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Category Archives: Posting

Spears

John Spears died a few Saturdays back. He had various handles: “John Costin Vincent Spears,” “JCVS,” or, more often than not, simply “Spears.” I knew him well and yet could probably count on one hand the number of times I called him John. There were other less formal tags, some but not all applied by […]

Grimaldi’s Head

Time marches forward and waits for no man. Nowhere is this more apparent than the South Ferry subway station in the chilled wee hours of a Sunday morning in December, half crocked on good whiskey following a rare appearance at a holiday party. I’d appear more if I felt less conspicuous; less alone, sweaty and […]

I Had Some Help

.. they say teamwork makes it dreamwork – Post Malone Damn straight, Post Toasty. To start with you lifted the opening riff from T.P.’s “Learning to Fly.” If you’re gonna steal, steal well, I always say. We all need a little help, particularly with those white boy hip-hop to country transitions. Everybody seems so angry these […]

Mayday

Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks – Tom Petty It’s the fifth of May and there’s snow on my deck. A full foot of it by my estimation. I was driving to the 7-11 in a whiteout blizzard last night for a bag of cookies and premade sandwich, thinking “really? …” But weather […]

Diggin’ up Bones

“I’m back ..” – Ace Frehley It temporarily wipes the slate clean. Makes you forget old regrets like backing down to Bill Shubin in eighth grade or letting Dave Rios call you ‘fuckface’ in front of Michelle Giacchino at high school scheduling. Erases the times you should have pulled the trigger but didn’t, opens that […]

Myers and the Chief

I traveled to Tahoe with Scott Miller and Tom Myers last week for our sexennial Sierra event, which sounds a bit gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but is the proper way to describe something that takes place every six years. I posted on the last trip back in 2017 and included a […]

Van The Man, Indeed

“No white man sings like Van Morrison.” So proclaimed the native San Franciscan and music journalist Greil Marcus. Whenever I use this observation in a comment section, I invariably get hit with “watch the racist generalizations” or similar sentiment. To which the reply “blow me” seems to suffice. And this is what I figure Van […]

I-80 East Revisited

Spending a lot of time on the interstate lately between sea level and Tahoe. I was stuck in a three-hour standstill just outside of Roseville a few Thursdays ago. Ninety degree heat with the engine off watching a lot of men unsuited for shorts getting out of their cars to try and get a look […]

Independent Thinking

“I can hear the fireworks / up-and-down the San-fran-cis-co bay” – Van Morrison Approaching another birthday and getting old. I never seem to “become old” but instead am always getting there. It’s like one last thing to aspire to before dying in failure. Bob Dylan has this line “I’m gettin’ old ; anything can happen […]

Bobby Z and the Lazy Repost

A long while back I took a crack at answering a post on ‘Quora’, which is a question and answer website. The question was straight-forward: “What’s so good about Bob Dylan?” Here’s what I came up with: The standard answer here, to paraphrase David Letterman on his penultimate show, is that Dylan is the greatest […]