Rogue's View

Stars diving

2012-02-23T21:28:00.002-08:00

Stars diving into

the rough horizon

horse prints in

the wet sand

a swollen moon…

Waiting to see the doctor

2012-02-01T08:13:00.001-08:00

My gut hurts, I’ve got hemorrhoids.

It’s the first time I’ve had these ugly little bumps sticking out of my butt that make it feel like I’m sitting on my insides each time I sit down.

“Don’t spend too much time either sitting down or standing in one place,” the nurse advises me over the phone.

“Natalie,” I say, “I never thought you and I would be having this conversation.”

“I know, when you hired me to work at New Times did you ever think I’d be advising you on how to treat hemorrhoids?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

Natalie had been a reporter at the weekly alternative rag in San Luis Obispo, where I did a brief stint as the late Steve Moss’s managing editor. She was one of my first hires at the newspaper. She had classic good looks, was smart and could write a good story.

I liked her and was pleased with her work but she wasn’t enjoying it. She found the work of a journalist not suited for her and decided to return to school and get a nursing degree.

I’m glad she’s my nurse. I know that I’m in good hands. She works at the Veterans Administration health clinic where I get my indigent healthcare as a veteran.

It’s a bureaucratic system that would probably serve as model for any the government might run in the future for other citizens unable to afford their own healthcare insurance.

I’m glad as heck to have it. But it’s a little slow and laborious. It could probably use a tune up.

I know the system is overloaded. The place is always busy and the wonderful volunteers and staff who work at the clinic do the best they can to process all of the great needs they see every day. They are always kind and attentive.

It’s not the workers but the system that’s the problem.

I’ve called for two reasons, not just to get relief from hemorrhoids.

I’ve also asked Natalie about little growths beneath the skin close to where a melanoma was removed from my lower back nearly 10 years ago. Melanoma, if left unattended and not caught early, is one of the deadliest cancers.

I’d seen Dr. Dingler about two weeks ago and he took a quick look, patted around my side, stomach and back, and said: “It’s probably nothing to worry about. If there are any signs of new growth or increase in size, give us a call back.”

I left that appointment feeling less than assured but figured the doc knows what he’s talking about. I’ve had two melanomas and I know better. The little bumps need to be biopsied, or I won’t relax.

“You’ve gotta be the squeaky wheel,” mom says, “that’s the only way you’re going to get the attention you need.”

“I know, mom,” I respond. I hate being the squeaky wheel when it comes to things that to me seem obvious: if a patient expresses concern, then care should be given.

I hate pushing people; I’ll do it, if I have to, but I won’t like it.

“Listen, Natalie, I don’t mean to second-guess Dr. Dingler, I just saw him not long ago but I’d really like him to take a second look, I’d like to be certain of rather than guess the nature of these growths. Is it possible to get a biopsy?”

She explained that a biopsy would have to be done through the West LA facility, about a four-hour drive into the car-crazed southland.

“Do you mean Long Beach?” I hadn’t known there was a facility in West LA.

“No, the biopsies are done out of West LA. Sorry, that’s the only facility.”

It’s not a problem. I can get down there. “How do I set up an appointment? Do I call them down there?”

“No,” Natalie said, “we have to put in a request. you’ll be notified.”

Sometimes I hate bureaucracies, but this is the only healthcare service available to me. I have to wait. I’ll give it a week.

The second melanoma, which looked like a little hairy piece of veal that came off my leg, will be a good reminder to persist.

The best prevention is early detection. My experience with the veterans healthcare system, however, as glad as I am to have its service, seems to lag in urgency care that might prevent full-blown cancer.

My second melanoma, about seven years ago, put me in the doctor’s crosshairs; she’d have come to my office and dragged me in for surgery herself if I had tried to delay for even one more hour.

“Your biopsy came back positive,” the dermatologist, Dr. Tinkle, had told me on the phone. Her call came during the peak of a tight deadline, just as we were about to roll with the presses. “You need to come to my office right now, if you can.”

“I can’t get out of here until four at the earliest,” I said.

“Good, we’ll see you at four,” she said, and hung up.

She didn’t just do surgery, unlike the previous doctor who removed the earlier cancer from my low back several years before, who was a little bit rough; she, however, was an artisan and performed her work with amazing professionalism and deftness.

There’s no scar where she excised deep into the skin. I’m ever grateful for her precision and care.

“You need to get checked every six months,” she told me after it was over.

I did that for about a year, until I left New Times and my healthcare insurance lapsed because I couldn’t afford it any more. I haven’t seen a dermatologist in nearly four years.

I’m lucky to have access to a doctor’s care as a veteran, and I can usually get in to see a doctor as quickly as necessary.

But in this case, I wish there was a little more urgency, the kind expressed in Dr. Tinkle’s demand that I come to her office without delay, especially where time and early detection are of vital necessity in the prevention of full blown cancer.

My daughter was still young when Natalie worked for me as a reporter. I inform Natalie that Anna has graduated college and recently completed the MCAT for entrance into medical school.

“Well, good for her,” Natalie says, “now you can look forward to talking to your daughter about your hemorrhoids.”

“Thanks, Natalie. Thank you. I can’t wait. I’m really looking forward to our next conversation.” §

The system is broken and can’t be fixed

2012-01-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

Apparently, I’m not the only person who’s broke.

Late with the rent, I called in a panic to a client who usually pays on time but was about one week tardy with my latest submission.

“Hey, I was wondering if you sent out my check yet. It usually goes out the Friday after my column gets published.”

It had been two Fridays, which made it harder for me to be on time with my rent. I’d already had a couple of conversations with my roommate, who wondered when I’d have the rest of this month’s rent.

“Maybe it’s the postal service,” he suggested kindly when I told him my check hadn’t arrived yet. “We haven’t been getting much of our mail lately. Have you?”

“Well, no. Certainly, no check,” I said, bewildered but doubting that the postal service was at fault.

“Well, they’ve done this before, where they put all of our mail at the right address, but on the wrong street,” he said. “I called the post office today to see if our mail is missing for some reason.”

“What did they say?”

“There shouldn’t be any problem. We should be getting our mail. Will you go down the street, and check the address there, and see if our mail got dropped off there somehow?” He pointed the place out from where we sat on the balcony.

“You know what,” I said, “I’ll call about my check first and see if it’s even gotten into the mail yet.”

I went downstairs to make the call. The check hadn’t gone out, I discovered, held because of a tight cash flow.

“You’re kidding!” I said, surprised that such a reliable client would be having trouble. “It’s that bad, huh?”

“It seems no one can pay their bills,” she said.

I’ve been feeling bad about my lateness, which has been more of a problem in the last three years of economic downturn. I haven’t been able to pay my bills in full for at least that long.

My debts are not off the charts but they’re enough to raise one’s eyebrows.

The sad part, I guess, is the “loser” tag that comes with getting behind on everything: medical bills, auto repairs, new clothes, a trip to the barber, the rent.

“Why don’t you just get a job?” someone has asked more than once.

“Well, I’ve got two jobs and I’m working on a third.” They’re not glam jobs by any measure, and I probably would do better by applying for a position at Home Depot, as recommended, but I like working in the blueberry patch, and I like getting paid to write from home.

My daughter, who recently graduated from college, says I should go back to school. “If you can’t find a job, dad, you could at least learn something new.”

It’s worth considering. Maybe a degree in horticulture? An apprenticeship in permaculture, or in some other related technology that will move us into the future? I’d like to stay as close to the farm as possible.

I’m convinced that our future rests in local, organically grown produce, in economies built on a smaller, more communal scale, a return to the village lifestyle. It may seem a quaint notion now but not so much when food becomes scarce or beyond the reach of most pocketbooks.

I’m also convinced it will be a very long time before we see the level of prosperity Americans made for themselves in the boom years after World War II, when every gear and factory in the country was cranking away, building the largest middle class the world has ever seen.

Those days are gone, and so are the factories and the middle class. We’ve entered into a new phase of living. What happens next is anyone’s guess. One thing is certain, though, we’ll never see such a lavish lifestyle again, not any time soon, and definitely not until we find an alternative source of energy that can power a global economy the way cheap oil has.

The days of cheap oil are over too.

Oil is becoming more scarce; by most reliable accounts, we’ve gone past the halfway point of what once was thought of as an endless supply, and entered into the era of depletion, which means costlier and riskier extraction. BP’s oil desecration of the Gulf of Mexico is proof of that.

It seems so many Americans fail to understand this; and if they do understand, they haven’t figured out what to do next, aside from buying a hybrid car, or screwing in a few energy saving light bulbs. Better solutions are out there, and much more needs to be done. But nothing’s going to happen if we don’t admit that the system is broken and can’t be fixed.

The economy, government, corporate America—they’re broken and can’t be fixed. Try fixing them, if you want, but they will never be the same; they will never support you the way they supported your parents and grandparents.

I’m done with thinking the federal government or the corporate world can do anything to help me, or that the state or chamber of commerce will do much to advance the interests of the poor. I don’t need a half-trillion dollar military to protect me. I can protect myself.

I’m looking for people and organizations that build their communities out of mutual trust in supporting one another’s interests. If you live in my village and need some food, and I’m a grower, I might be able to help you. That’s the way it’s going to be.

Forget about outside help. It’s time to get neighborly and smart, such as putting a premium value on small local farms, craftsmen, tinkerers, and people who know how to build, collaborate and get things done.

So many people seem worried about what’s going to happen when they run out of money. Well, we may actually have to find something else besides money to get things done. We may have to barter, share and give something back. We might have to reduce our consumer demands.

In my own reduced circumstances, I feel like the canary living on the edge of danger, the precipice of change, seeking a pathway to safety. My wings are in flight mode, my brain is in a panic. I sense changes ahead that will place a great deal more emphasis on living simply.

The takeaway economy appears to be declining, leaving behind a mess of bankruptcies and foreclosures, broken homes and looted bank accounts. Out of this mess, somehow, we have to rebuild.

The oil economy, with all of its riches and destructive force and power, is coming to an end soon.

The breakdown in oil-driven systems has already begun to occur. You can see it in the increase of poverty, the rising cost of goods and services, the nation’s crumbling infrastructures, the threats of war. The fundamental breakdown, however, the one that will get everyone’s attention, will be the failure of the system that delivers our food.

We might put more of our attention on that than worry about a full economic “recovery,” or where our next barrel of oil is going to come from.

Until we develop reliable alternative sources of energy, and perhaps even after we’ve learned (or start to learn) how to power our lives without oil, I doubt we’ll ever see an economy such as the one in which I and other Boomers grew up.

Meanwhile, I keep hearing tales of woe to come from the progressive left, namely from writers like Chris Hedges, who envision a horrible end to our rich lives as we once knew them. We’re already victims to the wiles of corporate barbarism and it will only get worse, they say, warning of a repressive state security system run by the very same money madmen who run the corporations.

Because the system is broken and can’t be fixed, I see something entirely different: Out of necessity, or out of simple communal interest in survival, the emergence of strong local economies based on barter, not just money; a renewed interest in protecting local fisheries and agricultural land; and a new approach to building homes that produce rather than consume energy.

As I transition from the old way of life into something smaller and newer, I’m discovering literally what it’s like to be hungry again, a sensation that can do wonders for the imagination.

I can live with hunger. It’s a motivator. What’s hard is the feeling that this experience of lack must be a solo virtue, which implies I’m the only one who is suffering, and getting what is deserved. If I wasn’t such a slacker, everything would be better.

But I’m beginning to see that others who are not slackers may also be slipping through the cracks, letting a few bills go past due, fighting to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table.

After my call to inquire about my missing paycheck, I learned that there are a lot of people besides me who also can’t seem to pay to their bills.

At first, it alarmed me: “If others can’t pay their bills, how will I ever pay mine?” Then, I realized I’m not alone. I’m not the only person who’s broke. There’s hope yet. There’s security in numbers.

As more of the impoverished begin to voice their concerns, we might be more likely to find each other and to search for innovative ways to rebuild from the ground up, to place our treasures closer to home, out of reach from the grinding impacts of a failing global economy run by corrupt businessmen protected by an equally corrupt government.

I’d like to look past the horror-filled scenarios drawn by alarmists who see the current economic malaise as the beginning of the end of civil society, a collapse into total anarchy and violence.

Maybe it’s the beginning of the end of greed. I’d like to think so. If not, we’ll all be broke soon. §

Travel light for the revolution

2012-01-09T00:37:00.000-08:00

Zsu Zsi laughs as I make a panicked, last-minute shuffle to stuff one more item into my travel bag, a book on poetry co-authored by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, a gift from an ex-girlfriend.

I don’t really need the weight but I’ve been feeling poetic, writing lots of poetry, and I’m enjoying “The Poet’s Companion.” So the book’s coming with me.

I had been up late the night before, reading the chapter on “Witnessing.”

It may seem strange to write poetry during dark times, the authors begin, sort of like “fiddling while Rome burns.” But it is “a necessary act, one that allies itself with hope rather than despair.”

This doesn’t mean, of course, that poetry records only the beautiful, or frivolous, but every act, human or otherwise, that touches our lives in some way.

“A poem of witness,” they write, “wants to look at the realities and name them, to retrieve them from the silence.” That’s what I want to do, name things, the beautiful and the absurd, the run-of-the-mill and familiar, the forgotten and the oppressed, and retrieve them from the silence, from the marginal, where an increasing number of Americans now live.

The media don’t often do an adequate job of telling the stories of those who live on the margins—the unemployed, low-wage factory and warehouse workers, the millions who have recently lost their homes, the millions more of American children who suffer from hunger. By most accounts, they’re just numbers.

To really witness such things, to retrieve them from the silence and name them, to make a poem or story out of what’s actually there, takes courage. I’m learning that the act of making of poem, any kind of poem, is not for the faint of heart.

Just the other day, while listening to a friend warn of an impending irreparable breakdown of our economy and government, and of a coming revolution in the U.S., I started to panic until this came to me:

Strengthen your core

listen, watch

and be ready.

Not great American poetry, but it has helped me to feel less fearful of alarming developments in the global economy, the ever-increasing gap and the injustices that follow between rich and poor, the destruction heaped upon ordinary people by a corrupt banking system and hostile government, as witnessed by the thousands of protestors who have occupied their cities and communities across the U.S.; it has helped me to focus more on staying healthy, being strong, observant and ready to act. This “poem” bears witness to what feels to me like a perilous time.

Zsu Zsi has come as a favor at 6 a.m. to take me to the Amtrak station for the first train out of San Luis Obispo, which runs every day to San Diego. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m going to spend a week with my mother and daughter, a welcome respite from my chores at the farm, and a holiday gift that I’m already treasuring, quality time with the two women I love most.

“I know, it’s ridiculous,” I explain to Zsu Zsi, tightening the pull string on my bag. “I try to travel lighter each time I get on the train,” I say, hoisting the pack over my shoulder, “but my bag always ends up being heavier than I want.”

“Why don’t you get a Kindle?” she asks. “You can put a whole library of books on a Kindle, and it’s light.”

“I will as soon as I can afford one.”

They’re only $80, I’ve been told, which isn’t much but it’s more than I want to spend. I wonder, given my lack of disposable income these last three years, where every dime is like a dollar, how anyone can afford one.

Still, I’d love to travel more lightly, and when I can afford to buy a Kindle, I will.

Were I homeless, which seems as great a possibility now as finding a low-paying slum job, I’d be pushing a shopping cart with all of my belongings spilling over the top, extra shoes and clothing hanging in heavy soiled clumps off the sides, and a box or two full of books on the bottom rack.

I need my creature comforts, which remain adequate at the moment, but I wonder: How much longer will they last? As the gears of the U.S. economy turn clunkier, chewing up the carcasses of minimum wage workers, I’m learning to live with less. I’m traveling lighter.

Like many of my friends, I find myself downsizing, scaling back on unnecessary expenses, growing more of my own food, learning to do my own repairs, thinking about harvesting rainwater and solar energy, building up the local community, preparing for the possibility of a complete breakdown of the system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich.

I’ve been on the tightest budget of my life since the economic meltdown of 2008—where banks made off with billions of taxpayer dollars while taxpayers were left to fend for themselves during a period of record home loan defaults. Money’s tight, people have been saying. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon.

Zsu Zsi and her husband, along with other friends, have kept me from falling through the cracks, providing places to work, rest and eat.

It’s not much easier for them either, I’ve noticed, as my friends and family watch their income and savings and retirement dwindle with each passing day. They’re working harder, and longer hours too.

Oil companies, meanwhile, report record profits; and banks, rescued from the brink of disaster, appear to have bounced back, returning much of the capital they borrowed from taxpayers. In some quarters, at least, the system seems to be up and running again. News reports paint a rosier picture of the economy as we head into the New Year. Jobs are increasing, unemployment is down.

The reports, however, come off as false assurances based on projections made from dreams not reality.

The decline in numbers of unemployed doesn’t include the millions of job seekers who no longer qualify for unemployment benefits. The increase in the numbers of jobs is likely the holiday uptick of part-time and seasonal wage slaves. Some economy.

The situation as I view it from our increasingly upscale little beach town on California’s Central Coast, where truly the rich get richer and several of my less privileged neighbors have lost their homes, still appears to be dim.

Job prospects also appear unpromising for many people, unless they’re willing to pour coffee or sling burgers, not that there’s anything wrong with service jobs but not everyone aspires to putting on a Wal-Mart uniform or pushing boxes in million-square-foot warehouses full of cheap goods imported from China.

We’re a warehouse, service economy. Those are the jobs that have most likely increased and which will continue to increase unless we can find ways to rein in our consumer demands, and get more imaginative and creative with our resources.

A little after 6 a.m., Zsu Zsi’s truck winds south along Highway 1 between black open fields under the pitch-dark winter sky. We rumble along comfortably in the late December chill. I feel safe, secure and warm inside the roomy cab.

It’s a big truck that uses a lot of fuel but is necessary for the daily tasks of running a ranch with chickens, and tending a field of blueberries. As oil becomes more costly, however, I wonder, how will she and other farmers and ranchers power their tractors and maintain their fields? How will we get food to market without it becoming too costly for most consumers?

I see a crisis coming, not just for commuters fed up with the high cost of gasoline but for the whole fossil fuel-driven system that brings food to most households throughout the U.S. Mere threats from Iran to choke the supply of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz last week sent a shiver of predictions of $150 per barrel, a spike that most consumers can ill afford.

Just ask any farmer what he spends on fuel and he’ll probably tell you he’s not sure how much longer he can make it. Subsidies help with many farm expenses, but those appear to be drying up soon.

Zsu Zsi’s big Ford is a much better ride than my beat-up but handy 25-year-old Toyota farm truck that leaks when it rains.

As we cruise down the road, lights glow eerily through the darkness from the National Guard’s Camp San Luis Obispo, a site for high-security operations, followed by the sheriff’s facilities and county jail next door, and finally, just across the highway, the state prison, the California Mens Colony, where Tex Watson, handsome assistant to the murderous Charles Manson, once resided. This whole area of the highway gives off an eery institutional glow in the darkness.

It reminds me of a fictionalized account I read once of a future San Luis Obispo County, which served as the government’s staging area for attacks on citizens, a top secret training site and encampment for a nation built on incarceration and fueled by terror.

When I first encountered the idea, it seemed strange, both plausible and a little fanciful at the same time, but now it’s become a quite possible reality with President Obama’s support of recent legislation that allows the military to indefinitely detain any American citizen it considers a threat to national security. The system for mass incarceration (yes, this was just supposed to be a whacky conspiracy theory, but it’s not) is already on its way to being intact.

The president promised to protect citizens from the legislation’s potential for abuse, but never explained why, with such reservations, he went ahead and signed it any way.

I’m guessing that it will make a convenient excuse to detain Occupy protestors in the next wave of occupations that are likely to take place in huge numbers coming this spring.

The Obama administration has already detained and deported more illegal immigrants, processed and warehoused in more than 20 newly built detention centers across the nation, in three years than the Bush administration could accomplish in its two full terms of office.

Further up, another cluster of lights present themselves from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where 20,000 of some of the country’s brightest minds and most privileged students pursue technical studies in agriculture, architecture and engineering, all supported through huge corporate injections of funding.

This little corridor of government operations in defense, education and imprisonment provides a pretty good living for a lot of people in this mostly rural county, rich in agriculture and tourism.These are the best-paying jobs.

Austerity budgets at all levels of government, however, have begun to take a bite of out those jobs too. We’re learning of high-paid civil servants who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing little more than push paper.

People are pissed off about that and, with the help of actual and threatening federal, state, and municipal bankruptcies, priorities are shifting, and money’s not available for new hires or much else.

Beyond government-funded industry, there’s not much in the way of high-paying jobs here. Most people get by, sometimes holding down two or three jobs, working in restaurants, contracting services for building and repair, and running mom and pop shops, candy and antique stores, coffee joints and gyms. And, of course, there’s farm labor.

As we cruise along, the darkness to the east begins to turn cobalt above the institutional lighting. I’ve been telling Zsu Zsi my woes of living on the financial razor’s edge, suggesting that I may have to move to another area, yet no matter where I look, things appear bleak.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” I say, thinking of a recent story I’d read about debtors being threatened with jail. I have unpaid debts but none as great as those owed by the government. You don’t see many government officials going to jail for their debts. Yet, to listen to some politicians, you’d think only lowlifes don’t pay their bills.

“Well, at least you have a place to go, if things don’t work out,” Zsu Zsi says as we descend the hill that divides the state prison from San Luis Obispo. “You can go to live with your mother.”

As much as I love my mother, that’s the last thing I want to do, but in this economy, it may be the most practical, at least, for staying off the street.

As we approach the sleepy college town and the Amtrak station, Zsu Zsi, a native of Hungary who helped bring an end to that country’s Soviet occupation in 1991, puts poverty and homelessness into perspective in her accented voice.

“I asked a homeless woman, how can she live on the street with no place to go? No place to be safe, no place to just let go and share a meal with friends or family? You have no one when you’re homeless. It’s so wrong.”

I try to imagine what it would be like to miss spending a week with my mother and daughter because of homelessness. It makes me shudder.

It’s Christmas time, Xmas time, the holidays in America, when friends and families gather and reconnect, and all I can think of is that it’s been hardly a week since the Associated Press reported that one out of two Americans lives in poverty, the highest rate ever.

“We’re fast becoming a third-world nation,” I say to Zsu Zsi. “Half the country lives in poverty.”

“That’s what happens when you cut education,” she snaps. “When you have a country run by a bunch of dumb shits, what can you expect? Poverty!”

Yes, I think, it’s hard to advance as a culture when one of your national goals is to make people dumber. The one advantage to dumbing people down, though, is that they’re easier to manipulate, easier to turn into stooges and henchmen.

Zsu Zsi’s own homeland struggles under a resurgent neofascist movement that seeks more seats in Hungary’s parliament, where they hope to restore the glory days of right-wing violence, racism and bigotry, all outgrowths of poverty and ignorance, and lack of education.

“It’s scary,” she says. “There are places you don’t go in Budapest, if you are Jewish.”

“Are you serious?” Already I feel naive for having asked, yet I can’t help adding, “After what Europe has already been through?”

“I’m dead serious,” she says.

The revolutions for freedom from oppression that have erupted around the globe and continue to spread will meet their fierce resisters; they always do.

It’s no different here in the U.S., where once it was possible for right and left to agree that the success of any revolution will be measured by the degree of its humanity.

The shape of our government is anything but humane; it supplies the world with its most sophisticated and deadly weapons, kills innocent people, barters in violence and mayhem, and uses torture to terrorize its enemies and its citizens.

The revolution that I envision will be a turn away from the inhumane, will be the joining of citizens who seek to rebuild their communities as they see fit, without fear, without corporate influence and government interference, and with the courage to bear witness to a world free from fear and terror, a world built on just and humane principals.

Some are saying that we will have to fight for it, maybe even take up arms to defend ourselves against increasing government encroachments upon our rights as a free people. That may be the case but it’s more likely that revolution, if there is one, will occur through the resurgence of strong local communities lessening their dependencies on outside resources and agencies, with homes designed to create rather than consume energy, and people learning to travel more lightly, write more poetry, and name more realities and retrieve them from the silence. §

focus, focus, focus

2011-12-29T23:31:00.000-08:00

so hard to focus

eyes, ears, mind

for the drive ahead

the one that stops

and never starts

again but leaves

fearsome thoughts

anxious to get on

with it, to buy the ticket,

enjoy the ride

and drive ahead

eyes ears and mind in focus.

WHATEVER!

2011-12-27T11:38:00.000-08:00

whatever

so rude, so dismissive

whatever

so easy, a conversation

stopper.

whatever

your words, your feelings

don’t matter.

whatever

is like saying

“fuck you!”

“you don’t matter!”

WHATEVER!

Forgetting themselves

2011-12-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

the mindful are not so

mindful

forgetting

tons of dharma

tons of karma

themselves

oblivious to the moment

the bliss-filled

moment that arrives suddenly

out of nowhere

PARANOIA IN THE HALF-MOON LIGHT

2011-11-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

my shadow jumped out

from the corner

of the cemetery road

and it spooked me.

I laughed and fell

into a dream

fearless

of love

fearless of the moon

and the half-moon light

sparkling

in the wet black sand

dripping diffuse

warm and blue

teasing out love

pulling down the tide

sweeping me off

my feet

until they

danced.

I gave my nakedness

to her beauty.

I am that willing

I am that overwhelmed

no longer afraid

no longer paranoid

in the half-moon light.

Greed: The Real American Dream

2011-10-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

At my college graduation in 1984, a candidate receiving a degree in American Studies stepped up to the podium for his diploma, and someone in the audience proclaimed loudly, “What the hell can you do with a degree in American Studies?”

I had taken an American Studies course, the “American Dream,” as part of my training as a journalist and Communications major, a degree for which one might have asked the same question. Still, I remember thinking, “What an asshole.”

Thankfully, I found my study of our “you-can-have-it-all” myth eye-opening and took the enthusiasm from that one course into my work as a journalist and found it helpful, if not enlightening. It gave me a newer, more critical perspective on our ad-driven, commercial culture, where standards are measured by how much you earn or own rather than by your character or how much you contribute to the welfare of others.

I’d enjoyed a semester of uncovering the many layers that go into the often vague definition of what that dream is supposed to be. Is it a house in the suburbs, a family, a beautiful wife and a new car? A steady job? A climb up the career ladder? That was about the extent of my dream when I started college. It’s become so much more than that now.

The term is so flippantly tossed around, and those who use it seem to assume that it’s the same for everyone. But it’s not. My dream isn’t about money. It’s about something more than that. I’ve learned to live small and work hard to be a helpful presence in my community. My American Dream is simple: Small is beautiful, and people are more important than money.

That same year, another questionable degree, the highly touted MBA, began arriving in newsrooms across the country, turning down the money meter and pinching editorial departments. If you wanted to make real money, you got an advanced degree in business. That was the way to go.

With MBAs, came tightened purses, reduced expenses, and newspapers were soon inching up profits from the desired 12-15 percent to the more wealth-inducing, newsroom-destroying 20-25 percent.

The resulting clash between the advertising and editorial sides of the enterprise, of course, could only end in disaster for journalism. More and more, the strength of editorial decisions was given over to the ad department, and newspapers, now big money-makers, became a vehicle for promotion and propaganda. Sticky ads began appearing on the front pages, pasted over the tops of headlines and stories that some sorry sap editor and reporter busted their asses to produce for the front page.

“We have to do it,” said a local publisher once when I complained of the practice, “it’s the only way we can stay competitive and make money.” I argued that he should let the editor decide what goes on the front page but it fell on deaf ears.

It marked the beginning of the end for newspapers. Money killed newspapers just as much as advances in digital information exchange. The more money owners made, the more they tried to squeeze out profits, laying off workers, demanding more and paying less to those who remained, the more irrelevant newspapers became. To be accurate, it wasn’t just money but “the love of money,” as greed is described in the Bible, that killed not only the news business and the quality of news but other industries as well.

Greed, the love of money, became a 1980s mantra and the guiding principle in most schools of business, and we all bought into the idea that more is better and that we can live large while the rest of the world starves or ekes out a living; it was a message that permeated every level of American culture but apparently one that only really worked for those who had massive amounts of capital. The rich, of course, got richer.

Even the once-sacrosanct newsroom, bedrock of free speech, protected by the First Amendment, where stories on government or corporate corruption could be written “without fear or favor,” couldn’t compete with money—or people with MBAs. It became an extension of the ad department.

The people on Wall Street know this better than anyone: Money—not just money, but lots and lots of it—talks. When it concentrates into fewer hands, however, there will be trouble as witnessed in occupations around the U.S. these past several weeks.

A Facebook friend, an activist for human rights, posted the following comment, pointing to the rage of Occupy Wall Street, and challenging The Nation Magazine’s recent bright cover, which listed selected occupied cities in the U.S., over which were the bold blood-orange letters: “Wall Street Invented Class Warfare.”

“I don't buy that!,” he wrote. “In my humble opinion, when the Founding Fathers wrote & codified a Constitution which initially granted and protected über rights and privilege to ‘white, male property owners’ - [that] created class warfare.”

In other words, white male property owners who codified rights and privileges allowed only to a select few more than 200 years ago created the class warfare evident in the Occupy Wall Street protests. My friend’s comment raises both the issue of privilege and race, not just class warfare, which can be enforced through the validation of greed and ownership as promoted in American culture.

Class differences have always been a factor of American life, even though we like to imagine there aren’t any class differences, and if there are, all you have to do is work hard and be smart and you’ll get rich one day too.

Wall Street showed its disdain for the common person long before its operatives looked down their noses at protestors marching in the street below while sipping champagne on the balcony above. That image played on YouTube was Wall Street’s “Let them eat cake” moment, when it became screechingly evident that indeed there are class differences, and that perhaps soon the mighty, and maybe a few others, will fall.

Class warfare keeps us divided but it isn’t the root issue.

More fundamental even than class warfare is greed, which permeates our culture, from Wall Street to Main Street. Of necessity, the whole system must implode, it will by nature destroy itself, unless we learn to live within our means. Greed, like pride, as the Good Book says, always leads to disaster. Some are saying it’s already too late.

Greed is the root problem. I’ve always thought of greed as having more than you need to live, which is probably too narrow a definition. By such a definition, we might all be guilty of greed.

I say this as a person who owns absolutely nothing. I have nothing but my skin and bones, and yes, I’d like to have more than I do now, yet I'm still willing to learn how to live with less. In the future, I suspect, that’s how things will be. I doubt we’ll ever see such an explosion of growth and wealth as the U.S. experienced in the years following WWII.

Americans are today more fat with more wealth than any nation in history. Blame Wall Street all you want but in many ways we also are to blame for thinking there is never enough.

Greed permeates down to almost every detail of our lives, from the cars we drive to the houses we build, enormous, monstrous things. That we continue to manufacture and drive gas-guzzling cars is but one example of not only our pride and lack of thrift but a lack of imagination, an odd unwillingness to think beyond the endless waste brought on by cheap fossil fuel.

It’s in everything we do; so entrenched is it that we can’t think of a way out, or imagine that another way is even possible.

Endless growth, unlimited growth, bigger and more are better, all these were never meant to be more than a bubble, a hope gone delusional, that we can continue to strip the planet clean of its resources and think that it will never end.

The “American Dream,” as it took shape through the ‘80s, had to end; it couldn’t go on forever, an ever-expanding economy to drive a lavish lifestyle unlike any the world has ever seen and one that could in no way go on without finally breaking down. Greed gets a reckoning. Sooner or later, it takes everyone—the guilty and the innocent—down.

It won’t be long before the disenfranchised, the hungry and the poor, the angry homeowners who have lost their homes to the bank, begin tearing down the ramparts that protect and insulate Wall Street from the commoners.

Meanwhile, for those who still hope, it’s time to re-scale the dream, think smaller and lessen our impacts, as has been suggested for nearly 40 years by those who saw this upheaval coming. It’s time to think about how to live with less.

A friend said recently: “I just have this feeling that suddenly everything’s going to get really small really fast.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean we’re going to have to start depending on our neighbors. Thank God,” she added, putting a hand on my shoulder, “we’re in a good place to do that.”

Yes, we are in a good place, where there’s water, healthy agriculture, and people who care. Will the system break down as my friend imagines? It sure looks that way.

These days I don’t worry so much about what I’m going to do with a degree in Communications. I’m happy to have a roof over my head and food to eat, and I look forward to getting to know my neighbors better as the world economy and Wall Street falter, verging on imminent disaster. §

Through the window of a train

2011-08-13T01:25:00.000-07:00

Mom called me about two weeks ago to ask if I’d like to come to a party she wants to throw for a bunch of old pals. She called it a “Geezer Gathering,” made up of high school friends from more than 50 years ago.

“No, not really, mom. That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun,” I said.

“Well, would you consider coming down to help me set up?”

“OK, sure, mom. I’ll go to your geezer gathering.”

So, here I am, riding the train somewhere between Lompoc and Goleta, two hours into a six and one-half hour journey on the rickety Amtrak rail to the Santa Ana station, not far from mom’s old Victorian home in Tustin where she plans to have her party.

The ride along the pristine California coastline is hypnotic, the noise of the train and chatter of passengers are muffled by a modern take on “The Music of Thelonious Monk” jangling through the ear buds plugged into my laptop.

Even with this technology at my fingertips, I feel “old school.” No tablet, no Blackberry, no iPad, just a clunky old laptop and cheap cell phone with pay-as-you-go service. No special features anywhere on my person—unless you’re looking for something non-digital.

The train is generally a good ride, if for no other reason than you don’t have to worry about driving or paying for gas, the view is nice, and you have the option to tune out the world if you like, indulge in a book, bury yourself in a computer, or take a nap.

Today, I ignore the passengers as much as possible. I don’t feel like being social, even though I’m generally a social person and feeling a touch lonely.

A cute but annoying little girl swings her legs in the aisle, supporting herself on the seats in front of me, she pushes up with her hands, lifts her weight and swings. Her grandma eats donut holes and looks at the rugged coastal terrain through the window.

For some reason, today’s view from the train evokes a nostalgic kind of hope, the sort of hope I knew and indulged more as a younger man, when the world seemed larger, filled with new and endless possibilities. As I get older, I’m sadly learning, the possibilities seem to get narrower, and less inviting. I’ve noticed how much more difficult it is for older, boomer types like myself to get too hopeful, especially now with the economy as doubtful and uncertain as it ever was, but even more so as we turn gray and decrepit.

But today, if it’s not hope that I’m feeling, it’s at least the suggestion of something like hope, a mystery, any way, that isn’t shrouded and foreboding but perhaps even gleaming, putting a different—if not new—light on things.

The Pacific, under the heavy marine layer, summer grey and wet, pops in and out of view through the train window, the misty morning holding down the coastline under a white blanket of timelessness. It’s hard to tell time in this coastal purgatory of summer mist. Is it still morning, or afternoon?

In either case, the landscape of scrub oak, green cypress, marshes, and sea birds dropping into view out of the mist brings me back to the present moment, the only moment I know that has any real possibilities, as I look out the train window.

I’m amazed at the long, long line of old fence posts tilted and worn, no rails between them, holding nothing, just standing awkwardly erect, one after the other, for a distance that seems absurd. It’s a ghost fence that runs along the tracks between the train and the ocean below. What could that fence line have been built for? How long has it been standing like that with nothing to hold or keep out?

I’ve got other absurdities on my mind as well. Amber said we should end our love affair. We should try living as roommates, she said, until one of us decides to move. I’d like to move; so, I guess, would Amber. Neither of us can really afford it. We’re both broke.

“Get out now!” a friend told me. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

I thought he was being alarmist, a little melodramatic, as friends can be when they’re watching out for you. I didn’t know that he’d gone through a similar breakup. I didn’t know that he also had kept separate rooms in the same house with his former girlfriend—for nearly six months.

“It was fine until she started fucking the guy she left me for in the room next to mine,” he told me. “You better get out when you can, dude.”

It’s only been a few weeks, and now Amber has moved in her 12-year-old son, and asked me yesterday if I’d thought about finding another place. It’s a good idea, she suggested. It’s nothing personal, she assured me, and I believe her, it’s what’s best.

As I look out the train window, and ponder the flight of a distant heron, the message sinks in: It’s over, it’s time for me to move on, and I’m a lot older now than I was seven years ago when we started, the possibilities for lifelong companionship narrowing ever more precipitously. Ah, the end of another conjoining of minds and bodies that could only wrap themselves into a tangled web of tears and unhappiness instead of blissful companionship.

“We’re not right for each other,” she said.

All those years, we kept pushing the wrong buttons, couldn’t seem to find the right ones, and each time it got so messy and hurtful and confusing.

“I don’t want you to feel sad,” she said.

I wouldn’t feel sad if I wasn’t a bit touched, hounded by a confusing mix of the cynic and the romantic, always hoping, always doubting. It’s a curse, really. I don’t know where it comes from but the tension between hope and doubt seems always to bring my relationships to ruin. I do feel sad.

As the train rolls on, I can feel myself moving on, drifting, searching, hoping, doubting.

“So, are you gonna find yourself another cute hot young thang—huh?” teased a friend after I’d told her that Amber wanted to separate.

“I’m not looking, really. I’m happy to be a free agent, that’s all.”

She moved her body close to mine and put her lips next to my ear: “You like young pussy, don’t you?” she whispered.

I gagged. Well, that’s not the only thing, I stammered.

Amber’s young, and beautiful, no doubt, but she’s smart and caring and—for some damn reason, we don’t get along very well. We agree on that. We’ve had some fine moments amid the turmoil and troubled times. I’ve seldom felt the difference in our ages, only when the occasional stranger mistook her as my daughter. Sex wasn’t the only thing that kept us together.

Still, it feels absurd, in a way, if not entirely liberating, to be moving on, at least at this point in my life, where I’d like to be more settled, and it becomes clearer by the moment that my days are numbered. I try not to think too hard that life is short, or at least not get morbidly obsessed with the idea, just acknowledge the fact, that I’m older now. I’m no spring chicken, as mom likes to remind me, and it’s quite possible that I will remain alone.

No one my age wants to be alone. I learned this a long time ago from a friend, a monk, whose entire life was dedicated to celibacy and solitude.

“The thing I fear most,” he said of death, “is that no one will notice that I’m gone.”

Even in his solitude, he wished not to be alone. Even in that final separation through death, he wished to be remembered.

I had high hopes, and so did Amber, that we could work things out, work through our troubles and stay together until the end—and be remembered. Along the way, perhaps, we both knew it wasn’t going to work, but we’re stubborn, and kept at it, and maybe, in the end, our stubbornness is what brought us to this painful juncture.

Now, I’m left with this thought: “Why did I hold on for so long? Will I soon be living in a trailer park, sad, lonely, broken up and finished like so many other geezers who grow old and die in their aluminum cages without so much as a hint of their loss?”

Or what about this thought: “Will the white blanket of timelessness that obscures my view of things and seems to rule my mind lately be swept away, as the coastal breezes outside the train window now lift the misty veil, to uncover lighter, more hopeful possibilities? Are any possibilities left?”

The damned romantic and cynic in me are at it again, stirring up the ridiculous inner tension between hope and doubt. Where do these feelings come from? My Buddha nature, governed by so many Western follies, is too weak and immature to overcome the turmoil, but I can at least feel it, breathe it, and observe it. That I can do. I don’t like it, but I can do it, even though I’m not Buddhist.

Frankly, I’d rather drink beer. I’d rather go to my favorite bar, Schooner’s, and sit comfortably, get blissfully shitfaced, and then quietly observe and meditate. It’s probably not the best way to practice mindfulness but I’ll bet Alan Watts would approve.

At the geezer gathering, I’ll be co-host with mom to a party of older folks, people in their 70s who are much closer to the precipice than I am, whose view of any sort of timelessness or aloneness is probably much sharper and more poignant than my own. Perhaps that precipitous view is where the romantic and cynic in me may actually, one day, finally find common, quiet ground.

Like my monk friend, in death I fear not being remembered; in life, I fear being alone.

I look through the train window into the distant fields where farm workers hunch low from the waist to pick strawberries. I ate a piece of strawberry with my yogurt this morning; it was surprisingly sweet and delicious. The breeze outside has broken the white sheet of marine layer into patchy clouds and blue haze, a perfect August day. The beaches must be crowded by now. The train barrels down into L.A. §

I may be poor, but I'm not destitute

2011-07-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

I know enough about poverty in the U.S. to be something of an expert. I earned less than $9,000 last year, the year before that was less than $5,700.

That’s money earned with hard physical labor. I don’t qualify for unemployment and haven’t for years.

It’s not something I’m proud of; ashamed is more like it. In the U.S., being poor, unemployed, or underemployed, even during rough times like these, is like wearing a badge of dishonor. You don’t advertise or talk about it. You suffer it—quietly, because no one, really, wants to hear it.

Or, when they do, they seem to have little clue about what it means or how it actually feels, what it does to your sense of wellness, to your sense of place in the community.

“I couldn’t live on that for a month!” a friend recently declared of the $9,000 I earned last year. Then, he smiled, and said: “In a way, you’ve got an advantage over a lot of people who’d probably kill themselves if they had to live on that small of an income.”

I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like a compliment. I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it was a slanted reference to some kind of resourcefulness that the poor are supposed to have when money’s scarce and steady decent jobs with living wages are difficult, if not impossible, to find.

Or maybe it was an unintended commentary on the shallowness of people whose lives are so fully defined by what they earn, what they wear and what they buy that they must kill themselves when those things are no longer within easy reach.

If so, it suggests that greed has made fools of us all. We thought we could have it all, but guess what? We can’t.

I felt sad for anyone who’d want to kill himself simply because he had to live on less. I may be poor, but I’m not destitute. I have friends, I have my health, and that’s plenty, but I’d sure like to pay my rent on time.

I no longer have to juggle my bills; I simply can’t pay them. I live on a wing and a prayer. I’m as resourceful as I know how, but without my friends, without Amber, I would be destitute.

Still, it hurts to be poor.

I get a queasy, sinking and embarrassing feeling each time I drive through town, for example, in a truck that chokes and sputters from an exhaust system that’s about to fall off the chassis. I don’t know a damn thing about trucks. I’d fix it, if I knew how.

I hope no one sees me when I drive through town, the only way, really, to get to work, but they do, and they laugh. I’ve observed them, my own hometown people, laughing at me.

“Hey, your truck smells like gas, really bad,” remarked a village elder recently as I approached my truck parked in front of the liquor store, where he lounged on a plastic chair, resting from his daily rounds through town.

“Yeah, I know. Thanks,” I said, hopping into the small, rusting and disheveled 25-year-old Toyota truck cab. He shook his head in disgust as I turned the ignition. It did smell bad, fire hazard bad, and it choked and sputtered as I drove away.

What could I do? It’s been hard to pull enough money together to buy parts. I need the truck to transport tools to the farm every day. I need the work. I’d take a bus but the bus doesn’t go to the farm, and it would be impossible to carry my tools.

I’ve thought about asking the boss to give me an advance but I don’t like doing it because it just puts me further behind and I hate the feeling of trying to catch up. I don’t like indentured servitude.

I traded some garden labor with a mechanic friend for repair work on my truck. He’ll do the work if I buy the parts. He doesn’t like working on cars but he’s a good friend and he wants to help out. I spent a couple of days weeding, trimming and potting plants in his back yard and earned about 12 hours of mechanical labor in trade.

In the off years, when steady work as a journalist or editor hasn’t been available, I’ve picked up work as a laborer, growing blueberries at the farm and installing landscapes. In fact, in this economy the best job prospects for the unemployed are the military and farm labor.

I’ve already done my military service and I’m grateful for the benefits I‘ve received from it. I picked the latter opportunity, which, as it turns out, isn’t too bad. I like it. Unfortunately, farm labor doesn’t pay that well.

I’ve been lucky up to this point. At 52, I’ve managed to stay mostly healthy and I enjoy the physical labor. But it’s beginning to tell in ways that I never expected in my 20s and 30s, when such work didn’t seem to hurt as much or as long as it does now. The aches and pains are the same, plus some new ones, but they don’t go away very easily, and it takes longer to get things done.

I’m not complaining, but I worry sometimes how much longer I can trade hard physical labor for truck repairs, food and money.

“Jesus!” I declared recently to Amber’s and my own dismay, “Do you realize that in 20 years I’ll be in my 70s?”

“Do you have to talk like that?” she responded.

I don’t like it either but the realization that time passes more quickly with each day hits hard when you’re past 50 and broke and few jobs are available. Like many boomers of late, I have to ask: “How will I support myself when I’m old?”

“A lot of people mistakenly think you’re my sugar daddy,” Amber said recently.

“I am, sweetie, I am your sugar daddy.”

Where do people get these ideas? I haven’t paid my share of the rent in more than two years, not since the economy tanked. It’s been hard on both of us, but mostly on Amber.

“Maybe you could get a job as a bartender,” she said, offering encouragement. “You’re good with people.”

Not really, not that good, I think. I’m an angry white person, a displaced cynical journalist, who’s beginning to understand what it means to live on the financial fringe, to be an economic outcast. If you don’t have money in the U.S., it’s assumed that you’re not a player; you’re little more than a sorry loser.

I’m not saying that’s the way things really are, I’m not saying I’m a loser, but it feels that way sometimes. It feels that way when people laugh at me as I drive past in a smelly, choking rust bucket. The looks I get seem to say, “Why don’t you just fix the damn thing?”

I love my truck and I’ll get it fixed as soon as I can, as soon as my finances allow, and I probably could grow into a likeable bartender. I’ve got other friends who’ve spent their best years tending bar, who would teach me how, but I like what I’m doing. I like growing plants.

Unfortunately, no one tips at the farm.

“When you get the money,” my mechanic friend said, “you’ve gotta replace that leaky exhaust system; it’s really bad to drive around like that. That’s how they used to kill Jews.”

He was born and raised into a Jewish family and says things like that when he gets frustrated at my apparent lack of concern about odorless deadly gas leaking into my truck cab.

“Don’t worry, Larry, I drive with the windows down. Soon as I get some money together, I’ll let you know.”

One disadvantage of being poor, I guess, is that even if you don’t want to kill yourself, you’re much more at risk of dying from hazards such as leaky and broken exhaust systems, or bad tires and brakes, or, as in the case of so many uninsured men and women my age, from unattended ill health.

I’ve been fortunate and I count my blessings for my health, for friends like Larry, and for my partner, Amber, who has picked up the slack where I’ve been lacking. And for the healthcare assistance the Veterans Administration offers to indigent veterans like myself.

The feeling of contributing little, or sometimes nothing, is the most devastating part of being poor in the U.S., especially for a man who is supposed, at my age, to be easing into retirement and living the “good” life, driving a nice car and smoking expensive cigars.

I blame mostly myself. It’s not just a bad economy that’s made things tough. The choices I’ve made have also been a factor. I’m not a “player.” I hate corporations and people who think they’re superior because they wear suits. Were it not for the lack of adequate financing, and feeling bad about it, I’d say my life is pretty good. Why throw it away simply because I’m broke?

“You’ve gotta be yourself,” Larry said as we sat in the garden one recent afternoon. I lamented the lack of a steady, good-paying job. He said: “Not everyone can work the nine to five routine, put on a coat and tie and play the game.”

Think of all the poor damned souls who have sacrificed the better part of their selves just to make a buck, he added. They’re mere shells, not fully realized individuals, even if they do have money and all the toys to go with it.

On the other hand, I thought, how many fully realized individuals do you know in the U.S. who earn less than $10,000 a year? In India, maybe, but not the U.S. Americans are definitely not enlightened when it comes to living on less.

I’ve recently picked up extra work writing for two online publications but it’s tough to get the juices flowing sometimes, especially after a day of working hard in the field, especially in the midst of harvest; and the pay for writing and editing doesn’t appear to be what it once was when print dominated readers’ attention.

Still, I push myself the best I can and try to make the most of my opportunities, and learn to live with less.

Recently, I managed to get enough money together to fix the thermostat, which was causing my truck to overheat. Larry patched it up, put in some new plugs and wires, and said, “OK, let’s turn it on and see what happens!”

I turned the key and she started up without a hitch, and the temperature gauge held steady on the cool side. Great, I thought, at least she’s running cool and on four cylinders now instead of three, thanks to the new plugs and wires.

“Oh Jesus!” Larry cried. “You can’t drive this thing. Turn it off!”

The fuel pump’s gone bad, he said. It’s leaking like crazy. We drove to the auto store for the third time that day, each time buying more parts which, when added together, came to a total of more than $150.

It may not sound like much but it’s a bundle, and a burden, when you’re struggling to pay the rent. Being poor certainly has its pitfalls, none yet that are worth giving up my life for. I certainly wouldn’t kill myself for a reduction in monthly income of $9,000 or more to less than $1,000.

Yet, it hurts me bad when Amber asks: “Are you going to have your share of the rent this month?” And I say: “Well, it’s not looking too good, honey, but at least my truck’s running.” §

You fly, I'll buy

2011-05-31T16:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of guys in shirts and ties board the train in LA.

“Yeah, sure, we could probably add another million dollars in sales if she didn’t have such a volatile personality,” says one as the pair finds seats across the aisle. “She’s a diamond in the rough. She’ll be all right.”

“You’re too soft on your people,” says his companion.

“Yeah, well….” He starts to hem and haw, and concoct a story.

He’s too soft, I think, just as his companion says. He’s probably a lousy manager, no worse than I’ve ever been. I hate managing people. I’m too soft too, like this guy who’s trying to tell a story about giving people a chance.

His companion stops him and counters: “If you create goals, with clear-cut objectives, and set a timeline….”

“I know, I know,” the other interjects, unwilling to hear what his companion is going to say.

I try to listen over the rattling of the passenger car, the frequent whistle, and announcements from the conductor over the intercom, but it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying.

My instincts tell me he’s not saying anything; he’s bull shitting. “What a waste of time,” I think, “put on a shirt and tie so you can spend the day making up stories and kissing people’s asses.”

Time stops for me on the train. I don’t’ do business. I stop, and listen, and watch people; and daydream.

The only diamond in the rough I care about is the one who’s supposed to pick me up at the end of the line tonight. She’s not happy with me; at least she wasn’t the last time we spoke several days ago. I’ve been gone four days and haven’t heard a word from her until this morning.

“I’ll pick you up tonight. Will you be buying sushi?” she wrote in an email.

I wasn’t sure I’d have a place to call home. “You fly, I’ll buy,” I wrote back.

In any case, there’s really no need to worry about home now. The train, as it runs, takes care of all my worries. What else can I do but sit back and enjoy the ride? §

Whose measure of a man: Acceptance

2011-04-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

“Acceptance,” she said as she walked through the door of the coffee shop.

I was sitting at the front counter of the cafe, on the seat closest to the glass door that opens into the place, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper.

“That’s the word I’m getting for you,” she added, closing the door behind her and putting her hand to rest gently on my shoulder. “Acceptance.”

I hesitated a moment, shifting my attention from the usual fare of global catastrophe, cataclysm and revolution, to focus on her word.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“It’s cleaner, cleaner than love. Love is too messy.”

I’d been going through another one of those “looking for love in all the wrong places” phases of my life, and this woman had sensed it, verbalized it and brought it out into the open, where I’d been trying to hide it.

“What’s going on with you?” she had asked me. I was shocked by the question because at the time she was a new acquaintance, a new possibility, and I hadn’t said anything too personal. We were still casual in our conversation and she was an attractive, dynamic older woman who seemed confident and happy with herself.

“What do you mean?” I’d said then as well.

“Ah,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, which she did often, not in a suggestive but in a gently reassuring way, “we’ll talk about it when you’re ready.”

I was ready. “I’m going through a breakup,” I told her.

She explained that she was an “intuitive,” someone who can sense problems in people’s lives and give them something to work with, words like “acceptance.”

“Acceptance?” I responded, feeling somewhat skeptical, having believed that the answer to any problem would always be “love,” even love that might be breaking and falling apart.

“Yeah,” she said, “it starts with you. Think about it: There are no conditions, no judgments, just you and acceptance. It’s totally clean.”

I wanted not just acceptance but love too, which, after she pitched her new word began to feel heavy and weighted, just as she described. I felt a protest against letting go of love.

“What about love?” I said.

“What about love? Look at you. What is love doing for you right now?”

“Lots,” I said, shifting uneasily in my seat. She found the chair next to mine and faced me. “I’ve gone to the moon and back on love,” I said, remembering better days.

“You’re such a romantic. That’s what gets you into trouble. Love is making you miserable right now. Try acceptance.”

She got up from her chair and patted my shoulder as she left to get her coffee and go to work. “You take care,” she said.

Acceptance, I realized as she parted, would mean letting go. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. I wanted to feel something. “Acceptance” left me feeling almost hollow, where love, even love that had gone sour, made me feel something.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I began to let go of love, the more free I felt, the less tied down to emotional outbursts and long days of sadness.

She was right and whenever love becomes a challenge I seem to find much comfort in acceptance: of the way things are, of how I am and how others are, and letting go of the demands of love, which can get ridiculously foolish and loud and confused.

Those who marry say that the institution is a bulwark against what doesn’t work, a citadel of promise to withstand the failures of relationship, even the failures of love, to the point where love becomes a duty, or a burden.

Acceptance is cleaner. I’ve always been suspicious of things that are “cleaner,” but it seems to work well in those moments when what we love does more harm than good.

Yet, I’ve also experienced freedoms in love that acceptance can’t seem to match. That’s the romantic in me speaking again, of course, but the world doesn’t become fecund and fertile merely through acceptance. Or maybe it does. I think it takes more than that.

And maybe it isn’t love, either, that fecundates the world. But the world dripping in the wet fertile stuff of life seems loaded with more color and possibility than simple acceptance. I don’t really know. I like both.

Perhaps it’s a combination of the two—acceptance and love—that give each their power to liberate. §

Whose measure of a man Part III

2011-04-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

When mom recently told me a friend had “died in his sleep” and asked if I was coming to the memorial, I didn’t think I could make it. My first reaction was to stall for time.

“I don’t know, mom….”

I worried about responsibilities at home: The blueberries need tending; they’re getting their first flush of ripening, the harvest is merely days away, and the plants need a lot of care right now. Besides, I don’t earn much as a grower and I can’t really afford to lose any working days right now.

“I’ll buy your tickets,” mom offered.

When she said that, I realized this was about more than finances and whether I could afford to attend a memorial. This was about family, even though I’d not kept close contact with my friend for years. His mother and mine are like sisters.

“Let me work out a few details, mom, and I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

As I made travel arrangements, I thought about him, and how we had met and changed over the years; he and his brother had played on my father’s Little League team more than 35 years ago and our families became fast, lifelong friends.

Growing up, he was cute and cuddly, the pudgy little guy with a winning smile, and the ladies cooed over him. He was a precocious boy who wasn’t afraid to rough things up with the older boys; he could be fearless and full of laughs, and we older kids worked him over pretty good.

His mother, like most Italian women and the women who knew him, doted on him.

He grew up into a man of formidable size, the kind of guy you would like to have on your side whenever you need a hand moving things around or keeping peace at the bar. Fortunately, he didn’t hold any grudges against us for tormenting him when he was a kid.

We didn’t stay in contact much as adults, mostly we knew how well—or not—the other was doing through our mothers. Yet, whenever we crossed paths at occasional family gatherings, he always met me with his huge disarming smile, a handshake and an embrace.

I saw him last at my own father’s memorial less than three years ago. He greeted me warmly as always, and had his own two boys, who appeared to have more of the devil in them than he had at their age. I noticed that he’d put on weight; that he’d probably been drinking a lot; his face was white and puffy. Perhaps he’d been under a lot of pressure, I remember thinking.

Mom said things had gotten pretty bad for him at home until finally his wife of more than 20 years demanded that he get out of the house by the first of the month. Unfortunately, mom added without a hint of irony, the day he was supposed to move out is the day he died.

He checked out in his own special way, I thought. He was having troubles with his heart, mom said, when I questioned her. The doctors had been running tests on him, but hadn’t yet received the results.

“Are you sure he didn’t die of an overdose or something?” I asked. “That just seems awfully young, mom. Dying in your sleep? At 44?”

“I don’t think so!” she declared, sounding surprised, even perturbed. There wasn’t any talk of drugs or an overdose.

***

I reflected on my own discomforts at home and how many times I’ve experienced misery in relationships past and present, how I’ve failed as a man to act as my father had under pressure: with respect, humor and grace, seldom with anger and never with the sting of bitterness, though I know he felt that as well. I’d seen him lose his temper but never his composure or dignity.

I thought about how many times I’ve felt sick to my stomach, dread rolling through in huge heavy waves, and wished I could flush it all down deep into the earth, expel it with one giant emetic purge, wished that I could run swiftly away from the rancor and fear of relationships gone awry, but I stuck with them and suffered indignities because I didn’t think it was manly to run.

I didn’t want to be like my biological father, who it seemed to me, quit when the family he created put demands on him that he wasn’t ready to meet. He became a flyboy. He fled, spawning more families along the way, leaving more fatherless children in his path.

I swore that I would never do that to my child; that I would never flee from my responsibilities, that I would break the cycle, and try to be a meaningful manly presence in my daughter’s life. I stayed physically close but fled in many other ways.

I’ve always tried to be like my stepfather, who clearly chose to stay close to his adopted family. Luckily, he found a woman who loved him, whom he could also love, and children he embraced as his own.

I haven’t been quite as lucky. I’ve picked relationships that haven’t always been good.

I thought of the countless days I hated myself for choosing to be in relationships that rocked me the wrong way, that felt more like kicks in the groin than the bliss of union, relationships which made me feel more miserable than happy, made me think about death more than life, and the many sleepless nights of feeling unwanted, undervalued, or worst of all, not needed. I thought about how these things can turn a man upside down, so that everything he owns, or thinks he owns, comes spilling out of him and the only thing he has left is to turn him self upright, or to collapse into a heap onto the ground.

Sometimes, after long struggle, a man decides he’s had enough, he runs out of gas and gives up, he quits, counter to everything he was taught growing up, things like stepping up to the plate, as my dad used to say, or standing in the gap and “manning” up, or taking it in the gut now and then to stay honest. A man, a good man, can’t be a lone actor. My friend needed his family and they needed him but I think it was too much for him.

Only after quietly assessing my own countless failures, and adding to them heaps of stress from unmet family obligations and a bleak outlook such as my friend’s was I able to understand how he might have taken an early leave of his family, just when they seemed to need him the most, the boys especially.

How else can you explain the sudden death of an otherwise healthy man?

***

At the memorial, odd bits and pieces of his story leaked out through people’s comments—he was having a tough time and had recently come to the Lord—and I felt bad for my friend, for his mom and his two boys. I hadn’t any idea how things had really gotten for him over the years, but from the sounds of it, it must have been pretty rough.

My friend had been out of work for years, he had lost his house and wasn’t making it, and was borrowing money from his mother, according to mom.

His oldest boy, barely into his 20s, had just gotten out of jail for drug use, and an addiction to heroin. His younger boy had been showing signs of trouble, “acting out,” as they say, but seemed to have found a place among the evangelical youth at the church where the memorial was held.

His wife was apparently having trouble staying sober. She, of course, appeared deeply troubled, not only by death, but by a myriad of doubts and struggles that weren’t entirely clear but evident in the sadness of her face, a sadness that seemed unrelated to death, and more to do with they way she lived her life.

An old man with a walker raised his hand to speak at the memorial. He was having trouble breathing as he worked his way down the aisle to meet the pastor presiding at the front of the church, an industrial building converted into a worship space.

My friend had apparently made acquaintances there and expressed interest in its programs only in the last few weeks before his death. Mostly, he came to bring his younger son to the church’s youth group.

The old man grabbed the microphone to talk about my friend: “Five weeks ago,” he said, whistling as he exhaled, “he came to the church here…bogged down…a defeated man…and I asked him to come up here…to pray the prayer of repentance with me…and to take Jesus into his heart.”

It had made a tremendous difference in my friend’s life, the gentleman said; he was a changed man. “Something’s different,” my friend reportedly told him, “I feel different now.”

It feels unnatural to me for a man of his youth, with two boys to watch out for, and possibilities still waiting, to suddenly die.

I’m still taking it in, still feeling the sad undercurrent of dark secrets that leaked into the memorial service, the terrible grief of an inconsolable mother, unattended, sobbing and convulsing, still wondering at the widow’s selection of music to open and end the service, which told of “new beginnings” and jilted love.

I’m still wondering if the oldest boy who just got out of jail will stay off drugs and do what he promised his father during the service, to make him proud and be the man his father wanted him to be, the kind of guy, as one person said, “Who would give you the shirt off his back but you’d better not ever try to take anything away from him.”

If a boy can learn that from his father, if he can learn to be both kind and tough, he’ll be off to a good start in life.

The young man sounded sincere, and there were men there, including myself, who witnessed his declaration that he would get it together and do right by his father. With his jailhouse-shorn head, he even looked up, as if peering into heaven, as if his father was right there looking down at him, and promised he’d be the man now and watch over his mother and little brother.

I was touched by his bravery.

But who will hold him to it? Who will hold him accountable? Which man present at the memorial will make sure he keeps his word? Some of the men themselves seemed utterly lost, or distracted and uncertain, medicated, numbed to dull grief. One or two men stood up to let the boys know they’d be watching out for them, men who were closest to their father.

It felt good to hear them say it; and I know that at least one of them meant what he said.

In some ways, however, the women who spoke at the service seemed to be the stronger sex: “If you need anything,” said one pointing to both boys, “you know that I’ll be there for you.” It’s the same sort of strong declaration I would have received (and often did receive) from my own mother’s friends.

The most certain to speak, however, those who were not plagued with doubt or grief, were our evangelical hosts. Between stories about my deceased friend from those who knew him best, our hosts let us know in no uncertain terms that because he had recently come to Jesus, he had found peace and was now with God.

“I know, that I know, that I KNOW!” the youth pastor howled, assuring the boys and their mother with a steady, pastoral gaze, his arm raised above his head, holding his bible, “I KNOW that he’s in a better place.”

It felt weakly reassuring. I didn’t want to hear about a “better place,” and wondered how anyone could know that my friend was better off now. And I wondered about his family and how much better off they were. §

Today's fruit

2011-04-11T18:50:00.000-07:00

Our berries have begun their ripening.

The older fruit, as seen in the berry at the top this cluster, may have been bitten by an early spring frost and has already begun to turn mushy (you can see it in the crinkling of the berry's skin). The lower fruits, closer to the camera, seem to be OK, plump and juicy, ready for picking.

I've been worried, as usual, about the plants and their health. The berries, as they ripen, place a tremendous amount of demand on the plants for nutrients.

In the last couple of days I've noticed a turning of the color in the leaves from a vigorous green to depleted-looking purple as more fruit ripens. I'm afraid there's not a large enough reserve of minerals and nutrients to meet the demand.

The 5-gallon grow bags in which the plants live have become as much of a liability as they are a boon now that the plants have matured and gotten larger. We were told that the bags would hold up for at least three years, five if we were lucky.

The plants have been in the bags nearly three years and it's clear that the plants have outgrown them and must now find a new home. After this harvest, we'll need to either put the blueberry plants in the ground or transplant them into larger containers.

Our plants draw all of their nourishment from an infusion of nutrients through the irrigation system and I'm afraid that it may not now be enough.

I was advised to try adding potassium. I hope it's not too late.

Whose measure of a man? Part II

2011-04-07T01:10:00.000-07:00

I had what was probably the best example of manhood from a guy who was—I thought as a kid growing up—not very manly.

My stepfather didn’t have the physique of a man who would easily intimidate; he wasn’t built like my “real” father, the pumped-up physical specimen who spawned me but little else. He looked like a New Jersey Italian teddy bear who loved to pass out cigars and pour a good drink when the occasion called for it.

He was the Mediterranean Buddha with a bulbous nose and big belly. He didn’t have a fighter’s body or disposition; but he had a lot of fight in him, and he was pretty good about knowing when to use it, without resorting to fisticuffs.

His most manly asset, though, was his fierce devotion to mom, which counts for a lot in my book. That made him as big a man as any I’ve seen in my life. He took on the role of husband and father where most men might have fled in the other direction.

He assumed the full weight and responsibility of father for children who were not his own, including major expenses such as making sure our teeth were properly straightened.

“There’s my new pickup truck,” he teased when friends came over, and he’d point at me, asking me to smile so they could see my new braces. “Show them my new truck.”

He’d have to wait a few more years before he finally got the truck he’d always wanted but in the meantime he took care of pressing family matters, making sure we all had what we needed first.

My biological father, meanwhile, deserted us when I was four; he didn’t put any time or effort into getting to know me, or my brother. He paid us no attention. He was a ghost in my life, a non-person essentially whose only historical significance to me was that of sperm donor. As a young boy, I’d ask mom what happened to him.

“You’re better off without him,” she’d say. At first, I’d get mad at her for saying such things; I didn’t believe her. How could I be better off without the man who was supposed to be my father? A boy doesn’t understand these things. He assumes that by rights the man who made birth a possibility would also take an interest in his own children.

After a while, though, I figured she was right, that he probably didn’t care, and that indeed I was better off without him, so I forgot about him, except for the one random visit he made to our home when I was about 10 to discuss visitation arrangements with mom and my new dad.

That was the last time I ever saw him. I heard from him once more when I was in high school and he sent copies of the New World Translation of the Bible favored by Jehovah’s Witnesses to me and my brother.

I took my brother outside with our copies of the “bible,” and showed him how we would appreciate the gifts by placing them in the gutter and then I set them on fire. As we watched the thin pages of the bibles crinkle into twisted ash, my grandmother pulled up beside the curb to park her car. She sat staring over the steering wheel, horrified.

“What are you doing?” she demanded as she got out of the car.

“Oh, hi grandma, don’t worry; it’s nothing, just burning those fake bibles Jim sent us.”

I’d gotten to calling him Jim because that’s what mom had always called him, never “your father,” whenever she talked about him, which was rare.

The strange thing was I hadn’t thought twice about burning those books, and didn’t realize the real horror of it until I saw grandma’s face when she drove up. No one in the family valued books more than she did, coming from a family of educators; her mother and aunt both had schools named after them.

For me, it was a kind of purgation.

I wanted to be rid of those books, and the false religion, and the show of some kind of weak Christian love from a man who didn’t want to be a father to his children.

Not long after I was married, I thought of seeking him out, to ask him personally why he hadn’t taken an interest in his two sons, but it was too late. He died when I was 23. He was 45, and had started at least two more families besides the one he started with us.

At that point, it didn’t matter much whether we “hit” it off or got on well. I was more interested in finding out what sort of man he was, whether there were patterns and habits of mind that I might have inherited and whether there was anything about which I should be concerned.

But any such opportunity was crushed when mom spoke up casually one afternoon as she and my wife relaxed at the dining table drinking tea and coffee. I was cutting an apple by the sink. “Oh, by the way, Jim died.”

I didn’t expect it to trouble me the way it did. I didn’t shed any tears, but I was troubled and left feeling vacant by the news. My wife graciously walked over and put her arm around me. I must have felt like a sack of potatoes.

I might not have picked my stepfather as the “ideal” model of a man for a young kid looking for a strong father figure, which is what I wanted. I would have picked someone like my biological father, whose pictures mom kept showed a man with a powerful, muscular build. My one earliest memory of him, in fact, is of him putting his fist through the bathroom wall.

I learned quickly, however, that my stepfather cared with the kind of devotion that shows real backbone. He made a lot of sacrifices, and paid us a lot of attention.

He was our protector, even without the intimidating manly presence a young boy might want in a father.

I’d seen him fearlessly go after people who wronged him or who showed the slightest disrespect, people, for example, who parked their cars in the handicap zone he’d had the city paint on the curb nearest the front door so that grandma could get to her car without trouble.

He run out, no matter whom it was, and he’d confront the offenders, directing them away from the painted curb. Even the scary looking guys complied.

“Dad, you gotta be careful these days,” I said once during a visit to the old neighborhood, “there are a lot of gang bangers passing through the area now.”

“I don’t care,” he said, “they don’t belong there.”

I seldom heard whatever he said to people as they rummaged through his trash; but he’d shoosh! them away too and off they’d go.

“I don’t want people digging through my trash or my recycle,” he’d say, sitting back down into his chair to read the morning newspaper. “I pay money for the city to come pick those up. If they want to dig through the trash, let them go to the dump.” §

Whose measure of a man? Part I

2011-03-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

Mom says, “We were lucky to have found dad.”

She’s right. My biological father, whom I never knew, left home when I was 4 years old. I remained fatherless until mom re-married four years later, hooking up with a New Jersey Italian she met through her sister.

He took us on—mom, my brother and me— as if we were his own. He quickly laid down the law, setting boundaries and establishing family as the end of all things.

As mom says, I was lucky to have been taken under his wing, flawed as he might have been, and through him I learned the measure of a man, enough so that I grew fond of him, loved him, and eventually started calling him “dad.”

For sure, he wasn’t perfect, he couldn’t fix his own car to save his life, yet one of his favorite things to say was that he was like Buddha, perfect in all ways, never to be crossed or taken lightly, and wise beyond reason. My job, he was fond of reminding me, was to “listen.” He even had the belly of a Buddha, which he sported and caressed without embarrassment or apology.

He loved food and he loved women but most of all he loved mom.

Women seemed to love him too, even though he didn’t appear to have Adonis DNA, or the blood of a tiger. To the contrary, he was like, as he sometimes would say, the Pillsbury® Doughboy, soft and cuddly and always available for a squeeze.

It amazed me how the ladies seemed to relax and laugh more when he talked to them. He teased them and they teased back, playful banter and innuendo that made even my young adult cheeks blush. Mom could just as easily roll her eyes as participate in such discussions, which were not her forte.

Nonetheless, dad was fiercely devoted to her; he defended and protected her in ways that are only now becoming clear to me as I watch her adjust to widowed life after nearly 45 years of marriage. She seemed to have fewer cares then, he wouldn’t allow her to become anxious or worked up and made sure her needs were well met.

They were a good team: She took care of him in the old-fashioned way of preparing meals and keeping him well-fed while he protected her the best he could from need or harm.

I seldom heard dad argue with mom; their arguments, he’d say, were no one’s business but their own. That’s why, when they needed to discuss something that might get heated, they took their personal business behind closed doors.

My own spats with him were few but memorable.

During a rough patch, when as a union man he feared there might be a labor strike, and that he would no longer be able to support his adopted family, he enjoyed a cocktail more than usual, but otherwise kept his temper and rarely flared, even when things were really tough.

One night, though, we got into an argument. I was 17 and wanted to go out with friends who were driving down to the beach for a party. My parents said, “No.”

I got angry and started mouthing off to dad. He backed me against the wall and put his hands around my throat. He’d had enough of my teenage rudeness, back talk—which he hated—and foolish attempts to be more independent.

“Take your hands off me,” I said, “or I’ll fight back.”

That didn’t seem to scare him and he kept me pinned against the wall. I could smell his breath and see the frustration in his face.

“You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” I said.

Immediately, he let go. It was the first time he’d ever done anything like that. I think it shocked us both. I stormed out of the house that night and walked the streets until my anger subsided, but it took years, I think, for us to fully recover, and for me to grow out of my boyish ways.

Less than one year after my first and only physical confrontation with my father, however, my parents told me, “We’ve decided that you’re old enough now to pay the consequences for your own decisions. We’re not going to tell you what do to any more.”

Finally, I thought, “I’m a man.” §

Angry white people

2011-03-25T18:42:00.000-07:00

I always find it amusing, if not sad and a little trite, when someone claims, “I’m not a racist.”

It’s usually followed by the qualifier “but…” and then a list of complaints about a particular ethnic group.

I recently received an email that’s making the rounds, subject line “Buchanan to Obama,” in which the conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan presumably wants to have a “two-way” dialog about race.

Fair enough, you might say, until you get into the heart of his message; which has the same “I’m not a racist but…” ring to it that seems to be making polite rounds in conversational and email circles these days.

Before we get to the “Buchanan to Obama” message, however, there’s a note at the beginning, from someone, probably an angry white person—it’s never clear where or how this “not a racist” message originated—which says: “Finally............It is Said Publicly. I have never seen the white side explained better! Pat Buchanan had the guts to say it. It is about time.”

Never mind that the introductory note is riddled with errors in composition more common to grade school spellers than to those who think critically and ask questions about where they’re getting their information.

Never mind that it’s clear from the beginning that this is the “white side” of the story that is seldom told out of fear of being politically incorrect.

Never mind the little squiggly American flag, waving at the top of the message indicating that patriots will not want to miss this important word from an angry white person.

The note alone is usually the first thing that causes me to press the delete button on these electronic circulars, which do more to diminish rather than promote democratic thinking, dialog and debate.

If you haven’t noticed, lately, the quality of public discourse in the U.S. seems to have gone into a steep decline. I don’t expect it to get better any time soon, not when we can hurl more than a hundred million-dollar Tomahawk missiles exploding into the North African desert while handing out pink slips to thousands of teachers across the nation. (The late comedian George Carlin pointed out not so long ago, the United States doesn’t bomb white people, only brown people.)

Perhaps I romanticize the notion too much, that we could give more of our public time and attention to ideas and conversations that actually improve our lives rather than degrade them. I find few things more degrading than racism (or even the hint of it, as in “I’m not a racist but…”), and lack of education.

I get these well-meaning e-circulars from friends and family, attached with the email addresses of previous senders, who then forward them to others and on it goes, until they get to me. I usually trash them but sometimes, out of curiosity, I have to check them out.

When I find one that is utterly or even partially false, I’ll send the correct information to all whose names appear in the previous forwards.

This one, as it turns out, is for real, and is taken from a passage of one of Buchanan’s syndicated columns. In “A Brief for Whitey,” published March 21, 2008, Buchanan argues that whites cannot be blamed for high rates of crime and illegitimacy in the black community, that whites should not be held responsible for problems they did not create.

“Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America?” he asks. “Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?”

In fact, the overriding message is that blacks in America should be more grateful for all that whites have done for them. And this is the central message of the e-circular.

“First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks,” says Buchanan. “It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”

Here’s where I have the most trouble with Buchanan’s and other angry white people’s thinking. What does Buchanan really know about “levels of freedom and prosperity” experienced by blacks?

Yes, Christian salvation brought to life some of our nation’s best activist churches, mostly black, during the Civil Rights movement, but Christians, especially U.S. Christians, have also been known for less charitable acts of righteousness, like slavery.

The worst part, I guess, is the subtle justification of bringing 600,000 slaves to the colonies so that we could cultivate and groom them, through several hundred years of brutality and servitude, into free and prosperous citizens of a freedom-loving state.

“We hear the grievances,” he says, but “where’s the gratitude?”

Yeah, where’s the gratitude? Thanks for Jim Crow, and segregation, and thanks for economic inequities that never make it into the mainstream conversation about race in America, but thanks most of all for a country that knows very little about racism.

Let’s not get into the racial issues of why statistics for crime and incarceration are “higher” among blacks than whites. Let’s not weigh the odds of how 300 years of brutality against people of color have become embedded into our national psyche and value system.

Let’s stay focused on the importance of being earnest and saying, “Thank you, America. Thank you for uprooting my ancestors so that I could be born in a free country to enjoy this nation’s endless opportunities and great prosperity, to have avoided the perils of the backwards jungles of Africa.”

That’s the message of Pat Buchanan try as he might to couch it in the vernacular of “angry white guy is tired reverse discrimination,” where blacks are given “unfair” advantage over whites through affirmative action or other entitlements.

What’s not said, however, is that without these programs, which may indeed have spent their usefulness, blacks would still be fighting (as some still are) for the right to vote, let alone attend the university of their choice.

“OK,” concludes the nameless angry white person who originally sent out this important message, “will you pass it on? YES. I did but will you? Because I’m for a better America. Sorry. I am Not racist, Not violent, Just not silent anymore.”

NO. I don’t think so. I won’t pass it on, because I’m also for a better America, and I too refuse to be silent. §

Police harassment and intimidation in SLO County

2011-01-21T19:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I received some friendly advice that it’s better to “lay low” than put myself on the radar of local law enforcement.

My friend had heard me complain on the radio last week that the recent Narcotics Task Force arrests of more than a dozen medical marijuana distributors lacked the force of law, and was intended merely as harassment and intimidation.

Local law enforcement has made it clear that medical marijuana, which is legal in this state, won’t be tolerated in San Luis Obispo County.

Talk show host Dave Congalton at 920 KVEC asked me to come on the air because I’d spoken out in the past when the sheriff’s department overreached its authority by setting up and taking down Charles C. Lynch for operating a medical marijuana dispensary in Morro Bay.

Lynch was later sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison, much to the distress of 9^th U.S. District Court Judge George Wu who sentenced Lynch. Federal law gave Wu little choice, the judge said, but to send Lynch to prison.

The Justice Department, even after newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced it would back off from marijuana cases, was fierce in its prosecution of Lynch, demanding that he serve a minimum five-year sentence.

The judge thought better of it.

It was clear that Lynch had committed no real crime against the community. He wasn’t the big drug lord that the government tried to make him out to be. He was dispensing large quantities of “medical” marijuana, to be sure, but, unfortunately, federal law and the U.S. court system refuse to recognize “medical” as a legitimate claim. The term “medical,” in fact, was ruled out as a means of defense in Lynch’s case. Lynch became another victim to the War on Drugs.

Lynch, who now must submit to regular and random drug tests, recently declared bankruptcy, and remains free pending the appeal of his case.

Sadly, Lynch’s cross with the law seemed fueled not so much by federal agents as by local Sheriff Patrick Hedges, who acted more as sheriff provocateur than sheriff protector, and made known to residents that he would not tolerate the sale and use of medical marijuana, even though voters had already made it legal, and California’s then-Attorney General Jerry Brown had provided the necessary legal guidelines on the issue.

They weren’t the clearest guidelines but the intent was clear: Medical marijuana, within certain parameters, is legal and should be protected in the state of California.

Meanwhile, the sheriff’s department and the Narcotics Task Force, whose job it is, I presume, to enforce local community laws and standards, have continued to ignore those guidelines. Instead, they enforce their own interpretation of the law—as federal operatives, in a sense—not as it’s written, which is to serve and protect the interests of law-abiding citizens, including those who sell, distribute and use medical marijuana in the state of California.

Sadder still is that, as a result of overzealous law enforcement, Lynch’s life as a businessman and homeowner, has been completely wrecked: He lost a thriving business that had been welcomed and supported by the City of Morro Bay, he filed bankruptcy and faces losing his home. To what end?

Whose interests were being protected and served?

His life will never be the same; and neither will those children be the same, who watched recently in terror as armored police burst into their home, forced everyone at gunpoint to the ground and needlessly hauled their parents off to jail. The parents were later released after the district attorney dropped the charges.

The message? Don’t mess with the “cowboys,” as they’re called, who make up the San Luis Obispo County Narcotics Task Force.

Unfortunately, what the NTF is doing—without oversight from the pubic or any other local agency as far as we know—is not law enforcement; it’s intimidation and harassment. It won’t pass muster in the California legal system, and it’s a terrible waste of precious resources.

It’s also bad for business, bad for the local community, and makes the cops look like renegades.

My friend is probably correct in suggesting that I keep my mouth shut, which seems to be the consensus among many who live here in San Luis Obispo County: Don’t cross the law; keep your mouth shut. People here are afraid to speak out. That in itself ought tell us something about the sort of “law enforcement” we have here.

Why should anyone but actual criminals be afraid of cops?

I’m not against law enforcement. I’m against law enforcement that uses terror to bring down non-violent suspects such as medical marijuana growers, distributors and users.

Frankly, I don’t want to be on anyone’s radar. Like most people, I’d rather be left alone. But I refuse to “lay low” when law abiding-citizens are being unjustly harassed and thrown into jail.

That alone ought to send shivers down the spines of anyone who cares about their safety. Any time the police can break down your door with hardly a second’s notice in the middle of the night and throw you around in your own home, you’re not safe.

I detest the pervasive use of SWAT tactics—designed to overwhelm and subdue violent criminals—to arrest distributors and users of marijuana, medical or not, who have no violent criminal past and who, if they were stoners, would be the least likely to resist.

Too much can go wrong, as it did recently in Utah when police got a warrant to raid a home using SWAT methods on the fear that the suspects inside might respond with gunfire.

A guest, unbeknown to the police, was sleeping in one of the rooms, and responded to the pre-dawn raid by grabbing a golf club to fend off the intruders. He was gunned down and died on the spot, not an uncommon occurrence in the endless, costly and useless War on Drugs.

It’s only a matter of time, so long as local law enforcement continues to imprudently apprehend medical marijuana providers and patients, before someone is seriously hurt or killed.

More tragic still is that those who were targeted by local law enforcement in the recent raids weren’t even violating the law. They were, again by most news accounts, in compliance with California laws that regulate the use of medical marijuana.

The district attorney has already dropped charges against three of the people who were arrested. Likely as not, any charges that do stick and go before a judge will also be dropped. In any event, a court case from these arrests ought to be welcomed as an opportunity to show how out of line local police have been.

Recently a judge in Montana couldn’t even seat jury because potential jurors said they would refuse to convict someone for possessing a few buds of marijuana. The defendant faced felony charges of “criminal distribution of dangerous drugs.”

The judge in the case was confounded by the citizen revolt and said he’d never seen anything like it before. Be sure to witness more such citizen revolts if police continue to cross the legal line of enforcement.

If the tone of Congalton’s frustrated listeners who called the station and complained of being unfairly targeted for growing and distributing medical marijuana is any indication, courts in this county will also have a tough time finding citizens who support the NTF’s local war on drugs.

I don’t know much about the Narcotics Task Force, a state-mandated agency supported through the participation of local police departments; I don’t know where its budget comes from, or who oversees its operations. I do know they’re members of our community, they’re “out there,” spending countless hours spying on and attempting to entrap legal medical marijuana distributors and customers. It’s a terrible waste of time, money and energy, which could be better spent preventing real crimes.

We also know that without the support of our local lawmen, the NTF would cease to function.

Too often I hear people say, “What can you do? The cops will do whatever they want.”

Only if we let them, only if through silence and complacency we turn our backs and “lay low” to avoid getting into the crosshairs of police who don’t respect the law. As long as no one speaks out, lawmen will continue to harass and intimidate law-abiding citizens whenever they please simply because they don’t agree with the laws we’ve enacted with our votes.

That’s not law enforcement; it’s harassment and intimidation. §

For the sake of argument

2010-12-09T23:40:00.000-08:00

I drove straight to Jim’s place, hoping to put to rest any doubts or hard feelings that might remain between us.

We’d had a failure of communication—our first—a few days earlier. He got angry when I challenged him about Sarah Palin, whom he admires: “Do you really think she’s qualified to be president?” I asked. It’s the same question he’d asked me two years ago about Barack Obama.

He snapped, thrust his truck into reverse and started to pull away, grumbling something, before he stopped momentarily, stuck his head out of the cab and yelled, “You tell that Steven character to pay his rent on time or I’ll just turn the water off!” He backed out of earshot, furious, and drove away.

He’d come out to check on me, as is his custom, to see if there was anything I needed, to talk about water use in the two-acre blueberry enclosure my friend, Steven, rents from him to house, feed and water 1,500 thriving plants. I know Steven is responsible and would get current as soon as possible—if he had gotten behind, which isn’t so rare in these tight economic times.

I got the feeling that Jim had been harboring other resentments and had simply had enough, and burst out in anger. I didn’t take it personally; I’d never seen him act this way before, not since I started tending the blueberries nearly three years ago. Our conversations have always remained civil, even when it includes politics, on which we seldom agree. I never thought he’d get upset over me asking him about Sarah Palin.

The drive up to the farmhouse winds through Jim’s well-tended orchards and can be treacherous on some corners if you’re not paying attention, dropping off suddenly into a ditch or clump of trees. It’s about a half-mile or so past the packinghouse, workers’ quarters, and the blueberry enclosure. I seldom drive up that way unless absolutely necessary.

I thought about just going straight to the enclosure, set my worries aside and let Jim settle. In time, our differences would abate. But I’ve seen how things left unattended can quickly turn sour, how one seemingly “simple” misunderstanding can turn best friends into bitter rivals or enemies, and make families into unbearable hornets’ nests.

Believe me, I know.

My brother, for example, hasn’t spoken to me, my mother, or anyone else in the family for nearly 20 years; maybe more, I’ve lost count. He’s refused to make peace, not enough even to send flowers or a word of condolence when mom suffered the loss of her husband of 45 years, a stepfather who treated us like his own sons.

His refusal to settle with our stepfather before he died made no sense, and his icy unwillingness to send a note of sorrow to our mother felt needlessly harsh and mean. I wanted to lash out and make him suffer the way I had seen our mother suffer over the many years he’d stopped talking to her. I felt the cold drowning force of bitterness trying to choke down my own grief. “He’s such an asshole!” I said. “How could he not even send flowers?”

It all began with what was an apparently “simple” misunderstanding, not unlike the one I’d just experienced with Jim, when a word or statement is misconstrued, and if left unattended, breaks the bonds of friendship or tears rifts into sacred family connections.

It’s unfortunate because many people pay a heavy price for these hardened feelings, which only become harder to break as the years pass.

I like Jim and didn’t want him to think that I meant any disrespect, didn’t want our misunderstanding to grow into something worse. We may live on opposite ends of the political spectrum but I don’t want it to become an obstacle to friendship.

I’m impatient with things hanging in air, with uncertainty, especially when it comes to friends and people of close acquaintance. It drives my roommate crazy that I want to “fix” things right away.

“I can’t settle things as quickly as you would like,” she argues.

I would rather have gone straight to the field and waited for another day to make amends with Jim, I would rather have gotten busy with work and forgotten about our differences, imagined or real, but I knew that wouldn’t work. I needed to make peace.

I kept thinking about the New Testament admonition of Jesus, who tells his followers that if anyone has anything against them, a complaint or a grudge, it’s better to go and make peace with that person first before going to the altar, the place of worship, to meet with God. Make peace with your brother first, he says, then go and worship.

I haven’t been to church in a long, long time. The blueberry field has been my sanctuary, a more welcome refuge than most—a place of quiet, with few distractions, and opportunities to find clarity. It’s like going to my own place of worship, where every day, in the silence of the vast open sky and surrounding hills, I encounter something much larger than myself, something that makes me glad to be alive.

I could feel some of that slipping quietly away as the days passed without a word from Jim. I was sure that he had taken offense and probably didn’t quite know how to say so. I was sure that the longer I lingered without going to him and straightening things out, the more likely a rift would form, potentially ruining a good thing.

“How hard can it be to make peace?” I asked myself on the drive up to his home. I’d never really thought about it out loud until now, the cost of making peace, the courage it takes to face another who may have a grudge or other legitimate complaint and attempt to make things right. It’s not as easy as it sounds. “How could anyone who wants to make peace get hurt?”

I decided to run up to Jim’s place to see if he was there and tell him, “Hey, I hope there aren’t any hard feelings between us, Jim.”

Usually, when we talk politics, Jim’s good-natured and keeps his sense of humor. He’s never lost his composure. Our differences are not unlike those of other Americans divided by politics; he listens to Rush Limbaugh while driving his truck around the farm. I can’t tolerate Rush for long, not before I begin to think what an enormous misinformed blowhard he is.

On one occasion, Jim drove up in his truck, blasting the radio with Rush Limbaugh’s churlish voice, which he listens to every day on local KVEC. He turned down the radio, popped his head out the window, as if waiting for a sound, and yelled, “What! You’re not listening to Rush?”

He knows I don’t care for Rush. “I don’t have a radio, Jim. I just listen to yours as you drive around the farm,” I shouted back.

Thankfully, Rush is on for only a short time in the morning, and Jim also occasionally likes to listen to the Rolling Stones or other early rock n’ roller’s from his days as a ‘60s rebel. Mostly, though, the farm is quiet, unless the tractors are running close by or the packinghouse is busy.

Jim drives busily up and down the farm’s dirt roads, monitoring his orchards, watering systems, or charging the batteries of a tractor, taking care of problems before they happen—if he can get to them in time. He’s busy and industrious, often getting into scrapes such as rolling his truck on its side while trying to move a fallen tree.

I have a great deal of respect for Jim. He’s been good to me, a complete farming neophyte rescued from the ravages of journalism. He’s gotten me out of jams when the irrigation has sprung leaks, or he’s brought tools I didn’t have on hand, and has offered advice on weed control and other farming matters.

Despite our political differences, he’s been a good friend.

Jim likes to share his story of attending the original Woodstock, where he subsequently met up with some hippie organic farmers and got hooked on a lifetime of farming. Along the way, with nearly 200 acres to tend and a family to support, however, he’s changed a lot of his ideas, including how to farm.

“The whole organic thing’s a sham,” he said once. “Well, maybe not entirely,” he added, “I know a few organic farmers who are doing OK. But how many of the people you know who eat organic are actually environmentally responsible? Don’t they all drive cars? Fly in airplanes?”

He’s been farming for more than 35 years, and he’s meticulous, keeps the machinery running smoothly, takes care of breakdowns as they happen, and doesn’t rely on factory mechanics to do it for him for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. He does it himself.

He likes to get things done and doesn’t have patience for people who don’t pull their share of the load. “I get up at 5:30 every morning because I’ve got things to do,” he complained recently. “I don’t sit around and wait for things to happen.”

When I finally caught up to Jim, he wasn’t at the house but down by the enclosure, pounding on a wall in the washroom of the workers’ quarters with heavy mallet. “This is how I work out my frustrations,” he said, after I told him I hoped he wasn’t offended by anything I’d said the other day, and that I didn’t want politics to become an issue between us.

“Yeah, that’s all right,” he offered. “I got a little excited. I’ve had a lot going on.”

A tenant had failed to pay rent since August, he added. The tenant has pleaded for time, telling Jim he’s working on a re-build of a car he plans to sell, and he just needs a little time. “Well, it’s been over three months, he hasn’t sold his car and I haven’t seen a penny.”

It was this and a few other things, like the cancellation of a big order and a family emergency, Jim said, that set him off the other day when he drove away.

“Still,” he added, “I don’t know what the big deal is about Sarah Palin. She’s just as qualified as anybody to run for president. I think she’d make a great president.”

I kept silent, saving that argument for a more appropriate time, biting my tongue to keep from pointing out that Sarah would hardly make a great president if she couldn’t complete her first term as governor. This wasn’t the time for debate, which will come soon enough, but for mending, and making peace. §

Who loves war?

2010-11-16T22:45:00.000-08:00

America loves war.

It struck me most plainly tonight when the waitress asked if I’d like a plastic bag in which to take home some chili.

I mentioned that L.A. had recently come down hard on plastic bags, which was probably a good thing, the waitress said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I replied, “there are a lot of things we could do without, or if we have to have them, we could at least find a way to make them so that they have less impact on the environment and use up less energy.”

It started a discussion on how our dependence on petroleum reaches into virtually every aspect of our lives: plastics, personal care, travel, commerce, housing, credit cards, you name it.

“We can do better,” the waitress said. “We have the ingenuity to tap into renewable energies, create jobs, and build things that won’t destroy the environment or kill us.”

“Then we wouldn’t have to send our armies and navies overseas to secure a resource that is clearly limited and won’t last forever.”

“Jeez,” she said, “did you have to go there?”

It’s hard not to go there, to where American taxpayers’ dollars are being wasted on mayhem and murder, when we could be spending our resources in more creative and less wasteful ways.

It’s hard to fathom why, when so many Americans languish without jobs, and education, mass transit and other delivery systems in the U.S. are in such shambles, we are spending so much money to conduct an endless war overseas.

But we’re a culture steeped in death and war. We love to battle, which we promote everywhere, in film, games, toys, at the mall, on university campuses. The U.S. war machine permeates our whole culture.

We love grace under pressure, gallantry, machismo, the rule of law, integrity, a sense of duty, commitment, the willingness to rise above, stand alone, face the enemy, and fight for love of country.

We’re a warrior culture, however, with an ethos based less on the glories we publicly espouse—the carefully selected words we use to promote selfish interests—and more on an indignant—steeped in hubris—sense of entitlement, the idea that we can have it all, anything we want. Everyone else be damned!

Take nothing away from the brave soldiers who fight our wars, although I know many who think the whole military enterprise is a complete sham.

George Carlin, who knew his time was short, spoke bitterly in the final season of his life about war and those who participate in it: “If you’re dumb enough to join, you deserve to die,” he said.

I don’t go that far but I understand what Mr. Carlin must have been feeling. He’d seen enough of the waste of war to know there’s plenty of sham in it.

And who, after living through a series of conflicts and wars doesn’t begin to see it for themselves? Who does it really benefit? Who gets rich off of war?

The men and women who go to war for us are not to be blamed for its stupidity.

The problem arises from a lifestyle the rest of the world has only dreamed about, a lifestyle of extravagance and excess that we have come to expect and demand, and will have to change, if we want to avoid the inevitable demise that comes to a culture driven by the violent ethos of war.

America built so much of its wealth, and its lifestyle, on oil and now, as oil reserves become more scarce and more dangerous to extract, we go to even more drastic measures to ensure its continued flow.

We send our armies and navies overseas not to fight terrorism so much as to secure our one and only—but increasingly less—reliable energy source. From the perspective of empire, it makes perfect sense. Secure the cheapest energy available so we can continue to enjoy our “lifestyle,” which is held up before us as a sacrosanct, non-negotiable entitlement. Few of us really know what it means, however, beyond getting what we want.

But from another perspective, one that doesn’t necessarily include war, it doesn’t make sense at all to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to feed a machine that destroys rather than builds; that poisons, maims, and kills rather than feeds, heals and creates life.

Sen. John McCain recently suggested that U.S. military spending could be trimmed by $100 billion. Imagine what could be done if we put $100 billion into education or healthcare or alternative and renewable energies. I’ve been called simplistic for arguing this point, even from those who agree that endless war will end badly.

But it doesn’t require much imagination to see the possibilities of limiting overseas adventures, which rob our national treasury of resources that could go into long-term innovations that will help reduce our dependencies on cheap oil.

I’m not a pacifist but I do know that most wars are stupid and unnecessary. They ruin rather than create prosperity. At some point, it becomes more imperative to build and renew, to innovate and create industries that will move the nation forward than to try sustaining an economy based on cheap oil and war.

“What’s holding us back?” the waitress asked. “We all know that eventually we’ll have to consume less, innovate and create new industries that aren’t based on oil.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “no one I know is holding us back. Ours is an economy literally built on dinosaurs.”

“Well, the people at the top, the people in Congress, sure haven’t done much to move us forward.”

“You got that right,” I said. §

I'm ready for that change, Mr. President

2010-09-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: A fuller, more recent version of this story was published as the cover article in the October 2010 edition of Cold Type, an online magazine with "Writing worth reading from around the world."

As I write this, a collection agency is leaving another annoying, threatening message on the answering machine.

The voice is petulant, measured and all business.

I’ve just walked back into the house to make a call of my own after starting up my work truck—a 30-year-old beast that backfires and sputters—and finding the gas tank too close to empty to go anywhere but to a gas station.

I’m literally running on empty. Unfortunately, I don’t have any money to buy gas.

Once the publisher of a literary magazine, I now work as a farm laborer and love being outdoors and away from the crowds, but I don’t earn enough money to cover my basic expenses, nothing in my pockets, and nothing in the bank.

So I came back into the house to call my girlfriend. I need at least $10. That will get me enough gas to drive to the farm where I can put in a few hours and earn some much-needed income. I know, it’s pathetic, but what are my options?

I’ve been looking for work since the economy crashed two years ago. I’m one of the “long-termed unemployed,” those who don’t receive welfare payments and who no longer count in official unemployment figures.

I struggle to collect my thoughts but, even with the voice machine turned down, I can still hear the annoying bottom feeder trying to get money out of me.

“I’ll leave my number with you one more time in case it wasn’t clear…”

Oh, it’s clear, all right. They call six times a day. How could it not be clear? Our only recourse, given we can’t afford debt relief services, or even to file for bankruptcy, is to ignore them.

The bottom fell out of the American Dream and all we do now is hope we can pay the rent. We’re cutting way back on everything, even things we need to stay afloat—like gasoline.

Ironic, that gas has become the symbol of my worst poverty ever. Gas has always meant going places, getting things done, getting to work on time. Now, I have barely enough quarters to put a gallon in my tank.

I’ve been poor most of my life, but never like this, not to the point where I can’t buy gas to get to work.

As the nation reels from economic woes unlike anything since the Great Depression, we’re finally beginning to realize that the American empire’s attempt to control the world’s oil reserves has had a devastating impact at home.

Cheap oil isn’t cheap any more.

But neither are cell phones and phone lines, which we canceled. Whittling our expenditures hasn’t hurt so much as the grinding, demoralizing effect of not having enough money to cover our basic needs.

I’m almost certain that my circumstances are caused as much by forces beyond my control as they are by failures of character. Still, it’s hard not to feel like a loser when every day six of the 10 messages on our message machine are from collection agencies.

I heard of one collector who, when informed that his potential victim was already holding down two jobs, barked: “Well, get a third job!”

If only it were that easy.

My only consolation on days like this comes from knowing I’m not alone. I’m not alone in my poverty, my anger over government handouts to corrupt bankers, or my frustration over the lack of jobs.

Few people I know have money to spend, their savings are quickly disappearing, and they’re living on less, much less.

Numbers indicating the bleak outlook on the economy keep appearing in the news but they don’t really mean that much to me. They don’t move me in any particular way other than to say, “See, it’s the economy.” But the numbers don’t tell the real story of how so many millions of Americans are struggling.

“Unemployment rose a fraction last month to 9.6 percent,” says one recent report. Tens of thousand of jobs have been created but not enough to sustain a healthy “recovery.”

Meanwhile, bankruptcies and loan defaults continue to plague us as bankers, recently padded with taxpayer dollars, refuse to renegotiate troubled loans and mortgages.

Some prognosticators say we’ll never be the same; wages will never be as high as they once were, homes never as expensive, and banks never as loose with their money. It will be at least 10 years before we can expect a recovery.

Until then, economists say, we’re in for even leaner times, worse than what has already passed. I shudder to think about it. The unrest at home seems to be mirrored throughout the neighborhood and beyond. So many people appear, like me, unsettled, angry, and financially depleted.

The lack of a vision that upholds the interests of all Americans will do that. So will endless war and a failure of leadership. Our current president won office through the promise of change and a real hope for the future.

Sadly, I find myself echoing Sarah Palin: “How’s that hopey changey stuff workin’ for ya?”

What I’ve seen so far doesn’t inspire much hope: The middle-class in America, what’s left of it, has fallen on hard times, malcontents have hit the streets, complaining of socialists and Muslims, and religious nuts threaten to burn holy books, while the government throws billions of dollars down the drain to fight the longest war in our nation’s history.

All of the precious resources we’ve wasted on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m certain, have contributed to the failure of our economy—the billions of dollars that might have been spent on projects at home have surely depleted the national treasury, as did the massive bailout of the banks.

And what have we gained from it all? Where are the jobs? Where’s the money for small businesses? What’s happened to education and the infrastructures that enable fluid commerce and industry? What, really, were the benefits of two wars and the largest cash delivery in history?

Now, it seems, we stand at a precipice, where we vainly await the long, slow and elusive but hoped-for recovery. After two years, however, I’m tired of living so close to the edge of disaster.

I’m ready for that change, Mr. President.

Like millions of other Americans grappling with the demoralizing impact of poverty, I continue to hope for the best. I hope that, somehow, things will get better. Meanwhile, I’ve set my sights on lesser dreams. I’m scaling back and learning to live with less.

My girlfriend arrives in time to hear the fourth collections call of the day. She hands me $10 and a few dollar bills. “Will that be OK?” she asks.

“Fine,” I say, “I just need enough to get to work.”

As usual, we ignore the petulant caller leaving another annoying message on the machine. The collection agencies, obnoxious as they are, don’t scare us. They’re the least of our worries. §

Field Notes: Watering without a timepiece

2010-08-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

I can’t remember today’s date. It’s been one of those kinds of weeks.

In my field notes, I write down: “Aug. 8, 2010 Mon.” It’s actually August 9, 2010. My watch, the one that belonged to my father and which my mother gave to me after he died, is broken. It’s not keeping time properly. I’ll get it fixed when I can get enough money together.

I feel somewhat challenged without it. There are other ways to monitor the irrigation but I’ve grown accustomed to turning my wrist and checking my watch to make sure I haven’t gone over my 15-minute maximum of watering each section of the field.

For a few moments after arriving at the farm, I wonder how I’ll monitor the irrigation without my watch. There are eight sections to water, each with about 200 plants. About 15 minutes of watering ensures a full moistening of each plant’s precious roots. It’s not too hard, however, to tell when the plants have had enough water.

After 15 minutes, little pools of wetness form around the bottom of the grow bags and saturate the surrounding weed mat on which the bags rest. I decide to eyeball today’s irrigation time. When the weed mat gets wet, I’ll turn the water off.

At first, I protested the idea of wearing a watch, even though it belonged to my father. My mother insisted that I take it, which I did. Eventually I got used to wearing it, and I appreciate having a memento from my father, whose death nearly two years ago still unmans me.

It’s not the kind of watch to wear while working on the farm. It’s an evening, go-to-town watch, a Seiko Quartz. My dad enjoyed getting dressed up and going out. Young women have given me doubletakes after noticing the gold wristband beneath my work sleeve. I’d like to think it’s me they’re ogling but, at 52, I’m pretty sure the looks are for the gold band and watch.

It’s probably not a smart thing to do, wearing a fine watch like this while laboring on the farm, but what do I know? I’ve never worn a watch until now; I never felt the necessity of it. I’ve gotten used to wearing it and if I didn’t wear it to the farm, I’d never put it on because I don’t get out enough.

I protect it the best I can.

Recently, while attending a party at a friend’s ranch, which attracts the usual suspects from the area’s original hippie population, a woman considered an “earth” mama, blurted out in front of a group of friends: “Stacey, what are you wearing a watch for?” Her contempt for timepieces was clear as crystal.

I got suddenly self-conscious, put my hand over my wrist as if absent-mindedly considering taking off my watch. Her question wasn’t playful, friendly, or even conversational. It came off like a snob-filled, judgmental statement, not a question.

It reminded me why so many of my friends hate hippies. “Buncha lazy-assed hypocrites,” says one friend who can see right through the plasticity of people who think they’re better than others. Of course, not all hippies look down their noses at Establishment trappings such as gold timepieces.

A whole bunch of thoughts went through my mind: “She doesn’t even deserve an answer…. This is my father’s watch…. I like to know what time it is.” I looked upwards and gauged the time by the sun’s position in the sky. “Sure, I could live without a watch. I did it for nearly 50 years….”

I fumbled with the watch, rotating the band on my wrist until finally, I thought, “Fuck her! I’m wearing this watch. What the fuck difference is it to her?” It pissed me off. I didn’t know what to say and stared at her as she sat lazily in her lawn chair in the midst of a crowd of friends who stood in a circle above her, chatting away. I wanted to say: “How come you’re such a fat ass?”

I went with my first inclination, which was to ignore her.

The leaves of the plants are turning up and away from the sun, exposing their undersides to the light. I’ve never seen them do this. It worries me a little and I make a note of it.

It amazes me how lively these plants are. They put on a new show every day: Changes in color, erectness, growing and dropping leaves, blooms and berries.

I’m always a little surprised at how dramatic the changes can be in the space of even a few hours, depending on the time of day or year, the levels of temperature, light, wind, and humidity.

Several plants appear limp, especially the young shoots that have begun appearing in recent weeks. The new leaves hang limply, as if fallen and defeated, or protecting themselves from lack of moisture. I check the bags and the soil feels dry. It won’t hurt if the plants receive more water than usual today, I decide.

I don’t really need my watch, but I sure miss having it on me. §

Fourth of July in Cayucos

2010-07-03T22:55:00.000-07:00

I’m raw and unbalanced, hung over from a bout with beer and whisky. I skipped going to work today. It’s gray, overcast and generally gloomy.

Besides, it’s a Saturday, and a Fourth of July weekend. I hate working weekends, especially holidays, but I’m getting used to it. In this economy, few can afford to turn down work.

I awakened early, before 7 a.m, and rode my bicycle to the park to practice aikido, a Japanese martial art designed to defuse conflict, with a friend. It’s been a long time since we’ve done this. It helps me keep an even temper.

Even with a hangover it felt good to tussle and talk. We usually talk politics and the economy. He hasn’t worked in nearly four months; I’m barely employed, working as a farmhand and laborer.

“There’s no work around here,” he says. “I may have to drive down to San Diego to pick up work.”

He’s a union carpenter and, until recently, supported a family of six; the last of his four children graduated high school last year. Finances aren’t as critical now as they used to be. Still, like everyone else, he needs to pay the bills.

“If I was smart, I’d find something to do with the military; that’s where all of the money is.”

Everyone but the banks and military is bankrupt, I say. “What’s wrong with this country?” We launch into another frustrated, cynical litany of ills that plague our nation: Militarism, greed, corruption in government and business, a weak economy and an empire in decline.

“This can’t go on forever,” he says, “we’re more than a trillion dollars in debt.” If anything, the message of the last two years of economic failure has been: The party’s over. The excesses of our revered material lifestyle have drained our accounts and left us empty handed.

Most Americans, hopeful as ever, seem to think the party has merely lapsed into a sustained lull. Things will get better, they say. The markets will regain their vigor, jobs will become available, and spending will save the republic.

Glossy red, white, and blue plastic streamers wave in the wind from houses along Ocean Avenue, which runs through the middle of Cayucos, the small California coastal town where I live, where tomorrow floats and troops of scouts, drill teams, and grass-skirted dancers celebrating the Declaration of Independence will march in a show of America’s love for “freedom.”

Cayucos loves a parade, and its freedom. Our small town plays host to more than 20,000 visitors during the Fourth, who come to celebrate their freedoms by eating hotdogs, playing in the sand, and shopping at the "Peddler's Fair," known by locals as “crap on the creek,” mostly throw-away junk.

The word “freedom” gets tossed around pretty easily these days, as if we all agree on what it means: Freedom of the press, speech and religion; the protection of personal effects from government search and seizure, the right to trial by a jury of peers, the right to bear arms.

More often, however, “freedom” becomes an amalgam of unspecified ideas and feelings, which patriots will defend to the death, about what it means to be an American, which usually includes waving the flag, getting goose bumps during the singing of the national anthem, and chanting “U-S-A!” at soccer games.

Upon closer review, this muddle of feelings and ideas about freedom just as likely arises from the belief that Americans are unique in exercising their right to get rich by whatever means possible, to spend money freely without end or hindrance, even when there isn’t any to spend.

“Freedom isn’t free,” we’re told in countless bumper stickers meant to remind us of the sacrifices that have been made on our behalf. Soldiers, mostly young men, have given their lives to ensure we continue to enjoy the clear advantages of being an American, including the right to spend our diminished earnings at any outlet of our choosing.

Fourth of July, as often as not, has come to be celebrated not so much for the Declaration of Independence from tyranny as for America’s great military empire and raw technological power, which still has not squelched terrorism, but nonetheless allows us to conduct full-scale war without the requisite sacrifices at home.

We can still shop at Wal-Mart and spend freely without guilt while others shed blood in foreign lands to stop the amorphous terrorist cell sprouting everywhere like a cancer across the globe.

“The military isn’t protecting me,” Patrick says. “My tax dollars are supporting the slaughter of civilians. That’s not independence.” Independence is being able to protect yourself, he suggests. “I don’t need the military to do that.”

In my weakened mental state, I don’t argue the point. He’s right, the War on Terror, as most wars, was a sham from the start. We still haven’t caught Osama bin Laden, our invasion of Afghanistan has become America’s longest-ever war, and the Taliban is as strong as ever.

“Why are we spending all our money over there?” he asks. “We need it here.”

Already, chairs have been placed in a mass claim for seating along the parade route. Police tape has been pulled through lines of chairs, marking seating sections between groups of the nearly 20,000 spectators who will gather for tomorrow’s parade.

They come from all points: San Francisco, Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles. It’s the busiest day of the year for our little town of less than 4,000.

The parade features the usual Independence Day amusements: Spectators waving American flags, young gymnasts cartwheeling, local bands rocking on flatbed trucks, grannies dressed in patriotic colors, waving to the crowd from old jalopies.

Once, an outfit of youngsters from Fresno, dressed in paramilitary uniforms, marched crisply in rigid formation, looking distressingly similar to the Brownshirts who helped the Nazis in their rise to power.

“I’m not that patriotic,” Patrick says. “It’s all a gimmick.” If they can get you to believe their story, such as “we need this war,” he adds, they can get you to do anything they want.

Last year, one of the grass-skirted matrons from a beach-chair drill team bolted from the formation as it approached the entry point of the parade. “Hey!” she waved, beckoning me to wait for her. She threw her arms around my neck, firmly pressed her middle-aged buxomness against my body, and planted her lips on mine.

The rank smell of alcohol at 10 in the morning assaulted my senses. Before I could pull away, I felt her tongue probing my mouth. “Yuck!” I turned my head away and slipped out of her arms. She ran back to her group as if nothing had happened.

Cayucos is a friendly place. “Did you see that?” I asked my girlfriend.

“What?”

“She just put her tongue in my mouth.”

“Yeah, right.”

You never know what’s going to happen at the Cayucos Fourth of July parade, but one thing’s sure: Just about everyone here’s proud to be an American, with or without their hangovers. §

I never thought it would be like this

2010-04-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

Worried that I might sink into a hole, squeaking out an inadequate living as a part-time farmhand, mom suggests that I look into an opening at Fairhaven Memorial Park and Mortuary, not far from where she lives.

“They’re looking for a funeral director,” she says excitedly.

“Mom, I’m not qualified for a position like that.”

“You might,” she responds. “You’re good with people and you’re low-key.”

I try to imagine myself—sober demeanor, faint smile, slight signs of hope and compassion carefully constructed across my face, voice subdued—doing the business of a funeral director: “So sorry for your loss. How may we assist you?”

A warm, professional grasp of the hand and on to the next order of business. “So sorry for your loss….”

“Mom, thanks. I’d really like to stay in the field I grew up with. I like stories.”

I’ve spent most of my adult life pursuing stories for newspapers and magazines. I grew up believing that there’s a place for stories that present life not as another promotional campaign but as it is actually lived by real people. Unfortunately, the market for these kinds of stories seems to be dwindling.

“You could get a whole bunch of stories working at a mortuary.”

“I’m sure I could mom.”

She tells me it’s worth looking into; the job has been advertised for more than three weeks, she adds; they might just consider me. “It doesn’t look like they’ve found anyone.”

“Mom, that’s what businesses do; they run an ad for a few weeks, build up a candidate pool, and make their selections.”

“Well, you could look into it, get some stories, write a book and get rich.”

“I’ll look into it, mom.”

It’s not a bad idea, really. There’s likely to be more job security in this business, of course, because there’s never a shortage of dead people. It’s unlikely to be a dead-end job (no pun intended), and the story possibilities…well, you’d have be six feet under not to see them.

I go online, find the mortuary website and locate “career opportunities.” The site lists openings for Assistant Sales Manager, Family Services Counselor, Sales, and Operations Manager.

I click on operations manager, curious what duties such a position at a mortuary might entail. Assign holes to be dug? Bodies to be dressed or cremated? Gravestones to be lifted, set into place? Coffins to be bought and sold?

The ad reads: “Premiere…mortuary seeking an individual looking for a challenging opportunity that offers the ability to grow and develop a strong employee staff.”

The “challenging opportunity” sounds interesting but the ad offers no details. I can only imagine the possibilities: “Hey Hector! How come you haven’t filled that goddamned hole yet? It was supposed to have been done yesterday. We have another graveside service scheduled in the next plot at noon. What’s taking you so long? … The furnace broke down again? Damn it! We’ve got five stiffs whose ashes we’re supposed to deliver by morning….”

As for growing and developing a “strong employee staff,” I like people but have never felt comfortable managing them: “Here’s the deal guys, I’m used to working a deadline, just not at a mortuary.”

Unfortunately, they want an “experienced manager with a minimum of 5 years of funeral home management experience.” That eliminates me right away. The call volume of “over 700 cases” a year I could handle. Hell, I used to handle almost that many calls in a week as a newspaper editor.

Additionally, the job prefers an individual who’s a California licensed funeral director. That’s probably a good idea. Someone with a license can be expected to get the job done right. No Maxwell House Coffee cans as urns in this business.

Next, the Family Services Counselor’s duties include “promotion of the funeral home through public relations.” Well, here’s another opportunity to create stories. “At Fairhaven, everyone’s dying to get in….”

I hate public relations. I agree with the late comedian Bill Hicks, who said that people who earn their living convincing others they should accept things that aren’t true, or buy things they don’t need, should just go ahead and kill themselves. “You’ll be doing a public service,” he says.

I also hate sales and skip over the remaining ads, so much for career opportunities in the funeral business. The year 2010 seems to be the year of deflated career options.

The latest reports suggest that many boomers like myself are working at “survival” jobs such as checkout clerks at chain hardware stores earning $10 an hour; or the lucky ones have found positions for which they are severely over-qualified at slightly more than $10 an hour and far less than the six-figure salaries they had before the economy crashed.

“I never thought it would be like this,” they collectively groan. “I was supposed to retire and spend my golden years taking it easy.”

In a recent Frontline episode on PBS, “Close to Home,” which features a local hair salon in the upscale Upper East Side of New York City, a woman in her mid-forties laments: “I’ve had to borrow money from my mother just make ends meet.” She’s embarrassed, and surprised that she’s admitting her sudden unexpected dependency as an adult.

A former middle-aged executive who’s been out of work for more than two years admits he never anticipated long-term unemployment. The hardest hit age group in the U.S. for periods of unemployment lasting two years or longer are people 50 and above.

And so it goes, as regular salon customers complain of their reduced circumstances: “I never thought it would be like this.”

Welcome to the economy of dashed hopes, where nearly an entire generation is forced out of retirement to survive the sudden loss of personal financial resources built up over a lifetime, where careers have been severely downsized or eliminated entirely, and where a banking industry on the verge of collapse, recently bailed out by the federal government, refuses to renegotiate home loans for people unable to make ends meet.

So far, we seem to be taking it in the shorts without much complaint, but here’s what one struggling homeowner recently said he’d do if the bank refuses to renegotiate: “If the fuckin’ bank comes after my home, I’m gonna call my buddy, who’s gotta ‘dozer, and I’m gonna have him bring it over here, and I’m gonna get on that thing, drive it off the trailer and plow it right through the middle of that fuckin’ house. And you know what? I’m gonna tell the bank, ‘You can have your piece-a-shit house.’”

Another friend recently called me a “malcontent” because I’ve never been happy with the status quo, with the little bit of truth or good that squeaks out of Washington, D.C. or Sacramento; I’ve never quite trusted Wall Street. I do, however, see something positive in the crumbling condition of our global banking and business enterprises, which seem to have forgotten the smaller economies of Main Street.

We’ve been challenged to reduce consumption, to find more sustainable models for doing business, to turn to our neighbors and friends for help and support, and to think independently from the “experts” who run our government and industry.

In my own neighborhood, we’ve talked about how to grow more of our own food, and ways to earn a little more money by selling the surplus, and saving money by doing more of our own repairs. Maybe it’s a pipe dream but already one of our own opened up his yard as a nursery because he can’t find enough work as a landscaper.

Selling plants won’t make him rich, he says, but it’s a better alternative to having nothing.

I’ve never lived so close to the ground, planting, tending crops, working as a farmhand, as I have in these reduced circumstances, thinking how much better it is to be above ground eking out a living than to be below ground pushing up daisies.

Still, there’s enough uncertainty and desperation in this economy for people like my mother to suggest that maybe, just maybe, her malcontent of a son might qualify for another ground-breaking endeavor. I won’t waste my time pretending that I might qualify for such an opportunity, but at least it’s an opportunity. §

The nexus of my grief

2010-03-03T18:19:00.000-08:00

My life has been mostly a train wreck since the economy suffered a near-collapse way back in October 2008.

I say “way back” because everything moves so quickly now; it feels like ancient history.

But several possibilities are likely: I’m broke because I’ve never made getting rich a priority, never fared well in the money economy, and some things, like voraciously greedy bankers, are simply beyond my control.

The forces at work today have made an already bad situation worse and seem to have burdened many others besides me.

A neighbor told me a friend of his who retired from pouring concrete 10 years ago is back on the job, just to make ends meet. He’s older, in his 60s, but thank goodness he’s got his health.

“It’s better than nothing, I guess,” my neighbor said.

“Yeah, but it’s a shame that someone who’s already worked so hard to enjoy his last years working less has to go back to the grind.”

“Oh, he doesn’t mind. He’s gotten used to it. He’s adjusted. At least he’s working.”

A lot of people seem to be making these “adjustments,” coming out of retirement, buying fewer consumer goods, picking up groceries at the weekly church food charity, and moving in with family to reduce expenses.

And not everyone’s lucky enough to be working. Fortunately, I’m working but not earning enough to cover the bills. I’ve also thought about calling up family to ask if I can stay with them to ride this thing out.

Last week, a fellow blueberry farmer asked me to give him a heads up if we had any additional work.

One of his tenants, a landscaper who was among the first to employ me last year when my magazine folded, needs a job.

“Oh, you bet. He’ll be the first to know,” I said. “He’s a good guy. Always pays on time.”

“Yeah, well, he’s having a really tough time right now,” the farmer said.

I’ve got barely enough work to keep one person busy. I’m mowing, weeding, tending the irrigation system, and making minor repairs. Soon, I hope, we’ll be harvesting.

Lately, I’ve wondered what future I have in working as a farm hand. Like the guy who pours concrete, I’m adjusting, making the most of a bad economy, but more uncertain about life than ever.

Print, which I grew up loving, went out of fashion just days ago, it seems, and has suffered its worst losses since the big crash. More than 30,000 journalists have lost their jobs in the past two years.

Online publishers, claiming a lack of funds, have taken advantage of writer angst and desperation, either severely reducing the amount they pay, or not paying at all.

The “free” mantra that governs the Internet has made it difficult for publishers to claim any proprietary interest in the material they post. Publishers better learn quickly they’ll never control content as they did when print reigned supreme.

It’s everybody’s business now. It’s open game for any and all; readers contribute and shape the news as much as the suppliers; and no one dare try to sell the stuff.

Additionally, digital space appears to demand less content with lower quality. I hope I’m wrong.

A recent episode of Frontline, Digital_Nation, showed that our young, who were brought up in this high-speed digital world, think they are capable multi-taskers, able to work on their computers, send text messages on their phones, eat lunch and have conversation with their friends all at the same time.

Studies are beginning to show that the more we multi-task, the more our dialog suffers. We simply can’t absorb all the data that kids today claim they can do with ease. They’re not that good at retaining information. They consume and write in bite-sized chunks. They can’t sustain a narrative beyond three paragraphs.

Everything comes in bits and pieces. The word, which once held a higher place in our public discourse, comes cheap. We don’t pay for words any more.

The complete devaluation of the word has made making a living nearly impossible for old schoolers like me who enjoy reading and writing stories that last more than three minutes.

I try not to begrudge the circumstances. The rush to throw up everything online will finally settle one day and, I hope, rest upon more established values than speed and efficiency.

I hope that we haven’t lost our appetite for stories, or our respect for storytellers.

My neighbor told me that he was also making adjustments, realizing that nothing lasts forever, accepting the inevitable—loss, change, and finally death.

At our age, we come to accept these things because there’s no use fighting them. The key, we agreed, is to embrace the changes, make the most of what we have, and move on.

That doesn’t make it any less painful. Rather than avoid the pain, though, we both agreed it’s better to grieve our losses. Why pretend that a train wreck doesn’t feel bad?

“I’ve had a hard time not getting sucked into the idea that this is a cold, mechanistic, and cruel world,” he said. He’d gone away last week and asked me to take care of his chickens. When he returned, he discovered someone had broken into his home and stolen some cash.

“I can’t think of anyone who would do something like that,” he said, more hurt by the possibility that it might have been someone he knew.

My girlfriend said later: “These are trying times; you’d be amazed at what some people will do when they’re desperate. Even among the ones you think are your best friends. If a person’s hungry, it doesn’t take much to justify stealing from another.”

My neighbor said he counters his negative thoughts with the belief that nature seeks exuberant expression; life energy finds its fulfillment in flowering and reproducing. We can choose to celebrate or rue our lives. Nature asks us to find joy, he said.

“The only way I know how to do that,” I said, “is to grieve. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, doing my best to let things go. I may never publish again. I may end up a farm hand for the rest of my life. It’s not what I envisioned when I started out…but I’m doing the best I can to embrace the changes.”

He looked at me a moment and then asked: “What is the nexus of your grief?”

I didn’t know what to say. I thought it was the disappearance and destruction of an entire industry—a way of life that I thought would last forever. Maybe it was the loss of a common story, a shared experience.

“I guess I haven’t gotten over the loss of my dad, who died just over a year ago,” I said. He nodded. “Or it could be that I have no idea how I’m going to make ends meet.”

“Money,” he said.

“Yeah, money. Sad isn’t it, that the lack of money could make a person feel so bad?”

Not even money can take away a person’s grief, I decided later, but it offers the illusion of safety and protection. It buys us small escapes from our misery.

The nexus of my grief probably goes beyond the loss of jobs, or money, or even of family; it seems to go much deeper than that, to the moment of my birth perhaps.

What I know most of all, however, is that it has connected me to my neighbor more concretely than online social networking, more simply than a smooth-running economy, and just as completely as any train wreck. §

On a full moon after the rain

2010-02-28T03:37:00.000-08:00

Great horned owls hoo-hoo in the trees across the street. Their deep, resonant calls echo through a canyon of hills surrounding our home.

The moon shines full on a landscape sodden from recent rains, two inches in a matter of hours last night.

We sit at the foot of a reservoir that has been mostly dry these past few years and is probably little more than half full now, even with the wet winter we’ve had so far.

Gov. Schwarzenegger warned not long ago that if we had one more dry winter, water conditions in California could become “catastrophic.”

I’ve celebrated the several storms that have swept the California coastline these past few weeks, keeping my fingers crossed that the dam containing the reservoir would hold and that mudslides in the state would be few.

So far, we’ve been lucky.

We’re still not entirely in the clear, but we can breathe a little sigh of relief that rationing water this summer will be much less likely than it was even a few weeks ago.

I knew this storm would be the one to get us. It rained all night. Two inches wouldn’t ordinarily make a whole lot of difference. But the ground is already saturated after weeks of heavy rainstorms. We found two feet of standing water beneath our house today.

I woke up to a cryptic email this morning: “Here are some websites to check out while you await the tsunami.”

I wanted to get outside and check the rain gauge, see what, if any, damage or flooding was caused by last night’s rain. The last time someone warned me about a tsunami it was my daughter calling me on the phone at 10 p.m.

“Dad, there’s a tsunami coming.”

“That’s not funny, Anna,” I responded. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I’m serious, dad. There’s a tsunami.”

I’ve since learned to take such warnings more seriously. Realizing this morning’s email was a tongue-in-cheek warning, I went online and checked the news, and learned of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile today.

A tsunami advisory had been issued for the entire Pacific coastline.

For some reason, the hooing of the great horned owls makes me feel at ease, even after I’ve gone to bed for the evening. In the middle of the night, they call from different locations around the hills, flying between cypress, pine, redwood and eucalyptus trees.

Sometimes, they seem to call from just outside the bedroom window. I don’t mind. I like hearing them sounding the hills as they hunt, or mate; I like knowing that they can cut through the night with deadly precision and silence, stalking their prey.

The great horned owl is a formidable bird of the night. Its powerful talons grip and tear, its wings beat like clubs, and its beak is razor sharp.

I heard my neighbor Claude rummaging through his garage outside this morning, cursing and tossing planks of wood.

I went outside and walked up the hill to scan for slippage, new openings in the earth, where rainwater might have rushed in and caused erosion. The great horned owls spend a lot of their time on this hill.

A steady stream of runoff flowed from the next yard over, Teresa and Tim’s place, and down through Claude’s backyard, dropped a few steps and into the back of his garage.

“Damn it!” I heard him say.

I like this neighborhood because we’re the last out post where the wilderness meets the edge of town. Only five houses on the street, which dead ends at the bottom of the reservoir that ascends nearly 200 feet above us and opens to miles of wilderness.

Osprey and eagles occasionally soar hundreds of feet above the dam. Flocks of migrating birds pass overhead nearly every day.

The enormous earthen dam was built in 1961, with a capacity of more than 40,000 acre feet of water (enough to cover 62.5 square miles in water a foot deep). That’s a lot of water.

I try not to imagine 40,000 acre-feet of water crashing down the valley, which is shaped like an enormous toilet bowl.

If the dam ever breaks, a wall of water will swish around the hillsides, flushing everything in its path—houses, trucks and trees—down to the ocean barely a quarter mile away.

From the ocean side, a sizable tsunami would come into the valley and do essentially the same thing from the other direction.

With the dam towering nearly 200 feet above us, it gives us the illusion that everything’s fine. We can’t see the enormous body of water behind it. Out of sight, out of mind, except when it rains.

I think about it every time we get rain. I think about the hills sliding down on top of us in one huge wall of mud and debris.

The owls don’t talk much during the rain, but tonight it’s clear. The bright full moon throws its bluish haze over everything; it drips in through cracks in the curtains and lights up the room.

There’s plenty of food for the owls, which will carry animals two to three times their weight; they’ll eat rabbits whole, take out skunks and raccoons, and occasionally snag a dog or a cat. Their hoo-hoos give me a feeling of reassurance. The system works.

The runoff had piled up in Claude’s garage. Water had soaked several pieces of choice wood he’d stacked on the floor. We pulled the good stuff off the floor and he dried the place out as best he could.

We followed the flow of runoff and traced it back to Teresa and Tim’s place. She came out to investigate.

“Hey,” Claude started, “I was thinking of putting a few sandbags down to keep the water from your yard running into mine and into my garage.”

“You’re getting water?” she responded.

Her husband came out and the four of us watched as the water pooled near some of Teresa’s flower pots and then ran down into Claude’s yard.

“I could probably dig a little trench right here,” Claude said, stepping past her flower pots and to a low spot that ran between their yards and away from his garage.

“Or,” Teresa’s husband suggested, “we could just move some of these pots and see if that helps.”

“I’m not moving those,” she shrieked.

“Why not?” Tim asked.

“It’s just going to open up a whole can of worms,” she complained, “and I’ve gotta babysit the grandkids today.”

She made such a fuss about it, I walked away thinking: “You wanna see a can of worms, try looking into Claude’s garage.”

She was so unwilling to be inconvenienced. Tim, her husband, later moved the pots himself, allowing the water to flow freely away from Claude’s garage.

Claude finally got the place aired out and dried up a little bit.

The owls have been quiet for a while, and now the cat fusses to be let outside. I don’t worry about the owls attacking our cat. I’m more worried about the coyotes. The rain has stopped for now.

The surf pounds in the distance and the surges of ocean water from the tsunami ceased hours ago.

Claude and I rode our bikes down to watch the ocean before the sun went down. A crowd of young people danced and teased as the water lapped at their feet. Tomorrow I’ll finish pumping the water from underneath our house. §

Between ministry and sports writing

2010-02-25T09:17:00.000-08:00

Tustin News Publisher Bill Moses took a deep breath, relaxed back into his leather chair, interlaced the fingers of both hands, and rested them on his chest. He gazed at me.

I had just asked him for a raise.

“You know I’m letting you be sports editor at my expense,” he finally exhaled.

I was earning $4 an hour, had just graduated from college and was beginning to develop a loyal readership.

“Really? That’s what you think?”

The area boasted numerous competitive high school sports teams which frequently dominated the playoffs and won state championships: football, girls basketball, soccer, baseball and water polo, a beehive of sports activity, including swimmers training for the 1984 Olympics.

I’d taken the sports editor position after completing an internship as a reporter at the weekly newspaper in the town where I grew up.

There were three high schools in the city, all jockeying for space in the local sports pages, wanting to be recognized for their hard-won battles and scores. Good sports pages meant devoted readers, subscribers, mostly parents of kids whose only glory might be to score the winning goal or to win an actual high school championship.

My readers let me know where they stood. They wrote letters to the editor, talked to me at games, told me secrets and asked me not to print things.

I got to know their kids, whose names and pictures I’d run in the paper.

I freely quoted the young athletes and let their color and personality show through, adding depth and drama to the sports pages. The feedback from readers was mostly positive.

Coaches encouraged their players to talk to me about their experiences during the game, how they suffered a beating or outsmarted an opponent, and to get used to the needling of sports writers.

This was especially helpful for those kids who planned to compete in college, a coach once told me: “It’s good for them to learn early on how the press can really fuck things up.”

Quoting the prep athletes was fine as long as opposing teams couldn’t use their printed words against them. “If I ever hear of an opponent using something you printed as a way to get back at us, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

Overall, covering local high school sports had been a positive experience.

I liked working at the Tustin News, even though it wasn’t something I wanted to do forever. For now, it was a fun first job as a reporter.

The only problem was that my wife and I couldn’t afford to live off $4 an hour. “What are you going to do if he refuses to give you a raise?” she asked.

“Hell, I could get a job as a janitor for $4 an hour,” I said. “I’ll give him my notice. If he doesn’t want to give me a raise, I’ll go somewhere else.”

Bill pointed to the many errors I’d let pass, told me that it wasn’t cheap getting me up to speed as a page editor. He was spending a lot of money on the presses right now and wasn’t sure he could afford any more expenses….

“I’ve never hung you up, Bill.”

“Once.”

“When?”

“We were late and it cost me a bundle.”

“If you remember, Bill, my pages were already finished when the ad department decided to throw another ad into the sports section, and not just a small ad but a quarter page. I had to cut an important story and shift things around.”

He lifted a hand from his interlaced fingers, and gestured for silence. We’d already had this discussion about late presses.

“Let me think about it.

Bill seldom gave pats on the back. As long as you didn’t hear from him, you could safely bet that he was satisfied with your work.

The next day, I stepped into Mr. Moses’ office ready to turn in my notice. I’d quit if he persisted in telling me that he was doing me a favor. I had nothing else lined up and nothing, really, to lose.

I’d already given up a chance to go into ministry.

Before going to work at the newspaper, I had been offered an associate pastor position at the American Baptist church down the road.

Pastor Hollywood, as my wife’s family liked to call him then, sat me down in his office one evening to show me that he had worked out the numbers and figured out a way to create a new position in the church budget. He only needed to get approval from the board of deacons.

The pay would have been about the same. The only difference was that the church would cover some of my seminary expenses and, down the road, a housing allowance perhaps, eventually a congregation of my own.

I liked Pastor Hollywood, even though he could sometimes come across as puffed up and buffoonish. His mantra, and his mission, was: “Bless people’s hearts and lives.” In spite of his sincerity, it always came off as a little bit vague.

He believed in me and allowed me to speak to the congregation whenever the spirit moved.

He wanted to build a family of believers, who’d gather weekly to pray, read and study the Bible, sing hymns, and occasionally sit down together for meals. He loved church barbecues and held them as often as he could.

He was more social than spiritual.

He kept a proud demeanor, with wide, grandiose waves of the hand as he blessed the congregation. “May the Lord bless people’s hearts and lives through you as you go about your week,” he’d say, his hand and arm passing over the flock.

He held his head high in the pulpit, slightly tilted, like an enormous sea bird, chest puffed out, feathers extended in a showy spread, which is how he earned the nickname “Hollywood.”

His showiness, however, always came across as a little bit stiff, as if God personally held him around his mid-section with a firm hand and turned him this way and that as he preached.

He looked down his nose at the congregation. Not in proud disdain but as one who’d once been raised to new life. The new life had long since disappeared but he still kept the composure of a child whose father was king.

He wanted to grow the church, he told me, and needed a younger associate to provide support and bring in new, youthful energy. “The board will probably go for it if I can show them how to work it out in the budget,” he said.

Pastor Hollywood’s offer appealed to me on several levels:

• The job would give me plenty of time to study and pray; and I’ve always liked time alone, although God presumably is never far away, if not occupying the same space—even in our most troubled, indecisive moments.

• I liked the idea of passing on a message of hope, letting others know they were never entirely alone and always loved, no matter who they were or what they did.

• I liked the experience of grace, of unmerited favor from a person whose love is unconditional, forgiving and kind.

• I could socialize, put off a real job for a little while longer, explore church life more deeply, and learn the ways of the Spirit.

• I might find a calling, a place for my best self to excel and shine as a beacon of light and grace.

“I have to warn you, though,” Pastor Hollywood told me, “just as many seminary students are as likely to turn bitter and leave the church as they are to find a place in it.”

He meant well and spoke the truth and it scared me. I had no plans of becoming bitter and leaving the church, but I could see how it might happen. Seminary students were among the most miserable people I’d ever met.

There were no guarantees, I decided.

Even with God on my side, I was learning, there would always be some measure of risk choosing a path, especially one that meant working in the church.

Prayer, the heart enlightened by the gospel, God’s truth, the Bible—all these would serve as signposts, I was told. When they all fall into alignment, I was taught, then I’d know without a doubt which way to go.

Unfortunately, most of my major life decisions had already been fraught with troubling doubts. The three-point method of discerning God’s will—aligning the heart through prayer, fellowship, and reading the Bible—made sense in theory but seldom worked out for me.

Does God want me to be a preacher or a journalist? Does God even care? More often, I stumbled into my opportunities and made my decisions based on what felt right and made the most sense.

I had worked hard in college to master the basics of journalism. I wanted to write and tell people’s stories. My parents, who were more interested in how I would support myself than in my ideas about following God, had pointed me to a career in journalism.

“You’re so nosy,” mom would say, “you’d be good at it.”

“I’m not nosy, mom. I’m curious. And I like talking to people.”

“Well, you are very social,” she’d add as if that was the same as being nosy.

Putting great stock in the Christian ethic that a child, no matter how old, should respect his parents’ wishes, I followed their advice.

In the end, faced with the choice of a career in ministry or journalism, I chose the latter, learning quickly that my professors were right: “It’s not a career where you’re going to make a lot of money.”

I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake choosing a career.

Bill Moses wasn’t religious as far as I could tell but he was a good Republican. He spent as little money as possible to keep his news business running. I was convinced that he certainly wasn’t going to spend another penny on me.

At a minimum, I would have appreciated at least 25 cents an hour more; an hourly rate of $4.25, but I’d already given up the possibility. I was ready to quit.

“Well, Bill,” I started, “I was thinking about our conversation yesterday….”

He stopped me mid-sentence. “How about $5 an hour?”

I didn’t know what to say. It seemed a huge increase. If I’d known better, I would have asked to think about it. Play out the drama. But I was too elated, realizing that he valued me enough to make such a leap.

“That sounds good, Bill.” It was the start of a long bumpy career that today has been devastated by the digital revolution. §

In the blur of an oak

2010-02-06T01:45:00.000-08:00

There’s a turn in the dirt road that’s almost a blur to me, except for the fact that it’s both beautiful and dangerous.

I slow down first because it’s a blind corner and second because it dips dangerously fast into the creek 30 feet below.

One slight missed turn and a tumble down the steep embankment would easily be the end of a life.

The only safety net is an old oak tree growing out of and over the embankment. The road becomes most narrow, and the turn most dangerous, at the point where the spacious oak stands.

I’ve wanted to stop here, stand by the tree, protected by its cover, and listen to the creek recently washed with rainfall. It’s wild, green and alive here.

But it’s too narrow and dangerous to stop.

At the bottom of the turn a red tail hawk sits at the top of a post, watching over the fast-flowing creek. There’s a place where I can park and take in the view.

Lately I’ve been in such a hurry to get to the farm, I haven’t taken the time to stop. So far, it’s mostly a blur with occasional side-glances at the tree and the creek below as I pass by carefully, watching for anyone coming around the corner.

The road is surprisingly busy with trucks from Arizona, farmers on quads, electric service and delivery vehicles, tractors and pick-ups with surfboards on the rack.

The dirt road has turned slightly muddy and it’s slippery. I can see the tread of wheels and the mud they’ve splattered onto the road.

Today’s not a good day to stop. Despite the rain, and the slippery mud, the road has been busy.

In fact, as I make another less treacherous blind turn in the road, I’m startled when a middle-aged man in a ball cap, face gleaming in the gray of recent rain, speeds by me on a quad, the four-wheel workhorses farmers use to tend their fields, check on workers, and repair irrigation.

He didn’t even let up the gas but sped along, smiling brightly, as if he’d been set free from something, without care, fearless.

His cheerfulness brightened me as I kept saying to myself: “Everything’s going to be OK. Everything’s going to be OK.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the area about an heiress of the Arm & Hammer fortune purchasing property here, 3,000 acres some say. At least there’s been a lot of activity—new fences, a new corral, and plenty of trucks from Arizona.

“She brings her workers here from Arizona; that’s where she’s from,” a local resident told me recently. “She won’t hire Californians, at least none from around here. They’re not good enough.”

Most of the crew building the corral drove trucks with Arizona license plates and they worked day and night until they finished the job. Within days, they were bringing in cattle.

I could tell her crew was a different breed, even before I saw their license plates. Everything about them seemed large, like the desert, and imposing.

“She works them like dogs,” the local told me. “She hires only the best.”

I don’t know why but my first thought when I saw the guy in the ball cap was that he probably works for her. He didn’t look like someone who was being worked like a dog. He looked more like management.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to manage a farm. You’d have to grow up with it. I don’t see how it could be done any other way.

I had yet to face my worst danger, still ahead, one that had started the day before. I was happy to be out, testing the road, driving as safely as possible, wishing I’d had the confidence and reckless glee of the man on the quad.

I’d barely averted a disaster, a result of ignorance and a sudden need to relieve myself in the unoccupied workers quarters, the nearest building with functional toilets. You don’t sit on these toilets. You squat. There’s no paper. You bring your own.

I had turned on the irrigation to test the lines and make sure they were drawing solution from a tank with sulfuric acid. In my haste to get to the bathroom, I’d improperly turned off the system and water had backed up into the tank.

When I returned minutes later, the poly tank looked as though it was about to explode. It had expanded and solution was trickling down the sides. My stomach turned ill. I panicked.

Fearful that it was too late, I walked to the other side of the field, distraught and sick to my stomach, imagining an environmental disaster in which acid pours into the creek and the end of my farming days; I collapsed to the ground and sat and waited for it to explode.

I thought of Zorba the Greek, as everything around him turns to shit, and he takes it all in. There’s no time for whining or groveling, he says. Be a man! Take your medicine!

When I realized that it wasn’t going to blow, I returned to the sputtering tank, released the pressure by opening the lines to irrigate the field. A small amount of solution had trickled out onto the muddy clay. The rains were coming.

I wasn’t too worried about it reaching the creek and if it had there was enough water flow to dissipate what might have spilled into it.

Still, I made a call to the supplier. “ I think water got into the line,” I said, “and the tank started sputtering, trickling out solution.”

It should be OK, he told me. “Everything’s going to be OK,” I told myself after we hung up.

The next morning I began researching the hazards of working with sulfuric acid and remembered that I had left a wrench on top of the tank, which had been covered to keep the rain off of it. Acid is highly reactive to metals.

Again, I panicked and rushed to get out there, imagining the top of the tank steaming with the fluid remains of a wrench melted in acid.

In the blur of passing an oak in the tight corner of the road, both beautiful and dangerous, on a wet and rainy California morning, I found a metaphor for my life on the farm.

I know very little of the hazards and joys of this lifestyle. I’m making a dangerous turn in my life and what beauty there is passes with side-glances and an eye out for oncoming trucks.

I’m reminded too that to survive it pays to pay attention.

I’m also reminded that I need to find a place in the road to pause and ponder its beauty as well as its hazards, and to feel the wind in my face, like the quad driver who found pleasure riding through the mud. §

Aldolfo's grief

2010-01-18T02:39:00.000-08:00

Aldolfo’s cellphone rang and he began an animated conversation in Spanish.

His mother died last week. I can’t be sure but I think he was trying to explain to a sibling why he wouldn’t be attending her memorial.

The day his mother died, Aldolfo asked if there was any work. I’d told him to take it easy. Nothing to do until mañana.

He left, appearing content, even though money and food were low and his mother was sick in a hospital in Mexico. He returned less than an hour later.

“Mi Madre,” he began, and let loose the saddest string of Spanish words I’d ever heard, even though technically I didn’t understand them.

The message, however, was clear: His mother was dead.

He’d received the message on his cellphone minutes earlier. He began to sob, I put my arm around his neck and he embraced me. Tears fell for a moment. Then he told me he still wanted to work the next day, and sadly turned away to walk home.

Unable to travel, he is the only child who can’t attend her memorial in Mexico. He’s stuck with me working on the farm.

“Maybe Decembré,” he said when I asked him the next day if he planned to go home for his mother’s memorial service.

“December!” That’s almost a year from now, I told him.

“No denaro.” He can’t go anywhere, with no money, or car. Like me, he’s stuck, living in a trailer across from the packinghouse. His sister lives a few strides up the dirt road in a home with a family of her own. They haven’t been around.

I’m guessing she’s with others—in L.A. or Mexico, I’m not sure. Her husband, who was already in Mexico and about to return home, is staying on a few days to assist the in-laws, according to Aldolfo.

I don't speak Spanish, but I'm beginning to understand him more as we both use signs, signals and Spanglish to converse.

The lack of money was starting to get to Aldolfo. He’d asked me several times when he was going to get paid. He seemed worried, agitated.

“No denaro, no comida!” he exclaimed.

“You’ve got no food, Aldolfo?”

“No!”

I’ll do what I can, I responded. I don’t make the payments. I’ll let the boss know right away, I told him, which I did.

I brought him some comida, tamales and pintos the next day. I bought them with the last bit of denaro, about $10 in cash, which I had until my own payday. I understood his frustration, but I also wondered if he wasn’t playing me, if he wasn’t making a fool of me. How could he not have any food?

I’m a sucker for hard cases. I figured it was better to err on the side of foolishness than see a grown man go hungry. So I brought him food.

When his phone rang, we were moving about 500 heavy, water-laden, soil-filled, 5-gallon grow bags into place, a task that wouldn’t have been necessary had Aldolfo set them up the way I had shown him from the start.

This has happened before, where I’ve demonstrated how to perform a task, explaining verbally and showing physically how to do it, and he continues to do it another way.

He watches me as I explain how to move the bags so we don’t trip over the spaghetti tubing that feeds the plants.

I know he doesn’t understand me. “Aldolfo,” I say, “move the bags closer to where the tubes come out of the line so people and dogs won’t trip over them and break them. OK?”

I demonstrate tripping by pretending to catch my foot on the loop. "OK?" I ask.

I move the heavy bag so that it protects the connectors, prevents the loops from catching people’s legs and feet. He nods OK, indicating he understands. He goes after it, slowly moving the bags into place.

He misses a bag. I don’t get on him about it. I can move it later. But I’m amazed at how quickly he lets one go. Maybe it’s sloppiness, a failure to notice, a failure to care—or grief. I can’t be sure.

I had broken two connections the day before. Working alone, I tripped over the tubing and broke the connectors, which snapped right off.

I held a can of spray paint under my arm; I was marking the broken connections. When I bent over to pick up the loose spaghetti tubing I’d just broken, I managed to blast the paint into my face and eye.

My head already hurt and my eyes felt sore in the light, like a hangover, from the moment I’d awakened that morning. A friend told me it was a reaction to the radical pressure changes in advance of several storm systems about to slam onto California's southern coastline.

Each time I bent over, my head would ache and pound. I’d already adjusted 200 plants and felt terrible. The paint blast to the face put me over the top and I threw the can as far as I could in a fit of anger.

I was mad at Aldolfo for not doing what I’d asked him to do in the first place, and mad at myself for not watching him more closely. I was mad for not paying attention to how I was holding the spray can, and mad for doing work that wasn’t necessary, for picking up after Aldolfo with a splitting headache.

“It’s like watching a child,” the boss said once.

My newest neighbor, recently relocated from Arizona where he managed his father’s vineyard, said: “I hate to sound prejudiced or anything but sometimes I think they do it because it’s job security.”

You mean the workers purposely do things the wrong way so they’ll have work?

“Yeah,” he said, without hesitating, “I think they’re a lot smarter than we give them credit. They pretend not to understand and that way they can keep working.”

If that’s true, I said, they should be laughing at us stupid gringos.

“They are,” he said.

Aldolfo wasn’t laughing. When he hung up the phone, I heard a loud snapping sound, as though one of the bags had been suddenly pulled apart.

I turned and saw the top half of the heavy bag torn in two places where his hands had just tried to pick it up. He stood over the bag, back hunched over, arms hanging at his sides. He seemed frustrated, angry, defeated.

Until that point there hadn’t been any mishaps moving the bags, even though Aldolfo had continued to try lifting them instead of sliding them over the way I had shown him.

I stood up and walked over to him. “Are you OK, Aldolfo?”

He nodded his head, “Yes.” His eyes were red with grief and fury.

I watched as he continued to move the bags, he was listless and unhappy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to go home. He needed the work as much—maybe more—than I did.§

Feeling like new

2010-01-12T01:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve always felt like a beginner.

As if I have to learn the world new every day.

I’d like to believe it’s because I have a beginner’s mind, a person who’s willing to learn. More likely, it’s because I’m inept; or, because I abuse myself too much.

My beginner’s mind has serious flaws. I do the same things over again and still can’t get them right. Or, I hurt myself in the process.

On the positive side, everything I do feels new. I’ve got a million questions, and nothing quite satisfies me. I want to know more about anything that holds my interest.

I put time into things that matter to me. I avoid the treadmill of modern life as much as possible. Consequently, I end up in unexpected places—like working on a farm—with little or no experience.

Or, running an independent magazine. Washing windows. Installing landscapes. Working at home. Staying out of the rat race. Unfortunately, living this way doesn’t work well in a rat-race culture that places a premium on cutthroat competition and greed.

So, mostly I’ve been poor, doing what I love but broke, living on the good will and charity of friends.

It can be rough at times, explaining why I don’t have this month’s rent, or keeping my fingers crossed so that my truck doesn’t break down.

The stress of coming up short takes away from some of the rewards of choosing what matters. But I suspect it’s better than the No Exit strategies and career paths most people take in today’s corporate world.

I’ve met few people who actually love their corporate jobs; more often they’ve used their positions and experience to launch their own independent careers, doing what they love best.

I’ve avoided corporate America, which I abhor. I’ve never established any credentials there, nor climbed its ladders, genuflected in its inner chambers. I’ve chosen instead to go my own way—living a kind of rogue’s life.

It’s no easy thing.

Going against the tide poses its own share of risks and traps, such as being poor, dependent on others, without adequate healthcare or enough food to eat, or setting myself up with false expectations where I have to be somebody.

I’ve tried to be a lot of things and have been mostly disappointed. Still, I’ve enjoyed, as Sarah Palin recently discovered, going rogue, doing things my way.

The idea of being a rogue, however, is just another one of those attachments, another thing to think about, worry about—another pigeonhole.

I want to live free from these kinds of traps, but also from dread, suicide bombers, economic collapse, jobs that only pay $12 an hour, obsessing over money, popularity ratings and HuffPost’s Top 10 lists.

What troubles me more than anything isn’t my lack so much as our culture’s lack of memory, its penchant for the trivial and its obsession with the wealthy, names, reality television and being somebody.

Only now, it seems, am I beginning to learn, as a farmhand, that some things are more important.

I like Hank’s Chinaski’s complaint in Charles Bukowski’s Barfly: “Somebody laid down this rule that everybody’s got to do something, be something—a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher. All that.”

Hank’s tired of thinking about all the things he doesn’t want to be, of all the things he doesn’t want to do.

“You’re not supposed to think about it,” Jim, the bartender, tells him. “I think the whole trick is not to think about it.”

I try not to think about what I do or what I don’t want to do either, but I can’t avoid it. I’m cutting dripline, trimming, planting, learning to speak Spanish. Does that make me a farmhand? Gardener? Farmer? Linguist?

I’m no farmer. I hate doing books and worrying about money. It’s enough to care for the crops. I love working with plants, almost as much as running a magazine. But I’m no gardener. And on it goes….

I’m open to change. I’m not attached to living on the fringe. I’m not attached to appellations like rogue. I wouldn’t mind moving up a notch or two above the poverty level.

Jim’s right, though; you’re not supposed to think about it, especially in a culture that’s more obsessed and trivial now than Bukowski could ever have imagined.

I’ll stick with a stubborn refusal to cave, and imagine like Chinaski that there’s more to life than doing something or being someone. All that.

It’s OK, I guess, to feel like a beginner, to approach things with a beginner’s mind, the unfettered mind, the one that, as Jim says, doesn’t think about it. §

Make me laugh

2010-01-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

Is that Edible SLO and Hope Dance Online publisher Bob Banner flipping the bird with (or is it at) UC Berkeley Good Food Guru Michael Pollan?

It sure is.

Today’s “Biz Buzz” in the San Luis Obispo County Tribune notes that Banner is teaching a yoga class based on laughter.

Banner, with whom I’ve worked off and on for several years, is a certified instructor from the American School of Laughter and offers laugh sessions throughout the county, the Tribune reports.

“It’s simple, fun and good for you, and anyone can participate,” Banner told Biz Buzz. “Laughing, even when faking it, releases endorphins, which are feel-good hormones, bringing positive effects to the mind and body.”

Sessions go for 45 minutes, 30 of which reportedly include “energetic laughing and playfulness exercises, and then concludes with a laughter meditation.”

I probably won’t attend the laughing yoga classes.

I really don’t need to when I can just pick up the winter print edition of Banner’s Edible SLO, and turn to the photo on page 4. The publisher’s “Food For Thought” column shows him with a big smile, flipping the bird, with Professor Pollan, about whom there is no mention, standing at his side.

Perhaps the pair decided to express their anger at Harris Ranch for raising such a stink over unflattering comments Pollan made about its meat operations with a big shit-howdy smile and a hearty old, "Fuck you!"

It appears more of a faux pas than sour grapes. Or, is it? In either case, it’s good for a laugh. Good enough to be included in Banner's yoga class.

Most likely, it’s sloppy editing that permitted the publication of the photo. Banner holds a copy of a previous issue of his magazine in one hand, and two glasses of wine in the other hand, which has its middle finger extended.

The image suggests what Pollan might have been feeling that night: "Hey assholes! Look who's laughing now!”

What a great way to start Banner's next yoga class: Hang the picture on the wall, meditate on Harris Ranch, and start laughing. The feel-good hormones will begin flowing, and no one will have to fake it.§