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…
Back to Transitophile …
… if you’ve been rudely redirected, and are wondering why the URL in the address bar looks unfamiliar. You’re not on a Russian spam site. You didn’t swallow anything funny at lunch. This blog now lives at transitophile.com. Just like the original transitophile.blogspot.com, but without those pesky nine extra characters. No more redirects (I sincerely…
Mechanicking Memories
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…
A photo of Ruby, the good luck dog
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…
Why I wrote Brothers of the Milky Way
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…
Posts from TransitoPhile blog …
… are below, thanks to the importing capabilities of WordPress. I don’t think they look as nice as they did on transitophile.blogspot.com, but suppose I should be grateful that I can pull them in at all. In any case, you’ve been informed. Posts below = 2011. Posts above = 2013 and later.
A Los Angeles straphanger in Toronto and Montreal
What follows is an informal, incomplete comparison between the experience of riding public transit in Los Angeles and that of a rider in Toronto and Montreal. I offer the comparison because I can. I just returned from two weeks in Toronto and Montreal, and traveled exclusively by train and bus while there. Several…
Public Transit in L.A.: an older-but-wiser look back
What follow are some thoughts on public transit that I haven’t read elsewhere and think I should share. This is a “wrapping up” essay for me. I don’t live in L.A. anymore, and doubt I’ll move back. The few Angelenos who knew of my TransitPeople labors probably thought of me more as a…