Coal Man

“What a completely wild idea, that leadership -- absent any chest pounding -- could also include a thoughtful discussion of humility and not be seen as somehow weak or trivial.” Alexis Grenell, The Nation

Well, as anticipated, Joe Manchin killed Joe Biden’s Build Back Better program. Manchin went to great pains to portray himself as having wrestled his conscience and his core political beliefs as far as he could, before telling Biden it was no go. Manchin played his role very well, he had a big hand in whittling BBB down, throwing objections around like daggers, until the bill’s ambitions were just a fraction of what was initially proposed. Manchin carried water for energy extractors and wealthy donors, as he always does. Manchin is firm in his corruption. He voted against a bill that could have provided real help to some of the neediest citizens in his own state. He stood with his backers. And then, at the end of the calendar year, Manchin lowers the boom. Happy Christmas, Biden. I’m still a coal man! 

Manchin is also a wealthy man, owns a yacht and a very fancy automobile, has a daughter who hit gold in the pharmaceutical industry, and family ties to the coal industry, which should have died a needed death thirty or forty years ago. (That death might have been phased in over the course of a generation to give those dependent on coal for their daily bread time to transition to something else. No, not in America. It has never worked that way. We live and die by profit! Someone’s profit.) Manchin’s not even a Democrat, but the Dems couldn’t afford to push him too hard lest he jump ship and Mitch McConnell resume his job as Majority Leader. That made it much easier for Manchin to play his spoiler role. Bravo Mr. Coal Mine, you just prevented your “constituents” from having to cough up more in taxes to pay for all those goodies to all those undeserving, lazy people. You did it! Your prize will no doubt be great. May I suggest a second yacht or a fleet of gleaming black Tesla’s equipped with bullet-proof glass. 

I watch this faux drama play out, try not to get cynical and angry, fail, as usual, and come back for more. The Dems are not as futile as they appear, their task on even minor issues is hard because of the numbers, and the filibuster, and FOX News with its 24/7 disinformation campaign. And Zuckerberg over at Facebook. The injustices we see almost every day, the slow pace of reform attempts, the drowning of damn near everything in money. It’s fucking nuts, and enormously frustrating. We have two major parties, itself an impediment to doing anything to meet the legitimate, universal needs of its citizens, and one of them attempted to overturn an election that their standard bearer, their great king, their icon -- Donald J. Trump -- lost. By a wide margin in both popular votes and the Electoral College. The coup was a multi-pronged and coordinated effort, no question about it. Despite the obstacles in its path, the January 6 House Committee has done a good job of amassing evidence that will prove what most people assume: that Trump, with the help of others, tried to steal the election. He told us he would a year in advance, but at that point people were numb, depleted by Covid and the tidal wave of lies Trump spewed every day he was in office. Trump told us, not in these exact words, but with the same intent: If I win, it was fair; if I lose, it was rigged. 

I think the one thing Donald Trump fears more than anything else is the humiliation of being outed as who and what he is: A business disaster. A conman. A fraud and a coward. Daddy Trump warped Donald, twisted his psyche like a pretzel, put him on a path to being loutish, cruel, corrupt, lazy, mean-spirited, petty, vain, spoiled and hopelessly narcissistic.  Trump is the greatest con man in American history, no doubt about it. Bernie Madoff conned hundreds, maybe thousands of people into giving him money, Trump conned almost half the citizens of this insane country,  and damn near succeeded in taking it over. All while making the shit up as he went along. 

Little Blessings

“While whites sought to extract uncompensated labor from Blacks, their principal concern in relation to Indigenous people was to secure ownership of their lands.” A Field Guide to White Supremacy, Kathleen Bellew and Ramon A. Gutierrez, Editors

It’s December and I feel a bustle. Many of the houses in our block and nearby blocks are brightly lit with Christmas lights. Ours are up, courtesy of my wife and daughter. They have outdone themselves this year. After several years with an artificial pre-strung tree from Sears, we have a live Doug fir this year. It smells great. When my wife brought it home from Home Depot and we stood it up and fluffed it out, I thought of the managed forests my brother and I drive through on our way into Washington each September. It sucks a fair amount of water each day. Needles on the hardwood floor. We have some inside lights, too, and the kids’ stockings hanging from an actual mantle. We’re in a new place this year and it feels good, a comfortable harbor against the strangeness of this period in time. Are we balanced between one way and another? Is that what is happening, is the world turning toward authoritarianism because we cannot agree on more fair and equitable means? The slogans are simpler, that’s for sure. Freedom! Liberty! Soil! The question is always freedom and liberty and soil for whom? Based on what, money or force, or both? 

Here’s some irony for you. On Friday the normal political world, not MAGA Faux Outrage & White Fear world, stopped to pay tribute to Bob Dole, war hero, Senate titan (during the good old days when the Reagan gang sold arms to the Iranians in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua), and GOP standard bearer in the 1980’s. Today, the Trump GOP would run the great and noble Bob Dole out of the party. Today, Trump would make fun of Dole’s war disability and belittle his legislative achievements, and then for good measure insult his wife, Elizabeth Today, would Bob Dole stand up to Trump or allow himself to be cowed along with a majority of his confederates? Would Dole turn a blind eye to Trump’s unprecedented corruptness? How corruptible was Bob Dole? As much as Mitch McConnell? Kevin McCarthy? That punk senator from Missouri? Ted Cruz?

Let’s turn to another depressing subject, the fate of Julian Assange, who a UK Court just ruled can be extradited to the United States to be executed or jailed under the Espionage Act, or whatever other statutes the American government can bury him under. Assange is a journalist, and he’s not an American. How does the United States even have jurisdiction? To me Assange is a historic figure. And what was his crime? Journalism. He collected information by as many means as he could, including sources, and published his findings. Isn’t that what journalism is supposed to do, the way it provides a check on the powerful? Yes, but when a journalist completely outs the Empire, exposes its crimes and hypocrisies in exhaustive detail, her, or she, will pay. And Assange has. With years of house arrest in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and a long spell in Belmarsh Prison, which isn’t known to be hospitable. There are probably many people in London and Washington D.C. who wish Assange would die or hang himself. The US will go all out to mete out a maximum punishment for Julian Assange. Too bad our government can’t direct such righteous fervor against those involved in the attack on the US Capitol, starting with Donald J. Trump. Assange will pay, Trump will not. There’s the unfairness of this world. The powerful have too many tools. 

On a different note altogether. I did a long training session this afternoon, mostly slow and cautious because my left shoulder/biceps is still wonky. I see a specialist in January. I may have done too much today. I have a decent range of motion and improved internal rotation, but it’s not pain free. Not that the pain is overwhelming, but it is constant. Every day I run through several rehabilitation exercises, and I do a lot of stretching on my breaks when I work at the store. I am sleeping better than I was. Now I wake up with a stiff lower back. It’s one ache then another. 

My Chelsea football club isn’t well these days. I think the manager, Thomas Tuchel has done a very good job, but injuries have sidelined too many key players for too long, primarily N’golo Kante and Mateo Kovacic. Christian Pulisic missed a number of games. Ben Chilwell is out for an unknown period. Romelu Lukaku has just returned after a multi-match absence. Jorginho, the important pivot point in midfield, has also been injured. Trevor Chalobah, a young player emerging as a critical member of our back three, is out injured. We drew with a Manchester United side we should have beaten, escaped Watford with a win, but lost to West Ham on a late wonder goal. Our recent Champions League match in St. Petersburg saw us fail to hold a lead in the last minutes of the match. A defense based on amnesia. We drew, and consequently Juventas topped the group. We play Leeds United in the premier league next. Although we’ll be at Stamford Bridge, I expect this to be a tough match. Leeds play with a quick tempo and they face a Chelsea team that is tired, depleted, and in a ragged run of form. 

I’m writing a review of a new book by Brian Klaas, Corruptible, for the California Review of Books, and reading A Field Guide to White Supremacy. Not exactly light, year-end reading. For that I’ve turned to True North by Jim Harrison, a novel I first read some years ago. I have since read nearly all the fiction Harrison produced. Definitely one of my favorite writers. 

We’re almost to 2022. I’m still wondering, and unable to understand why so few journalists or writers are not doing the same, what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin talked about for ninety minutes in Helsinki in 2017. I don’t imagine the needs of the people of their respective countries came up much. So what did these two kleptocrats talk about? 

Waiting for the Last Shopping Cart

 “Much of the world is dominated by systems that attract and promote corruptible people.” Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power And How It Changes Us

She came into the store at 8:30 p.m. I saw her in the whole body section, reading the label of a hair care product. She had a small cart with no more than half a dozen items in it. Her own hair is dirty blonde, tucked under a beige wool cap. She’s dressed as she was the last time I saw her, also a Thursday night, in a bulky sweater, leggings, heavy wool socks and hiking boots. I remembered her because that night she didn’t check out until after 10:00, and I had to wait for her before I could lock up the carts for the night. I helped her load two bags into the cluttered back seat of a Lexus SUV. When she drove off the Lexus made a horrific screeching sound. Good, I thought as I passed on my way to the back of the store, she’s got a head start. 

I went about my rounds, cleaned out the floor drain by the olive bar, another in the cheese section, and three behind the bakery counter. On my last inspection of the evening, at 9:45, just as the closing announcement came over the intercom, the woman was still in whole body, in the same spot, reading labels as if she had all the time in the world. She had the same few items in her cart. I swore silently, knowing that I was going to be standing outside with the cable and lock, waiting for her to check out. Maybe shopping is her hobby I thought, or perhaps she suffers from insomnia. She could be lonely. I’m not great at guessing ages, but she looks to be in her late sixties. She could be widowed, with children living far away. All these thoughts ran through my head. I see all kinds of people in the store, from the obviously affluent to those who haven’t bathed in weeks. Though I haven’t seen it myself, I’m told that shoplifters are common, repeat offenders even, despite all the surveillance cameras. A few nights ago, during a final inspection of the women’s restroom, there was a woman sitting in one of the stalls eating an orange. Before I saw two filthy feet in rubber beach sandals beneath the partition, I caught the scent of citrus; after she left I found peels in the sanitary napkin receptacle. 

The woman came out at 10:05. Her Lexus was the last car in the parking lot. I wondered if she had tended to the screeching sound. She took her time loading two bags into the back seat. I didn’t help her this time. It had been a long shift and I was tired. I wanted to lock the back gate, collect my gear, punch out, and bicycle home. The woman finished loading her bags and came toward me with her cart. “Can I roll it to you?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. I was only six feet from her. She gave the cart a push and it came toward me, curving slightly on the slope of the parking lot and into my waiting hand. I then made the mistake of saying, “Hey, that was like a golfer playing the break.” When she said “You know,” and began walking toward me I knew I was in trouble. “I played golf when I was very young. My dad taught me and I used to beat all his friends. I could drive the ball 160 yards with a 5-iron. I should take it up again. I did it all wrong, starting so early. Have you ever played golf? It’s a wonderful game.”

I pushed her cart into place and locked the padlock. I began moving away, telling her that she should take up golf again. For a moment I was afraid she might follow me. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” I said with a wave. When she drove off there was no screeching sound from her Lexus. 

Holly Jolly

 

“In the evening the wind stops. A low gray ceiling of clouds hangs over the desert from horizon to horizon, silent and still. One small opening remains in the west. The sun peers through as it goes down.” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

I ate too much ham, stuffing and mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner and felt like a real, red-blooded American. Excess consumption, no better than a sow at the trough. I didn’t need that last piece of ham, but there it was, and I ate it. The soldiers who accompanied Lewis & Clark on their exploration of the Missouri river and the virgin west were said to consume seven pounds of meat per day. Salt pork, deer and buffalo. Every day those men did hard, physical labor, always exposed to the elements. On a good day, they made twenty river miles. They required large amounts of protein. 

On the Saturday after the holiday I worked the opening shift for the first time. 6:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Lunch break at 10:00 a.m. I left the house at 5:15 and rode my bike under a clear sky with lots of stars. It was a brisk 50 degrees or so, nothing to complain about. I have North Face gloves. By the time I was chugging up Garden Street I was comfortable enough. “Fresh” is how a man I used to train with at the dojo would describe the morning. I was reminded of when I was a very young man of 19, living in a tiny apartment in Tachikawa, Japan, about a mile from the train station. Yokota Air Base where I worked was a thirty-five minute ride and a half mile walk to the west. I had to be out of the apartment at 4:30 a.m. to make it to work on time. It was tough in winter, when the temperature was in the 30’s. I walked to the train station in the dark, my footsteps echoing in the street. At that hour the platform was sparsely populated, with very few headed for Fussa, the station nearest the main gate of Yokota. Smell of cigarette smoke. The usual jumble of bicycles outside the station, a few taxis idling, the drivers leaning against their cars, smoking and talking. A few drunks from the night before, sitting on benches, muttering to themselves. A sleepy-looking JNR employee in a rumpled blue uniform. I’m the only foreigner, a military man, though I’m dressed in civilian clothes. I never wore my uniform outside the gates of Yokota; I always wanted to blend in, not stand out. I’d board the train and find a seat and close my eyes. In the winter the train was warm, and I’d fall asleep easily. There’s nothing like sleeping on a train. 

The morning shift is the opposite of the closing shift. Locking up the shopping carts is one of the last tasks I do when I close, but the first when opening. The grocery team arrives at 4:00 and the aisles are jammed with pallets, cartons, balls of shrink wrap. Music blares from at least three different sources. The store opens at 7:00. The Marborg garbage truck rolls in at 6:30 to tip the dumpster. The behemoth cardboard bailer, my nemesis, is nearly full from the previous night and will need to be emptied soon to accommodate all the cardboard the grocery team will bring out. The giant machine seems to mock me. These processes are like the tides: every day the same. Every job is repetitive to a certain extent, but at the store we’re always racing the clock. I walk the aisles with a long-handled broom and dustpan, sweeping up pieces of wood from the pallets, scraps of paper, price tags that have eloped from merchandise, some flour left from a burst bag. Once that’s done I head for the restrooms to make sure they are ready for customers, reminding myself to check that there is enough toilet paper, seat covers, and paper towels. 

One difference between the school district and the Market is that in the grocery business the managers also work, and what I mean is that when needed they bag groceries, run the registers, deal with Amazon returns, and work on product displays. They have a rudimentary knowledge of every job in the store. One thing they don’t do is spend hours upon hours in meetings, talking, talking, talking, or staring at slide decks, charts, graphs. I hated management meetings and avoided them at all costs. Most were a complete waste of my time. Very few people know how to run an effective meeting. School administrators love to hear themselves talk. 

It gets dark early now. The end of November. Christmas music plays in the store. Holly jolly. 

Patience & Stillness

 “The most vexing thing in the life of a man who wishes to change is the improbability of change.” Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall

I saw a podiatrist and he diagnosed my foot problem as Morton’s Neuroma. Most of my shoes have a tapered toe box, and when I wear those shoes the nerve in my foot is compressed and causes a burning sensation in my third and fourth toes. The diagnosis confirms my own experiments with different shoes. Before I started working at the Market I bought a nice pair of Columbia hiking shoes, not considering that the narrow toe box would cause me problems. The only shoes I can wear for my job are an old pair of AllBirds, which are comfortable enough but dangerous on wet floors. At least I now know what I’m dealing with. 

Now, if I can fix the biceps tendonitis in my left arm, I’ll be 100%. This condition really bothers me at night when I sleep, I often wake up with my shoulder howling, and of course it restricts my training.  What’s next in this process of aging? Hair loss (in progress), flagging sex drive, forgetfulness, indigestion, wrinkles, liver spots, constipation. Aging requires coming to terms with loss -- of physical and mental capabilities, of friends and relatives, of jobs and settled routines -- and forces us to to get it through our thick heads: nothing is solid, nothing lasts forever, the sand is always shifting beneath our feet. Even though we know how life ends, we must walk on, through loss and disappointment, pain and suffering. This takes honesty and courage -- or a strong gin & tonic. 

November. Thanksgiving on the way, a strange holiday that I can take or leave. We don’t yet have a family get-together planned, and have given no thought to buying a turkey. The day is over-hyped to get the public to spend money, to set up a vigil outside Target; what’s the hot gift this year? What can’t the children live without? You have to give advertisers credit for linking holidays with consumption. I’m sure there are people who believe that shopping is the point of Thanksgiving, the reason for the day. Get out there and plunge yourself deeper into debt! It’s your patriotic duty! Pilgrims, what pilgrims? Amazon Prime, baby! Instant gratification. 

It’s overcast today. The orange cat from next door is in the front yard, hiding beneath a cactus, within two feet of the spot where small birds congregate. Perhaps the cat will finally get one. The cat is a study in patience and stillness. His owner’s name is Bob. Bob is over six feet tall, completely bald, and often wears suspenders. His one-car garage is as neat as a pin, everything in its place. We don’t see Bob that often. He makes a trip to Costco once a week; from our kitchen window I watch him unload his Toyota Highlander. Patience and stillness isn’t encouraged in our society. I always laugh when I’m working at the Market and a customer, usually a younger female, enters the store on her phone, and remains on the phone, gabbing away, through the produce and dairy aisles, past the meat counter and the prepared food islands, through the baked goods, the wine and beer section, and even while she’s checking out; phone clutched between shoulder and ear as she digs in her purse for her debit card. In the waiting room of the podiatrist’s office I counted eight people, myself included, all over the age of fifty, and only one man on his phone. An older woman was reading a book. The others were just sitting quietly, lost in their own thoughts. 

Is the cat taking a nap? Slumber or eternal vigilance? 

My wife and I marked our 29th wedding anniversary on the 7th of this month. My brother turned 64 on the 11th. Milestones of time. 

I’m reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose, and The Big Seven, a novel by Jim Harrison. 

To Have and Have Not

 They start off shy, watching us from across the street as we begin bringing things out of the house and setting them on the sidewalk. Then a short, brown-skinned woman in a long skirt, large white t-shirt, and sandals comes across the street with a toddler by her side and pushing a stroller in which an infant sleeps. The toddler hugs her side. She appraises the stuff on the sidewalk, and asks my wife how much, in Spanish. Free my wife says, which makes the woman smile. Almost as soon as that magic word is spoken and understood, more women appear, as if summoned by an unseen bell, also with small children in tow; two or three of the women are pregnant. All wear long skirts and sandals, none wears a mask. They whisper among themselves. An older woman emerges from the small house next door and makes a beeline for a standing lamp. My brother-in-law and I wrestle a queen mattress and box spring out of the house and set it against the white picket fence. It is immediately claimed and the box spring is carried across the street by a short, slight man wearing Nike slides. When he returns for the mattress I gesture an offer of help, but he just smiles, gets the mattress over his back, and staggers across the street beneath the load. The metal frame is left in the dirt of the front yard. The women grow bolder; one even enters the yard through the open gate and starts sifting through a pile of electrical cords, an ancient computer tower, a keyboard, cable modem, and a couple of surge protectors. We politely ask her to stay beyond the fence. Two toddlers are climbing inside an old china hutch. My wife and her sister Kathy bring out glassware, small kitchen appliances, purses, coats, a box of canned goods, a red cookie jar shaped like a rooster. 

This is our third trip to clean out Nancy’s house in Santa Maria. Nancy is my wife’s older sister. Nancy and I actually went to high school together. She had a stroke in August, open heart surgery in September, and has been in a rehab facility in Arroyo Grande since. She has suffered from diabetes for many years, is almost totally blind, and needs kidney dialysis three times a week. She will not return to the small, dilapidated two-bedroom house she has rented for the last 20 years. My wife and sister-in-law are making decisions about what to keep and what to toss or put on the sidewalk. The house is a mess. One bedroom is jammed from stem to stern with stuff that has piled up over time. On our first trip we found a four-year-old Canon inkjet printer that had never been opened. There were a few pieces of furniture that had belonged to my wife’s long deceased grandparents. Boxes of albums, Barbie dolls, a collection of Star Wars toys, two soccer balls autographed by Rod Stewart, the musician Nancy had followed for years, attending more than 100 of his concerts. There was mold in the bathroom, rust stains in the toilet, and the smell of dogs in the carpet. Dust bunnies followed in our wake across the kitchen floor. 

I began filling two four-yard dumpsters with all the junk we had piled in the carport two weeks ago.  It had obviously been picked over. Blankets, boxes of papers, lengths of carpet, beach towels, Christmas ornaments, cracked pottery, chipped cups. The crowd of women and children on the sidewalk had expanded and now numbered more than a dozen. They watched us expectantly, wondering what treasure might emerge from the house next. As I made my trips from the carport to the dumpster the absence of color on this block of Fesler Street struck me. Drab. Older cars and pickups lined every foot of curb, a sign that the little houses were occupied by multiple families. I heard the cry of small children from the house next door, though I had no way of knowing how many there might be. I’m glad that some of Nancy’s stuff will be put to use by others, but this scene depresses me, as it has every time; this is poverty. One of the mothers is younger than my daughter and already has two little ones and another on the way. Why? I want to scream. Don’t you see that the more kids you have the deeper into poverty you sink? I think of the influence of the Catholic Church, its stubborn resistance to birth control and family planning. Children are a gift from God, insurance for old age, is this how these women think? I don’t know and don’t have the language to ask. What I see is that Nancy’s junk is their upgrade. What I think is that the places they came from must have been dire. I feel anger building inside at the injustice of the world, of the twists of fate, luck, and misfortune that define so many human lives; of the indifference of the wealthy. I look at the woman, most of them heavy, and wonder what ailments they will face in the future. Diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure? There must be a school nearby because in the mid-afternoon kids stream past the house; two teenage boys don Latex gloves and climb into the dumpsters. I count five children under the age of twelve entering the house next door. How many souls live under that roof?

On this trip we make good progress but will need to return one or possibly two times more. The house must be vacated by the 15th. We will put Nancy’s belongings in storage and see where she lands. In addition to everything else, she has tested positive for Covid. We’re all beat after a long day. We head down the 101 to Los Alamos and eat flatbread and drink two bottles of good wine between the four of us. The sun begins to set over the hills. Even with a full stomach and a warm shower in my immediate future I can’t get the appraising eyes of those women on Fesler Street out of my head. 

Selective Mercies

“The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies.” Ian McEwan, Saturday

I haven’t had time to write anything new for the Balcony. Semi-retirement is busy, a different routine, but still a routine. One thing that has changed is the way I wake up in the morning. No alarm, for one thing, and no rolling out of bed like a soldier roused from sleep. Even when I work until 10:30, p.m., I wake up between 6:00 and 7:00, but now I have the luxury of laying in bed until I’m fully awake. I usually stretch and flex my feet, and then perform eye exercises, glancing from left to right, right to left, up and down, and then rolling them one way and the other. I don’t know if these daily exercises provide any benefit for my vision, which is wonky to begin with, but they feel good. Then it’s off to the bathroom. 

There’s something optimistic about brewing a pot of coffee, pouring that first cup. I’m sure I drink too much of the stuff, just as I drink more wine than is good for me. I sit down at the dining room table with my laptop and notebooks, read some news and watch a few videos on YouTube. Like coffee and wine, I know I need to reduce, if not eliminate, my consumption of political news; it puts me in a foul, defeatist and bitter frame of mind which sometimes stays with me for several hours. We’re living in an age of idiocy, of treason, of cruelty, of misplaced anger, of political malfeasance, of endemic corruption and stupidity. No samaritan is coming to winch us out of the ditch. As Hunter S. Thompson would say, we’re well and truly fucked. I wrote here after Trump’s defeat that at best all Joe Biden will be able to do is slow the slide. The Democrats are on course to lose the House and possibly the Senate in 2022, which could very well pave the way for a return of the Orange Menace in January 2025. 

I’ve been off for a couple of days but return to work tonight for my usual 2:00 - 10:30 shift. My partner, Jose, is on vacation so I’ll be the only maintenance person on duty for eight hours. The electronic minder I carry will remind me of the hourly inspections of aisles, bathrooms, and the front of the store. Being midweek there’s bound to be lots of cardboard to bail. The bailer is the color of a battleship, a huge piece of machine powered by hydraulics. The U-boats that line the narrow hallway that run behind the store will be loaded with product and empty cartons. If my average holds, I will walk between 12 and 13 miles. The pain in my left foot that I’ve been dealing with for a while has been alleviated with stretches for my lower back. I suspect I suffer from sciatica. The test now is to see if I can work pain-free regardless of the shoes I decide to wear. 

My other physical problem is my left shoulder. It has been bothering me for a while, and might be the result of bursitis, tendonitis, or a rotator cuff tear. My mobility isn’t terrible, but it comes with pain, and I don’t have much strength. I’ve got a series of exercises that I do that have helped some, but I need to see a doctor. I had a rotator cuff tear in my right shoulder in 2012 that had to be surgically repaired. I see how the kind of work I’m doing now can break a person’s body down over the long term. Long hours on your feet, standing, walking, bending, twisting, reaching, stooping, pushing and pulling. I must be weird, but I enjoy the physical aspect of the work, even with these nagging ailments. The challenge is to ward off the incredibly repetitious nature of the work. I’m very fortunate to only have to do it part-time. I’m not sure I could handle 40 hours a week. My injuries haven’t kept me off the job, and I can work safely provided I’m conscious of what I’m doing and my body mechanics. Where the shoulder issue really plagues me is when I sleep; I’m a habitual side sleeper who must now sleep on his back. 

I’m writing book reviews for the California Review of Books, the website I co-founded with David Starkey and Michelle Drown. The latest one I’ve got in the hopper is Humane by Samuel Moyn, a brilliant analysis of how the US has made war more humane but at the same time never-ending. It boggles my mind to think we spent two decades fighting in Afghanistan, longer than the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam, combined. I just received John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, and this morning I finished reading the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. I’m about fifty pages into Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose. 

Change is constant, time is finite, and suffering is unavoidable. 

Back in the Working-Class

 “Few gods, nations, or revolutions can sustain themselves without martyrs.” Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

I spent thirteen of my twenty-two years at the school district in management positions, meaning I had some direct responsibility for people and processes. I was fairly successful at this work, though in the final few years of my career I often felt like an overpaid clerk. I never simply went through the motions -- I’m not wired that way -- it was more that the work itself became routine, often boring, and it didn’t require one hundred percent of my energy or focus. I felt like I was on a treadmill, running but gaining no ground, and it was difficult to believe that what I was doing made much of a difference in the overall scheme of educating children. The experiences my own children had in the school district stood in contradiction to the high-minded rhetoric I heard almost every day in the district’s internal propaganda. Reality rarely lives up to the ideals we espouse or revere. The school district was a system created and managed by people, and that guaranteed it would be flawed, capricious, contradictory, and sometimes, incomprehensible. 

Retirement came at the right time for me, as I felt like I had nothing more to contribute. I didn’t believe in the district’s stated mission of preparing students for a future that had yet to be created, because in my more cynical moments I believed we might be better off preparing them for a future in the process of being destroyed. This seems more honest to me. Human societies often push the consequences for their inaction and cowardice and corruption onto the next generation. We need to be dead straight with kids: the future will not be brought to you by Disney. As is in all large organizations, there was too much conceit at the school district, too many pointless meetings, and far too many egos in need of stroking and delicate handling. I’d had enough. 

I understood that retirement didn’t mean I would completely stop working, because it wasn’t financially feasible on the one hand, and because I need the balance work provides to my life. Work, leisure, time for reading, time for quiet. Simplicity and moderation. Most of all, I wanted a job without the heavy mental load, the responsibility for other people and answering for their perceived failures and misdeeds. I started working on a golf driving range, picking up balls, when I was ten years old. My dad was a butcher. My mother worked in a bank. My family is working class, once a proud moniker. From my boyhood I always loved to work. I loved taking care of the yard at our house so much that when I was done, I ‘d go down the street to the Castagna’s and rake their leaves, even though Mrs. Castagna had three very capable sons. I just liked doing it. On the driving range in the California summer evening, the mountains turning shades of purple in a sky that was much fresher back then, I’d race myself to fill as many baskets as I could, and try to beat my record for clearing the entire range in the shortest amount of time. Silly little challenges. Work well done made me feel good. What kind of work didn’t matter.  I don’t shy from honest work and never have. 

I’m now working at Whole Foods Market on upper State Street. It’s a decent-sized store, seems to do a high volume, and employ many people; customers stream in steadily and spend solid money on groceries, meats, fish, dairy, and vitamins, and other healthy living, never-get-sick-and-never-die, products, all free of dyes and perfumes, never tested on animals, vegan and organic, and of course, green as a Virginia field. If you judged only by the cars in the parking lot, you’d guess that WMF attracts consumers with lots more money to spend on food than their less affluent fellow citizens. I try not to render judgments as I round up shopping carts like a shepherd in search of lost sheep. I’m assigned to the Maintenance Department, and there’s certainly some tasks that fall into that bin, but ninety-five percent of the gig is custodial work. Inspecting and cleaning the bathrooms and every aisle every hour, with a scanner to register accountability to the standard. I sweep/mop the restroom floors five or six times every shift. When I complete the “walk”, I usually check up front to see if the lines are long and the checkers need bagging help. Bagging is my favorite task. It’s  the challenge of packing the cold stuff in the same bag, double-bagging when the load appears heavy with meats, cheese, apples, or bottles. I silently bless the shoppers who bring their own cloth bags because the store paper bags are thin and tear easily. For me as a bagger, cloth bags are far superior, hold way more product, and are easier to pack. If the checkers aren’t swamped, I go cart hunting, making a complete sweep of the parking lot. If the carts are under control, I’ll check and tidy up the outdoor eating area, and then swing around the back of the building to check the roll-off garbage cans and the cardboard bailer. By the time I get through all that, it’s usually near time to make the next store walk. Basically, I don’t stop moving, which is why during my eight-hour shift I average more than 30,000 steps; my health app reports this is twelve miles. I start at 2:00 and work until after 10:00, the closing shift that many employees dread. I’m learning the ebbs and flows and patterns, recognizing repeat customers. I commute back and forth on my bike, eight miles round trip. My lunch break is thirty minutes. For the most part, the time passes quickly, and I can always find something to do. I clock in and out, on a Kronos electronic keypad, something I never did in all my years at the school district. I’m back in the working-class, with folks who work irregular hours, often at night and weekends and holidays. The store never stops. The wheel turns anew every morning when the doors slide open and doesn’t stop until the gate is locked after 10:00 p.m. This kind of work has a relentlessness about it. A mundaneness. By the time I get home my legs are tired and my feet are sore. I have this weird condition with my left foot. No matter what shoes I wear, within an hour or two, I feel pain in the ball of my foot, or the tip of the toe next to my pinky toe. Sometimes it’s tingling, other times it’s a burning sensation. I don’t know the cause because I am afraid to pursue an answer. Nerve damage? Bone spur? Arthritis? Sciatica? This condition predates my work at the store. For the last nine years I worked at the district, I used a stand-up desk -- I was the first person at the district office to get one, years before they became standard -- and was on my feet seven or eight hours every day. Even so, that was much different from walking non-stop for a couple of hours at a go. 

This is the right kind of job for me at this time. Interacting with people, solving little problems, and putting in an honest shift is good for me. I still have time for writing and reading. I just finished 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari -- very thought-provoking -- and am well into Humane by Samuel Moyne, a book about war, American-style. My sister-in-law in Santa Maria, and my 87-year-old mother in Hawaii, are having fairly serious health problems, and Terry and I are now engaging the health care system in a totally new way. Skilled nursing, OT and PT, radiology, multiple doctors, advanced health care directives. The whole ball of wax. 

The Gathering Storm

“What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false and have already led to events like the January 6 insurrection?” Katha Pollitt, The Nation

Are you as tired of the spectacle of American politics as I am? I hate to be defeatist and cynical, but I don’t see a path out of the box canyon we’ve hiked into over the past twenty years. When I look at the scene I am reminded of a line from Yuval Noah Harari’s book,  21 Lessons for the 21st Century: never underestimate human stupidity. Look at Mike Pence, for instance, a man as full of ambition as he is devoid of substance, who now blames the media for the January 6 assault on the capitol. This is the same man who was rushed to safety by Secret Service agents as the Trump mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” Who knows what may have happened if the mob had seized Pence, but now Mike has developed amnesia and is back to kissing Trump’s ass with the servility he displayed for four years. Mikey is apparently convinced that God wants him to be president one day, and his penance in the meantime is to suffer humiliation and degradation at the tiny, corrupt hands of Donald J. Trump. 

Nine months on and none of the architects of the attempted coup have been held accountable. With the notable exceptions of authorizing military actions, gifting billions to the military-industrial-surveillance complex, and enacting tax breaks for the wealthy, the gears of Washington D.C. grind and squeal but the wheels barely turn. I assume the efforts of the House committee investigating the coup will come to naught, zero, nada. Let’s see what the committee does when Trump’s aides and toadies refuse to comply with subpoenas, as they almost certainly will. Steve Bannon thinks he’s untouchable. When all is done and dusted, the likely outcome is a voluminous report that will garner media attention for a day or two and then be forgotten without any significant remedial action taken. We’ve seen this movie many times. Iran-Contra. The 2008 financial meltdown. The Mueller Report. I will also not be surprised if Biden decides to shield Trump’s Oval Office actions and communications from scrutiny under the convenient guise of “Executive Privilege.” Political elites rarely hold each other accountable because it sets a bad precedent. As I’ve written on this blog many times, accountability is reserved for those of us without wealth or connections. When the law or the government comes for us, we have no place to run or hide. We can’t ignore Congressional subpoenas or stash ill-gotten gains in offshore tax havens. One country, two sets of rules. It’s good to be King or Queen, lousy to be a serf. 

Life goes on as it has always gone on, through fire, flood, famine, drought, pestilence, war, revolution, insurrection and disaster. The poor scrape and scramble for their living while the wealthy party in high style in gilded palaces. As in the past, so in the present. 

The battle for Truth is in jeopardy of being forfeited. And then what? An America ruled by the Trump family? Will we suffer Big Daddy Donald until he draws his final breath, then watch Junior ascend to the throne, and after him Ivanka, and finally, Eric. Is that what the future holds? Camelot is dead, long live Mar-A-Lago. You think I’m crazy? Perhaps so, but the scenario doesn’t seem that outlandish to me given the chicanery happening in state legislatures and in the chambers of the radical Supreme Court. Add the fact that millions of Americans believe whatever Donald Trump spews or the latest QANON fantasies rather than what they see with their own eyes. The fix is in the process of being hard-wired. Once the Truth and the Law are totally debased what remains? Will Americans come to expect that every politician and public servant is on the take, amenable to bribes, as most Russians do? Possibly. What’s to prevent it from happening, appeals to decency, morality, or ethics? Fat chance. America isn’t immune to the endemic corruption that has sundered other nations. We’re on the slippery downslope. 

Over the Bridge and Back Again

“It is the mark of illiberal regimes that they make free speech more difficult even outside their borders.” Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

I have just returned from my annual trip to Oregon to visit my brother. He lives in a working-class neighborhood in Tillamook, one block from the Hampton lumber mill which churns out wood products twenty-four hours a day. We loaded two bikes on his Jeep Cherokee and set out for Washington under blue skies. We crossed the Astoria Bridge, always a thrill for me since I have few opportunities to see a river as wide as the Columbia, and headed for the small town of Ocean Shores. In years past we explored Westport, Grays Harbor, Port Townsend, Tokeland, and Aberdeen. Ocean Shores has a population of around six-thousand souls. Two of its larger hotels were shuttered temporarily, and when we inquired about vacancies at another we were told there were none because of a shortage of housekeeping staff. Help wanted signs were ubiquitous. Despite the labor shortage, we noticed quite a lot of new construction -- houses, condos, and commercial spaces. I wondered if the city mothers and fathers were following a Field of Dreams strategy -- build and they will come. We finally found lodging for the night at a Comfort Inn. The young woman at the front desk told the customer in front of us that due to a shortage of staff she worked seven days a week for most of the summer. 

After an uneventful evening we drove back to Astoria the following morning, crossing the bridge minutes before a maintenance crew set up, which slowed traffic in both directions for several hours. We rode along the bicycle path that parallels the Columbia, watched a couple of big container ships, and saw two Blackhawk helicopters fly under the bridge. We had dinner on Pier 39. The window of our first floor room at the Hampton Inn faced the river, and we could watch the container ships at anchor get turned all the way around by the current. The barking of sea lions went on most of the night.  

Back in Tillamook by midday the following day, we cleaned rain gutters and wiped the bikes down while listening to Mojo Nixon’s show on Sirius XM. I was interested to learn from some of my brother’s friends about Tillamook real estate, which, as in many other unlikely locales in our country, is experiencing price wars, with potential buyers offering thousands of dollars above the asking price. Where the money comes from I have no idea. I wonder if this phenomenon is another example of irrational exuberance that will come crashing to earth sooner or later. 

Whenever I travel I realize how little I know. I can finally distinguish a Douglas fir from a spruce, but there are many other species of tree I can’t name. I don’t know much about fishing, tides, currents, and very little about bow hunting. The older I become the less I seem to know, and much of what I think I know is tinged with doubt. Our world is drowning in information, yet knowledge seems to be in short supply, and wisdom is even more rare. One of my brother’s friends, Larry, immediately struck me as intelligent because he listened more than he spoke, and when he added something to the conversation it was thoughtful. I must learn to listen more. This blog is of course filled with my opinions, notions, biases, prejudices, gripes and inchoate thoughts. The modern world is bewildering, and it very often scares me. What is real, what matters, how can we help? 

I drove from Tillamook to Portland in a steady rain, through the state forest on Highway 6, a twisting road prone to rock slides in spots. I left my brother’s house early so I could take my time. My rental car hydroplaned once or twice. It was early in the morning, dark, and fortunately there was sparse traffic headed east; I kept to a steady 45mph. My night vision is suspect and at times it was hard to see where the road was heading. I alternated between high and low beams, and when a vehicle appeared in my rearview mirror I pulled over to let it pass. No sense pissing off the locals. 

Travel is a luxury, but it’s one of the best ways to learn. 

I Left My Money in San Francisco

 “Spend what you need but just throw even a few coins into a tin and forget that you have it. A woman should always have something put by.” Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

We spent three days in San Francisco to celebrate our children’s birthdays. Miranda turned twenty on September 3, and Gabriel ushered in his twenty-fifth year on the 4th. They were born five years apart. Our last visit to San Francisco was fifteen years ago and much has changed in that short span of time. There was the financial implosion of 2008 and 2009, the recovery and gentrification that changed many of SF’s neighborhoods, the election of Donald Trump and the madness of his administration, massive wildfires that confirmed some of our worst foreboding about the changing climate, and the pandemic. Gabriel lived in San Francisco for a couple of years, moved down to Los Angeles for a job at the LA Phil, then back to San Francisco when he got a job at the Opera. He lives in a quintessential Victorian-style house with three roommates. The front door opens on a steep flight of stairs, climbs to a landing, then another short flight of stairs to the living area. The windows in the high-ceilinged living room offer views of downtown. The room Gabriel occupies has hardwood floors, a fireplace and a lovely bay window. 

Miranda spent most of her time in Berkeley visiting two of her girlfriends from high school who attend UC Berkeley. She got her first tattoo and rode the BART for the first time. We all had dinner together at Gabriel’s on his birthday. The boy made pasta, bread, a lovely salad, and cookies for dessert. 

We stayed at the Marriott Marquis on 4th street, near Union Square. There’s a Trader Joe’s across the street from the hotel. The room was decent, although the mini-fridge leaked water. Marriott charges its guests $14.95 per day for Internet access, $80 a day to park a car. Aside from being annoying, it was another reminder of how corporations try to squeeze as much profit as they can from every customer. We parked our Honda across the street for $58 a day. The Dodgers were in town for a weekend series against the Giants and the hotel was full of baseball fans decked out in team gear. Face masks were required in the common areas of the hotel, and at every restaurant and the Academy of Science we had to show our vaccination cards and ID to get in. We didn’t find this unreasonable or see it as an encroachment on our freedom. It seemed a sensible precaution in a pandemic. We got around on foot, and by Uber and Metro. Union Square is gritty and grimy, populated with tourists and homeless folks, street corner preachers and panhandlers. The Disney Store is closing, Crate & Barrel is looking for seasonal help. 

The Academy of Science in Golden Gate Park was fantastic, worth every cent of the $40 entry fee. We went to the top of the observation tower at the de Young Museum to take in the panoramic view of the city. The sky was hazy that day, but the view was still spectacular. The park was crowded with joggers, cyclists, people walking dogs, picnicking on the grass, playing Frisbee. The weather was fine, sunny and warm. I like the ethnic diversity of San Francisco. I enjoy looking at the architecture and the fire escapes, the old facades juxtaposed with gleaming glass towers. 

 I tried to stay away from the news during the trip, but it was difficult with the shocking reproductive news coming out of Texas and the Supreme Court. The conservative political minority in the United States has been intent on killing a woman’s right to an abortion ever since it realized it was a potent wedge issue. The political (banks, insurance and real estate, large corporations, and the Pentagon) arm of the American right wing cares about low taxes, minimal regulation, weak unions, heavy defense spending, and limited social insurance; this arm doesn’t care one bit about the unborn. The issue is useful in that it gave the political right entry into the world of the Christian right. Both arms are after the same thing, power, but on their respective planes of interest, which frequently overlap. The Christian right believes its male members are sanctioned by the bible to control womens’ bodies. This marriage of convenience and mutual aid is why a man as immoral and religiously illiterate as Donald Trump was adored by evangelicals. 

Naturally, Texas, being Texas, had to go full Taliban against women, with a cruel and bizarre law. The Texas state legislature has a long history of crackpot members and idiotic laws. Read Molly Ivins for confirmation. Note, too, that the legislature rammed this abhorrent anti-abortion law through at the same time it was passing a vicisous voter suppression bill. Power and control, minority over majority, not accidental. I don’t know what to say about the Supreme Court other than to call it what it is: an unelected and unaccountable political body. The action taken by the Court in the Texas matter isn’t as surprising as the cowardly way the majority went about it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed to create a bill that will codify in federal law a woman’s right to an abortion, but this is a hollow response since such a bill has zero chance of getting through the Senate, unless the Democrats change the rules regarding the filibuster, an action they are too timid to undertake. Pelosi is probably thinking that the abortion issue might be very useful for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Women voters (especially women of color) could very well hold the key to the Democrats holding the House and Senate. 

In the final days of the US occupation of Afghanistan many conservatives expressed concern about the fate of Afghan women, and cried their crocodile tears, and yet when it comes to the reproductive health of American women, they are only too happy to support Draconian measures that will hurt the poor most of all. The GOP is the party of Hypocrisy. If Republicans are so concerned about women, why is their standard-bearer a serial sexual harasser? Why is the ERA still languishing, and why won’t Republicans back renewal of the Violence Against Women Act? Spare the tears. 

I’m reading The Fall of the House of Dixie by Bruce Levine, a fine history of the Civil War. 

Chronicle Of A Failure Foretold

 “I was reminded again how the men who start wars invariably live through them to justify the behavior that has left millions maimed and dead.” Jim Harrison

Saigon, 1975. Kabul, 2021. The motif of the limits of American military power is that of helicopters evacuating personnel from embassy compounds once thought to be impregnable, and permanent. 

I was opposed to the invasion of Afghanistan from the beginning. While the American reaction to the 9/11 attacks was understandable, it always struck me as an overreaction, misguided, out of proportion. I place the Patriot Act in the same category. The folly of trading civil liberties for the illusion of safety, and in the process creating a massive bureaucracy with a creepy name -- the Department of Homeland Security -- was sure to return to haunt us, and did in the summer of 2020 when protestors were snatched off the streets of Portland by DHS thugs in unmarked vehicles and uniforms without insignia or identification. I never consented at the ballot box to be kept under constant electronic surveillance by my own government. Homeland. The word has fascist overtones. 

Had 9/11 been treated like a crime America would not be scrambling to exit Kabul today. Nor would Osama bin Laden have been able to evade capture for ten years, hiding in plain sight in Pakistan. We were told that bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world, hunted by all of America’s major intelligence agencies, and with help from our “allies” in the region. I’m sure it will be fifty years before the full story about bin Laden is known, but my gut sense is that the reporting on the raid that killed bin Laden by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is nearer the truth than any official explanation by the US government. And, of course, the War on Terror didn’t end with bin Laden’s death. Over the course of two decades the lies told by the military establishment to Congress, the media, and the public about Afghanistan rival the lies told about Vietnam. We’re winning; progress is being made; we’re turning the corner; we can leave victorious once the local security forces are trained and equipped, indoctrinated with our fool-proof methods; all we need to completely turn the tide in our favor is a troop surge; all we need is to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Year after year. Thousands of Afghan and American lives, trillions of taxpayer dollars, wasted. 

Once the rather nauseating explosion of “thank you for your service” tributes, solemn moments of silence for our fallen heroes, and stadium flyovers by Navy F-14’s lost their novelty, the American people forgot about Afghanistan. Who could keep track of the Whack-A-Mole nature of the conflict, with the Taliban being routed one year only to return the next more potent than ever. Our victories on the ground were ephemeral; the Taliban had only to be patient, to wait. That was the way to outwit the overwhelming military power of the foreign invader. It worked against the Soviet Union. It worked against the United States, too. 

I’m struck by how often the most egregious blunders are conceptualized and sold by men and women with the finest pedigrees, educated at elite institutions like Harvard and Yale. The best and brightest of the Vietnam Era, the financial wizards who crashed the world economy in 2008, and the architects of the War on Terror, which was always meant to be evergreen. We’ve forgotten the inconvenient fact that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were nationals of Saudi Arabia, but the United States could hardly launch a military invasion against our dear friends in Riyadh, not at the risk of losing access to Saudi oil. No, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney gave the Saudis a soft pass, as has every administration since. What was the first foreign country Donald Trump visited? Saudi Arabia. Hubris. Greed. Corruption. Rot. This is how global empires deteriorate and collapse. Under the crushing weight of stupidity and the mythology of their own infallibility. 

In my head I can still hear the voice of George W. Bush, the faux cowboy, as he justified the undeclared war against a country that had not attacked the United States; a country in a part of the world that most American citizens couldn’t find on a map or begin to understand; a country of regions, tribes, languages, dialects, feuds and traditions. Bush painted with a simplistic brush, good against evil, on our side or the side of our enemy, our benevolent god against their malignant god. A shocked and frightened nation bought the story. Now will come the excuses and justifications and retellings of the story, recast, not as a tale of colossal failure, but as a noble effort to bestow American-style freedom and democracy on a country that never asked for either. 

Hardwired

 “I will finish it by saying that you should resist letting self-analysis become self-abuse.” John Steinbeck

That’s good advice from John Steinbeck, a writer who had a deep understanding of human psychology, and something I frequently violate to my detriment. I am my harshest and most consistent critic. I need a certain amount of order and predictability to feel balanced, a trait I’m not proud of because it can easily lead to falling into a rut and a lack of spontaneity, which makes one dull and rigid. Sometimes the set of my ways, my habits of mind, make me feel closed off, isolated inside my head. Staying in the moment is as challenging as ever. 

Full, leisurely retirement here in our delightfully comfortable bungalow on Milpas Street has been wonderful but I know for the health of our bank account that I have to transition to semi-retirement before long. Today my wife looked at me and said, “I’m a little worried about money.” So, this pleasant run we’ve been on will soon come to an end. I expected this, and planned all along to find part-time work within a few months of bidding the school district goodbye. This will hopefully mean a reasonably tolerable part-time gig of thirty hours a week. I don’t want to do much thinking, I just want something I can do primarily on my feet, even if it’s repetitive, in exchange for time to write, think, and breathe. Thus far, Trader Joe’s has rejected me twice, not even an interview to look me over, see that I’m ambulatory, pleasant, and capable of doing the job. If I’m honest with myself, and I usually am, I admit that my job hunting efforts to date have been scattershot, not even classifiable as half-hearted. I don’t want to surrender the slow-paced, completely free hours spent writing, reading under the market umbrella on the patio, afternoon naps, training sessions, drinking wine and sleeping past six a.m. Not yet. Part of me wants to hold on to this luxury as long as possible. 

Dissipation and dissolution are for the wealthy. I’m just a working-class guy. 

My daughter started her first post-City College job today, at a local sandwich shop. It’s an entry-level gig, part-time. She was nearly a half hour late because she mixed up the start time, but she made it and put a full day in, and came home smelling of salad oil and bemoaning the math involved in making change. She’s had this awful phobia about numbers for years, it’s her academic Achilles Heel. She may return to school in the Fall, but she doesn’t yet have an idea where. On the other hand, she’s not yet twenty so I refuse to push her faster than she can go, not as long as we can afford it. No rent, no chores to speak of, a car to get around. My daughter’s best girlfriends, her posse, have returned to their colleges and universities, one at Cal Poly in San Luis, and two at UC Berkeley. Smart girls, but goofy as hell. They start laughing for no reason. Why does Ally titter when I ask if she wants a glass of water?

My wife and daughter rarely read this blog, but somehow always react if I mention them in a piece. I’m making an effort to bring the lens closer to who I am, although any regular readers of this thing I created in 2004 and have obsessively kept going since should have an idea. My politics lean left and have since I had a brief fling with the GOP in the mid-80’s. My preoccupation is with the balance of power between citizens and their government, between the wealthy and the many, between corporations and consumers, and between humans and the planet. Our economic system works too well for the few and is too hard on the many, and is making the planet sick, and in some places unlivable. The resources America hands to the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex at the expense of the welfare of the nation’s citizens is obscene. The War on Terror was a misguided delusion that I opposed from the outset. Ditto the Patriot Act. Serious shit is happening on every front, but if it’s not unfolding before our eyes every day we lose interest, until the next flood, fire, mudslide or hurricane. Human nature, hard-wired. It’s like Robbie Robertson sings, “Hardwired for war, hardwired for sex.” 

The only book I’m reading now is The Road Home by Jim Harrison. Nearly done with it. Harrison’s writing gobsmacks me. I love this tale about the Northridge clan on the American Plains. It’s a story of land and cattle and rivers, of lost brothers and a long absent son, and his mother, Dalva. Harrison gets the tone right, and the reader always knows the season, the temperature, and what flowers are in bloom or lying dormant. But Harrison also gets his characters right, builds them with insight and detail and humor. Like some people are taken with certain painters, I’m taken with Jim Harrison, though I feel like I’m late to the party, having intentionally immersed myself in his writing only in the last two years. 

We’re taking a road trip to San Francisco in a few weeks for our kids’ birthdays. Our son Gabriel lives in the city again, so we’ll see his neighborhood and do some wandering. No idea what the Covid situation is up north at the moment. In the third week of September I will travel to Oregon to visit my brother in Tillamook, our annual get together. Whenever we spend time together I realize how similar in temperament we are. We’re both obsessive, neat, and practical, and born fretters over the mundane details of adult life. I was mulling over a road trip, sort of a repeat of what I did last September, hopefully minus the wildfires and closed freeways and smoky air, but have decided not to risk getting stuck somewhere and will fly to Portland and rent a car that will sit in my brother’s driveway while we head off in his Jeep Cherokee with bikes on the rack and a cooler full of snacks in plastic bags with twist ties. Granola bars, crackers, cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Green pastures, dairy cows, rivers, trees. I hope to once again look upon the mighty Columbia.