J.D.’s Columns

Popping Hoppers        Ah, Summer, when we can finally curl up in a lawn chair by the pool with the sun over our shoulder and a towel across our knees. We open that thick mystery we've been saving since Christmas, reach over into the big Tupperware bowl, grab a handful of deep-fried crickets, and settle down for a good long read.      Before the reader begins to look for legs and antennae hanging out of the corners of this column, let me publicly state that I am a good red-meat American burger chomper and that my interest in eating insects is mostly scientific, so far.        That interest began fifty years ago in Burgdorf, Idaho, when I was snowed away from civilization for six months at a time and attempted to read the Bible from front to back. Of particular note was the eleventh chapter of Leviticus, in which the Lord lays out to Moses and Aaron those things which may be eaten and those which ar...

Hail Caesar San Francisco        I worked with Caesar Romero. Not the one who danced with Carmen Miranda and Betty Grable, not the Caesar Romero who acted with Tyrone Power, Burl Ives, Rod Serling, and Freddie Prinz, and not the fellow who played The Joker to Adam West’s Batman on television.       This Ceasar Romero was a janitor, a green card custodian two years out of Nicaragua. We buffed floors, cleaned toilets, fixed faucets, painted, filled water coolers, emptied the trash and washed the windows together in a seven-story building situated in the heart of the Tenderloin, San Francisco.      The Tenderloin is a rasty part of Baghdad by the Bay. At the time we performed our custodial magic, the district was becoming a landing spot for Vietnamese folks, ten city blocks in transition from a haven for street hookers, flop houses, soup kitchens and sex toy shops to a home for Asian versions of the s...

The Movie Business Northwestern Montana After a summer of laying in the grass beside good trout streams, the fun tickets ran dry in Browning, Montana. I had connections in California, made a few phone calls, and came up with a job as a location scout for a group who wanted to shoot yet another mountain man movie. Two hundred and fifty bucks a week, plus expenses. Big money in those days. I had no idea what a location scout did, but I did know the mountains where the film was to be shot. At the appointed time of the first meeting with my new employer, a black Lincoln town car pulled up in front the Timber! Cafe, in Augusta. Out of the driver's side climbed a pudgy white male human, clad in beaded elk fringe leggings over Gucci shoes. Around his neck was sixteen troy ounces of chain with a golden goat dick dangling from it. I should've run out the back door of the Timber!. Instead, I hurried onto the sidewalk to prevent this Californian from being eaten by log truck drivers. My t...

Ponderings           At the age of 84, I am certifiably old in the game of life,   but not quite ready to cash in my chips. It has been an interesting process. When I was 21, I was certain that I would have a handle on the changes by the time I was thirty. What I didn’t know was that the changes come faster than one can accommodate or adjust to them. Thus, as an old fart, I have lingering questions.      For instance, who or what am I to believe now that lying has been institutionalized by the government at all levels? Will Artificial Intelligence, which mines cyberworld for its information, eventually learn to lie to us? “Gee. AI, how is the security of our power grid?” “Oh, just wonderful, JD.  It is the most secure power system ever developed by humans.”      So, I have sluiced my memory box to reclaim chunks of knowledge that were given to me over the years by folks who had no reason or inclina...

Being Rich       I grew up in a union household where being rich smelled of worker exploitation.  I am old now and my thousand bucks a month Social Security check ensures that I will never be accused of ill-gotten rewards. My daughter and I were recently discussing how diddled we, as members of the working class, were becoming because our leaders are greedy people when she reminded me of how we once felt rich, during the Wendy’s era.       We were living between Petaluma and Point Reyes, northern California, while I took care of an assortment of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, dogs, and poultry, including peacocks, on a couple hundred acres of prime Marin County pasture.       The property was bordered on the north by Red Hill Road that began in Petaluma then snaked up and down through San Francisco’s milk supply and ended up twenty miles west at Point Reyes National Seashore and the big blu...

                              The Executioner’s Fork         Five of us roomed in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on my eyes, just so, the ro...