Tales from the Coast

Doomstock Nation

2009-10-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm hearing a lot about doom lately.

From time to time I hang out in the comments section of a real estate and economics blog called Calculated Risk. CR, as we call the blogger, is a well-informed and level-headed analyst who warned of the housing market collapse and the resultant credit crisis long before anyone "respectable" paid attention. These days CR is very respectable indeed; when his co-blogger Tanta died, the New York Times ran her obit. Well, Tanta was amazing.

And CR is still there, following economic developments, analyzing them, and converting them into cool charts and graphs that anyone can understand -- we call it chart porn.

CR doesn't buy the economic recovery talk. What improvement there is will tail off as soon as the stimulus money is spent, because private industry is still laying off. So show his charts. But he's not waving the bloody flag and calling the End Times, because he's responsible and level-headed and will only say what his charts can show.

But not so much can be said for his Commentariat, the people who hang out in the blog's Comments section. It's a cohesive group that has mainly been with CR for years: it includes people with handles like Angry Saver, Merchants of Fear, Resistance is Feudal, Disempowered Paper Pusher, Byzantine Ruins, creditcriminalslovetrap, and"1 currency now yogi." People with Views.

A lot of these guys are interested in doom; it's not all they talk about, but the subject comes up over and over. Many CR commenters are very financially astute. They can intelligently discuss complex financial transactions that I don't understand, or dissect the policies of the Federal Reserve with merciless precision. But they're angry and nervous, many of them -- who wouldn't be, these days? And they do what angry people do when they're part of a system that they dislike or fear: speculate about its downfall.

Oh, the varieties of doom that they discuss: Mad Max breakdown-of-civilization doom. Peak Oil energy-crunch doom. Hyperinflationary doom that destroys the savings of sober and responsible Americans (like the Calculated Risk Commentariat). Death-of-American-Industry doom with optional Chinese economic takeover. World economic collapse doom with resulting war and carnage: stock up on gold bullion and farmland and build your own private doomstead in which to ride out the troubles.

The doom talk gets so thick that I once proposed that the Commentariat organize a Doomstock festival where all the proponents of the different doom scenarios would give seminars and and sell survival merchandise. Twenty-four-hour death-metal bands on three stages. A weapons check at the door --no entry without weapons.

Nobody took me up on it. Pity. And the doom talk goes on; it kicks up whenever the government pours more money into the big Wall Street banks who caused so much of the problem; whenever proposals to reform the financial system are shot down or replaced with weak proposals; whenever the government pumps out tens of billions more to prop up the stock market, or housing prices, or "cash for clunkers" deals .

But the problem with talking doom all the time is that you start to think it's inevitable. Worse, you get impatient for it, start counting the hours until doom comes and sweeps away all the people that have caused all the problems of the world. And just happens to prove that you were right all along.

I call it millenial thinking. Every thousand years come a new millenium. And something about that big, round "000" number makes evangelists declare the end times, the second coming of Christ and the coming of Judgment Day. A time when all the unbelievers will be swept away to eternal agony and the pure and faithful will get their eternal reward in an air-conditioned afterlife. Makes people feel good to know that the end is near and the evil will be punished: for a value of "evil" defined by you or whatever leader or guru or priest you've put your faith in.

Right now nearly everybody in the nation feels pain and insecurity; so it's understandable that everybody's hoping for an end. And when you've got no leader you trust to bring you to brighter times, doom is all you've got to fall back on -- the end, at least, even if no new beginning. Whether you're a certain type of Christian, or the Calculated Risk commentariat, or even some guy standing in line to see a blockbuster film about the coming 2012 Mayan apocalypse in which Earth itself tires of mankind's depredations and decides to strike back (opening in two weeks, by the way).

Now -- doom happens, there's no question. The dinosaurs are no longer here to crop the grass along interstate highways. Mere changes in wind patterns have vanquished whole civilizations: the rain stops coming, doom comes instead.

Or, the barbarians overruns the gates, convert you all to their religion, and 20 years later it's as if your civilization was never there. Or the goats eat the bark off all the trees and the desert rolls in and covers your cities. Or a nation weakens and is overcome with corruption and collapses under its own weight so badly that people start hoping for barbarians to show up. Genocide itself is just one part of the spectrum of doom.

What looks like doom can also be transition: the end of one regime might mean a better one takes its place. Though there's no guarantee; it might be worse. That's the rock and the hard place: things only tend to change when the specter of doom hangs close. That can be the only thing that scares the nation into taking a new course. But sometimes no new course is taken -- or the wrong one -- and doom really comes.

What I know is that a change for the better here and now will not come without pain, and lots of doom-calling. That's the way it's always been. It was that way in the Great Depression, it was that way in the Progressive Age at the turn of the 20th Century, it was damned well that way during the Civil War and the decades of struggle for equal rights that followed. No matter how bad things are, there's always somebody profiting from it; and they don't step out of the way until they're pushed out. Ever.

In the meantime, too much doom can be hazardous to your mental health. Accept that things will change. Accept that there will be pain. Take comfort in the fact that we will, as a nation, probably come out the other side. Eventually. It may not be fun, but we always have before. It's a lot more fun than planning your doomstead or converting all your cash to gold and moving to Belize. Though it doesn't hurt -- it never hurts -- to put some cash aside and pay down your debts.

And there are other ways to relate to doom. One of the most creative members of the Calculated Risk Commentariat is a guy named Pavel Chichikov. He's no particular expert on finance or real estate, but he's been around awhile. And he's a poet and writer. Every once in a while he caps one of the group discussions with a poem. Once, when I believe the commentariat was moaning about how economic collapse might bring civilization to a halt, Pavel posted this:

NOT A HUMAN LIGHT REMAINED
Copyright 2009 , Pavel Chichikov

She saw the stars above the city,
Every light extinguished then,
Streets were severed arteries
Of city light and city men

All had stopped except the wide
Returning of the universe,
Silence and the long divide
Abolished between them and us

Then the stars descended, shared
Reflections in the window panes,
In all the padded thoroughfares
Not a human light remained

Joyful planets wandered by,
Only some disdained the sight:
Merchants who could never buy
The constellations of the night

It's always good to have a poet in the room. They can put things into perspective. Like this poem on the greed that has brought us to the place we are now:

IF THEY KNEW
Copyright 2009, Pavel Chichikov

Mammon on the platform sits,
Heavy is the weight of it,
Sycophants, and all devout,
(Ponderous the god and stout)

Bending to the ground who bear
Golden Mammon through the air,
Belly to the knees they bend,
Will their service never end?

Die they will and others bear
Up the poles that others share,
Even pay for what they grip,
Mammon calls it partnership

If the bearers let it go
It will crush them, that they know,
Because of Mammon’s heavy weight -
Ownership and real estate

There is something else it rules,
Disunity of many schools,
Babel is where it was made,
Carried since by this parade

Words to think about, made more memorable by poetry. Much more interesting than doom itself are those aspects of human nature that tend to bring it about. And those are always worth ruminating on.

Sick

2009-10-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

My mother liked to tell a funny story about being out on her own during the Great Depression. It involved a teenaged girl nobody wanted much -- Mom -- hunger, and fear. Mom thought it was a hoot. I suppose that I don't have her perspective.

Mom was the youngest of six children; her father died when she was five. In that time and place welfare did not really exist, nor did aid for widows -- especially if they were immigrants. So Grandma remarried ASAP. To another immigrant, a bootlegger who didn't expect to raise someone else's children for very long. So she pushed her kids out of the house as fast as she could. She got them places on farms, with dairymen, even forced the oldest daughter into early music with a bona fide abuser -- who she later divorced. (When I was young, I was warned that Auntie Ex was a little peculiar. It took them decades to tell me why.)

As the youngest by far, Mom got to stay around the longest. But in eighth grade she was told to quit school and make her own way in the world. I believe that Grandma gave her the advice "Don't have children," on her way out the door or not long after. You could call Grandma a lot of things -- people did -- but "sentimental" was not one of them.

So Mom found work as a mother's helper -- a live-in housekeeper -- before she was 15. She worked for a lawyer's family: room, board, and $10 a month or so for full-time work. Fortunately, the lawyer's family treated her well enough.

And that was the problem. Mom ate with the family every night. She ate what they ate, in precisely the same portions. But they didn't eat much, and Mom did -- she did all the heavy work around the house, and she was a teenager besides. "They'd serve one piece of bread with the meal," she'd moan, rolling her eyes. "One piece!"

Soon she was going to bed hungry every night -- and waking up hungrier. But she was too afraid to ask for more food. Who knew what might happen? In 1935, in a small city in farm country, in the Great Depression.

So Mom suffered for a while until she just couldn't take it anymore and raided the refrigerator in the middle of the night. She found something that looked like a cake of deviled ham sitting on a plate on a low shelf. She guessed that no one would miss it, and she gobbled it down. "It tasted so goo-oood," she told me later.

The next morning, the lady of the house asked the world at large -- in honest puzzlement -- where the dog's food had gotten off to. (Mom always laughed uproariously at this point in the story.)

Mom broke down and tearfully confessed. Questions were asked, and answered; and the lawyer and his wife, because they were humane people, waved aside the entire matter and began feeding my mother honest-sized meals. End of story.

Last week an acquaintance joked that, if the economy continued on its downward course, she'd be able to get people to clean her house for nothing but meals and a sleeping pallet in the garage. Then she'd feel rich. I didn't find that particularly funny -- nor much of anything else these days. So I told her the story -- not as a joke, the way Mom presented it, but as a story of what it's like to be desperate in desperate times. Mainly, this woman took the point -- she'd just been snarking.

"But," she added, "those people didn't mean to starve her. They just didn't understand."

Completely true. Mom held those people no ill will. Heck, she was even a dutiful daughter to Grandma after she married my dad. She'd give me a smack for telling you this story from the point of view I've used.

My mom needed a place to be in the Great Depression, and the lawyer's family gave it to her. I suppose they felt they were doing her a favor, and they probably were. Of course they could afford to be generous -- they were wealthy by the standards of the day. That little ag town had some very wealthy people in it -- Mom used to say -- and I'm sure the lawyer did well serving them.

And the lawyer's family got something back for their largesse: a clean house at a cheap price. If you costed out Mom's wages and adjusted for inflation, it'd come around to $1.50-$2.00 an hour.

To put it in perspective: if somebody you knew hired a homeless 13-year-old, took her home to clean their house and paid a bed and $2/hour for full-time work: what would you think of that? Especially if they made no time for her to continue going to school, and they thought they were doing her a favor? Mom never did go back to school; she never got her high school diploma; and she never got a good job in her life.

Yes, it's all in the perspective; Mom had hers, I have mine.

Now, the only reason I've been thinking about this is that I've been sick lately. Twice. This has not been a good few weeks. Sure, I took some time off, but somehow staying home sick is almost worse than going to work. Staying home was fun back in elementary school when you weren't really that sick, but your mother would take no chances and it was all about a long day of your favorite toys and books, unlimited television, and Campbell's Cream of Tomato soup. The vapor off a hot bowl ot Campbell's C of T would instantly eat through the dried snot in any blocked sinus or plugged nostril. You didn't even have to actually consume the stuff -- just sniff.

But when you're older and stay home sick, there's nobody to fetch the Campbell's -- because we're all two-earner households these day. And all the chores you know you have to do just stare at you all day. This time I ended up doing the laundry on my sick days from work, even though I really was ill and felt like crap.

So I had descended into a grim mood by Day Two, when the postperson delivered the newsletter from the local food bank.

I give to the food bank because so many poor people around here have a hard time getting enough food all year. These are working poor, most of them. But much of the work around here is seasonal and low-paying. Agriculture. Hotels and amusement parks. Restaurants. Construction (not the good-paying kind). So they need the food bank to fill in the gaps in their income. And this year it's worse than ever.

The back pages of the newsletter bulged with long lists of people and organizations who'd given gifts to the food bank -- thoughtfully sorted by gift amount. People from all walks of life and levels of society. And they're all people who care, and want to help. I have no doubt. I recognized a certain number of names in the back of the book. Some of them are the hidden princes and princesses among us -- not because they give a lot, but because they give all they can.

Then I looked at the front of the book, which listed the food bank board of directors and the advisory council. It was full of pictures of the officers and directors posing at posh fundraisers: laughing, wealthy, and partying for a cause. I know they're wealthy, because I know of many of them. And the others I bloody well looked up on the Internet. Sick people have time on their hands.

There was among them a corporate officer of a giant berry grower. An owner of car washes. The proprietor of the landscaping company that charges my neighbor 'way too much. An executive from the Seaside Company, which operates the Boardwalk amusement park and hotels and restaurants. Another grower. A government rep or two. The widow of a construction industry giant. Yet more growers. And bankers. Lots and lots of bankers to fund the growers and the landscapers and the tourist businesses and the construction companies.

And it occurred to me that all the rest of us who give to the food bank -- all us folk in the back of the newsletter -- are doing a wonderful service to these fine pillars of the community in the front of the newsletter, these businessmen who employ so many. Because these fonts of charity don't pay high enough wages to keep their workers out of poverty, or employ them long enough every year to enable them to feed themselves.

How kind of the rest of us to help out these paragons of free enterprise with our money. Because if their workers didn't get food aid, they couldn't actually afford to stay here on what these fine capitalists pay. With our charity we help the businessmen among us maintain a stable workforce to underpay.

Did I mention that many of the directors and advisors of the food bank -- not all, but many -- are members of the political party that values personal initiative, free enterprise, and low taxes? You can look that up, too. I'm sure they think charity is fine, though; charity is an individual choice, not a government mandate. And it's tax deductible.

I'm sure that many of these people are decent to know face-to-face -- in one case I know that personally. And I'm sure they're happy to throw some spare cash at the food bank and even some spare time at fundraising so that people at the low end of the economic food chain don't starve.

But why should we leave it up to them? Why should the problem of starvation in society be dealt with by society's spare change, given at the discretion of the wealthy. And by the rest of us, unknowingly propping up a bad system for its owners while doing good?

And if I were to wave my magic wand and say, "We're raising taxes on the half-percent of Americans who control close to half its wealth, we're going to make sure that nobody ever goes sick and hungry again" -- what do you think those fine and charitable growers and amusement park owners and construction giants and bankers would do?

Would they be happy and say, "Thank God, at last the poor among us are safe and secure." Or would they fight the proposal tooth and nail with bags of money and threats and dire warnings? Would they say, "No, no, we won't make enough money, our competitiveness will be destroyed, thousands of jobs will be lost, business will disappear, government will waste all the money..."

My answer would be, if your business can't make money unless it pays its employees too little to live and thrive on, you don't have a business. You have a racket. And throwing a few coins that you can easily spare at the people you keep poor doesn't make you any less a source of misery in the world. No matter how hard you exhort the rest of us to feed those poor people. If individual charity alone could solve injustice and inequality, it would have done it by now.

Yes, I'll still give to the food bank, because it helps the starving. But remember -- they're not the only ones being helped.

Live for a world where no one is hungry and no one is sick and no one is afraid. And the wealthy have to throw fundraisers for each other to buy Porsches and third homes and vacations in Tuscany.

The Apartment

2009-09-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

Had a nice phone call with Bruce the other day. Bruce is a blast from my past: my old life up in San Francisco and the East Bay, 20 years ago and more. And in fact I may not have physically seen Bruce in 20 years. I'm not sure.

But LK, a mutual friend, hipped Bruce to this blog, and he's been reading. And after a while he wanted to call me and catch up, so the same mutual friend passed along my phone number.

And, after about two weeks of speaking to each other's answering machines, we finally managed to both be at our phones at the same time. We had a nice chat about this, that, and the other. Including the other thing we have in common besides a mutual friend or two:

An apartment.

Thirty years ago I moved to San Francisco to make my name in insurance company advertising (yeah, really). I also came to the city to have an exciting life if at all possible. It actually wasn't; that's something that comes from within.

But I took a cheap apartment on a nondescript block between Van Ness Avenue and Polk Street., and proceeded to experience the city.

And for a young, awkwardly shy man, it wasn't a bad neighborhood: central to the Polk Gulch gay district, the fern bar inferno of the Marina, and the hoity-toity restaurants and salons where the denizens of Nob Hill and Pacific Heights deigned to come down and nosh among we mortals. There was always something to see, five movie theaters to visit, and good restaurants that never closed.

I never felt safer in my life, at any hour of day or night. True, bad things can happen when it's just you facing off another guy and no one else is around. But in that part of town, someone else always was.

It was also the quietest place I've ever lived since childhood: in the absolute back of the building, 40 yards off the street. The only sound I ever heard was faint, tasteful music from the apartment above where Roger the apartment manager presided over a majestic quadraphonic stereo system and five thousand vinyl disks of classical music.

Mostly in a neighborhood like that -- all one- and two-bedroom apartments and nothing else -- people came and went in a few years, as I did. But some people came and stayed. Roger the Manager had been there for decades. Gay, middle-aged, cultured, and of modest means, he cobbled together a living out of managing the building, pulling shifts at a corner grocery down the block, and working at an abstruse record store downtown that stocked only movie and musical soundtracks. He got his health checkups at the free clinic and his cavities filled at the UOP Dentistry School. And he did all that because he wanted to live in San Francisco and nowhere else.

And there was Mike the silver-haired Irishman who lived in a tiny studio around the corner and clerked at a liquor store. He was a great talker, had a million stories -- and the photo albums to prove them. A pianist, a Korean-war jet pilot, an aerospace guy, a dealer in Asian antiques, married and divorced a couple of times -- and now, at 60, all he wanted out of life was a small apartment, an easy job within walking distance, cheap tickets to the opera, and an occasionally drinkie. I had a few with him down at the Marine's Memorial, the Buena Vista, and a few other places. I'm not much of a drinker, but he made it fun.

And Mike introduced me to Bob the Hippie Philosopher, a forty-something underachiever with a doctorate in psych and big plans that never quite materialized. He, too, lived alone in a tiny apartment. His big score while I knew him was landing a gig as Santa Claus in one of the big department stores. And Mike and Bob both introduced me to Stan the public television activist, who fought a losing battle to keep the local PBS station from turning into a hellhole of yuppie programming. Who also lived alone in a small... yeah, you know.

It was kind of strange to hang out with guys who were decades older than me, but they were a riot. Sometimes when they didn't intend to be. I'll never forget the time they started ranting about Unitarian women. There was a big Unitarian church a couple of blocks over, and all the local middle-aged singles went over there for classes, activities, and the opposite sex. The guys assured me that the church was lousy with well-heeled, middle-aged Unitarian divorcees who were always interested in the right man. But only to a point.

"They'll date you, they'll go to bed with you," Bob said . "They'll be your girlfriend. But they won't marry you!" The other guys all grimaced in sympathetic frustration. It was an interesting reversal of traditional roles: the guys wanted to settle down with a sugar mama, but the women had the economic power and liked their freedom, thank you very much.

I could have stayed in the neighborhood forever and become one of the guys. I had the temperament. And San Francisco has all the cheap, public luxuries that a man on a limited budget could hope for. It's the necessities that are expensive.

But I fell for a woman -- the wrong one, it turned out -- and left Polk Gulch to live with her for a few years over in the Richmond District. I didn't see the guys anymore . I finally broke up with the wrong woman and ended up in the Haight for awhile, which was less fun and more menacing than I expected. Haight Street was a lot like Pacific Avenue here in Santa Cruz, except that the worst night on Pacific was three times better than the best night on Haight.

And that's when I got a call from Bruce. He was staying with our mutual friend out in the 'burbs, but wanted to move into the city to live and work. Did I have any leads on a cheap apartment?

Hmmmm.

I told him I'd see what I could do, and called Roger. "Yes, we just had an apartment come vacant," he said. "Your old place, in fact." I talked up Bruce as a paragon of reliability. Roger passed the word along to the owner's son, and it turned out I had some cred with him from paying my rent on time for three or four years straight. Bruce looked at the place, applied for the place, and got the place. And he's been there ever since.

So when Bruce and I talked, of course we talked about what was going on around the old apartment building. The place was in the same hands, more or less, but they'd brought in a management company which prettified the joint and hiked the rents to the sky. And Roger is still there, though pushing 80 by now and no longer apartment manager. San Francisco's rent control laws protected him and Bruce from the worst of the city's rent inflation these past decades.

So Roger is still there; Mike died in place; God knows what happened to Bob; and Stan ended up in "active mature residents' co-housing" in a progressive college town. Which is not a lot different than living in a small apartment above a busy street near people you know.

In that neighborhood most people came and went in a few years, but some came and stayed. I went, Bruce stayed. So did others. I hope he has his guys to hang with, just as I did 'way back when.

I wonder if the Unitarian women are still around.

Spiderland

2009-09-19T22:15:00.000-07:00

My wife Rhumba was born with poor hearing; the shape of her inner ear doesn't focus sound well. She can't hear well on the phone, in classes, and in meetings. She can hear me well enough; then again, my voice carries like the call of a peacock.

A few years ago she got her first good pair of hearing aids. And when we returned from the audiologist that day and stepped out of the car, the first thing she said was --

"What's that NOISE?"

"Noise?" I had to think -- it was just the usual background noise. "Uh, the traffic, I guess." Our house backs up against a four-lane highway.

"It sounds like this all the time?"

"Yeah." From thirty yards away, on the other side of the house, came the roar of a semi-truck's Jake Brake -- rather like the sound a lion might make if it tried to roar and gargle with mouthwash at the same time.

"So why did you let us buy this house?"

"Because it's not noisy in the house."

"You didn't think about the yard?"

I didn't. I never think about the yard. I'm an indoors kind of guy and always have been.

Rhumba and I have friends who practically live in their backyards. By adding landscaping and decks and hot tubs and various amenities, they've made their backyards into integral parts of their houses.

We can't do that: short of erecting 100 yards of concrete sound wall around three sides of the lot, nothing's going to fix the thundering road in back of the house. But even if we could have constructed a backyard pleasure dome for our ease and enjoyment, who knows whether we actually would have? Again: we're indoor people.

So we threw a couple of storage sheds in the back yard, planted a few giant and indestructible bushes, and forgot about it. I cut back the wild grass with a string trimmer from time to time, and feed the compost heap with kitchen scraps once or twice a week. Otherwise we don't go there much.

But the spiders do.

They build vast webs between house and bush and fence and shed. And because no one walks there, the webs endure. And so the spiders feast well, and breed well. And the next year -- there are even more webs. And next year, yet more.

I won't say it's a warm and fuzzy thing, to wander sleepily into the backyard with a steaming bag of veggie scraps for the compost heap and suddenly confront a black-and-white-striped, eight-legged horror hanging in the air at eye level. I wouldn't say that at all.

But I will say that the spiders have now completely colonized the yard. This past month I could not walk any of my typical routes to the compost heap without breaking the web of an eight-legged overachiever. With my face.

Imagine sudden shock of tiny, tough silk wires suddenly cutting into the skin of your cheek, snapping just before they begin to cause pain (just before). Imagine that they are slightly sticky, as well. Does it sound gross? Icky? Oh, yeah. Especially because your next move is a quick full-body pat-down to make sure the spider didn't land on your chest or torso when you collapsed her web.

Did I say they were big? And furry? And striped?

I guess I could go back there and kill 'em all, but why? They cause no real harm. We have spiders in the house, but not the monster striped furry kind, which are harmless and don't come in. (Some of the house spiders -- tiny, drab, unassuming arachnids with primitive webs -- are actually more dangerous than their king-sized outdoor siblings. But that's another story.)

And there are advantages. Precisely one fly made it into the house all summer. One. Moths? Gone. Mosquitos? Missing in action, though the county pest control people may be responsible. Our hovering mini-monsters have fulfilled their duty to the food chain and stripped the air of flying insects. We don't use pesticides, so they've made themselves valuable to us. Even if they're icky.

I also know that a yard that is criss-crossed with giant intact spider webs, is a yard that no one's been wandering around in. This is Santa Cruz. People wander every damned place, and I know for a fact that strangers have roamed through our back yard and even slept in it.

But I'm pretty sure that no one's been back there lately, because they'd have broken the webs. Spiders as cheap security guards? Who'd have though it?

Finally, I'm just a live-and-let live kind of guy. Sure it's my back yard. But I'm not using it. I'm not interested in it. And until I am, someone harmless might as well make use of it, even if they have eight legs and look like the nightmares you remember all your life.

And is even that entirely true? Enjoy Spiderland. And do click on the photo.

The Supermarket Cookie of Mercy

2009-09-09T19:25:00.000-07:00

Human kindness can take many forms. It can address many kinds of human misery.

My least favorite form of misery? The dehumanizing situation that no one will admit is dehumanizing. Oh, keep a stiff upper lip, others say. It's not that bad, they say.

They lie, of course, or fear to tell the truth. And you can bet that somebody profits while others are treated like dirt -- are told very clearly, if indirectly, that they are dirt.

So when somebody actually has the courage to say, yes, it is bad, it's hard on you, we're sorry -- Lordy, I can forgive almost anything.

I'm always very late paying property taxes. Late as in 3 pm on the last day. And if you're that late, you actually have to go down to the county tax collector's office to pay in person. So I do. It's only ten blocks from the house.

And it used to be that, as you inched forward in the endless line with dozens of sweaty people waiting to give the county several thousand of their dollars, you passed by a counter that held a large metal mixing bowl of -- Oreos. The Oreos were only there on tax deadline day.

I don't eat Oreos. If I'm going to eat useless calories, I want ones that taste better, and don't hit the pit of my stomach like a lead washer.

But I always took one, and ate it. Because I appreciated the gesture.

The gesture said, "Yes, we know it's tough. We know it's a lot of money. We know you're not happy. So... have a cookie. We're civil service. It's all we can do."

That's a lot of message for one Oreo to bear. But I could taste it. Small gestures can mean a lot. And I'll take my mercy where I can get it.

A couple of years ago the old tax collector retired, and the new guy did away with Oreos on tax day. Curse you, Fred Keeley! But I'll always remember.

Some years ago I worked for a company that had been taken over by a vast comglomerate. Everything changed overnight. We were given all new duties and tough deadlines. We were told the office might close; and when people started to quit before our big project was done, we were told the office would stay open forever, after all. The new management took no questions; they simply told us to work hard and trust them, with big and insincere smiles.

This went on for weeks. Finally, in a department staff meeting, my manager got off-message for minute and said, "Look, I know things have been hard here lately, even unreasonable..."

"THANK YOU!" I shouted. "THANK YOU!" It just burst out. Because somebody had actually admitted that we were being used. It was a huge relief, like a weight was lifted. Everybody around the table looked at me as if I'd started raving about crop circles. In the end, they understood. A month or two later, when the big project was finished, management abruptly closed the office. Most of us quit rather than take the relocation offer. Because we knew we couldn't trust those guys. But there had been that moment of mercy, when my boss couldn't quite keep his humanity from bursting through.

Tonight, Rhumba and I sat in the car listening to the radio as a man who is President of the United States said things that had never been said from a place of such high authority in my meory. That health insurance companies hurt the American people, and must be held accountable. That Republicans have been telling bald-faced and cynical lies to frighten people into opposing health care, and that he would "call them out" if they tried it again. That private industry without government control and regulation will hurt and harm the American people.

He said all these things which I have believed, which my friends believe, but which no one in Washington has said as the debate over health care and social issues grew more and more vile and dishonest and destructive over the last few months, with no one willing to call out the people who were willing to tear America apart for their own personal gain.

Obama may in the end wimp out on us. But, tonight, he said it. Something that nobody at the highest authority has said in a long, long, time:

It IS that bad!

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

Fangs for the Memories

2009-08-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

One of our cats went to the vet today. They pulled his two biggest assets:

Quite the tusker, wasn't he? Thanks to chronic gum disease Petrucchio had just three teeth left in his head. But his condition made two of them seem huge. After today, only the one small tooth remains.

The procedure cost about $400. Every time one of our cats go into dry dock, the price is "about $400." As if the vet now has one price for everything, to make it easier on the bookkeeper. For now, we can still afford it.

Years ago I fed a small piece of beef burrito to one of the cats we had at the time. He'd been begging for it, and I gave in.

Bad idea. He immediately began spewing from both ends. I thought I'd poisoned him. We rushed him to the vet. They did a zillion tests. They gave him back. They told us, "Don't feed him burritos." And they charged us $170.

For years, Rhumba and I joked about the "$170 burrito." But if you adjust for inflation since that time, the price would be -- "about $400." So this game goes 'way back.

But we pay the price because we can (for now), and because we consider our cats to be members of the family. Small, feral, unsocialized members with poor hygiene, big appetites, and no work ethic. Who stay up late and sleep all day. Aren't there one or two of those in every family?

There exists an infant intelligence test that requires neither speech nor sight nor even hearing. A friend of Rhumba's uses it in her work with profoundly disabled children. Out of curiosity she tested her cats: they scored like 20-month-old toddlers. Fur-covered toddlers with fangs and claws. Think about it.

At least they'll never ask for the car keys.

The Weekend in Review

2009-08-16T20:30:00.000-07:00

As we wandered around Santa Cruz this weekend I kept camera in hand. It wasn't exactly a beautiful day in the neighborhood, but it, well, was... Santa Cruz.

Yes, they stay on his face quite well, thank you. We got up Saturday morning and headed over to the Harbor Cafe, where you can eat outside and bring your dog. And everybody did:

I've got a soft spot for Corgis, for some reason. Ridiculous-looking dogs, but they're friendly and affectionate and just happy to be here. This one was the pampered child of a middle-aged couple who fussed over her endlessly.

But this is what I really came to the Harbor for: the dreaded Moco Loco, the Mike's Mess of the East Side:

Fried eggs and a hamburger patty on a bed of Spanish rice covered with pan gravy. What's not to like? Well, maybe the results of my next blood panel. But for now: MANJAH.

This was not the healthiest of weekends for me or anyone. Besides the cholesterol jolt, I and everyone else breathed smoke all weekend. Ten packs a day, easily:

Six thousand acres of forest blazed madly a few miles away (the "Lockheed Fire,") and the smoke came down to street level all over Santa Cruz. It was hard to breath; even the most rabid joggers took the day off. A minute after I took this shot an old lady with an old dog told me she'd barely made it home from her daily walk the day before, when the smoke was even worse.

A block away the Red Cross had set up a refugee center; and some did come for shelter, but not very many. The affected area, Bonny Doon, has home prices in the million-plus range, and most people who can afford to live there have a lot of options.

So despite the fire and smoek, life in Santa Cruz went on pretty much as normal:

This was a drug bust of the silly kind. Someone's been selling weed downtown out of that old camper -- in public parking lots -- so the cops finally got wind of it came to knock on the door. And the people inside actually tried to drive away around the massed cop cars. They didn't get very far before the cops blocked their path, but they still wouldn't come out of the camper. In the photo above, the cops are trying sweet reason.

I don't know if it ever worked, because I had to leave. Rhumba and I were headed out to a bakery for a snack. We have bakeries everywhere. Come fire, sleet, snow, rain, or no dope, Santa Cruzans will have their pastry:

I mean, it was six o'clock of a Saturday evening, and the Buttery bakery was packed. Cakeholism is a serious problem in Santa Cruz, and these poor devils were here to get their fix for the next day: Boston Cream, Princess Cake, Black Forest, Tiramisu -- the poor devils. They've got Betty Crocker on their backs. As for us, ah, well... we just came in for a glass of water. That's it. Water. We can quit anytime we want, ask anybody.

We went next door to Shopper's Corner to pick up a few things, and our usual cashier had had gold piercings placed in both cheeks -- the cheeks of her face, okay? To say she had a brilliant smile was factually accurate. I thought about snapping a picture, but... never piss off the people who handle your food.

The next morning we headed back down to the yacht harbor for morning coffee and a little wave action. We weren't the only ones:

People come down to the sea of a morning to watch the boats go out, watch the tide come in, or just watch.

Looks like he's staring into the primordial void, doesn't it? Fog and forest fire smoke together will do that.

And as a beach volleyball court is a terrible thing to waste, there was some of that action as well. C'mon people, it's too damned early:

Rhumba and I went home for a morning of laundry and borscht-making, but our plans were knocked awry by a message on the answer machine. As I've mentioned, Rhumba has a yen for knitting machines, and somebody was selling one at a ridiculously low price 30 miles away at an estate sale. Rhumba has a zillion of them, but we know someone who wants one and can't afford it -- at the price offered, we could afford to be Santa Claus.

So into the car it was and down to the Land of Artichokes, aka Monterey County. If anything, the air was worse down there; they have their own fire going as well. Fire season this year is just going to be a bitch, I can tell.

We pulled into Marina and found the estate sale -- "Just follow the signs," they told us, and they were right. The deceased's family had hired a professional flea market vendor to run the sale, and she had everything ship-shape and organized. An assistant led us directly to the knitting machine, which had been set aside for us. "I don't think it's ever been used," she said.

It hadn't. Thirty-five years old and yet new in the box. Fully tricked-out, all the accessories and add-ons there, all the original cardboard and foam spacers still holding everything in place just as they had when the packages shipped from the factory. Rhumba looked like she'd found King Solomon's Mines. A lot of the accessories haven't been made for 20 years, and yet are still in demand.

That said, the knitting machine is still going to our friend. But the chase, successfully running down a great deal, is always fun.

And yet there's always something a little forlorn about an estate sale, and I don't often go to them. I find it sad to watch someone's household being carted away a bit at a time, even if I'm doing the carting. Even though all the stuff is going off into other hands that will make good use of it.

Our business done, we headed home; there's not much happening in Marina. We stopped at Gayles in Capitola and treated ourselves to the first real Napoleons I had tasted in maybe 20 years.

I spent my post-college life in San Francisco, and that will spoil you. I lived two blocks from a bakery that turned out fresh Napoleons six days a week. It's not that they were cheap, but -- I could get one whenever I wanted. Five minute walk. On an impulse. Even Gayle's is 15 minutes by car, when traffic is good.

We headed home down Highway 1, and at the usual traffic jam at the River St. stoplight, about a zillion motorcyclists streamed past up. The pictures don't really do them justice:

We finally made it back to the house and turned our attention to a little laundry and borscht and some composting -- because when you're done with borscht, you've got a lot to compost. Look at all that organic goodness:

After that Rhumba turned to some knitting projects and I spent some time in the garage with my soon-to-be-finished (for the last three months) stained glass project.

It's a stained-glass representation of a fruit crate label; it's a little dicey because a lot of the "clear glass" is empty space; it's going to hang in a transom space over the kitchen door, and we want air to pass through it. But because of that, and because I free-handed large parts of the design, I'm having a hard time getting all the pieces to align so I can solder it. I'll think I almost have the pieces ground to complementary shapes, then one piece shifts slightly and nothing fits at all. Driving me mad. But I'm closing in on it. I am. Will have it soldered together Real Soon Now. I swear.

Can anybody guess what the electric frypan is for?

After I finished struggling with the glass, we had dinner and sat in front of the tube while Rhumba (who will never submit to a photograph) knitted and I worked on this blog. And there you have it. Time to head off to bed and get ready for another week in harness. It wasn't exactly a brilliant weekend. But I'm sorry it's over.

They're Alive! ALIVE

2009-08-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

Looks like they're trying to escape, doesn't it? Well, they're beets, and escape is what beets do.

There's nothing more slippery than peeled beets. They've got a positive death wish. You finish peeling the thing in the sink -- leaking red juice everywhere -- and it shoots out of your hands and neatly down the drain. Little bastards.

I expected to live my life without ever peeling a beet. But the fine folks who provide Rhumba and I with a weekly order of organic vegetables decided that we would get to know beets -- better than we ever had before. Because they've been shipping us beets almost every week this summer. The little buggers were beginning to crawl around the kitchen and build nests.

We bought a share at a CSA farm; CSA stands for "community-supported agriculture," which is a big deal around Santa Cruz. You give a local farmer several hundred dollars for a "share" of the produce he grows, and he guarantees you a weekly load of fresh and (usually) organic fruits and vegetables for maybe five months of the year.

And the CSA farmers don't want to bore you, so they plant a veritable United Nations of vegetables. And you never know what you're going to get from week to week.

Strawberries? Sure. Blueberries? Absolutely. And lettuce, and plums, squash and new potatoes and cabbage and basil and dill and salad greens and green beans. Who could argue?

But then comes the stuff you don't know what to do with. The fennel. The kohlrabi, which looks like it came from another planet. And the rainbow chard. Week after week, bunches and piles, no, SNOWDRIFTS of rainbow chard.

I've talked to other CSA shareholders, and nobody's really dealing well with the rainbow chard. Nobody confesses to it, but I think in most households it's going straight to compost. As for kohlrabi: "Did you ever figure out what to do with them?" "No, you?" "Me neither." "I finally sliced one up and ate it raw. Ehh."

And then there were the beets. They kept piling up in the fridge, and they refused to rot -- or at least they resisted pretty damned well. But we're not beet people. Then a few weeks ago the CSA delivered more beets. With potatoes, cabbage, and carrots. "It's a complete borscht kit," Rhumba proclaimed.

Borscht? I can eat borscht. Sour cream makes everything possible. And as it turns out, borscht is dead easy; peel it all up, throw it in a pot, and cook it until everything turns red.

So we've been eating borscht three or four times a week for the past month. We cook up a big pot on Saturday, freeze it, and eat it on those weekday evenings when we don't have the energy to cook dinner, which is most of them. Early on in our relationship, Rhumba told me, "I'm really, really glad you don't mind eating the same thing day after day." I think we were on a black bean kick at the time. And I don't mind, as along as it's good. And there's sour cream.

And since I do tend to eat the same things over and over, maybe it's good that the demonic farmers down at the CSA keep throwing curve balls into our market basket. I've picked up on some good things. I've learned to make pesto out of about every green that comes along (except the dreaded rainbow chard). One week last month when the broccoli was starting to pile up, I even made broccoli pesto. Killer, definitely.

And we've learned to love collards, and bok choy, and lipstick peppers, and even -- I swear -- turnips.

Kohlrabi and fennel and rainbow chard, though -- still working on that.

Bonehead Borscht

Borscht is not rocket science, hence the name. You can put it more or less of any ingredient, and it's still borscht. Just different borscht.

Five potatoes
Four carrots
One small cabbage or half a big one
Eight ounce can of tomato paste or 8-16 ounces of tomato sauce
One 32-ounce carton of vegetarian stock (or meat stock of your choice)
Salt and pepper.

Peel and slice the beets, potatoes, and carrots into relatively small pieces. Slice the cabbage thinly.

Mix the stock and tomato sauce/paste in a big pot; add shredded cabbage. Heat until the cabbage cooks down a little and makes room for everything else. Add everything else. Cook until everything turns red and it doesn't resist a fork. The borscht will be thick, very stew-like; add a little water if you must. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with (yum) sour cream.

Broccoli Pesto

6 oz broccoli flowers, raw
1 clove garlic 4 oz pecans (or hazelnuts or macadamias)
2 oz Parmesan cheese
1/4 tsp pepper
7 fl.oz olive oil

Grind it all up together however you do those things, smooth or chunky just as you like. We just have a cheap rotary chopper, and we get by. Serve over pasta. Different than your usual pesto, and delicious.

Turnip/Potato Mash

2 pounds of potatoes, cubed
1 1/2 pounds of turnips, cubed or sliced a little smaller than the potatoes
4 cloves of garlic
Four ounces of buttermilk
One tablespoon of butter

Steam the potatoes, turnips, and garlic together until soft, about 25 minutes. Drain, add everything else, and mash. Salt and pepper to taste. The best mashed potatoes I ever had -- probably because they aren't, exactly.

Saved by the Organist

2009-08-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

I was hanging out on an Internet forum the other day, and somebody commented on a news story about 47 passengers in a grounded airliner. For some reason, the airline kept them on the plane for six hours.

The commentor said, "The fact that those 47 people were willing to not kick open the door and bail just for the hell of it is amazing. Not sure if it was an act of orderly calm or sheepdom tho."

And that reminded me:

Last Sunday was quite a warm day here in Santa Cruz. Rhumba and I spent the morning in a pew in a church with ventilation that -- well, "iffy" is the best word I've got. At the beginning of the service the temperature seemed pleasant. But it soon got warmer. And warmer. We all became a bit drowsy. During the long sermon, heads began to droop.

Now anyone could have got up at any time, flung open the rear doors, and let in some fresh air; I thought about it. But nobody did anything; we weren't sure if we would be stepping on anybody's territory, I suppose.

After the sermon, we sang a hymn -- very, very raggedly because we were all still drowsy. When the hymn ended, Igor the church organist got up from his keyboard, marched to the back and opened the rear door. As cool air wafted in, he hissed "Now, KICK IT UP A NOTCH!"

Whatever you call it -- orderly calm or sheepdom -- this sort of passivity is pretty normal human behavior for settled, comfortable people. (Igor, of course, is neither settled nor comfortable.) America has rewarded such behavior for much of the last 50 years. Only recently have conditions changed; and we haven't viscerally realized we won't be rewarded for staying in line.

Start getting mad about what's happening in the world -- how corporations and their stooges have destroyed our health care, our economy, our future -- or be prepared to sleep forever. A grouchy organist may not be nearby to save the day for you.

I'm Still Standing

2009-07-30T22:08:00.000-07:00

There he is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rhumba's Small Pencils

2009-07-18T21:56:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

A Requiem for Uncle Walter

2009-07-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasant dreams, Uncle Walter.

This is Your Shirt

2009-07-08T22:25:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Fourth -- I Guess

2009-07-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eye of Rhumba

2009-06-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

Sarah sighed. She danced for kings and not for the likes of Captain Giles. He had a nice butt, though.

Recently, my wife Rhumba began drawing extremely tiny, ridiculously-detailed pictures with colored pencils. There's a whole back story here, but in short: sometimes Rhumba takes an interest in some art or craft or activity, works with it diligently for a good while, then gets discouraged with her progress and puts it all aside. Then, 10 or 20 years later, picks it up again and kicks ass.

Thus with the colored pencils. I want you to know that the drawings you see above and below -- somewhat degraded and softened by our poor scanner -- are pretty much actual size, in the 1.5 by 2-inch to 2.5 by 3-inch range.

Why? Apparently drawing with colored pencils is like painting a picture with a brush that has just one bristle -- maybe two. If you want to get a project done in under two hours, it had better be small. And more than a few hours is on one project is -- BORING, in the Rhumbaverse.

So each drawing consists two to six square inches of ridiculous detail and Rhumba's well-developed sense of humor. (Except for the drawings of plants -- Rhumba is serious about plants.) They say that every picture tells a story, and so do Rhumba's -- she actually writes the story on the back of the drawing in a few choice and biting words. They have to be choice; as I said, those drawings are small.

Anyway, I think her drawings are pretty cool. I've scanned a few -- not necessarily the best of them -- and here they are. With their stories, where they have them.

Lisa and Tony Together -- but not for long.

Snapdragons -- World's First Action Toy?

Dan was a sailor -- and that was just the way it was.

Of course the question, "Has someone been in the chocolate?", did have an answer.

My great-aunt's yard was covered by bird-of-paradise plants. She never went for restraint when excess would do, even tho' she was a Methodist.

Uncle Frankie wants you to obey your mother.

Only girl among six siblings, Mercy could do fine needlework plus hold her own in any fight.

The Last Gasp of the Tighty Whities

2009-06-26T22:06:00.000-07:00

There is a basic divide in the ranks of the human male, and it is not between gay and straight, or strong and weak, or athletic and wimpy. It's much, much more fundamental than that:

Boxers versus briefs.

There are those who switch between the two casually. But mainly, a briefs man would be lost without the firm grip of his tight white underpants. And the boxer crowd wouldn't give up that airy roominess for anything.

I'm a briefs man. Was born a briefs man, have been one all my life, expected to die in briefs.

But y'know, bodies change as they age. I found myself getting kind of --- IRRRITATED -- down there. Regularly. I was in danger of becoming one of those thick-set older guys who don't shave very well and absent-mindedly scratch their balls at social occasions. And chew tobacco and dribble the juice down the front of their flannel shirts.

This would not be allowed to happen. It was time to cross the great divide to boxerdom.

Rhumba was all in favor. "Boxer shorts are sexy," she said. "Men look kind of stupid in the tighty whiteys." She wrinkled her nose.

Honestly. You live with a woman for twenty years, you think you know her.

So I went off in search of boxers. And in Santa Cruz, this is not easy. It's not easy to find men's underwear of any kind.

Santa Cruz is a hotbed of sustainable-living advocacy; you know, growing food locally, and making consumer items locally. Buying and selling nearby. Not having to hop in the car for every darned thing.

So how did it come to pass that you have to drive five miles to the mall to find men's underwear? That's the only obvious place to buy men's underwear anymore. Oh, I used to buy my whities at Long's Drugs downtown. But Long's got taken over by the evil CVS drug chain, and the last time I went in they'd ditched men's underwear completely.

Anyway, I refuse to drive to the mall just to buy underwear. I find the idea obscene. Underwear should be -- everywhere. Whenever you need it. We're a town of 55,000 people, after all. So this evening I drove all over town trying to find a place that sold boxers, or even briefs. There had to be one. There just had to be.

I did find boxers and briefs at Ross Dress-for-Less last-chance-discount clothing store: in waist sizes under 34 and over 50 only. No thank you. Then on to Rite Aid Drugs, where a clerk with dead-white skin said, "If we have any, and I doubt it, they're on Aisle 6C." All I found was six lonely packs of men's briefs.

And Walgreen's? Women's undies only. What are men supposed to do, make their own out of paper towels?.

I finally found a pair of boxers of the right size at the West Side Long's on Mission. There were all of three packs left, and not many briefs, either. The clerk said, "No, I'm sure we'll continue carrying men's underwear." But I'm not so sure. Maybe I scored one of the last packs of boxers to ever be sold in a drugstore in Santa Cruz.

In the meantime, I've just tried on my new boxers. They're an appealing blue-and-white plaid and... I can feel the air circulating freely down there. Everything's happy and dry and non-itchy and... has plenty of room.

I approve. I'm just sorry it took 50 years. But you know... sometimes it's hard to change sides.

No Inspirations

2009-06-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

Under its own power, a cardboard box lurched across the floor of the church narthex. It stopped; changed direction, and slid toward the nearest bystander.

"Don't be alarmed," cried Pastor Biff in his best Jolly Minister voice. "Well, I think he wants you to be alarmed. But it's just my son; we're trying something creative in the way of child-minding."

So begins another Sunday morning at St. Bob the Informal's Presbymethertarian Church on the low-rent side of Santa Cruz. A little creative chaos is par for the course at St. Bob's. That's just the way the place works.

So no one much minded the creeping box. We knew who was inside before Pastor Biff even told us; his young son is a wiry, quivering bundle of disorder with the primordial chaos gleaming in his eyes. When boredom sets in, he literally climbs the wall (they're bumpy). So, animated box in the narthex: who else?

We went in for service. I couldn't tell you a thing about it. I was bored out of my mind. Church has always bored me profoundly... since the very beginning. The same old hymns, the same old liturgy. Traditions from 100, 200, 500 years ago. Very little of it inspires me.

Oh, there's has been the occasional sermon by a pastor who really knows how to sling the lingo -- I once heard a Baptist minister preach a 35-minute sermon without a single wasted word.

And there has been the occasional memorable moment of meaning and emotion. I also remember the baptism of an adult friend: after the pastor stroked her hair with the holy water and said the words, she flung back her head and laughed and laughed and laughed. That's the real thing.

Church attempts to connect with the creative inspiration that was the origin of Christianity -- but with rote ritual, popular music, tame testimonials and pleas for money, and the occasional smell and bell. Christianity is at its heart a revolutionary religion -- practiced by tradition-bound, middle class congregations who are mostly over the age of 50. How good can that be? Pastor Biff gives it his all every Sunday, but he doesn't have that much to work with.

Frankly, the best part of church takes place outside of service. You make friends, get involved with group activities, do some good in the community. And every brand of Christianity attracts a somewhat different kind of person. Presbymethertarians are hearty people, and fun to be around: conservative in lifestyle but broad in mind. They're good talkers and good company.

So after church it was off to lunch with Edsel and DeeVine, a retired couple Rhumba and I have become friendly with. We went out to lunch a few weeks earlier and that sneaky Edsel had whipped out his credit card before I could get to mine, so we were one down.

Brunch on Sunday in Santa Cruz is something of a crapshoot -- you might wait five minutes, or an hour. So we decided to take them to ARRRRRGH! MATEY!, a boaty kind of breakfast joint down by the yacht harbor because a) there's the bare chance of getting a seat there and b) it's a different kind of place, even for Santa Cruz.

ARRRRRGH! MATEY! is a tumbledown diner with an enclosed patio that's become part of the main building, and yet another patio outside decorated in a rundown mutant Tiki/Hawaiian/Jimmy Buffet style. With crusty picnic tables, driftwood, old ropes -- you get the idea.

ARRRRGH! MATEY! is unique around here because you can bring your dog, if you sit outside; and since nearly everything inside and out is made out of battered wood or concrete the place is also childproof. So some people bring their dogs, and some people bring their kids, and some people bring their dogs and their kids.

And some people bring their dogs and their kids and their alcoholic boyfriends, because ARRRGH! MATEY has a liquor license, and you can get a Bloody Mary or a vile rum drink to go with your Matey Omelet or Mexican Armada or Moco Loco.

It's, ah, quite a scene.

It's also hard to park around there on a busy day, because most of the street spaces are permit-only on the weekends, to keep beach-bound tourists from stashing their cars in the neighborhood. So while I found a space, Edsel couldn't. He dropped off DeeVine and vanished over the horizon in the family car.

"Oh, don't worry about him," DeeVine said blithely. "He's a power walker. He does at least four miles a day."

And Rhumba, DeeVine and I settled at at table and chatted while Edsel wandered around out there, somewhere.

DeeVine is a interesting person, one of those conventional and proper people who, late in life, found a channel for being unconventional. Her channel is Red Hats, that federation of ladies who gather together to carouse freely and boisterously.

DeeVine has gone beyond the standard Red Hat achievement level to create elaborate and bizarre costumes which she wears to the special events. So bizarre that the street kids on Pacific Avenue who dress in tatters and tats have approached her with compliments. ("They were so friendly and interested.")

The menu captured my attention for a moment, and when I got back to the conversation, Rhumba and DeeVine were discussing abortion.

"It's a difficult decision, but I'm in favor of it," DeeVine said. She looked down for a second and chuckled. "You know, in our old faith community I never could have said that."

Damned straight. For most of their lives DeeVine and Edsel were joined at the hip with God's Shouting Multitude, an evangelical sect that isn't into dissent.

For while the Presbymethertarians will happily kick around both sides of most issues not involving crime or sexual assault or tattoos for children under 12, the GSMers have no need for that. They know what you should believe and think on every issue; here's the list, read it.

But Edsel and DeeVine are thinking people -- Edsel is a retired academic, in fact -- and over the years they read and saw and did and thought and thought some more. And they came to some of their own conclusions.

And when they tried to discuss them with their fellow GSMers, they were told to stop it; or leave.

So they left. It's a hard thing when you outgrow your faith community. (It's also a scary thing, for me, to remember that all the rigid, closed-minded people in the world can find a church that will tell them God agrees with them completely.)

And DeeVine and Edsel found a place with the jolly Presbymethertarians -- who also have their problems, or there wouldn't be fewer of them every year.

Edsel finally showed up and we all had a good lunch and some fine conversation. Edsel and DeeVine are still thinking and growing. Into their eighth decade, they're using their computers and the Internet more each day, writing, Red-Hatting, engaging the world. As long as they're alive they'll be moving ahead. We're proud to know them.

It's just too bad that churches can't do the same thing, even the so-called "contemporary" ones.

And I have to ask, why not?

The Name of the Hour

2009-06-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

We give names to the hours. I've always found that interesting.

Some hours have mundane, obvious names: lunch hour, rush hour, happy hour.Some hours have sinister names: the Hour of the Wolf, the last hour of the night before dawn. When, so say the Swedes and Ingmar Bergman, more people die or are born.

And there are hours with more back-handed names: Attitude Adjustment Hour, for example, the hour from 5 to 6 on Fridays when stressed-out workers head to the nearest bar and raise a glass or four with their comrades. I remember a programmer who could down three Long Island Ice Teas during Attitude Adjustment Hour. And then drive home.

Even the standard Happy Hour can morph into something odd. I walked by a holistic health center the other day and saw a big sign for "Acupuncture Happy Hour, 4-7 pm."
The mind boggles, doesn't it?

There's also the Hour of Power, which begins at 12:00 a.m. midnight on your 21st birthday -- the very first second that you're legal to drink. It's your solemn obligation to get as stinking drunk as you can by 1:00 am. Or it is if you live in a frat house anyway.

Anyway, I've been thinking that we need more named hours. To commemorate those hours that serve a special purpose in our lives, whether they occur daily or once a decade. I give you:

Antsy Hour. 4 p.m. or so, when the workday is almost over; when you can see the edge of it creeping up, and your ability to concentrate falls apart. Especially on Friday.

The Hour of Make Believe. Every Saturday morning at 8 am. You swear you're going to jump out of bed early and get all your chores out of the way in two or three hours and then have the rest of the weekend for yourself, guilt-free. Yeah, right.

Hour of the Fat Anchorman. Five a.m. every weekday morning, when local stations air their dawn newscasts. What kind of anchor gets stuck with the 5 a.m. shift? One who's a little past his prime. A little too bald, a little too old, but mainly... a little too chunky. In my media market, there's not a thin anchorman to be found at five in the morning. Thin weathermen, sure, but they're all otherwise too green or too geeky for prime time.

Hour of the Mighty Burrito. The hour before closing time at the taqueria, when the staff makes dangerously overstuffed burritos to use up the dregs of the rice and beans and such.

The Hour of Wasted Youth. Every school day at 8 a.m. High school and college students trudge off to early classes before they've actually woken up. They step off curbs with their eyes closed, and you'd better keep your foot near the brake. Somebody take pity on these poor wretches and move the school day back to 10 am.
Brainfuzz Hour. For people over 35, the hour after 10 p.m. when you're too tired to think straight, but not tired enough to go to sleep. It's 9:59 p.m., and I'm just about there.

So many hours, so few names. Has anyone got any special hours of their own to add to the list? Operators are standing by.

I've Got Sunshine

2009-06-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

I've not been writing much lately. Everything that comes to mind is grim; though anymore, grim is the new black.

Let's see: it's June in Santa Cruz, and the weather's mainly been cold, gloomy, and no fun at all. Frankly, it just started raining five minutes ago. Rain in June -- not supposed to happen in Paradise.

Rhumba and I have been sick for three weeks. Some sort of pneumonia-like thing that settles in the chest and then moves on to make a last stand in the nose or sinuses once you've got it on the run.

Work is hell. I don't much ask people "How are you" anymore because about half of them moan, "I've got so-o-o much work to do." Today I found one of my coworkers facing a blank wall, resting her forehead against the padded surface. "I thought this week might be better than last week," she sighed. "But it's not."

As promised by Mr. Bigboss after the first round of layoffs (we've had another, small one since), we're working ever harder to cover more and more work with fewer and fewer people. It won't end well. I can already tell which projects are going to crash.

But sometimes the sun breaks through. On Sunday evening I got in the car and headed off to Shopper's Corner for the weekly shop. The fog had rolled back and mellow evening sunlight put a warm glow on the trees, the buildings, even the people passing by.

Sunday evening has always been a time of finishing one thing and preparing for the next thing. It can be a time of dread, a time of hope, or a time of anticipation. Pretty sunset or not, I was leaning toward the "dread" option, when an old song came on the car radio:

I've got sunshine on a cloudy day.
When it's cold outside I've got the month of May.
I guess you'd say
What can make me feel this way?
My girl (my girl, my girl)
Talkin' 'bout my girl (my girl).

And suddenly it was a golden Sunday evening in 1966: me and my evil older sister in the back of the family's huge green Buick as we motored home down the Silverado Trail from a penny-ante family resort we frequented up at the cheap end of the Napa Valley. As the vineyards and oak trees rolled past, and the Temptations and the Everly Brothers and Frankie Valli pulsed from the car radio.

I"ve come so far, and yet not so far at all: a Japanese hybrid, not a 10-mpg Detroit V8. Forty more years and triple the body weight, for good or ill. But a golden Sunday evening is still a magic time, and an old Temptations single brought it back to me with a vengeance. And I enjoyed the moment, more than I'd enjoyed anything in weeks.

My childhood was no bowl of cherries, and many Sunday evenings I spent thinking about how much I'd dislike the coming week at school. But even then there was nothing better than sunshine on a late Sunday afternoon -- that quiet golden time when you've done everything expected of you and had nothing more to do than -- whatever you felt like. Or let your stocking feet hang out the right rear window of a Buick Electra into that warm Napa breeze. Soundtrack courtesy of the Temptations.

Y'know, if I could find a '61 Buick and someone to drive it.... I might try that again. And in the meantime, for just the moment... I had sunshine on a cloudy day.

Obsession

2009-05-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

His name was Daniel Sheets Dye. And he was obsessed.

In 1909, the 25-year-old college grad signed on with a Baptist missionary society to help establish a medical college in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, western China. Sichuan in those days was literally beyond the edge of our world; civilized, but alien. Western influence hadn't made the slightest dent.

I can't tell you what made Daniel Dye, a square-jawed Ohio farm boy, make a long-term commitment to teach science in Chengdu, a 2000-year-old city he'd probably never heard of.

But as he packed his bags, Dye's old professors urged him to get a hobby -- something to stave off homesickness and culture shock ten thousand miles from home in a land that probably never heard of Cleveland or Columbus, either.

And after Dye settled in, he got his hobby.

One day he was touring a shrine to a famous poet when he saw some Chinese lattice windows of unusual design. In traditional Chinese architecture, windows are made of a decorative wooden lattice with a sheet of rice paper glued to the inside to block the draft. Lattice windows let in the light, if not the sights; glass windows hadn't made it to Sichuan yet.

Dye had noticed simple lattice windows before -- grids and so forth -- but these were special. He immediately copied down 20 designs and took them back to the university. Something about the intricate lattices -- perhaps the underlying maths and geometries that informed their design -- zapped Dye's systematic Baptist brain. He took his copies home and set out to research the history of Chinese lattice windows.

But there wasn't any. Lattice windows weren't considered art; they were simply something that carpenters created using folk designs that were passed down through the generations. Dye found just one book on the subject, 300 years old and "with a limited commentary."

But now he noticed lattice windows everywhere he went; he saw similar designs and motifs from place to place, and others that were wildly different than anything else. So Dye decided that he would be the scholar of Chinese lattice wherever he found it -- in windows, on the side of buildings, carved into wooden boxes. Wherever.

He made hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings and rubbings and measurements in the street and on the road, where he traveled by sedan chair in convoys with other notables. Dye said that you could always tell which sedan chair he was in because it was likely to pull over unexpectedly so he could jump out to sketch an interesting window. And of course curious locals would invariably crowd around the odd-looking foreigner. It wasn't always easy to get those drawings made.

Dye even taught one of his Chinese assisting teachers to use a mechanical drawing set and transcribe Dye's rough sketches into permanent, precise drawings in his spare time. (It's unclear precisely how "spare" that time was to the Chinese gentleman, though Dye kept him at it for 20 years.)

Where certain lattice designs had Chinese names, Dye identified and recorded them; where there were no names, he made his own. He devised a complete classification system for Chinese lattice design based on the basic motifs he identified, and placed each and every one of his designs in it, along with the precise location of the original and what he could find out of its age and background.

But it wasn't enough. The Manchu Dynasty had collapsed, the country was in turmoil. Old buildings were burning down or blowing up in insurrections, riots, clashes between rival warlords. The lattice windows were going away; modern glass windows were replacing them.

Dye figured out the principles behind each type of lattice design in his classification scheme and developed procedures for replicating every single one of them. And he never stopped trying to figure out What it All Meant. Some of the designs had themes he could figure out from Chinese cultural references, but the rest -- Where did they come from? How old were they? Who invented them?

All the swastikas that recurred over and over -- religious, or just a folk motif? And then he started looking at patterns woven into the belts of Tibetan herdsmen and saw many of the same patterns he saw in his windows. And he went to Japan, and Korea and even back to the states and saw lattice everywhere and noticed similarities everywhere. What came from what? Who influenced who?

Daniel Sheets Dye never did figure "it" all out. Maybe there was nothing there, or maybe too much. His lattice designs could have come from a hundred places, and moved on to a hundred places and mutated along the way; folk art is like that, especially in a cultural crossroads like western China.

But after he'd spent 25 years in China -- where did the time go -- Dye took his mass of material and published an awkwardly-written book with an extensive collection of drawings arranged according to his new classification system. And thus appeared the first treatise on Chinese lattice design in 300 years. There hasn't been another one since. There may never be. Who else would care that much? And even if they did, how many lattice windows are left?

Dye stayed in China until the Communists rolled into Chengdu in '49, and then went home to the States -- though I suspect it wasn't "home" anymore. The medical school he taught at is still operating, by the way.

Daniel Sheets Dye lived on for many years and never gave up on lattices -- and never achieved the "Big Picture" synthesis he'd been hoping for, either. Before he died, though, he apparently sold the rights to his works to Dover Publications, that eccentric reissuer of obscure and forgotten reference books and literature. And Dover has kept it in print ever since.

After Dye died, Dover even published additional lattice patterns from Dye's papers as an artists' design book.

Which is why both books were here for me to find -- at a ridiculously low price -- on the "New Arrivals" cart at Logos used bookstore in Santa Cruz a couple of weeks ago. I marveled at the odd patterns and strange geometries, unlike any I'd seen. I found them curiously satisfying on some visceral, non-intellectual level. Perhaps I felt what Dye had felt as he hopped from his sedan chair on a bustling street in Sichuan, pencil and paper and measuring tape in hand, at the sight of a mesmerizing lattice window. I bought them both; I see at least a couple of good stained glass projects in Dye's collection.

Yes, Dye was obsessed. But obsession, though not always fun to be around, often leaves something behind for the rest of us to enjoy. And if you troll the Internet you will find artists and craftspeople and even mathematicians and programmers whose work, they will gladly confess, was influenced by a Baptist science teacher's book on Chinese lattice designs. Designs which might never have made it out of China -- or survived at all -- if Dye had decided to take up cooking instead.

All hail to the obsessed! And thank you, Mr. Dye.

Where the Buffalo Roams

2009-05-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

I don't really have time to work out during my lunch break; but today I took the time anyway. I was in a mood, and I needed the endorphins.

I'm in a mood quite often these days; openly contentious sometimes, passive-aggressive other times, too overly-eager-to-please still other times. This is how I act when I'm feeling out of control of my own life. Mood swings deluxe.

And why not? Vast impersonal forces are at work reshaping the world, and my life. Evil banks, crashing economies, influenza pandemics, vanishing nest eggs and home equity, skyrocketing unemployment, layoffs: the future is in play, and very few of us have a seat at the gameboard. I sure don't.

Did I mention my employer may have another layoff in a couple of months? Rhumba's job isn't secure, either. I don't know the odds on our survival; but I have reason to worry.

Which is why I felt the need for endorphins today. And for me, nothing generates the endorphins like a set of bench presses with a few 45-pound plates on a six-foot bar.

So it was off to the Iron Dream, Santa Cruz' premiere free-weight gym. It's all about plates and bars and dumbbells and squat cages at the Iron Dream.

Now in today's fitness world, a free-weight gym like the Dream is as passe as line dancing and leisure suits. Fifteen years ago, the Dream would have been jumping with office workers and executives and trophy wives at half past noon on a weekday. Today, I almost had the floor to myself.

Almost. There were a couple of other people. Including the Buffalo.

I've blogged about the Buffalo: an old-time, hyper-dedicated weightlifter who was king of the pro bodybuilding world before Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up -- even helped Arnold get started in America. The Buffalo has pumped iron for half a century and still works it 'til it hurts, every set and every rep. He built his life around the discipline of iron, even built a temple to it: the Iron Dream, which he owned for years before selling out. He still works out there: a big-chested, big armed, gnarled man in his late '60s

And today, just as gnarled. But smaller in the arms and shoulders. Bigger in the gut. Working out light and breathing hard after every set. It had been awhile since I've seen him. And there were rumors he'd been sick, even gone to the hospital.

I walked by as he finished a set, trembling and gasping; I just gave him a nod. you don't break on the Buffalo when he's in his house of pain. And I'm not what I used to be, either; mind your business, Boomer.

I warmed up with some back extensions and a couple of sets of bench presses with nothing but the six-foot bar, which weights maybe 45 pounds with its collars.

When I finished doing light sets with the bar, I lowered it back onto the bench-press rack. Then I got up and loaded the bar with 240 pounds of iron plates.

I lay back down on the bench and gripped the bar from below. I gathered myself for a couple of moments; then pushed the bar off with everything I had.

Some days I give it my all and the bar just sits there. But today it moved up smoothly and I felt the weight of the iron flow down my wrists and arms like warm water, pooling up on my chest and shoulders and then spreading out to every joint and every muscle in my upper body.

I paused at the top of the motion, my arms fully extended overhead, and then let the bar down slowly to a count of six. I've got to take it slow at my age; moving that much weight quickly and explosively would blow out my right shoulder in record time. It'd be the end.

At the six count, the bar hovered six inches above my chest; I dare not go lower, my joints would take cruel revenge. So I pushed up into a second rep -- with a grunt, but fairly easily -- and again lowered the bar to a count of six. And then pushed up again -- and my muscles began to run out of gas and the bar slowed in its upward path and started to sway.

I got the bar back into the rack. Just barely. At that weight, two or so reps is all I can do. I hopped straight up off the bench; I always do, it's as if all the muscles in my body are wound tight and they all come unwound at one time.

And then the endorphins hit me all at once, like a glass of strong whiskey. But whiskey makes the world fuzzy and fevered; an endorphin rush makes the world clear and calm. The body relaxes, the mind relaxes, and all the things you have left in the day seem somehow... a lot easier. And they will be.

I took 50 pounds off the bar and did five or six more reps just because, and then moved onto other workout stations where I also went really heavy for the first two reps. The way things are these days, workouts for me are 50 percent about the endorphins, and going heavy gets them for you.

But nothing beats that first rush.

I finally plopped down on a bench to recover for a few minutes. I really don't have the stamina I used to. I glanced around the room with nothing in mind.

The Buffalo was looking at me. He sat on a bench of his own with two dumbbells at his feet, taking a break from his beloved bicep isolation curls.

"You've been around for the whole life of the gym, haven't you?" he asked. He can never remember my name. But it's true; I signed my first contract with him personally 20 years ago, before he even had the place completely set up.

"Yes, a long time," I said. "But I haven't seen you around lately."

"No. I've lost a bit," he said, ruefully. He meant muscle mass.

"Not so much," I lied. "I don't want to pry, but I heard you maybe had an operation?"

"Several," he answered, snorting. "Several. I had a quad bypass, and then I had a..." he reeled off a sequence of latinate syllables ending with "otomy."

"I don't even know what that means."

"They drilled out four of my vertebrae," he explained. Yeesh. Quadruple bypass and a rebuilt backbone, and there he was, still in the game. Still lifting. I said as much.

"Yeah," the Buffalo agreed. "I don't have the stamina I had. I get dizzy and out of breath after sets. But I still get in here two or three times a week. It just makes me feel better than anything. I even breathe better afterwards."

We talked a little more. One of the Buffalo's good buddies materialized and gave him a big hello, and I drifted off. I finished my sets hurriedly, got my clothes on and motored back to work in my little car. Nothing had gone bad in my absence, so they hadn't missed me. And I faced the rest of the day with a somewhat better attitude. I even breathed better.

I have got to get to the gym more often.

Don't Leave Home Without It

2009-04-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

Thursday morning, April 9, 6:15 am. Rhumba and I were getting out of bed to face yet another low-wage day shuffling paper, when she turned to me with an interesting proposition:

"Caff," Rhumba said. It was a light, sharp cough. "Caff, I say!"

We call it the Madame Bovary cough: delicate, mannerly, fake. It means one intends to feign illness on a workday. I raised an eyebrow.

"I'm calling in sick," Rhumba confirmed. "Nothing's happening at work. And I've got things to do around here. Do you want to call in sick, too?"

I thought about it. I'm a Boy Scout at heart, forever earning imaginary merit badges for good behavior. But... the boss was out of town. I had about three weeks of sick time piled up. And after last week's layoff, the office was as quiet as a tomb. Layoffs tend to kill personal initiative in the short term.

"Caff," I said. "Caff! Caff! I'll get a shower and call in. Then we can go out for some breakfast."

Rhumba padded into the spare bedroom, where the computers live, to do something to one of her insanely complicated websites. I took the shower, suited up, and phoned work.

But I couldn't open my voicemail; the voice prompts were different than usual, and they took me through a weird series of commands that repeated themselves without ever leading anywhere. I couldn't even change my greeting message.

I finally succeeded in leaving an I'm-sick message in someone else's mailbox, but even that was a struggle.

"Something's wrong with the voicemail at work," I told Rhumba.

"The Internet's down, too," she said, looking at the network router as if it had personally insulted her. There followed several minutes of cable-swapping, but to no avail.

"I guess the ISP is down," she said. "It happens. I'm going downstairs."

She left, but I hovered over the computer. Rhumba is three times the techie I am, but being a male I just knew that she hadn't tested every possible line. There had to be a bad one somewhere in that rat's nest of cabling. I reached for the first plug...

"Stop!" Rhumba burst back into the room. "TV says the Internet's down!"

And most of the phones, too, in Santa Cruz and southern Santa Clara County. Our phones still had dial tone, but that explained the screwy voicemail at work; AT&T is our voicemail service provider.

We hovered around the TV for a bit and got what details we could: dark tales of cut cables deep within in South Bay manholes; rumors of dead cell phone reception, failure of the 911 emergency service. And even though our phone worked, we probably couldn't call out of the local area. Nasty.

So -- we drove off to breakfast. Had a few bucks in my pocket and a debit card. That should work. Why shouldn't it be a normal day?

And about four blocks from the house, the car radio told us, "All credit card systems are down throughout the area." Oopsy. Debit cards use the credit card system.

"Maybe they have one of the old manual card readers at the diner," I said tentatively.

"Maybe," Rhumba echoed.

"But... maybe we should..."

"Hit the ATM," Rhumba finished.

I wheeled the car around and drove to our local branch of Bank of the Women. We call it that because the staff is all female except for a vestigial male manager who sits in the corner office and never comes out.

But when we got there, the ATM displays read "OUT OF SERVICE." And though bank hours hadn't even started yet, the vestigial manager actually emerged from the building to address a small crowd of customers that had gathered outside.

"All ATMs in the area are down, and probably will be down until at least noon," he announced. "The Internet's out all the way to San Francisco. We can't connect to the data center."

"Can we take out cash when you open?" somebody asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe not."

"Oh jeez," I said to Rhumba. "I guess we're heading home for emergency cash."

I keep a few hundred bucks in bills around the house against the day the banking system shuts down because of some catastrophic global financial reset and all the pretty plastic cards stop working for a day, or a week, or more. And while such precautions may place a tinfoil propeller beanie on my head in your eyes, I never, ever imagined that somebody could close the banks and shut down the credit card system and the ATMs for three million people -- with a pair of cable-cutters.

I grabbed -- well, enough money for any likely eventuality. When I was a kid back in the '70s, nobody would trust an 18-year-old with plastic or even take his check unless they knew him personally or he lived close by. So I carried a couple of hundred with me whenever I left town, even for simple day trips. (I was a saver even then, okay?) And suddenly, it was 35 years ago again.

And off we went to the diner, where the baby-faced waitress was reassuring but under-informed.

"Yes, the credit card system isn't working," she said. "But don't worry, we have this old machine that we can run them through."

"Good. And the ATMs are down too, you know."

"Really?" Her eyes widened.

"Yeah. And the Internet, and a lot of the telephones, and most of the cellphones."

"Really?" I was describing her doomsday scenario.

"Yep. Think of all those college students roaming around out there with two bucks in their pocket, an ATM card that doesn't work, and a dead cell phone."

"Chaos..." she breathed, eyes like saucers. I really should be kinder to the young.

Breakfast was breakfast. They would have taken our debit cards, but we paid cash and got bigger-than-usual smiles for our trouble.

But when we stopped in at a store afterwards to pick up a couple of things, there was no choice: they were taking cash only. And things were slow. While we were there, one customer had to leave her items at the counter because she had no greenbacks -- just useless plastic.

Across Santa Cruz, some businesses took only cash; some struggled with old-fashioned card readers; and some just closed. The big chain food stores with state-of-the-art cashiering systems let people swipe their cards as usual; their systems simply stored all the transactions electronically against the time that the Internet became accessible again; then they would submit them all in one large batch.

But they were the exceptions. It was hard for business to get done. Almost all money is electronic. Nobody carries cash, and the banks couldn't even dispense cash because they couldn't reach their data centers to okay the transactions. All because of a few cut cables.

I was here in Santa Cruz in '89 for the Loma Prieta Quake. All the electricity was down for a day and a half. But before long, business got done. People bought food and water and what batteries they could find. Stores scrounged up gasoline generators to run their cash registers, and people brought their cash. Or checks, because in those days some stores issued check cards to trustworthy customers that told the cashiers, "It's okay to take this guy's check."

But people don't carry much cash now, because we can use plastic for the smallest purchases, and get cash just as we need it 24/7 from ATMs. And we don't need check cards, because most people don't write checks and anyway there's also an electronic network for verifying checks.... which was also down.

We made it through one day. Two? I don't know. Even the big markets, with their ability to electronically store transactions, might start to balk after a couple of days. In recent years electronic-base commerce has made our financial system very efficient -- but also very ephemeral and very, very fragile. Most of us didn't know how fragile it was. Until somebody cut a few cables. Just a few.

And we didn't even have to lose electricity.

Rhumba and I went home, sat tight, and did stuff. Every once in awhile, listening to the latest news on the radio, I thought about getting on the Internet to get more details on what they were talking about. But there was no Internet. No texting or twittering or commenting or browsing. Just TV and news radio, as if it were 20 years ago.

Eventually the radio said that repair crews had reconnected the first of the several cut cables. I'll bet they got the Internet up first, I thought. And I flipped on the modem and router, and our little net made contact with the ISP. And all of you were there again.

And I'm glad you're there. And I hope you stay.

But I'm beefing up my emergency cash stash.

Running with the Red Queen

2009-03-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

In Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice in Wonderland), Alice and the Red Queen begin to run a race. But after a bit, Alice realizes that for all their running, they are still exactly where they started. And she remarks on this:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

We had a Red Queen moment at work yesterday. Our unit manager brought us in for a meeting and told us that we would be working much harder in the future than we are now.

And we've been working flat out. Everyone's taken on extra duties. Through herculean efforts our organization has reached out to more people than ever, has held more marketing events than ever before, has closed more transactions than ever before. The reps are on the road so much that I've forgotten what they look like. The back office staff is staggering under the processing load.

And we haven't grown dollar volume one single dime.

Yes, we're getting more sales, but smaller ones. If we hadn't gone flat out, our revenue would have dropped by half. So we're working twice as hard for every dollar. Expending twice as much overhead capacity per dollar on every sale. And the pressure will only increase as the sale amounts get smaller -- even more transactions, even more promotion, more back office work. More and more work for all of us, with no extra help, no overtime, no nothing. And somehow the budget will be cut. I think we'll be bringing our own pencils soon.

Our unit manager is not a bad guy. He's a family man -- he's got a life -- and he understands. He said, "Anything I can do to make life easier, if you think you've got too much work to handle, I'll do what I can. I'll help you prioritize, and I'll stand behind your decisions. You're a great team, and I want to keep you together."

Unsaid in the room floated the thought, "Keep us together? Where else is there to go?" Outside our office door, the official unemployment rate is 13 percent. And that doesn't count the people who've given up.

And the Red Queen laughs, and screams, "Run! Run! Run twice as fast as you can! You should be grateful that you HAVE a job."

Somebody put a bullet in the head of our economic system please. Just kill it. Let's have a new one that doesn't run on greed -- and fear.

The Return of the Good Old Days

2009-03-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

Late this afternoon, six scantily-clad young women sat on the roof of an old house on the West Side. They held cans and bottles of beer, and a sign that read "Honk and we'll take a drink." The car in front of me tooted its horn, and the young women dutifully took a swig in unison.

It's a sign. Finals are over.

Most Santa Cruzans have a vague sense of the academic year up at UC Santa Cruz. We knew the winter quarter was just about over. But when you see bikini girls on rooftops, you know it for sure.

It's been so long since my college days that I don't even remember what the end of finals felt like. But for the UCSC kids it's absolutely a cause for celebration; and I understand that, especially on this most mild and pleasant day, the last day of winter. Today the sun shone, and the air passed softly 'cross the cheek. Okay, my work day was hell but everybody out on the street seemed to be having a good time.

I pulled in late this evening at Long's Drugs for a bag of cat litter, and the place was full of young people in UC garb enjoying the evening and stocking up on part-tay items. The pressure's off, the evil professors have taken their pound of flesh, and it's time to relax. Good for them.

Got back home around ten and there was a party going on at the student house down the block. They'd strung lights all around the back yard, and the sound of banjos and fiddles drifted over the fence: they had an actual band, bluegrass band at that. I was impressed. Laughter, loud talk, and finally a ragged, rousing chorus of "Shady Grove."

It's true, it's always true: these are the good old days.

The Night Before the Change

2009-03-07T21:09:00.000-08:00

I got to the gym late this evening, 5:30 or so. On Saturdays the gym closes at seven, but I'd promised myself I'd get there today after a couple of weeks of not making it for one reason or another. Rhumba and I had had a room painted this week, our office, and we'd spent all day moving things back into the room and rearranging them.

And it would have been easy to keep going, but I had made the commitment. I do like going to the gym; there are just so many other things to do that seem more important at the time. But lifting has been part of me for 25 years, and I'm not going to let it fall away.

I left the gym just before seven, feeling all pumped up. It had been good to lift; usually the endorphin rush hits me after the workout is over. But I felt oddly uplifted, mentally and physically, right after the first couple of sets.

I stood outside the gym for a minute and enjoyed the evening.The air was mild for early March; we'd had good sun today after a week of rain and clouds. Still, the air was cold enough to warrant a jacket; but I had still had the blood pumping under my skin, and I didn't feel a thing. I got in the car and drove back downtown. A taqueria beckoned; I pulled over for a snack.

The place was jumping. People crowded around most of the tables: young people, mostly college kids; a couple of parties of Hispanics, middle-aged couples. A good taqueria is Your Best Value for Dining Out, no question, and the boys behind the counter were literally running to keep up.

I joined the line behind four smooth-skinned college kids. The first one paid for his burrito with a credit card. The second one used a credit card. So did the third and fourth. All for purchases of five or six dollars. I ordered a chicken taco and laid down a couple of bucks, then sat at a table to wait for my food. I kept an eye on the counter to see how many people paid with cards.

The next young person in line, a little older than the rest, did pay cash. He didn't look like the other young Anglos in the place; his clothes weren't as good, his hair was long and wild, and he had acne like a relief map of the Sierras. But the next two people after him were again young and fashionably dressed. And they both paid with plastic.

"Mind if I sit down?" The young man with acne stood over my table, holding a Good Times.

"Why not?" He laid down the paper and began to read. But I had to remark: "You know, you and I were the only ones in that line who didn't pay with plastic."

He smiled. "Credit cards are a big problem."

"They're going to be," I said.

"They are now," he answered. Then the counter guy called him, and he walked off with three bean burritos to go.

You may have heard that there's a credit crisis. Basically, the major banks are broke; their "assets" are worthless securities based on irresponsible or fraudulent home loans or shakey credit card debt.

The feds, and governments abroad, are keeping the banks propped up with loans and partial buy-outs. But the banks are still loathe to lend very much, because they need all the cash they can get to beef up their own balance sheets.

The thing is, everybody depends on credit these days. A lot of big businesses that used to keep cash reserves to operate stopped doing that, because it was so easy to borrow at low, low rates. Everybody needs credit. Businesses borrow short-term to make payroll and buy raw material until they get paid. Banks even need short-term credit (yes) to obtain the cash that goes into ATMs.

And the assets held by the banks keep degrading. More and more securities based on mortgages and consumer loans keep going bad. One of these days the banks may just stop lending, because no one will lend to them. Money will be unavailable. You will try to use your credit card for even the smallest purchase, and be denied. You will put your card into the ATM and nothing will come out. Businesses will shut down because they cannot make payroll. This could happen.

I finished my chicken taco and drove further downtown to a video store. Rhumba had tasked me to rent a couple of DVDs on the way home. It was the last night before daylight saving time; night had fallen, but people were already behaving as if the sun were still out.

People were everywhere. Clustering on the sidewalks. Walking in the streets. Stepping off curbs without warning. Dark, shadowy crowds of them, all moving on unexpected vectors.

At night, the streets of Santa Cruz are dim at best; our street lighting is pathetic aside from the very largest boulevards. Not for the first time I felt like I was in some vast live-action video game in which the goal was _not_ to run down someone while driving through downtown Santa Cruz. "I will not hurt anyone, I will not hurt anyone," I chanted to myself. "Even though they're wearing dark clothes and aren't watching where they're going. I will do no harm."

I threaded the car carefully through random swarms of pedestrians and parked near the video store.

I got out and walked. Something floated in the air -- an electricity, an awareness of change. Well, tomorrow the sun would set an hour later, the day would be lived differently, a new season would dawn -- not of the calendar, but of human behavior.

As always, I felt separate. All the other pedestrians had bundled up against cool night air, but I soldiered through in a t-shirt. The workout still kept the blood up against my skin. Everyone else looked happy and excited. I felt how I usually feel these days: cynical, watchful. Not pessimistic, but... ready to jump if the earth's crust opens up beneath me.

And the scary knowledge is, it might. It might not, but the possibility is there.

A couple of tips for the very few of you who read this blog: keep some cash money around, in case cash and credit are suddenly hard to put your hands on. A month's expenses should do it.

Also, keep a month or two of staples around the house; pasta, canned food, rice, and so on. You should do that anyway, in case of earthquake or the other natural disasters we're prone to around here.

But if commercial credit dries up, then the whole supply chain from field to processor to distributor to grocery shelf will shut down. And that's why the Feds keep throwing money at bankers and financiers who, in a just world, should be wearing orange coveralls and picking up garbage along public highways.

I got to the video store and found a couple of decent disks: "Spaced," with Simon Pegg, and a Coen brothers film. At the counter, a woman paid for "A Chihuahua in Hollywood" with crumpled dollar bills. She wore thick-framed sunglasses (it was dark outside), and clothing in several different violent colors and patterns. Her hair booofed out in all directions; an actual chihuahua rode nervously in a sling around her neck. As the finishing touch to her outfit, she wore mismatched Croc plastic sandals: one red, one pink.

An eccentric? Maybe. But she paid cash, didn't she? Down the line, she might be judged saner than -- most of us.