Just today a friend forwarded me a brief excerpt from David Herbert's gossipy memoir that threw me into little paroxyisms of nostalgia:

"The English community has dwindled, not so much in numbers as in personalities. In the old days Tangier attracted individual people - people with character, eccentric, tragic people, wicked people, but seldom ordinary people. Now for the most part they are ordinary. I suppose it is the same the world over. There is no time for eccentricity because le... read more

When I bought my former home in Santa Cruz in 1974 on Dakota Avenue, there was a house halfway down the street on the other side that had been owned by local members of the COS. When it went up for sale in '75 I took a tour of the rooms and floors that had been all painted darker colors and illuminated with symbols like the pentangle here. Among the high school English classes I taught at the time was a semester elective called "Ghosts, Goblins and the Unexplainable" and one of my students wa... read more

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at end of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night....

Dylan Thomas

It's Halloweeen, the third one I have spent in Sonoma. I just finished a great 70th birthday bash that I threw for me and over 50 other friends and family last week. And here I am facing an empty Halloween once again, a hollow halloween. I have wonderful friends, including two great women friends who for their own reasons do want io go out tonight, And I do not want to do my own version of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" either. But I wonder...WTF??? I know I have made the right choice in... read more

and I somehow thought, after moving to what (I eventually learned) young people wisely called, 'Slownoma" after living in Santa Cruz for 35 years (1971 to 2005) that I would find this new home town not unlike the one I had left after those 35 years, the earlier Santa Cruz I'd moved to in the beginning of the seventies. However, these two years I've lived here have shown me that I was mistaken: it is not in any significant way like my previous home town, no matter how many years have passed, h... read more