To Get a Dog, or Not
Down the stairs of my condominium and across Campus Drive I walk along Leona Canyon Open Space Preserve. In April and May, I canter past an expanse of wild radish and California golden poppies. Below there’s a culvert and a pond lined in cattails and home to a family of mallards whose ducklings hide behind […]
The 99% in Crossett, Arkansas
When you’re in the belly of the monster You don’t consider if your lipgloss is sticky Or if your hair spray is crunchy Or how Steve Jobs, if he found himself in the same situation, Would’ve connected the dots. Even when distraction and evil influence rule the day, And the EPA is scheduled to show […]
The Morgue, the Merrier
Satchmo, of course; the Marsalis family, naturally, even Ann Rice, and her vampirish underground. But me living in Louisiana? You’ve got to be kidding! I got here on subways and BART trains, sidewalks, public parks, and noise made by people, not insects whining for hours in the summer heat loud enough to drown out a […]
Hazardous Turnips: 4
“…she was short on sleep and in no mood for bad news.” There was no other way to tell her except for straight out. “Was the whole crew laid off?” “They said they needed a more experienced operator.” “Who said?” Since the baby had arrived, Judy was short on sleep and in no mood for […]
Note to Google: Honey, Not Tonight. I Have a Headache…
Don’t get me wrong. If I need to find something on the Internet, I know how to type a few keywords inside a search box. But remember those almost bygone linear search days when all we had to do was to scan a list of blue links and choose one or two or maybe three? […]
To My Dead Namesake
To My Dead Namesake To the dead Lenore who always appears on the same Google page, an interloper who comes up in search results by virtue of our identical names, twinned on the Internet, the two Lenore’s, one a writer, the other a Route 66 historian, the first woman to receive the John Steinbeck Award for […]
The Babble Comes Full Circle
It’s kinda gonna be Oakland, people walking around Lake Merritt beneath a necklace of lights people talking on cellphones in Arabic, Spanish, Cantonese, Russian, German, Hebrew, hip-hop and everything else, a seagull looking for a good place to bash a mussel clenched in its mouth, a pfeffernusse of white daisies sprinkled on the lawn, the […]
Scrabble, Super 7, and the Public Space
“Where had I been all these years? Instead of reading books, I should’ve been at video arcades perfecting my hand eye coordination and driving vehicles up the vertical side of mountains.“ Home from work, I grab my iPad and open a Scrabble-like game that ingeniously allows me to compose words with players half-around the world, […]