A Walk to the Park - Part II

I’m just back from a walk to Franceschi Park. From our front porch to the parking lot of the park took 31 minutes at a reasonable pace, with only a brief stop or two to enjoy the view of the city. I had my phone but didn’t listen to music or podcasts. I’m trying to provide myself a respite from news, information, sound bites about American democracy or the situation in Ukraine or which Chelsea attacking players are said to be at odds with the manager. Enough. Poverty, injustice, cruelty, and stupidity. Same goes for you. I need a break. I worked the last three days at the Market, one day shift, two closing shifts, during which I walked nearly 40 miles and put in 24 commuting miles on my bike. Didn’t get up until eight this morning, late for me. A body needs rest. Ahead of me near the top of Garcia Road I saw a worker carrying his tool belt in his right hand and his lunch pail in his left. His body language told me he was tired after a long day. No weekend for him, just a short respite and back to it. I see that same look at the store in some of my co-workers, the guys and ladies who work in areas that are short staffed, like the meat department. More times than not, their workday goes on for twelve hours. Most of us always have one eye on the work and the other on the clock. 

I’m reading a book called Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Prize winner who until recently I had never heard of. This is why I remain an unpaid book reviewer. I can’t even pretend to have read broadly or deeply enough. But this novel is so brilliant it makes my head spin. The voice telling the story is that of a master of pace, dark humor, and memory. Heavy moral and ethical subjects written about with a sly humor, and always, a knowing. 

The other book I’m reading is To Govern the Globe by historian Alfred W. McCoy. It’s weighty like Chronicles, but in a much different way. McCoy’s subject is empire and world orders, and his range of analysis is the past half century of human history. Empires like that of Spain and Portugal, and later Britain, with outposts in exotic, foreign locations; wars of conquest for church and crown giving way to wars between sovereign nations that included colonization and the radical racial theory that legitimated the enslavement or murder of thousands of human beings. A world order organizes an entire age, not precisely, but as a prevailing ethos, like the Iberian idea -- backed by the Catholic Church -- that to the conqueror went the spoils, including total dominion over the conquered. Great book. British rule of the Indian subcontinent has always fascinated my imagination, the circumstances that made it possible for so few to assert control over so many for so long. I’ve heard Alfred McCoy on podcasts and seen him on Democracy Now, and he’s always concise and direct in his analysis. He has some trenchant things to say about the future of the American world order. (Spoiler alert: it’s coming to an end.) He’s worth listening to. 

I put a book by Rebecca Solnit called Orwell’s Roses on my radar. 

In terms of my own writing, I published one review at California Review of Books this month, and two pieces for my Medium page. I admit to getting caught up in the anxiety and anticipation of views, reads, and reaction from others, but I usually remind myself of the hundreds of things vying for our attention these days, sunup to sundown, from the latest must-have deals to what’s hot on HBO. Is it trending? How many likes? What’s the hashtag? It’s exhausting. My fiction project hit a stall, as if the breeze on the sea suddenly ceased and the sails drooped. While I was walking it occurred to me that though the story is coming clear to me, I still do not know who is telling the story. I don’t trust my own voice, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I don’t know what my voice sounds like. I think I’ve stumbled upon a structure that might connect all the scenes in my head. We’ll see. My labor of love, failure, and hopefully, learning. I try to get better at things. 

As I was riding past the Old Mission the other night around 10:30, I heard the yipping of coyotes, a loud chorus that I haven’t heard in such volume in a long time. The sound echoed in the heavily wooded canyon. Nature. I’ve been working on composting, experimenting with opening the tumbler to air it out as much as possible, because it’s too wet and smells rank, a sign of excessive moisture. Composting food waste and watching its slow decomposition, then spreading it around our yard, turning it into the soil with a long-handled trowel, is very satisfying to me. From a very young age I loved gardening. There’s wisdom in it. I need to get my hands in dirt on a regular basis. 

And sometimes I find I need to just be, where I am, fully present in the moment. It’s the toughest discipline. 

A Walk to the Park

 “Let us march on ballot boxes, until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress men who will not fear to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.” Martin Luther King, Jr., March 25, 1965

Today my wife and I made an urban hike from our house to Franceschi Park. I did this four-mile round trip a week or so ago and wanted Terry to see it. Turns out that she had never been to Franceschi Park, incredible news to me as most Santa Barbara natives have visited FP at least once. We set off up Garcia Road. The sky was streaked with clouds but the islands were visible in the channel. I couldn’t remember the last time we had taken a walk, just the two of us. Terry turns 60 in March of this year; in November we will celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. As with most marriages, ours hit a few bumps in the road, rocky patches, but we managed to find a way through and now find ourselves in a good place, more tolerant of one another, happy in our little bungalow. Funny how we can find ourselves content in a world that my incessant social media news feed portrays as falling apart. Terry, as ever, is the optimistic one. While I’m happy enough on a personal level, I find myself more and more resigned to the real possibility that the United States is headed for autocratic rule. 

We took a rest on the low wall where Garcia Road meets Alameda Padre Serra then continued on our way, pausing only to admire a stately house or the vibrant colors in a beautifully landscaped yard, the rough texture of a sandstone wall. Traffic was sparse and it was quiet enough to hear the shriek of a turkey vulture as it floated above the Santa Barbara Bowl. Terry had her earbuds in and was listening to music, which she claimed she needed for motivation. We cut through Sylvan Park, green after the heavy rain in December. A young couple was sitting on a bench, but other than them nobody else was around. On Dover Hill Road Terry stopped and lay on the road, protesting that she couldn’t go on. I knew she was being dramatic and waited for her to get on her feet. We climbed the stone stairs between two elegant residences and reached the lower section of the park. The foliage was green and hearty, proof of the restorative power of six inches of rain. The cacti looked refreshed. We could see some of our city’s landmarks, including the County Courthouse, the spire of the Arlington Theater, the Granada Building, and Peabody Stadium. As it has since I was a teenager, the contrast of trees and sky, white stucco and red tile roofs, and the blue of the Pacific Ocean filled me with happiness. When I was in high school my friend David and I spent a fair amount of hours in Franceschi Park, usually stoned to the gills on weed. It was the late 70’s, after all. 

Walking puts me in a ruminating frame of mind, and I found myself thinking, not about the peace of the moment, the beautiful scenery, but about something the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka said in an interview I watched on YouTube. Soyinka was talking about the endemic, crippling corruption in his native country, describing it as an endless cycle of rogues and robbers. Naturally, I thought of my country and the threat posed by Donald J. Trump and the GOP. Unless Trump chokes on a drumstick or is indicted, I expect him to run for president in 2024. Were he to win, I think he would try to do what autocrats always do: consolidate as much power as possible, including over the armed forces. Because Trump is a spiteful and vindictive man, it’s likely he would attempt to use the power of the federal government to go after people who refused to go along with his coup attempt. He would appoint loyalist lackeys in key agency roles in order to hollow the agencies out even further than they already are. He would continue to load the federal judiciary with right-wing activist judges. Cronyism and grifting would be rampant. Loyalty tests for members of the GOP would become ever more stringent. I think we would also witness more spectacles of white supremacy. Trump would find new enemies to blame things on, fresh scapegoats. 

Of late I’ve heard Trump declare, echoing Joseph Stalin, by the way, that who counts the votes is more important than who casts the votes. Such statements should put all citizens on alert. Here I’m going to plug an organization called Free Speech for People, which is doing important advocacy work around elections as well as barring January 6 insurrectionists from holding public office. Please check out: https://freespeechforpeople.org/one-year-after-january-6th-attack-on-the-us-capitol-public-interest-groups-launch-campaign-to-bar-insurrectionists-from-the-ballot/

The view from Franceschi Park was stunning, as always. 

A Year Too Late

“Well, the good old days may not return/And the rocks might melt and the sea may burn.” Tom Petty, “Learning To Fly.”

Finally, Joe Biden has spoken about the Insurrection that aimed to overturn his victory. The President said the right things and placed the responsibility for what took place that horrible day squarely where it belongs -- on Donald J. Trump. The long silent US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, also made a statement, though by comparison his was tepid and didn’t leave me with the sense that the DOJ will vigorously investigate and prosecute the insurrectionists, including Donald J. Trump. The country needed to hear from Biden and Garland ten months ago, when the wound was fresh and still oozing blood. 

Watching the footage of the attack a year later is no less horrifying. Those were some angry people. Some rage-filled people, most of them men, and most of them white.  

November and December of this year could be a dangerous flash point. The GOP is going all out to retake control of the legislative branch, and if historical trends hold, they will, which would end  Biden’s legislative agenda, such as it is. On the off chance the GOP fails to regain control of the House and Senate, you can be sure there will be accusations of fraud, demands for recounts, independent audits, court challenges, and possibly violence. Trump primed the pump, and now far too many Americans believe that political violence is acceptable. What kind of country will we be if we legitimize political killings? I think Ted Cruz is a dickhead but I do not advocate for him to be assaulted, maimed or executed. Mike Pence is a cowardly cipher and a religious fanatic, but at no time did I want to see him swinging from the gallows. The norm of a peaceful, cooperative transfer of political power has been one of America’s singular strengths, something we all could be proud of, at least until Trump came along and trampled it. Once the people’s votes have been counted, we have always agreed to abide by the outcome. Not anymore. So where does it go from here? Where does this spiral end? Are we just going to contest every electoral outcome, at every level of government? Or simply ignore the outcome by calling it illegitimate? No complex country and society can operate with such a prevailing ethos. Escalating turmoil would result. 

Where are the cooler heads, the good people, the smart and compassionate people, the level-headed, decent, common sense-filled people who accept the fact that Trump lost and Biden won in a legitimate election with a legitimate outcome? There are 81 million of us, give or take, the majority of the country, dispersed across the land, in every city, village, town and hamlet. We’re the fucking majority of Americans, the people who believe we deserve a voice in how the government functions and for whose benefit it functions. We’re living our lives, trying to be decent, tolerant people who raise children to be the same; the kind of people who more times than not do the right thing. The majority of us looked at the four year reign of Donald J. Trump and his sleazy, pathetic, sycophantic entourage, and said, No, enough of this fool is enough. Enough scandal, enough incompetence. We don’t like Trump or the impulses he stands for. We’re smart enough to recognize a conman when we see one. We didn’t vote for him. We, the majority, agree that Trump and his followers are a potential danger to our representative democracy. We wonder why so little is being done, and why so much is being deliberately thwarted. Who benefits? Who pays the cost? 

You know what I want? A society as close to justice as we can get, because that is itself a lofty ambition. Some of us have been poisoned by propaganda and disinformation to act unjustly toward people we do not even know. 

Rules need to be in place to make corruption difficult and wholesale corruption impossible. 

How many Americans honestly believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate President? Is it roughly the same number of Americans who believe Tucker Carlson is a legitimate journalist? 

I’m going to pose the same question I have since November 2020: if the election was fraudulent, how do you explain the strong showing by Republican candidates across the country? If the Democrats rigged the election, why didn’t they rig it to cement control of Congress as well as the White House? Why would they rig it only to secure razor-thin Congressional majorities? At its core the Big Lie makes no sense, it’s a fantasy concocted to protect Trump’s brittle ego. The election was a referendum on Trump, he was at the top of the ticket, and he was rejected by the voters. Down ballot Republican candidates fared just fine, but 81 million voters repudiated Trump and what he stands for. 

I don’t know if America is headed for a social crack-up, but if that’s our shared destination, it will be a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare. All the craven, scheming politicians and media figureheads who precipitated the Rise of Trump to begin with, who didn’t stand up and say NO to Trump’s idiocy, and all the people fooled into cheering for him, who refused to see him for what he is, and will always be, a grifter and conman. Can’t you see that when you are no longer of use to Trump he will discard you like a spent condom? Television is a universe of make-believe and the only industry that Donald J. Trump was successful in. He was shit at the Casino game, which is pretty hard to fuck-up, but Donald John is a rare specimen of elite fuck-up. When it comes to elite failure, my GOAT was George W. Bush, but as I said, Trump is rare. He should be ridiculed and laughed at like a two-headed carnival freak, not revered as a God. America, I ask honestly, what’s wrong with you? Do we really need to do this old dance around the racist maypole? Look, very soon white folk will be a minority of the population. Is that what my fellow white people are afraid of? Why? What’s scary about that? I thought living through Richard Nixon was the low point.  Jesus Christ, compared to Trump, Nixon was a saint.  

Nixon was a twisted fucker, but Trump is many times more dangerous. Trump is a mass media maestro in a mass media age. Reality is what he says it is. Donald needs to go out in the wilderness, naked and alone, and have a refresher course in reality, in the basics of raw survival: food, water, warmth, shelter from the elements. 

Remind me, what is it exactly that we disagree about? What direct harm has been done to you by the government? What harm was done to you by Barack Obama?What’s your beef? 

Trump, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone are the kind of warped people who instigate social unrest and then hightail it to safety on a private jet owned by a real billionaire. Republicans knew what Trump was about from the beginning, yet waited in vain for others of better reasoning ability and morale capacity to step forward to restrain him. Out of nothing but lies, a story of magic and malice was forged. An invention worthy of Hollywood. The King is insane, his wife is a rigid bitch, his children are incorrigible phonies, and yet, some people can’t get enough. I don’t get it. I never will. 

The Right is using all its media power and rhetorical judo to convince enough Americans that what they saw with their own eyes on January 6, 2021 is false. They’re telling us that what we saw wasn’t sedition or a deadly insurrection, but the rational response of Patriots to an epic injustice. Get it? In this rewrite of the script the insurrectionists are the good guys, and the institution they stormed and desecrated is evil. Is this how the idea of America ends?

 

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.