Tales from the Coast

It's the Law

2012-02-09T21:34:00.000-08:00

The beginning of a jury trial resembles the beginning of a play.

Sixty prospective jurors file into the courtroom and sit down in the spectators box like any audience. The prosecutors, the defense attorneys, and the defendant stand and face the crowd silently as the jurors seat themselves.

The attorneys, the defendant: they are the players. We the potential jurors are the audience. Some of us will actually serve on the jury and become a part of this play as well.

As in most courtrooms, two tables have been provided for the opposing legal teams. At one table stands a cagey-looking black man of middle age: graying hair trimmed short, silver wire-rimmed glasses and a nice blue suit.

At the other table stand a slim young Latina in high-heeled boots, and a veritable wall of a man in grey wool herringbone. He has a lawyerly look, yet his eyes don't quite focus. The Latina is very pregnant. She wears a short gray dress that hugs her every contour -- whether it should or not. And she has rings under her eyes.

I speculate on what crime the Latina might have committed until the judge saunters in and introduces the attorneys and the defendant. The Latina is a public defender. The wall of wool is the defendant. The black man is the prosecutor. In the courtroom, appearances can be deceiving. Often intentionally so.

The judge speaks to us at length. How lucky we are, she tells us, to be part of a jury trial. What an enriching experience it can be for jurors, she exclaims, and what an important role the juror plays in the justice system. The judge lays it on thick.

And soon, I understand why. Because we sixty potential jurors are about to spend four hours in jury selection to try a man on charges of attacking a parrot.

From experience, I know that the the modern American criminal court system will move heaven and earth to avoid a jury trial. For better or worse -- I think, worse -- there isn't the time. Deals are cut. Reduced charges are offered. it is made clear that if the defendant asks for a jury trial -- and loses -- the Book will be Thrown. The inalienable right to a trial is so very often alienated.

So how did this one slip through? Over a parrot, at that?

The charge is animal cruelty -- not even a felony. The judge makes that clear, but little else. The first eighteen people troop to the jury box. And over the next few hours of interminable questioning, a few things become clear:

The hulking defendant is accused of stomping a parrot to death.
There are several witnesses. When the trial begins, we should expect them to contradict each other.
The defense attorney wants to know which juror candidates are animal lovers. Nearly all of them, it turns out. The one bird lover will be dismissed.
The defendant seems bewildered, glum. At one point his tiny attorney pats her giant client on the back.

The prosecutor wants to know if even "people who've done bad things" deserve equal protection under the law. Interesting point for a prosecutor to make.
The crime took place in the small mountain hamlet of Boulder Creek. It has a reputation.

At the end of several hours, the attorneys have their jury. And I am not on it. Truly, I was relieved. This would have been a terrible week to be away from work. Though lately, all of them are.

And yet, I was also sorry. I enjoy telling stories, as longtime readers here should know. And the trial of the hulking parrot stomper would have been a doozey of a story, the pride of my collection.

But there were compensations. Released from my duty to keep an open mind, I immediately rushed home and searched the Internet for mentions of parrot stomping in Boulder Creek. And I found them.

About Boulder Creek: it is an isolated town in a rural, hard-to-get-to pocket in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Sunset magazine just listed Boulder Creek as one of their "Favorite Places to Move To." I'd like to know what they're smoking at Sunset; because if it's what I think it is, they grow a lot of it around Boulder Creek.

And while the majority of citizens are solid, Boulder Creek is a sort of eddy that people drift into when they don't have much going on: unsettled people with unsettled lives. There are cheap (for here) houses to rent on big lots, with neighbors who don't ask questions. People who get busted for anything in Boulder Creek are likely also drunk or stoned, or want to be. And, not so very rarely, they have two or three pounds of marijuana in the trunk of their cars.

Enter our defendant: a man of loose ends and few prospects. He had recently been evicted from his last residence. And the day of his offense had not been good for him. At 1:30 in the morning, the sheriffs busted him for driving under the influence of a controlled substance.

He made bail and was released. He went to the house of a woman he'd been staying with. She was very likely a convicted criminal. ("Do even people who've done bad things deserve equal protection under the law?" the prosecutor asked) She kept several loud dogs in the house, and a parrot that was free to fly from room to room.

Was the residence a drug-free zone? I suspect not.

At 11:30 pm, with several people in the house, the defendant stepped outside for a smoke. When he reentered the house, the dogs began to bark at him furiously. And the parrot flew straight at his face and landed on his neck. The defendant flailed at the parrot wildly and knocked it to the floor.

Then he stomped on it three times, killing it. Pandemonium ensued.

Was he protecting himself? Had he simply panicked? Or was he angry and sadistic? Some witnesses held that the parrot was just being friendly. The pet's owner, who'd been in another room at the time, called the police at once and insisted that her former friend be charged and prosecuted.

And he was. He's been in jail for most of the last four months; a few weeks after the incident, he got arrested for drug possession again -- and vandalism, and parole violation. The guy just can't stay out of trouble.

And there he was at trial, hulking and passive and gloomy, barely reacting when his attorney tried to engage him in jury selection. Why, I had to ask, hadn't he just copped a plea? Maximum sentence was one year. Maybe he had nowhere else to go. Maybe he was really innocent, or thought he was.

The whole chain of events reeks of junkie madness: hysteria, warped personalities, panic, impulse. And it cast this rudderless man into the cold embrace of The Law.

I have served on several criminal juries, and sometimes the defendant's motivations appear straightforwardly criminal. Somebody had money; he wanted it. His gang feuded for territory with another gang; he shot some of them. The logic is there, even if the humanity isn't.

But about half the time, the defendant is guilty of -- cluelessness. Overreaction. Poor coping skills. Something bad happens, they get excited, and they go off the rails. They make what some call "poor choices." And they end up in court with a bewildered look on their face -- not sure how they got there, convinced that they're going to get screwed.

And they do. The judge had given us a nice speech about the law: how we had to decide according to the narrow strictures of the law, because the law was the law and there was no choice. Actually, there is one: you can vote "not guilty." You don't have to explain. But judges don't care to travel that territory.

The thing is, law isn't what this guy needs. He needs someone to take a good look at him and figure out how to help him get back on track. But law is all he's going to get. The law is a mechanism that says when A happens you will do B, and there are no exceptions and there is no heart. Unless, of course, you can afford a six-pack of high-priced lawyers.

At any rate, the law will dispose of the defendant dispassionately, classify him, possibly convict him and, when it has had its way with him, release him back into the world, probably worse off than he was when he came in.

Unless the jury finds him innocent. According to the trial schedule, deliberations began this afternoon. I can truly hope that when all witnesses are heard, there's enough contradiction and irrationality that the jury doesn't believe anyone. And have a "reasonable doubt" that anybody really recalls the truth.

But does it matter? One day the defendant will be back on the street again; and I have no idea whether he'll ever straighten out. But unless there's some hero in the system who lends him a hand, the law will be of no help to him. It will simply sit there, waiting, until he falls into its maw once more and is chewed up by its gears. Again.

Over-the-Hill Police Blotter Haiku

2012-02-05T22:31:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the long delay since my last post. I recently declared that I would make writing a larger part of my life, and I have. But what I've been working on is not ready to be published.

So in the meantime, please accept a few more police blotter haiku. These are "over the hill" haiku: not because they're old and tired, but because they are literally from "over the hill:" the Santa Cruzan term for the Silicon Valley and other environs that lie on the far side of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the dreaded Highway 17.

Silicon Valley is a world center for high tech; but 70 years ago it was the world center for prune packing and canning; and it still resembles a collection of farm towns in some ways. True, they're very expensive farm towns. But the small-town provincialism remains. And the local papers publish excellent police blotter columns, from which I've been able to fashion a few haiku.

As always, enjoy. And thanks for coming by.

To feel more secure
he points a surveillance cam
at his neighbor's house.

They left drops of blood
in exchange for the cash they'd
broken in to steal.

Wheeled outside and left
by his caregiver and then…
It started to rain.

Her car missed him once.
Then twice, but the cops wouldn't
allow a third try.

She knows that her ex
left the door ajar so that
her cat could escape.

A young drunk, stranded,
bangs on random doors in search
of a lift back home.

It took a thin thief
to break in through that dog door.
He stole only food.

His wife's mother died.
While cleaning out her house
he found her hand grenade.

A Viagra spill
found in a video store.
What plans went awry?

Unwelcome

2012-01-25T21:35:00.000-08:00

If it wasn't for the breaded chicken sandwich, I'd never go near Kelly's

Kelly's is a bakery and cafe on the West Side, not far from my company. You'll find Kelly's in a funky shopping complex built around a large and sunny courtyard that opens to the parking lot. In the courtyard are big plants, outdoor tables with umbrellas for Kelly's customers, even a pond.

Kelly's is a true community gathering place, perhaps the only one on the West Side. Other than that, there are tables outside the supermarket. The West Side is home to Santa Cruz' economic and university elite -- and to many others who are just getting by.

In many ways, Kelly's is an attractive place to hang out. In other ways, it doesn't feel like home ground. Mainly the elite are able to hang at Kelly's, partly because it's not cheap at all. And yet as I said, Kelly's is about all that passes for a public square in that part of town, and one of the very few places to get a lunch that's better than mere fast food.

And they've got that heavenly sandwich: a nicely breaded breast of chicken on a fresh focaccia roll with mayo and sauteed sweet red peppers. I can't get enough of it; and I can get the sandwich for several dollars under list price if I get a pre-made version from the bakery case "cold to go." So Kelly's has seen me at lunch hour from time to time, though I don't actually stay and hang.

But my problem with Kelly's is not just about the dollar cost of eating there; it's more subtle.

The other day at lunch I approached Kelly's front door just as Gloria stormed out of it. She's a co-worker. "I've had it with this place," she declared. "It takes forever to get waited on. I don't have the time!"

I mumbled something and she flounced away. "Flounced" is a technically accurate term here, because Gloria is expecting a child. Imminently.

I've worked in the same office with the same people for almost six years, and for five of them nobody started a pregnancy. But as I write this, three women are expecting -- all in their early to mid-30s, all with their first child. And that excludes the two slightly older women who adopted this past year.

I suspect it's the way life rolls for working women these days: you get your college degree, you start a career, get married, pay down the student loans, settle into a house. And before you know it you're over 30 and your biological window of opportunity begins to slide shut… so you'd better get moving on procreation if that's your plan. And of course you keep working.

Jeez, as I write it all down, life sounds more like an obstacle course than a journey.

So that day, at that lunch hour, I perhaps understood why Gloria decide that her time was better spent on practically anything than waiting for service at Kelly's. I pushed through the door and saw: exactly what I usually see.

There was a line, all the way to the door. It inched forward slowly along the bakery cases to the cashier/order taker. There was only one of her, and she also got drinks. It's a poor system, and it does not change.

Few seem to mind. Immediately in front of me in line, a tall and slender young woman took advantage of the wait to give life lessons to her two toddlers. She described the items in the bakery cases; they asked questions, she answered them. When the woman and her children finally got the cash register, each child placed its own order as Mom prompted them. It took awhile.

Farther up the line were three young men running heavily to horn-rimmed glasses and hipster-style beard stubble. One even wore one of those little fedoras with a narrow brim -- sky blue in color. They laughed, checked messages and texts on their iPhones, and had a great time. When they reached the counter, they spent more time arguing about who'd pay, and then ordered a beer, a sandwich and a pastry apiece; which at Kelly's will run you about seventeen bucks.

At the very head of the line, a gaggle of older women placed sandwich orders. They asked for detailed descriptions of the sandwiches' ingredients, asked that particular items be left out or added, inquired whether the tea was organic. One of them decided against the sandwich she had originally ordered and started the process over from scratch.

All in all, it took ten minutes to traverse the line and ask someone to fetch me the sandwich; it would have taken as long to order a cup of coffee. And yet no one seemed to mind. The air was sweet, filtered sun streamed through the tall windows, cooking smells wafted from the kitchen. Everyone was happy to be where they were and in no hurry to be anywhere else. At 12:30 pm on a weekday.

Suddenly I hated everyone in the room and at the tables outside.

I hated the elderly parents and their adult children sitting together, dandling the grandchildren above their laps. I hated the well-kept oldsters reading thick books. I hated the lazy tables of twenty-something men and women, with and without children, who bore the tell-tale signs of the well-heeled graduate student. I hated the grinning, grungy young men dropping serious money for lunch and in no hurry.

I hated them because they were not subject to the tyranny of time and schedule and wages as I was, I and my co-workers. I hated them because they are living life slowly and well, while my co-workers try to shove life into the small spaces that remain after work and schedule and debt have taken their fill. I hated them because the older among them, many of them university people, had mostly retired on good pensions in paid-for homes. While some of my friends work past seventy. And so may I.

But mainly I hated them because they don't believe they're privileged, these West Siders who express surprise if you tell them you've never been to Europe, don't have a pension, never got a master's degree, never took that spiritual voyage of self-discovery to the Himalayas, don't have the time to scratch-cook organic meals at home, only eat grass-fed organic beef, or don't think ten bucks is too much for a raffle ticket in a vaguely good cause.

They don't think they're privileged as they eat their lunch in a bakery that was custom-designed for them -- for people who aren't in a hurry and seldom need to be in one. A bakery with no place or allowance for schedule slaves like me, yet is the community gathering place for half the town.

My anger was not healthy. It was judgmental, it was too generalized, it was not fair. But it was my true feeling. Wondrous chicken sandwich or not, I'm going to stay away from Kelly's. Kelly's symbolizes the part of Santa Cruz that appears to welcome everyone, but really only welcomes the chosen ones. The others are invisible to Kelly's denizens. I suspect that they like it that way.

A Few More Police Blotter Haiku

2012-01-21T17:57:00.001-08:00

Here are a few more haiku derived from police blotter columns in small-town newspapers hither and yon. I only managed nine haiku this time; I generally try for ten, but the quality was dropping off and I decided to cut my losses.

As always, enjoy.

Her car was not lost.
Merely, one block over from
her misconception.

Long after midnight
they argued Armageddon
in the sleeping streets.

It came to them that
they could not find their way home
without their cell phone.

The intruders' thanks:
A twenty left behind on
the rumpled bedspread.

They have a town drunk.
The cops bust him every week.
It's not picturesque

He finished his soup,
went out for a drive and was
never seen again.

He and his dog took
a long walk through the back yards
of the neighborhood.

Cold day, hard times, and
a thief who stole nothing from
the store -- but firewood.

Her ex walked in and
rearranged her furniture.
There's a story there...

Creative Sitting

2012-01-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday I spent four hours watching Rhumba read a book. This was the high point of my three-day weekend.

I am attempting to self-publish a couple of juvenile novels that I wrote years ago and did nothing with. I submitted one to Amazon, and they sent me the proof copies last week.The proofs looked good -- at first. But on closer inspection, I found a lot of errors that I thought I'd taken care of. But had not, or not well. Oops.

So I asked Rhumba if she'd read the proof. Rhumba is a professional editor. Back in the '90s when everybody was going to be rich, she made more money editing manuscripts than some guys make running large high schools. She's a technical editor, but she understands the logic of language as well as the grammar. And she's read more children's lit than two librarians.

So on Friday night she said, "Tell you what. Let's go out to the beach real early tomorrow morning, and I'll read straight through it. It shouldn't take long."

"Sounds good."

At face value, it doesn't sound good -- not with the 35-degree mornings we've been having lately. But the idea was to drive down to the warm and cozy harborside coffee house we favor before the regulars showed up and hogged all the tables. So we could hog one.

So we did, and it was dead cold outside and the sun hadn't come up yet. But we did get a table, and coffee, and I plunked the book down in front of Rhumba. She riffled the pages.

"It's bigger than I thought it would be," she said. But she picked it up and started reading. Every 30 seconds or so she wrote a comment in the book and placed a yellow sticky-note next to it. This went on for awhile. I had nothing to do but sit there.

But the dawn was coming on outside the window, and boats began to leave the harbor: big boats with many passengers on missions that were not obvious. Charter fishing? Maybe, but where were the poles? Whale watching? Memorial services? "That guy there does a lot of ash scattering," one of the old salts said, pointing at a vessel crammed with people in somber garb.

Who knows? The dim, pink dawn gave every boat an air of mystery.

Rhumba was still only 15 pages along, so I went outside with the camera and took a few shots. The sun was coming up.

A few minutes later, the sun was still coming up. And some of the gulls lifted off the freezing beaches to catch what warmth they could.

After a bit I couldn't feel my face any longer, so I went back in and sat down in the warm. Rhumba hadn't gotten much farther.

"This is going to take awhile," she said, not looking up. Fine. Rhumba can concentrate on one task for several hours with unwavering attention. Whereas I'm eminently distractable. We make an interesting team: a detail woman of steely logic and a big-picture guy with fuzzy-edged thoughts.

I had not planned to spend the morning here, but once Rhumba gets her hooks in a job it's best to let her roll. I'd have my manuscript in a few hours, and she'd had the rest of the day clear for her own projects.

No matter. There's always something to see at the beach. As the day grew bright, dog owners nipped in for a quick brew and a little yakking. No dogs allowed inside, of course. But the dogs don't mind staying out in the cold. Do they?

One of the old salts had been showing off his new iPad to friends. He showed it to me as well, including a really pretty good color drawing he'd done with a five-dollar graphics application. I told him what Rhumba was doing for me.

"I wish I could write something," he said. "I've got all these old surfing stories I could tell."

"Well, you should try."

"I don't know how to write anything," he said. "I was never any good at that."

"You don't have to be, if the story's good. Writing doesn't have to be that different from conversational language. You just have to get it down in print, and then you can look at it and rearrange it."

"I dunno," he said. "Hey, y'know I could tell about working in air freight in Hawaii, years ago." And he proceeded to tell us hair-raising stories of flying air freight into a leper colony in a decrepit old plane with a pilot who called it a win if they crash-landed in a pineapple field instead of ditching in the ocean.

"You really ought to get some of this down," I said.

"Does your iPad record speech?" Rhumba asked suddenly, looking up from her work.

"I'm not sure," he answered. "Maybe."

"If it does, you can just speak your stories right into the iPad. Then someone can convert the sound files into text for you. "

We left him surveying new vistas of possibility. Well, we didn't leave; he did. But that was okay, the coffee house began to fill up with people holding ukeleles, mandolins, and other stringed instruments. Casually-plunked tunes filled the air. This is normal.

Harbor Beach in Santa Cruz is home to an anarchic musical community known as the Sons of the Beach. Every Saturday morning a heterogenous group of up to 100 people show up dragging drums, guitars, mandolins, keyboards, saxophones--but mainly ukeleles. They arrange themselves in a large, rude circle on the sand and play tunes from a thick chord book of golden oldies.

Because everybody in Santa Cruz wants to be creative and sing and play an instrument and have a good time doing it. And even people with two left hands can handle a uke. If a ukelele wasn't easy to play, the Portuguese (my mother's people) would have never bothered to invent it. Santa Cruz is a huge ukelele town, and there are people who'll teach you for very little.

And a good time is had by all at the weekly SOB conclave, with most of "all" being well over 50. But really, anybody's welcome; and just about anybody shows up. If you're ever in town with an acoustic instrument on a Saturday morning, come on down.

And people do. I ran into the Atomic Grandpa, a member of the men's group I belong to, who'd just come by to hang out. He told me that East End Alf, another men's group member, was out there somewhere with the Sons making music. And I did find Alf and gave him a wave though he was busy plunking and singing. He's in one of the pictures I've posted, and I will leave you to guess which.

And I met a few other people I didn't expect to see there, and passed the time. Then I wandered back inside, where Rhumba said, "Just a few more pages. Can I get a blueberry muffin?"

And, a little while later, muffin-powered, she reached the finish line. And we tooled off in the sunshine to visit bookstores and catch lunch and enjoy the rest of the day.

But I've still got a bit of work to do on that book. Rhumba found a few things. More than a few, actually. Okay, my manuscript looks like it was brutally attacked by marauding bands of rabid yellow sticky notes. Yes, Rhumba is a good editor.

The point of all this, I suppose, is that sitting in one place can be creative, productive, even the high point of a weekend. If you pick your spot well. May you sit with dignity and wisdom.

Sweet Thursday Police Blotter Haiku

2012-01-12T22:16:00.000-08:00

Once again, here are haiku derived from short items in "police blotter" columns from small-town newspapers on the west coast and beyond. I'd say more, but I'm falling asleep.

Thanks for coming by, and enjoy.

Steamy car windows.
They conceal much, but the cop
had seen quite enough.

No place left to be
except the supermarket.
And they don't want her.

First rule of mugging:
small bags clutched by dog-walkers
rarely hold money

"Invisible men
have been stealing my knick-knacks!"
"Yes, I have cats. Why?

For unknown reasons
an unknown man hit him and
left by unknown car

Waiting in his house
was a puppy that someone
thought he had to have.

From her house she heard
a mysterious "plop" that
no one could explain.

An unknown cousin
wandered in unannounced and
was taken captive.

Chairs in the streets and
fires as well and the cops can't
wait for school to start

People in the walls:
alluring targets for a
drunk with a crossbow.

Decision Point

2012-01-08T22:29:00.000-08:00

I made it to the gym for some exercise the other day. Although increasingly, "exercise" should be defined as short bursts of activity interrupting long periods of browsing the magazine rack by the elliptical trainers.

The magazines reflect the concerns of the gym's mostly-female clientele: fitness and beauty, fashion, gossip, children. And yet, a fresh copy of the New Yorker appears weekly, looking as out of place as a Wall Street banker in a drum circle.

So I picked up a copy to browse instead of heading back to the Bosu Ball for more ab work as I should have. And found myself reading a profile of yet another youngish, impatient libertarian investor who made billions with Silicon Valley start-ups. Facebook, Paypal, and others.

He founded one company that few have heard of. But I have. I might have gone to work there. We'll call it Octoflex Systems.

This was six or seven years ago. I had dropped out of high tech a while back and spent a couple of years getting a teaching credential and working in the public schools. I probably burned $20K and what I mainly learned was that teaching isn't for me -- a least, not the kind of teaching that involves facing down 30 or 35 grade school kids for six hours a day.

So I started looking for work in high tech again, and it wasn't easy. My skills were dusty -- I'd been a technical writer, but I no longer knew the latest tools, nor did I have subject matter knowledge of the hot technologies.

But I was still a writer, and many successful technical writers never were. They churn out endless field descriptions and procedures to plug into manuals that already exist. But ask them to write an actual overview of the product and how its parts work together -- a "white paper" -- and you don't get much.

Your average human resources department doesn't know or care about such things; so I concentrated on smaller outfits and start-ups that advertised through craigslist.

And I got a few bites. Somebody from Octoflex Systems called me up, and we chatted a bit. He was a techie; Octoflex was a new start-up, too small to even have an HR department.

And the techie told me that Octoflex designed software for drawing information out of vast seas of apparently unrelated data. And that the intelligence community was their biggest customer.

Ooooh-kay. I've tried to stay away from defense-related work, mainly out of ideology but partly because defense contractors aren't wonderful people to work for. But it sounded interesting. And the techie on the line wanted something besides mere product documentation. He wanted to know if I could write white papers aimed at high-level intelligence bureaucrats.

I gave him ten minutes of rap about What A Good White Paper Should Contain, and we parted on good terms. He said I'd hear from them.

No lie. Two days later they called me in for an interview, and it was off to Palo Alto. I don't like long commutes, and Santa Cruz to Palo Alto is a long one and a bad one. But maybe, I thought, I could work at home some of the time. Many companies offer the option.

So I donned my interview clothing and headed over the hill in a car with no air conditioning on the hottest day of the year. By some miracle I got there without sweat stains penetrating the tweed.

Octoflex's offices were up in the mundane part of Palo Alto, away from downtown in a neighborhood that looked like any suburb. I walked in, introduced myself, and the interview was on.

Ninety percent of the staff were top-of-the-line twenty-something software gurus out of Stanford. The kind who write algorithms that millions use daily without realizing it, because the code is hidden inside e-commerce applications, social networking sites, and financial systems. You wouldn't know these guys' names, but they know each other; and the opinion of their peers is all that they care about. Well, money's nice, too.

The young man who herded me through Octoflex was the senior engineer under the development VP. He handled himself with the earnest arrogance of a king nerd, the one who knows he's the best in the world at a job that most people don't even understand.

Octoflex makes -- call it search software. Octoflex's system could look through seas of telecommunication data and from it compile information that, to you and me, wasn't really there. It was all about counter-terrorism -- or so the king nerd told me. That's probably what they told him.

There'd been complaints in Congress about illegal access by the feds of domestic phone calls and email -- all in the name of detecting terrorists. The king nerd assured me, with a superior smile, that if the feds had used Octoflex's software they would have been able to get the same information without breaking the law. Technically.

The best, they told me: nothing at Octoflex but the best people, the best software, the best ideas. They told me I was the only one from the phone screening that they'd bothered to interview. Nobody else had measured up. It was that white-paper spiel of mine; most tech writers don't think that way.

And yet --- I blew the interview. I knew I was blowing it. I could have fixed it, but I didn't want to. Maybe it was the hot day. Maybe it was the killer 50-mile commute -- and, no, working at home was not an option.

Or maybe it was the heroic geek culture at Octoflex. They worked long hours every day and were proud of it. They had a private convenience store on the premises: glass refrigerated cases filled with packaged salads, heat 'n eat meals, ice cream, and every energy drink known to mankind, all free. You weren't supposed to have a life. Or if you did, you were supposed to live most of it on the premises.

You have to be young to think that this is fun. And I'd achieved voting age, at least, before every other person in the building had been born. They still thought it was all an adventure. I knew it was a job. And I already had a life.

But mainly I blew the interview because Octoflex was sleazy. Yes, the best, the very best technology. To spy on public telecom -- legally. To catch the bad guys, only the bad evil foreign terrorists. Yes, we swear, we swear.

As I said, I'm too old. I know where this leads.

They didn't ask me back. But I didn't try to make them want to. There were so many reasons not to want that job. So I made a decision. And that decision affected how how my life played out since that day. That decision ultimately sent me off to a low-paying job that I don't enjoy. And yet that same job gives me plenty of time to be with my sweetie and to have something resembling a life here in Santa Cruz, most beautiful of regions.

So imagine my interest, halfway through reading the New Yorker article at the gym, when I read that Octoflex is now worth "an estimated $2.5 billion dollars." They've come a long way from an office park in the downmarket end of Palo Alto.

If I'd tried to get that job, I might be sitting pretty right now. Or, I might be a burnout with a heart attack and a crappy relationship with Rhumba. I most definitely would have hitched my star to an enterprise that works for people I despise. Octoflex is not only in with the spooks; they're palsy with the big investment banks and hedge funds, too. I'd have to destroy all the mirrors in the house so I couldn't look at myself.

Decision points are interesting. You often don't notice them except in retrospect. You wonder why your life turned out a certain way; and if you wonder long enough and hard enough, you can see the decision point that launched you in a certain direction -- or didn't.

Fifteen or seventeen years ago, I wrote a children's novel. More or less as a lark. And I got it to an agent, and then to a publisher. And prospects looked good. And then it all turned nasty. I didn't get published. My agent quit the business in disgust. That nasty.

So I wrote another one, and I couldn't even get an agent. I could have gone to writers' conferences and tried to connect with an agent or publisher along with thousands of other wannabes.

But self-promotion doesn't come easily to me. And I'm naturally risk averse. And the wonderful world of publishing looked pretty grim and, yes, sleazy. And at the time I was making very good money at a job I could do in my sleep, and expected to keep on doing it for as long as I wanted to.

So I gave up; stopped writing anything but technical manuals. Went with the flow.

And of course the flow didn't take me at all where I expected it to. And here I am, fifteen or so years later, making a third the money in a chaotic job that doesn't suit me and isn't good for me. And I ask myself: where would I be if I hadn't given up, all those years ago, and kept writing? Somewhere else, I think. At least, not exactly here.

I say this because when I actually give myself time to do it, writing is the one thing that makes a humdrum and not-very-satisfying weekday seem worthwhile after all. (Well, except for Rhumba.) Even if all I have to write about is what I saw at breakfast that day.

I think I'm going to make writing a priority. Call this a decision point not in retrospect. And hope for the best.

Unknown Ostrich Police Blotter Haiku

2012-01-05T22:51:00.000-08:00

The troubles of the world have gotten the best of me; I have no particular idea for a meaty essay.

So -- more police blotter haiku! Because my brain may be stuck in neutral, but the citizens of small-town America never cease to act out in interesting ways. Here are more of their stories, distilled from news copy down into the 17 syllables of an old-school haiku. And one of these days, there'll be a book.

And as always, enjoy.

Soon-to-be-exes
in a knock-down drag-out o'er
Who gets the cat box.

His ex barged in and
smashed his Christmas tree but not,
at least, his new girl.

Her cell-phone savior:
When Grand-Dad tried to grope her,
she recorded him.

Their friend went missing.
But the cops knew where he was
As they'd put him there.

Banned from the Safeway,
He eyeballs his former haunt
from across the street.

When the dog bit him,
he pursued it in anger
and with pruning shears

The neighbor's ivy
trespasses in his garden,
overgrows his calm.

A muddy boot print
on the driver's window of
a vandalized car

Three in the morning.
A chicken coop catches fire.
Do hens smoke in bed?

A burglar alarm
he can't recall the code for.
The cops come often.

Is EVERYBODY drunk?
Or is there really out there,
somewhere, an ostrich?

(Note: Haiku 1, 3, and 8 came from a small-town Kentucky paper that's not fully on the Internet. But a reader sends me copies through the snail mail. Thanks, EvoDevo!)

Post-Solstice Police Blotter Haiku

2011-12-28T20:38:00.000-08:00

Close to two months have gone by without new police blotter haiku. I don't know why: lack of inspiration? Seasonal affective disorder? Burnout?

At any rate, I sat down to write a few today, and they poured out just as they used to. So perhaps I just needed a break. As to whether the quality's back up to snuff: that's your call.

But once again, here's the word from Bonanzaburg, Lake Harborwoodville, Block City, Greater Crater, and all the other small towns where everybody's business is served up daily in the newspaper's police blotter column. As translated into haiku by yours truly.

And as always, enjoy.

Bald, confused, 50.
And nothing could keep him from
taking off his clothes.

"Call the police if you
don't like the noise," the men sneered.
She did, and they came.

A classic case of
serial tire deflation
up and down G Street

She found a lost dog.
But kept looking and found the
lost dog's lost owner.

He called to complain
that his girlfriend's husband keeps
stopping by his house.

A window to smash.
Sans brick, he threw himself and
landed in madness

It was not explained
why her hub tried to come inside
through the doggie door

He returned his son
to his ex-wife's custody
with a large tattoo.

He goes to Starbucks
and tells all the customers
that he's off his meds.

It was a cold night
and the neighbors' hot tub just
sat there, beckoning

What's the Rat Answer?

2011-12-25T19:40:00.000-08:00

Late on Christmas morning, I walked downtown for a little exercise.

Few were out and around, save for the drifters, alcoholics and addicts who had had no place to sleep the night before, and still had no place to be now. People who had homes had stayed in them that morning, to celebrate Christmas.

Except for two families with young children. Together they walked up and down Pacific Avenue wishing Merry Christmas to the people sheltering in storefronts or huddling on benches. The children handed out home-made cookies and candies, which were accepted with thanks and grace.

A good Christmas scene, all in all. At one point I caught up with the families as they talked to a trio of drifters with big backpacks.

The young men smiled at the children, and chatted with them; and from his pocket one brought out a pet to show them: a big brown and white rat.

"Oooooooh," the children said, surging forward to stroke it.

"Children!" screamed one of the mothers.

"Did you ask him for permission to pet the rat?!"

Sometimes I truly appreciate this town. Merry Christmas to it.

A Christmas Nose

2011-12-25T13:10:00.000-08:00

Years ago Rhumba and I drove up to Ashland at Christmas to celebrate with her virtual sisters: the kind you earn through long friendship and shared experience. Blood is optional.

And they were great folks: one a teacher of profoundly disabled children, and the other a children's theater instructor. Ashland's a famous theater town, and the theatrical sister's two daughters had spent so much time on and behind stage that they didn't speak so much as declaim -- and often. Add to the mix her husband, a shiftless Buddhist monk with a vague grasp on reality, and voila: a Christmas party right out of a '30s screwball comedy directed by Preston Sturges.

I've rarely had so much fun at Christmas. Between the robust conversation of the overly-theatrical children, an animated discussion of the lost continent of Mu, and much much more.

We stayed for hours. But our hosts, the theatrical sister and her husband, were poor as church mice; dinner was modest. And small. Rhumba and I ate what we were served and refused seconds. Else there would not have been enough.

In the evening we said our farewells and drove into Medford to see a movie. After, Rhumba and I both admitted to substantial hunger. But it was 8 pm on Christmas night and Medford had shut up like a tomb. This was 20 years ago, but Medford was conservative even for those slower times.

But since the town was so conservative, I had a hunch that it would have the kind of restaurant that could help us -- one was nearly extinct in California even then.

I drove through a couple of business districts, and then we found it: an aged red building of plaster pillars and plaster dragons, topped by orange-and-blue neon signs proclaiming CHINESE AND AMERICAN FOOD. And inside, the lights were on.

The Asian hostess wore a tight, red silk dress, yet greeted us cordially in a flat Oregonian accent. Opening our menus, we skipped past the bland Cantonese dishes and focused on the special of the day: turkey dinner with all the trimmings. And a good one it was, too. Or, good enough.

If it wasn't for Asian restauranteurs, I don't know what some of us would do on Christmas Day. Most likely half the Jews in Ashland were in that restaurant with us.

Of course, few Chinese restaurants offer both Chinese and American food today; but then, Chinese restauranteurs no longer own only Chinese restaurants.

Rhumba and I did not go to church on this Christmas day, but we did go for a drive: it's a Christmas ritual of mine to head up to UC Santa Cruz on Christmas and photograph deer. The campus shuts down for the holidays; and in the complete absence of people, the deer are known to drift in from the surrounding forest and graze on the sports fields, between the administration buildings, in front the library, and elsewhere. I get some good shots.

Rhumba was interested in coffee; she did not want me to go out of my way to find coffee as we drove along; but if any coffee happened by, she wanted it. I deciphered her wishes as best I could and took the long way to campus, past several coffee venues. All closed. I knew where to find a Starbucks, but Rhumba eschews corporate coffee.

There remained but one place to check -- a surfer-dude-friendly coffee house that we don't visit often. And it was open!

We hurried inside and found -- new ownership. All Chinese! In fact, one big happy Chinese family, except for the barrista.

Rhumba says I have a nose for these things. All I can say is, thank God for the Chinese. Without them, Christmas wouldn't be everything it needs to be. And that's one of those little conundrums of the modern age that I'll leave you with. Happy Christmas to those who want one. And a shining solstice to all the rest.

(We never did find any deer.)

The Road That Shouldn't Be There

2011-12-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think I've seen everything. But I never will.

One day many years ago, I found myself driving home to Santa Cruz on Highway 17 around mid-day. I don't remember the errand; a job interview, possibly.

Highway 17, also known "That @(#$*@ing Highway 17," would need a book to describe. In fact, somebody wrote one. Suffice it to say that Highway 17 climbs and descends 1800 feet or so in about fifteen miles. It is a narrow ledge hacked into the side of mountains.

People drive Highway 17 like a freeway, but it is not one, at least not through the mountains. The curves are sharp and sudden -- traps for the unwary that flip cars or bounce them off the center barrier . The shoulders, in places, are nonexistent. Perhaps two feet separate the inner lane from the center barrier. The speed limit is 50, and rightly so; but few keep it.

Fifty thousand Santa Cruzans commute daily over this eccentric strip of asphalt. Rhumba and I did, for years. And if I had it to do all over again -- I wouldn't.

But at noon, traffic is light. I'd made the summit with no trauma, and was descending to the Glenwood Cutoff through a series of sharp s-curves. The roadbed is narrow there: two lanes, a barrier in the middle, and no shoulder. Just a vertical wall of dirt two feet from the outside lane.

And just at that moment, the Japanese sports sedan in front of me began to scream.

It was the hoarse, basso scream of locked brakes, of melting tires giving up their rubber. The rear end of the sedan swung forward and threw the car into a spin. Black smoke spewed from all four wheels.

Spinning end for end, the sedan continued to hurtle forward. Never quite touching the center barrier or the outer wall. Twice it revolved, three times, six times, now nearly invisible in a cloud of burnt rubber. And the tires screamed and screamed. As I followed behind at a safe distance, my eyes like dinner plates.

But gradually, the car slowed and on the eighth revolution its rear end hit the dirt embankment and it stopped, nose sticking out into the road. And there was no shoulder at all there, none. And we were in the middle of a blind curve.

There was nothing to do but the right thing. I pulled in behind the sedan and hopped out on the roadway, half expecting some car to flatten me at any second. But again, traffic was light, so approaching drivers had the leeway to swing wide. And, thank God, they did. Though not one slowed down.

I knocked on the driver's window of the beleaguered car. Its engine was still turning over. The tinted window slid down; behind it sat a middle-aged woman in a suit, She wore a cell-phone headset. A briefcase and a stack of binders lay scattered on the passenger seat: she was a businesswoman, perhaps a lawyer or successful realtor. And her face had gone white as a sheet.

"What happened?" I shouted over the traffic noise.

"I don't know," she said, voice unsteady. "The brakes just locked up on me."

"Are you okay?!"

"I think so."

"I can drive you somewhere for help!"

"No. I can drive. I"ll go down the road a little ways and park. I can call people if I need to."

I asked her if she was sure, and she was. Though I wasn't. But I got back in my car and she pulled out. I followed her closely for a while until we came to a turnout, a mini-parking lot by the side of the road for distressed motorists. She pulled over, out of danger, and I left her.

This incident ranks low in the great scheme of things. Though I can still hear those tires shriek: like elephants in agony. And I still wonder what failed: the car, or the driver's nerves as she, perhaps, rushed into a tight curve too quickly. It's easy to do that on 17.

In these parts, everybody has a Highway 17 story: stories of accidents, near accidents, overturned big rigs, crushed cars bent over the center barrier, wooden-faced emergency crews drawing the shroud over motionless forms. Sometimes it's funny: a truck spills hard candy across the road, completely paralyzing traffic until the road crews pick it all up.

But mostly, it's not funny. People die. And even when they don't, crossing the Hill is a little ordeal that thousands must undergo twice a day just to pay the bills for what they're told is a "normal" life.

So it's no surprise that the locals gave Highway 17's curves and features the kind of terse names that befit some grim battlefield: Glenwood Cutoff, where cars coming onto the road risk being t-boned by drivers screaming out of a big fast curve; the Summit, a long straight, level stretch at the top of the mountain that lures the unwary into thinking that the worst is over; Valley Surprise, a sharp descending curve at the north end of the Summit where centrifugal force tries to pull you off the road; Little Moody Curve; The Cats; Lexington Reservoir.

And Big Moody Curve, a 270-degree monster so notorious, so tight and steep and nasty in the downhill direction that it has its own web page. Big Moody Curve is a truck-flipper, a tight-knuckled exercise in adrenalin secretion where the center divide bears the long black scars of many past accidents. The individual sections of Big Moody Curve are banked -- but in the wrong direction, so that Big Moody pushes you at the center barrier on the downhill, and off the shoulder on the uphill.

And yet, nobody faults the highway department for this horrible road. They shouldn't. Caltrans does the best it can to stabilize the road cuts (which often slide), improve the safety barriers, install road surfaces that improve traction, and so on.

But there's only so much they can do. Highway 17 must conform to the shape of the shifting, creaky, unstable mountains whose sides it clings to. And it was never designed to carry tens of thousands of commuters a day -- which was never in the plans until, against all odds, Santa Cruz became a suburb of Silicon Valley for individuals who want the Valley money and the Santa Cruz lifestyle.

Only, they don't get the lifestyle, much. They spend an hour getting to work, work nine hours, and spend another hour getting home -- or more, if there's an accident. Because there's so little spare space, any accident anywhere on 17 routinely adds 20 minutes to the commute, at least. At that point, there's barely enough energy left to nuke a dinner and collapse in front on the TV once you get home, much less trip on downtown and hang out at a trendy cafe with your friends.

Rhumba and I commuted over The Hill for years. And then we figured out that we weren't really living in Santa Cruz: just sleeping in it. For me the defining moment came when I realized that I hadn't gone down to the ocean in months. Though we live only a mile away.

So I got a job over here in Santa Cruz, and Rhumba wangled a telecommute gig. And we left the Hill behind. We still drive it occasionally, and the old adrenaline comes right back every time.

Highway 17 -- the Hill -- is a road that isn't supposed to be there, but which is Santa Cruz' only link to a high-tech economy that it once could live without, but now cannot. It is the great conundrum of Santa Cruz: a city that prides itself on participation and humanism, yet is increasingly home to people who don't participate and have little time to express their humanity.

You can slap a "Keep Santa Cruz Weird" sticker on your beemer, if you like, as hundreds have done. But the only real way to do it is to give up that damned Highway 17 and start living in the town that you profess to love.

And if you have no choice, may the universe watch over you. But you might be better off moving to San Jose.

Dickensian

2011-12-18T20:33:00.000-08:00

Near the beginning of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, two jolly gentlemen visit the office of the bitter old miser Scrooge. They ask for money to help some of London's poor at the Christmas holidays.

Scrooge gripes that he pays his taxes to support the prisons and workhouses, and the poor are more than welcome to visit either as far as he's concerned. The conversation continues:

"I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.''

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die.''

"If they would rather die,'' said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides -- excuse me -- I don't know that.''

"But you might know it,'' observed the gentleman.

"It's not my business,'' Scrooge returned. "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!''

The more things change, the more they stay the same. You can hear that argument, or close enough, on the cable television news shows. During televised presidential debates, people in the audience have shouted that those lacking health insurance should be left to die.

Hard times can bring out the worst in people -- and the best. In part, that's what A Christmas Carol is all about: taking a good hard look at yourself, and deciding whether you're the person you think you are.

And so it is good to revisit A Christmas Carol every so often. As if you had a choice: endless versions have been filmed and taped, and as far as I know every single one of them is going to air in the days leading up to Christmas. Scrooge is everywhere.

Rhumba and I saw Scrooge live on stage yesterday, in a theatrical production of A Christmas Carol at the San Jose Repertory Theater. I enjoyed it thoroughly: the acting was good and, as this was Silicon Valley, the special effects were excellent. Most of the cast could sing and play instruments, and so many fine old carols were brought into the story to good effect.

Dickens' heartwarming parable about the spirit of giving and love was presented to an appreciative audience -- of mostly older, well-dressed people who had the 65 bucks to plunk down for a ticket.

Our seats were good even though we sat high up in the rear. And so when intermission came, I could see the hot, bright screens of smart phones and tablets pop to life throughout the crowd below as people came back from Dickens' London to check their calls, their texts, their emails. A Christmas Carol is a nice place to visit, but I'm not sure how many of us live there.

And yet, some do. We'd come over from Santa Cruz to see the play with my sister Queenie and her adopted daughter, the seven-year-old Princessa. Queenie and I sometimes can't find things to talk about; and so when she comes to visit, we go to a play or some other attraction.

A Christmas Carol can be a scary play for a seven-year-old, especially if the special effects are good. Princessa spent a good bit of the performance sitting in Queenie's lap.

But it helped that, when the show ended and the cast trooped off stage and through the audience, Scrooge himself bent down and gave Princessa a big kiss on top of her head.

Half an hour later, Rhumba and I were sitting next to "Scrooge" and his wife in a Thai restaurant across the street. Opposite us sat Queenie, the seven-year-old Princessa, and two six-year-old girls. As we waited for food, the three girls busily made "grape burritos" out of purple Play-Doh.

Princessa and her two friends are Chinese -- or their biological parents were. One of the other girls was "Scrooge's" daughter, and the third belonged to another couple at the table.

"Scrooge" and his wife, the other couple, and Queenie had each adopted a girl infant from Chinese orphanages at about the same time. They became friends through a support group for adoptive parents of Chinese orphans.

Tell me that nobody lives in A Christmas Carol; these little girls do. Mainland China's one-child policy produces a surplus of unwanted girl children: because the parents have already had a child -- or because they would rather raise a boy who could support them in their old age than a daughter who would join her husband's family.

Nobody wanted Princessa or the other two burrito-makers; it was the orphanage for them. And after that, who knows? They had no legal status; the state wasn't even obliged to educate them.

And then kindly old people from another land -- armed with the wads of cash required for doing this kind of business on the Chinese mainland -- swooped in, adopted them, brought them home to America, and offered them all the love and help and opportunity that a child could want. And a copious supply of purple Play-doh. It's a story that Dickens could have written.

Scrooge knew how bad the world was, and didn't care; he thought that the poor deserved what they got. Some of us feel that way. And some of us just don't want to admit that the world can really be that bad. We refuse to believe it; or we feel that the problems are overstated, or easily solvable; or if the problems are that bad, certainly someone else will do something about it.

But when things get bad enough, people start to notice. And when they let themselves notice, they start to do things. They have to.

This week the news wires are carrying stories about the "lay-away Santas" haunting K-Mart stores around the nation. Almost alone among major retailers, the K-Mart chain has a lay-away department. If you want to buy something and have no credit, you can put the item on lay-away; the store will hold it for you while you make small weekly payments. When you've paid the full price, K-Mart gives you your item. People with little money and no credit use lay-away a lot. They've no other choice.

At a number of K-Mart stores, strangers have come to the lay-away department and paid off the accounts of people who've been making payments on children's toys or children's clothing. And are behind on their payments. The donors don't know who they're helping; they just ask the lay-away staff to pick an account.

Others wait in the lay-away department and press cash into the hands of people who come in to make payments. It's enough to warm the hearts of all. A classic Christmas-time feel-good story.

And yet, it is more. The times have turned Dickensian. No longer is our country a vast, bland, safe middle-class enclave. It is truly the best of times for some, and the worst of times for many others.

It makes sense, then, that some people are emulating the reformed Scrooge and helping where they can. But does it stop there? Would it have stopped there for Scrooge? Or would he have campaigned for free schools for the poor, clean water, covered sewers -- the major social reforms of mid-19th-century England? I think old Scrooge would have seen his way towards helping out, or at least paying higher taxes. And, who knows, perhaps even running for Parliament on the Liberal ticket? He wouldn't have been the only rich merchant to feel that way.

Because if you care enough to give a toy or a coat to a poor child, eventually you'll care enough to know it's not enough.

So bring on the kindly strangers, the tearful parents astonished that they'll have a Christmas after all. Bring on the Occupy protesters who've stopped banks from evicting people from their homes at the holidays. Bring on the food drives, the turkey drives, the free Christmas dinners for all comers down at the civic auditorium, the food bank holiday contribution barrel in every workplace.

Bring it on, bring it all on. Because when the deserving poor grow too many to be helped by our charity, the libertarian propaganda will melt away and we will remember that all people in need are deserving. Of something. An irreducible something that every human being should have. Dignity, help, hope: they're all in there. Dickens knew.

And God bless us, every one.

Amateur Political Analysis

2011-12-14T20:37:00.000-08:00

My wife Rhumba is good at reading people: by their expression, their mannerisms, their tone of voice, she can tell when someone is being sincere, and when they are not. She can read the emotion hidden by a smile.

She's not infallible. But the less emotionally involved she is with a person, the better a judge she becomes.

So...watching politicians on TV with Rhumba is fun. And sometimes a little scary.

Sunday night we watched President Obama give a long interview on the "60 Minutes" TV news magazine. I have not been in love with the gentleman; there are villains in our society, and he has seemed unwilling to confront them, or even to declare them as such.

And as I watched him on television I found that sometimes I found him entirely insincere. At other times, I trusted everything he said and claimed to feel. But I couldn't say why. I asked Rhumba what she thought.

"When he's trying to sell something, he adopts a straight-on stare to seem sincere," she said. "But it doesn't look right. And he holds his head completely still."

"When he's really sincere, his head moves around while he's speaking.

"I don't think he's actually lying," she said. "But he's saying things he doesn't completely believe."

"You mean, like talking points?"

"Yes." She thought a bit. "He's trying to be a good person. Otherwise he wouldn't be so easy to read. He wouldn't let his thoughts get so close to the surface. It's not like that guy -- Boner?"

"Boehner," I supplied. Pronounced Bay-Nor. The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. ""But people call him that."

"He's hidden his feelings so deep I can't read them at all," she said. "He's drunk a lot, too."

We were eating dinner in front of the television. The interview went on, and Obama cycled between back and forth sincerity and spin. And occasionally, when he didn't like the interviewer's question, he responded with barely-controlled irritation.

"He can be a prick when he wants to be," I observed.

"He needs a room of his own," Rhumba said. "Some place where he can go off by himself, and scream."

We'd been eating cheese, and the cats began to paw at the debris. So I took the dishes to the kitchen and put them in the sink.

I heard a strangled cry from the living room.

"What is it?!" I rushed in.

While I was gone, Obama had made a statement; and then made a face.

This was the statement he'd made: The one thing I've prided myself on before I was President -- and it turns out that continues to be true as President -- I'm a persistent son of a gun. I just stay at it. And I'm just gonna keep on staying at it, as long as I'm in this office. And we're gonna get it right. And America will succeed. I am absolutely confident about that.

And he made the oddest face: almost a smirk. A lawyer's smile. We replayed the sequence a couple of times on the Internet, and I took a screen shoot.

It was his eyes that startled Rhumba. Take a look at them. Is he really "absolutely confident about that?"

Or is there something he's not telling us?

Hey, who took my tinfoil hat?

Things Happen

2011-12-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

All diners have regular customers. These two sit in the front window every morning and split a breakfast.

He's pushing 70, if he hasn't already gotten there: egg-shaped, bald, bad skin. He walks slowly, stiffly, carefully. She's a little younger, a lot more vigorous.

They're not married. They're friends. They don't live together, but they breakfast together. Every single morning. Drive by the diner at 7 a.m. and you'll see them from your car.

Only this day, not. Someone else sat at the window table; the woman dined alone at a two-top in the back.

"Where's your boyfriend?" someone asked.

"He had to go to work early today," she replied.

"Where does he work?"

"Home Depot," she said. "You know -- the job you're not supposed to need after you retire? But things happen and, you do?" She shook her head.

Things happen. Boy, do they ever.

The other day I stopped for gas at a big self-service station on the West Side. In California, most stations are self-serve. The smiling attendant in uniform is a thing of the past.

I stood by the car and looked around idly as the gas pump robot filled my tank. An old man with long white hair and a long white beard walked up to the trash receptacle at my island and rooted through it. He surfaced with a few recyclable cans and bottles, threw them in a sack, and moved on to another trash receptacle.

The several customers standing by their cars studiously ignored him as he went about his work. When he'd searched all the receptacles, he took them back to his vehicle: a motorized bicycle conversion with a small trailer full of cans. As we all stood there with our cars and debit cards and waited for machines to fuel our cars.

Things happened. I can't imagine what. He was older than I was, and this was his livelihood. Maybe he made bad choices but -- a third-world lifestyle? Here in Paradise by the Beach in the United States of America? You expect this in Asia, in Africa -- not here.

Whatever he did, or was doing, these were not the things that should have happened. I looked in my wallet -- only a couple of twenties. I'm sorry to say I wasn't man enough to give him a twenty.

What things happened -- to me?

The Patron Saint of Bloggers

2011-12-03T22:04:00.000-08:00

On my writing, I have been complimented for finding the extraordinary in the mundane. Because I try to look at my everyday surroundings and perceive in them things that aren't obvious or everyday.

I'll accept that. But much of the credit must go to another writer.

It is perhaps admirable that I find insights to share from the mundane life that I live. But this other writer's life was amazing, and the insights he wrung from it were literally the stuff of high drama. He wrote a book that is my bible.

He was no ordinary man. His parents emigrated from Russia at a time when it was very smart to do so. Especially if one was Jewish. They settled in, worked hard, attained the middle-class.

Their son, on the other hand, became a prodigy -- and a rebel. By age ten, he mastered the violin at the professional level; a life in music lay before him. Two years later, he joined the circus as an acrobat. Whatever he did, whatever he achieved, the next new thing always beckoned. He read voraciously, then and all his life.

At 16 he finished school forever and went to Chicago to be a journalist. He proved to be good at it. Very good. Within a few years he was an ace crime reporter, and then a foreign correspondent. He broke a sensational murder case and made headlines nationwide. And at night he wrote for literary magazines, experimented with plays and worked on a novel or two. Journalism all day; literature all night. He just never stopped. He may not have been able to.

Chicago was his town; as both a newsman and a literati, he had one foot in the street and the other in the salons. He saw it all -- beggars and bankers, prostitutes and playboys, anarchists and artists, burlesque and ballet, flappers and cops and immigrants and cleaning ladies and on and on. He drank it in, all of it.

And when publishers began beating on his door for manuscripts and plays and PR firms offered him vast sums of money to massage the images of the famous, he left journalism -- or tried to.

Because after a few weeks he returned to his old newspaper and pitched an idea: what if journalism and literature could be merged? What if there were more to journalism than the flat recitation of facts? What if he went out into Chicago, day after day, to find the stuff of literature in everyday life?

All he was asking for was a nice salary -- and carte blanche. All he was offering was 1000 or 1500 words of -- something. Every single day of the week. The column would be called 1001 Afternoons of Chicago.

Today, this would be called "a good gig," but nothing revolutionary. Slice-of-life journalism, journalism that focuses on the plight of the little guy -- it's old hat today. In those days, however, it was unheard of, radical. But the writer was already a hot literary figure. The editors hired him back at once.

And the column began. It was Chicago, 1921, and the town was hopping with jazz and political ferment and money and commerce and bootleg alcohol. Every day, he came up with 1500 words of something: tragedy, comedy, satire, life, death, crime, sadness, triumph:

A flapper stares into the heart of the Jazz Age and sees... nothing. An old cop has witnessed so many lurid crimes that none stand out to him. A radical labor leader makes the rounds of the town's hot spots the week before he reports for a twenty-year prison sentence.

A pretty manicurist offers blistering observations on men in general. A sheriff's deputy explains why he plays gin rummy with condemned criminals. A mother of nine who toils ceaselessly finally gets a night off -- the hard way. In desperation and hope, an old sailor changes religions every time he falls off the wagon, as the boys at the pool hall laugh and jeer.

The writer kept it up for a year. Oh, he still worked on his plays and and articles and speeches and novels -- and published a smash best-seller while he was at it. And somehow also turned out a column a day, every day, of news as literature. And they are some of the best short pieces that I have read. They portray a Chicago 80 years gone; and yet they're as fresh as yesterday.

Oh, I don't love them all; but some are amazing.

The writer finished the column, published it in book form, and became even more famous than he had been -- a true man of letters. Then he moved on to other things.

His name was Ben Hecht. And eventually the "other things" he moved onto were movie scripts: he wrote many of the Hollywood classics of the '30s and '40s, and script-doctored half of the rest. Hecht was the archetypal Hollywood script-writer with a cigarette in his mouth and a smoking-hot typewriter, banging out first-class work in eight weeks, four weeks, two weeks, and once, two days. Scarface, The Front Page, Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Mutiny on the Bounty, Wuthering Heights, and dozens more.

He stayed in Hollywood for two or three months of the year, picked up a hundred thousand dollars or so, then went home to New York to be a social activist and man of letters. That was his life for nearly 40 years. Nice work if you can get it.

And at the end of his life, sitting on a pile of money and scripts but wondering why he never wrote the truly stupendous novel of his dreams, Ben Hecht came to realize that 1001 Nights of Chicago was among his very best work. Others agree.

I would go one step further and anoint Ben Hecht the patron saint of all bloggers -- those peculiar people who write not just because they want to, but because they need to. And who have their own unique viewpoint to bring to daily life.

I'll never be Ben Hecht. But he's a mighty target to shoot for.

Here, then, for your amusement, are several of my favorite pieces from 1001 Nights of Chicago. Or you may go to Project Gutenburg, that treasure-house of public domain manuscripts, and read the whole thing.

Mrs. Sardotopolis' Evening Off
Nirvana
Sergt. Kuzich's Waterloo
The Exile
Coral, Amber, and Jade
An Iowa Humoresque
Queen Bess' Feast
Thumbnail Lotharios

Thank you, Mr. Hecht.

Thanks

2011-11-24T11:40:00.000-08:00

Mention commuting, and for most people you conjure the image of long lines of cars on a crowded highway.

For me, the word brings to mind a yawning college student.

Rhumba and I drive by crowds of young yawners at the bus stops every morning on our way to work. The average 19-year-old isn't truly cognizant until 10 a.m. or so, but the sadistic gods of academia up at the City on a Hill have decreed that education will begin at eight.

And yet the bus stops were near-empty yesterday. No mouths gaped wide to expose expensive orthodonture. No hopeful thumbs were sleepily extended. Even though it was a school day up at UC Santa Cruz.

At my office, one of our student workers explained: the majority of instructors cancel classes on the day before Thanksgiving so that their students can head home early for the holiday. Most of them had already left town. She herself would be gone by noon.

You can ponder the meaning of Thanksgiving, but I suppose that the students already have something to be grateful for: an understanding instructor who lets them go early for the holiday although not, I hope, without a double-helping of reading. Finals are just around the corner.

And I do suppose that there were a few die-hard professors who made their students attend class on Wednesday despite everything -- for reasons good or not good.

Believe me, exercising petty power over college students is a prime perk for some few members of academia. And so no doubt some students sat there in class on hard chairs, not concentrating, eye on the clock, while Professor Turdey lectured drily on the sex life of the African army ant.

With luck those stragglers have fled town and made it home to the bosoms of their families without too much fuss. And are now enjoying good food, good friends and family, and good times. And probably a little football on the tube.

The point is that there's always something to be thankful for. And there's always something to be truly bummed about: a tyrannical professor, an abusive customer, flat-out bad luck, lack of money, or even your own stupidity.

So if you want to have even the least peace of mind in this troubled world, you've got to have a world view that embraces the bad while still leaving you happy to be here.

It's hard. But if you let the universe in -- I name no particular deity here -- it'll give you a hand with your equilibrium.

It's been a tough few days at work. I haven't been a happy boy. Part of it's the job, and part of it's me. I'd be better off somewhere else. But there's no "somewhere else" right now, and there may not be one for a long time.

I'm getting old, arthritis is kicking up in my feet. Rhumba has her own health problems. We've saved and put away a fair stash, but we don't feel secure; medical bills could take it all, and the house, too. The grim unease that affects much of the world well and truly has its hooks in both of us.

I was thinking these things the other day at the beach. We'd had coffee and muffins in the coffee house before work, and we'd gone outside to throw the crumbs to the pigeons and gulls and blackbirds out on the sand. They seem to enjoy it so. Sometimes the gulls hog the action, but I try to make sure that everybody gets something. Did you know that a blackbird can fly with a piece of muffin in its beak that's half as big as it's head?

And I was feeling grim about work and about what my life looked like as it stretched ahead of me. And why the damned birds wouldn't come over for their crumbs.

And then I felt something soft and wet lick my hand. I looked down; it was a big, pink-tongued black Labrador, grinning. "It's really going to be all right," that face seemed to say.

I threw the plate of crumbs onto the beach and the lab galumphed after it, happily scattering the bids -- not in pursuit of anything, just for the joy of being there in the sun and sand.

That was the universe, tapping me on the shoulder. The sun is there, and the water. I get to have coffee at an actual beach before work. I have the woman I love at my side, and a place to live, and food on the table. Tomorrow is another day -- and that's good. Who knows what might happen?

The fact that there is bad in the world should never, never overshadow the good that's also there. Is always there. Will always be there. And much of that good is people.

So, thanks. Don't have to thank anyone in particular. Just, thanks. For everything.

The Classifieds

2011-11-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

Read a newspaper, read the town. Online, I read a lot of newspapers from a lot of towns. But the most telling section, they don't always put up on the web.

And that part is the classified ads. The classifieds tell you what people want to buy, what they have to sell, what they want to be, what they want to do, and what they want to do to other people.

Culturally, Santa Cruz is a town of contrasts: half intellectual, half adolescent; half progressive, half hedonistic; half huckster, half sucker; half prosperous, half desperate. If I had to write the archetypal classified ads page for Santa Cruz, California, it would look something like the following. And believe me, the real classifieds aren't that different. Enjoy.

WORK IN SANTA CRUZ!  Great marketing job in socially conscious local firm. We only pay 50 percent of what you'd get over the hill, but what's your alternative? A two-hour commute to San Jose? Remember, plenty of others will take it for even less. Peace! Cosmic Muffin Unlimited. Phone 44S-12M7

BE A RIGHT-WING ACTIVIST. You've been saving the whales for years, and what did it get you? Work for people who've got lots of funding. (Just don't ask where it came from.) Benefits, high pay, media support. Send resume and vial of your blood to: Quisling Search Services, Falwell, BQ

MAJORED IN THE WRONG SUBJECT? Over 40? Bad sex life? If yes to all three, your life could be the basis for a best-selling modern American novel! Millions want to read about lives of people like you, for some unknown reason. Send for details! Goniff Literary Guild, Box 47, Brownwich Village, LC 29F83

FOOD TASTE TOO GOOD? People are starving in Africa: how dare you enjoy yourself! Special D-Flav-R Sauce covers up the acid taste of socialist guilt. Pour D-Flav-R Sauce on your steak, fish, cake, candy. Makes everything taste like chalk. You can eat expensive food again without moral qualms -- because you won't enjoy it! D-Flav-R, only $7.95 bottle. Flagellante Merchandising, Box 4, Hairshirt, MX 00020.

CHEATMEAT: MEAT THAT LOOKS LIKE VEGGIES! Want to be a vegetarian but can't give up meat? Our frozen entrees look vegetarian, but are made from RAW RED BEEF: 'Tofu burgers' made from ground round, 'grilled eggplant' that's really ribeye steak, and more. Join the vegetarian elite, but do it the easy way! Free catalog. CHEATMEAT, Box 2483, CHARNEL, WG 393C1.

WOMEN NEED  YOUNG MEN FOR SEX!!! Make love to gorgeous swimsuit models and GET PAID FOR IT! If you're unattractive with poor social skills, this is your chance. Bad skin, poor hygiene a plus. Send $5 processing fee to: Nookie Hut, 1432 Frontage Rd., Capsize, RD 2905U.

WORLD PEACE NOW!!! Only $5. You'll be revered by millions. Pax Enterprises, 1432 Frontage Rd., Capsize, RD 2905U.

SOMETHING FOR NOTHING!!! It's true! Send $5 for details. Cornucopia Unlimited, 1432 Frontage Rd., Capsize, RD 2905U.

ESPRESSO RECOVERY GROUP. Caring, gentle, bearded psychotherapist with shaky credentials and an '85 Volvo badly in need of repair wants to help those who just can't say no to that first cup 'o joe. Or have issues with the parents. Or weight problems. Did I mention I do hypnotherapy? And massage? I paint houses, too! Hawkwind, 42C-239X.

WHY NOT  RENT A LIFESTYLE? Have a good-paying job? Shop at the Gap? That's boring! Rent-a-Lifestyle can provide you with a colorful Santa Cruz persona that can be easily shed for your day job. YOU can be a 'Misunderstood Novelist/Artist,' 'Prickly Wiccan Womon,' 'Cosmic Navigator,' 'Perpetual Grad Student,' 'Green Entrepreneur,' or 'Slacker Philosopher.' The next time you walk into LuLu Carpenter's, YOU WILL OWN THE PLACE. Call Now: 4K1-2V93.

STINKING RICH AND POLITICALLY CORRECT! That's you, when you sell all-natural Green Scum Nutritional Supplements. They're overpriced and taste foul, and we make claims that not even God could make good on. And yet people buy this slop faster than we can brew it! Is this a great country, or what? There's plenty of money to be made before the FDA shuts us down. Become a Green Scum dealer today! Scumway, Box 5210, Grunnion, NB, 47E6T

TURN OLD SURFBOARDS INTO $$$$$! New book shows how to make wornout boards into coffee tables, building materials, contraceptives. Small words, big type, lots of pictures. Send $20. Gonzo Inc., Box 2, Turbid, WP 98A3E2.

OLD DRUID'S STONEHENGE MOTORS. In a town of odd cars, we've got the oddest! '65 Mustang hearse conversion -- very clean. '82 Jeep CJ with strap-on JATO rocket paks -- show that Tesla who's boss! '62 Lincoln sedan, blood red with chrome skull hood ornament and suicide doors! It's always Solstice at the Old Druid's! 1742 Bermuda Triangle, Santa Cruz.

LUCKY FRANCOIS' CATACOMB OF CARS. We serve the many adventurous lovers of French cars in Santa Cruz, who are not bothered by tiny matters like reliability, personal safety, or parts availability. '71 Citroen Pissoir Volant, favorite of penniless school teachers who didn't know any better! '64 Renault Petit Molotov -- one of the very few not yet burst into flames (but soon, we guarantee!). '88 Peugeot Chat Noir sedan with hydraulic ashtrays, fifth wheel, and the famous pneumatic tranmission! It's always Bastille Day at Lucky Francois'! 146 Slime Trail, Santa Cruz.

HIGHER BOB'S BUS-A-RAMA. Best selection of pre-incarnated school buses, VW microbuses, and camper vans for your mobile alternative lifestyle. Every vehicle comes with guaranteed good karma from DOZENS of previous owners. Visit our nomadic showroom at the Rainbow Gathering. Hitch-hike in -- DRIVE away!

A Very Clear Day

2011-11-11T23:25:00.000-08:00

The cold weather came early this year. Recent days have been chill, gray, and sometimes wet.

But on this particular day, a brilliant sun rode a low, autumnal path across the sky. The cold, clear air did nothing to diffuse it. With almost physical force the morning light stripped away all the fuzz and blur from the world. Until each car, each tree, each cloud, each person seemed sharp-edged and freshly sculpted.

In this merciless light -- it hid nothing, it showed everything -- I dropped Rhumba off at her job and headed out on the road. My employer could do without me for a day. And I had places to go.

I have said here many times that I don't get out much. For one reason or another I'm a stay-at-home and mainly content to be one. Certainly there is great beauty here in Santa Cruz; I need not go far to see it. But I've never been a fan of travel for the sake of travel, wherever I lived. I like my comfort, and my own bed.

Still, sometimes the need arises. This was one of those times. Someone had died. And I had a funeral to attend.

So I drove up Highway 17, across the Santa Cruz Mountains, and up the Bay Area on Interstate 680 through Los Gatos, San Jose, Milpitas (all roads lead to Milpitas), Fremont, Pleasanton, Concord, and beyond. Traffic was heavy. Everywhere, traffic was heavy, though rush hour had passed.

Heavy, and fast. I gripped the wheel perhaps more tightly than I once would have. Too many cars, moving too fast, changing lanes too often and with too little warning.... I was one pinball among thousands on a vast game board of traps and thumper-bumpers. While some unseen player worked giant flippers.

I age. My concentration, my reaction time are not all that they once were. And yet, more than my abilities have changed. The freeways are faster now, more crowded, more ruthless than in years past. Glance too long at the passing countryside and you can find your fender up a Range Rover's backside.

And yet 35 years ago and more, at ten in the morning you could practically play a game of kickball on this road. But that was a smaller, saner Bay Area where people could afford to live near the places where they worked or learned or shopped or played. .

Who are all these people, driving 70 miles per hour a car-length apart? At 10 in the morning, under a cold sun? I knew why I was there. But the rest?

I made it through Concord to Martinez and then crossed one of the twin bridges that span the Carquinez Straits there. I remember when there was only one bridge. And before that, only a car ferry. I recall riding it with my father in a '52 Chevy. He bought me a 7-Up in the snack bar while we crossed the straits. It took 15 minutes. How the world changes.

Crossing the straights I left behind the worst of the traffic. And then nothing remained but a long speed run to Fairfield across the grasslands.

Fairfield has never been my home, but long ago I knew it well. I worked there, went to college there, hung out there, and had more than a few drinks there. Fairfield's an old Air Force town in the middle of farm and cattle country: a little conservative but also mellow and casual.

And Aunt Mary had lived there, and many times my family had come up for family functions at her place. This day I returned to Fairfield for Mary's funeral: one last family function.

Aunt Mary was my mother's sister; I've written of Mary before. She was a forthright woman of strong opinion who would say anything to anybody without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment. Sometimes, embarrassment would have been nice. But Mary was indifferent to her effect on others. She never doubted herself in any way.

When I first introduced Rhumba to Aunt Mary, before Rhumba and I married, Mary took me aside -- all of five feet aside -- and told me in a loud voice that I could do better and that she wanted to fix me up with one of her step-daughter's friends. This was typical Aunt-Mary behavior.

You will have noted that Rhumba did not come with me to the funeral.

It may seem strange, but our family never did get around to strangling Mary and throwing her body into Suisun Bay. But there was no malice in her, none. And like many bossy people who think they know best, she took a lot on herself for the good of the family. She saw to Grandma in Grandma's last years -- even though the two of them fought like cats. She organized endless family reunions. She made sure that everybody kept in touch with everybody else.

And Mary lived to a ripe old age, as bluff and confident people often do: almost 94, and driving till near the end. Mary outlived Grandma, my mother, and all their brothers and sisters. She was the last of the old family. Underneath her were only we cousins, her nieces and nephews, now in our 50's and '60's and '70s. Many of the cousins are already grandparents and have formed their own family dynasties.

So I came to the funeral to honor Mary, but also to say goodbye to the old family. With Mary gone, it has no focal point. Its pieces, already receding from one another, may never come together again.

I met my sister in the funeral home parking lot and we went in for the service. There we found the other cousins, and the children of the cousins, and the grandchildren of the cousins. Most of them I couldn't name if my life depended on it.

Nobody gave a eulogy. The preacher called out for anyone who felt the need to stand and say something about Mary. A couple of people responded, both of them friends of Mary's. But not one family member felt the need. She was just .... Mary. Everybody knew her, and everybody knew what everyone else knew. In ten decades, it had all been said.

At the cemetery we stood in the brilliant sunlight as a machine lowered the coffin into the ground and the preacher said a few words. A lot of people came up and greeted me by name; I didn't know, or recognize, half of them. It occurred to me how long it had been since I'd seen most of these people. And that although the old family was dissolving, perhaps I'd already left it.

After, the family went to Cousin Bob's place for a get-together. Most people sat with the people they'd come with and quietly ate deli sandwiches from some supermarket. The zeitgeist was oddly somber and quiet.

You might say that this was normal; after all, someone had died. But historically funerals have spawned the best parties my family ever held: big, noisy, crowded affairs with lots of drinking and catching-up and tubs of Portagee beans and linguica and ham.

But the live-wire uncles and aunts of old were gone, and something felt "off" about their children and their children's children.

I'm a shy person, but I did something out of character: I worked the room. I talked to people I knew, and people whose faces I could connect to no name. I walked up to folks and said, "I've forgotten your name, but how are you?"

Many of them had the same problem I did: they were furiously trying to remember names, and keeping to themselves because they couldn't. Bossy Aunt Mary, and some of the other oldsters, used to haul people around the room and reintroduce them to each other. But the old folks who knew everyone were gone.

Still, people were happy to talk since I was making the effort; we reconnected. I chatted with adults whom I hadn't seen since their toddler years. And after talking to enough of the family, I figured out why there was no energy in the room.

Like America, my family is hurting. The kids can't find good work; the parents are struggling with health insurance and other concerns. And are worried about their kids besides.

Cousin Lorene wants to retire; but without her job, the health insurance payments will crush her and her hub. Cousin Trish is happy that her college-grad son got a good job; but her own job, which she's had for 30 years, is being reduced to part-time. She's losing income and health benefits. At 62.

Cousin Steve's boy Anthony set out to become an emergency medical technician. And he succeeded. It was rewarding work for a young man who likes action, and there was plenty of work. And then, there wasn't. He got laid off, and the openings dried up. He works at Sam's Club now.

Cousin Bob's son Jack got off to a fast start in construction down in Florida. But when Florida real estate crashed he spent years looking for work; and he'd still be looking, with a family to feed, if Cousin Bob hadn't pulled strings with his own employer to get Jack hired.

I could go on; why bother? Everybody's worried. As Bob's son Jack said, it's a crazy world right now. I told him he'd live to see it straighten out. I hope I'm right.

I enjoyed myself; but I stayed only an hour. I wanted to get back to Santa Cruz before the evening commute kicked in. My life is elsewhere, far from all these people. It's no wonder that we knew little about each other.

In the end, we cared enough to talk, but it took some doing. In hard times like these, we all start to shut down a little; we pull in the boundaries of our lives. And old family ties dissolve even faster than they might have.

All the best to Aunt Mary, wherever she is. If there's an afterlife, she's probably telling them how to run it. For all her faults, she kept the family together. By her absence, she shows how hard a job that was.

And yet, as I walked down the driveway to my car Cousin Little Joe came up from behind and gave me a big hug. Little Joe is 6 foot two and husky. He dresses in black from head to toe. He hugs hard.

I didn't expect this. We'd spoken only briefly. But I hugged him back, and meant it.

The family is drifting -- has drifted -- apart. But the pieces can still strike a spark or two when they do meet. And for that achievement, Mary -- and Johnny and Joey and Pinky and Mom and Augie and Tony, all the other uncles and aunts who've passed on -- deserve a bow. God rest them all.

Harvest Time Police Blotter Haiku

2011-11-06T20:31:00.000-08:00

For your reading pleasure, here are a few more of my police blotter haiku: simple poetry adapted from the police blotter columns of small-town newspapers across America.

Some of this evening's haiku come from a new source: the Greater Crater Journal-Armenian. Greater Crater was a small agriculture center that doubled in size during the housing boom. When the boom collapsed, Greater Crater had to deal with the fallout: emptying neighborhoods of ticky-tacky houses, a collapsing budget, new forms of crime.

Yet Greater Crater still holds the annual Lima Bean Festival, elects a Bean Queen, and grows amazing cantaloupes. And it loves its police blotter. The Journal-Armenian publishes a big one five days a week. Greater Crater is still a small town at the core.

So live from Greater Crater, Bonanzaburg, Lake Harborwoodville, and all the other stalwart towns of the police blotter universe, here are 11 more police blotter haiku. And as always, enjoy.

The 'Burb Commandment:
Dump not in others' dumpsters.
He breaks it -- sinner!

Both names on the lease.
In vain, each ex struggles to
eject the other.

On Bear Crossing Road,
She shrieked and qualied at the sight
of a bear, crossing.

The end of childhood.
She smelled it as pot smoke on
her skateboarder son.

The staff of that store
were all (bleeping) rude (bleep) (bleeps)
he told the police.

The police asked him
to consider calling his
ex-wife less often

On Halloween Night
He saw suspicious people
in his neighborhood.

"Possible poached deer."
The phrase leaves one to wonder
what they poached it in.

Set fire to a tire!
Strange inspiration struck him.
But the cop said "Stop!"

Their calm streets witnessed
A wild-eyed man with dreadlocks
wielding a spear gun.

She claimed he'd hurt her.
When it was her feelings that
he'd really wounded.

My Dysfunctional Relationship

2011-10-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

I have something important to say.

This past week, after much thought, I ended an abusive relationship. After nearly 30 years, the lies, the cheating ,the blackmail, the disrespect have grown to be too much. So I've broken it off at last and found another.

Yes -- I'm .... no longer an AT&T subscriber.

Once a stodgy regulated monopoly, American Telephone and Telegraph was broken up, deregulated, and reformed into the very paradigm of the modern American corporation. That is to say, it delivers the absolute minimum value for the absolute maximum price. As time goes on, you pay more and more for less and less.

AT&T makes sloppy billing errors -- always in its own favor. It sells services that do not meet expectations. It herds you into online billing and then makes the task difficult, confusing, and buggy. I have vivid memories of Rhumba cursing like a sailor while she tried to pay our bill.

AT&T is big and stupid and greedy. And it lets the government listen to all your phone calls. It didn't even ask for a legal justification; it just caved right in.

But we had to stay with AT&T for the DSL, about the only affordable broadband in America. Without AT&T local phone service, we can't get DSL.

Oh, there is choice: broadband through Comcast, our cable provider. But Comcast products are just as expensive and bundled with services we don't want; and Comcast is just as bad a company as AT&T in every way.

We call this a duopoly: "free choice" between two equally bad companies that don't really compete with each other.

For you overseas visitors, I should point out that here in the states we now pay much more than you for broadband and phone service, and get a lot less. That's the power of a duopoly with bought-and-paid-for friends in high places.

And then somebody had to go and screw up: real competition is happening.

My local independent Internet service provider hooked up with an upstart regional provider called Sonic, and they are offering ultra-fast broadband and unlimited real telephone service for $45 a month. Cheaper than AT&T; better than AT&T; and most of all, NOT AT&T.

We switched this week without a single hitch. The service is just as advertised. Life is good; AT&T's not in it.

In other news, I opened an account at a local credit union and will move most of our money there from Big Bank Incorporated, where it is now. The credit union offers more convenience, more services, and a free national ATM network. And it will loan our money to our community in responsible ways.

Rhumba and I also seek alternatives to cable TV so we can cut Comcast out of our lives as well.

Do you see a pattern here? The class of extreme wealth controls telecom companies, cable companies and banks which people believe that they can't live without

Only they can. And if they can, they should.

On Wings of Angst

2011-10-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

Poor Numkins. He's a juvenile Western Gull, and nobody loves him.

His mother used to love him. Not long ago, Numkins was a cute and downy seagull chick. Not long ago, he sat safely in his nest, peeping endlessly for the sustenance that a growing gull needs. And Mother gathered food for him, and fed him from her own beak. Numkins was her everything.

Over time, Numkins grew into a greasy, hump-backed, snaggle-beaked juvenile. Mother taught him how to fly. And as far as Mother was concerned, her job was done. She's ready to move on.

But Numkins doesn't think so. He still wants her to feed him. He peeps at her constantly; he follows her everywhere. He doesn't understand why Mom doesn't love him -- that is, feed him -- anymore. But I know why.

With adolescence, Numkins' peeping little cries morphed into the screech of fingernails on a blackboard -- with a bit of creaking hinge thrown in. It is by far the most irritating noise that I've ever heard. A screaming baby? Not even close. And Numkins never, ever stops.

No adult gull wants to have anything to do with him. Not even Mom. I'd never thought I could read body language on a seagull, but it's pretty clear that she wants him to take off for Baja and never come back.

Numkins is the last juvenile gull on Harbor Beach this season. The others were just as noisy and unlovable as he, but they've struck out on their own. I see them on other beaches, gingerly learning how to forage; and still making that hideous noise. Yes, life is hard. But they'll keep at it; some day, given a bit of luck, they'll grow up into handsome, long-necked Western gulls with feathers of pure white and fog grey.

And so may Numkins. Although right now I'm thinking that, were he human, he'd be the 12-year-old who plays video games all night and never leaves his room save in search of Hot Pockets.

"MA! I'm HUNGRRY!

Ah, it's a big world. And time is long, even for a gull. Maybe someday, someone will love him again.

I Apologize

2011-10-20T23:07:00.001-07:00

I hope I never have another week like last week; but I probably will.

Rhumba is fine; I'm fine. But work has been a basket case.

As you may know, part of my job is customer support for Mystery House, the labyrinthe and illogical database that handles practically everything at my place of work. Somebody always has a question. Or an emergency. Usually the latter. Mr. Bigboss does not accept the excuse "Mystery House ate my monthly report" at sales meetings. Even when it's true.

Mystery House has a million data entry forms, but the salesmen mainly use it to print reports: sales statistics, customer profiles, prospecting lists, and so on. It's not rocket science, even on Mystery House; I don't usually hear from the sales guys unless they're new and confused -- or when something goes hideously wrong.

So, the weekend before last, Milo the 65-year-old surfer dude who keeps Mystery House alive came in on a Sunday to take down the system and run a simple diagnostic program. Then he brought the system back up and went home to watch football.

And on Monday, nobody could get to the reports. I had a stack of email complaints already waiting, 8 am Monday morning. And a "call me" voicemail from Milo.

"Nobody can print their reports," I said. "They just get an error message. It says "The server didn't hear you."

"But they can print their reports," Milo drawled.

"Then why aren't they?

"They need to know the work-around. Y'see, when they get that error message, they should just press the "Pretty Please" button. Then Mystery House will ask them if they're sure. They should say Yes, and in, oh, two or three minutes, Mystery House will let them into the Reports Area."

"That's not too bad, I guess..."

"But if they get the other error message, that won't work."

"What's the other message?"

"'No Way'," he said. "In big red letters."

"What do they do then?

"I dunno. Still working on it."

He worked on it all week. He never solved it. Then he went on vacation. We eagerly await his return.

In the meantime, I sent his work-around out to the staff. "Work-around" is the right term: it worked around half the time. Sometimes it worked for someone for awhile -- and then stopped again.

Which meant I had to talk down harried salesmen all week. They couldn't run their reports. They had a sales meeting in an hour. They had to send an address list to the mail house. They needed a list of hot prospects in Fremont. And they COULDN'T RUN THEIR REPORTS.

So I ran their reports, when I could get in myself. And I urged them to keep trying the work-around, and recommended completely made-up strategies -- restart the browser, reboot the computer, turn it off and come back an hour later. Sometimes they even worked.

When a system goes rogue, you have to keep the users' hope alive; or, they'll give up in frustration and stop using the software. Followed soon after by massive work bottle-necks and deployment of Weapons of Mass Finger-Pointing at the highest levels.

I keep their hope alive by always being there for them to talk to. And offering brutal honesty.

"Yes, it's terrible," I'd say. "You have a lot to do, and this is going to slow you down a lot. It shouldn't have happened, and we don't know why it's happening. We'll do everything we can to help you get your work done. And we're really sorry that you have to go through this."

"We're sorry." "I'm sorry." "The situation is terrible." These are phrases you don't much hear in the workplace anymore, as an employee or customer.

When there's a problem, it's nobody's fault. It's just the rules. It's the way things are. It's your problem and, it's implied, probably your fault.Workers protect themselves in a hostile workplace by embracing their own powerlessness and blaming the victim. By becoming a little less than human.

But some of us still believe that we're all in this together. So that when something goes wonky, we should try to help each other. And if we can't, we should at least acknowledge that the other person has a right to be upset.

The phone rings. "Boomer, I can't get in to run my report, and I need it right now," moaned Mr. Hereford.

"I can walk you through the work-around. It's pretty easy, but it takes several minutes," I said. I outlined the procedure for him. I want the users to run their own reports if they possibly can, or I'll end up a secretary to 40 salesman.

"I have to do all that to get one little report?" he whined. "Can't you run it for me?" He's manipulating me -- but he's also got a point. The report he wants takes all of ten seconds to run.

I give in; I said I'd email the output to him. "But I want you to keep trying to log in on your own."

"I promise," he assured me.

"I'm sorry for your inconvenience," I said, on the way to signing off.

"What are you sorry for?" he scoffed. "It's just the computer."

"Somebody's got to do it," I said. "Somebody ought to apologize. Why not me?"

He snorted and hung up. Later on he did try to log in, and succeeded. He sent me email so I'd know.

I had a lot of Mr. Herefords last week. It's tough to tell people that something easy just got hard -- or, in some cases, impossible. I flinched every time the phone rang -- and it rang a lot.

I'm not a self-assured person. I have been told, at times, that I look like I expect someone to hit me. But I have learned that when you offer a co-worker your humanity, most of them will offer you theirs in return. And what could be better than that?

Later in the week things began to calm down. The reports server remained wonky -- and still is, as I write this -- but people have made arrangements. Those who could get in, were printing reports for those who couldn't. And some of those who couldn't found that, if they tried two or three times, they could. For some reason. Magic, for all I know. Perhaps the God of Bugs is showing us a bit of digital mercy.

And just when I thought I could relax, I heard a sound like hammers drumming on the floorboards -- coming my way.

"Boomer!"

Oh hell, it was Ms. Krieg. A woman so driven, so hard-charging, that her footsteps shake the room. For all that she's five-foot four and lean. For reasons unknown to me, the bug hadn't affected her at all. All week Ms. Krieg had printed her reports with ease. She didn't even have to use the work-around.

This, I was to learn, had changed.

"BoomerIcan'tprintmyreportsandIhavetopresentthem," she paused for air, "toMr.Widemaninanhour. It'stheworstpossiblesituation Imusthavefreeaccess tothereportsthisweek Ihaveacompletepromotionalcampaign toplanandlaunch Ifollowedyourprocedureseveraltimes Itdoesn'tworkandI didexactlyasyousaid HowcanIgetmyworkdone?

Yes, Ms. Krieg really speaks like that, huffing air out both nostrils and leaving not a knife-blade's thickness between her words. Her accent comes from somewhere east of Dusseldorf, but thank God that her diction is perfect. Otherwise we'd never understand her at all.

"I know," I said, raising a hand. "It's a terrible situation, it's going to make your work even harder than it is. There really is no excuse, and I am truly sorry. But we'll do whatever we can to help."

"Oh," she said. Ms. Krieg always girds for combat; when the other side doesn't fight, it disorients her. I'm sometimes impatient with Ms. Krieg, because she presents all her problems as emergencies that require my complete attention now-now-now, or some unstated catastrophe will occur. She panics easily and often. And quite frequently at ten minutes to five.

As it turns out, she'd had a bad day all around. Her computer blew up. And the loaner she'd been given, besides being old and clunky, couldn't get to the report server. The big red "No Way!" message appeared on her screen again and again.

And she expected me to do something. And I had no answer. But I went to her cube and rebooted her machine and tried to log in to the report server. "No Way!", it replied.

Ms. Krieg sat and watched. "IfIcan'trunreportsthewholeweekfallsapart," she said. "Eachtaskleadsto thenextandifIcan'trunthereportsthewholethingisimpossible."

"I know," I said, looking at the screen. I pressed the "Pretty Please" button, but eventually the "No Way" message appeared. "I can run some reports for you, you know."

"Thankyou," she said. "Buthtatwon'tbeenough becauseIworkathomeandintheevenings." And she sat there while I tried futilely to get into the system. And we chatted about this and that and gradually, somehow, the tension began to bleed out of her.

"WellIsuppose," she said. "I supposethat if this is impossible, it's impossible." And with those words, she actually relaxed: took a deep breath, sat back in her chair, and let her cheek muscles unclench. "Mr. Wideman's just going to have to wait."

In front of me, the screen flickered. Report icons appeared.

"We're in," I said in amazement.

Ms. Krieg punched the air with one fist and cried out. The word may have been "Yes," because it began with a "Y", but following that came several garbled syllables. I suspect her long-ago ancestors made similar noises after killing a Roman. I left her typing away like a fiend and gave thanks to the God of Bugs.

Customer support is a strange creature. On the one hand, it is exactly what it says it is: support of the customer. But the nature of that support varies. Sometimes you support them with a solution; but when you can't, you support them by talking them down. Ms. Krieg's situation was practically zen: as soon as she let go, the problem solved itself. Go figure -- I've given up trying.

Is there a moral here? Maybe, maybe not. There's one thing I know: that my users trust me. When things are bad, I admit it. I don't make the problem out to be their fault, or beyond repair. I apologize, and do what I can. And so they give me the benefit of the doubt; and the second doubt, and sometimes even the third. And eventually the God of Bugs lets a miracle occur and we all carry on down the road.

Can you imagine what would happen if President Obama came on the tube and said, "My fellow Americas: I apologize. I apologize for not addressing your many grievances; I apologize for letting you live in fear while urging you to hope. I apologize for offering solutions that help the wealthy more than they do you. America is a land of agony and hopelessness for many, and I will do everything I possibly can to make your lives better. All I ask is that you follow me as I try to make America the place you were told that it was -- once again."

Would you follow him? I would -- all the way to the moon.

Terse or Worse Police Blotter Haiku

2011-10-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

Not a lot of words in me this week. So it must be time for more police blotter haiku. Humor, zen, tragedy -- all disguised as crime news in the police blotter columns of small-town daily newspapers. And then distilled by me into -- one hopes -- seventeen meaningful syllables.

As always, enjoy.

The sheriff summed up:
"You can do lots of things but
you can't choke a duck."

Cereal killers?
Two brothers brawl at breakfast
o'er whom Mom loves best.

Brush fires light no smiles.
Until one ignites at a
hula hoop retreat.

Stolen: one Samsung
Vibrant Galaxy Android
cell phone (yes, really).

They watch where they step.
On that street where some stray dog
has diarrhea.

Obstructive, dead squirrel.
She says it blocks her driveway.
What is blocking her?

Reported is a
"transient issue" which proves,
of course, transient.

Complaint: a smashed windshield.
The suspect: sixty feet tall, green,
and careless with cones.

He drove there to die.
A nice, quiet town, said the
note by the body.

Every day, somewhere,
someone's TV blows up at
6:19 p.m.

Illusion

2011-10-02T21:09:00.000-07:00

Rhumba and I went out for breakfast this morning. After we finished our meal, the waitress brought our check. She had drawn something cute for us on the blank side of the paper.

Only young, smiley waitresses do this sort of thing; she was both. If there had been any 'i"s to dot, no doubt she would have dotted them with tiny smiley-faces in hollow circles. Once you start down that road, butterflies and rainbows can't be far ahead.

But she hadn't signed her name. I flipped over the check to read what the computer had written:

"TABLE: 15
#PARTY: 2
SVR: MAYA

Maya. It's an interesting name with many possible meanings: a venerable people of Central America; a river in Russian; a wide spot in the road 300 miles north of Perth; and much more.

But Maya also can mean "illusion" or "enchantment," and comes from the idea -- according to Wikipedia -- that we do not experience the environment itself but rather a projection of it, created by ourselves. Maya is not necessarily a lie. But it is not the real, everlasting truth at the heart of all being.

Our breakfasts -- while not everlasting, thank goodness -- were still truly good. I liked my eggs; Maya served us assiduously. We tipped her well. Illusion can be tasty.

I kept an eye out for Maya the rest of the day. I saw her at the gym, where the women's fitness magazines in the lounge screamed "SHED TWO SIZES," "6 WEEKS TO THE PERFECT BODY!" And offered snake-hipped, blonde fitness models as "perfection."

I saw Maya in a magazine put out by local mystics. Several of its columnists claimed to "channel" trans-dimensional beings, and wrote long screeds on the ascended masters' tips for spiritual evolution.

I saw Maya in media reports from New York, where the Occupy Wall Street movement protests the corruption of America by occupying Wall Street itself. The protesters believe that the wishes of the powerless many can cow the entrenched and wealthy few. Can this be true? They believe it is; because this is America, land of the free. And of Maya.

The truth is that we live by illusion. We don't face the world as it is, but as we need it to be -- or as we're told it should be.

Is this a bad thing? It depends. The mystics who claimed to channel the ascended masters at least offered common sense to the suffering: try to find the contradictions in your own thinking, meditate when you're anxious, find a trusted friend to confide in.

The fitness magazines set a near-impossible standard for human beauty and yet tell you that it is easy to achieve; so that any failure to achieve beauty, by corollary, must be your fault. This is also illusion, but an illusion that weakens those who accept it.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters believe in an American story of freedom and justice that is only rarely true. Throughout our history, the wealthy and powerful crush reform movements again and again. And yet... a very wise man once wrote about humans: "You have to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?" And sometimes, they do.

That quote is from a novel by a man named Terry Pratchett. In that book, Death Himself takes up the defense of mankind against forces that would drain from men the power of Maya: the power to believe in things that are not true, that are not there. But could be.

This is not Maya as the Hindu would know it; but I would say that we need this kind of Maya, the right kind of Maya, to become better than ourselves. How can we distinguish "the right kind?" That's up to you and me and all of us. Whatever Maya you choose, make sure that it offers you something at least as nourishing as a plate of eggs.

And now I will let Mr. Pratchett -- or rather Death Himself -- explain the importance of believing in things that don't exist. If I could put this in the Bible, I would.

Raiders of the Lost Artwork

2011-10-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Things that don't last, things that come and go -- they interest me. Because they shape our lives, and reflect them. These little things add context to the big things that happen in the world. And yet almost nobody keeps track of them.

What songs were at the top of the chart the day JFK died? How surprised was the average American by the D-Day invasion? What kind of trousers did hip teen-aged boys wear in 1941, when war loomed? (Deep Purple and Sugar Shack; not very; yellow cords, washed as seldom as your mother would allow.)

Pick up a battered old magazine from the '30s or '40s or '50s. You may find a full-page color advertisement touting the health benefits of smoking. With endorsements from doctors and Olympic athletes.

There might also be an advertisement for "fatten-up" food supplements aimed skinny women who want to gain weight and attract men. Or a picture of a grinning black chef with big white teeth touting Armour Star Ham, "The Ham What Am." When civil rights activists met in the '30s to plan their struggle, did that face leer from a newspaper that lay on the table?

Did you know that, in the 1890s, the cream of high society in England and America went crazy for tattoos? Staid bankers and socialites would submit to the needle so that a tasteful monogram or family crest might be inscribed on their shoulder blade or elbow. And there were those in New York who went for elaborate dragon tattoos, applied by a master craftsman from China.

You might be surprised to know that, back in the 1840s, a youth counterculture had already formed in East Coast cities. The young men wore red shirts with big buttons; the young women wore their hair long. They recited Shakespeare and sappy pre-Raphaelite poetry to one another and paid homage to a long-ago world of beauty and gentility that never was. Peace, love, truth, beauty: is this reminiscent of some other counterculture you've heard of? Yes, it is. One hundred and seventy years ago.

Nobody writes this stuff down -- except perhaps in the scholarly magazines and specialty history books. Nobody teaches school children about it. School teachers will tell you that a war was fought, that civil rights were won, that women took equal status with men. But they don't tell you what everyday life was like before and while these things happened: and it's the world around us -- the myriad little things -- that shapes us and defines our choices for us and leads us down paths that we might not have chosen -- or shouldn't have.

And the years go by; the magazines crumble, the red shirts wear into rags, the tattoos vanish into the grave with the society dead. And nobody would ever believe that an Olympic athlete would endorse cigarettes.

I'm reading a book on the history of debt. Fascinating stuff. Yet the author complains that ancient documents on the financial crises of three thousand years ago -- yes, they had them -- don't describe what happened in practical terms; if only, he moans, somebody had gone into the taverns and written down what people were bitching about.

If the young see history as dull and unimportant, it's because nobody teaches them the real stuff: not just what people did, but why they did it. How they lived. What the man in the street was up to while a civilization rose or fell or changed.

Thus Ashley the sixteen-year-old preppy, so proud of her daring new tattoo -- cats and flowers intertwined down one arm -- has no clue that in 1901, a Chinese tattoo master hammered a four-color dragon into her great-great Aunt Millicent's back.

And did any counterculture of the last hundred years -- bohemians, hippies, beats, goths -- know about the red-shirted young poets and the long-haired Ophelias of long ago? What happened to those kids? Did they stumble into the maw of industry and war? Or did they keep the transcendental spirit alive and pass it on, so that bohemians and beats and hippies could find it?

All these things that people do -- the things that they believe in, or follow, or take part it, or value -- leave a a physical trace in the world: membership cards, books, magazines, pamphlets, posters, clothing, jewelry, t-shirts, insignia. And these things fascinate me.

When I can see that a thing had a meaning to the people who made it, I want to understand that meaning and learn more about it. And so I collect it and research it. I've had many collections over the years, big and small. And eventually, I let them all go. Because the fun's not from having them, but from learning about them..

Which was why, a couple of weeks ago, I spent an evening sitting across the dinner table from a free-lance writer. She'd taken an assignment to report on something that no longer existed. And it was something that I had collected, and learned about -- a long time ago.

The writer had won a grant from the local art museum to compile a history of the lost street murals of Santa Cruz: murals from twenty or thirty years back that had clothed blank walls with color and scenery and emotion. They had their years in the sun, literally. And then they faded with age or were simply painted over. This is the fate of almost all murals. They don't last. They're not meant to.

But the writer found to her chagrin that the lost murals were -- lost. No one had kept an inventory; murals were no one's responsibility. Who remembers an old mural on the side of a skate shop or supermarket? Most people live in the now.

Nevertheless, she persevered. Here and there, source by source, picture by picture, she painstakingly pieced together information on the vanished murals. None of her sources could tell her about more than one or two of them.

And then she left all her notes and materials on a train, and never saw them again.

The past is a tricky little devil. You think you've got it in your grasp, and then it gets away from you.

So she called me; I'd heard about her project and offered my help. And now she needed a jump-start to get it moving again. Did I have pictures and information about the old murals?

Oh yeah.

Sixteen years ago, I decided to "collect" murals in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is loaded with public and private murals: wonderful, colorful things. And while I couldn't actually take a mural home with me, I photographed every one of them that I could find around town, interviewed the artists when I could, and put everything up on a web page.

Why? Because most murals are meaningful statements from the people of the town, not just free-floating art pieces. Sure, there's an artist involved, but he or she paints what the customer tells them to. The statement could be as self-interested as "Buy my tires," or "Skateboarding is cool, so get a skateboard." Or it could be more complex: "Here is my heritage, and I want to share it," or "This what we do for a living," or "Appreciate the place you live in." And in one case, "Bill Clinton is an idiot," but that's another story.

And murals don't last. I like things that don't last. I think the art that we pass on the street every day should change with the times. And murals -- unless the community really cares about them -- come and go with the people who paid for them.

But because murals don't last, it's important that someone at least record them. So that people in the future would know a little more about the landscape of culture and messages that we walked through in 1995 or 2001 or 2011. Perhaps not consciously aware of all the messages, and yet unconsciously absorbing them.

So I did the research and took a great many photos and met a lot of interesting people and for a time was even an ad hoc "expert" on local murals. Public agencies called me with questions about what to look for in a mural, and even who to hire. They had to. I was the only one who'd compiled any information.

And eventually, I learned everything I wanted to and let the web page lapse. The several dozen packs of photos went into a little plastic tub of the type you keep on your desk to throw pens and notepads into. And I stowed it. Somewhere. And the phone calls stopped coming.

Until years later, when the writer called. And I jumped on her request. Because while I knew all about the murals, no one else did. And so it behooved me to get the knowledge off the hard drive and out of the old photo packets and help get it someplace where people could find it and use it, ten or twenty or even a hundred years down the line.

The writer and I made an appointment. So all I had to do was find the tub of photos. No problem, right?

Wrong! I ended up tearing the house apart. I could see the tub in my mind, but I couldn't find it. It wasn't in the box of old photos. It wasn't in the office, or in the file cabinets. I could not find it in the closets or bookshelves or junk drawers. I searched for two days. Nothing.

So I looked in places where the photos should not possibly be: toolboxes. Storage sheds. In random cases of equipment. I finally hacked my way through the Devil's Garage, that concrete-floored chamber that no car has ever occupied but which bulges with mystery boxes of all varieties. Nothing. Nothing!

I took my heart in my hands and considered my final option: the Attic of No Return. It is a long, dim chamber above the garage that no human had visited in years. Things that go into the Attic never come back again. Though I hoped that I, personally, would. The floor creaks meaningfully every time I go up there. That's why I don't go up there.

Giant Mag-Lite in hand, I climbed the creaky pull-down ladder into darkness and crawled thirty feet past boxes of old bills and moldering vinyl record albums, past cases of empty olive oil bottles that I just know I'll need someday, past battered particle-board furniture and heaps of old videocassettes. Until finally, finally, at the farthest corner of the attic, in a box marked "Photo Stuff", I found a couple of old camera cases and -- the tub.

That's the past for you. It's tricky. It can get away from you. But not this time.

And so, a couple of days later I sat across from the writer flanked by piles of gleaming Kodacolor prints of murals that no one has seen for years. -- long shots, detail shots, sectional shots that could be stitched together by computer into high-res panoramic photos. And I told her everything I knew and loaned her all the prints she could ever use.

You're seeing them, too. None of the murals shown in this article exist any longer. These may be the only photos, or the only ones that anyone would ever find.

And the writer thanked me profusely, but I should be the one to give thanks. She'll publish her project; some of it will go online, but a few copies will be printed and kept at the museum and maybe the library as a permanent record. And the photos I took will be there in the stacks for somebody who badly wants to know, decades down the line, about the murals of old Santa Cruz.

Because you shouldn't judge a thing's importance by how long it lasts. No, judge it by what it meant while it did last. And what it can tell you about its times.

So, on November 22, 1963, what was a teenager likely to be listening to on the radio, just before the announcer broke in with tragic news from Dallas? What was the number one tune on that day?

When the deep purple falls 
Over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin 
To flicker in the sky 
Through the mist of a memory 
You wander back to me 
Breathing my name with a sigh.

The Ride of Your Life

2011-09-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

Santa Cruz is home to many odd and old vehicles. Here in Paradise, we have no road salt to nibble at their metal flesh. Cars will hang together for as long as you care to keep them running. And there's always duct tape.

But when a car gets old enough and cheap enough, it can become the steel canvas of some wild-eyed artist/mechanic. Here is a picture of what was once a vintage fire engine. Now, it's a two-seat coupe of truly giant proportions.

Anyway, there's always something new on the streets -- or old, but in a new incarnation. And a few weeks back I was mooching around a parking lot when a hairy young man pulled up on a sort of neolithic motorcycle and dismounted.

It looked like a two-thirds-scale model of a Harley Davidson... if somebody had cut the frame out of hardware-store bar stock and welded it together in the garage.

I had to ask. "Interesting bike," I said. "Is it home built?"

He shook his head. "It's from a kit. You send 1700 bucks to this guy on the Internet and he mails you three big boxes of parts. You put it together."

That's a pretty cheap price for a motorcycle; though one, he admitted, that was very simple and not particularly fast. But he'd driven it up to Seattle and back, and it did well. And none of the big boys will sell you a long-distance two-wheel ride for $1700.

I bring this up because mutant two-wheel vehicles are on the rise in Santa Cruz. They're almost always ridden by by young men who seem long on hair and short on cash.

Most commonly you see bicycle conversions: an cruiser bike with a gasoline engine powering the drive chain and a little fuel tank on top of the crossbar. They buzz along with their hairy passengers at 20 or 25 miles an hour. I'd never seen motorized bikes before last year, and I always asked, when I could, where they came from. Always got the same answer:

"Some guy in town makes them. They're $600 bucks." That's all anybody would say. Some guy. Six hundred bucks.

It's not like motorized bicycles are everywhere, but I see them more and more often. Some of them even haul trailers. It's beginning to remind me of the Third World.

When I went to Thailand 20 years ago, almost nobody there had the money for a car, let alone the car's fuel bill. But they could afford a fuel-stingy 50cc Honda motorcycle with a long, flat seat. Every household had one. I saw a family of five riding one motorcyle on Koh Samui -- very, very slowly. Thailand was my first third-world experience.

And maybe the third world is coming home to roost here and now in Santa Cruz. Say you're a hairy young man making ten bucks an hour with a rented room that costs you $600 a month. How are you going to afford a car to get you to work and around town?

Well, you can't. You can't even afford a motorcycle. But you can buy a a motorized bike -- a motorbycle -- from "some guy" for six hundred bucks. And skip the insurance, the registration, and even the driver's license.

It's not like poverty's breaking out all over in these parts. I would not call myself J. Wellington GoldPlate III, but daily I encounter people who are truly rolling in cash: multiple houses, multiple boats, even multiple airplanes. And they take trips, anywhere and everywhere, twice a year or more.

And living amongst all this wealth are other people: people who can't afford cars; don't have health insurance; can't afford a room of their own or even a lot of food. And not that long ago, it wasn't that way.

Yesterday I chatted up the counter guy at our favorite taqueria while I placed our order; I complained about how tired I was. He confessed to fatigue as well. But he told me that when he finished his shift in the late evening, he had to go to another job and work until four in the morning. "I need the money, man," he said, shrugging. I'm sure he does; but it's just not right.

The third world is not about uniform poverty; it's about great income inequality. It's about obscene wealth and inexcusable poverty existing side by side -- and no one having a problem with that. We're moving faster and faster in that direction.

This morning Rhumba and I went down for coffee at the harbor, as usual. We got there early; only one other man had sat down. He was a convivial, pear-shaped gentleman who joked with us about the matters of the day. He seemed genuinely friendly.

After awhile, a friend of his showed up, and the two of them talked about his upcoming trip to Peru; his second, in fact, but this time he'd make it to Machu Picchu for sure. And he talked about skin-diving around the world, and how great life was on the island of Aruba, where a friend of his made big money laundering South American cash into the European Union. And he talked about his father the wealthy real estate developer, still raking in large cash at age 80.

While this conversation went on, a gentleman pulled up outside on a motorbycle. Most motorbycles are drab, modest affairs -- a bicycle with a motor. But this one was impressive.

Its' rider was impressive, too: no hairy young man, this time. He was middle-aged, and wiry like a cowboy: with a cowboy's leather skin and a face that exploded in crinkles when he smiled.

He came inside and, in a courtly way, chatted up a good-looking middle-aged woman. She wanted to know about his bike, and he was happy to take my questions, too.

Yes, he'd built it himself. He built motorbycles for a living. The one he'd ridden in on was the top of the line, $1400. But his base model started at -- $600. He'd sold a hundred around town.

Yes -- it was "some guy." And he believed in motorbycles down to his bones: they were cheap, dependable, drove all day on a gallon of gas, and didn't need expensive, heavy batteries like e-bikes. He had proved in court that his motorbycle didn't need a license, didn't need insurance, didn't need anything.

"If it goes less than 30 miles an hour and it has pedals, it's legal," he said. "Of course that's my personal ride out there and I've hopped it up a little bit." He winked: "It does 50."

Coastal California is truly bifurcated economically; it doesn't matter that both sides sit side by side in the same coffee house.

So at one end of the coffee house, the middle-aged child of wealth went on and on about his upcoming adventures abroad. And a few feet away, a man who earns his money with his hands touted his ultra-cheap, below-the-radar,hand-built, non-government-approved transportation system for the man who needs to go places and can't scrape up the money for a car. And insurance. And gas. And, and, and all the other things that are suddenly hard to afford.

There's something to be said for "some guy" and his motorbycle. But one thing it says is that the brutal inequality of the third world is right here, right now. And if it's here on the gold-plated California coast, what's it like out in the heartland where so much of the wealth has completed drained away.

I've heard stories. Have you got any?

Back-to-Basics Police Blotter Haiku

2011-09-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

I've written police blotter haiku for fifteen months now; you'll find my latest below.

Over the months, the Internet has offered me much haiku material from the small-town newspapers of America: tire-deflating ex-boyfriends in Montana, saran-wrapped cars in the Sierra Foothills, assault with a flying jar of Cheesey Salsa in a Tennessee Walmart. And much, much more.

And yet my best work comes from stories about -- not much. I'm talking about stories where no real crime occurred, but someone worries that one might have: like the "prowler" who's really your next-door neighbor coming home from the late shift, or the "fight" in the park that's actually a wrestling match. I've tried to make those little squibs of human folly into even terser haiku.

It's time to get back to basics. Today's haiku are about -- not much. They're from privileged towns where little ever happens: St. Vinifera, a wealthy enclave out amidst the vineyards; and Prettyville, an enclave of marinas and mansions on the San Francisco Bay. In fact, the Prettyville Gazette inspired the original police blotter haiku.

So let us pose the question that started all this writing of haiku: what is reported as crime news in towns that have little crime? And why?

Here is an answer. Enjoy.

Not quite evicted.
Each night he slept with his truck
in the parking lot.

Burglars reported,
and burglars there were -- of the
raccoon persuasion.

Their flashlights glowing,
midnight fruit thieves denude
the neighborhood's trees.

Students who cut class
received a long lecture from
Officer Friendly.

The scent of fireworks
lingers at the site of a
reported gunfight.

Dragging broken chain,
two dogs drool on a baby
and on its father

How could he know that
ramming a single power pole
would black-out the town?

A night of no crime.
No phone rang, no sirens shrieked.
No news was the news.

Two feuding neighbors.
Police come weekly to quell
the fight without end.

"Suspicious cars"
were any cars on his block
that he didn't know.

A zen-like fist fight.
Neither man blames the other.
The cops say, "Go Om."

Nonstandard 9/11 Ruminations: Living in Barsoom

2011-09-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, September 11, marks the tenth anniversary of terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York and seriously damaged the Pentagon, America's military headquarters, in Washington D.C.

If you are an American, you will be urged all this weekend to remember, remember, remember: the terrible tragedy, the horrible loss of life, the evil and dangerous terrorists who threaten us. You will hear about the necessity of long and expensive American involvement in the Mid-East "to keep us safe."

And you won't have learned a thing about what really happened. You're not supposed to. "Bad people who hate our way of life want to destroy us," say the conservatives on Fox News.

But why? The real reason for the attack, and for America's bemusement, is that we don't live in the world we think we do. The world plays by different rules than we're told it does. We are perceived overseas differently than we perceive ourselves. And our government's actions overseas are not always about "protecting Americans."

The following is a piece I wrote ten years and eleven months ago: the US Navy destroyer USS Cole had just been attacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen. Confusion and fear were in the air. And yet America didn't have a clue about what was coming. But I feared what might come if we didn't start perceiving the rest of the world with open eyes.

And we didn't; and our world exploded in terrible and confusing and meaningless ways. Because we don't really live in a just, benign middle-class world. No, we live in... Barsoom.

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for the Year 2000....

* * * * * *

One muggy afternoon, many years ago, I set off on a near-impossible quest: to find a pack of disposable razors somewhere on the streets of Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I had no idea of what I was up against: I just knew that I needed a shave, and that the disposables I'd brought from home had somehow worn out in record time. Chiang Mai, though chock-full of centuries-old temples, seemed to have all the modern conveniences. My guidebook told me that a certain part of town was a general shopping district; so off I went.

What the guidebook did not tell me, and what I was too much of a greenhorn to figure out, was that the thrifty folk of Thailand didn't waste their money on razors that you had to throw out after a week. I browsed at stores and stalls well-stocked with housewares of all kinds, but the only razors I found were big chrome safety jobs like the kind my father used when I was a kid. I didn't even know how to load them.

I had worked my way down a busy street for 15 or 20 minutes with no luck, so I picked a side street at random and changed course. I rounded the corner and walked into another world.

I still could still hear the din of the modern thoroughfare behind me, jammed with motorcycles and trucks. But in front of me stretched a long narrow street of crumbling brick -- the pavement, the buildings, everything -- jammed with people and dead animals.

It was an outdoor slaughterhouse. Everything in sight was old and worn and simple; butchered carcasses hung from meathooks mounted on the buildings, or were laid out on tables in the street. People in dirty aprons and faded clothing furiously hacked and carved at all manner of creatures. There were no machines, no electricity, no cars, no sidewalks, not even much noise -- just the flash of knives and cleavers, the constant activity of the butchers, and a gray canopy of flies.

I clearly remember a squat old woman in long skirts who sat on a crate in the middle of the street, killing frogs. As I watched, she grabbed a live one out of a tub with one hand, passed a knife across the back of its neck with the other hand, then dropped the still-kicking carcass into a bucket. Before the dead frog even hit bottom, she had reached for another one. She watched me watching her for a half-second, then ignored me as the rich and silly foreigner -- no, alien -- that I was.

I got that same quick, dismissive glance from everyone on that street; I was not part of the reality they toiled and sweated in. They lived in a different world, or maybe a different time. That street, those people: were they from the 1980s? Or the 1880s? Or earlier?

Suddenly a vast, hollow boom shook the air. I glanced up barely in time to see three small, clean shapes arrow across the narrow patch of sky overhead -- supersonic jet fighters from an airfield outside of town, their cockpits crammed with advanced avionics, their weapons bays heavy with high-tech death. They were from my world, my time, for better or for worse.

So it came to me, at that moment, that we all live in the same geographical space, but not in the same era, and not in the same reality. Different worlds and times intermix with each other wherever you go, like chocolate and vanilla swirling through a slice of marble cake. On our planet today, you can get cash from an ATM machine on the road to the Great Pyramid of Giza, or use a web search engine to find a shaman who casts venerable spells of success and good fortune for the technology kings of Silicon Valley.

You may think you live in Santa Cruz, or Chiang Mai, or New York City, or Timbuktu -- but you're wrong. You're really living in Barsoom.

About 90 years ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs, arguably America's greatest pulp novelist, started his career with a zippy science fantasy novel called "A Princess of Mars." Burrough's hero, ex-Confederate officer and would-be gold miner John Carpenter, is transported by mystic forces from a cave in Arizona to the surface of the exotic planet Barsoom.

Barsoom, which we Earthians called Mars, is an ancient and arid planet of ferocious animals, dry seabeds, ruined cities, and at least two flavors of intelligent beings. The high-tech Red Barsoomians look like us, live in high-rise walled city-states and cruise the skies in cool anti-grav airships.

Then there are the hordes of six-armed, twelve-foot-tall Green Barsoomian nomads, who gallop their strange steeds across the dry sea beds, battle murderous white apes in the ruined cities of the ancients, and shoot down Red Barsoomian aircraft with the greatest of ease.

Both the Reds and the Greens live to be a thousand years old unless they die young by violence (which is what usually happens), and everybody walks around bare-naked except for armor or jewelry, depending on their state of mind. And the women lay eggs instead of bearing live young, which seems to be a great time-saver.

But do you want to know what's really strange about Barsoom? It's the fact that nobody there really knows whether they've living in the future, or the past -- or cares.

For instance, both Green and Red Barsoomians have everything they need for good old high-tech destruction: radium bombs, explosive bullets, rapid-fire cannon, strange rays. But when Barsoomians fight each other face to face, do they whip out the death rays? Nope: in fact, nothing other than a good old-fashioned sword fight will do. It's nothing to do with fair play: plenty of (literal) backstabbing takes place on Barsoom. But Barsoomians somehow just don't think about guns when it's time it's time to party mano-a-mano. Just never enters their minds.

And about those airships? If you're not Red Barsoomian royalty or military, you don't get one. No, you get to ride a thoat -- sort of a bad-tempered cross between a hippo and a crocodile. I mean, come on -- not even a bus system?

The Reds have atomic motors and machines to serve their every need. Machines cook and serve the food and handle most of the other grunt jobs in the Red cities so that the populace has plenty of time for chivalry and hanging out in sidewalk cafes. It's a very civilized society -- except for the agricultural sector, where Red debtors, criminals, and gays raise society's food through forced manual labor. (Don't tell Dick Cheney about this -- he might like it.)

Or take the Greens -- ferocious, uncouth nomads for sure, possessing nothing that resembles a sewer system or a lending library. But with the technology to hit a target with an atomic bullet at 200 miles while riding a thoat, or to practically bring a wounded man back from the dead. Hey, why not? Everybody's a modern primitive on Barsoom.

Okay, the real Mars is nothing like Barsoom. The space probes tell us that the Red Planet is just a barren rock: no monsters, no walled cities, no canals, no naked spunky princesses in distress. Burrough's Barsoom is a pulp-fiction pastiche of ancient history, made-up super-science, pop mysticism, and Victorian sexual fantasy.

But if you don't think you're living in Barsoom right now, you just aren't paying attention. Our own world is just as bizarre a mix of past and future as Burrough's Barsoom: an untidy patchwork of sophistication and ignorance, plenty and poverty, rigid scientific rationalism and blind faith.

Even as I write this, up at UC Santa Cruz, astrophysicists search for planets around other stars and plumb the secrets of black holes. But give me a few minutes to walk downtown and I can hunt up a fairly intelligent adult from some agrarian society in Latin America, who doesn't know that the earth goes around the sun.

In flashy offices on Pacific Avenue, dot-commers are counting their stock options and weaving intangible webworks of technology and commerce. But all their suave marketing talk of synergy and leverage and mindshare is so much white noise to the dreadlocked Rainbow kids living up on the north coast beaches, toking and copulating and dancing the day away while awaiting the downfall of "Babylon."

Somewhere in the Cruz, right now, Christians of an intellectual bent are deconstructing the Bible to find a spiritual meaning beyond the literal interpretation. Not far away, someone is chanting a spell written on a cheaply-printed card and praying to God to kill his enemies, or to make someone love him. And in some new-age meditation space strewn with candles and crystals and plush pillows, a middle-aged woman with burning eyes is channeling, she says, the wisdom of ancient beings from beyond space and time. There are Wiccans in the woods, yogis on the mountain-tops, and feng shui masters who'll rearrange your living room furniture to encourage the flow of good luck. Are we really in the New Age, or in a very, very Old one?

In one of the Cruz' many public meeting rooms, concerned women gather to discuss and work for the rights of women world-wide. But somewhere nearby, a computer programmer packs for a trip to his native land, where he plans to buy a wife. And a goldurn all-Amurrican male with a lot of money and poor social skills places an order for a Russian mail-order bride who's desperate to escape the chaos in her homeland. Who's living in the future here, and who's living in the past? Unfortunately, the answer is unclear.

Out in the world, one of our billion-dollar high-tech fighting ships has just been put out of action by a couple of terrorists with a rubber raft full of explosives. The Green Barsoomians could have done no better. The U.S. naval chief of staff went on TV and called the attack a "senseless act of terrorism." Wrong: that attack makes all the sense in the world -- if you're a religious fanatic from a different culture with a mindset from a different century.

And here we are in the United States, the most powerful society the world has ever known, with a sophisticated system of law and due process that stretches back hundreds of years. And yet we still choose our tribal chief by single combat -- I mean, what else would you call those presidential debates? Again, the Green Barsoomians would approve, although they'd probably expect each debate to climax in a knife fight. (Would have made great TV, for sure.)

You know, I take it all back. We're not living in Barsoom. In a competition for Weird, Barsoom's not even in the same league as 21st Century Earth. Show Ed Burroughs all the things that would happen to his country 60 years after his death, and his skull would explode: gay rights, abortion rights, a flood of new peoples and new religions, computers, nanotechnology, Hiroshima, virtual money, racial intermarriage, cloning, the Internet, Burning Man.

Things have changed at the speed of light, historically speaking. And the pace of change will only increase, as will the turmoil that change brings. The New will challenge the Old on every front, but the Old will regroup again and again, and pop up in the most unexpected places.

My advice: keep your eyes and your mind open. Don't assume that everybody in line with you at Starbuck's is living in the same world and time as you, because some of them aren't. You don't have to love these folks -- they probably don't love you -- but you'd better at least take the time to understand where they're coming from, if you want the barest clue about why things play out the way they do in the headlines.

The alternative is to hunker down in one place, keep your eyes glued to Monday Night Football, and persuade yourself that every person on earth thinks like you, or will think like you someday when they come to their senses. But eventually somebody's going to knock on your door, and when you open it you're going to find a six-armed green barbarian riding a thoat. Or something symbolically equivalent.

* * * * * *

The year is once again, 2011. And apparently, I'm a damned prophet. Or I was for one day.

The Green Barsoomian showed up at the door on September 11, 2001. And America panicked and gave all its freedoms and money and power to mealy-mouthed demagogues who wasted most of them.

And the question, on this day of 9/11 remembrance and soft-focus patriotism, is whether we've learned why some people in other countries hate us and call us enemies. Because if we haven't learned, more war will be thrust upon us.

I'll call the question an open one; because I really have no answer.

Laborious Police Blotter Haiku

2011-09-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

Happy Labor Day. On this day America honors the honest labor of its own people -- or that was once the case. It's now clear to all that the real path to wealth lies in financial manipulation. Labor receives no honor -- except as a three-day weekend of no meaning. If you wish, read my Labor Day post of several years past: Happy Labor Day.

But I did labor on Labor Day, nevertheless. I've lightened up my production of police blotter haiku lately, and I wished to rectify that. So here are nine more of no particular theme except the one great theme: the human condition. Thanks as always to those fine newspapers across small-town America whose police blotter columns provide the raw material. And, enjoy.

Stolen: Mustang coupe.
Color: blue -- and gray, and white.
And black and yellow.

Once, men threw pebbles
at their lady-love's window.
Angry, he chose rocks.

Future savants will
mull the skateboard tracks he left
in the wet concrete.

"Party at Bob's house!
Bob's in jail, but I'm sure he'd
be okay with it!"

Some cop took his gun.
He couldn't remember why.
But he'd like it back.

"An unclothed male, FREE."
An amazing craigslist find.
Needs a good home, though.

A wild party, or
some guy doing the dishes?
The cops say "dishes."

Six days he sought his
misplaced car before he thought...
it might be stolen.

Bright light in the sky.
It could be a UFO!
Or... Planet Jupiter.

Fog-Bound Police Blotter Haiku

2011-09-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

The cool gray days continue in Santa Cruz; as summers go, this almost wasn't one at all. And yet, gray weather frees me to sit down with the laptop, connect to the streaming jazz station, and write a few more police blotter haiku. For the day outside holds no sunny distractions.

I'm reminded of the science/science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, whose output skyrocketed after he bought black-out curtains for his office. I'm no Asimov, but I understand.

Here then are a few more police blotter haiku, based on newspaper crime reports from those all-American towns where a crime's severity is less important than its humanity. As always, enjoy.

Long ago, no doubt,
he was told, "Don't pet strange dogs."
But did he listen?

A shoplifter flees
with cans of energy drink
at notable speed.

A thousand dollars:
The worth of a stolen bike
that he couldn't describe.

Raccoon, or boyfriend?
Let itself in, scared the cat
and raided the 'fridge.

Someone took money
from her "secret hiding spot."
Which, in retrospect...

His card was denied.
He tried staring down the clerk.
His stare was denied.

A car, 1 a.m.
Doors open, middle of street.
Nearby, he seeks her.

Did the two dogs fight?
The only snarls police heard
were from the owners.

Here is a three-haiku cycle taken from one police blotter item down Florida way.

A wrong-way driver.
Stopped by the police despite
his pretty Lexus.

The cop smelled pot smoke.
"Smoked it all," the driver smiled.
A search proved him wrong.

"I can't go to jail!
"I study," the doper wailed,
"criminology!"

The 200th Shot

2011-08-31T20:21:00.000-07:00

When I was a wee young desk jockey still clad in my first pinstriped suit, my corporate masters sent me to a one-day photography-for-idiots seminar. They needed someone in the office who could click a lens for the company's in-house propaganda sheet -- I mean, employee newsletter.

The seminar instructor, a professional photographer, had been published in National Geographic and all the big news and nature magazines. His advice was refreshingly simple: take lots of pictures. Take them continuously, and from every possible angle and distance.

Climb on things, stand on furniture: do whatever you have to do to get all sorts of different shots, he told us. And out of two or three hundred exposures, you might get two or three you could use. That, he said, was how the professionals did it.

And then he let us loose with Polaroid instant cameras and an unlimited number of film packs and we spent all day snapping photos on the fly and comparing shots. It was all great fun in those pre-digital days, and one of the best classes of any kind that I ever took.

Now in the time of film photography, taking hundreds of shots to get a few good ones tended to eat your pocket money in a big hurry. But I never forgot the photographer's advice; and when digital cameras came along, anybody could take hundreds of shots to get the one.

And so, this weekend I set out to get a clear picture of a pelican in flight; regular readers know that pelicans interest me, and that they've been present in great numbers lately. But pelicans in flight are as difficult to photograph as cats: they keep their distance; they fly at 20 miles an hour or more and turn on a dime. And they drive my camera's auto-focus mad.

But I stood out by the yacht harbor channel the other day and clicked my 200 shots while the pelicans wheeled overhead in great, sloppy circles. And damned if I didn't get one that was good enough to keep. Just one:

Is it the shot? For now, maybe. But not for long: you should have seen the ones I almost got.

Next time, for sure.

Rodney's World

2011-08-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

I'm in love.

I'm in love with Rhumba's new sewing machine. And I don't even sew. And it isn't even new.

But it's as good as new. Even though it's 60 years old. It's all cast aluminum and steel and machine screws and Art Deco industrial design. It's not a lightweight "ladies" device. It's a serious and capable power tool, made for a time when home sewing was still serious business.

Rhumba says it's the fastest, most powerful home machine she's ever used. Its needle slides through six layers of cloth with ease.

I love machines that are well-designed and well-made. No matter what their aesthetic, there's always something right about the way they look. Kipling called machines "the children of our brains." And he was correct. Look at a machine, and you're looking at the minds who birthed it.

And the minds who birthed this sewing machine -- a Singer 301A -- imagined a machine that was powerful, precise, and dependable. Something they could take pride in, not just make money from.

And they built it to last. That was expected, sixty years ago. Appliances and furniture were durable assets to be conserved and maintained; you made them last for decades if you could. And when you no longer needed them, you sold them or gave them to someone who did need them.

This particular machine came off the line in Singer's Anderson, South Carolina, plant in 1951. The golden medallion on the side celebrates Singer's centennial year in business. The medallion is made of metal. It's attached with rivets. Singer meant even the machine's decorations to last.

And the machine went to a Singer dealer, and a woman -- most likely -- purchased it. She no doubt expected the 301 to last all her life And unless she was very young, it did. And then some.

She paid well for that durability. This machine cost around $150 new: two weeks' pay in those days. Consumer credit was nearly unknown in 1951; unless the owners were well off, this machine was saved for.

Note how things have changed: back when money was expensive, people didn't buy so much -- and even then only things that would last.

But when money became cheap -- when everybody could get credit -- people bought a lot more. And stopped caring about whether things would last. Because there was always something new to buy.

So goods became cheaper and less durable. Plastic replaced metal, glue replaced bolts. Products went to the junk heap within a few years. And who cared? New was better. And you had your credit card. Sixty years of Madison Avenue brainwashing paid off big-time for the corporations.

And the unwanted, everlasting Singer 301 ended up in an attic somewhere, dirty and gunked up and missing a part or two. It was just Grandma's old machine, who cared? It's not like anyone sewed, anyway.

Except, someone does. Certain vintage Singers -- like the 301A, the 221A Featherweight, and the 500A "Rocketeer" -- are in demand once more. Quilters and amateur seamstresses love them because they're cheap, rock-solid, and reliable. And, as I've opined, cool. They don't do everything the new machines do, but they still do what they always did.

And across the land savvy operators who knew their way around a sewing machine began haunting estate sales and yard sales and craigslist, asking after "any old sewing machines you have hanging around." With a few of hours of repair and refurb, they could turn a twenty- or thirty-dollar investment into a hundred or two hundred dollars of profit.

And so a gentleman named Rodney came across, somewhere, the old Singer 301A that had belonged to someone's grandmother. He purchased it for very little, got it running, and advertised it on craigslist for a fast $140. Rhumba was looking for a 301; she's a seamstress in her own right as well as a knitter. So she answered the ad one sunny Sunday. And that very day we drove to Rodney's place.

Rodney lived in a neighborhood of middle-aged duplexes and big trees. Soft of voice and slight of build, he invited us inside with scrupulous courtesy. "Inside" was a neat bachelor pad with comfortable older furniture and, here and there, tasteful posters of pouting, bare-chested young men.

Rodney showed Rhumba the Singer and offered her a test drive. She found it to be everything he'd promised, and the deal was sealed. But Rodney still had a lot to say.

He'd learned to sew at his grandmother's knee, on her old sewing machine. Now he was a computer technician, fixing computers for a living. After hours he fixed old sewing machines as a sideline. Because good old machines of any sort must not be thrown away while there is use in them. Everything in life must be reused; that was Rodney's position.

His grandmother had died recently, and he'd cleaned out her home. Among her possessions was a torn lace tablecloth that some might have thrown away; but he'd used the cloth to make a pair of workout pants. He showed them to us: a professional job, and probably the only lace workout pants for miles.

Then he took us to another room and showed off his machines, both his stock and his personal collection. Solid old metal sewing machines covered every flat surface. Black ones, blue ones, green ones, cream- and beige-colored ones, all gleaming like new cars. They were tall and short, thick and narrow, curved and squared-off. Some were conventional, others could have landed from Mars. But in fact they'd been made in the States, Britain, Italy, Japan, Germany, and points between.

Rodney rested a hand on one machine, more battered than the others. It had a nose like a locomotive; it was nearly three feet long. "This is a Singer industrial machine from about 1920," Rodney said. "It went down to Mexico for a long time. And then, it came back."

And it still worked, 90 years later. It had come to Rodney as broken, but it wasn't. "They'd put the shank (part of the needle) in backwards," Rodney said. "It'll go in backwards, but the machine won't run right. That was the only problem." He shook his head in wonderment. And I wondered where that machine had been, and who it had made clothing for during all those years.

As we bid him farewell, Rodney told us his mission in life: "I want to fix up all the old sewing machines in the world and all the old computers in the world and teach people how to use them and get them to doing work!" I imagined I saw the flash of lightning in his eyes, and heard the roll of thunder down the hall.

Rodney is onto something. We have a lot of useful things in this country that have been abandoned or relegated to storage. Machines, yes, but also people. We should be fixing them all up, and putting them to work.

But we're not. Instead, we're making wonders of technology -- overseas, at that -- that are meant to be thrown away.

Take the iPad, the iPhone, and all the other smart phones and tablets and hand-held computers that everyone wants: their rechargeable batteries are not meant to be replaceable. If your iPad's battery fails under warranty, Apple "replaces" the battery by shipping you a new iPad.

In Apple's world, there will be no old hand-held machines to fix up and repurpose down the line. They'll just stop working and be thrown away and replaced with something new. To the continued profitability of Apple.

Fortunately, there are other people like Rodney out on the Internet, selling kits and instructions for replacing the batteries in dead hand-helds. If you are adventurous, it can be done. So that old machines can keep on doing what they were built to do. And people can use them to do useful work.

We need a lot of Rodneys: to fix machines, and people. To show us how to repair the good in both -- instead of throwing it away or warehousing it.

And if you think that's a new idea, let me introduce you to an old one: the Civilian Conservation Corps. Back in the '30s we taught disposable people how to fix a worn-out country, and paved the way for America's future success. Read about it here.

I don't want to live in Apple's world. I want to live in Rodney's world.

Which do you prefer?

A Splendid Fog

2011-08-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty predictable. It's Saturday morning; Rhumba wants coffee. I wouldn't mind some either. So as on most Saturdays, down we go to the beach for a cup of java and a roll. Every seat in the coffee house had been taken so we sat at one of the outside tables in the fog and damp.

And we found it all simply lovely.

As a native of the Northern California coast, I am a connoisseur of fog. Fog has its own agenda, dictated by heat and pressure and physics, and it does not care a whit what kind of weather we puny humans would prefer to have.

A chilly fog can ruin your long-planned picnic; or it can break the back of a murderous heat wave as it rolls into town to the cheers of the populace. Fog is what it is, and "is" changes daily.

Temperature and wind speed make all the difference. When the temperature is 50F and the wind is up, fog is something to avoid; it'll suck the heat right out of you. But this morning, the temperature is ten degrees higher and the air is still. The sky shines like pewter, and drops of mist settle on every surface like tiny pearls.

A foggy day like that is a day for being outside, because you'll never overheat, never dry out, never get too cold. The fog envelopes you like a vast, cool comforter. And indeed the beach area was jammed with vollleybalists, catamaraners, and paddleboarders.

Personally, I've never understood why stand-up paddle boarders don't just fall off with the first wave; there must be some pretty large stabilizers under the surface. At any rate, paddle boarding is the coming thing around here for forty- and fifty-somethings who want to take to the water and get some exercise -- within limits.

Even the pelicans had a good morning in the fog, patrolling close offshore for some prey that only they could see. When they spotted somethings, they'd fall from the sky like stones.

And then, belly full, it was time for a comfortable snooze on a buoy.

I'm a big fan of pelicans; actually, I'm in awe. The pelican is such a successful design that, according to the fossil record, it has not changed in any way in 40 million years. And perhaps longer; the fossil record goes back no further. Perhaps pelicans soared over the backs of brontosauruses and velociraptors before the big meteor came down.

Seventy million years, maybe. And they still make 'em the way they used to.

We left the beach, but the fog has stayed with us. It may stay all day today, but no matter. Santa Cruz is beautiful in this fog. The guy who taught me to handle a camera maintained that overcast days were the very best for shooting color. "Just keep the exposure an F-stop low, and you'll be all right," he said.

He was correct. Today the flowers and foliage glow with color under clean gray light. I do not know if plants feel emotions, but you can tell when all is well with them by the way they hold themselves. Today I took picturs of giant sunflowers in someone's yard; and I had the oddest feeling that the flowers were looking back at me.

So gray it was that the four o'clocks were open at 9 a.m. And the fog graced their faces with gentle and comforting moisture, as it does for all who walk with it.

It's noon now. And it still seems like 9 a.m. Who cannot love fog, when it brings you a day full of morning?

The Tamale Generation

2011-08-17T23:05:00.000-07:00

Work's been busy this week. All sails have been hoisted, all hatches battened, all mooring ropes cast off.

As our corporate ship sails into the teeth of economic gales, the captain stumps around the fantail on his wooden leg screaming, "Sell on! Sell on! Sell on and on! Nothing less will save us. Sell on, lest all be lost! Arrrgh!"

And when he does something like that, my schedule gets busy.

You see, I provide support and training for Mystery House, our company's enterprise software. Mystery House offers a wide variety of obscure and hard-to-use tools for the beleaguered salesman.

Some of our sales staff have avoided Mystery House for years, and I don't blame them. It's aged and poorly designed. Blind alleys and sinister mazes await the unwary user. If people can get by without it, more power to them.

But as waves of insolvency crash over our bow and the maniac at the helm casts aspersions on their offspring unto the tenth generation, even the most stubborn hold-outs begin to poke gently at the keyboard and explore whatever advantage may be found there.

And they call me for Mystery House training, and help, and advice. Have you ever finished a call and put the phone's handset back on the cradle -- only to hear it ring again before you can release your hand? That's happened twice this week.

And we have a lot of turnover, even now. People have their fill of the place, lower a skiff, and launch themselves into the storm. To my surprise, we've been refilling the positions.

My two trainees today were new hires: young, enthusiastic, intelligent people who'd never work for a stodgy outfit like ours in a million years -- except that jobs are scarce right now, and the company still offer health insurance and vacation and other benefits fast vanishing from the American workplace. For now. Knock on wood.

Both trainees caught on to Mystery House with ease -- I was impressed, and told them so. And thus they were easy to train. So I was only mildly brain-dead when I went out for a short walk at lunch. I cut through the rear parking lot of the manufacturing business next door and ran straight into -- the Tamale Lady.

Do you have Tamale Ladies where you live? They're everywhere in these parts. The typical Tamale Lady is a 30- or 40-something Latina housewife with a baseball cap and an ice chest full of tamales. She has turned her kitchen into a tamale production facility to make some needed money.

Tamales are a lot of work, but simple; all a Tamale Lady needs is a big stove, lots of big pots, and easy cowed children or relatives to do the grunt work. Then she roams lower-paying workplaces at the noon-hour selling her tamales. This is all strictly under the table and non-government-approved, of course -- but cheap.

Once upon a time, our Tamale Lady walked the neighborhood with a rolling beer cooler full of tamales. Now she sells tamales out of the trunk of an sedan; and the trunk is crammed. Business is good; and no wonder. For two bucks you get a sub-sandwich-sized roll of corn meal, meat, veggies, beans, and other items. They're heavier than lead, and more corn meal than anything else -- but tasty. And -- again -- two bucks.

She sells a few at our office, not many. But at the manufacturing plant next door yesterday, a dozen hairy young men waited outside for her mealy goodies. A half-dozen had already bought; they sat on the curb, chomping and slurping their tamales.

Most of the factory workers don't make a lot of money. There are skilled positions, but not many: production is largely automated, and most of the work is unskilled and repetitive: packing, stacking, stocking, shipping, and so on. A two-dollar tamale is just the thing to power the workers through a long afternoon: lots of calories,inexpensive, few vitamins.

I thought about this as I walked by: I wasn't particularly hungry today, so for lunch I chowed down on a five-dollar bag of frozen organic blackberries, with yogurt. Few calories, much more expensive, overflowing with vitamins and minerals.

A two-dollar tamale will get a worker through an afternoon's labor well enough, but organic fruit and yogurt will get you to an older age even better.

I like food a lot, and I think about food a lot. Among other things, food says a lot about the people who eat it. I have the better-paying desk job, so I can eat expensive healthy food with few calories. The young men have low-paying physical jobs, so they eat the cheap food full of empty calories. Made by an unlicensed food vendor who is a stranger to the health inspector.

Don't let anyone tell you there isn't a class system in this country. The food doesn't lie. And these days, more and more of the "other" class is young.

I had low-paying menial jobs when I was young -- after school, or between terms. I swabbed the toilets, cleaned the floors, packed the crates, made the pizza. But then I moved on and up to other things.

"On and up" isn't a given anymore, especially for the young. Some will make it -- they always will -- and many will stay on the bottom rung for years to come, maybe forever. Where the pay is low and the tamales are crude fuel that doesn't do a lot for your health.

And I'm seeing a lot of kids in bottom-rung jobs where I've never seen so many kids before.

On Thursday night I drive Rhumba to the church we attend, St. Bob the Informal's, where she leads a knitting group. While they knit, I sit. And blog on my laptop, and wander around the parking lot.

Across the lot sits a ramshackle two-story office building whose tenants come and go. In the past its windows have been dark after sundown; , but the building's newest tenant works operates well into the night: a telemarketing firm.

Telemarketing is a hard job, full of rejection and abuse. Face it, nobody's happy to pick up the phone at eight in the evening and find a telemarketer on the line. Years ago, only the desperate took that job.

And the desperate still do: the young and desperate. Few people over 25 walk in the door. I see them reporting for work in battered old cars with faded paint and missing hub cabs. If they have a car at all.

I see the job applicants trot up the stairs dressed in their best, application in hand, face full of hope for a job, any job. Even telemarketing.

And on warm evenings I hear the manager's pep talk echo down through the open windows: "Anyone who moves a thousand dollars worth of product tonight will have their name put in this bucket. And I will draw one of the names, and that person will have a chance to...." and on it goes. He invokes dreams of cut-rate riches, eventual success... always transitory, or illusory, or just out of reach.

I see this everywhere: young people gathering petition signatures for a few dollars a signature, instead of the old men who used to do it. And I see young people accosting passers-by on the street to aggressively solicit money for charities, in greater numbers than ever before. This practice annoys me, and I have blogged about it.

But I've since talked to a couple of people who do that job, and it's a back-breaker: like telemarketing, but face to face. They meet with rejection, invisibility, abuse, and anger a hundred times a day. Why do they do it? "I hadn't worked in four months," one young man told me. "There was nothing else out there for me. So one day I gritted my teeth and -- took it."

He had to rev himself up emotionally every day just to get through the shift. And he dreamed vividly about fundraising every night. He hoped he'd be able to stay true to himself and not use the high-pressure sales tactics his bosses encouraged. "Maybe someday I'll get hard and I won't care anymore," he told me. "But I hope not."

He'd been on the job four days.

I bitch and moan about my job, but as a younger man I had my times and I had my chances and I'll never tell you otherwise. But for a whole generation there aren't enough chances to go around. For too many there'll be nothing but poor-paying, degrading work and, for supper, a two-dollar tamale of dubious goodness.

Are you proud of your country? I'm not.

Somethin' Somethin' Police Blotter Haiku

2011-08-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

I've never written haiku before while half-asleep. The results should be interesting... on some level.

Anyways: as usual, all of these haiku are based on short items from the police blotter columns of loca newspapers across the U.S. of A. Enjoy.

Marks on the sidewalk
were not from Satan unless...
He runs Public Works

Great fun for a slow day:
Make a fake bomb and watch the
bomb squad blow it up.

A tree collided
with a drunken motorist.
The tree was not hurt.

The stolen car, found.
The man inside, arrested.
It seemed logical.

Dead man by the tracks.
Was, the police found, merely
A dead mannequin.

Over at Mac's Club
one flying bottle set off
a small civil war.

Jail proved no restraint.
He defied the court order
and called her daily.

Family fights don't
normally end in hangings.
But this one, almost.

He hit and he ran.
Only to be tracked down by
an outraged witness

Sometimes the gods smile.
And the dead cat in the road
is merely sleeping.

The Chocolatey Taste of Victory

2011-08-06T21:17:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile, the overcast lifts in the American workplace and the cubicle minions get a glimpse of sunshine. Just a glimpse -- but it's the memories that carry you through.

A friend of mine works in a state agency with an executive director and several divisions. Like most such agencies, they've had layoffs. Not long ago, planning began for yet another round. The head of each division had to determine who could be let go, what job functions could be combined, and so on.

Most of the division directors came up with some sort of plan. Eventually. But Ms. X, the head of my friend's division had a better idea.

Ms. X showed up several years ago and made a point of communicating clearly with her staff. Time after time, she made it completely clear that she had no idea what they did, wasn't concerned with learning about their work, and had little interest in their well-being. Apparently she was more interested in making a splash at executive team meetings.

Ms. X is justly famous for authoring a "security plan" that stated, in time of civil disobedience, her staff would lock down their building and act as door guards to control access. Never mind that most of her staff is over 50 and female; hiring security guards is expensive!

That one didn't fly.

Ms. X had a bigger problem, though: two of her departments had their own sub-directors and ran themselves. But the other two departments reported directly to her. (That was the theory; in actuality, the front-line managers called all the shots, because Ms. X didn't come around much.)

Ms. X didn't have a clue about how her departments did their work; she couldn't figure out where to make the cuts. The front-line managers were not in favor of her innovative ideas: phrases like "violation of federal law" were thrown out on the table.

So when it came time to present her budget-cutting plan, she came up with a doozy: take the two groups that reported to her, and give them to another division.

It wasn't clear to anyone how that saved money or cut head count. But it sure gave Ms. X less to do. And that may have been the point.

The Executive Director's office hemmed and hawed and referred the idea to committee. Everybody thought that was the end of it; except that head count would still have to be cut somewhere, sometime.

And then last week, a memo came from the Executive Director. The agency would indeed heed Ms. X's advice and transfer the two departments to another division. But there was more: her other two departments would also be transferred elsewhere.

Ms. X had no division left. Her position was abolished.

The memo went on to thank Ms. X for her several years of service and her energetic participation in executive team meetings. There was no talk of layoffs.

Everybody in Ms. X's division did the calculation in their heads; Ms. X's six-figure compensation package would cover the wages of quite a few clerks.

That day, the grey minions of Ms. X's domain could be seen sauntering casually from cubicle to cubicle with shining eyes. Did you read the memo, they asked one another. Sometimes the answer was only a smile. And that was enough.

The next day, the grey minions showed up for work, and there was cake. Good cake, and chocolate at that. Nobody owned up to buying it. Nobody named the occasion. It was just there, laid out in the break room at eight in the morning. And everybody ate some. At eight in the morning.

Because victory may have a sweet taste, or a bitter taste. But sometimes it tastes like chocolate. And there may be no happily ever after for bureaucrats ever again. But there can still be, occasionally, a happy now. With icing.

End-Times Police Blotter Haiku

2011-07-31T20:40:00.000-07:00

As I write this the big brains in Washington have solved all our problems by cutting government spending in the teeth of a looming recession. I don't expect this to end well -- for anybody who doesn't own a bank, and perhaps not even them.

But in the meantime, here are a more few haiku taken from stories in the "police blotter" columns of small-town American newspapers. I hope they give you a chuckle, a smile, a frown, and maybe something to think about. Thinking is good, in times like these. Especially if you want to stay out of the police blotter!

Enjoy.

The new primitives
built fires in the street and jumped
skateboards over them.

Two cars, two driveways.
Two neighbors back out at once.
Into awkwardness.

Found on the sidewalk:
Her purse, most of her clothing.
She came back for them.

Patriotism,
to her, meant planting flags on
the lawns of strangers.

Her car window, smashed.
Her wallet remained, but the
border collie? Not.

Not everyone in
an orange jumpsuit is an
escaped prisoner.

Boomerang tenant:
Her landlord threw her out but
she promptly returned.

No law exists
that mandates the arrest of
a cheating boyfriend.

A high school feud,
remembered three years later.
Assault, battery.

He was wanted in
Nevada but not so much
that they'd come for him.

Obey all speed laws
when driving a stolen car
full of stolen goods

Is it fraticide
when a tree service truck rams
a fence made of wood?

The police findings:
drunk, underage and pissing
off the balcony

The Revenge of Junior

2011-07-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

This was a couple of weeks ago: I had wandered up to the reception desk to ask something of She Who Must Be Respected, whose kingdom that is.

In truth, you are free not to respect Her, but good luck booking a conference room if you don't. Oh, it'll happen -- tomorrow.

But I do respect Her -- She does a very hard job, and well -- so we get along fine.

But She wasn't there. I found Junior manning the desk in her absence. In theory Junior is a sales professional, but he's young and -- well, junior. So he fills in for Her at reception when She and her minions are all absent.

I've written about Junior: one of our part-timers who transitioned to full-time work after finishing college. Bumptious, naive, and obsequious, his non-stop flattery and overeager 'tude initially got under my skin.

But I took pity on Junior after his new boss, the infamous Mr. Z, buried him under impossible assignments on Week One. I helped him to get his feet under him and, to his credit, he's marched doggedly through the muck ever since. Still, the place gets to him sometimes. It gets to all of us.

But Junior looked happy that day. We dealt with some small piece of business -- an employee was quitting, and I wanted to know if he was still on the premises or not, so that I could yank his system privileges.

Junior's expression turned sly. And he said, "Boomer, I guess I should tell you that I just gave notice myself."

"Well, we're going to miss you around here." I meant it. The kid grows on you -- okay, like mold, but nevertheless.

"Thanks, Boomer. I've really enjoyed working here; I've learned so much, everybody has been so kind, people have really helped me, especially you..." blah, blah, blah. I happen to know that Mr. Z's foibles make Junior tear out his hair on a daily basis. But he poured on the accolades like corn syrup on pancakes; it's his way.

We talked a bit more; like many young men, Junior's heading off to follow a woman. His girlfriend's starting grad school in another town come fall, and Junior's going with her.

"Got a job lined up?" I asked.

"No," he said, nonchalantly. "I'm sure I can get a sales job somewhere. And if not" -- he shrugged -- " there'll be something.

He's right. And he's young. Sure, the young act impulsively: but they can act impulsively and risk little, unlike some of us. Few bills, no kids, good health, a positive attitude, plenty of years ahead: Junior can afford to roll the dice a few times before he gets his seven. And he should.

So after a year of being kicked around -- and becoming a valuable employee -- Junior took his revenge. By leaving. He may not have intended revenge. But he got it anyway.

Because now Mr. Z will have to train somebody else, and that'll take months. If he's allowed to replace Junior at all. And he might not be. Money is tight.

Junior's not the first bright young person to leave us, not even lately. Another of our sporty young men took off for Hollywood three months back to try make it in show biz. It's a chancy move, but he's almost as young as Junior: it's the right time for chancy moves.

And a couple of months before that, yet another young person took off; she's starting her own own business. Times are tough, but she's a hard worker; she can make it if anyone can. And if she can't, she's young. It's the right time to venture.

These days the common wisdom holds that if you have a job, you'd better cling to it with both hands. But the uncommon wisdom says that only those who take chances win big rewards. No matter what the unemployment rate.

It has to be said: most of us don't have the freedom to leave our jobs right now. We don't have Junior's youth or lack of responsibilities. I can't believe how many people I've heard lately say, "Well, we should be lucky we have jobs." As management turns the screws just a teeny bit tighter every day.

But what if things changed? What if there were a lot of jobs? Or even, affordable healthcare? If my co-workers and I all had someplace else to go, and knew we'd have affordable heath care no matter what, there'd be empty desks as far as the eye could see.

And I have no doubt that this could happen. And hope that it will.

Meanwhile, today was Junior's last day, and we threw him a going-away party in the conference room with no windows and bad air circulation. And we gave him cards and a few presents.

Most honorees at such events say a few words and sit down. Not Junior. He spewed a solid ten minutes of flattery and bad jokes at his assembled co-workers. I mean, really bad jokes. And everybody laughed. Junior's so naively blatant that he's sort of -- cuddly.

And then all was said and done and he slapped a few backs, cleaned out his desk and left the premises. Wish I was going with him. One of these days, I hope, we all will.

Big Dada Books

2011-07-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

My t-shirt collection continues to grow. Life seems busier than ever, yet there's still time to head down to Goodwill Industries and sift through the dollar rack for t-shirts that are odd, or unusual, or appalling, or meaningful. Or at least, meaningful to me.

But, you may ask, in what way is this t-shirt meaningful? And is it meaningful in a way that you can explain in a family blog, sir?

Why, yes, it is.

Objectively, the "Cunning Linguist" t-shirt is one of a long line of rude, sexually-suggestive tees marketed by the Abercrombie and Fitch clothing stores, purveyors of over-priced clothing for college frat boys since 1988. This shirt is almost that old. Young men who bought this tee, I imagine, went on to become mortgage brokers, hedge fund managers, payday lending magnates, Heritage Foundation policy analysts, and other professionals who made our society what it is today.

But, I really did know a cunning linguist. He was at the same time a knowledgeable book dealer with a true love of literature -- and almost no skill at running a retail bookstore. Which was too bad, because that was his major business.

In my mind's eye, I see a sturdy, elderly man dragging a cheap wire shopping cart up and down the rows of a suburban flea market. The man wears a battered black fedora, dusty black suit coat, and open-neck shirt.

The shopping cart holds a few books, two dented cans of fava beans and a carton of smeary supermarket danish that expired perhaps two weeks earlier. Which he has just purchased for 25 cents, and will eat later.

His name was Everett Cunningham and for decades he ran a chain of used bookstores called the Joyce Bookshops around the San Francisco Bay Area. A typical Everett Cunningham bookstore looked like the reference section of a public library -- after somebody dropped a hand grenade in it, and homeless people moved in to sell used golf clubs. That's cruel -- wait, no it's not.

Everett Cunningham came out of the West with a good education from the U of Montana and a head full of languages and linguistics He put his knowledge to work as a translator at the Nuremberg war crimes trials following World War II.

And he developed a love of modern literature. His company, the Joyce Bookshops, was named for James Joyce. He was also a fan of dada, as I understand: that cultural movement that espoused anarchy and ridiculed bourgeois thinking and the meaninglessness of modern culture. Those who worked for him might say that dada informed his business philosophy.

Somewhere along the line, Everett learned the book trade, and opened his bookstores. They opened and they closed at various times, but there were never less than a couple of them. You'd find a Joyce Bookshop in low-rent quarters near the city center of whatever city it happened to be in.

Everett was expert with certain kinds of scholarly and high-end books, and he knew how to dispose of them privately. But as for stocking his shop, it seemed like the books were always priced wrong: too high or too low. Much was elderly and uninteresting at any price. The stores were drab and uninviting and decorated eccentrically, probably with whatever Everett found cheap. I have this hazy memory of black velvet paintings.

Still, Everett's establishments were famous for his "quarter books:" old paperbacks displayed on big tables or carts near the front of the store. Twenty-five cents each, or ten for a buck. And even then, some of those old paperbacks were collectible and could be sold for more. But Everett didn't care. It seemed to me that bookstores were just ways of getting rid of books he personally didn't have much use for.

I heard stories: he had a vast pile of old comic books in his warehouse -- worth several dollars apiece -- that he insisted on selling for five cents each in his stall out at the Napa Flea Market. LK, a frequent commenter on this blog, worked for Everett and recalled the time he found an extremely valuable first edition propping up the toilet tank in the restroom at Everett's warehouse.

I do remember going Everett's flea market stall once and getting the full first year of Sports Illustrated magazine in mint condition for almost nothing -- including the famous first issue with its fold-out of 1954 baseball cards. It was probably worth fifty bucks even then, if you could find one. I got it for 50 cents.

I'm sure that his own employees told him that he was letting money slip through his fingers. To little avail. No doubt he'd just smile at them: a wry, steady, big-toothed smile delivered with good eye contact. An impenetrable smile that warded off arguments.

Despite everything that I say, Everett was a well-known and well-loved book dealer in the greater Bay Area. He'd been around forever, he was knowledgeable in his field, and he gave a lot of people their start in the business, and was a friend to other book dealers. He was a sweet guy to talk to; and a little eccentric, which always makes a conversation more interesting.

Late in his career, Everett did one of the most constructive things I ever saw a bookman do. The storefront next to his Gull Bookshop in Oakland went vacant, and he turned it into a co-op bookstore for all the specialty book dealers he knew who dealt books by mail or at events.

There was no eBay in those days, no Internet, so these dealers had no regular place to display their stock to the public. Everett gave them that. They paid a certain monthly fee per bookshelf occupied -- which was low, this being Everett -- and put a special code in all their books. At the end of the month, Everett would give them their proceeds, sans rent.

Everett's idea worked; the store drew book collectors and dealers from throughout the Bay Area. If you wanted to talk books, that was the place to go. LK and I rented some shelf space together there, and sold a lot. I'm sure Everett didn't get rich, but -- that never seemed to be the point.

That was when I got to know him best; we talked a fair amount as I came by to restock; he took me out to lunch at a terrible, terrible drive-in on MacArthur Boulevard. "I really like the food here," he told me. And since he was paying, I agreed. LK later told me he always dragged people to that drive-in, and everybody endured the terrible food.

Linguist, scholarly bookman, slipshod bookstore owner, benefactor to others: the man had a lot of sides.

He was a politician, too. He ran a joke campaign for city council in Walnut Creek on the Dada ticket. His slogan: "Vote for Everett Cunningham, the Cunning Linguist." The newspaper printed a long article on Everett's nonsensical platform.

The one plank I remember was his promise to establish a community center for low-riders inside Rossmoor, a well-to-do retirement community, so that the low-riders and elderly Republicans "could learn to relate to each other." I'm told that Everett's campaign generated much discussion, and a fair amount of hysterical laughter.

Everett Cunningham died some years back, and old employees and fellow bookmen came to honor him at a reception. A selection of Everett's trademark "quarter books" graced every table. And I'm told that a good time was had by all as they shared remembrances of this kindly eccentric.

But as I think on it, I wonder about the truth of that eccentricity. Here is a guy who seemed determined to run his business in an eccentric manner, seemed blithely indifferent to any attempt to make things run better, liked to take acquaintances to the worst restaurant in town, and ran a dada campaign for city council in a staunchly Republican community. A man with such a low opinion of authority that, when was told his warehouse building was not zoned to be a warehouse, promptly renamed it a "Technical Processing Center." And got away with it.

I see that wry, big-toothed smile in my mind, and I wonder if Everett the eccentric wasn't having a long, dry, joke on everyone around him. A decades-spanning dada performance of unprecedented scope. A life as dada. I remember that smile; and I wonder.

One other thing I must say: I'm not the person to be writing about Everett Cunningham, really. Others knew him much better, including LK who no doubt will have many corrections to make. But Everett Cunningham is not on the Internet, anywhere. And that, I believe, must be rectified.

Drunken Pirates of the Carribean Police Blotter Haiku

2011-07-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

I wrote tonight's batch of police blotter haiku while watching "Pirates of the Carribean" movies on cable. It's not like they require much attention.

By accident, most of tonight's haiku come from police blotter reports that involve drinking or drunkenness. And where alcohol isn't mentioned, you know it has to be there. Climbing somebody else's house to drink a beer on the roof? C'mon.

I think it's fair to say that if we had a bit less drinking -- and smoking, and toking, and snorting -- we'd have a lot less crime. The blotters don't lie. But they do entertain. Enjoy.

He apologized
as he snatched her necklace, but...
did he bring it back?

The drunk got between
the mall cop and his golf cart
Merriment ensured.

Drunk, at 1 a.m.,
office-chair street racing sounds
like a fine idea.

She answered no calls.
And her friends worried -- but only
her cell phone was dead.

A brew with a view.
He mounted a stranger's roof,
downed a beer, then left.

He robbed the store, then
walked down the street to hang out
in a friend's front yard.

A full bladder, and
a likely looking alley.
But there was this cop...

They don't lock their doors.
They found a drunk on their couch.
They now lock their doors.

Drunk, overheated,
he opened all the windows.
With a big shovel.

First rule of all rules:
Don't light a cigarette while
you're on oxygen.

Hump Day Police Blotter Haiku

2011-07-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

I can't say they came easy this week, but here are a few more police blotter haiku, taken from items in the "Police Blotter" columns of small-town newspapers from the across the U.S. From places like Block City, Jetsam Beach, and of course Bonanzaburg, where gunshots are like -- well, see below.

And as always, enjoy.

His wallet was found.
Good news, if it hadn't been
found at a crime scene.

Christmas comes but once
a year -- unless you steal your
grandpa's debit card.

A dog dripping red paint.
Police follow his trail home,
thinking it not paint.

The tag on the bag
on the ground read "Dead Raccoon."
And it did not lie.

The sound of gunshots.
It means no more in that town
than screams on the playground.

Two guys broke in, then
fell asleep on his driveway.
Or, he dreamed it all.

Quite a nice canoe.
Someone left it in her yard.
She'd like it to stay.

You make it sound like
I'm some criminal, whined the
hit-and-run driver.

Hey, it's my birthday!
Think I'll drink 48 beers
and expose myself.

Things You Don't Know About Me: Funny Eyesight

2011-07-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

The check-out lines always run slowest at natural food stores. It's one of the mysteries of the retail universe.

Tonight I made haste for the shortest line, as all of us would. Just two young men stood ahead of me, and they seemed to be together. In fact, they were together; but as usual, there were complications. They split the groceries between them on the counter, and each man purchased half the items; although one didn't have enough money to pay for his half, so the other had make him a loan. And the purchases of both men were to be put in one bag. I call that the long way around the block.

In the midst of this complicated game, technology tossed a joker into the pot. The check-out scanner refused to read the bar code on an all-natural unfinished-wood vegetable brush. The check-out clerk tried three times, and got only electronic raspberries for his trouble.

"I'm sorry," the clerk told the young men. "The bar code's too small for the machine to read." So he attempted to punch in the bar code numbers manually -- twice. But the bar code that was too small for the machine to read, was also too small for him to read.

"Pardon me," I said, stepping forward. "I'm extremely near-sighted, and I think I can read the code to you."

"Go ahead," the clerk said. He handed over the brush without hesitation.

I flipped my glasses up past my forehead, and squinted. The numbers were ridiculously small -- like the bottom line on an optician's eye chart. I pulled the brush to within an inch of my nose; I can focus there.

"Okay: Seven-One-Seven-Nine Eight," I sang out in the clear, ringing tones of a good phone support tech. "Zero-Zero-Two-One-Four!"

The clerk punched in the numbers as I read them out. He smiled. Success! The two young men completed their complicated purchases and soon the clerk had rung up my four cans of organic cat food with all deference. Here is monsieur's change. Would monsieur like a bag? Would this size of bag suit monsieur's needs? And there were several gratuitous rounds of thanks.

Some say that there's a reason for everything, but it took 50 years for my ridiculously bad vision to prove useful for anything. It felt good, but unless you think there's a niche for a superhero called Myopic Man, I'll put off buying tights and a cape till the next time around.

At Sea

2011-07-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

I looked out to sea; the setting sun cast a glare across the water that obscured much. But way, way, out, I saw...tiny black dots hovering over the bay. Hundreds of them.

"What are those things?" I asked my companions.

"What things? I don't see any things out there," said Footlight Ferd. We were at the weekly meeting of the Lords of Shavasna, the yoga/men's group I belong to. Most of the Lords are older, and eyesight is not our forte.

"I see them," said El Guapo, the youngest and fittest of us. "Look, there's a line of them."

I looked again, and my eyes resolved the dots into a dense column of birds speeding across the water from west to east. Hundreds of them passed by each second. Imagine an invisible tube in the sky, crammed with black birds all flying madly, wing to wing, in exactly the same direction.

We were on top of a cliff in Aptos. In fact, we were in a bedroom on top of a cliff in Aptos, at the Atomic Grandpa's place. His bedroom has a floor-to-ceiling 120-degree view of the ocean from seventy feet above the beach, and the only wall-to-wall carpet in the entire house. So that's where we do our yoga when it's his turn to host.

I have watched birds migrate my whole life. But never have I seen anything like that tight and never-ending stream of birds. It was as if a giant fire hose shot them out at great speed. And the stream continued far as we could see -- out of sight down the coast to the east. From the west, straight out of the setting sun. Ten thousand may have passed our window in the course of a minute. And they just kept coming.

"They're shearwaters," El Guapo said. "Look over to Capitola. See those grey crescents on the water? That's all shearwaters, sitting there."

And I looked up the coast a couple of miles to Capitola, and in truth, I could just barely make out tiny specks rising from long grey crescents on the shining bay . And heading our way. The Great Shearwater Freeway in the Sky just kept coming and coming. .

I had to find out more about the shearwater. The Lords told me some things; the Internet did the rest.

If the sooty shearwater were a man, you'd call it a stud. An iron man -- or woman. A marathon runner with super powers. And yet it's just a medium-sized sea bird that breeds down in Tierra del Fuego, or the Auckland Islands, or other points near the Antarctic fisheries.

But the sooty shearwater spends most of its time on the wing and on the water, winging 45,000 miles up and down both sides of the Pacific every year, following the fish. It doesn't hit land for eight months at a crack. It can dive 200 feet below the ocean's surface for fish or squid, if it has to. And it lives for decades. This year some ornithologist captured a shearwater that had been banded over 50 years ago.

It sounds like a life, doesn't it? A few months on land every year to rest up and raise the young, then a wild epic speed run across the oceans in great flocks or by yourself, whatever you want. Skimming the waves from the bottom of the world to the top, and back again, out there where everything is cold and clean and fresh and blue. Decades of this, an eternity of this, and finally, maybe, death on the trail, short and sharp. The quick way, the way nature intended.

The anchovies are running now -- you see the boats stopping offshore to catch some for bait, before heading out for halibut or salmon. And that's what the shearwaters came for. They've been gorging themselves well. And when that's done, they'll move on and on and, eventually, back to Tierra Del Fuego for some R and R and a little canoodling. And the cycle begins again.

It's a rare person who doesn't want to retire someday -- although I've met some who don't care. They love their work; and when you love your work, it's more than just a job.

But even those of us who aren't retired -- or who can't retire -- tell ourselves that we're like the sooty shearwater. If we can't retire, we'll just work until we die. Go on and on and die in harness.

Unfortunately, that's not a plan. The sooty shearwater doesn't get laid off at 55 and find that nobody wants to hire an old bird. He's an independent operator, it's all up to him. While most humans need to work for someone else.

Nor does the shearwater linger for years after a heart attack or a stroke or cancer , unable to work and building up debt. For good or ill.

And unlike men, the shearwater always knows what it is. It's a living, flying bird. And if it can't ffly anymore, it won't live long enough to feel existential angst, the great who-am-I that people torture themselves with when a long-held job is snatched away.

Down at the harbor coffee shop last week, one of the regulars turned up for his morning coffee as usual -- but wearing a wetsuit. He'd never done that before. But he'd just been told the day before that his job was over. He was no longer needed.

Oh, he had some sort of retirement pay coming. I don't know if it was very much, though, and now he had to figure out what he was without his job, and what he'd do with the rest of his life. He's over sixty. He lives alone on a boat. With a cat.

And now, on the first day of the rest of his life, he was going surfing. He picked up his board and jogged stiffly down to the surf. The other old salts stood there with their coffee and called encouragement as he paddled out, found a wave, got up on his board, and --- wiped out. He's been in the coffee house every morning since, whether his buds are there are not. I don' think he has anywhere else to go. I haven't seen the wetsuit again.

Some people handle life changes better, or seem to. I had the week off last week and so I headed out to the farmer's market, which in Santa Cruz is the best free show in town. Everybody's there: hippies, farmers, hippie farmers, college students, seniors, hipsters, families, clowns, musicians, and politicians. And the colors:everywhere are piles of produce and fruit and flowers in purple, yellow, green, white, brilliant red, blue.

And there was Tammy: small, sprightly, elderly. She used to work for my company, but got caught in the last layoff . We exchanged light hugs; I'm not a hugger, but Tammy is one of the nicest people on earth. I asked her how things were.

"Good," she said, after a moment's hesitation. "I really would have liked a chance to plan for this, but I'm going to be all right." And we talked a bit about what she'd been doing with her life.

"I'm visiting friends and family and doing things with them," she said. "You know, when you've got a job it sort of brackets and limits your private life. And now, it doesn't " She smiled. She has a great smile.

Tammy's lucky. She may not ever work again, but she's taken care of financially. And she knows what she wants to do with her life. The old salt down at the harbor still doesn't know. The other day I asked him how retirement was. "Interesting," he answered, looking out to sea. And he didn't say anything else about that.

A couple of shearwaters flew by the window and I pointed them out to Rhumba.

"Shearwaters!" the old salt said, lighting up. "They're such great birds! They fly just ahead of the waves and barely flap their wings, y'know! They're come around here for the anchovies."

I did know these things. "Yeah," he said, "Sometimes they eat so much they can't even fly. I've sailed right through bunches of them sitting on the water, and they're so full they don't even try to take off!"

And we watched the shearwaters fly away; the birds who would never retire,who might not have medical insurance but always know their own self and their place in the world. Just birds, but -- I know a fair number of people who'd take the deal the shearwaters have. I wondered if the old salt would, too.

Police Blotter Haiku: Elegy for a Mailbox

2011-06-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

I have vacation this week, and I've finally calmed down enough to write another batch of police blotter haiku. As always, these seventeen-syllable haiku are based on the brief reports of petty crime and personal distress published by small-town newspapers across the nation.

It's becoming more difficult to find new things to say about the same old crimes and human predicaments. But I soldier on; it's a challenge.

So today, I include a brief cycle of haiku about that most common of police blotter items: mailbox vandalism. I'm even re-running one haiku I wrote months ago because it makes sense in that context.

As always, enjoy.

To his trial, he wore
the very coat that he'd been
accused of stealing.

Breakups happen, and
even the police can't help.
But she had to ask.

She was troubled by
phantom dogs who roamed her yard
yet left no paw prints.

Thrown out of the store,
he returned with the orange
road cone of vengeance.

Holstering his gun,
it fired and wounded his thigh.
And his vanity.

Two teen-aged boys fought
for a teen-aged girl and won...
nothing but handcuffs.

Someone made off with
the rocks that lined his driveway.
Petty theft, defined.

She's been dead five years.
So how did her purse land in
a First Street trash can?

Ducklings down the drain!
Returned to mama duck by
Officer Friendly.

My jewel was stolen!
Or perhaps I misplaced it.
It's the same thing, right?

It's a very nice town.
The gang-bangers tag cars
with washable paint

Minors, booze, and noise.
The same old story and the
same old police call.

A drunken parker,
She blocked two driveways and then
passed out in the back.

Mailbox Destruction Haiku

"Blow up a mailbox
with a giant firecracker?
Who's got a lighter?"

"Bash a mailbox with
a flower pot? Oh, c'mon,
You know you want to."

"Crush a mailbox with
an upright vacuum cleaner?
Sure, why not? Do it!"

What is it about
mailboxes that makes young men
want to destroy them?

55 and Gray

2011-06-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

Fifty-five and gray? A pretty good description of ...me. But it also describes today's weather. Fog as thick as cotton, and the air and water temperature are both the same -- 55. Like Hawaii, only evil.

And yet, this is still a beach town. You can't stop the locals:

I couldn't say why a group of women would done wet suits to cavort in the surf together at 8 am of a Saturday morning. Some new physical fitness regimen -- Freez-er-cise?

I haven't a clue about half the stuff that goes on around here. For I am 55, and gray; just getting through the day takes all my attention.

And yet I always keep an eye on the beach -- that interface between land and ocean. It draws people. Even when they don't wish to swim or surf; even when the weather is cool; people are pulled to the beach.

They draw images on it, images that they know will be erased by the tides.

They hold beach parties into the night, even though public parks have more facilities for big parties. Even when the weather is pleasant everywhere, and no one swims.

And they hold rituals on the beach; they marry on it, worship on it, dress up in Santa Claus costumes and dance in circles on it. Or just sit there, feel the breeze on their face, and contemplate the great wet Pacific.

At the beach, the great roar of the universe comes through loud and clear in the sound of the surf. Quadrillions of water molecules form into waves thanks to the inexorable laws of physics and crash against the shore, to subside again until the next wave of energy picks them up and hurls them forward once more.

Energy is expended, minerals are broken down and transformed, nutrition is deposited. The paltry marks of man vanish from the beach sand as if they'd never been. And the detritus of dead creatures falls back into the mother ocean.

Do you doubt that there's some force greater than yourself? The beach and the ocean may convince you otherwise, if you listen long enough. At the beach, you can most clearly hear the heartbeat of the great system that we're all part of. It sounds like the rumble of the blood in your own veins.

This system that we belong to does not require worship, nor does it promise eternal life in your form. What the system does promise is that you came from it, you'll go back to it, and from your molecules new things will form -- creatures, plants, minerals, rock, water. On and on until the Earth is a cinder -- and perhaps beyond. Whatever else you believe, and whoever else you believe in, these are promises that will be kept.

I wonder if that's why people come to the beach to marry, to party, to celebrate, to contemplate. Perhaps life's transitions and puzzles are best celebrated where the ceaseless forces of the universe are impossible to ignore.

These forces may not give you many answers. But in a life where we are distracted by jobs, possessions, taxes, social standing, fear, lust, greed, and anger -- they may help you to discern the most important questions.

The Non-Thematic Weekend

2011-06-19T17:59:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to find a theme for this weekend. Goofy? Self-interested? Ad hoc? Size-oriented? All of the above? I'm thinking on it.

My wife Rhumba and her knitting group planned a yarn-dyeing extravaganza for Saturday, so I drove Rhumba over to the church they meet at and helped her to set up. The knitters take white wool yarn and dip it and paint it with a variety of dyes until they get something that a hippie would knit socks out of. Then they boil it in great vats of nontoxic mordant (fixative) to make the dye permanent. And while they wait for their yarn to cook, they knosh, discuss,complain, and compare shoes.

All jokes aside, they turn out some nice-looking yarn. But I didn't stay around for most of it. Instead, I took off for a cafe with WiFi and wrote police blotter haiku at the window table. Very Parisienne, except that I'm a middle-aged fat man and no one was impressed.

A torrent of elderly men and women in biker's leathers suddenly filled the place. They were on a group ride, and it had been time for gas, a clean restroom, and a latte. And of all the coffee houses in town, only this one is next door to a gas station. Someone had made plans.

I couldn't work with all the noise -- I'd been doing poorly even before they arrived -- so I headed for the door. The parking lot looked like a Harley dealership; I saw dozens of bikes. The bikers had even brought an RV support vehicle. I would bet that many of them also had iPhones with anywhere-Internet access. The solitude of the open road isn't quite what it used to be.

At loose ends, I headed to Goodwill and looked for t-shirts. I've written about my t-shirt collection before at length; I look for tees that are culturally significant in some way. This is what I came up with, from a construction supply company:

I'm a guy, and I ask: what is it with tradesmen, t-shirts and penis double-entrendres? This shirt is going into a subgroup of my collection along with the shirts from "Big" Johnson Trucking Company, Bustichi Construction ("We really know how to use our tools," and Jansen Electric ("We'll check your shorts!").

These shirts are even more interesting for where they're worn: on worksites, in garages, and in other places frequented mainly by -- other guys.

Somewhere in this land some scholar has no doubt written a thesis on "Homo-erotic Imagery and Sexual Confusion in American Blue-Collar Culture." And if they haven't, they ought to. And drop a few copies in every hardware store in America.

From the thrift store I headed to the gym for a bit, and then back to the church where Rhumba and a few others were still waiting for their yarn to cook. One kniter, Aggie, took off as I got there; she needed to perform with her Taiko drum group at the Japanese Cultural Fair, which was being held in a park near our house. We gave her permission to park her car in our driveway, as street parking would be a joke.

I have thoughts about Taiko drumming and women. Taiko drumming, if you've never heard of it, is a form of ensemble drumming from Japan. The drums are of traditional design, but the "music" is not; a Japanese drummer with jazz experience came up with ensemble drumming in the '50s, and added jazz beats.

But taiko looks traditional, and savage. Drummers dressed like martial artists dash around the stage banging giant drums and shouting. It's very physical music;the beat is intense and ever-changing.

And for some reason a lot of politically-correct middle-aged white women around here really, really like to get up on stage, pound the big drums, and scream like banshees. The bigger the drum, the better. Size matters.

So I just had to see what Aggie looked like up on stage.

Rhumba and I finally closed up the church and went home. And I grabbed the camera and headed to the park.

But I didn't get there right away. The westbound side of the street was full of bicycles moving at a walking pace. Hundreds of them. Young people, old people, men, women, people in costume. But mostly lean young men.

The stoplight went red and the crowd braked to a halt. I hailed one one of the riders and asked what it was all about.

"Zachary Parke," he said, and nothing more. He assumed that I would understand. And as it was, I did.

Zachary Parke was a 25-year-old bike messenger, a home-town boy. A couple of weeks ago a hit-and-run drive struck and killed him while he was returning to Santa Cruz by bicycle from the UC Santa Cruz area; it's out in a country a bit. His body lay undiscovered for hours on the side of the road.

It was a terrible tragedy, and police worked hard to find the driver; in the end, he turned himself in, but they had already found the car he'd used. And now the bicycle community was mourning his victim, Mr. Parke, with a mass bike ride across Santa Cruz to the accident site. At rush hour, at five miles an hour.

It was a tragedy. Mr. Parke no doubt was properly in the bike lane, and the driver no doubt was at fault. On the other hand, the accident took place after midnight on a dark road, and Mr. Parke was definitely riding without lights and perhaps even without a helmet; no one has found one yet, at least.

In short, Mr. Parke was taking chances that did not help his cause. But he was young, and strong and in control. And then, he wasn't.

What I have never noticed, from the activists in the biking community, are calls for increased biking safety measures for adult bicyclists. They have not publicly urged bicyclists to always wear helmets, to ride with lights after dark, to obey all traffic laws. They never do, even after a fatal accident. I've heard no public spokesmen for bicyclists here ever say that one hundred percent of all fault in a fatal accident might not lie with the motorist.

And yet when someone is dead, what does it matter who's to blame? Shouldn't we just concentrate on making sure it doesn't happen again? On both sides? I say this as a former bicyclist and current motorist whose car has been hit twice -- by bicyclists.

So as I stood on the curb, Mr. Parke's memorial parade cycled slowly past. And I'm not sure that it taught anybody anything that made the situation better.

And now it was time to go see the taiko drummers.

I got there late, just in time for the last drum troupe. Aggie's crowd had already come and gone. But the last crowd, a mixed Japanese/American male/female troupe, was going at it hard and heavy.

The taiko sets are not free-form; they are composed and rehearsed. The people I heard were performing a composition called "Tsunami" -- like the bike parade, a memorial, but for the tragedies in Japan.

And it went on and on and the drums got under my skin and into my heartbeat. And it did not make me think of Japan, or of tragedy, but it made me feel -- something. Alive, perhaps, or maybe just aware that there are bigger things in the world than me. Both good things to feel.

And the drummers screamed and sweated and dived from drum to drum. And as I said before, there seems to be nothing that a woman likes better than a big, big drum to beat. While screaming. I could get behind that myself.

And then I walked downtown where nobody was memorializing anything, and nothing was intense. And a little girl danced to the music of street buskers under a canopy of monkey balloons held by her mother. A good ending to the weekend, I thought, even though it was Saturday.

Even more happened on Sunday, but that's another story. In the end, perhaps the theme for this weekend was simply: keep your eyes open, and think about what's going on around you. Because there's a lot to notice, even in a little town like mine. Every moment of every day.

Time Warp to the Seventies

2011-06-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

Recently I chatted online with a gentleman who claimed he had "lived through the seventies."

As it transpired, he meant that he'd been born in '78.

Hah! Vile poser! You may have been born in the seventies, but you never Wore the Leisure Suit or the Polyester Yoke Shirt. You never Donned the Puka Beads, or Boogie Oogie Oogied Till the Break of Dawn. Or even Did the Hustle.

You never cooled your sangria or a six-pack of Coors in an avocado-green refrigerator. Or listened to the Captain and Tenille or "The Pina Colada Song" -- without a gun to your head. Or asked a woman what her sign was.

You never even Ate of the Carrot Cake. And that's the key.

In short, you did not spend ten years of your life trying to be cool and hip by the rules of what was, in retrospect, the dorkiest decade of the last eighty years.

For the seventies were the middle-class version of the sixties. There's no way they could be less than grotesque.

In the sixties, idealistic college kids and smelly hippies and a few intellectuals pioneered the sexual revolution and recreational dope. They got in tune with nature -- frequently in the nude, or that's how the movies told it. And they rejected consumerism, and meaningless formalities and conventions.

In the seventies, the middle-class got jealous of all the free expression -- and free sex -- and joined in. Call it rebellion lite. Oh sure, everyone vaguely acknowledged the idea of a more just, more balanced, eco-friendly life for all.

College students would tell you that their life goal was "to help people." Big business was bad; crusading lawyers and journalists and activists were good.

And yet, this was still America. It rewrote the story of the sixties as: "Boy meets girl. Boy gets lucky. Boy buys a white suit and goes to the disco the next night to get lucky with someone else."

Folk rock morphed into "soft rock" with its endless, boring paens to "getting it on tonight." Hopeful young and middle-aged men grew a porn star mustache, permed up their hair, and hoped for the best. Respectable blue-collar twenty-somethings moved in with their "old ladies" and smoked dope at weekend barbecues.

Formality was out. Polyester leisure suits were in, so you could step directly from the office to the disco floor without missing a beat.

Ah, polyester. Things were done with polyester that should never be repeated.

And some middle-aged men should never be reminded of what they looked like in leisure suits, back in the day. This isn't me, by the way:

And yet despite all this personal freedom and love, the middle-class never exactly got around to turning its back on the consumer culture. It just consumed different things. Mood rings. Pet Rocks. Polyester. Car stereos. Marijuana. Boom boxes. Tofu. Barry White albums. Porn videos on Betamax. Things that would help you get down. Get funky. And hopefully, get some.

We won't discuss racketball.

And around and above most of these personally-expressive activities hovered the warm orange presence of carrot cake.

Carrot cake was a sort of keystone of the seventies scene. The vaguely "natural" and healthy restaurants that sprang up like weeds all served carrot cake. So did every trendy little cafe worth its salt.

Carrot cake -- it's cafeteria food, as far as I'm concerned. But it was orange and "natural," because it had ground carrots in it. That made it healthy, and somehow good for the earth, too. So you should eat carrot cake, because in some way it was virtuous. Never mind the inch-thick cream-cheese frosting or all the oil.

So people ate carrot cake like mad for a few years. Until, eventually, they realized it was just a chokingly-moist cake with shredded carrot in the batter.

And things changed. Somewhere around 1980, I looked around and everybody had switched from carrot cake to solid chocolate tortes so rich that your head ached afterward. The waiter would bring you a puny, two-inch-wide slice -- and it was still too much.

For the children of the '80s, "helping people" was no longer part of the program; the college kids wanted MBAs and a Wall Street job. Businessmen were gods, especially financiers. Government was bad, greed was good. Dope was out, and dopers were persecuted; but coke was more in than ever, particularly with the lawyers-and-limos crowd.

Living together was still commonplace, but so were condoms. And AIDS, and other drug-resistant STDs. The party was over.

And pale, fat-faced men in open-necked disco shirts sat in fern bars and chortled over Reagan's victory and the great new tomorrow they saw ahead for their stock portfolios. And they were right, but at the expense of the American economy -- or at least, the economy for the bottom eighty percent of us. I really hated the '80s.

The seventies were a time when we fooled ourselves; a nation took on a style, and considered it substance. And while we amused ourselves, the wealthy among us began the long process of stripping our metaphorical cars, left unattended out back behind the disco next to the dumpsters. What a loser of a decade.

And yet. And yet.

Off on the fringes, beyond the neon glow of the dance clubs and pickup bars grew wild weirdness and offbeat creativity that would flower in the years to come. In literature, in music, in technology, and more. An oddly sweet, idealistic weirdness that convinced me that, when push comes to shove, down the road, it'll be the freaks who set us free.

Throw the big switch, Riff Raff. One of these days, maybe -- we'll do the Time Warp again!

...and Carry a Big Stick

2011-06-09T21:11:00.000-07:00

As we often do, Rhumba and I went down to Harbor Beach before work for coffee. There's a coffee house right on the shore, and you can watch the fishing boats and pleasure boats come and go.

For a change the weather was mild, so I took our muffins outside to a table by the beach while Rhumba settled up with the cashier.

Or I tried to. A dog, laying on the ground, blocked the cafe's door from the outside. He was a disreputable mutt, and I'd seen him around often. Across his paws lay a long stick glistening with drool. And his eyes held a meaningful look.

I finally forced the door open past this furry doorstop and made my way to a cast-iron patio table. As soon as I sat down the mutt was on me; he dropped his stick at my feet, and waited.

"Sorry," I told him. "I can't throw your stick until I finish my muffin." The battered old tree branch glistened with saliva and canine microbes.

"No, do it NOW," he said. Well, actually he didn't say. But he did shove the stick straight into my shoe with his front legs. I got his meaning.

"No, you have to wait.," I told him. He shoved his stick forward again, this time right into the table. It moved sideways several inches.

Honestly I was tempted, but Rhumba picked that time to come out and join me, bearing coffees. Had I thrown that stick, my muffin would have been impounded until I'd made the long march to the restroom to wash my hands.

So we sat and listened to the crash of waves and watched the ducks fly over. And ever 30 seconds or so, the table went TWANG as the dog hit it with his stick. "Now! Now! Now!"

I finished my muffin -- gluten-free, no less, this is Santa Cruz -- picked up the stick and gave it a long, side-armed fling down the beach. The mutt churned after it with all speed. He seized it where it fell and brought it back to me, panting like a small, hairy locomotive.

Obviously a repeat performance was required, but I sat down and took a few sips of coffee and discussed dog psychology with Rhumba. Then I flung it again. We settled into a routine of one fling every minute or two.

It was silly and fun, and something I hadn't done in a very long time. Rhumba and I don't have the space for dogs, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed myself. Always is it good to have a few minutes of fun in the early hours, before beginning a long day of no-fun-at-all.

After a half-dozen flings, the mutt lay down under the table with his stick, tired and satisfied. No fetch-aholic, he; and not as young as he used to be, either. Believe me, I identify.

And I had a brilliant idea: I think we need a National Fetch Corps of well-trained but bumptious dogs to roam the parks and beaches with well-sanded, splinter-free sticks.

The fetch dogs would seek out world-weary men and women and bully them into taking up the stick and forgetting themselves for a few minutes. How can you not have fun with a dog? Dogs have more fun than anybody. Oh, and they would wear little bandoliers of wet-wipes so you could wipe the drool off you hands afterwards.

I think it's a winner. . Hell, we could probably get the dogs to volunteer:

"Hey, do you want to play fetch for the rest of your life?"

"Now! Now! Now!" (shove).

Police Blotter Haiku: Greetings from Jetsam Beach!

2011-06-04T17:57:00.002-07:00

Here are a few more police blotter haiku, adapted from items in the "Police Blotter" or "Crime Log" colums of community newspapers across America.

Most of these are taken from the blotter of the Jetsam Beach Pneumatic News, down Florida way. I find petty crime reports in Florida to be a bit more vivid, if that's the word, than those from the rest of the nation. You decide and, as always, please enjoy.

"The whole world is mad!
I am the only sane one!
Must be my new meds!"

Burning dog feces.
A statement, on her front porch,
that bore repeating.

With his new girlfriend,
he watched as his old girlfriend
slashed three of his tires.

He did quiet down
When Mom brandished her knife, but..,
Is this parenting?

She was naked and,
She was speaking in tongues and,
She was at Walgreens.

The Buddha vanished
from her front porch and, one hopes,
spread enlightenment.

He saw yellow when
her dog pissed on his green lawn.
Vivid threats were made.

They stole his garbage.
But it was HIS garbage, and
he wanted action.

Angry with her ex,
she poured bleach on him and yet..
her anger remained.

Fearing attack, he
struck first with a beer bottle.
And was forgiven.

Evolve or Die

2011-05-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

I'll explain the photo in a moment or two:

The question came up at this week's meeting of the Lords of Shavasana, the weekly men's-yoga-dinner group that I belong to: are human beings still evolving? In what way? Do they still need to evolve?

I considered the question as my stomach processed the turkey meatballs, quinoa pasta and soy ice cream that I had just consumed. Our host and cook was on a gluten-free and dairy-free diet. In Santa Cruz, fortunately, you can give up all those things and still eat well. Our cavernous natural-foods supermarkets carry palatable substitutes for practically any food that someone, somewhere, can't have.

I draw the line at Tofurkey, though. Who thought that was a good idea?

Ongoing human evolution, though: an interesting idea. Not long ago I would have argued that further evolution was unnecessary: we already had everything we needed to move ahead.

But lately, I'm not so sure. We aren't looking past our narrow self-interests to confront the larger problems that may doom all humanity -- and many other species.

We have all the brains in the world; and yet, when it's time to use them, we manage to turn off the parts that might tell us truths that we don't want to hear.

I once knew a man who was very, very good at that. This is his story...

I grew up in a Navy town; my father was a veteran of World War Two, a Marine. Most of his friends were veterans; my friends' fathers were veterans. They'd served in different theaters of operations, different branches of the armed forces, and different capacities.

But in the matter of World War Two, they all had one thing in common:

They didn't talk about it much.

Particularly if they saw action. My father served in the Marianas, the Marshall Islands, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima: real hot spots. And he didn't say a thing about any of it, except that he took a bullet in the leg on Iwo Jima.

As a boy, I accepted it. Fathers just -- didn't talk about the war When I grew older, my mother told me that for years after the war my father would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. And he would never tell her why. But she guessed that he had seen horrible things.

Years passed, many of them. The folks moved to a seniors' community; Dad died a few years later. Mom married a widower neighbor named Boyd.

Boyd was courtly, polite, and outspokenly pious. Boyd would tell you that a man's troubles would all be solved if he could just turn to Jesus, as Boyd had. He just didn't understand why anyone would turn down the love of God.

Boyd talked a good game; and I'm sure that he believed his own line. But after we got to know him well, it became clear that Boyd could also be unscrupulous, bullying, and belligerent. He would override any agreement or promise if he felt like it. If you asked him how his actions jibed with his promises or religious beliefs, he'd say, "This has nothing to do with that."

Boyd was a master of compartmentalization. He could honestly believe he'd given his soul to God while at the same time behaving unethically towards his fellow man. He never examined the contradictions in his own being; he didn't want to.

But in the end he was also old and fragile -- well into his 90s when my mother went into the hospital for her final few weeks. I spent several days a week staying down in their town, to see Mom and also to mind Lloyd when my sister wasn't around. He'd begun to wilt under the strain of dealing with my mother's illness, and from spending hours and hours in the hospital each day.

One night we got back to the house about midnight; and as we were preparing for sleep, Boyd had a panic attack. His blood pressure and heart rate flew to the ceiling. Sleep was out of the question for him. So I sat up and talked with him into the early hours as he gradually calmed down. And for reasons I don't understand or remember, Boyd suddenly began talking about -- it. World War Two. He'd served, too.

He'd been captain of an anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) battery in Europe. His battalion had gone to France after D-Day. In late autumn they reported to Belgium to take part in an operation called Antwerp X, also known later as the Defense of Antwerp. (He didn't tell me all the details; I looked them up.)

Nearly all supplies and equipment for the invasion of Europe came through the port of Antwerp. The Germans, preparing for a winter offensive that would later be called the Battle of the Bulge, wanted to cripple Antwerp or at least disrupt port operations. And so they decided to attack Antwerp with V-1 flying bombs. There's a picture of one at the beginning of this article.

The V-1 was a nasty piece of work: a cheap, unmanned jet aircraft that carried one ton of high explosives. The V-1 launched from a ramp and traveled in an approximately straight line for whatever distance had been programmed by its launch crew.

When it had gone the programmed distance, the V-1 would abruptly throw itself into a death-dive; it detonated on impact. On impact with anything that happened to be there: a school, a church, a hospital, shops, housing. The German high command didn't know precisely where a V-1 would end up, and it didn't care. The idea was to cause widespread damage and disruption, and foment terror.

So German forces launched thousands and thousands of V-1s at Antwerp in the autumn and winter of 1944-45. In those months thousands of small, dark jet planes traveled low and fast across the Belgian countryside until the moment when they dived to earth and exploded.

Boyd's AAA battalion, and many others, formed defensive a ring around the outskirts of Antwerp, out in the countryside a ways. The V-1s always came from the same few directions -- straight from their launch sites -- and so the AAA guns were placed right under the standard flight paths.

And the brave gunners of Antwerp X did indeed shoot down thousands of V-1s. Hundreds got through to Antwerp and inflicted terrible damage. But it could have been worse; nothing interfered with the business of its port, and that was the goal. The official AAA battalion histories that you can read online heap praise on the AAA men for their work -- in generalities. Terms like "harsh conditions" and "difficult circumstances" are used. But, all in all, a job well done.

That's not quite the way Boyd told it. To Boyd, Antwerp X was all about collateral damage. Because you could shoot a V-1 and hit it. And you could hope that its charge would detonate in mid-air and blast the craft into many small and harmless pieces. That was the plan, or at least the hope.

But two-thirds of the time, that didn't happen. Instead, antiaircraft fire knocked off a wing, or the tail, or damaged the rudder. And then the V-1 went mad, screaming across the sky in an unpredictable death spiral as its simple autopilot fought vainly for control.

And the V-1 would land and explode. Somewhere nearby. Maybe in the field over there. Maybe in the river. Maybe in a nearby village. Quite likely on you.

Belgium was, and is, densely populated. Any bomb that Boyd's men shot down was going to explode near someone. The V-1s flew at 2000 feet, and right overhead; if Boyd's gunners hit one and it didn't explode outright, it'd descend on them in moments. And dozens came by every day.

If you fired a gun numerous times a day and knew that every time you did so, a vengeful flying robot might swoop out of the sky and kill you or, worse, bystanders -- what would that do to you?

Boyd's unit cracked. Day after day of dodging the dying V-1s and their deadly cargo took its toll. Men deserted; One of Boyd's men, against all reason, fled toward enemy lines . The battalion commander went mad and had to be relieved.

A Belgian family that lived nearby had befriended Boyd's battery. They came out to visit the gunners when there was a lull: a young couple and their small daughter. One day Boyd's battery shot down a V-1 that landed on their house.

Boyd and his men jumped into a truck and sped over to dig them out of the ruins. They found the mother and daughter dead under the kitchen table.

"That just... about did it for me," Boyd told me. He said that by the time Antwerp-X finally ended, he had decided that war was "the worst thing there was," and he didn't want any part of it anymore.

And yet, here he was, sixty years later, cheering our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan every day in front of the television set. One day he turned to me and said that he believed that the U.S. had a special place with God and a holy mission to fulfill in overseas wars. That's what they told him on Fox News and that's what, in the twilight of his life, he wanted to believe.

Although, in the middle of that one bleak night near the end of his life, he did contemplate how awful, how unjustifiable, the carnage of war really was. And then suppressed the thoughts. The next day, he was the old Boyd once more.

And to me, this is the proof than humankind still needs to evolve: that someone like Boyd can experience the sheer, senseless destruction war causes, and yet "compartmentalize:" believe that what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan was somehow different and better than what he had seen with his own two eyes.

There are tens of millions of people like Boyd in this country, hundreds of millions or more around the world. And as long as they can keep their beliefs safe from the reality around them, we will always have war, and people willing to go to war.

And worse: we will have people who are willing to send others to war while knowing full well how senseless and awful it is. But who shut that knowledge away and refuse to make the connection.

I can only hope we evolve, and fast. Because the only sure way humanity will survive is if we, the individual humans, start thinking of others as well as ourselves.

Not-Good-Enough-for-the-New-Yorker Police Blotter Haiku

2011-05-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

With the encouragement of friends, I submitted a select set of police blotter haiku to The New Yorker magazine. Sadly, the editors declined them. Although I think they sent me the 'Class A' rejection form letter: I got "warmest regards."

Well, their loss is your gain: so here are a few more police blotter haiku, inspired by the "police blotter" columns of minor crime reports in small-town newspapers across the United States.

Although if any of you can think of a likely magazine to submit to, I'll try again. I'd love to see a few in print. Enjoy.

Blackberry jam, spread.
All across the wall-to-wall.
Ex-roommate anger.

Less concerned with the
loss of their pet bird than with
who to blame for it.

Late night vacuuming:
The bane of good relations
in condo towers.

Three thugs with rifles,
or three kids with airsoft guns:
Choose your perception.

An angry old lady
threatened a librarian.
Book 'er, Officer!

They argued, he left.
She smeared pasta on his car.
He shouldn't have left.

Dew catches the sun
and floods the windshield with light.
Two-car accident.

Failed jewelry store heist.
With an axe, a bucket, and
a beekeeper's mask.

Woman in wheelchair.
She rolled down the center line
to an unknown fate.

The hubcab Mom flung
through his windshield, he returned
through hers; no charges.

Water Babies

2011-05-18T23:00:00.000-07:00

I walked out of the supermarket and felt cold rain patter on my face and hands. Another shower had blown in.

The wet weather just doesn't want to leave us this year. Mid-May, and the storms just keeps coming.

A father and son trotted toward the store entrance from their freshly-parked car. The man bore the raindrops good-naturedly.

But his son, a skinny seven-year-old, held a tray over his head and acted distinctly grumpy.

"Daddy," he fretted, "I'm getting RAIN on my FACE."

Small children and water: it's a hate-love relationship. They hate being wet. But they love getting wet. Because they love water: throwing it, kicking it, pouring it, and especially jumping in it.

I understand: I remember being little. To a seven-year-old, water is Mother Nature's video game. Water moves, it splashes, it makes sounds, it catches the light. It's interactive -- you can make it do things. Before X-box, there were puddles. And squirt guns.

When he was three or four, one of the neighborhood children would stand on the sidewalk with a hose and pour water straight down the storm drain. For a half-hour at a time. He would stare at the water gravely as it disappeared into the slot in the concrete, as if trying to figure out where water went when it died.

We never found out what he got out of it. He wouldn't say a word. Maybe it just seemed.... awesome.

Most kids -- especially boys -- can't pass a puddle without stepping in it. If you give them water for a class activity, two or three or five of them will fling water drops at each other, giggling madly.

Because water is fun to play with and -- best of all -- your parents and your teachers don't want you to. "Not in your nice clothes," my mother would screech. As then, so now: forbidden fruit is sweet.

Though once little children do get wet -- even if it's their fault -- they turn into little drama queens who insist that the world stop while every hint of moisture is removed from their bodies and clothing. I usually respond by acting out the "I'm melting!" scene from "The Wizard of Oz."

When kids reach age 10 or so, they become 'way too cool to jump in puddles. They're more interested in hand-held video games, cars, cliques and, just maybe, their first cell. But...

A few years back, I worked as a teacher's aide for awhile; and for a short time, I assisted an old man who taught science in the primary grades. He was a year from retirement, and he'd seen it all. One day he demonstrated various properties of water to a group of ten-year-olds. And when he finished, he turned to me and said, "I will now make a fifth-grade class laugh by pouring water into a plastic bucket. "

He poured the water from a bottle, gently; it drummed in the bottom of the bucket, making precisely the sound of a man pissing.

"HEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEE" the class shrieked. The old teacher raised an eyebrow at me. Kids. Water. The forbidden. I'm sure they all rushed home after school and tried it themselves.

As a card-carrying adult, I suppose that I should be annoyed when children get rowdy with water. But I don't. Water is a great teaching tool for consequences: play with water, get wet. You don't like being wet? Then be careful with water.

And anyway, they love water. They need it: water is the way to be "bad" without really hurting anything. While still really being good. Your mother may rag on you for getting your new clothes wet, but never too hard: because, really, no harm is done than ten minutes in the dryer can't cure.

A week or so ago on a rare warm day, I decided to wash the car. And soon water from my hose flowed down the driveway and across the street in a steady stream.

Three small children, all siblings, happened to be patrolling the street on little silver scooters. It's a dead-end street with no traffic.

One of them, perhaps only three, diverted from her flight path and stopped just short of the stream of water. She looked at me gravely, looked at the water. And then deliberately rolled her scooter across it. Then she sped back down the street, leaving a black track of moisture behind her.

A minute later her older brother, all of five, made a bee-line for the stream of water and also rolled across it. "MY scooter got wet, too," he called to his siblings, speeding away.

Kids. Water. The forbidden. Rebellion. Competition. Life. And no harm done.

Things You Don't Know About Me: Prehensile Toes

2011-05-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

My genetic heritage granted me long, maneuverable toes that can easily grasp small objects. When barefoot, I routinely pick items off the floor with one foot and transfer them to my hands.

Back when I was more flexible, I'd bend over and pick items up with my fingers -- like a normal person. Time passed, and my back doesn't bend as well as it used to; but my toes are as strong and bendy as they ever were. So I'm farming out some of my manual labor to my feet. They seem to enjoy it.

Here's the toe task I'm proudest of -- and it's a Stupid Middle-Aged Guy Trick of the first rank:

When I strip to take a shower, I always throw my old t-shirt, briefs, and socks on the bathroom floor. After I've showered, it's time to put the dirty clothes in the laundry hamper. I begin by grasping the t-shirt with the toes of one foot and stretch ing it out on the floor so that it's more or less flat. Then, individually, I pick up each sock and my briefs with my toes and drop them in the middle of the t-shirt.

Finally, I grasp one end of the t-shirt with my toes and fold it over the socks and briefs. I line up the end I've grasped up with the other end of the t-shirt. Then I pinch both ends together with my toes and lift; the t-shirt becomes a sling holding my socks and underwear. I elevate my foot to hip height, grab the sling with one hand, and carry it off to the hamper.

Sometimes I think I have too much time on my hands. Or feet.

Just...Police Blotter Haiku

2011-05-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday night, and the weekly grind begins again tomorrow. I'm tired, and I want to go to bed.

And yet, somehow, I found myself pounding out another ten police blotter haiku this evening. It's probably the last fun I'll have for 24 hours or so. So...

From the stark, dusty streets of Block City to the humid thoroughfares of MoonPie; from the quirky neighborhoods of Bonanzaburg to El Lado Oscura's well-worn Miracle Mile: people constantly veer off the safe, wide road of rational behavior and stall out in the local paper's "police blotter" column.

Where, sometimes, I can distill down their story -- or the questions their story raises -- into the 17 syllables of a haiku. It sure beats stamp-collecting.

Enjoy.

Why call in a theft
when you won't tell the police
who you are, or where?

Alarming screams, yes.
But they came from a sports bar.
Context rules the world.

Umbrella, shotgun.
One confused with the other.
The SWAT team showed up.

Ring and run away.
Giggling children had their way
with doorbells that night.

His ex's boyfriend
warned him that she'd rob his house.
Honor among men.

Fracas at Walmart!
Bystander struck by a jar
of Cheesy Salsa!

His neighbor came by,
destroyed his TV, and left.
Do you need details?

An oddly -marked truck
selling ice cream to small girls.
There may have been clowns.

Big night for taggers.
The next day, call after call
about defaced walls.

Flashing cop car lights
deflated their ardor and
inflated his ire.

Team Players

2011-05-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

The company I work for learned a valuable lesson some time back: never hold an outdoor sales event when the weather forecast is "chance of thunderstorms."

It was pretty ugly. But our doughty marketing minions salvaged what they could from the drifts of wrecked booths and sodden pop-ups. Then they moved the show inside in record time.

The show did go on -- more or less. Again, thanks to our marketing minions. And the many clerks and secretaries who volunteered to help on their time off. There's a lot of pressure to "volunteer."

Mr. Bigboss's subsequent memo to the troops was ecstatic. It included every positive adjective and noun in management's motivational library: "creative,""teamwork," "innovative," "team spirit," "initiative," "team," "passion," and on and on.

Team, team, team.... when did we stop being a company and start being a team? When management says "team," what does it mean? Is it a good thing? I've been thinking about that.

Because it doesn't feel good. In practice, the people who chant "team, team, team" are not folks I'd trust with a half-eaten piece of pizza.

Companies didn't talk about teamwork in the old days. They talked about loyalty. You were supposed to join a company and stay with it; it was rumored that if you job-hopped too much no company would want you. You were supposed to stay with a company until it didn't want you. But it would always want you -- wouldn't it?

Early on after college, I got a job in the advertising department of the Fairweather Friend Insurance Company in San Francisco. They had tremendous benefits -- if I stayed with them, they'd take care of me for the rest of my life, the HR rep assured me. Thirty-year men were common. The CEO himself had worked his way up from file clerk.

It sounded great. Then I met my department -- as fine a group of depressed, middle-aged alcoholics as you would ever want to avoid meeting. I heard rumors, spoken in tones of hushed reverence, that the VP had once downed 15 martinis in one sitting. Enough to kill a man. It rather looked like it had, but he was still walking around.

My fellow employees all hated their jobs. They were sick to death of them, and of the company. Their managers were mean-spirited and vindictive, interested only in moving up the corporate ladder over the backs of anyone in the way. Mine certainly was.

But nobody could leave. The lion's share of their generous company investments and pension benefits would stay behind; and they were middle-aged, and over-paid. No one else would pay them half what they made at Fairweather Friend.

Fairweather taught me a couple of things. First, that while companies had the right to employ people to write nice things about them, those people weren't going to include me. Not after some of the things the troops in the field told me about Fairweather's shoddy claims service, when I called them looking for chatty features for the company newsletter.

Second, it taught me not to get trapped in a job, ever. To always have a way out, if I couldn't stand it anymore. Too many people at Fairweather Friend were the walking dead.

I would get lists of recently-dead retirees from Personnel and write up their obits for the newsletter. I soon noticed a fairly common pattern: 35 years with the company, retired at 63 with full benefits and a generous pension -- and dead within two years. And I had to wonder if they'd actually passed away years earlier, in every meaningful way.

They never mentioned "team" at Fairweather Friend. They didn't have to. They owned you.

I quit -- not in defiance, really. They already had me beaten down. I just smiled, said it wasn't a good fit, and got the hell out of there. Two of the lifers told me they wished they could go with me. Their golden handcuffs held them fast, though.

I goofed around for a few months and got a job at a software start-up six or seven doors down from my apartment building. Best move I ever made, and I didn't even have to leave the block.

Nobody said "team" at Unsurenet. Wasn't necessary. Either everybody worked together, or we didn't ship our software. That meant not waiting for our clueless management to recognize every problem and issue orders; we grunts found the problems and solved them ourselves.

The industry was new, the jobs were new; there were no standards or procedures. We made them up as we went along; and again by "we" I mean we grunts. I used to work weekends willingly, because I knew it needed doing. Nobody set me an impossible deadline -- I set my own, and kept them.

All Mr. Bigboss's buzzwords -- creativity, initiative, passion, innovative, teamwork -- we lived them. We didn't say them, but we lived them. We lived them because we had control of our work and how we did it. That made the work "ours," and valuable to us.

And there was the eventual promise of a pay-out down the way if the company made it big. None of my start-ups ever did, but it was an egalitarian promise -- something for everybody -- that was appreciated.

Not only high tech worked this way. My dad worked construction through a union hiring hall for 30 years. And that meant that when he got to the head of the line, he got to choose what contractor he worked for. And he chose to work for contractors who were friends of his, who trusted his judgment, who treated him as an equal out on the construction site.

Dad used to sneer when I'd complain about how much I hated the daily grind at Fairweather Friend or some of my dumber office jobs. He looked forward to work every day. Well, maybe not the days when he had to climb inside giant oil tanks. But the other days.

Eventually Dad got too old for construction; and he took a government job where nobody gave a damn about him or his opinion. Then he understood what I'd complained about. He apologized for doubting me -- he who never apologized for anything.

Basically, work gets done best when the actual workers get a lot of input. That gives them ownership of their work, and they can care about it. They can take pride in it. But when they don't own their work -- when they're micromanaged, or ignored, or overburdened -- they tend to burn out or turn into surly robots. Because it doesn't pay to care. "Caring" means you might disagree with the boss -- and that can be dangerous.

The boss may not have much choice, anyway, because he's gotten his orders from people three levels up in the organization who have never done the work and don't know what's doable. They just know what they want. And the boss wants to keep his job, so....

Most of the American work force is stuck in surly robot mode. We want to do a good job, but we can't: the orders are wrong, or we don't have enough time or manpower or money. So we turn out crap -- it may not be what management wants, but it's what they asked for. Whether they realize it or not.

Oh, you try to do your best for your peers; you want to help each other get through the day. And you try to do well by customers who've plunked down hard money for your services. This can involve individual initiative of the surreptitious kind, when what needs to be done is not what's supposed to be done.

So occasionally your job is still under your control, because there isn't time to get management involved -- or it's just better not to, and you know you can get away with bending the rules in this one case. You have ownership, and pride. And a little fear.

That's why the marketing mob and the "volunteers" put the ruined sales event back together so quickly. They were the ones holding the bag, the ones who'd face the customers. So they made their own decisions and just -- did it.

Mr. Bigboss and his kind love this sort of stuff, this teamwork. They like enthusiasm in their workers: that's why they chant "team, team, team" every day. They don't understand that they're the worst enemies that teamwork ever had.

Because if they really believed in teamwork they'd talk to the people at the bottom before making decisions. They'd give us some ownership. But they never do. So we surly robots do our best to keep on keeping on, and to look after each other. Mr. Bigboss sure ain't.

Because to Mr. Bigboss, "teamwork" means that all his employees turn out enthusiastically to fulfill his every desire -- even if it's stupid or useless or impossible, and we all disagree with it. He doesn't have the slightest idea of what "teamwork" really is.

As for reaping the benefits of our work: nearly all of Mr. Bigboss' original management team has moved on to better-paying jobs elsewhere on the strength of our "teamwork."

But most of the lower ranks are still in place -- there's nowhere else to go in this job market, locally. We haven't seen a raise in years. We have all gained just two things: weight and gray hairs. And that includes the guys still in their 20s, which is scary.

I have no uplifting finish to this essay, no firey "someday it'll be different" rant to give you all hope. The only way the workplace will improve is for the entire nature of the economy to change. That process will be neither pretty nor short nor painless. Many will suffer, including perhaps myself and my wife Rhumba and everyone reading this. And what we end up with, while it might be better, might not be wonderful.

If you like your work, do everything you can to keep it. If you don't, try to maintain your dignity as best you can -- without starving. Be good to those working with you, do your best, try to serve others as best you can even when your employer makes it difficult. Stay human. And --

Go team.

Police Blotter Haiku: Blotterday

2011-05-01T17:44:00.000-07:00

All towns are different. You learn that from reading their crime news.

I read a lot of crime news: news of small crimes from small town newspapers on the Internet. They're where I get material for my police blotter haiku, of which 13 new ones lurk at the bottom of this entry.

And as I go back to the same towns over and over again, I find that each one has its own style of small crime; when people act out in a particular town, they're likely to act out in ways that are special to that town.

In "Bonanzaburg," for example, people drink too much and get rowdy. They bother the neighbors, and they fight with their relatives. They like guns, and they like to shoot them. But almost always at the wildlife, rarely at each other. The people are more flamboyant than crazy. Bonanzaburg is that big weird guy next to you at the bar who's basically okay.

In "Diamond River," a wealthy country town, they complain about dogs. Loose dogs, barking dogs, and biting dogs. They like their quiet; they paid a lot for it. Suicide is big there, too: the real thing, or the fear that it might happen. The rich are not happy. Oh, and -- if you're wanted for a crime, never ever drive through Diamond River if anything at all wrong is with your car: an expired registration, even a busted tail light. The cops will pull you over every time. Diamond River under its real name is very well-known. But it is not happy.

In "Block City," drunks like to fight in bars, and sober people like to cut down trees on each other's property and complain that each others' pets and livestock aren't being looked after properly. But other than that, it's all goats in the road, noisy children, dogs raiding trash cans, and the occasional drunk naked guy. Sounds like a decent place to live: if it wasn't 200 miles from anywhere, with horrendous winters.

"El Lado Oscura" is a stout, staunch, settled old town in the high desert where everybody knows everybody -- a little too well. At the heart of them, about half the police calls concern two long-time acquaintances or relatives who've crossed each others' boundaries one too many times. It's the sort of town where, if you had a cold and possibly gave it to somebody else, the somebody else might come around to bitch at you. And bring the relatives with them.

We think of the United States as a single society, but I'm coming to understand that it is actually a galaxy of small societies. Each city has its own histories, cultures, shared memories, slang, and issues. We are not Walmartized yet, at least not all of us. Even here in Santa Cruz I could tell another local, "Well, I went downtown for Mike's Mess and then headed up B40 to the Top of the World for a little ultimate." And you, the outsider, mightn't have a clue.

So come with me once more out into small town America, where the crimes are small but the personalities are definitely not. And where the small old towns on the secondary highways make new history every day -- just not the kind that's written down anywhere except in the police blotter. Enjoy.

His undeserved
handicapped parking permit
incensed the neighbors

They argued that Spot
was no chicken-killer but...
there was video.

Being annoying
is no crime, but his victims
really wish it was.

She's "just dancing."
Though some deem it a stagger
and her, "erratic."

She woke that morning
with bruises from a beating
she didn't recall

A soused Irishman,
one ladder, and a beehive.
Just what could go wrong?

They busted him for
barking at a police dog.
He'll plead "free speech."

Drunk woman at bar.
No one she called would come to
give her a ride home.

"My wife's trying to
run me over NO AAAAAGGHH" (click)!
Yes, she got his leg.

Oral fixation.
She ate his TV dinner.
And then he bit her.

Suicidal male?
No, the cops saw -- just one
with a pile of child porn.

Spent bullet casings.
skid marks, beer cans in the street.
Signs of a good time.

Kicked out of the bar,
he thought it wise to return
and fight the owners

The Everlasting Henchman

2011-04-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life is like a old gangster movie...

Pete the Derby stood watch in the mouth of the dark alley. Nobody was going to look closely at a bulky Irishman lurking on the street. Not one with his hands inside his overcoat. Not in that neighborhood, anyway. And definitely not at two in the morning. No, they would look away. And run.

Behind him in the alley, Mike the Sledge broke through a brick wall with half-a-dozen blows of his giant hammer. The rotten brick just crumbled away. Mike was better than TNT; quieter, too.

"Hurry it up guys," the Big Boss hissed, and Mike and Joey Fingers and Crazy Rico squeezed through the gap and into the building. "Pete," the Boss said, "We're going to have the lock blown in two minutes flat. You be ready."

"I'm ready," Pete growled, and the Big Boss followed the others inside.

But it was only one minute before the burglar alarm went off.

Pete swore. Lights went on in the building across the street, an orphanage. He could almost hear the phones dialing. It wasn't two minutes before a beat cop trotted around the corner. He was just in time to hear the blast as Fingers blew the door on the strong room.

Pete pushed his derby hat firmly down on his noggin. Then he hauled the tommy gun out from under his coat and fired a long burst at the copper. The patrolman dodged behind a car and returned fire. Soon Pete heard sirens in the distance, in two directions. Three. Coming closer.

Behind him, Crazy Rico oozed through the hole in the wall with an armload of fur coats. "The others are coming," he hissed, and headed down the alley to the moving van waiting there. Joey Fingers came through after him, and the crooks inside the building passed furs to them through the wall as the two men ran back and forth to the getaway vehicle.

But out front, cop cars were skidding to a stop from both directions. Pete raised his Thompson gun and laid a tattoo of bullet holes down the side of each black-and-white. A gray-haired cop slumped down behind the wheel as his partner bailed out the far door and started shooting.

And then there were three cruisers, and four, and men in blue uniforms spread out behind every piece of cover. The Thompson grew hot in Pete's hands as he hosed the street again and again. Window glass shattered in the orphanage, and children screamed. Guns flashed from behind telephone poles, cars, trash cans; and bullets zipped past Pete's head.

"We're done in here," the Big Boss yelled from the alley. "Hold them off one more minute, then make for the truck!"

"Gotcha," Pete called. He could see the coppers grouping for a charge. He fired a few short bursts to keep them busy, cartridges tinkling at his feet. Then the truck's engine coughed into life behind him, and he began backing into the alley.

But then he heard the truck fall into gear and begin to pull away... "Hey, WAIT!" he yelled, turning after it. And the cops rose as one and launched a swarm of lead at him. Pete's body jerked as bullet after bullet slammed into him.

Pete the Derby toppled like a pile of bricks, the tommy gun blazine one final deadly gout of fire as his finger convulsively tightened on the trigger.

Then he was dead on the ground as the cops rushed past him and down the alley after the fleeing truck...

Crime and punishment, life and death, bosses and henchmen... I'm thinking about all that as I read that Peter Darbee has lost his job yesterday.

Peter Darbee's the guy who's been running Northern California's power company, PG&E, for the last five years. Right into the ground. He's a money man, trained on Wall Street.

PG&E's been going downhill ever since it was deregulated. Many of its power plants were separated out into a separate, lucrative company. Soon after, PG&E the utility almost went bankrupt; but the state bailed it out. We're still paying for that, in our power bills. Peter Darbee helped work that deal out, back when he was just the CFO.

Wall Street liked Peter so much that they made him chairman and CEO. Just one thing, Peter, they said (this is an imaginary conversation): always make the numbers. When we project what your profits will be, you make them happen. When we project your stock price in a year, you make it real. Nothing else matters. Oh, and -- we don't need to know the details.

And Peter Darbee said, sure, boss. I'll find efficiencies.

And he did. The easiest way to make more money in a public utility is cutting service, and that's what happened at PG&E. They cut service; they cut maintenance; they cut inspections. That's what it looks like, anyway. This didn't all start with Darbee, but it sure didn't stop with him.

Darbee tried to roll out smart electrical/gas meters for homes and businesses, so he could lay off all the meter readers. But there were a few problems with accuracy in the early going; customers got angry. Perhaps it was nothing that a little tweaking couldn't solve, but PG&E tried to ram through the meter program without publicly proving that it was sound. A lot of cities refused the smart meters, and the program stalled.

A few cities decided to found their own electric utilities, and PG&E fought them in court. Unsuccessfully, and at substantial expense. So to cut expenses, Darbee launched a state proposition to kill new public power. By requiring a two-thirds vote of the local electorate. He sold it as "protection against new taxes."

He spent fifty million on the campaign, and lost the election. But PG&E did gain one thing: the active hatred of most Californians, liberal and conservative. I wrote a firey rant against P&GE before the election, and another one after. In the latter I burbled gleefully that I hoped Darbee would lose his job for his failures.

My modest blog must have made at least a small impact, because somebody claiming to be Darbee's daughter posted a complaint to my blog: "My father is a generous man, how dare you throw around his name with such unjustified hate!"

Then, a couple of months later, a faulty PG&E gas supply line blew up and burned down an entire neighborhood. Eight people died horribly.

It turned out that, for PG&E, "pipeline maintenance" had become something of a joke. They didn't even know the complete maintenance history of their major gas lines, anymore, or said they didn't. And they didn't know why they should give that history to the Public Utility Commission, even if they could find it.

Peter Darbee never wavered. His PG&E kept turning back the attacks, protesting the inquiries, declaring innocence. While continuing to ship profits back to Wall Street.

Until even the PUC, those normally careless patrolmen of the public good, got ready to come down on Darbee and PG&E with guns blazing -- again, or so I hear. A million-dollar-a-day fine until all records were surrendered; that was one of the plans I heard rumored.

That was enough for Wall Street, said some journalists. The Wall Street funds that owned hunks of PG&E told the directors that Darbee had to go. He'd made the numbers, but now he was too hot. Angry regulators, a burning neighborhood, dead people. Peter Darbee, loyal henchman to Wall Street, was cut loose, left behind, sold out, so the Big Boss could get away.

Peter Darbee will be gone soon. But the Big Boss -- Wall Street -- remains. And they'll want a new henchman to fill his place. They'll say to the new guy, be nice to the locals; let things calm down. Make friends. But then... make the numbers. Nothing else matters. Do what you have to, and don't tell us the details.

And the new guy will say, sure, boss.

As for Peter Darbee, don't cry for him. His pink slip comes with a $35 million severance check. Sometimes, life is not like an old gangster movie.

Pete the Derby groaned and opened his eyes. Nobody was around. The cops were still chasing the Big Boss. He jammed his derby back on his head. Then he levered himself up off the ground and staggered away, staying in the shadows. The tommy gun, Pete threw into a culvert.

He paused in the light of a neon sign and pawed at his chest. His shirt was ripped up, but there was no blood. He opened the buttons and looked at the gleaming thing that had saved his life: his solid gold bullet-proof vest.

That's why everybody wants to work for the Big Boss, Pete thought to himself. Even when he sells you out -- he still takes care of you.

Pete the Derby closed his shirt and limped off toward a new life. Maybe in private equity.

Stand and Deliver!

2011-04-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

The other day East-End Alf, a friend of mine, had a close encounter of the sales kind.

Like all our crowd, he has a DSL internet connection, which is nice and fast. But even faster is always nicer. And a sharp young man called him up to lure him to a new DSL provider. Which offered blazing fast service and a low, low price.

Now Alf doesn't mind saving a dollar or two. Not one single bit. He was much in favor of more speed for less cash. But Alf knows his way around a contract. So when they gave him the papers to sign, he read the fine print. All of it.

And he found out you could get blazing fast service, and you could get a low, low price. But not both at the same time. In the end, neither the price nor the service would be better than what he already had. So he showed the young salesman the proverbial door.

Sharp sales practices are as American as Mom and apple pie. (And slavery, and religious intolerance, and corruption.) But it seems to me that when I was younger, that it was the fly-by-night credit furniture stores and the sleazy car dealers and the no-money-down jewelers who were most dishonest.

We trusted the big retail chains and manufacturers to play by the rules, offer products in a straightforward manner, and not try to fool us -- too much.

But now it seems that even large corporations are springing traps right and left. As "good business practice." I have no cell phone, but I hear plenty of gripes from friends about the manifold ways cell carriers find to nickel-and-dime them with obscure fees. Because those nickels and dimes add up.

Airlines, hotels, utility companies, Internet service: the same thing. An attractive, low, low price to start, with hidden fees or a bump in rates down the line after an "introductory period" that you thought was the real price. After you've committed yourself.

Again, this is nothing new. But everybody is doing it now.

The other day I was walking down Pacific Avenue when I spied the Greenpeace Blockade ahead of me. Greenpeace, the giant save-the-environment nonprofit, likes to scatter two or three attractive young people across the sidewalk at it's widest, often at Pacific and Cooper. They don't really block the sidewalk, but there's no way you can get by without passing within four feet of one of them.

And a cheery youth with a clipboard and colorful literature will will smile, make eye contact and say, "Would you like to help us save the planet?" Or "Can you spare two minutes for Mother Earth?" It's a lovely come-on. No one's going to say "No, I don't want to save the planet. No, Mother Earth can go flush herself down a toxic waste dump." At least, nobody in Santa Cruz.

Most people run the gauntlet without stopping. Because we've all stopped, once; you get a fervent conversation with a young idealist, which is nice. But they're young idealists with a hidden agenda -- and a paycheck for doing this -- which is not as nice. More about that in a bit.

As I approached the blockade, one of the crew, a slim and handsome young woman, looked at me and commanded, "Help us save the planet!"

I shook my head and continued on my way. "Come on over here," she said, trusting out her modest chest. She cocked her head, smiling. "I wanna talk to ya." I can most charitably describe her smile as "playful."

No thanks, young lady. I'm old and, thank God, that approach doesn't work anymore. Besides, I know where this all leads. It starts innocently with some fervent talk about the good Greenpeace can do, and how even a small donation might help. And, oh, if you don't mind, your name and address and email. And phone number. So we can keep you informed on important matters.

And it's over in five minutes and very pleasant. Only after days or weeks do you realize that you've acquired a social disease. More more painful than gonorrhea, more long-lasting than herpes.

But as the phone starts to ring and the mailbox starts fill, you realize: you've caught -- junk mail. And telephone solicitors. And they will be after you till the end of time to give, give, give.

The kids weren' treally after my money. My contact information is the big score.

It's a big business these days, charity. More of more big charities emulate the marketing strategies of big corporations. Money's tight, donations are down; they feel they have no choice. Let me tell you a little bit about what happens to your contact information, the address and phone number you so innocently passed over, after you give it to a big international charity.

Your information will go into a database; well, you guessed that. Everything does, these days. The charity may have paid for third-party data services that can match your name with information gleaned from public sources to find out how many properties you own, their assessed value, whether you're the officer of a corporation, hold public office and on and on. Complex algorithms will estimate your net worth from this sketchy information -- and fairly well, too.

Your information may even be matched against the characteristics of known big givers, so that you are automatically "scored" on how likely you are to give big gifts, frequent gifts, bequests, and so on.

If you're a hot prospect with high net worth, you may get special attention. Personal calls. Invitations to events. Special meetings with roving bigwigs.

But 99.8 percent of you are going to get junk mail and phone calls. And the more you give, the more appeals you'll get. The introductory meeting with the nice young person was pleasant, but the only representative of that charity that you may ever speak to again is a paid solicitor whose primary goal is to persuade and cajole you to give more than you did last year. And he knows exactly how much that was.

If you do give a lot of money -- we're talking five figures -- you may be bumped up to the special-attention category. But other than that, you're on the list forever until you tell them specifically to take you off; few people do, and nonprofits count on that. If you move, and you're a regular giver, they'll find your new address; it can be done for a dollar or less. And some non-profits sell their donor lists for extra cash, so you'll get more appeals from even more organizations.

At the bottom of it then, down in the sub-basement of its soul, a large charity is very similar to a big corporation. Of course the "profits" go to good causes. Minus overhead. Careers are built and paid-for on that overhead. Greenpeace and all the rest of them were built to do good, but once they were built and became established, their primary mission became that of all big bureaucracies: to survive. To continue.

I just have a problem with charitable organizations, organizations for good, that do business just like large corporations -- the bad guys. Can they really be the good guys if they emulate the tactics of enemy -- because those tactics bring in money?

Today I went down to the post office to file our tax returns. At the last minute, as usual. Oh,well -- as the man says, no matter how long you put something off, there's always time for another last minute. And I hate doing taxes.

A team of elderly ladies had set up a table at the bottom of the post office steps in honor of the International League for Peace and Justice -- or something like that. They were selling brownies for peace.

Across the street in front of the Bank of America, a crowd of protesters urged passers-by to defeat the big banks by withdrawing out their deposits. About as practical a scheme as there can be to discomfit banks.

There was much waving and laughing and enthusiasm and munching of brownies. And some money changed hands, and some addresses were written down, and nobody's career depended on it, but everybody was involved.

And I guess I would tell the big charities that if they really want to succeed, they have to find a way to bring all their supporters along in the adventure. Treat them like partners, not like resources to be farmed.

I know, that's not how big business does it. And big charities have been taught to emulate big business.

But those charities who really have what it takes to change the world -- will find a way. Because that's how the world will be changed.

Tax-Avoidance Police Blotter Haiku

2011-04-10T19:22:00.000-07:00

Instead of working on income taxes this afternoon, I churned out another batch of police blotter haiku. Fear of paperwork does much to stir my creative impulse.

As usual, these haiku are drawn from the "police blotter" columns of small-town newspapers up and down the West Coast and sometimes a state or two inland. There may not be much actual crime to report in those towns; but the human comedy gets full coverage. Enjoy.

There in the driveway
glistened their Saran-wrapped car.
King Tut on four wheels.

Pulling up his pants
made him fall over backwards.
Well, that and the booze.

The car, not missing.
Missing was his memory
of having moved it.

Bruises, or Mother?
He chose the bruises and jumped
from her moving car.

Turns 18 at 12
and can then buy cigarettes.
She waits near the store

Her threat: suicide.
But they found her at Safeway
shopping the specials.

Vultures and dogs eat
a deer carcass in the road.
Ah, country living.

A nice tree planter!
She stashed her child in it and
hit the casino

In Socorro City,
somebody heard a dog bark.
It made the papers.

He ripped off his shirt,
pushed her down, she punched him back.
Then they left, with beers.

His vow to kill his
mother was "taken out of
context," he complained.

Two cars, one digit.
Which driver raised it to which,
They both disputed

A bottle of piss.
Upset by son on father --
who became upset.

It's never a mere
"family dispute" when a
rifle is present

The tire merchant's dream:
a truckload of nails spilled at
a busy crossroads.

In the Valley of Shadows

2011-04-07T22:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a bit slow at work this week. No last-minute emergency rush jobs have landed in the job queue, no servers have melted down, no one has had a hissy in my cube because Mystery House, our quirky enterprise application, has blow up in their face. It so loves to do that.

And that's mainly because we had another layoff earlier in the week. Nothing subdues an organization like a good layoff. You'd think people would work harder than ever out of fear, or determination to survive, or just to get their mind off their worries.

But they don't. They web-surf a little more. Small groups of people accrete in the hallways, seemingly at random, and chat.

People who normally work through lunch actually step away from the keyboard and eat a civilized meal in the break room. Others actually go out to lunch, usually in groups of two or three. None of this is normal behavior for our driven little organization.

Me, I've been too busy posting witty comments on the Calculated Risk blog to do much work the last couple of days. I'm just not motivated to do anything else but put out the occasional fire or take phone calls. Emmett, my boss, went on the road, so pretending to be busy isn't much of a chore.

And I feel the occasional twinge of guilt, and kick myself periodically to get going again. But I know what's happening. It's the mourning period. Not so much for the people who are going, but for myself, and all my co-workers. As if someone shot off a gun and the bullet missed your head by three inches -- and hit someone else. Afterward, you need a bit of recovery time.

We've had so many layoffs that everyone can see them coming. I certainly did this time. It was late morning, and I'd just come out of a long meeting. I sat down in my cube to call Rhumba. We made a date for a quick lunch at one -- she was home with a cold, and wanted to get out of the house.

As I put down the phone, the guy in the next cube called out, "You should know that you have a meeting at one."

"Huh? It wasn't on my schedule two hours ago."

"Is now. It's on everybody's. It's an all-hands."

A last-minute all-hands meeting can only mean two things -- somebody died, or there's a layoff. I was sure it was a layoff announcement. We'd been expecting one. And I was sure that I'd made the cut. I wasn't being laid off. Because the people who were laid off never go to the layoff announcement. They're sent home, to avoid awkwardness.

Earlier I compared surviving layoffs to a near-miss by a bullet. But that's only roughly true -- because if a bullet passed near, you'd' hear it. But a layoff you survive is the bullet you don't hear. You only know what happened after the deed's long done. It's like waking up in the morning, stretching -- and spying a bullet hole in the wall two inches from where your head had lain. It's not a warm feeling.

We had the meeting; actually, there were several going simultaneously,hosted by different top managers. Mr. Bigboss was nowhere to be seen, but our meeting was led by Mr. Littleboss and Mr. Vandersleeve.

And they did a decent job, with long faces and somber voices. They said that none of the layoffs reflected on the individuals themselves; they said that the budget reductions would put us on an even keel for the time being; and they said that more layoffs could come at any time.

So you can understand why the troops were a bit bemused for the rest of the week. Oh, we'll snap out of it and climb back into harness. What choice do we have? What choice do I have? It's a tough world out there right now. I'd rather not face it without a job, or health insurance.

Because for the little guy, the stakes are higher than they've ever been. The rewards for hard work are negligible, but the downside -- that's limitless. Once you fall down in this society, you may never get up again. Especially if you're over 50. Unemployment can break you, the housing bust can break you, illness can break you, and medical bills can lay you out for the vultures. Even if you have insurance.

The other night, Rhumba said, "If I'm ever diagnosed with a terminal illness, I'm going to refuse treatment." She looked me in the eye. "Don't let them take the house." Because it's come to that now. Save some money from a life of labor, hope to have a good life with it, and watch a voracious, profit-driven medical industry vacuum it out of your pockets with the least excuse.

The predators are everywhere in our economy, our society; some of the worst of them claim they're "just there to help."

We had such hope 18 months ago. We had a new president who promised change, and many believed him. Even cynics -- and I am one -- thought there would be at least some progress against the forces of corruption, greed, and entitlement.

And we were wrong. Time after time, Obama and the other politicians who "were on our side," who were "here to help," laid down and rolled over for the most insane demands of far-right radicals.

And while we recover from our layoff the radicals threaten to block a new federal budget and shut down government operations. With a smile, Obama has given them everything they wanted -- cuts to education, college scholarships, Head Start programs for poor children, environmental regulatory agencies, all the things ultraconservatives hate -- and they want even more. And Obama says, we must reach compromise to avoid the great harm a government shutdown would cause.

Harm? HARM? I am not sure he knows what the word means. Or he would have by now taken up the sword and declared war against those who wish to abandon the many for the good of the powerful few.

Mancessories for Manly Men

2011-04-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

I think I've invented a new fashion item for men. Something new in... mancessories.

A mancessory is a man's accessory -- something that any manly man would wear.
Unlike women's accessories, which may be worn, held, or draped, a mancessory can be worn in only one way: clipped to the belt.

And a mancessory has a real, practical purpose -- which it may never be used for.

My father wore two mancessories at all times: a giant Swiss Army knife in a battered leather holster, and a two-dollar pocket watch on a chain. There was an extensible key chain, too, some years. Some years not. And, occasionally, a tape measure.

Dad was a skilled manual laborer and he wore a pocket watch in part because no normal watch band could fit around his giant wrists. And because in his very physical work, a wristwatch would take too much punishment. Even his pocket watches were toast within a year. I recall that a truck ran over one. My father was not attached to it at the time, but nevertheless.

The Swiss Army knife, I gave him. He'd grown up on a farm and he'd always carried a small pen knife in his pocket because on a farm you're always needing a blade for some damned thing. But we weren't on the farm, and in his later years I got tired of watching him loosen screws and pry the lids off paint cans with a wimpy knife blade; the tool at hand was the one he always used. So I got him a fat Victorinox folding knife with about ten tools and a handy leather holster, which he immediately slapped on his belt and left there forever.

Mom gave me the knife back after Dad died. I've never seen a more scarred, battle-weary pocket knife in my life. He even broke the tip off the big blade -- probably loosening a bolt that didn't want to loosen.

Dad used his mancessories to do actual work. Unlike me -- I bought myself a Swiss Army knife when I bought Dad's, and it's still pristine. I think I cut some paper with it once. And a cake.

Mancessories are meant to be useful; but they're also meant to be cool. Let's face it, a Swiss Army knife, a Leatherman tool (has folding knife blades and turns into a pair of pliers), even a set of Allen wrenches or a cell phone on the belt make you look like you're ready for business. Capable. Serious. Able. Dare I say -- potent.

Whether we actually need or use the dang things is, very often, secondary. And if the mancessory is worn on the hip like a weapon -- so much the better.

When I attended college, back in the '70s, pocket calculator were very new. And every male engineering student -- in those days, nearly all of them -- had to carry his 87-function calculator in a black leatherette case worn on the hip. They looked like geeky gunfighters, and I guess that was the idea. Every man wants to be cool and manly -- in his way.

And so finally, back to the mancessory I've invented: I never have an umbrella when I need one; because when I have one, I lose it in short order. But one rainy day a couple of weeks ago, I found a collapsible umbrella with a holster -- a holster with a strap and snap-closure for attaching to backpacks.

But if you could attach it to a backpack, I thought -- why not a belt? And here it is -- the manbrella, the latest thing in mancessories:

It's perfect. It hands from the belt, and it's a (ahem) male shape. It's even red, like a Swiss Army knife. And I'm now the man who has an umbrella ever at hand to shield a damsel in distress. I feel more manly already.

My manbrella's one slight problem is weight -- it tugs downward on my trousers, which already cling to my growing gut with only the most precarious of grips. Not only the manbrella has a weight problem.

But all I need to do is go to lightweight composite construction -- as in golf clubs -- and cut the manbrella's weight down to four ounces. No more sagging belts, ever! Sure, that'll drive the price up to sixty or seventy bucks. But then we just slap the Nike symbol on the side and call it "performance raingear." Men who never go out on cloudy days will snap 'em right up.

But I'm not greedy. The market has room for competitions. For the man who needs more extreme masculine compensation, there'll always be items like this: the sword-pommel umbrella, complete with sheath:

Available now by e-tail and catalog. Operators are standing by.

Police Blotter Haiku: Life in the Small City

2011-03-26T11:18:00.000-07:00

Here is another batch of police blotter haiku, adapted from the "police blotter" and "crime log" columns of small-town newspapers across the West. The crimes are small -- if they're crimes at all. But they loom large in the collective consciousnesses of those micropolitan cities where -- face it -- not a lot really happens.

One note: I find that some of the very best material comes from newspapers so small that they don't have websites. If your local Weekly Granger/Republican pops up a few interesting items, I'd be pleased if you sent them to me, if you have the time. They may not inspire me, or I might not be able to make them work in haiku form. But I'd love to look at them. Thanks to Forrest for pointing me to a few good ones in his neck of the woods.

Enough housekeeping: enjoy.

Lonely ATV.
Left to graze in the pasture.
Jumped the fence and ran.

What could be more cool
than skateboarding the highway
at night in dark clothes?

He left three days back.
But turned on his stereo
as he locked up -- loud.

A house packed with stuff.
So full that burglars couldn't
force their way through it.

Two drunks crash a truck.
Neither of them was driving.
So say both, at least.

"Strange noises!"
Were just noises strange to him.
Like crosswalk alarms.

"Jesus" at Walmart.
There are better places, and
They took him to one.

Cops have many jobs
But they don't include making
your son do his chores

She'll always be known
as the woman who threatened
a man with her fork.

Show a gun, to scare.
The new way: text a picture
of the gun to scare.

The pawnshop owner
Should have asked questions before
he bought that laptop.

Parolee Rule 1:
Put down your meth pipe before
answering the door.

Upturned flower pot.
Defaced Obama sticker.
Life in the small city.

Stormy Weather

2011-03-22T20:13:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the living room window late Saturday night, I felt as cozy as a person could be. Computer in my lap, Rhumba knitting beside me, massive windstorm throwing horizontal rain at the side of the house with the force of bullets.

That last part perhaps wasn't so cozy. But the ice-cold, wind-driven rain was outside. Inside was warmth and light and....

Darkness. A sudden power failure. Everything went black for five seconds. The lights returned briefly. Then darkness once more, and a distant thud. This time, the power would not return. Through the window, over the tree tops, I saw the cheery yellow glow of an electrical transformer, detonating. They do that a lot around here.

That was pretty much it for the evening. We saw ourselves off to bed by flashlight.

It was that kind of weekend. In the morning we'd gone out for coffee and ran into a massive hailstorm. They say snow never sticks on the California coast, but what do you think? Pretty good for the last day of winter?

It was the most intense hailstorm I've been out in. We could hear the hail crunching under our tires.

I don't care if it's feathery and light or round and hard, anything white and wet that falls from the sky is snow. We drove to a shopping center and tried to get out of the car, but the slush and ice was so thick that I couldn't stand up without slipping. When we got home, parts of our yard were solid white.

All in all, a interesting weekend. Some things changed and some didn't. The weather changed. So did the news from Japan. It seemed to improve. Japan made progress on its reactor problems, and more food and supplies and services were getting to the people in the ruined areas.

And we began another war. That's not a change. I can't remember a time in my life when America wasn't in a warlike situation somewhere. There may have been a couple of peaceful years during the Carter Administration. Maybe.

As always, there seems to be a good cause: overthrowing yet another evil dictator with bad skin who is putting down a popular uprising. Even though the U.S actually lets a lot of popular democratic uprisings slip by without getting involved. And the evil dictators usually win. And then there is much stern talk from the U.S. and other enlightened democracies. But it's usually only talk.

This evil dictator, however, controls a significant slice of the world oil supply. So we must get involved -- in the name of freedom -- and replace him with a cooperative regime that'll keep the oil flowing, thank you.

But it's hard to get a grip on what's really being done -- in your name -- half a world away. On Sunday, as missiles flew through North African skies, the heavens cleared in Santa Cruz and all was pretty once more. Power had been restored during the night -- mostly -- and exhausted linemen slumped against their trucks and chugged energy drinks in the noonday sun. Mission accomplished

The next day Rhumba and I went out for coffee before work, as usual, at a coffee house by the sea. The place was empty except for the manager -- who didn't mind the quiet a single bit -- and a couple of middle-aged men chatting calmly about jobs, families, and the raising of children. They explored the Libyan conflict, too, but reached no closure.

"One thing's for sure," the older one said. "It's all about the price of oil, one way or the other."

"My daughter's turning 13," the other one said. "She's starting to ask questions. I'm going to have to tell her something."

Yes. He will.

Reflections in Haiku

2011-03-16T21:21:00.000-07:00

(Update 3/23): one of the local weeklies published most of these haiku in their Letters to the Editor column. I kan haz fame?)

I found a way to write about the events of the past few days. The following expresses only my subjective vision and emotions. It is in haiku form because haiku is the only tool I have that works.

Nothing in the following is meant to demean the character of the Japanese. They are a fine people. And they, like us, have a government that increasingly does not serve their best interests.

Earth shakes, waves tower.
Godzilla, made real by greed,
rises from the shore.

Tsunamis erase
the seaside towns while death brews
in reactor cores

Trains down, roads gone.
The country's infrastructure
becomes its shackles

In the bitter cold
wait the dispossessed -- and the
undiscovered dead.

The army moves out.
Rescue begins but where are
food, water, power?

Confused reports, fear.
Fire at a nuclear plant.
Bland assurances.

Aged reactors.
Past their lifespan, design flaws.
Bland assurances.

Radiation, blasts.
Dead men, evacuation.
Bland assurances.

Containment breaches.
Hot fuel melts, death rides the air...
Is someone in charge?

Japanese do not
question authority, but...
They're beginning to.

Toyko stands proud.
But fears what the wind might bring.
The crowds are thinning.

Ahead of the wind,
Corporate jets flee Japan
And the hint of blame.

Refugees huddle.
Snow blankets their poor shelters.
Forgotten, for now.

As Japan, so us.
We're no better; perhaps worse.
Is this our future?