fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
Audie Bock is not a household name. Only California based political nerds like myself even remember her. She was, for a brief moment, the highest ranking Green party politician in the country. Happenstance got her into that position. Ron Dellums’ retirement from the US Congress in 1998 started a daisy chain of special elections. Then-State…
You’ve changed That sparkle in your eyes is gone Your smile is just a careless yawn You’re breaking my heart You’ve changed One of the last songs Billie Holiday recorded, accompanied by strings, horns, and an angelic female chorus singing high soprano, a delicate arrangement that only enhanced the delicate state of her voice. Her…
I had never heard of Harold Camping. I am familiar with Family Radio, the station he helped to establish in the 1960s. It was one of many evangelical shortwave stations I encountered on the dial during my long years of traveling international radio. I paid it no mind. Evangelical stations are typically, though not exclusively,…
So President Obama persuaded Hawaiian officials with a personal, handwritten note to send him copies of the sacred “long form” birth certificate so that the White House can distribute the document widely and bring a hoped for end to the “silliness” about the origins of his birth. Until this week, Hawaii officials said they wouldn’t…
Since its launch last fall, the gar spot has received a goodly amount of traffic, some comments here and there, and . . . SPAM! The spam comments are caught in the snare of a spam filter, an electromagnetic mesh affair that captures the little phishing spams while allowing the more wholesome content to pass through…
This week Live Science published the article 6 Civil War Myths, Busted in time for the 150th anniversary of the start of the bloody battle. The first myth busted is that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. The article presents this alarming statistic: Across America, 60 percent to 75 percent of high-school…
Groggy from lack of sleep, I rolled over early one morning just before Get Up time and put on my reading specs then turned on the Touch to read the latest headlines. At the SF Chronicle mobile site I find this: Demographer: US has 4M adults who identify as gay. Really? I thought in…
It sat in a little white building nestled on a small block squeezed by Santa Monica and Sunset. I always had problems finding it exactly, and then there was the parking which was challenging even for a motorcycle. I didn’t drive cars in those days. It was small and crammed, the way all independent, hippy-ish…
Today I’ve had one word going through my head: GEORGE! GEOOOOORRGE! It’s impossible to represent with letter and words and punctuation the raw emotion evoked when Elizabeth Taylor belched it from her gut in scene after scene of her Oscar winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She was only 34 at the time, but she…
Big Bird and I have grown grey together. If you look at him closely, you’ll see a tuft of white feathers on top of his head. It’s been there for a while, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t born that way. Maybe he was, and I just don’t remember. But in any case, it pleases…
