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2024
Primitive, Emotional Beasts
Focused on Failure
My Life As a Cook
Thinkers and Doers
Nature’s Experiment
The Election of Elon Musk
Che vuoi? What do you want?
The key to The Liquor Closet
The economy of desire
Can this city be saved?
Why do some people seem to enjoy being angry?
The power of psychological mirroring
Fixated on growth
The great Arizona food desert
The Brutish and The Clever
The terror, the terror
Planning for the past
You can’t always get what you want
Alive and conscious of it
The mastery of nature
The tales we spin
What is this moment?
The rise and fall of schemers, empire builders, and big talkers
Encountering Counter-Enlightenment
How I earned “Most Improved in Canoeing”
When reason vs. faith
Homo whaticallus?
Reverting to orality
The choices we make
Life and death on Hwy. 101
The religion of politics
On whispering to flies
Are we governable?
Firmness and flexibility
Forget about death
Dishwasher Chess
Biochemical Me
Finding time and space
On dying happy
Between sameness and difference
Serenity or turmoil?
A sequence of random events
It’s life and life only
Does the universe require a prime mover?
The Emotional States of America
If water could talk
Perfecting my disappearing act
Of mind and meat
One with everything
Health and science denial
2023
America’s politics: Tit for Tat
Freedom, first and last
Sonoma Noir
Systems of self-propagation
Woe is democracy
A bias towards becoming
Rushing towards oblivion
Rise of the machines
The authoritarian magic helper
What is the forbidden fruit?
When worlds collide
Our terrible love of war
How we rule
On hating haters
A crime boss of botany?
Can humanity be reduced to an algorithm?
Taking care of business
Should public hate speech be illegal?
The MAGA-Anarchist Revolution
The opposite of woke
Dharma Barbie
The other Oppenheimer
The soliton of self
Enough?
It’s all Greek to us
An ugly cost of green energy
Tune in, turn on, be woke
When the hypothetical becomes real
Everything for everybody or oblivion
Consciousness without intellect
America’s political anti-hero
Once upon a time
Universal me
Our fundamental confusion
AI and the implicate order
On being neurotypical
What’s the point?
The seed of consciousness
Nothing Isn’t
Transcending our predatory animal nature
The fluid continuity of the real
Blues and the abstract truth
Feeding the tiger
A pinnacle of success
Why we must endure
Have you thanked your kidneys lately?
Breaking symmetry
The probable uncertainty of being
Nature always wins
The life and death of a Vasculopath
My new friend ChatGPT
Irrational rationality
Walter Clifford Barney – RIP
The Unnatural Selection Zone
Universal public education and freedom of thought
2022
What’s holding you together?
Free speech: the end or the beginning?
It’s a loud, loud, loud, loud world!
Our place in objective reality
Squrlz in da hood
The economy of systems, living and otherwise
Floitin’ with Fascism
Being Green
The persistence of self
Being Green
Survival of the adaptablist
Being Green
Does the universe have a purpose?
Being Green
Warfare within, warfare without
Being Green
Set Theory, Intersectionality, and the Self
Being Green
The progress delusion
Being Green
The 10th Commandment
Being Green
The age of innocence
Being Green
Does life have a purpose?
Being Green
America, the game of
Being Green
Is modern society making us crazy?
Being Green
When money talks, people listen
Being Green
Moving to The City of Decline
Being Green
Reversion to the mean
Being Green
Life, the opera
Being Green
The evolution of All-About-Me
Being Green
The power of misnomers
Being Green
Metaphorical Me
Being Green
Excuses don’t count
Being Green
I don’t buy it
Being Green
“Malignant dissociative contagion”
Being Green
We are fine, yes?
Being Green
California’s anti-democratic housing regulations
Being Green
The ins and outs of fast-food
The human sacrifice of America
Being Green
Purple Haze
Being Green
Enslaved to technology
Being Green
The end of titles?
Being Green
America’s Taliban
Being Green
Ufology
Being Green
The Universe of Yes
Being green
A tough fact to swallow
When we are mythtaken
Not just a Jew in name only
Touching the earth
Is crazy the new normal?
Prognostications on the future
When the Boomer bubble pops
Old photos
Resisting the bureaucratic mind
Inflection point
Killing our way to a better tomorrow
Fences, neighbors, and private property
A taste of freedom
2021
Traveling at the speed of faith
Take that, Mr. D!
My final column, perhaps
What we leave behind
The hub of the wheel
A life of food and cooking
On being silly
The truth of false duality
How cool is that?
A topology of being human
When life is worth living
Leaving Traces
The democratizing debacle
The best or the worst of times?
Coming back?
Equality before the law, and otherwise
This too, too solid flesh
Finally Fascism
More equal
The blemish of history
In the land of the Id and the home of the crazed
Gangs of U.S.
The edge of the abyss
Judge, juror and executioner
Embracing chaos
Civilization and its malcontents
Born hungry
On the wild bird circuit
From fluidic to concrete
Fumblers, stumblers and bumblers
Commercial free
Trumpism without Trump
The “hi ya’ honeeeey” syndrome
The willful and the passive
GOP Doublethink
The whole story of everything
Navigating intersubjective reality
McConnell’s Solomonic Solution
America’s fight reflex
Invasion of the hippocampus snatchers
The banality of banality
The revolution that didn’t
The future of American democracy is poor
Are we better than this?
The Joy of Chaos
Iconoclasm at the Capitol
Cheerleader or doomsayer?
Hacked to pieces
2020
Freedom, selfish and otherwise
Anger and our quest for shared emotional intimacy
Better dead than red?
My bullet-riddled body
Living in a doctrinal world
Between reason and feeling
American Feudalism
After Life
The strange case of Donald Trump
Semi-woke
Developing Herd Humility
Signs of Election
Your part in America’s highest rated sitcom
In the beginning was the word
That Fly
Karma, Trump and America’s Shit Show
America’s Putsch
The Great Purification
The continuity of catastrophe
Hating the haters
I’m afraid of the big, bad wolf
Apocalypse ready
Shih the hermit
America’s Kulturkamph
Reclaiming my time
On globalism
The joy of chronic illness
It’s Time for America’s 21st Century Nuremberg Trials
From bias to bigotry
The venality of evil
The image instinct
An early lesson in systemic bias
Just so much fertilizer
Between impulse and reason
Optional locust coverage
Nature’s resonant harmonic
Lawn Sign Politics
Outliers, Westworld and Trump
Where we are now in the story and how it ends
The left’s dilemma
Surviving Trumponavirus
Collapse of the imaginary economy
Masking our feelings
Gettin’ hairy
The stimulus check shell game
The battle of the trees
RNA: Triumph of the willful
Unmasked
My April Fools’ ads that never made it to print
We’ll always have Paris: A eulogy
A week of Sundays
In the time of no toilet paper
Pandemic and the domestication of people
Tearing the ties that bind
Watchin’ the end of the world on TV
A Buddhist final exam
The Piper pandemic
Covid-19: A war of the worlds
The human experiment
America’s not ready
The growth paradox
The problem of evil
The homelessness Tsunami
Accessory Dwelling Units, aka: ADUs, a building industry dream come true
Progress at all costs?
2019
1967 and the death of Groovy
Homage to The Great Waveform
A not so grand theory of
How to create affordable housing
The craziness
Change fascinates us
Gaming the system
Passing the baton
Front Porch Fantasy
The meaning of life
The Golem of Artificial Intelligence
Life at the Improv
Talkin’ Dog-talk
Knock-Knock
Regional Gods and local heroes
Theft and corruption
The instrumentality of machine intelligence
A border crisis?
Deconstructing Sonoma
Your real-life 3D movie
The limits of freedom
Society recapitulates phylogeny
Perpetual elections
Particular forms of torment
No, we can’t all get along
2018
My 400 mouths to feed
The animate and the inanimate
No land left for affordable housing? Hogwash!
Eating out side of the box
Screen time — then and now
Dimples in Space-Time
Let them eat plastic
Craving a dose of reality
Sonoma’s Urban Growth Boundary in Maturity
My life as a sheep
Justice and mercy
The Beauty – The Horror
Everything matters
The dogma of no dogma
The business of politics as entertainment
The roots of ecstasy
Seeking Ecstasy
Ecstasy in everyday life
The Best and Worst of Times
The future is certain
The horror, the horror
The view from my back yard
Pot Shopping
Are you being too hard on yourself?
The devolution of consciousness
Mother Earth’s Hot Flash
Nearing 70 but still livin’ in the 60s
The Democracy Experiment
2017
Authoritarianism in America: The view from 2050
Things to Come
Welcome to the Dark Side
On ants and massacres
Getting a grip on suffering
Sonoma Valley’s fires and The Black Swan
The fire of compassion
The Dark Side
From “Themsies” to “Selfies”
Confessions of a cactus and succulent nerd
Virtual Reality is dead; long live Augmented Reality
Three-brained beings
Our 21st Century, post-modernist mess
When Fascism arrives at the ballot box
Your life as an amoeba
It’s so easy being green
The responsibility of leadership
Men’s war on women
Sonoma, Super-Sized
The pathology of happiness
Sonoma’s Touristary-Industrial Complex
Hit and myth
Why it’s so hard to relax
The search for autonomy
When life throws you a curve
Disfavoring moral complexity
Sonoma’s examples of real, true and beautiful
Predictably predictable
Sonoma’s new oligarchy
Paranoid leader, paranoid state
Modern man in search of a smart phone
The soul of Sonoma
Name your psychopathology
Rise of the grunting symbolists
Sonoma’s choice: community or cash cow
In praise of elites
The rise of the underground
America’s mean streak
Beyond Orwell, way beyond
Gaia’s Garden
A return to the Byzantine
Want to know your fortune?
Call Me Spanky
Right back where I started from
Urine Trouble
In appreciation of quiet
Dehumanizing Humanity
2016
Ubu Trump
In love with the glow
Body, Mind and Universe
Game Over
The Pseudo-Science of CEQA and an EIR
Capitalist Morphology
America’s Angry White Men
Sex and male aggression
My high school reunion
Just Sayin’
Grandfather Yoga
The Liberation of Lowered Expectations
When men are pigs
Fixated on the future
Intelligence, talent and ambition
Competition, sportsmanship and politics
With regard to difficult people
Mean and Hurtful
Fevered Visions of Dystopia
Rights of the trans-human community
Cloud Nine
Levels of abstraction
The peril of hatefulness
The equanimity of annoyance
Must history repeat itself?
Eating Sunlight
RoundUp, Slavery and Avarice
Credit, debt and revolution
Feeling Angry – Being Kind
A trail of crumbs
Sonoma’s true vocal minority
Eating Chicken Little
Robberhood and his Merry Men
Exceeding Sonoma Valley’s carrying capacity
Food-as-utility
This must be what’s called getting old
A language like none other
A NIMBY by any other name
Does Sonoma’s History Matter?
On learned ignorance
The color of greed
Changing our narrative of conflict
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Affordable Housing and Sonoma’s Wheel of Samsara
Big Pharma’s Inverted Values
Selling Off Sonoma
Trumped up by Trump
The Dumbed Down States of America
Sonoma County’s Vacation Rental Betrayal
The child of invention
Nationalism and Individualism
Holding the Middle Ground
2015
The aesthetics of intoxication
Preferring Royalty
Our War of the Worlds
Friend or Food
Technology takes command
Managing Fear
Cultural identity and gender science
Tourism as entertainment
From Eco to Echo
Experience, memory and time
From Homo sapiens to Homo economicus
Baseball-bat-leaf-blower-badda-bing-badda-boom
On caring for green, living things
Blythedale, with a “y”
The flip side of SMART
It’s not easy being puny
O’ Donnie, We Know Ye Too Well!
Homo Sapiens 2.0
Homage to Oliver Sacks
The Unnatural World Moves Too Quickly
Williams-Sonoma as Catalyst
The horror, the horror
The Age of Airnarchy
El Niño is not our friend
Not, but also not not
Why the public water business sucks
Why do people put up with all this crap?
Global OCD: Greece, Germany and Palestine
Ritual killing and the death penalty
A Tendency to Tamper
On Being Transcategorical
The Mindfulness Mess
The coolest geriatric generation in history
Homelessness and our fictional economy
No Neighbors/No Neighborhood: The Vacation Rental Problem
The Happiness Habit
Sonoma’s Creeping Urbanism
Sustainable Ethics
Council deafness on Broadway Oaks
In Deep Water
Ornaments of Liberation
Majoring in Philosophistry
Death as a selling point
Dreamies and Movies
The world’s most powerful religion
Busted by my refrigerator!
The Dynamic Tension of Society
The decline of the intellectual
Life’s Dynamic
Madness in a crazy world
Sports and the Great American Head Injury
Good man, bad man
Half-vast ideas
Unity Through Diversity
Water Rights and Wrongs
2014
America’s Security Oafs
Oil Price Skeptic
Wealth-Porn Addiction
Unreliable Testimony
Clicketty-Clack
A skeptic’s bread and butter
Thanksgiving – Thanksgetting
Fast money, slow money and no money
Coming to terms with Halloween
Ebola Rising
Crazy wars of assassination
Infections, virus and hacking! Oh my!
The dawning of the age of aquarium
Oceanic Mercury
Why government is not a business
Not so Grimm Fairy Tales
If not for communication, what’s a metaphor?
Multilingual Multiculturalism
Mistaking Ignorance for Wisdom
Monopolies of knowledge
The poverty problem
The role of ritual
The case for a $15/hr. minimum wage
Alison Von Derland
Fee-fi-foe-fum
He lives in a pineapple under the sea
The rationality of the irrational
The pepperoni tears of Richard Wagner
Cause and blame
The social mythative
Things created, things destroyed
Outmoded and outworn
Radiation sickness
How we play the game
Some reflection on nicknames
The nature of land speculation
Figure and ground
Sonoma wine tasting — welcome to the bubble
The fires of hell
Come again another day
Sonoma wine bars: from cachet to cliché
Transparency in government
The living dead
Sentimentally Sonoma
Words and meaning
So who’s the boss?
The importance of being plastic
Baby-sitting the baby-sitters
The explicit and the hidden
2013
The nomadic life of an information gatherer
My daily paper
Regarding all appearances as divine
The All-American game
Regarding the infinite
The unintended consequences of doing nothing
On poppin’ counterfeit pills
Is my wife a witch?
$elling $onoma
In the bubble of time
The grammar of place
Signifying nothing
The umpire strikes back
Can you feel it?
A victory of stats
Sonoma’s Thneeds
Ordinary madness
Across the homegrown bagelverse
The consumption spiral
The notebooks of von Meier
The process in place is corrupted
Marking territory
Guiding the hand of government
Let them eat bugs…in space
The real tourist trap
All politics is internal
Living in an immaterial world
What weather type are you?
Going nuclear
Oh those Giants
Letting boys be boys
Citizenship in the 21st Century
The food of the gods
Disturbing the established order
Drone wars
In praise of old and shabby
Marking time
Preserving Sonoma’s small town character
Masculine and feminine
From hunter to hunted
Life’s puzzle
American mythology circa 6013 AD
The Priests of Dionysus
The lowliness of the long distance writer
The business of America
Understanding greed and envy
Vampires among us
Thievery plain and simple…or not
Know thyself?
Civilization by the numbers
A well regulated Militia
2012
Perfect boredom
Idealizing violence
In their own image
What’s precious
Our Mandala of meaning
The politics of have-not
Unnatural selection
And long may it wave
Gutenberg’s end
The mother of us all
Jobs folly
Malled in America
Society is basically good
All the food that fits
This column is 100% natural
Finding America in the funny pages
No beginning, no end
Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber
The way of the western
The Higgs Aether
Mass murder and free will
Resting in complexity
I like Ike
Ignorance is strength
The tempest of a teapot
The arrow of time
Technology: good, bad or neutral?
Art, love, time and money
The specialist-as-ignoramus
The mythology of self
The engine of survival
Who owns the truth?
Sticks and stones may break my bones…
The consciousness problem
Doing human being
A boy and his Saurus
A price, love has
Freedom’s just another word
Winners and losers
Getting out
Breakable
Hunting and gathering at Safeway
Loss and gain
Is knowledge power?
The psychology of the inconceivable
Rich good, poor bad
The thing upon which we all agree
On the passing of an old friend
Marijuana madness
The tyranny of fiction
2011
Happy Old Year
New gets old
It’s all about you
My dinner with Audré
Ripe fruits and red rumps
From the Starship Latke Gravis
The meaning of life
A bite of the apple
Just one of the gals
You are your credit score
The myth of management
Last and first men
The taxonomy of taxes
Coming to terms with the bib
Dark matter comes to light
The season to be stupid
My ears are burning
The pursuits of happiness
The mother of necessity
Recession redux
The last Roundup
How I learned to stop worrying and love satire
CEO: American royalty
What’s the point, y’ know, of communicating?
So sing The Supremes
The Sellout
Education 19th century style
All hostages are killed, don’t worry
Powerful men who can’t keep it in their pants
Eating ourselves to death
Attila the Hun: neighbor’s report
Waiting for Godzilla
I shoulda been a bank
Pondering the imponderable
To hell with us
The mother’s milk of what?
The miracle of folded proteins
The overfishing of America’s wallets
Walter’s hot dogs
Nuclear disaster: the folly of duck and cover
The decline of penmanship
Kibble for people: an update
Democracy of make-believe
The Panopticon
The Bull of Brooklyn
About love
A portrait of the artist as a very young girl
Have Netflix, will time travel
Hurrying forward while running away
The Forum of the Twelve Caesars
Torture, they said
2010
The gifts of hospice
Living in a banana peel world
My body lies over the ocean
Life just wants to be
What do you mean you don’t like ketchup?
Space within space
Three nights in Vegas
Earth without people
Why here, why now?
Welcome to The Dopotel
Nations at war against themselves
Political anger management
I’m a body man
Leaf blower? It must be Wednesday
21st century aether
Picky, picky, picky
Maybe aliens from space will save us
The contextual self
Making peace becomes a crime
My life as a turnip
When bad words happen to good people
The end of the mailman
Stuff happens. Now what?
Gathering of the clan
For the sake of a great shave
The perverted aspirations of barbarians run rampant
A universe of WIMPS and MACHOS
What I meant to say
Gender Blowback: Part Two
Gender blowback: fear of feminine
The power of the pile
Fully surrendering to love
Monday Morning 10:04 AM
Heath care in the cross-hairs of history
In the hot tub in the rain
America’s new economic demographic
Can you help me, honey?
The whole in part
Don’t bank on it
About my old man
A guide to difficult times
Blackmail by credit card
A matter of health
Mouth shut mind open
Trader Horn meets Avatar
An irresistible memory of oneness
Survival of the most cooperative
Getting ready for 2012
The great spam war of the early 21st century
2009
Once upon a time in America
Leaning into hate and fear
My dream vacation
Heaping insult upon tragedy
Nowness for dummies
One man’s junk – another man’s treasure
An epidemic of happiness?
2009: A space oddity
The inconceivable lightness of being
Profiling…just for the fun of it?
Rebuilding a truly prosperous economy
Row your boat
Attention K-Mart shoppers
Looking back at the future
And what if stars are great celestial beings?
Chinese Czechers
The body of metaphor
Someone’s in the kitchen I know
The dawn of ego
Upon knowledge, generally
Enduring a torturous debate
The animate and the inanimate
Not leading by example
Increasing Gross Municipal Happiness
Pirates, Incorporated – The world’s first IPO
My Father, My Self
Swine flu over the cuckoo’s nest
For the sake of a good harvest
The celebrity of nothing
The metaphysics of the ordinary
A note from Mommy
Cycles
From the mouths of dogs
The power of choice
Meditation on the heart-breakingly beautiful
This statement is false
A simple weekly column
Reflections of a Post-Darwinian
The economy of enough
Nice letters and nasty notes
The joys of tea
Playing the fool
A slice of time saves dimes
Yet another modest proposal
Creating our better self
UFOs and advanced civilization
The name is the rose
Time, nowness and attention
Depression jobs in abundance
The breath of the world
All the wrong places
The domino effect revisited
2008
Seeking happiness in objects of enjoyment
Pork spareribs in mourning sauce
Goin’ nukular
Boys, men, victims and heroes
Drawing on greatness
Bumps in the road
On ‘muttness’
Congratulations, you got the part
It’s the end of the world as we know it
The economy of my secret self
The aging of Aquarius
Wall Street’s Dow of physics
Emergence, confusion and wisdom
Wheels, wheels and more wheels
Don’t say I didn’t warn you
In contemplation of 9/11
Not so mad men
84,000 degrees of happiness
Confessions of a recovering sarcastic
Considering the universe within
Playing the confidence game
Speaking with silence
The marriage of Abbott and Costello
A webocracy of disembodied relationships
A lover not a fighter
Vox Populi
Apocalypse later
The soft underbelly of the Internet
Bashing God for fun and profit
Cable TV truth or fiction: You be the judge!
This truth is false
Spring training
Empire’s decline
The sutra of the heart of financial knowledge
Feeling green with envy
Desire that’s perfectly pure
Anger and racism in America
Life among the brokenhearted
The nature of natural
The dysfunctional democracy of America
Hard work, thrift and the new American way
It’s how you play the game
On making dogs of heroes
Non-obstructed interpenetrating simultaneous arising
If animals could talk
The world as it is
Of art and the sacred
Dinner for the vultures
A world beyond words
Hip bone connected to the …
It’s life and life only
New Year’s Letter 2030
2007
Me, Mine, Thee and Thine
When it’s all about nuts
The kindness of strangers
Why I will not talk in music class
Falling apart
Women are from Venus, men are from wherever
The decline and fall of the lovely pink shirt
A rose by any other name
Illness as a fashion statement
Blaming it on the system
Paying the piper
The sex lives of others
That number is no longer available
Chocolate Buddha: The exploitation of enlightenment?
Who’s not weird?
A child of the woods
America the beautiful depressed
Deconstructing reductionist philosophy
The probability waves of intention
Seeing the invisible
Discovering the unburied life
Creating Suburbitat not Suburbia
War used to be hell
The third chimp
Longevity equals awareness of every moment
Drowning in a sea of sound
Why I don’t write fiction
A display of primordial intelligence
Understanding the nature of discovery
Earth, air, fire and water
First the murder, then the chicken noodle soup
The tyranny of normal
Life as a virtual experience
Flexibility and firmness
The business of city council business
For the love of a great shine
Marketing the hunger diet
The forgiveness of the world
I know historic character when I see it
Shellfish on Prozac
On cultivating kindness
A cup of tea
The airport security full-body massage
The ultimate truth about French toast
Man enough to tell the truth
The sweet mystery of life
When baby boomers’ health hits the wall
Thoughts on the ‘surge’
A perfect new restaurant just for you
The new, improved death and taxes
Corporate health care vs. Sonoma
Just a matter of opinion
2006
In anniversary of the New Year’s flood
Illuminating the way of citizenship
My life as a particle
A look back at 12 years on city council
The myth of adulthood
For those of you unfamiliar with the term
Stop the world, I want to get off
The Morse Code of Heaven
Affordable housing – a philosophy or an obligation?
Understanding Sonoma’s UGB: Scarcity and abundance
The politics of green
The algebra of good and evil
A eulogy for fallen giants