Books & Writings
As the editor of the Bohemian, Pacific Sun, and North Bay Magazine, I’ ve learned something about deadlines—they’re addictive. So, when I’m off the clock, I publish books (essays, how-to’s, neo-noir sci-fi) and my own one-man magazine newsletter exploring how creativity becomes culture.
Join me here:
In Print
Columns
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The Arts Racket
Dear Artist—Let me applaud you for staying in the game. The arts are a tough racket. They’re one of the few human endeavors that have to justify their existence and yet they’re also one of the defining elements of our humanity. Remove the arts and we’re shaved apes. Their production comes with personal risk. You’re…
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Beautiful Corpus
A young person recently asked me what they should write to make money. “Checks,” I said. Then I had to explain what a checkbook was. About halfway through the history lesson, I could tell I had lost them. So I offered a more contemporary answer: Due to market forces well beyond our control—everything from artificial…
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Manifest Your Manifesto
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” observed motivational speaker Jim Rohn. Well, hell. I spend much of my time with “creative people,” a professional hazard that explains quotidian lunacy of my life. It’s not me, it’s them—I’m just the sixth wheel, suffering the agony of their influence.…
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On Purpose
There comes a time in everyone’s life when they realize their lifespans—when compared to the great, yawing expanse of time immemorial and its unimaginable end—are but a nanosecond, a blip, a nothing burger trapped between infinite buns. I was a 13-year-old aspiring Petaluma punk when this occurred to me. Some time-lord weirdo had inscribed a…
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Happy 250, America: When a Nation Fails to Show Up to Its Own Party
Unless one counts the “Ultimate Fighting Championship Freedom 250” fracas on the White House lawn as the pinnacle of civic celebration, one might conclude that the federal government has phoned in the nation’s semiquincentennial celebration. This is giving real every-other-weekend bad-dad-forgot-your-birthday energy. This is some gas-station bouquet, silver-anniversary-level crap. This is “I thought your mom…
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Happy Midsummer, Midsommar, Midsomer
Sunday’s summer solstice marked the exact middle of the summer season, which both starts and ends sooner than one might expect when yoked to the arbitrary calendar of, say, middle school rather than the celestial mechanics of our planet. Note to Alice Cooper: Technically speaking, “School’s out for midsummer!” Much of Scandinavia recognizes this moment…
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Father’s Day: The Ties That Bind
Father’s Day is here, which means many of us will participate in the annual ritual of pretending we don’t want anything while secretly hoping someone buys us noise cancelling headphones because somebody left the “Jane Remover” on—whatever that is. In the days of yore on these fateful Sundays, fathers have received neckties. The next time…
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Commencement Speech
Dear Class of 2026—congratulations… You did it. You survived active shooter drills, pandemics, wildfire smoke, AI plagiarism scandals and the mass psy-ops known as social media. Someone is proud of you (and if you don’t have that person, it can be me). I once attended a graduation whereupon the guests were treated to an uneven…
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1976: The Running Fence meets The Judgement in Paris
50 years ago this year, California’s drought of 1976 was so severe that we in the burbs kept buckets in the shower to use the run-off to water our lawns and load our squirt guns. A neighbor had a sign in their bathroom that read, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush…
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Black, White & Read All Over
I have spent my entire career weathering the vicissitudes of the media game—from classified ad-eating Craigslist in the early internet to paywall snafus (“information wants to be free—oops”) to the algorithmic siphonings of social media, Big Tech’s annexation of advertising and the ever-receding mirage of the creator economy. Some will argue the future has never…
