As I’ve said, I tend to avoid (or try to) the black-and-white manifestations that present themselves to me in my life. By this I mean the uncorrupted or totally corrupted of anything. I really don’t believe that the absolute bad or good exists in anything; that is, giving exception to such things as tornados and
Another story from my Tales of the Late Twentieth Century is one entitled “The Blue Light.” With the previously mentioned “Point Arena” it forms a sort of duology, fictionalizing at least one perspective of my military experience. This pair of stories may be the closest thing I would refer to as autobiographical; although, as a
In Germany, at the height of the terrorist alerts, and during the most ferocious snowstorm I had yet witnessed there, we went on deployment again. The sirens rang at two a.m.; the alert drivers stumbled from their bunks, got dressed like unhappy Eskimos in their fur-lined parkas, hopped in their jeeps, and drove out every
A Story I Never Believed Read More »
Terrorism was as much a part of my time in Germany as warm beer. There was the Red Army Faction (RAF), otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen, or RZ), and other splinter groups, copycat wannabes, until it became hard to keep track of who was blowing up whom. My German
When I was a boy, my family moved to a dilapidated old fishing camp, north of San Francisco and at the south end of the Napa Valley, called Cuttings Wharf. I never went back after we moved away, but I would guess the place is only a memory now. However, when we arrived there, in