The Bolinas Hearsay News

I’m reading the Bolinas Hearsay News at the moment, a weekly ‘community newspaper representing you, the populace of the community’ Reading the Bolinas Hearsay News sure brings back a lot of memories.

It seems I was a progressive before my time. I’m not bragging, only reporting, having sung the Star-Spangled Banner loudly and with great enthusiasm in 3rd grade and then, about ten years later, becoming a critic of American foreign policy while never looking back.

It’s good to know too I am still prone to expressions of wonder regarding the natural world and that I can remember at least a little Shakespeare, “to thine own self be true”, though I sometimes seem to be living on a hard-boiled planet where a big turd may be dropped from the sky at any moment by the Commander-in-Chief…

My house in San Francisco, I’m happy to report, is an open book as reported in the previous post (At) Outside Lands, August 9, 2025. At any moment a nice piece of language can wander in without my having to think about it, and make itself useful, if not at least a little bit more interesting. These days I can spend an inordinate amount of time walking around one word to see if it still makes sense enough to get along with the other words..

No, this is not the Age of Aquarius! And for this I’m grateful.

Addendum: I hope it will be noted by present and future readers that I spent an afternoon with the poet Robert Creeley in 1971 on the beach in Bolinas and that we drank two 16.oz Budweiser beers apiece, then walked together to Smiley’s to play a game of pool. Robert Creeley the poet lived in Bolinas at the time; he was very kind to me, as I was college student then.

Bottom of a smallish Ikea barrel. Photo by author, August 18, 2025