Someday, I hope, I'll write the next Great American Novel. I even have the opening lines jotted down somewhere -- but that's all I've got so far and I've been carrying them around, virtually unchanged, for years. But at least I can say I'm working on a novel. The rest of my writing, though, is a bit smaller in scope. Mostly local news reporting, some foreign correspondence and news analysis, commentary, and other random acts of weirdness.

This was my first piece for The Fish Rap Live!, the gonzo-oriented student paper at UC Santa Cruz that I eventually ran. It's also one of my few Fish Rapstories in which no one gets arrested.

I've covered a lot of protests, and I like to think I do it in a pretty unique way. More storytelling than reporting, more concerned with feeling and meaning than facts and figures, and not afraid to take sides -- though my side was rarely with either the protestors or their target. The protest covered in this piece happened the same day the Fish Rapwent to press, so we photocopied the story and manually inserted it into the printed papers the next day.

This was my last Santa Cruz protest, and by this point I was pretty jaded with the whole process. But this demonstration against increased prison spending renewed my faith a bit.

I spent a few months right after college roaming around Europe trying my hand at foreign correspondence. I realized it's a lot harder than it looks, but I managed to come back with a few good pieces. This one dealt with the Criminal Justice Bill, a pretty heinous piece of British legislation.

I went all the way to Finland for an election nobody there cared about. But I got this news analysis piece, which is a good deal more academic than much of my other work. And for good reason, too. My Politics thesis was also on Finland. For some reason I had this fascination with that country, but it went away once I went there.

I was lucky enough to be in Berlin in 1989, just a few months before the Berlin Wall came down. I went back five years later, to celebrate the anniversary and see how things had changed. I was the only one there who cared about the anniversary.

Ever since high school, when I wrote an opinion column for the student newspaper and found out how much fun it is to really get under people's skin, I've been a big fan of the provocative commentary. This one was actually fairly mild in its position, but pretty far reaching in its distribution. First written for the San Francisco Examinershortly before President Clinton's first inauguration, it was later aired on NPR's "All Things Considered."

I'm strangely proud of the fact that my home town is the site of the first and only Little League-related homicide. After it earned that notoriety, the San Francisco Examinerasked me for my reaction.

When I heard the inventor of the Amazing Talking Condom on the radio one day, I knew I had to talk to that guy. This story was first written for Tweak, but was later picked up by Masquerade, a journal of erotica. It was in their annual spanking issue.