Category Archives: semi-fiction

THE END OF RICE by Peter Nolan Smith

Thailand has many superstitions. One concerns rice. Never joke while eating or else a ghost will steal your rice. The ghosts will have to wait, for this is the beginning of the rainy season and throughout the Kingdom aging farmers are planting rice. The current price for jasmine rice per tonne from the wholesalers is […]

BET ON CRAZY 1 by Peter Nolan Smith

In the 1970s I knew very little about diamonds as a child other than Superman could squeeze coal with his steel-hard hands to create diamonds and my father had bought a diamond ring for my mother. It was a hundredth of the size of the diamonds Superman never gave to Lois Lane, but my mother […]

4:20 4/20 2024

Police and parents demonized Marijuana during my youth. Reefer smokers were condemned by the courts. John Sinclair, the MC5 radical, was sentenced to ten years of prison for the crime of ‘giving’ an undercover agent two joints. The severity of his punishment did not deter the millions of marijuana smokers of the 60s from becoming […]

After Bathing At Baxter’s – The Jefferson Airplane

The Milton town library added another angle to my education. The head librarian recognized my thirst for knowledge and allowed my taking out adult books at the age of ten. I read Nicholas Kakanzakis’ THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHIRST, Balzac’s A HARLOT HIGH AND LOW, Prescott’s CONQUEST OF MEXICO, OM BURKE’s TRAVEL AMONGST THE DERVISHES. […]

The Bowery 1962

In April 1962 my father attended a business meeting in Manhattan for Ma Bell. While my father was at his appointment, my older brother and I accompanied my mother to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty and rode a taxi north through the Bowery heading to the Enpire State Building. As we passed […]