Sweet and Sour Meanderings

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell
That’s the story of the Hurricane
But it won’t be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time he’s done

“Hurricane,” Bob Dylan

+ My daughter is going back to Philadelphia in a few days, back to university and student life. She’s feeling sad about leaving. Of course. She’s 21 and life here is comfortable and familiar and easier. But she needs to be back in school. She seems so young, much younger than her peers of the same age. The progress she made last year was hard-earned, with tears and daily thoughts of throwing in the towel. Homesickness. We thought she might quit. We encouraged her to see out the semester. She did. She also changed her living situation, from the dorm to sharing an apartment off-campus with a new friend. She’s working it out in the Big City. 

+ There wasn’t any flooding or damage in our immediate area from the recent rains. Crazy rains after years of drought. But that’s the history of this state, cycles of drought and flood. Water in the wrong places, far from the majority of the population, water that has to be moved north to south and east to west, through canals and dams and a massive aqueduct. Engineering marvels on one level, but on another destructive as hell. Fucking with nature, changing the course of rivers, streams, making lakes where no lake was meant to be. Displacing people. That’s part of the California story, too.  

+ The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday crept up on me this year. It’s usually a time of reflection, but this year it came and went. Dr. King. Frederick Douglass. W.E.B Du Bois. James Baldwin. My pantheon of great Americans. Each one a prophet. The radical King is largely unknown now, except to scholars and careful readers. With every passing year we get a watered-down, white-washed, sanitized King. I encourage folks to read or listen to King’s 1967 address, “A Time to Break Silence.” It’s all there. “There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.” The American war budget for this fiscal year is $858 billion. A fair chunk of that is earmarked for Ukraine, another war that might continue for some time. $858 billion while so many Americans are unhoused, hungry, without access to medical care or an education, in need of mental health care, and the wealthiest corporations and individuals have gamed the tax system. We saw Trump’s tax returns. They’re the returns of a lousy businessman and a cheat. No surprise, not really news. Not that uncommon in his circles, either. 

King said that America has a “proneness to adjust to injustice.” How right he was. We have adjusted to being ruled by the magic of the Market and every inequity that it brings, as well as conditioned to accept permanent war as normal. I’m not a communist; when it comes to economic matters I’m more of a social democrat. The infallible “logic” of the free market has failed for too many and succeeded for too few. People created the Market, it wasn’t handed down by the Christian God. It’s not free, and rarely has been in this country. King knew that unregulated capitalism produced rough and ragged edges, which led to other maladies, social, political, racial. Read or listen to the address. It seems to me that we’ve never been most distant from King’s vision.

+ Democracy isn’t perfect, not close, but it’s better than most alternatives. We’ve neglected ours, assuming, I suppose, that it’s carved in stone and will last forever. Neither is true, Trump and his accomplices proved that. The legal guardrails were challenged. Innocent people died. Trump and Meadows and Flynn and Giuliani and Stone are free, all  of them. Kevin McCarthy is Speaker of the House. America is in trouble. Remember what Hagrid said to Harry Potter: “Dark times, Harry, dark times.”

+ Our natural gas bill rose from something like $75 to $220 in the space of a month. Our little house is 90 years old, drafty and poorly insulated. We have to run the heater. 

+ Two minutes on Twitter is enough to convince me that America has lost its collective mind. Fortunately, Twitter doesn’t present the entire picture. 

Beware the Full Moon

 “Another day of anger, bitterness and doubt.” Bob Dylan, “False Prophet”

I can always tell that the moon is full or nearly so by the behavior of the people I observe at the Market. It’s really uncanny but people seem to act differently, more befuddled and spaced-out than usual. Slower, indecisive, best evidenced by a woman with a basket standing in the center of the aisle, as if she’s the only person in the store, completely alone with no sense of time or space or the fact that there’s a man with a broom behind her, looking for a way past her so he can get on with his work, a determined runt of a man who tries to anticipate if the woman might veer left or right so he can dart by. For what seems an eternity she does neither. This is the time when customers ask all kinds of questions -- where’s the dijon mustard, where’s the sour cream, do you have crystalized ginger, can I buy just one stalk of celery. A tall man stopped me on his way out of the store with his grandson and asked me to examine a quarter to determine if it was real or counterfeit or foreign. He couldn’t read the inscription on the back, but I could and assured him that he had the real deal. “Old eyes,” he said. As if I’m the proverbial spring chicken. I’ll be sixty-three in a couple of weeks. 

Full moon, odd behavior. Fuck, in the United States of America, the moon is always full and bright and fit for lunatics. The American era is ending and something new is being born, and it appears more authoritarian and cruel, driven by a perverse greed for wealth and power that is difficult for average people to understand. Without heed of consequences or casualties. Without shame. The will to power, I guess. I don’t have it, I may have many years ago, when I was in the Air Force, but the impulse flared and died. In my professional life I have always been honest and fair. The only job that I flat-out failed at was as an insurance salesman. Dark days, foolish days. Cold-calling from the phone book. Knocking on doors in the suburbs. I could do neither with any competence, I was struck with terror at the prospect and could never overcome the fear of rejection. Even when I got an appointment, which was rare, I was probably the worst closer on my best day in the history of sales work, statistically more likely to talk myself out of a sale than into one. Asking a stranger for money is what it comes down to and I couldn’t do it. For a certain time in my life I believed a lot of corporate bullshit and American hype. Strong military, free markets, low taxes, American benevolence, etc. I was as ignorant as they come about the history of my country, the theft of indigenous land and the enslavement of Africans, the causes of the Civil War, the Industry of American slavery, white supremacy. American imperialism. American-style capitalism. The only thing that saved me was a love of reading, a thirst for knowledge, and my own lived experience. 

Fuck, on this full moon I committed a cardinal sin of a book reviewer and mispelled the names of two of the main characters in a piece I wrote, edited and proof-read. Fuck, double screaming fuck. The publisher brought the error to my attention, kindly, but I’m furious with myself, chagrined that I could make such an elemental error. No excuse, I fucked up. I fixed the review and sent my apologies. 

Full moon decisions usually go sideways. There’s a lot of noise in this world, a constant, annoying buzz; we can’t get quiet enough to hear. Phones, sirens, radios, bells, beeps, chirps, screeches, chainsaws, leaf blowers, pneumatic nail guns, cement mixers, drills, endless and everywhere, poison for some, the kind that takes over the brain, and these days everybody’s got an opinion and some means for expressing it. Lots of noise, images slipping past at warp speed. We need to put our phones down, shut out the noise and the images. There’s too much talking, too much hypocrisy, too many lies and too many flim-flam artists, too many cowards.

But there are no saviors. Hold on. It’s the end of an era. And a full moon. 

Too Much Stuff

 

“Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain.” Bob Dylan

= I came across a quote by Thomas Mann that seems to sum up the age we are living in here in the barely united United States.  Mann wrote, “Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.” The batshit antics of the Trump-owned GOP, from the surreal ballot recount in Arizona, which may be ruled illegal if it gets any nuttier, to Trump urging all his sycophants to run Liz Cheney out of her leadership position, to the hundreds of anti-democracy voting bills introduced in Republican-controlled state legislatures. The assault on Liz Cheney, who sits third in the House hierarchy, behind the power-mad Kevin McCarthy and Trump bootlicker Steve Scalise, is an example of the GOP eating its own. Cheney’s transgression? Refusing to carry water for Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, which, let’s not forget, he lost. I haven’t forgotten that Cheney is the spawn of Uncle Dick Cheney, one of the most devious VP’s in recent history; she’s a hard-right Conservative about whom the only positive thing I can say is that at least what she believes is tethered to reality. If it appears that Cheney is standing alone against the Forces of Trump it’s only because the bar for integrity in the GOP is an inch from the surface of the cesspool. McCarthy, McConnell, Hawley, Cruz, Rubio -- this bumper crop of political miscreants -- who daily trade their honor for power, are going to destroy the GOP as a viable political party. Since the Reagan Revolution conservatives have run the table, as dominant as the best Manchester United teams under Sir Alex Ferguson, but they have lost the magic and must be relegated. They’re out of ideas, other than obstruction and destruction. They’re deathly afraid of Donald J. Trump, who sits on his fat behind down in Mar-A-Lago and whines about election fraud, and SAVING OUR GREAT COUNTRY to small crowds of devoted fans and asskissers like Kevin McCarthy. America might benefit from more than two political parties, but at the very least two are necessary, and they must do more than obstruct, undercut, and sabotage each other. We’re headed for a bad patch, of this I am sure. The GOP is too far out to sea to rescue itself. Thanks to Trump, the man incapable of accepting defeat, every election from here out will be doubted, contested, and denounced for impropriety. Democracy runs on faith in shared norms, and rules written and unwritten. Trump always thought, and still does, that no law applies to him. 

=One week in our new digs. First time we’ve ever lived in a house. Still surrounded by boxes in need of unpacking, but we’ve made good progress in a week. Got the cable and the WiFi connected -- after I dashed down to Office Max and bought a new cable modem. Washed our first loads of laundry, ironically the last in our 15-year-old GE washing machine. Blew the bearings the first time we used it in our new home. We bought a refurbished Kenmore for $450 from a man with a side yard full of appliances of every description. Commercial grade stoves, a huge gas range circa1949, refrigerators, cannibalized washers and dryers, hoses and motors. It was like an amusement park of appliances. 

We have real windows. By that I mean double-windows which slide up and down. Of the many things I loathed about our apartment, the casement windows were at the top of the list. I’ve always wanted a front porch wide enough for a bench or chairs, and now we have one, with a little bistro set my wife purchased from Wayfair or such. (Inexpensive stuff, made in China by human beings who earn very little money, a fact not lost on me.) We have a solid front door. We have nooks and crannies, a kitchen you can actually move around in without bumping into something or someone. We even have a fireplace. Yet this first week we have struggled to adapt to the space, our minds and muscles trained over two decades to a very different configuration of light switches and cupboards and drawers. Waking up one night to pee, I was momentarily lost, not sure where the bathroom was. Long way to go yet, but this is going to be a wonderful house to live in, though I suspect it will be cold in the winter months. Another month, possibly two, before we’re dialed in. 

The move has also been difficult because clutter and disorder unsettles me. I can handle a certain amount of both, but when I reach my limit I get cranky as hell, a problem for my wife and daughter, both of whom tend to hoard. Over twenty years we had simply accumulated too much stuff, a lot of it useless. I counted six upright fans, a big box of board games no one has played for at least five years, a bolt of muslin that I’ve wanted to toss for a quarter century, a broken telescope that belonged to my wife’s father. To me moving day felt like drowning. We loaded box after box into the U-Haul and still there were more. For the first couple of days we climbed over and around boxes and hunted for toothbrushes and Q-Tips and prescription medications. It kind of made me snap, I just lost my shit over the futility of moving all this stuff from one place to another, only this time without a large storage space to put it in. Six plastic storage boxes full of Christmas ornaments, enough to decorate three trees. Rolls of wrapping paper, some sealed, most open, loose, torn. Boxes of shoes. Stuff, everywhere. I’m still looking for a black belt. 

=My beloved Chelsea Football Club booked a place in the Champions League Final later this month, brushing aside a struggling Real Madrid team. This is a stunning achievement for a team that six months ago looked to be going absolutely nowhere. Frank Lampard’s team was bereft of identity and solidity, and some players, like centerback Antonio Rudiger, and wingback Marcos Alonso, had been shunted aside like surplus parts. When Lampard got sacked and the German Thomas Tuchel took over,  it was a reclamation project of the highest order. But Tuchel has been more than up to the task. The hallmark of successful football managers is their ability to make good players great players. Tuchel has a good football mind and very high standards for his team. 

Escape from Banjo Land

 

 “It’s rush hour now, on the wheel and the plow/and they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” Bob Dylan, Ring Them Bells

I picked the wrong time for my annual trip to visit my brother in Tillamook, Oregon, and the wrong means of transportation. Uncomfortable about flying due to the risks of Covid-19, I decided to pack the 2008 CRV and do my version of a Sam Shepard/Bruce Springsteen/Hunter S. Thompson road trip, driving a long distance alone, with 9 hours of music on a Spotify playlist I created to keep me company, GPS for navigation, and some snacks to munch on. I knew when I made this decision that California was in the grip of the Summer of Fire, a gruesome preview of what is coming if we do not stop pretending that the devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods happening all over this planet are caused by some force other than human activity. Climate activists, scientists, and indigineous people have sounded the alarm for decades, to deaf ears and blind eyes. The climate crisis is happening right now, before our eyes, and we are ill-prepared for the shocks to come, the consequences of our actions. Our obsession with bigger, newer, shinier, cheaper, faster, and more profitable is threatening our ability to live. 

Not in play at the moment of my decision was what would happen in Southern Oregon only a few days after I arrived in Tillamook. 

The drive to Oregon was mostly uneventful. It was warm and sunny the Sunday I started north on the 101 freeway. From San Jose to the California border the sky was smokey and the sun the hue of a ripe peach . When I reached Redding in the late afternoon it was 111 degrees. At six the next morning when I headed out it was already 71. When I pulled into my brother’s driveway in Tillamook, just after noon on Monday, it was an astonishing 85 degrees, cloudless blue sky overhead, and windless. When I called my wife to let her know I had arrived safely she told me it was over 100 in Santa Barbara. 

By three a.m. on Tuesday morning a hot wind was howling with gusts up to 70 mph. When I went outside in the morning the CRV was covered with dust, trash cans lay on their sides, and drifts of leaves had collected against the fence surrounding my brother’s yard. The leaves were green, torn from the trees a month before they would have fallen on their own. In other parts of Tillamook the wind uprooted trees and downed power lines, forcing road closures. My brother moved to Tillamook in 2006 and has seen all kinds of weather, but never before had he experienced a freak windstorm that pushed an overheated wind like a California Santa Ana. 

Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We left Tillamook on Wednesday morning, headed for Westport, on the south side of Grays Harbor in Washington. It was warm and the sky was hazy with rust-colored smoke. We loaded bikes on my brother’s Jeep Cherokee and started out. Before we got out of town we saw the plume of smoke rising from the forest behind the golf course. For more than twenty years my brother worked on Hot Shot fire crews in the Los Padres National Forest and northern Arizona. “We normally get about 90 inches of rain a year,” he said. “This year it’s down to 60 inches. It’s dry back in there. If that fire  spreads fast it could be a big problem for local firefighters. They don’t have much experience with wildfires.” The 101 northbound was open so we headed on, crossing the Columbia River on the Astoria Bridge into Washington about four hours later. I noticed at least a dozen dead birds on the bridge. 

My brother sarcastically refers to Tillamook and other small towns in Oregon and Washington as Banjo Land, meaning Hicksville, populated with rednecks and narrow-minded folks, a generalization he knows is too sweeping to be true. But when you are Santa Barbara born and raised it’s hard not to make comparisons -- and find nearly every other place wanting. It’s rare in Santa Barbara to see the front yard of a house littered with the hulks of old cars, refrigerators, tires, and junk. It’s equally rare to see Trump 2020 yard signs. But like the rangeland around Yreka in northern California where I saw signs that read, FARMERS FOR TRUMP and SAVE BABIES, VOTE TRUMP, the rural towns we drove through looked like Trump country. I saw many American flags and a dozen Trump 2020 signs. As the scenery passed I thought about these small towns, and how they contribute their sons and daughters to fight America’s wars. Proud and self-reliant, these people don’t like being told what to believe or how to live their lives by people of my bent or the federal government. They vote Republican. God, America, guns, freedom to own a big gas-guzzling truck. I think the honest ones know that climate change is caused by human activity. They may not have liberal-style sophistication, but they’re not stupid. From what I saw, they are practical, capable people making their way through life, raising families, working the fields or the rivers and sea. I’m not willing to write these people off, even though I assume we would disagree on many subjects. I want to know why they see Trump so differently than I do. If nothing else, we’re still Americans. That meant something before the working-class got hammered by big money titans on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and divided from each other by racial animosity, religion, guns, immigration, depictions in the popular culture. Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We rode the bikes around Westport, checked out the boats in the harbor, followed a bike trail to the beach where many surfers and stand-up paddle boarders were enjoying the gorgeous afternoon.  A few hours later I stood on the jetty and watched the sun dissolve into a nearly horizontal line. There was a cool breeze, the sound of the waves, an uncommonly lovely moment that I wished I could share with my wife and kids. Peace is very hard to come by these days. I closed my eyes and breathed in the sea air. 

Back in Tillamook on Thursday, the sky was hazy with smoke and very fine ash.  My brother cleaned the Jeep while I read. We smoked some weed and listened to Mojo Nixon’s Outlaw Country show on Sirius XM. We watched the Weather Channel. We talked about our parents. 

My plan on Friday was to drive down the 101 to Eureka, spend the night, and then continue on my way home. I’ve never driven the 101 from north-to-south, and I thought it might be cool to hug the coast. I felt some apprehension about the fires, but the 101 was open when I started out at six a.m. My Road Trip playlist was on as was my GPS, and I was feeling fine until I saw the flashing red and blue lights up ahead, and then the orange letters of a sign announcing that the 101 southbound was closed. The GPS tried to re-route me down a country road but that road was also closed. The next route the GPS suggested was blocked as well. I was starting to feel trapped. Eureka wasn’t happening. To get home I would have to return the way I came, on Highway 22, then 18, then I5 through Medford and Ashland. I pulled into a rest stop to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka and call my wife. By now it was 7:30 and the sun was behind a dense dome of smoke. My phone was down to 10% battery power. What the fuck? The charging adaptor wasn’t working. I switched it out for a spare and that adaptor also failed. Neither adapter worked in either port. No phone. No GPS. No paper map. I had had no problem charging my phone on the way to Oregon, but now, when I needed it most, it was useless. After a couple of wrong turns I found my way back to highway 22 heading east. The smoke was still thick and visibility poor. 

At a gas station mini-mart I bought a new adaptor, two cans of Red Bull, and a cup of coffee. Fortunately, the new adaptor worked. I called my wife and asked her to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka, and then I settled in for some serious driving into what looked like the apocalypse. Passing through Medford I saw the destruction, like a bomb had been dropped. Buildings leveled, metal twisted, cars burned out, a chimney here and there. It reminded me of the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara more than a decade ago. All in all it was seven hours before I crossed into California, and another ten before I reached Santa Barbara at 11:30 p.m. I only stopped to pee and get gas. When I crawled into bed, my comfortable, familiar bed, I still felt as if I was moving, driving fast on highway 41 in the pitch black night, the smell of smoke in my nostrils, and Bob Dylan whispering in my ear.