Bruce Willey

Beer Party

2010-04-21T21:39:30-07:00

Came to your party/ drank all your beer/ we’re a bad trip. —Camper Van Beethoven By now we are well familiar with the splendid machinations of the Tea Party. This well-publicized movement of fear and hate that has co-opted their attention grabbing demonstration theater straight out of a University of California protest manual, has by now managed to strike the fear of Darwin in every good-hearted believer of freedom and democracy. Obama is finally striking back against these purveyors of insanity and so should we. Which is why it’s time for a wholly different protest party. Tea and coffee are already spoken for. Herbal tea is nice, but maybe too nice. Wine would be good, but liberals have already been...

Matchbook Story

2010-03-30T18:16:52-07:00

At the risk of paying myself a backdoor compliment, I can think of no better story to print for the first issue of Matchbook Story than a story which calls the whole enterprise into question. Whether he knows it or not, or whether he'll cop to it, Bruce has written a metafiction--a story about writing stories--which is signaled here by the self-referential title, To Light a Cigarette,

Remembering to Forget

2010-02-19T12:38:05-08:00

For the past year I’ve watched my grandmother succumb to dementia. In truth she has full-blown Alzheimer's, but there’s no doubt in my mind she’d prefer the term dementia if she indeed knew what was eating her brain from the inside out. She’s proper after all, hailing from a generation that says “intestinal fortitude” instead of “guts.” Pushing well into 90 years on this good earth, my grandmother is ox-like from the neck down. Her brain, however, has lost all of its capacity to remember what happened five seconds ago. Though it sounds unfairly cruel, I’m trying my best to forget how she is now. Tried to forget how last Christmas, she asked me, “is your mummy still alive?” while...

Decadal Intuitions: A look into the future from on high

2010-01-02T13:28:28-08:00

Can’t change the past; it wasn’t built to last. Can’t change the way it goes, nobody answers cause nobody knows —Michael Houser Those who regularly follow this column (thanks Bob, thanks mom) may recall with certain fondness that, under the influence of nitrous oxide, I predicted we would be blessed with a black man in the White House. Spinning in a dentist chair more than two years ago with a laughing gas coursing through my neurons and a drill whirling into tooth number 21, I also predicted a woman vice-president. That didn’t turn out to be true. But since Hillary is in the White House a lot nowadays, I’ll give myself a tie score. Astrologers do it all the time....

Impersonating President Carter

2009-11-16T17:43:04-08:00

I don’t know why, but my hand shot for Jimmy. Might have been my interest in regional dialects or my taste for peanuts for all I know. In retrospect, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. As the kind of student who sat at the back of the class, hopelessly drowning in a horny ocean of pre-adolescent hormones, this would have been last thing I would have normally done, much less volunteer for. Standing up in class, impromptu, was enough to cause a life’s worth of priapic mortification.

East and West: Cycling the Berlin Wall

2009-07-24T03:01:32-07:00

It's been nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down to roaring applause. So with little fanfare, I've decided to cycle the entire Wall—or what's left of the old Mauer—all 160K of it. There's a dedicated trail, both road and off-road called the Mauerweg (Wall way, basically) and I've been trying to follow the directions in German though this fact leads me to find myself lost and off route. Doing the Wall in sections during the best light is alos getting me in shape for the big all day push coming up next week. Sometimes I am accompanied by my mother-in-law, Cora Schaumann who I've dubbed "Mauer Mama." Other times I go solo, heading out to the Mauerweg from...

Here Comes the Sun

2009-07-02T14:18:26-07:00

The time has come to look at climate change with more precision Just a few days past the official start of summer and while much of the nation sweltered under a heat wave, the House narrowly passed what was largely regarded as a “landmark” climate change bill. The Waxman-Markey Bill, which would limit carbon dioxide pollution and require the use of renewable energy is only due to take effect two and a half years from now—this despite what would seem an existential urgency for all human kind in the most dire terms possible. With their heads in the sand and their sunburned asses in the air, 212 congressmen voted against the bill including 44 Democrats. (Only eight Republicans members of...

The Plane Crash You Die in Could Be Your Own

2009-03-23T20:42:28-07:00

Without attempting to be crass or insensitive to the people who die in plane crashes, the last one—as of this writing—was beautiful. It pictured a cemetery in Montana, the old stone grave markers in long perspective to the edge of pines, the last tree on the right in orange flames bursting forth under a ruthless cloud of black smoke. Beauty amid terrible chaos. Perhaps the juxtaposition of cemetery and the fuel tank exploding in flames is an over-cooked metaphor, one that even a Hollywood pyrotechnic would think is over the top. But the reality is the Holy Cross Cemetery lay under the approach for the Butte airport, as good as any place to let the dead rest. That is where...

Reefer Madness?

2009-03-19T19:45:45-07:00

originally appeared in GT Weekly, March 10, 2009 A candid look into the near and possible future I think here in California, we can understand $14 billion is something that can’t be blown off. The state deserves to have a piece of it. —San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano March 2, 2010 Santa Cruz, California While the rest of the nation continues to slide into economic despair, California, which legalized marijuana three months ago, is well on its way to recovery. In his State of the State Address last night, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and other state legislators including John Laird and Joe Simitian for bringing the bill to his desk that removed “all penalties in California State...

Holy Rollers and Paint Pilgrims

2009-03-06T12:42:30-08:00

Salvation Mountain Slab City Last December my father and I drove down to Salton Sea from his home in San Bernardino. With our camera bags in the backseat and my dad’s rat terrier Little Joe between us, we turned off Highway 10, heading south along the eastern edge of the man-made sea in search of good images and the easy friendship between a father and his son, as he is apt to call me. My father taught me F-stops and shutter speeds when I was still a boy. A few days later, having absorbed the interplay between aperture size and the velocity of light still untethered in my young mind, he taught me how to drive. I must have been...