Fully cocked, 6 or 7 Olympia brand dollar-beers in, I tipsily swiveled back and forth on my bar stool with temporary abandon. 30 minutes till the end of happy hour, which, at the downtown gay- and homeless-friendly pub, stretched from three to nine. I swiveled again and almost tipped off. I looked up without embarrassment…
Scenes from Yosemite—Part I The hybrid shuttle’s engine whirred down to a hum as it reached Stop #16 outside Yosemite’s Nature Center at Happy Isles. I could see several people already standing over the seated passengers, gripping the overhead rail, and there were more than a dozen people waiting with me at the stop. Room…
The septuagenarian’s Swisher Sweet curled blue smoke under the brim of his trucker’s hat. He pensively exhaled, and the early-morning sun caught the cloud’s varied thickness as it laid itself across the edge of the blank parking lot and pooled into the fir trees. He was staring slightly upwards, as though making a study of…
Sometimes you have to push yourself for a good story. Sometimes, the push is alcohol. …the thought I awoke to late one night while sleeping on the couch of my sister’s bougie Mission District Apartment in San Francisco. I had seen people hitting stems outside the Mission District’s thin hotels, their punched-up faces sucking scalding…
After a glorious, soul-warming morning spent hiking the verdant topography of Pacifica, some problems arose. I had ran down the mountain trail, and had apparently ran too vigorously, because the shirts I had taken off and stuffed in my pocket had been jogged out somewhere along the way. The only other clothing I had (other…
…was what I was mouthing my entire time in Pacifica, a sea-dewed town south of San Francisco pressed towards the ultramarine sea by yellow-green hills. Still being on East Coast time, I awoke in my sister’s apartment at 5 AM. I could’ve snuggled back into her couch, but the excitement of the new day vibrated…
“Heeey. Hey.” I turned from the queue leading to the greasy bullet-proof partition that separated the Vietnamese cashier and her products from the customers. A 30-something black woman with short, blonde-tipped dreads was close enough to my face for me to smell her booze-breath. “Hey,” I responded. “Could you buy me a dollarbeer?” “Uh…” I…
-have you heard from him in the last few days? -No…why…what did he do NOW? -Well, you know how he was on probation, and… -Did he fuck that up too? -Uh…yeah, I guess he messed that up…he sent me a text a little bit ago saying that he was waiting for a van to pick…
“How long ya been down in Middle Earth? -Boss JUST because the hike down was so exhilarating and the terminus so eye-widening, I found myself trekking for a second time from the small town of Mirador down the inside of an extinct volcano to Laguna de Apoya, a 48-square kilometer crater-lake so deep that its…
The last time I traveled extensively abroad, Obama had just been elected to his first term, and people around the world were in love with America. Europeans in particular were enamored, due to part to Obama’s tour of Europe while he was campaigning—I remember one pundit saying that his loop was “the first time an…
The Other Hudson Valley 