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…
All posts tagged Brothers of the Milky Way
A Job like HM&F
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…
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…