I'm Still Standing

There he is:


It's a grim, foggy morning at the front gate of UC Santa Cruz. It's not even 8 a.m. But Sammy Slug is on the job, welcoming new students to freshman orientation day.

Somebody's got to do it. Even if that somebody is a groggy coed wondering why she agreed to dance around in this damned slug suit for two hours when she could have stayed in bed.

But dance she will. Sammy has to be there, smiling. He can't do anything but smile. He's the happy, anarchic mascot of UC Santa Cruz.

Back 40 years ago UCSC saw itself as the anti-university. UCSC would challenge the establishment. It would educate people to Do Good. It would have no big-time sports, no stadium, no ROTC, no vicious animal mascot. Screaming eagles and grizzly bears need not apply.

But the school needed a mascot of some sort. And half-seriously, somebody suggested the gentle banana slug. The banana slug, a lowly, bright yellow gastropod, lurks among the redwood groves around campus. It's an odd beast, hardly inspirational. But an anti-university needs an anti-mascot. And so the slug it was. How counter-cultural, everyone thought; how subversive.

But -- did you ever know a hip, ironic young couple who bought a house and put lawn ornaments in their new front yard? Not regular lawn ornaments, of course -- but, hip, ironic lawn ornaments. Gargoyles. Demons. Tyrannosaurs. To demonstrate their hipness and irony. Satirizing the kitsch their parents loved.

And twenty years later, the hip couple are thicker, grayer, have a couple of kids, and the hip lawn ornaments -- are now just lawn ornaments. Old hat. As kitschy now as the plaster deer and alabaster cupids their parents put out front decades ago. And so the formerly hip couple have become their parents -- complete with funky lawn ornaments.

In the same way, over the years, the anarchic slug became -- just another mascot. It appeared on a few t-shirts, then many more. Alumni began calling themselves Slugs for no reason other than school spirit.

The slug developed a cute name, Sammy. Then a fun costume for sweating students to wear at sporting events, because UCSC does have a sports program, and the swimmers and basketball players take it all very seriously.

Finally Sammy Slug became UCSC's official, legal mascot, and began appearing at university fundraisers and reunions, and hob-nobbing with corporate donors. He's not the anarchist he used to be.

But he's still here -- on this foggy morning, dancing as fast as he can for the incoming baby Slugs and their parents. Worn, middle-aged getting a little tatty around the edges, if you look closely. Smiling even at this ghastly hour of the morning because there's no choice; the expression is molded into his face.



I identify with Sammy, just a little. Worn, torn, and sore of foot. With a PR smile on my face, because that's how you show a Good Attitude and Keep Your Job in Hard Times -- at the price of a little dignity and integrity.

But I'm still standing. Like Sammy. Hope you are, too.

Rhumba's Small Pencils

Joseph felt that he did love his mother;
but, if the boys saw him like this, he was doomed.

I am pleased to announce that my wife Rhumba has put up a site for her wonderful, and wonderfully tiny, colored pencil drawings. Just follow this link to Small Pencils, and enjoy. I'll also put the link in the sidebar.

We scored "Complete Works of Vermeer" today at a garage sale down the block; all color plates. Rhumba said she wants to study how Vermeer handled light. Watch out, world.

A Requiem for Uncle Walter

I am a child of television. Not quite so old as to remember the golden age of Milton Berle and Phil Silvers and live dramatic broadcasts from New York. But I've bathed in the glow of a cathode ray tube nearly every day of my fifty-plus years -- a Philco, an RCA, a Zenith or two, a Panasonic, and finally a Sony.

And my very oldest memory, from back before my second birthday, begins with the face of Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchorman, on the eight-inch screen of a black-and-white Philco.

To be fair -- the persistence of that memory may have to do with the violent thunderstorm that had just struck our neighborhood. It cut off the power in the middle of Cronkite's newscast, and Mom swooped down on me and my sister and carried us both off to the bedroom.

She took us under the blankets with her in case the storm broke the windows and blew the glass into the room. It was that bad.

The violent wind, the panic: that's probably why I remember that moment so well, though I barely even talked at the time.

But Walter Cronkite was there. He was part of all that.

He has been "there," somewhere, every day of my life. More ubiquitous than William Shatner, more reliable than electricity, and more trusted than any other person who ever anchored a news broadcast. More trusted even, than any president of the last 50 years.

If you're over 45, that is. But if you're younger than that, you probably don't understand what Walter Cronkite meant to the nation, or what he was.

Cronkite died yesterday at the age of 92 and the airwaves were clogged with today's young(ish) news anchors and pundits dredging up vague memories of seeing Cronkite on TV when they were growing up in the '70s, and of how important he had been.

They know nothing. They're too young to remember how it really was. I was a news junkie at the age of five. I read the evening paper every night, and watched the CBS evening news every day until high school, when I started working.

In those days there were just three major networks and three broadcast news operations: CBS, NBC, and ABC. There was no TV news for conservatives, TV news for liberals, no entertainment-only news. There was just news, one kind of news, for everyone. And very few places to get it. So the newsmen had to be professional, informed, responsible, experienced, and fair.

And all those things described Walter Cronkite, the man in the seat for the CBS Evening News, the air traffic controller for the brains of half the nation. The man with the grumbling, growling warm voice who would give you the facts and only the facts. Who would not emote on camera or express outrage or ask outrageous questions or mug to the audience.

But who also would never falter in the face of the most unspeakable news. Not when a president was assassinated, or a civil rights leader, or a presidential candidate. Not when the Russians threatened war, or high crimes and misdemeanors were committed against the state by trusted servants. You could always count on Walter Cronkite to tell you exactly what had happened and exactly what to expect. In a slow, calm, controlled voice. In full command of the facts -- or with a complete list of what was not known.

Last night, one of the news shows played a clip of a rare occasion when Cronkite got excited, when the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon. And I remembered seeing it live.

And they played a clip of Cronkite breaking in to a CBS broadcast to announce John Kennedy's death -- and I remembered seeing it live. He held onto his composure, barely, so the rest of us could hold on to ours. I remember:


He was part of our lives every day -- he was part of mine, certainly -- and he never let us down. Never made up news, never pandered to political groups, never got above himself or partied with Washington power brokers. He was just an old reporter who didn't consider himself any better than anyone who listened to him.

Through the most tumultuous time in recent history, from the early '60s to 1980, "Uncle Walter" came to visit each night after supper and told us how it was. And we trusted him because, well --- like old friends, we all had so much history together. He'd always been around, and he and the CBS news team in those days would go after facts that the government did not want known.

In those days, TV news was not just "what the president said today." It was what Walter and his minions went out and dug up. Yes, we still have reporters who do those things -- but how many of them have a voice on national television?

It was Uncle Walter who went to Vietnam, looked around, came home and told America -- in a rare show of opinion -- that we were never going to win there. Such was his credibility that much of America took it as fact. And a week later, President Johnson declined to run for reelection. Who do we have today in the media that we trust that much. Who do we have that we can trust that much?

And then there was the voice. You still hear it -- everywhere. CBS News still uses Cronkite's voice for introductions. At one point, everybody in America knew that voice, and knew that it was the harbinger of something important. When your regular TV show was interrupted and you saw the "CBS NEWS SPECIAL REPORT" slide flash on the screen, and you heard that voice, you stopped what you were doing, hunkered down, and waited. Because something important had happened. Not the death of a pop star or the arrest of a spoiled starlet: something really important.

A friend of mine, as a kid back in the '60s, went back east with his folks to visit relatives. His family ended up at a Christmas party at the house of an NBC news correspondent, a distant relative. All the kids were down to the basement rumpus room to hang out. But after a while they got too noisy for the adults upstairs.

"The door at the top of the stairs opened, and and a big voice said, "WHAT ARE YOU KIDS DOING DOWN THERE?" my friend remembered. "That voice! Everybody stopped dead. I thought it was GOD!" Almost -- it was Walter Cronkite.

That's who died yesterday -- a part of my life, and a part of America's -- or at least the portion that was cognizant and paying attention between 1962 and 1980, when CBS put him out to pasture, and shouldn't have. He kept busy after that, writing and speaking and making television nearly all the way up to the end. And not holding his tongue about what happened to TV, TV journalism, and the nation.

And never, ever, letting us down or playing us for patsies. No matter how much trust we gave him.

Pleasant dreams, Uncle Walter.

This is Your Shirt

I collect t-shirts with logos on them. Not athletic team shirts. Not rock-band shirts. Just the everyday shirts that people print up for their business, their sports team, their fun run, their anniversary, their air force squadron whatever.

No art directors make the designs; no image specialist is around to whisper, "Hey, J.B., you don't really want to put THAT on a t-shirt, do you?" Just average folks doing what looks good to them. So I find some interesting things. Social documents, I call them. A window to your soul on eight ounces of combed cotton. Three for a buck at Goodwill Industries, such a deal.

The t-shirts divide into two groups: the ones I can figure out, and the ones I can only speculate on. The ones I can figure out -- their subject is obvious, or they're local, or they're something I can look up on the Internet.

Here's a fine example of a shirt I can figure out: Bustichi Construction, up in Scotts Valley. Click on the pic for more detail:


Now, I have actually dealt with Bustichi Construction; they did some work on the house, and they did it well. Dene Bustichi is a classic, boisterous Italian-Californian good old boy. And from the backside, he pretty much looks like the picture, or he did.

This is a classic tradesman's t-shirt, the kind I live for: the artwork by somebody's brother, the bathroom humor, the phallic humor ("our tools"), the bad puns ("We may be small, BUTT"), and most of all the idea that Bustichi and Company actually went around and did business dressed like this. You look at this shirt, you just know what life was like around the office.

This tee-shirt is quite old, probably from the company's start-up days. These days, funky Bustichi Construction is now BCI, a full-service contractor with a professional logo, a professional website and an impressive set of customers. Dene Bustichi is a well-respected two-term Scotts Valley city councilman and chairman of the county transit board. A responsible pillar of the community.

But I've got the shirt. Hee hee hee.

But now let's talk about the other group of t-shirts I collect: the ones I can't figure quite figure out, all the way. I mean, who is Nancy?


For reasons unknown to me, a lot of people print up t-shirts for their friends' fiftieth birthdays-- they give one to the birthday boy and maybe pass out a few more at the party. The shirts say things like "BRUCE HITS THE BIG FIVE-OH," or "Uncle Bob turns 50 in Acapulco!"

After the big day, nobody wears these shirts again, because they say "50" on them. And so the shirts end up at Goodwill, where nobody buys them unless they don't read English.

But Nancy's tee is the best fiftieth-birthday shirt I've ever seen, and that's why it came home with me:

I'll never know who Nancy is, really, but there it all is on the shirt: her life life in schematic form. The shirt is pretty new, so it's likely she was born in the mid to late '50s, grew up in a steel town in the rust belt and maybe got busted for smoking pot with the tough kids.

The rest I can only flesh out from my own head. But that's half the fun. For example:

Maybe Nancy was a tough kid herself, a proto-punk growing up in a hard-knocks steel town. Where all the boys were destined to go to work in the mills, and all the girls were supposed to stay home and make babies. But Nancy decided to go her own way.

So the popular Catholic girls at Industrial High spread rumors she was a "slut." Which means almost nothing but implies almost everything, and is a hard label to shake. And all the pimply-faced, smelly boys with big hands and noses went "hur,hur,hur," as she passed their lockers and secretly hoped she'd pop their cherries, too. Lotsa luck, creeps, it's just gossip.

But eventually she tottered out of high school on platform shoes and straight into the maw of the '70s. And hit the disco floor in Farrah Fawcett hair, a tube top, and glittery nail polish. Maybe she tended bar. There might have been some college in there, or not.

There was certainly a little coke -- maybe more than a little -- and eventually her Disco King in the form of a tall, dark, fast-talker with puka beads and and a porn-star mustache. And a bright future as manager of a discount vinyl-flooring outlet.

They moved in together, and the Catholic girls from the old neighborhood -- half of them already married and pregnant -- upped the gossip volume to Overload. Even though their brothers were aping John Travolta and trolling the disco floor for one-nighters. But, y'know, boys are different.

And so it was party party party for a while but Nancy got tired of taking a couple of general ed classes and hanging around the house all day. Disco King wasn't around so much -- he worked late nearly every day. She tried a little dealing -- I mean, why not sell what you like, and Disco King liked paying wholesale for his blow -- but called it off after the cops got a little too interested.

So she got herself a part-time job humping paper for a real estate agencies. Where her adolescent 'tude translated into just the right phone manner for barking at appraisers and title companies to keep that paper moving.

One long weekend, in a fit of coke-induced optimism, Nancy and Disco King drove to Atlantic City and married up. But not long after Nancy caught him in the hot tub with a barmaid, and he told her that marriage didn't mean the same thing to him as it did to other guys." And he invited her in for a threesome. Wearing gold chains down past his nipples. On the spot, Nancy had an epiphany of disgust.

So she packed her stuff and moved out that night, but not before keying a pithy comment about penis size across the hood of Disco King's Camaro Z28. She never took coke again. Well, hardly ever.

Nancy upper her hours at the real estate office to full time, took night classes, bought a few dress-for-success business suits -- the kind that showed boob -- and before you knew it, she was leasing commercial space in the new office towers going up in the inner 'burbs. Nice bonuses, a sweet Volvo 240. And networking parties three nights a week; and yes, sometimes she brought home more than business cards.

One of them stayed around -- Thor, a tall, blond, residential agent with a good track record in high-end home sales and a water-polo body he picked up playing for Lutheran University. It was lust at first sight, and compatible interest afterward. In the afterglow of sex, they talked cap rates and depreciation and gross rent multipliers until the sun rose. A merger was soon negotiated and finalized.

The Eighties hit the Rust Belt hard, and real estate along with it. Nancy and Thor looked for greener pastures, and Thor fastened on California. People told them the business was hell in Calfornia, too; but as Nancy said, you don't fear hell when you've seen Pittsburgh.

They settled in Santa Cruz, because the competition was small-time and they could smell all that Silicon Valley money just waiting to pour over the hill. And in a few years, it did. And they sold beachfront homes to execs from Apple and Silicon Graphics and Tandem, all gravid with stock-option bucks. After a while Thor stayed mostly on the sales end and Nancy took over the business end, running the office, leasing vacation property, managing apartment buildings. Twin Mercedes, a sweet executive manse in Carbonero Heights, and then the dotcom boom; life was good.

Well, except that Thor spent more and more time hanging with the sales staff while Nancy minded the store alone. And it wasn't easy. Nancy kept their ever-larger staff pumping paper and moving money, whipping cohort after cohort of slack-jawed 22 year-old-girls and boys into hard-nosed cubicle warriors. Until the competition hired them away and she had to start over with the latest crop of community college grads. Were they really getting dumber every year? And what the hell was this tattoo business all about?

She belonged to about three clubs and started partying with the other self-made businesswomen and corporate ladder-climbers. They had great times down at the Crow's Nest on Wednesday night and then was the time -- or two -- when she woke up Thursday morning in some Seabright beach boy's bed not knowing how she got there. And there was a photo --or two -- of her dirty-dancing half-naked with Weevil, a 30-something local surf god with 37 endorsement contracts. She honestly didn't remember a thing.

Sadly, it was time to swear off the margaritas. She cooked a fine dinner for Thor one night and kind of apologized. Thor accepted the apology and told her he was moving in with their third-best salesperson -- a 26-year-old blonde Reiki practitioner and CrossFit instructor, Abs you could bounce a quarter off, he gloated.

"Then I've got a going-away present for you" Nancy said. She reached for the stungun she'd bought for protection -- she managed property in Watsonville -- and tazed him in the nuts. For a long time.

After he collapsed on the floor, she kicked in the door of his locked office and went through his papers. She found travel receipts for Mr. and Mrs. Thor to Vegas and Cabo and Mazatlan going back three years. She didn't remember any of those trips, and not because she'd been drinking.

So she gathered the papers up neatly and went back into the other room to taze the groaning Thor another time or two for good measure. But the battery died, so she settled for pouring dessert -- zabaglione -- evenly up and down his prone body. She thought about trying to light it, but restrained herself.

When Thor regained full consciousness, he found one of the Mercedes gone and a lawyer's business card propped against his nose.

The divorce wasn't pretty, and neither was splitting the business, but they got through it and agreed not to spit at each other when they met again -- Thor had it written into the settlement. Thor got the residential real estate business and the house; Nancy got property management and commercial real estate and a couple of apartment buildings.

And a few visits from the FBI in the middle of it all, because one of her clueless 22-year-olds had opened an email attachment "from a friend" and infected the entire office network . It was now under the control of a Russian hacker ring that was using Nancy's computers to flood the Western Hemisphere with weight-loss spam. ("Lose 30 pounds the RIGHT way!) The young worker was "reee-leee sorry." Nancy put her on landscape maintenance.

And suddenly she was 50 years old and the "client meeting" someone put on her calendar turned out to be a surprise birthday party with the girls over at El Palomar. And then her best friend Babs put this t-shirt in front her and led everybody in a gawdawful version of "Happy Birthday."

And Nancy just stared at the tee, virgin daiquiri at her side. The big 5-0, then and God, hadn't it just been the other day that she was 22 and dancing the Latin Hustle under an giant laser-lit disco ball? She shook her head. She was here and this was now, and she was a tough old broad and that was that. She led the table in a toast to tough old broads everywhere and they pelted her with coasters. And a good time was had by all.

....and that's why I collect tee shirts. Yeah, I'm weird.

Happy Fourth -- I Guess

The Fourth of July in Santa Cruz isn't just one day. The town just sort of gears up for it for a day or two before, and recovers for a day or two after. It's arguably the biggest tourist weekend of the summer, and the locals get kind of crazy, too.

Rhumba and I had yesterday off, and we wandered over in the afternoon to the West Side to buy some yarn off a woman who had posted some for sale on craigslist. Rhumba's a huge knitter, even teaches free classes, and she was looking for cheap yarn to pass on to some of the more low-budget knitters she knows. The lady wanted a little too much at first -- she was raising money to fix a dead truck parked in front of the house, $1500 for a fuel pump. But after Rhumba showed her how to cast on and do a project herself with some of her yarn, she came down.

So we're standing in the driveway dickering over all this stuff when there's a sudden WARRROOOOOM! from across the street. Like a bomb going off. And it was one -- somebody was warming up for the Fourth.

"They could get a thousand-dollar fine for that," the woman complained.

"But they won't," I said. "And tomorrow night there'll be ten thousand of them on the beach with stuff like that, and not enough cops to stop any of them."

She sighed. She knew I was right. On the evening of the fourth, 20 or 30,000 people head out to the beaches between Santa Cruz and Aptos with firecrackers, skyrockets, pyrotechnics of all varieties -- and shoot 'em off. Not the safe-and-sane variety, either. It's actually dangerous -- and all the beer and dope doesn't make it any safer.

This is not a scene Rhumba or I endorse, and we don't take part in it. Once I took a tour of Netcom, the local 911 center here, and the supervisor told me that July 4 was the worst night of the year for emergency calls -- injuries, fights, auto accidents, drunkenness, burns, fires. Every possible operator is on duty, every possible cop is on the street, every engine company and ambulance crew is at the ready. What's being celebrated? Well, I wouldn't call it freedom, exactly.

Last night we watched a couple of shows about American presidents on the History Channel, and they spent some time on James K. Polk. He's the guy who invented a phony provocation with Mexico to start a war and grab maybe half the land mass of Mexico for the United States. A war that Abraham Lincoln himself condemned as evil and immoral. (That part wasn't in the show of course: the History Channel is corporate media, and doesn't like to stir things up with too much perspective.)

The bit on Polk ended up with some bespectacled milquetoast from Nowhere University opining that Polk had to be considered one of the "great presidents" because of how he enlarged the country. Through an evil and immoral war, of course, but if you think the Iraq war was anything new, it wasn't -- just American imperialists trying to grab more, as they always have. The only difference between Polk and George W. Bush is that 1) Polk was a hard-working detail man, and so 2) he got away with it. And yes, I know where I live, and who used to own it; and no, that doesn't make it right.

This morning, we woke up early to go down to the water and have coffee under the fog. When everybody else in town is jamming the Buttery and Emily's and all the other morning coffee/bakery hangouts, they're ignoring the best one of all: the Kind Grind, down at the Yacht Harbor. It's right on Seabright Beach, the parking is free and easy before 10, and you can sit outside at tables along the promenade with coffee and a muffin (a damned good muffin) and watch the boats motor out into the bay.

Today, we watched the guys from the catamaran club tote a couple of big canoes down to the water and paddle out to sea. Sunburned women tightened up the nets on the beach volleyball courts and guys set up pop-ups and beach chairs nearby, obviously for a tourney. Early bird locals marched down the hill laden with folding furniture and ice chests to claim their bit of sand for a long day of partying in the sun. People and dogs ran back and forth along the water's edge. A nice beach-town vibe, all-in-all. Just like any other weekend on a locals beach, only a little more so.

Heading back home, we drove through the motel districts where VACANCY signs were very easy to find. Here in Santa Cruz on arguably the busiest tourist weekend of the year. Five years ago, even the worst dumps would be booked up two months in advance for the Fourth.

As we drove by the lumberyard, the usual crowd of illegal Mexican day laborers stood on the sidewalk out front waiting for work -- any work. On the Fourth of July. There's a saying that everybody dies quickly, but some people take a long time to pass away. One hundred and fifty years later, James K. Polk has not yet passed.

The United States is many things, many of them good. But for the powerful who run things for their own benefit, it has always been and will always be the United States of James K. Polk. And until we force their hand away from the controls of the nation, some day, the Fourth of July for me will be nothing much to celebrate.

Freedom from tyranny? More like, meet the new boss....