Mark Brown’s Blog

Earthquake make a big mess! Loma Prieta earthquake damage - Marina District, San Francisco • 1989 On October 17th, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. my 15 month old son Jordan and I were playing with colorful blocks on the floor of the living room of our house in Mountain View,...

If you kiss your elbow, you’ll turn into a girl! Gender bending contortionist wizardry When I first heard of this magic spell from my trickster mother as a young boy, I turned into a contortionist, trying in vain to give the pointy, forever too far away elbow joints...

It’s the turn around spot. The turn around spot E. F. Jones was a young black man who was driving to Wisconsin to visit his ailing father in law. He picked up Steve Wolf and me hitchhiking in Berkeley, California and took us to Rock Springs, Wyoming, a one thousand...

We will light the house with 500 candles to welcome in the New Millennium! My Invitation to our Millennium party We covered every surface in our living room, dining room and kitchen with hundreds of burning candles on December 31st, 1999, trying to provide enough...

What is that a picture of on his back? I was cooling down with my 6 year old son son Jordan, at Raging Waters Water Park in San Jose, California on a hot summer afternoon, bobbing in a 350,000 gallon wave pool, when where a young Latino man walked by above us on the...

Freeze! Put your hands up! If you move I’ll shoot! A policeman crouching in a bush shouted this command to me on the night of my 25th birthday.  My friend Paul and I had been helping a very old couple move out of their suburban home into a trailer park in...

Tito's is a Santa’s Elf’s Best Friend! Elf Elixer I was at the Mountain View train station two weeks before Christmas, waiting for the 8:27 train to take me north a few miles to Palo Alto, when I was suddenly surrounded on the platform by several Santa Clauses...

No! No! No! No! No! You no order that! I tell you what you get! Waiter Edsel Ford Fong (often called the world’s rudest waiter) shouted this to me and Debbie Jenkins in 1968 at Sam Wo’s Restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, correcting our order. Fong greeted...

“You don’t pick your totem animal. Your totem animal chooses you.” Raven sunrise at the Trona Pinnacles • Photo by MMB This quote, which I heard recently on a podcast, shed some light on a seminal event in my young life. When I was a child, my family was at an outdoor...