Essays by Larry Barnett
He stroked his beard, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes in thought. I’d known Ben Eleazar for many years, but never could predict how long such pauses would go on. I’d once waited two hours and twenty two minutes.
“Ok,” he said, “I’ll tell you.” It had only been four minutes. “But,” he added quickly,… Read the rest
Like water circling the bathtub drain, our consumer society expends a lot of energy but ultimately spirals down a bottomless hole, and unless more water is continuously added, nothing but an empty tub remains.
Of late, the “water” being added is money printed by the Federal Reserve Bank, in the form … Read the rest
“Ashes to ashes, shed to shed.” So go the notebooks of Von Meier. For over 40 years my friend Kurt von Meier kept a daily notebook. A compulsive documentarian, he stored his filled notebooks in file boxes, and as they accumulated, placed the boxes in a shed in his backyard. When he died in 2011 the thought… Read the rest
How is it that time after time governmental process and policy results in harm to the public? Hearings are held, reports commissioned, experts consulted, and yet decisions are constantly made that endanger health, despoil the environment, cause economic hardship and erode public confidence in … Read the rest
Males of many species mark their territorial boundaries. The other day my wife accused me of marking mine.
I will confess to feeling shocked by her comments at first. The shoes I leave under the coffee table in the living room, a pile of mail stacked on the dining table, my pants draped over the cedar chest… Read the rest
The wealthy and powerful expect to get what they pay for, and most often they do, spending billions on lobbying and campaign donations to guide the hand of government. Though lip-service is paid to the free market, tax rules, land-use law and public policy all favor “big money,” and for these reasons … Read the rest
The subject of two articles in today’s newspaper have been conflated in the title of this column. Article one involved the prospect that as the world’s population reaches 8 billion people, the need for a protein-rich food source will create an international diet of bugs. Bugs, the article points out,… Read the rest
For the North Bay wine country, including Sonoma, tourism has been a mixed blessing. Just one-hour’s drive from five million people looking for a weekend escape, the boom in tourism has both irrevocably altered the rural landscape with wineries, hotels and backed-up traffic and simultaneously filled… Read the rest
There is a yogic practice in Tibet that takes place in a charnel ground, or what we call a graveyard. Graveyards in Tibet, which is mostly rock, are not the neat and grassy parks we have here in America. Tibetan charnel grounds are bone-scattered yards where the dead are dismembered and their body parts… Read the rest
We think we live in a world of things: cars, dogs, trees, tables, salt shakers, cardboard boxes, underwear… the list is nearly inexhaustible. Every culture has its own words for each thing, and each thing has many sub-categories, right down to its molecular structure. So complete is the presentation… Read the rest
My father-in-law used to answer, “Fair to partly cloudy,” when I asked how he was. By this time he was in his late 70’s and not in the best of health, but I suspect he’d been a “fair to partly cloudy” guy his whole life.
I certainly know people who spend a lot of time “Overcast,” a gray cloud hanging above their… Read the rest
Recent reports on the condition of the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan indicate that highly radioactive water used in the makeshift reactor cooling system has been leaking from buried storage tanks damaged in a tsunami several… Read the rest
My wife surprised me a few weeks ago when she announced that she thought we should follow Giants’ baseball this year. “It will,” she said, “be fun.”
I should note that we like to watch the World Series when we can, but to call us regular baseball fans is more than a stretch. We’ve gone to a few games over the … Read the rest
A recent report indicates that as many as one-in-five high-school-age boys have been diagnosed with ADHD and many of them are being treated with drugs like Adderall and Ritalin. Clearly, either there is a growing epidemic of ADHD of unknown causes, or diagnostic criteria and social standards… Read the rest
A tremendous amount of energy and attention is focused on providing a path to citizenship for America’s many immigrants, and appropriately so. Citizenship provides, first and foremost, the protections of the Bill of Rights and laws granting access to legal representation,… Read the rest
For nearly 10,000 years human beings have lived in a land of milk and honey. Milk and its derivatives are used ubiquitously as food, and the importance of cattle made them one of society’s first forms of money. Old African tribes like the Maasai still measure wealth by number of cattle and notably, the … Read the rest
All seemingly stable systems are subject to perturbations and disruptions; what we perceive as stability is only the temporary emergence of fixed patterns within a container of unfathomable complexity, or what we commonly call chaos. We begin to think we can control chaos by adapting ourselves to… Read the rest
In the insect world, drones are males suited for only two functions, mating and work. Actually, that sounds like many of the guys I know. Seriously though, male honey bees, ants and termites spend their entire lives working constantly at the behest of the queen of the hive, the matriarch who … Read the rest
If you’ve gone out to buy a coffee table or a dresser, you’ve most likely come across some with a “distressed” finish. Banged, scraped, rubbed, chipped, and worn, distressed furniture is new furniture intentionally made to look used and old. Setting aside the question “why not simply buy an old beat-up… Read the rest
Conventionally, time as we know it is a socially-constructed artifact of civilization. Subject to the application of widely differing schemes, intervals, periods, adjustments and methods of tracking, time has been variously rendered according to the seasons, phases of the moon, growth habits… Read the rest