Retail Therapy
By Amara Rose

It's flu season. The feverish desire to spend creeps stealthily into your bones, causing you to cough up dollars at the sound of Santa songs and pleading tots. "Affluenza" is a flu strain that lodges in your wallet, not your lungs....

Esidarap
By Joe Smith

The cars parked beside the trailers are mostly bruisers, badly dented V-8 muscle cars from another era hunkered down on fatigued springs. The trailers themselves are rather small, as trailers go, and also dented. The skins of many are pitted, as though they had contracted some trailer form of smallpox....

Tale of Two California Tidefalls
By Liz Garone

This is the story of two rival California coastal waterfalls. Their names are McWay and Alamere Falls. They have never crossed paths but may have unknowingly mingled in the deep waters of the Pacific blue. Each has its own charm. Where Alamere is the stocky, rough-and-tumble type, McWay is slender with an even flow. And each has its followers. McWay, right along Highway One

Guilt Gone for Ex-San Franciscan
By Andrea Perkins

"It's a long way down," says Fiona Crimshaw looking through the open doorway of the bus. It's hard to believe she's flirting with the lumpy bus driver, but she is. She turns to him, flashes her bus pass, winks, turns again with a little wiggle, and jumps, clearing three steps with panache and triumph. The bus lurches away and she now stands in a bad part of town facing an enormous pyramid....

Blondie
By Joe Smith

My daughter and I are stooping to inspect some carnivorous plants in the marshes out by Little River Airport when Blondie suddenly comes to mind. Suddenly, unexpectedly. A moment ago, I never would've guessed this brassy woman with peroxide hair could emerge so vividly from the depths of my memory, that she could step into the light so full-blown, right down to the smudge of lipstick ...

Brewing Up a Revolution
By Jayson Matthews

Americans consumed over 300 million gallons of beer last year. A few of the 15 million resulting hangovers were likely a tribute to the fine work of Wendy Pound and Barbara Groom, owners of the Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka. Since 1990, Pound and Groom have been brewing up a storm of high quality microbrews ...