As many of her friends know, my wife, who writes on Open Salon as Sirenita Lake, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Naturally, this news has rocked our world, and will be the main thing going on for us and our family -- that is to say, her sisters and aunt,… Read full post »

I've written before about collapsitarians, people who believe western society is rapidly heading toward a cliff, usually for economic reasons, and that it will soon devolve into a total collapse scenario where the cities are convulsed in riots, armed gangs roam the countryside in a hillbilly version… Read full post »

Everyone has heard the dictum "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." It means that when crime strikes you personally, you supposedly forget all your liberal pieties about race, gun ownership, non-violence and so on, and instead go out and buy a gun and start voting for Nixon.… Read full post »

In San Francisco, an institution known as the Academy of Art University is highly visible around town. Its advertisements are plastered on Muni buses, its own shuttle buses ferry students around the central city, and its logo appears on numerous buildings devoted to classes, workshops, dorms, or othe… Read full post »

Hanging out with Cris in the morning while she makes a cheesecake to take to a dinner she's invited to. She was talking about her aunt, who lives in the city and whom we used to take to Golden Gate Park every Sunday to feed the feral cats. (I was thinking… Read full post »

What if gasoline hit $5 a gallon and unemployment was still hanging around the current ~15%? What if there were a few small protests that turned a bit violent -- not even on the scale of what we see in Europe -- but a few townhall meetings that get… Read full post »

Sunrise in Joshua Tree, Calif. on 29 Sep. 2010

I've been working on my present project, a long novel called "Knock Yourself Out," for a solid two and a half years, since the last week of December 2008, when I got a series of ideas that led directly to… Read full post »

One of the core beliefs of the crypto-fascist collapsitarians, who think the western world is headed for an economic and social apocalypse, is that when "the end" comes, all cities will collapse into hellholes of violence, rioting, looting, pillaging, and so on. This is one of the main reasons t… Read full post »

A cool wind gusts over stones and grass as I walk amidst skyscraping fir trees and mountains. A mountain stream, brimming with snowmelt, hurls itself over rocks and sand in its bed behind a stand of trees a few yards away. Shaken by the wind, the trees… Read full post »

This weekend I visited my mother and her husband -- they married after my father died in his 70s -- at the "assisted living" facility in suburban Portland, Ore.  They moved there a couple years ago from a home she owned in an over-55 development nearby, after she became too frail to… Read full post »

When I think of all the stupid things I did as a child -- including but not limited to the things I did even though adults warned me not to -- I wonder how I managed to get through it with relatively little harm. I never even broke a bone til… Read full post »

Today on the main salon.com, Tracy Clark Flory wrote about the odd pornographic all-female wrestling events held by kink.com, the online porn site. 

I visited kink.com in 2008 and covered this phenomenon. View my account here: Wrestling with Reality at Kink.com.  

Funny, I was just thi… Read full post »

Ausaf Umar "Omar" Siddiqui 
^{Photo: Gary Reyes, San Jose Mercury News}

Over two years ago, as one of my first posts on Open Salon, I wrote about a former executive of the Fry's electronics retail chain whose extravagant tastes and willingness to bet large sums made him a "whale" to the casin… Read full post »

I've written previously about Chuck Baldwin, the former Baptist minister who moved his whole family from Florida to a rural Montana county filled with survivalist and Patriot Movement types. Of late he's been ranting about how churches that get federal 501(c)(3) tax exemption are… Read full post »

There's what the New York Daily News evidently considers the most important stories today: two stories related to celebrities, and something about parking. 

Oh, that's just the cover, you say? Okay, let's look at the website… Read full post »

Despite the fact that the messy pro-democracy upheaval in the Middle East will actually make the world safer by ridding the region of the dictators driving the hoi polloi into the arms of Al Qaeda, to right-wing conspiracy nuts It's All Part of the New World Order's Master (and they do… Read full post »

Imagine a world where everything's stopped funtioning: police, the medical system, the food distribution system, the internet and everything else electronic, and above all, the government itself. 

That's the picture painted by a several groups of people prophesying the immenent destruction of so… Read full post »

As the battle is joined for the federal budget, pleas to sign an online petition are being circulated, because of a Republican proposal that would "zero out" federal support for PBS and NPR.

My reaction to an invitation to sign the petition was: Let's keep National Public Radio. You ca… Read full post »

There are two types of would-be authors: Those who decide to go to writing programs, and those who do not.  This is about those who do not.

The role of writing programs in modern American culture is the subject of much controversy these days. People argue over their purpose and utility,… Read full post »

A British MP has a blog she uses to publicize her activities and her positions on issues -- just as most politicians now do. But after being cleared of allegations she misled Parliament on some expense account-related matters, she blithely announced that her blog is "70 percent fiction" anyway and it… Read full post »