In 1994, I traveled with several friends to Maui. Midway through the trip, we drove fours hours to Hana on the back side of the island. We visited the Seven Sacred Pools, a series of ponds and waterfalls stretching from the mountain to the sea. At the lowest pool bordering the ocean, the pond is split in two by a reef.

As I walked atop the reef, I noticed a local Hawaiian man diving into the pool, disappearing, then reappearing on the other side of the rocks.

“How’d you do that,” I asked.

“There’s an underwater tunnel beneath the rocks…

I was rummaging through the stacks of City Lights Bookstore in North Beach when I noticed an attractive young woman in the Russian Literature section. She was reading The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol, one of my favorite authors. I feigned interest in the nearby books, summoning the courage to speak to her.

“I love that book you’re reading,” I said. “I won’t have any coffee today. Just hot bread and onions.”

She gave me a strange look.

“That’s from The Nose. It’s the third story.”

“I haven’t read that yet,” she said. She had a European accent.

She had beautiful…

“We cannot assert that after death there is nothing. Something can never become nothing.” Thich Nhat Hanh

The night before my mom died, she visited me in a dream. She showed me a drawing she’d made in an art class. It was a labyrinthian pattern with multiple twists and turns resembling a journey through a maze. I expressed this to her and she smiled. Around the same time, a light fixture blew in my brother’s home. My mom passed away later that morning.

What happens when we die? The body withers like an old flower, but what happens to the…

When I was six years old, my mom gave me an important lesson. She was on carpool duty when she dropped off Lawrence Fishman at his home. He didn’t say thank you. She became furious. She told me, “I don’t want you to be friends with that boy. If someone doesn’t say thank you, you don’t want him in your life.”

My mom always offered little gems like that. She once told me, “You’re born into a birth family but you spend the rest of your life searching for your earth family. If you’re lucky, the two are the same.”…

The NBA Playoffs are upon us and the stars have dropped like flies. Wounded warriors include LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, Kyrie Irving, Joel Embid, Luka Doncic, Donovan Mitchell, Jamal Murray, Jaylen Brown and Trae Young.

The Lakers were favorites to repeat as champions until Lebron injured his ankle and Anthony Davis strained his groin. The favored New Jersey Nets couldn’t overcome injuries to Kyrie Irving and James Harden. Utah had the league’s best record then Donovan Mitchell and Mike Conley were injured. The Clippers lost Kawhi Leonard to a sprained knee. Jamal Murray’s torn ACL killed…

In August 2012, I received a call from my father. We spoke about the Dodgers and the coming election and the Los Angeles heat wave when he casually said, “I’m going to Ghana tomorrow.”

“Uh, what?”

“I’m meeting with an investor for our movie. He owns a gold mine and wants to get in the film business.”

I was accustomed to my father meeting with strange folks all over the world in his never-ending search for film funding. But Ghana? This seemed out of the ordinary.

“Who are you traveling with?”

“Myself. It’s a three-day trip. I’ll be back Monday.”

…

We called ourselves the Vidiots. We were not paparazzi since we had little interest in videotaping celebrities. Nor were we nightcrawlers, those gothic ambulance chasers who taped police shootings to sell to the evening news. We saw ourselves as documentarians wanting to capture the essence of our beloved Los Angeles.

We relished taping locations from classic movies. We recorded inside the Bradbury Building featured in Bladerunner. We shot at the Alto Nido Apartments where William Holden’s character lived in Sunset Boulevard. We taped in dark alleys, on rooftops, inside abandoned buildings, on the sides of freeways. Once, while driving through…

Our ice cream man’s name was Mac. He was a stocky ex-marine with a spiky crew cut and aviator sunglasses that hid his eyes. His truck had a Nixon for President sticker on the back bumper and the music box played “Hail to the Chief.” Mac was surly and impatient and hated kids. But his ice cream selection was top notch. He had bomb pops, big sticks, fudgesicles, drumsticks and ice cream sandwiches.

I usually bought a Klondike Bar and a pack of Topps baseball cards. I also loved Wacky Packs, the goofy parodies of brand names such as Quacker…