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So, I had a vision this morning in which I visited the moon. What’s that? You don’t have visions? Oh, my friend, you must learn to have visions; it is a gift that saves. I did not intend to go to the moon. I was trying to visit a figure I met in a dream: […]
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The last time I punked the muse, I wrote of the summer solstice, a meditation into the heart of the sun. My goal was to leave behind the ever-more-depressing news cycle, and touch some place deep down where hope resides. We live in the Sun, I concluded. I envisioned a home where we could all […]
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Today I write on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. As someone who has been influenced by not a few pagan practitioners and Wiccan wonder workers, along with more conventional priests and monks of various religious varieties, I am attuned to the turning of our planet in the cosmos. Striving to be […]
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I am meditating. In a room in Rodeo, at the rickety old secretary/dresser I use as a desk. It is by a window. I look out at the roadway, and think I am glad to live at a crossroad. The house across the street is silver grey. By its front stoop is a tree all […]
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June is an ambivalent month for me. As a child it meant the start of summer vacation, and weeks spent at my grandparent’s beautiful beach home in Hyannisport. This was wonderful because it meant spending time with my siblings and seven cousins, a houseful of children of all ages, and loving—even adoring—grandparents, aunts, and uncles. […]
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This Tuesday was, by no means, a good news day. The night before was the tragedy in Manchester, England, at which a suicide bomber killed children at a pop concert. But, sad as it is, that is not the story that moved me, on this beautiful Tuesday, to tears. I care, but at this point […]
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On Thursday night, May 25, an amazing event will take place outside a BART train station in the Mission District of San Francisco, as it has every Thursday night for the past fourteen years. If you were to pass by, you might not even notice what is taking place. The corner of 16th Street and Mission […]
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Dinner party! Now that the garden is starting to look nice, and the cats are becoming less feral and more civilized, and Klopnik has begun to change (occasionally) out of his gardening clothes, the Storming Bohemian’s thoughts turn to socializing on the patio. Klopnik, who insists that he is a hermit, and, like Huck Finn, […]
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It is springtime for sure in the house of The Storming Bohemian and Argyle C. Klopnik. All day, every day, Klopnik digs his garden. Our once-chaotic backyard is now a richly soiled pile of black, with a section of lawn and some brick pathways, terraces, and several rose bushes a-blooming. (Ah-choo!) Our landlady is delighted […]
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My day job is driving on the ride sharing platform, Lyft. Several years ago, I retired from teaching school to devote myself to writing and painting and lived off savings until I couldn’t. Four years ago, I started driving Lyft so I wouldn’t have to take a straight job and could focus on my creative […]
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The Storming Bohemian is away this week, doing his taxes. He’ll return when Uncle Sam lets him loose again (next week).
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In America, everybody, it seems, wants to be a success. Me, too. Recently, I confided to a family member that sometimes, in moments of deep despair (fortunately they are fairly uncommon), I find myself contemplating suicide as the most sensible retirement plan. The road ahead, paved with potholes and poverty, sometimes doesn’t look all that […]
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When I attended professional acting school back in 1986 (the MFA program at UC Irvine, I proudly remark), I had a teacher ask me once, “Charles, are you able to feel any authentic emotion other than anger?” I paused for a bit and considered the question, before answering, truthfully, “No. I don’t suppose I can.” […]
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File this one under “they can’t Trump everything; life goes on.” Last week, I got caught up in reflections on poverty in America: mine, yours, and ours. This week, I decided to do something about it and buckle down to design a careful budget. “Ack!,” I said, early one morning. “We’ve got to make a budget […]
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Poverty may have been beloved of St. Francis, but not so much by the rest of us. Nobody likes to look at advanced poverty, toothless and drooling, clutching the hands of children who have running sores on their filthy legs. Poverty is a crackhead who pisses on the pavement, and sleeps with fleas and stray […]
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1972: War was waging in Vietnam and kids were coming home in boxes. Hippes and yippies went clean for Gene McCarthy, but George McGovern won the democratic nomination. Tricky Dick Nixon was the one for the Republicans and the so-called Silent Majority. I was a sixteen-year-old runaway revolutionary of peace and love, living in a commune, […]
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Socrates: All men are mortal. The Storming Bohemian: I’m a man. Socrates: Right, so… The Storming Bohemian: Uh oh.
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This week, I’ve found myself thinking about heroism. What makes a hero, anyway? Who should we choose for our heroes? When I was around fourteen, I developed a hero crush on W. C. Fields, of all people! I was delighted when I read about the time he and John Barrymore gave a ride to a […]
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Yesterday, walking home along the wet pavement twinkling under the sunshine, I spied a flock of no fewer than twenty-four wild turkeys parading down the street, mostly chicks. I don’t see them today, as the rain has returned, and all is gray. I live on a hill where I can look out the window to […]
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Politics has become a bloated balloon on the horizon of our days, marked with the face of the Pr*sident, grinning under his orange corona like a demented sun-god, a raucous Ra. It burns.
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Today is the day that Pr*sident Trump shut down the American borders to refugees, green card holders, and non-citizens with paid for and improved visas—if they were from certain “Muslim majority” countries… It is also the day his administration made it clear that, going forward, “Christian” refugees would be given priority over all other refugees—and […]
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Thomas Merton, the most prominent Catholic monk of the 20th century, famously left the world to live a cloistered life at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemini in rural Kentucky, taking vows and becoming Father Louis. As many will recall, he described his journey to the cloister in one of the century’s masterpieces of memoir, The […]
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In my last column, the Muse inspired me to write about dreams. And since then, I’ve been thinking about other types of altered consciousness. As a guy who often hangs out with Catholic monks, and who practices “Will Rogers spirituality”—that is, I’ve never met a religion I didn’t like—I take an interest in miracles and […]
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Do you keep a dream journal? I started as a teenager, and continue on-and-off. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a memory. Does this happen to you? Or am I confessing to something strange and pathological? Where is the line between pathology and creativity?
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Oh better far to live and die Under the brave black flag I fly Then play a sanctimonious part With a pirate head and a pirate heart!! –The Pirates of Penzance At fifteen years old, I was a runaway. It was perhaps 9:30 at night, my first night out, having hitchhiked a couple of hundred […]
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My family was always political, but I have a love/hate relationship with politics. Today, I can feel the country swinging towards madness. And make no mistake, a country can go mad. It is familiar territory, exciting and threatening, seductive and fearful. It feels good; it does NOT feel good. Or, if I may coin a […]
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Sunday: I work through the voting guide, propositions, and candidates, making my decisions. My partner, Argyle C, Klopnick (ACK!), is sure, now, that Hillary’s victory is certain. I ‘m not yet a believer. I think Trump is electable. Monday: I’m catching the excitement. My female cousins and my sisters post pictures of themselves in white […]
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Oh my god, I’m stuck again. A truck in the muck. A cat up a tree. An explorer in quicksand. Winnie the Pooh in the door of Rabbit’s house. Trying to birth a column and needing a Caesarean. Is there any horror worse for a writer than a deadline?
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The small town where I have recently landed is ugly and beautiful. Walk down the main street: there are a few old gems like an ancient and glorious Masonic Hall, now home to evangelicals. Several boarded up stores, ugly as can be, and some small town cafes: one for Giants fans, specializing in breakfast, pancakes […]
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One recent hot weekday afternoon, I told my partner—the guy who created the “Punk the Muse” logo and draws its cartoons—that I wanted to get out and about. We’d been sitting at home too long. Moon’s Handbook for Northern California revealed an abandoned mine, with a ghost town and an old Western cemetery, a half […]
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