Tariq Essop

The internet as we know, is a wide world of “answers!” There is a definite answer, or three, or three thousand on any topic! It is dizzying and confusing for many who are looking for “true information.” All claim to be “it!” Truth! And stated as such. I recently read the quote from some erudite […]

I remember when the Pandemic began in March of 2020. London Breed, the then mayor of San Francisco, announced that we all had to “shelter in place” for two weeks. I had no idea what “shelter in place” meant, I had never heard that expression before. When I learned that it meant stay home, and

With some dismay I read a recent article that the US game giant Hasbro is unveiling its new and updated version of the familiar board game Monopoly. Although we only lived in parts of the country with snowy winters until I was seven, I can remember sitting in the cozy basement with my sister for

The Nazi Holocaust is very much a part of my personal story. However, this does not in any way reflect my feelings about the current tragic and heartbreaking situation in the larger world. Home Our Dad always said his first view of the Golden Gate Bridge was from below. He would reminisce that when he

Another voice from the soundtrack of my childhood falls silent. On January 28 Marianne Faithfull died at the age of 78. Her song, a compendium of addiction, eating disorder, tortured love of Mick Jagger, figurative and in her case at one point even literal homelessness, and a general landscape, a continuing background or set of

My husband bought the Miata in 2013. From the beginning, we affectionately named it “the Mouse,” because it was small and gray and could vanish at lightning speed (It was however far from as quiet as one!). I loved that car, not only because it brought out the 17-year-old wanna-be race car driver in my

Got to get something done todayGive accomplishment a shotMight not have a full palette to useBut I’m gonna paint with the colors I’ve got Bruce Hornsby, This Too Shall Pass Usually, the wee hours are a time of quiet solitude, productivity and comfort for me. I guess those three things have always gone together. And

  I write this in a hunt and peck, one-handed fashion from my perch in paradise: Hilo, Hawaii, where the drama queen volcano Kilauea is wildly dancing and singing, erupting in her fiery, spectacular way. I take pleasure in knowing that when she settles down, or “pipes down,” as my mother impatiently used to say,

  (WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS EXPLICIT REFERENCES TO CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE, AND OTHER SEXUAL REFERENCES)   For many of us with sexual abuse trauma, our first “knowledge” of sexual stimulation, eroticism, or any kind of sexual experience, was likely to be frightening and most likely confusing. It is painful, not to mention distasteful to think

You are receiving this on what in the U.S. is Thanksgiving Day. I am writing it, however, on the 22nd of November, a sad day in 2022, when we lost one of my great heroes, Pablo Milanes. He was 79 which seems increasingly young to me as I rapidly approach 70 myself. Milanes was one