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Feast your eyes! Pretty slick, no? Better than I deserve! And the spatial, three-dimensional novel may look better still, even with cover text and ISBN bar code. (I pause to lovingly heft the paperback that now graces my computer desk, to fan its crisp pages, inhale that dreamy new book smell. And you thought I…
In the first chapter of the blockbuster referred to so frequently on this blog, my protagonist confides a plan for San Bruno Mountain that probably wouldn’t plump his stock at a Department of Parks meeting. I hadn’t yet visited this mountain when Hank whispered his nefarious scheme during work on the first draft, but did…
Two years ago in Public Transit in L.A.: an older-but-wiser look back, I grumbled that I have seen graffiti in some San Francisco buses worse than I’d expect in a public bathroom on Venice beach. Those of you lucky enough to straphang in better governed cities might have thought I was exaggerating. If only, if…
Twelve year old Lee Joseph’s father beat him until his skin was black and blue from his hips to his ankles. Lee ran away from home, was befriended by a gay male prostitute, and turned his first trick in Houston before his thirteenth birthday. This was in 1978, four years before the Center for Disease…
I’ve never worked at a place like the HM&F factory brooded about in Brothers of the Milky Way, but did once have a job that inspired my description of Hank’s miseries there. I was just out of college, a few years younger than the artsy fellow shown with the preposterous old microbus elsewhere on this…
All I have to show today for my fifteen year career in amateur auto repair is my toolbox. I never sold it, although it has done little except take up space since the middle nineties, when I donated my old bus to a local church. The box gathered dust quietly in my apartment closet through…
One summer in my elementary school years, the dog pictured below charmed my mother and inveigled his way into a cozy sinecure of room and board in our home. This photo is the only record of him. My mother called him Rufus. He simply wandered in from the street one day, irresistibly friendly and cute…
Just in case you missed the 60 Minutes special or the White House press conference: I wrote a novel, Brothers of the Milky Way, about (among other things) the friendship between a car-crazed East Bay supermarket cashier and an environmentalist drifter. Blue Tower Press is where you’ll find the ebook; the price is right, as…