves and the way the style let you keep your number two pencil on the page when you finally got to write whole words and sentences. Now my handwriting…
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Outside Agitators — showbiz goes to the demo
Prompted By Protests
/ Stories
Mao Tse Tung, Uncle Ho / Dow chemical has got to go
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Ornithology
Prompted By Chance Encounters
/ Stories
Damn, I thought, this guy has to be a musician...
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Good gawd how we tried.
Superstition, science, blind faith, denial, and ignorance: a trumped-up world view
Prompted By Superstition
/ Stories
If an event happens once, it can — and probably will — happen again.
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Breathe in… Breathe out
Prompted By Pandemic - Pandemonium or Panacea?
/ Stories
What a strange and terrible time to feel at one with the universe.
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Fuller Brush Boy
Prompted By Door-to-Door Sales
/ Stories
Once past the gate, I lit a cigarette and noticed that my hand was trembling.
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Covidream 1.1
Prompted By Dreams
/ Stories
For a time, I remain convinced that I am awake.
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From the Inside Out
Prompted By Vacation or Staycation from Hell
/ Stories
So now we have a messenger.
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Caring to say goodbye
Prompted By Caregiving
/ Stories
What does care mean when you can say goodbye? And when you cannot?
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An American family — myth, memory, imagination, and lies
Prompted By Family Myths
/ Stories
One can only imagine the glories and horrors...
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Getting Organized, or… How I Joined the Wobblies
Prompted By Get Organized
/ Stories
Don't agonize... Organize! — Mother Jones
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Ah, Hollywood!
From the Other Side
Prompted By Affairs of the Heart
/ Stories
That 'Cliffie who had a crush on me who I blew off as a pest and lived to regret it...
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The Time Capsule
Prompted By Libraries
/ Stories
In the womb of this arcane atmosphere, my imagination flourished...
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Rimpoche Chogyam Trungpa’s Crazy Wisdom
Prompted By Hacks and Scams
/ Stories
...too complicated to categorize
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The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Prompted By Potpourri (Writer's Choice)
/ Stories
(as reported in The University Times)
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Hirth from Earth
Prompted By Final Farewell
/ Stories
My friend Hirth died five years ago, today. I don't think he'll mind if I bring that up. Whatever I did, he was down with it; whatever he did, I was down with him.
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I smell elephants…
Prompted By Kindergarten
/ Stories
More and more these days, I been working overtime in an attempt to channel this little guy. I have a lot to learn from him. I think my old man took this picture with a giant Speed Graphic just before we moved from the federal housing projects in Boston’s Jamaica Plain. We relocated 30 miles…
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Black Ice
Prompted By Weather
/ Stories
The wheel felt woozy in my hands and the truck began to float.
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Beach Reads — Sankaty Head, Herman Melville, and the wreck of the Andrea Doria
Prompted By Beach Reads
/ Stories
...the house felt huge, empty and swept by onshore winds that buffeted the old frame building.
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...all fiction writers are liars.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Prompted By Social Media Friendships
/ Stories
Professor watches amazed as 16 students disappear into broadband stream
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Okay, Charlie
Prompted By Learning to Drive
/ Stories
I had to hold onto the steering wheel to reach the pedals.
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The Soviet Matter
Prompted By Cold War Coping
/ Stories
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
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Hope is a thing with feathers
Prompted By Earth Day
/ Stories
Genuine, hopeful retreat is possible.
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Que Lastima
Prompted By Poetry
/ Stories
“Que lastima,” says a delicate-featured little girl. What a pity.
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Conscientious objector or draft dodger?
Prompted By Betrayal
/ Stories
The great river of class, culture and convictions afforded me a way out.
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Putnam Avenue
Prompted By My First Apartment
/ Stories
Don’t try to brush aside a death in the family. It won’t work.
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California
Prompted By New Beginnings
/ Stories
That year, summer vacation released us into the unknown.
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Gates of Eden: the genesis of an antiwar novel*
Prompted By The Draft & Vietnam
/ Stories
My antiwar writing began in a theater. I was working on a new play and the antiwar movement of the 1960s came up in conversation. Several of the actors expressed amazement that there had been a determined movement to stop the war. One actor said something like “Wow! We just thought that all…
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A new wave is calling BS on you.
Holes in my head
Prompted By Accessorize, Accessorize
/ Stories
When I first saw this Retro prompt, a David Sedaris essay* came to mind. Here, Sedaris laments the lack of worthwhile accessories for men. “[Accessories” for men aren’t nearly as interesting as women’s,” he writes. “I have no use for cuff links or suspenders, and while I’ll occasionally pick up a new tie, it hardly…
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Good Riddance — A future retrospective
Prompted By Good Riddance
/ Stories
Now we can begin anew.
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The Kiss Messenger
Prompted By Fame
/ Stories
I wasn’t smitten by love or lust, but fame, especially when well-deserved, can be, well… awesome.
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Placerville, 1888 — Galoots in mud boots
Prompted By Vintage Photos
/ Stories
I had no idea that part of me had come from this place, a California boardwalk town in the northern Sierras. I’d grown up in Massachusetts. Save for one trip to California when I was 10, I knew California as a distant, colorful place that gift packages materialized from, sent by my West Coast aunts…
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The Lost Coast
Prompted By The Twilight Zone
/ Stories
The darkness stretches away in a perfect circle.
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Time is a river…
Prompted By That Was Then, This Is Now
/ Stories
. . . a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already gone past. — Marcus Aurelius
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Sunday Morning at the Monarch Diner
Prompted By My Hometown
/ Stories
You can't go home again... or can you?
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Cranking it out — a reflection on the end of work
Prompted By Retirement
/ Stories
Is this retirement? I ask. Nah.
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One year later… tremendo aché
Prompted By A Year in the Life
/ Stories
"Oh, I think the Haitians know how to take care of themselves."
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My friend
Prompted By Marijuana
/ Stories
Season after season, he perfects his crop amidst civilization's sturm und drang.
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Technology — Hydra’s extropic head
Prompted By Technology
/ Stories
Extropy — an evolving system of tools, methods, and techniques guided by values and standards intended to improve the human condition.
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Recollections: Rocked in Time — blues beginnings…
Prompted By What We Listened To
/ Stories
The boy rocked in time to the music, rump bouncing against the back of a ruptured easy chair. He pushed a mouth harp across tiny teeth, accompanying a blues singer over the pops and scratches of a fast-revolving 78-rpm record. The harmonica’s discordant moan caught the rhythm, modality, and feel of the music and bounced…
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A Father and Son Reunion
Prompted By Reunions
/ Stories
Reuniting with an unrequited spirit
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Stowaways: Clyde, me, and the CHP
/ Stories
He nodded the beak of his perfectly molded, authoritarian-style trooper’s hat in my direction.
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Immeasurable, incomprehensible
Prompted By 9/11
/ Stories
Like matter, gravitational energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
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Enuf o’ this Shit
Prompted By Quick Take: How Is This Still a Thing?
/ Stories
Duck and cover seemed the height of folly, and I'd never felt immortal.
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From Scratch
Prompted By Let's Put On a Show
/ Stories
You can make up your own play from scratch. It’s different from interpreting other people's words.
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Outta the West!
Prompted By Summer of Love
/ Stories
We were going to a-go-go and the devil be damned.
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4.1 Miles and Three Hundred Fifty Years
Prompted By Immigrants
/ Stories
That was then; this is now.
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Periodo Especial
Prompted By Theater
/ Stories
Doing original theater is very different from dredging up the old chestnuts. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but laugh.
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Science: a future retrospective
Prompted By Science
/ Stories
Then, the ecstatic carnival of scientific exploration halted. But why?
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Faith?
Prompted By Faith
/ Stories
I’m writing this because somebody asked me about faith and I don’t have any.
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Too many books…
Prompted By Altered States
/ Stories
Seeking motivation, the author opened his current lit file and scrolled past folder after folder, doc after doc. Jesus, he thought, this is one big pile of writing, all these little black characters wiggling across a white screen. He recognized travelogues from Cuba, some published, most not; sketched-out narrative postcards about growing up absurd in…
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Tidal Wave
Prompted By Women's Lib
/ Stories
exploring chauvinism felt like tumbling through surf
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After decades, I’m in trouble again.
Am I Bourgeois? An unreliable narrative
Prompted By The First Time
/ Stories
What was I doing with this new scheme? Was I planning to…settle down?
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The Lotus and the Schoolboy
Prompted By Temptation
/ Stories
I’ve never been big on sin. Sin belongs to a god thing full of good, evil, and punishment, straight-jacketing people with shame, and excommunicating so many nice things. Regardless of my godless stance, at age 11, I helped myself to three temptations. First, I sought out pictures of naked women in magazines, stolen from my…
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The Unrequited
Prompted By Be Careful What You Wish For
/ Stories
My head snapped back and hit the wooden booth.
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Brahmins, transcendentalists, and Sunday school science
Prompted By Traditions
/ Stories
...sometimes there would be fresh snow, sparkling white on the granite steps.
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Three American Dreams
Prompted By The American Dream
/ Stories
— I — Tables sag with provender Prime ribs, suckling pigs, purple pomegranates Chewed-on, puked up, wasted detriti Litter the Persian carpets, lounging, waiting not caring Whisked up by a brown man in a white coat Armed with dustpans and broom Club chairs and sofas gleam with silk and gold fabric Pilfered from global’s…
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Change the world; it needs it.
Prompted By View from the Mountaintop
/ Stories
Turn your skills, your craft, your art into a weapon.
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The Great Beyond… Where the hell is it?
Prompted By The Great Beyond
/ Stories
Death? Perhaps I’ve seen plenty of death, although we can never get enough. We’re not allowed to; the damned thing just keeps on comin’. And I doubt that we are morbid by nature; we simply have no control over the end of life beyond the magic and ministrations of good medicine from CAT scans to…
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Scariest halloween ever — 3.0
/ Stories
...the woman ascending has never visited the devil.
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Dollars, dimes, and the Red Menace
Prompted By Best Advice: Money
/ Stories
"Welcome to the American Dream, old man. Not so fast…"
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Monk, Punk, and the San Francisco Deaf Club
Prompted By In the Band
/ Stories
"...one band, one club, and one gig."
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My Last First School Day
Prompted By First Day of School
/ Stories
“Heck,” my partner suggested “Go back to school. Who knows? — maybe you'll even learn something.”
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High Country
Prompted By Something Wild
/ Stories
I had been swallowed by the perfect madness of the wilderness.
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Work: a future retrospective
Prompted By Working
/ Stories
I am a historian on the interstellar environment Samsara, circa 3200. I explore the many time capsules that were loaded aboard the craft before we departed earth. The capsules were loaded helter-skelter in the pre-launch rush, but I take great delight in randomly sampling their contents. Today I found several intriguing artifacts that had worked…
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Lucky’s Afghans: a 20th-century disaster
Prompted By Disasters
/ Stories
How do you reconcile heartbreak and fear, sadness and jeopardy, and the sense that everything is ending? You don’t.
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Wow! I really loved your show…
Prompted By How We Met
/ Stories
The princess lost her startled expression, nodded, and looked deeper. I could see her think, Is this guy for real? How does he know about German expressionism? He’s a musician, for chrissake!
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… to bad rubbish
Prompted By Good Riddance
/ Stories
Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and all the other nasty little Neo-Cons… Feel free to add to the rubbish list. It all goes into the dustbin of history.
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Winter Sun
Prompted By Turning Points
/ Stories
Winter Sun was unloading its guitars, the Fender keyboard, PA speakers, and microphones into my Andover Street garage. It was about 3 a.m. and we had just done a free gig to benefit the Dore Street Garage, a woman’s auto repair collective. This all happened in San Francisco when feminism’s second wave was rising strong,…
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Serafina
Prompted By My First Car
/ Stories
I grew up in rural New England and, altho my dad was a scientist who worked in Boston, I spent my school years in a small public school that embraced equal measures of college prep students and shop kids. Many of my friends were the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics. Out of family…
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Bob and Carmelita’s Wedding
/ Stories
I had just returned from a tour of Alaska with a rock and roll band. It was June, 1980 and we were about to descend into the Reagan Era. The glow of the late 1960s had contracted into the dire and apocalyptic 70s and promised to flow headlong into Iran Contra. Our friend Carmelita, one…
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Midnight shift at the Bulletin
Prompted By Good Bosses, Bad Bosses
/ Stories
Asshole bosses often don’t realize they’re assholes because they’ve been assholes all their life. Like a frog who doesn’t grok that he or she is slowly parboiling in a pot of hot water, asshole bosses have usually been considered assholes since infancy. Consequently, most assholes develop early defenses to assure themselves that asshole behavior is…
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Johnny never said goodbye…
Prompted By Those We Miss
/ Stories
Ever lose somebody without saying goodbye? A friend goes off to war, he wasn’t drafted, he enlisted, it’s been awhile, you’ve gone in opposite directions. No rancor, just divergence, then gone. A girlfriend slides into her father’s car to drive home too late. You lean down, kiss her through the window. She’s so pretty, her…
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I liked Ike, but I was supposed to root for Stevenson
Prompted By That Was Then, This Is Now
/ Stories
Then: Waiting in the railway crossing shack with the gate keeper, hoping for a Boston & Maine diesel to come along. Now: Wishing I could feel the earth shake as a steam locomotive rolled past with a full load of freight, throttle wide open to make the grade. Then: Watching my mom crank the…
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Rosewood, pewter, oak, resistance, and a friend
Prompted By The Things I Keep
/ Stories
I don’t keep much. Yes, stuff clutters my life but not from way back. Family things went into diaspora after my father died. My mother wisely refused to become the widow Degelman in our little New England town. She sold the house and left for New York University to begin a new life. My personal…
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Stanley Mouse and the little white pill
Prompted By Pills
/ Stories
I wrote this piece in 2016 for the Retro prompt Altered States. I hope you enjoy this '60s tale of a little white pill. — CD
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How soccer saved me from the draft
Prompted By Sports
/ Stories
I was too short to play basketball. I wasn’t that great at baseball, although I love the game. Our little high school couldn’t afford a football team. Then along came soccer. Soccer was affordable and — so they thought — less dangerous than football. Soccer was perfect for me. I swam in summer and skied…
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A brief audible history
Prompted By What We Listened To
/ Stories
Back in the early days of the Internet, I wrote for a short-lived interactive startup in Santa Monica. I was a practicing jazz musician at the time, so of course I needed the money. Before the interactive outfit folded I happily researched and wrote a brief musical history of Mozart, a jazz jukebox, a classical…
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Charles and Louise — Liars, lovers, and mythmakers
Prompted By Grandparents & Grandchildren
/ Stories
I never knew my grandparents. They died long before I was born. My father died before he could describe them to me. Given the circumstances surrounding his time with them, I doubt that he could have told me much. Therefore, my fact-or-fiction report springs from primary source materials including pictures, letters, and newspaper articles and…
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Miles ‘Binky’ Davis — coincidence and convergence
Prompted By Pets
/ Stories
Ever confuse coincidence with causality? It can be fun. Somebody you meet on a demo in Madison, Wisconsin shows up at a concert weeks later in San Francisco. Wow! The ex-girlfriend of a city radical materializes unannounced on your rural commune. Both of you are amazed… too weird! People once directed me to the sleeping…
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Santiago de Cuba — a special period vacation
Prompted By Vacations
/ Stories
I’ve never been much of a tourist. From my days residing in the Haight-Ashbury to my thin-air existence in the Colorado Rockies, from my street musician days in North Beach to my current residence under the Hollywood sign (nope, not homeless), I’ve been an objet du tourism more frequently than I’ve been a tourist. Nothin’…
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El Año de los Muertos
Prompted By Lessons
/ Stories
Some say death can be your ally. Yeah, maybe… If you’re an Inuit shaman or a Yoruba priestess. Some days I can dig it. Mostly I doubt that death teaches us anything. Today marks the year-one anniversary of ZL’s death. I first met Z when she ran into a theater rehearsal and shouted “they’re gonna…
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What I watched, what I didn’t…
Prompted By What We Watched
/ Stories
Television came to our house late in the form of a used 10-inch Motorola with a cabinet as big as the Ritz. Sunday night was family night. Except for dinner, we weren’t big on family rituals but Sunday night was an exception. I’d be called inside to watch “The Ed Sullivan Show” (with varied interest…
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Do you, Mister Jones…
Prompted By The Draft & Vietnam
/ Stories
Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mister Jones — Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965 As a teenager I participated with the Quakers to ban the bomb. I celebrated the March on Washington and survived Mississippi Freedom Summer. I learned to play blues and folk…
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Lydia’s Cousin
Prompted By Teenager in Love
/ Stories
RURAL MASSACHUSETTS, 1960ish — Over the past year, the girls had shot up… and out. They stuck pink plastic combs into their bobby sock tops and made rude remarks to the junior high girls who had stuffed tissue paper into their bras. Beyond the scent of cologne, deodorant, Clearasil, and cliquish anxiety, the girls were…
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Hair: a devastating dilemma
Prompted By Hair
/ Stories
Hair. Always been a big deal to me. I accomplished hormonal lift-off at 11 and immediately shifted into hyper hair-awareness mode. I simultaneously stumbled upon my first rebel role model — James Dean. I became fascinated with him, not for his work in film — Who knew what a method actor was? — but for…
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Can’t Bust ‘Ems
Prompted By What We Wore
/ Stories
I still own a pair of black Can’t Bust ‘Em dungarees that I wore while working as a timber cutter at the Buckshot mine in Eldora, Colorado. I don’t wear them anymore — I’m a little beyond a 1970 waistline — but the rugged old pants still sport the brass buttons sewn onto the beltline…
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Sputnik
Prompted By Lost in Space
/ Stories
We lived at the edge of a forest in Massachusetts. The hay field across the road served as a planetarium surrounded by stone walls and maples. From there, the night sky unfolded for us: an unusual moon, the northern lights, an eclipse, but now. . . who could predict? “Tonight!” My old man shouted. “Sputnik!…
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Digger Bread
Prompted By What We Ate
/ Stories
Baking Digger bread had only one stipulation — you had to give it away for free.
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