Archives for March 2019

It’s an easily forgettable stretch of Ventura Boulevard. Deep in the valley. We live up on the hill. Some actress on KTLA reported that 100% of all self-service touch screens and shopping cart handles in the San Fernando valley were completely contaminated by fecal matter. We have tile floors and prefer glass smoke utensils. Needless […]

When the elderly woman spoke to me after I said “hi” outside our apartment complex’s communal laundromat, her words tumbled out with the unmistakable grammar of terrible loneliness. She had a slightly anxious, furtive look, as if she was caught red-handed committing a terrible crime at the same time that she seemed equally relieved to […]

It was always a gamble going somewhere with Mamma Cheese.  She was light-skinned.  The white women disliked her because they thought that she thought that she was “as good” as them.  But the black women disliked her because they thought that she thought that she was “better” than them. Mamma Cheese didn’t take shit from anybody.  Once, when I was […]

My dad, Nathaniel Spain Chism, whom we all called Daddy Cheese, or just Cheese, told the following story.  He got drafted and went into the Navy.  But he ended up in the brig–in prison.  Why?  The Navy, of course, had wanted all its soldiers to declare that they were going to fight “the enemy” for […]

In 2005 I was hired by a non-profit in San Mateo County to design and teach classes in a combined English as a Second Language and Family Literacy program in the community room of a low-income housing development. The development was run by a different non-profit, and yet another non-profit ran an on-site childcare facility. […]

Devastated. My long time friend Joffre Stewart has died. Joffre, a long time anarchist and pacifist (after serving in the military during World War 2) was a poet and was referred to in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. [Ginsberg was taken by Stewart when they met years ago at a gathering in San Francisco. In his poem […]