Bakersfield
Dedicated ESL Teacher Retires
(I wrote the following announcement about the retirement of my friend and former colleague Gary Christiansen and, without byline, it was published in the Bakersfield Californian on May 24, 2019.) Long ago friends and colleagues of Gary Christiansen began to wonder how he could teach a four-hour English as a Second Language class five mornings…
Read MoreDrink the Giant Orange
I rush into the art museum and within minutes feel thirsty and hot and dizzy. I spot relief in a painting called Giant Orange topped by a tall orange and black sign and staffed by a pretty young lady inside a huge orange ball below. “Whaddya got to drink?” She looks at me as if…
Read MoreWild Child Plays Like The Doors
Tonight I decide to stay home and watch the documentary Muscle Shoals about many great singers appearing in a small Alabama town to record music. Down in the land of high humidity and slow-talking, Aretha Franklin enlivens everyone with pure and powerful vocals like those of Wilson Pickett and the Rolling Stones and others in…
Read MoreGuns in Classrooms
I arrive late to a packed board meeting of the Arid School District in your community and have to join others pressed against the wall and already listening to speakers address the five popularly-elected trustees of the school board who sit behind a long desk on the dais. “Guns are inherently offensive, not defensive,” says…
Read MoreNorthwest Catastrophe
seattle mourns seahawks move to bakersfield
Read MoreYoung Cowboy Sings Country
Merle Haggard may have passed but he hasn’t departed. He’s enjoying this tribute to his life and work. On stage at the Bakersfield Music Hall of Fame, a sleek new place highlighted by polished wood floors, cushioned seats, and sharp acoustics, popular country singers from Haggard’s hometown and the Central Valley are delivering four hours…
Read MoreMoney in the Bank
There aren’t any good jobs in L.A., and I’m sick of work anyway. I don’t even want to sell drugs anymore. I’ve got a better plan. Two friends and I are going to knock off a bank in Bakersfield. It would be too tough in L.A. In Bakersfield we’re dealing with hicks. I figure we…
Read MoreKobe Decides
This story is in the collection “Basketball and Football”
Read MoreCrazy Return to Golf
I didn’t know whether to blame Jason Day or Davis Love so I rebuked both for casting a curse I thought would never return. Only in hindsight did I realize I should’ve blamed myself. I’d chosen not to write or go out and do something fun on a recent Sunday, and instead reclined on the…
Read MorePortraits on Glass
I’m a little nervous before talking to audiences about my work but usually warm up and tell part of my story and then am ready to improvise and answer questions. This morning they come nonstop from about a hundred visitors, quite a few for an art lecture, at Bakersfield Museum of Art, in the gallery…
Read MoreDrought is God’s Punishment
Until last week I thought the drought that’s squeezing California resulted from natural weather fluctuations, and didn’t want to be political or presume to have scientific insight so rarely mentioned climate change and then only as a relatively minor factor. I should’ve known there was a much simpler yet more ominous explanation, and Shannon Grove…
Read MoreArt Appraisals
To an interviewer who asked Mick Jagger if he had any art, the slender septuagenarian said, well, I just have several paintings people have given me and a few I’ve bought, but it’s definitely not what you’d call a collection, and they (the bad guys) know that so they never bother coming to my place.…
Read MoreBakersfield Number One
Bring out the beer, boys, Bakersfield’s number one again. You see the report? We got the highest rate of auto theft in the United States. My buggy was ripped off last month. I love it. We also got the dirtiest air in the country. And as more of our teenage girls get knocked up we…
Read MoreCareful, Justin Bieber
I’m surrounded by lots of nasty newspaper and magazine articles and insulting letters and want you to understand this deluge on my doorstep is the same or worse than cyber bullying. Not many understand. I’m nineteen and make fifty million a year and fans love me and I’m doing things most my age would do.…
Read MoreEnd of Suffering
Frankly, I don’t often feel well and really should say I never do. I don’t know what the problem is but try to feel better by smoking bath salts, not the stuff you use in the tub but a combination of chemicals that’re way stronger than amphetamines. This morning the bath salts hit me much…
Read MoreThe Right Room
First time in Puerto Vallarta I was hungover standing at basin, looking into fright, when woman popped from stall behind and said sir are you aware this is women’s bathroom. Years later long sober I stood in Bakersfield theater as two women entered and one said what’s guy doing here. Leaving quickly I forgot to…
Read MoreGold Rush
Poor guy farming hardpan back East hesitated and missed first California opportunity but rode fast and walked hard in eighteen fifty-five for Kern River Rush yielding most miners three, four, even five ounces of gold daily and up to fifty bucks per. Guy didn’t have many good days and following year wadded smart aleck newspaper…
Read MoreWomen in Television News
In the vast and luxurious clubhouse of Seven Oaks Country Club, the League of Women Voters of Kern County hosts three female veterans of television news broadcasting in Bakersfield. Prior to their appearance the audience is treated to cashews and cake and a political history lesson: eleven states allowed women’s suffrage before the Nineteenth Amendment…
Read MoreKit Foxes in the Road
Four years little kit foxes, bearing the sharp angular look of underfed and downtrodden foxes, instantly scattered from the road as I reentered my neighborhood, interrupting asphalt gatherings that had followed their nocturnal dashes from dens to seek duck eggs, lizards, and insects. A few months ago the kit foxes began departing leisurely and, instead…
Read MoreBakersfield at the Movies
Legions of teenagers and adults march into theater carrying troughs of buttered popcorn and sodas large enough for elephants, and guffaw during previews of teddy bear wrestling man, creamed pants jokes, president slicing face open to reveal he’s bullet-dodging, axe-wielding “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.” Amid chomping and slurping, I wonder how many here have watched…
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