Author Archives: spottywestgoeseast

I’m back to using my local Safeway grocery store. Since my last blog post the human feces near the bike rack has been cleaned up entirely. It doesn’t feel like a victory. Victories are decisive. This felt more like the end of a war—how I imagine a shell-shocked union soldier might have felt walking home after hearing the days-old news that Lee had surrendered at the Battle of Appomattox. 

Okay, I’m being dramatic, but I felt a bit zombie-like walking back into the store after a month of boycotting, after numerous in-person and telephone discussions. After scrawling “CLEAN PLEASE” on the wall with sidewalk chalk and arrows pointing to the offending matter. After coming back and finding the message removed but not the remaining feces and scrawling another message “YUCK” with more arrows and this time circling the poop. 

Finally it is gone. 

I walked into the store and it seemed so peaceful, even majestic. It was a Saturday night at 7 o’clock so that might have helped. But the inside lights felt a bit unreal—or I should say, real, like they had borrowed something from the sun. People were neither friendly or un. They just were. 

Two women at the bakery counter with their children looked at me approaching and one said to her complaining younger child, “Look, here comes a man that’s going to steal you and take you away. He’s coming for you.”

“I don’t want any children,” I said to her. 

“See mom, that’s what they always say,” her older child said. 

I smiled at them and went on shopping. My bike pannier was getting full with all the things I was buying. I hadn’t come prepared for a real shopping trip, but once I was in there I suddenly felt generous to Safeway even though most of the area around the bike rack was still generally filthy. 

I half expected someone to come up to me and say I was banned from the store. I guess my picture wasn’t on a bulletin board in the back or, if it was, no one cared. 

6 cans of Fancy Feast Pate

1  bag Kind Peanut Butter Granola

1 Jar of Pepperoncinis

½ gallon of Clover Organic Milk

Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Half-baked frozen non-dairy dessert

2 everything bagels (Safeway made)

True Story sliced turkey

organic radishes – 1 bunch

organic bananas – bunch of 5

organic lacinato kale – 1 bunch

organic avocados (mesh bag of 4)

six-pack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

____$65.97

I’d really only come for the beer, but I was happy to have my local store back. Relieved, I guess, is a better word. 

I’m not ready to tell you about any more battles. I’m battle weary. My life feels too battle-centric. There has to be a way to fight that doesn’t feel like fighting. Somebody teach me please! 

I took a nap yesterday and dreamed I was sitting down in a chair, but fell the last four or five inches. The jolt of hitting the chair’s back and bottom woke me. I don’t know how that works—how letting go and then catching yourself in sleep can feel so real, but it did. 

Along with the Safeway issue being resolved (at least until it happens again), I finished an afterschool enrichment class that was somewhat stressful. Then, yesterday, Jillian and I went to the top of Mt. Diablo. It’s the first time we’ve done that since we moved here almost four years ago. I don’t know why we waited so long. It’s an amazing place and California was mapped out based on the view from the top. Being up high like that took all my problems and feelings of self-importance and shrank them just like the houses, trees, roads, buildings, and bridges below. 

Shell Shocked

The soldier walks past freshly dug graves, limbless veterans on crutches, others with gauze covering missing eyes. He walks along long dirt roads, over hills, noticing butterflies lifting and disappearing behind shrub. Quiet pushes its way into his brain. Gentle wafts of sun-heated air scented with honeysuckle paint the absurdity of violence across his frontal cortex and continue their brush strokes between the folds of grey matter. He knows the land and his feet guide him with very little thought.

Finally, after many miles, perhaps days on foot he arrives home and walks through the front door only to find the house empty, but otherwise preserved. He collapses into a chair. The reports of cannon and rifle are still inside him but he hears them as an observer, not a participant. He feels safe for the time being, but a hard wrap on the front door or someone nailing wood can instantly put him back in that place. 

(For the people of Ukraine and Buffalo, NY — everyone anywhere in the world where people have to think about being shot.)

I don’t want to become a crotchety old man but I feel the pressure of time and weather bending and twisting me like some gnarled old tree that can only survive long spans of drought and sudden onslaughts of torrential rain by pulling in, tightening its cells and clinging fast to the rocky soil with roots like talons. 

Last week at my favorite corporate pet food store where the employees seem to genuinely like greeting me when I enter, I went to the bagged cat food aisle and pulled our favorite crunchy off the shelf and slung it over my shoulder. The green bag features the picture of a crouching mountain lion on an outcrop and an attentive stag looking on in the background. I like to think of our two cats, Ruby Lou and Buddie, getting a “Taste of the Wild” just like that cougar. I paused to look at the price tag on the edge of the shelf–$37. That’s seven dollars more than the price just over two months ago when I last bought it and $12 more than it was a few years ago. 

As I strode to the check-out counter I debated whether to bring up this price hike with the cashier. On one side I thought, why bother him with my disgruntlement? There is nothing he can do about it. But on the other side I thought, well maybe he can’t do anything, but he will be better off being informed. He might even engage me with his theories about the price hike. Was it due to the labor shortage brought on by the pandemic? Did people get a taste of not working and decide they like it? Is this the dawn of a new era in society whereby we value time over money and possessions?

I resolved to apprise the cashier of the price change in a somewhat neutral voice.

“Wow the price of this has gone up seven bucks since I last bought it,” I said. 

“Yeah, I know. I get that kind for my cats too,” he said. 

His simple answer took all the steam out of me. I didn’t want to work someone up who was in the same shoes as me. He was dealing with it in a rather graceful, matter-of-fact manner. More to the point, I could tell he wasn’t going to engage in any theoretical guns and butter discussions, nor was he agitated enough for serious commiseration. 

It was barely topmost on my list of micro-aggravations anyway. That placement belongs to the pile of human shit in a corner where the bike rack is at my local Safeway. 

Actually, it is now merely a slice of shit, the top nine-tenths of its crumpled, pyramid having been removed after a steady campaign of complaining on my part. I suppose I should be happy with the nine-tenths removal, but I am not. Instead I’m boycotting the store and planning my next action.  

It’s all very bothersome. I’ve spent more effort trying to get the store to do the job than it would have been for me to simply take cleaning supplies and the necessary tools there myself. 

It all started about three months ago when the poop first appeared. It was fresh then with a glistening sheen and sat on the concrete ledge which I can best describe as a thigh-high wall facia that runs all the way around the exterior of the building. Presumably this concrete facia is there precisely for the purpose of being able to engage in heavy duty cleaning without damaging the more delicate finish of paint and stucco which is above. 

It is not hard to imagine how a person managed to shit on the ledge. It is the right height to catch the bowel movement of someone leaning against the corner with their pants down. A smaller portion of the poop fell on the sidewalk below with accompanying streaks where it slid down the wall. 

This corner is not visible from two-thirds of the Safeway parking lot. It cannot be known whether it was an act of vandalism or necessity. There is a significant homeless population that camps in an open space across the street. I often see shoplifting in the store and imagine that some of it is done by this group. Safeway policy does not allow the security guards to physically engage with shoplifters. The most I’ve seen was a short female guard harassing a large, tall woman draped with a blanket, walking steadily, unhindered toward the front doors. For every one of her steps the small guard took three, some of which were sashaying cross steps.  It was a bit like watching a songbird go after a crow that has stolen an egg from its nest. I appreciated the guard’s efforts.

Anyway, back to the feces. At the time it appeared, I thought that’s a shame. When I came back later that week (I do a lot of shopping at Safeway for basics like organic eggs, milk and bread) the shit was still there but it had been covered with cat litter. It seemed like a temporary solution to a problem in need of a permanent one, but I acknowledged that it might help contain the mess, speed up the process of desiccation and make it easier to clean up later. That was three months ago and every week when I came back to the store and parked my bike at the rack, it was the same. 

After two months I realized nothing more was going to be done, so I decided to talk to someone at the “customer service” counter where lotto tickets are sold. Several visits later it was still there. I talked to a worker putting carts away. He promised to talk to a manager. Still nothing. Finally I talked to a manager. She was appropriately appalled and promised to have the whole area power washed. Guess what? Weeks later and still nothing.

I decided to call corporate. I was awake one morning at close to five a.m. A message said the customer care office opened at five, so I waited and called again. No answer. I waited until 5:30 and called once more. Going through the phone tree to the appropriate spot I ended up on hold. After 15 minutes I talked to a real person. He was a American sounding man who I imagined was sitting in an office at corporate headquarters in Pleasanton, CA, 30 miles away. In reality, he could have been at home in his underwear in Ohio. 

Safeway has 906 locations in the United States with 246 in California. It was bought by Albertson’s in 2015. The man took down my information. That afternoon I got a call at work from a manager at my store. He was confused about where in the parking lot the shit was. 

“It’s not in the parking lot. It’s in the corner where the bike rack is. Someone covered it with cat litter about two months ago and it’s been there ever since,” I told him. 

He talked about not seeing it, but I didn’t say Are you blind? I didn’t say It’s just ten feet from the front entrance. I didn’t say Do you ever walk around the outside of your store? I thought I was pretty nice about it. He said it would get cleaned up. 

Now going to the store was like waiting for a surprise. Each time I went was like opening one of those little nesting boxes and finding a smaller box inside. I was imagining the day when I would arrive and open the last box and instead of finding a smaller box would find no shit. The absence of shit was going to be the greatest gift of all. 

No luck. A few weeks later I called a different number that was specific for customer care. I waited on hold again. This time a non-Indian sounding woman trained to sound like thousands of other non-Indian sounding women who are Indian answered the phone. She apologized over and over again for laughing at my story. I couldn’t blame her although I would have felt completely in the right to have tried to sober her up a bit and tell her this was no laughing matter. Between laughs she apologized on behalf of the company and assured me that she would escalate this to a higher level. 

I recognized a call again that day at work but I was too busy to answer it. What was there to say anyway? There was no voice message, but because of some peculiarities of my phone (another of my micro-aggravations) the voicemail left that day showed up two days later. I stopped on the side of the road on my bike ride home to call the manager back. It was a different manager. This time I went off. 

“Why do I need to talk to you,” I asked? “There is shit behind the bike rack. I don’t want to see that or smell that when I go to your store. I don’t want to put my bag on the filthy ground when I load my groceries onto my bike. The whole area needs cleaning. I like your store. I like having a store in my neighborhood, but I’m not going to shop there anymore until the shit gets cleaned up. This isn’t brain science. If you can’t get someone to clean up the shit then as the manager you should clean up the shit yourself.”

I felt bad about saying shit so many times, but he seemed to receive the message and respond appropriately. He promised that right then he would go out there and take care of it. 

I waited more than a week before I went back.  There was too much at stake. I was still feeling the vibrations of my anger a few days after the phone call and I needed even longer to have less attachment to the outcome. When I finally did go, my reaction was simply—

figures 

The bike rack had been moved about four feet from the corner. 90 percent of the shit was gone, but there was that slice of 10 percent that was still there. In the center of the 10 percent was a bolt and nut that had prevented a bladed tool from removing it efficiently. The cat litter was still embedded in the remains. The smaller amount was still there on the ground too and the nasty streak down the corner remained as well. 

I guess some people might call it a victory, but it just felt like a half-ass effort that would allow any further complaint to be dismissed as coming from some winey-assed man. 

That’s where things stand now. I’ve pondered next steps. First thoughts had to do with spray paint. The possible legal ramifications played out with me happily explaining my reasons before a judge. Fines for damages would be a small price to pay to have my airing. 

Then I thought about washable window markers. Could I even be charged with vandalism for that? I revisited the idea of simply cleaning it up myself, but that just seems entirely too passive, although arguably the most adult-like solution. 

Finally, as of this writing, I’ve decided on a message written on the wall with sidewalk chalk. “Please clean” with an arrow pointing to all the contaminated areas which will also be circled in chalk. 

As a proponent of direct, non-violent action I should do this in broad daylight and take full responsibility for it just as many people who have advanced important causes over the years. Of course, it’s debatable how important this cause is. 

It’s a shame that my sense of urgency for this affront isn’t equal to the needs of the homeless people across the street. Maybe it’s knowing that writing “Give them homes” on the wall will likely not have any effect or it may be that I just have a lack of imagination. Curmudgeonly old men are mostly only concerned with themselves, but it’s often true that what concerns oneself matches with the concerns of many others. In that sense maybe it’s an important cause after all. 

I don’t really want to be a curmudgeonly old man. I want to be a luminescent being filled with a generosity of spirit. 

—————————————————

Speaking of spirit, this last week I attended two big life events—the wedding of a friend in Philadelphia and being present with a friend after the death of his partner in Oakland. It would seem there is much distance between the two. There are few things quite so joyful as a wedding and nothing so sad as death.

The flatlands of Oakland and the San Francisco bay are like a broad valley between the San Bruno Mountains and the Oakland Hills where I sat yesterday morning pondering existence. I watched the profile of a jet plane head north through this valley several miles away and at eye level to me. The distance was so great that the plane appeared to be moving very slowly…and it was silent like the death of the loved one we will never hear from again. 

Just a few days before I had been in such a jet. We like to think it is quiet inside a jet, but it is actually very loud. We are fooled into thinking it is quiet because we hear the ping of the fasten seatbelt sign so clearly, but our ears are stopped up with pressure and the roar of the engine is right outside the window and if you need to fart there is little chance the person next to you will hear it or even smell it for all the filters sucking in and blowing out air. All this noise of life is short lived. The sound of a glass wrapped in a napkin crushed under foot. Two people lifted in chairs with loud music and cheers. It’s all rather fleeting and hard to make sense of the contrasts.

To Julie and Dave I say mazel tov. To Paul, it’s hard to know what to say about Lyn. She was one of the few people who consistently left me encouraging messages about my blog. When I left a cliff hanger for one of my posts this past summer she wrote me a simple one. All it said was Dun dun duuunnnn. She was so damn good at not taking things too seriously and that included her own inevitable demise. We could all learn something from that. The more I got to know Lyn the more I realized what a special, kind, funny, unique, forthright and thoughtful person she was. I will miss her. 

I was worried the rain yesterday morning might result in a low turnout for the ride for Jose Castillo, the 16 year old boy who was hit and killed at the beginning of last month while riding his bicycle home from school. But over 60 people showed up at the Bike Concord Shed—a community run bike and bike-repair shop. 

We started out in the rain and by the time we got to downtown the sun was poking through the clouds. We rode to Jose’s school, Mt. Diablo High, where we heard Jose’s English Language teacher talk about how special he was and excited to learn English. She has the same job as me working with newcomers—high schoolers, in her case. I learned that Jose had only been in the country a few months when he was killed. 

We left the school and went back through downtown to loop past Ellis Lake and the intersection where Jose died. We laid flowers at the memorial placed near the intersection. Several of Jose’s relatives were there. One was overcome with emotion as his words of thanks were translated to the group. A jacked up truck coming through the intersection laid on the horn and yelled at a woman who had stepped off the curb to take a picture of the memorial. “That’s how he got killed in the first place!” the driver yelled as he sped off.

“Asshole!” someone from our group yelled back. My anger quickly rose and then receded. Bicyclist and pedestrians are accustomed to this attitude from drivers that they own the road. I’ve turned into an asshole myself behind the wheel, more times than I can count, although mostly toward other drivers.  

There is something about cars that can transform the most mild-mannered person into a raging lunatic. It’s easy to feel competition with other drivers and it’s often the case that I don’t leave myself enough time when I’m traveling by car. I tend to dilly dally under the false notion that I can control how fast I get from point A to B. So when I finally do leave and realize that traffic is not parting like the red sea I tend to try to make up for it by driving too fast.

But I’m happy to say that I’ve been doing a good job avoiding the use of my truck and it’s anger-inducing effects. In fact, I received an unintended compliment from a stranger that made me swell with pride. 

In preparation for a delivery of mahogany bark I moved my truck from the driveway and parked it parallel to the street. I was inside my house with the front door open when I overheard two people talking as they passed by. “Look, the truck has been moved,” one of them said. 

I still don’t know many people in Concord and I often feel alone riding my bike in this car-dominated town. The bike ride for Jose had a harmonizing effect on me. At the end of the ride, someone made an announcement inviting everyone to a downtown brewery—a place called Sidegate which I’d never been to. I showed up with my friend Louis who joined me on the ride and a man I’d never met was buying everyone a first round of beers. We moved tables and wiped water drops off of chairs in the outdoor courtyard. As we began talking I suddenly felt like I’d found my people— a whole slew of bike riders that I didn’t know existed in Concord. 

Ahh, companionship. I’ve missed that. I’m not a religious person, but it’s been kind of a perfect Easter/Passover/Ramadan/Ostara weekend. 

I haven’t had a book to read for several weeks now. My BART train rides are empty. I stare out the window and ponder the multitude of micro-aggravations that exist in my life like the human feces in the bike area at my local Safeway that someone at the store covered with cat litter two months ago and still hasn’t cleaned up.  

It’s dangerous to go without a book. 

The train ride itself reveals some of the aggravations. It passes through the land owned by the former Naval Weapons Station which has somehow made its way into the hands of private developers who will be building 12,000 houses on the rolling landscape that otherwise could be the inspiration for leprechauns or any number of fairy tales.

The leprechaun reference is, of course, misplaced here in California, but so is the stucco relief that is in progress on the wall of a warehouse-sized building that’s gone up facing the highway and BART tracks. The new building is part of the Willow Pass Business Park. It’s a private plaza that’s been there for about two years now and is the staging grounds for the massive housing development’s contractors and future sales force.

I assume the plaza of contractors, custom kitchen manufacturers, landscapers, real-estate agents, etcetera, will be turned into a shopping mall when all is done. People need a place to shop. The big new warehouse will probably serve as a lumberyard or something and then become a Whole Foods or some other high-end grocery to cater to the people that will be able to afford buying a house in this new conglomerate of neighborhoods. 

Right now the plaza represents the pot of gold that is at the end of the leprechaun rainbow. By my less-than-expert approximation the pot contains $15,600,000,000—that’s fifteen billion, six hundred million dollars.  I’m conservatively guesstimating a sales price of $1.3 million for each of the 12,000 homes. I haven’t heard much in the way of low cost housing planned for the development.

As for the stucco relief on the wall, at first I believed I was witnessing the progression of a mural that would mirror the fine landscape across the highway that would soon be lost by the development. A rolling horizon appeared on the wall with five live oak trees in the foreground. The shape of the live oaks seemed slightly off but I took this to be artistic license. How tasteful, I thought. At least they are honoring the California landscape that they will be subsuming—the muscular California hills as my deceased poet friend, Janice King, called them in her poem, Looking for Father. 

Perhaps a Miwok village would appear beneath the trees honoring the original people of the area along with tule elk and red-tailed hawks circling above. Maybe the now extinct California grizzly would walk into the scene as he does on the state flag.

Each morning, seeing the progression of the mural is something I look forward to–or did. Nothing blocks my view as the train speeds by for five hundred yards of open air and blue sky before passing over the saddle of Willow Pass. A few motorized scaffolding platforms usually have a few workers in blue hardhats. I think of a few artist friends who do this type of work and I wonder at the process of bringing these three-dimensional sculptures out from the wall.  

Then one day last week I saw the outline of giraffes and elephants appear beneath the trees and I realized these trees were not meant to be live oaks, but umbrella thorn acacias, the iconic tree of the African savanna.

Just like that, the mural became, for me, a source of further disappointment rather than a bit of salve for the impending injury of taking over the natural landscape. It just made me think how much these developments (or maybe I) don’t belong here. It’s a gorgeous mural but it bothers me in the same way that coming across a Sea World in Omaha, Nebraska might or a McDonald’s in Outer Mongolia or a cheery Applebees commercial following television coverage of the dire Ukrainian/Russian conflict. (That last one apparently happened.)

Disappointments seem to be ruling my life these days. It’s not a good state of mind to be in. I don’t think it has to be the natural arc of aging although those who are older might be more prone to it. I probably inherited this tendency to see the irony in things from my father who was inclined to see what was wrong with the world rather than finding ways to appreciate it for what it was. I say was because both my parents are dead and because the world is always changing and the only honest way to evaluate it is to factor in as much as possible.

At least once a month I go to myCALSTRS website and put in some numbers using their retirement calculator. I put in my teacher salary for the last three years, enter my accumulated sick days, and then play with what it would look like if I retired now, next year, three years from now, etc. 

I feel like I would be a happier person if I retired this year, but there is an enormous jump in my monthly benefits—almost 25%—if I wait one more year. Then I think about what I could do if I waited five years. I could be one of those retired people that hops on a plane every four or five months and goes to some place exotic.

Then I think, yeah, well I could do that now. I could retire from teaching and work some little part time job and save up enough for a trip when I wanted or I could hitchhike, do a drive-away (if those still exist), bike cross-country, walk. I could be a cabin boy on a sailboat. I could join a biological collection team in the Swiss alps, become a mercenary in Ukraine. Who’s going to stop me except another person with a gun and isn’t that what war is all about? 

I guess I’m just not feeling great these days and it’s not all Will Smith’s fault. I don’t like knowing he is heartbroken, but it’s hopeful that he feels that way. I guess I’ll blame my overall gloom on living four years under a would-be dictator and that half the people thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe I’m gloomy because Covid killed one of my favorite cousins. Maybe it has something to do with Governor Newsom wanting to give car drivers tax breaks because of the gas prices. Or Biden opening up the spigot on oil reserves and sounding amenable to more drilling. How about passing out some public transit vouchers instead? Remember Mr. President those two big words—Climate Change.

Sometimes this life feels like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and we are all just dreaming, waiting for the gangplank on the hanging platform to drop. 

When I started this blog this morning I soon realized I didn’t have any pictures of the land where the neighborhood subdivisions are planned. The few good pictures I found on the internet wanted me to ask permission to use them, so I went out this afternoon and took some pictures of my own.  In the course of doing that I also found the only bicycle through-route from my school worksite to home. Someone on the Bike Concord Facebook group told me that bicycles are allowed on state highways in California for spaces where there otherwise is no way to get through. They even posted this sign showing me that it is allowed on a small section of busy highway 4 where I would need to go:

So today, after picture taking, I drove the route. There is a wide margin and sure enough there was a sign at the on ramp, another sign showing bikes are allowed on the highway and a third sign about a half mile later saying all bikes must exit (at Port Chicago). I’ll probably try it once, but likely won’t make it a habit. Cars typically do about 80 mph through there. In fact, someone horn blasted me and shot me the bird as they sped around, just for not getting up to speed fast enough on the entrance ramp. I don’t relish being an easy target for vitriol on my bike. 

In the meantime, I’m going to work on my attitude. I didn’t mention it, but being without a book feels good sometimes. It’s sort of like walking instead of riding my bike or taking the truck. Don’t need those extra keys. Can do without a windbreaker. Can just walk out the door and there are no more doors to deal with. No getting in or getting on. No strapping helmets or seatbelts. Just a closer sense of freedom. 

Being without a book is like that sometimes too. It’s valuable to have time to ponder the world and pay attention to it. Waiting for a late train sometimes bothers me, but I bet I wouldn’t have seen that mural for a long time had my nose been stuck in a book. I’m thinking I might even find a way to enjoy the new mural. There are far worse things. I’d be willing to bet there were elephant-like creatures here many thousands of years ago—giant mastodons or woolly mammoths and perhaps some long-necked creature like the giraffe too. Maybe we aren’t so out of place after all. 

———————————————

*Janice’s book, Burdens of Bliss, published by Freedom Voices, is out of print. It’s on my to-do list to reset the manuscript for reprinting. 

This weekend, I went down a few rabbit holes reading about psychological tic disorders that are being spread over social media and another topic, Lia Thomas, the transgender woman who is breaking all kinds of competitive women’s swimming records. There seems to be some commonality in both stories —i.e.—that people need to be seen and that we live in a society where people feel embattled to express who they are. (Please do not read into that statement that I think the reason people transition from one sex to another is for attention.)

Lia Thomas’ story is particularly compelling. Does a trans female have the right to compete against cis females? The NCAA has ruled yes — after the person undergoes a full year of hormone replacement therapy. But others claim that post puberty trans females can still have an advantage by having greater lung and heart capacity and a larger size. That is a legitimate criticism to me. 

Lia Thomas’ thoughts on this particular point were not addressed in the Sports Illustrated article — it was an informative essay not an interview — but what is clear is that Lia is an elite competitor and that her need to be a competitor at this level is in her DNA. What is also in her DNA is her need to be a woman. I have no doubt that those urges are every bit as strong. 

So here is why this is potentially a non-issue (at least for individual competition) and how, everyone — in my mind (sometimes a fantastically delusional place) — can be made happy and whole: 

Sports is all about data—most wins, fastest time, most points, etc. Any sports fan knows that there are a million data points to look at, all titillating to that geeky, nerd-self that some fans have inside.   

My point is, let things stand exactly as they are, but record wins and other data with notations of sex. Michael Phelps (cis man). Lia Thomas (trans woman). People then won’t feel as if their cis records (fastest time, most hoops) are being unfairly broken.

There is room on the podium to have two gold medals. For anyone who has the innate ability, loves competition enough to train four hours a day, and also feels strongly enough about who they are to have sex reassignment surgery, there has to be an arena for them to show the world what they can do.

Cis women will still have records for cis women. Cis men will still have records for cis men. Trans men and trans women will have records too. And for the elite athletes who are the top in the world, there will be an arena for them to be seen on a grand scale. 

I suppose for some people this will be too much like giving out participation ribbons. Where do we stop? Will there be nationally broadcast competitions by age group? Basketball associations for players five feet five and under? 55+ gymnastics? Swim competitions with fins? I guess I’m being a little bit flippant, but at the same time I think, why not?

What about coed teams? Why is it that women’s teams still don’t get the level of attention and coverage as male teams? It seems like a good time to completely rethink competitive sports. Judging by the new categories being added to the Olympics, it is already changing. 

I read an article that the Eophoria actor, Hunter Schafer, wants to be identified as a trans girl not as a cis girl. I admire her for that and wonder if that is common among transgender. So what’s the matter with categorizing sports people and their accomplishments by gender, especially since we already do that. It may satisfy all the people that are worried about the ethics of allowing transgender people to participate in gender segregated sports and maybe it will satisfy transgender participants as well.

___________________________

I guess if my blog has a theme, I’m blowing it out of the water this week by going on tangents. Still, gender identity definitely relates to place and having one in the world, as well as my next topic — accessibility to the streets. 

Locally, there was a violent incident in Concord that has shaken and angered me. Last week, a fifteen year old boy was killed on his bicycle about eight blocks from my house at the corner of Galindo Street and Clayton Road. One person is being charged with vehicular manslaughter.

I was on my way to the climbing gym a little after four o’clock when I saw his covered body being loaded into the ambulance. The whole block was cordoned off. A half dozen police cars had their lights rolling. All major corridors were jammed with vehicles. 

At this intersection, Galindo is a two-way street with seven lanes and Clayton is one-way with four. Neither have medians which would have likely prevented this accident. It’s just a wide swath of asphalt without a safe place to rest or barriers against crazy driving. Concord is filled with similar intersections.

This accident comes just two weeks after I witnessed the driver of a new Dodge Charger become impatient at a red light, make a sudden left turn from the far right lane and T-bone a woman turning onto the freeway at Bailey Road in Bay Point. A month before, I came across a concrete mixing truck that had turned over a few feet from this same spot and destroyed the concrete barrier between the on and off ramp.  

I turn my bike lights on at all times now. I’ve taken to wearing a yellow safety vest given to me by my old principal, Mr. Ruiz, who could barely see me riding in the fog one day.

We desperately need traffic calming here—bulb outs, medians, bike lanes, sharrows, no parking zones, signage, etc. It’s easy for car drivers to make the case for the city to not do these things. After all, very few people ride bikes. To this argument I say, “Have you seen the movie Field of Dreams? Build it and bicyclists and pedestrians will come.”

The truth is, most municipalities in the United States do very little to make walking and riding easy or safe. Cars have owned the culture for a long time. 

Things may seem to be getting better. Motor vehicle fatalities peaked in the United States in 1972 with 54,589 deaths. In 2020 there were 38,680—and this with a hundred million more people. Still, I wonder how much of this is primarily due to seatbelt laws and air bags—measures that do nothing to improve the safety of bicyclists and pedestrians? 

The streets feel more dangerous than ever to me, but I’m getting older. Danger is around every corner. It might not be long before I no longer want to go out at night.

Yesterday I sat down on a low, rather ugly cinder block wall that separates my neighbor’s yard from mine. The wall is made less ugly by the fact it has been painted red and somewhat matches my front door and the red walkway tiles that lead up to it. Sitting on the short wall made leaning over to pull weeds out of the gravel drive a bit easier. My neighbors are selling their house and I don’t feel obliged to make my place look nicer as much as to protect my investment – as in, I don’t want the property values around me to come down because I have a weedy front yard. 

Moments like this invariably bring up that Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime, and I ask myself, How did I get here? 

I also often recall a short story I read during my college days that features a neighbor who runs out of his house whenever a leaf falls on his perfect lawn. Not that I keep an immaculate yard, but it can lead one to wondering what’s the point? 

The tent encampment around the CVS pharmacy near here has been removed, as well as the ones on the open land near the skatepark and along the aqueduct under the highway 242 overpass. 

I’m not sure where the people went who were there. I don’t have a lot of firsthand information except for two unhoused women who I spoke with that were charging their phones at an outlet next to the water machine in front of the CVS. They were sitting against the wall eating Chinese food out of large Styrofoam clamshells when I pulled up on my bike. I asked if they minded if I locked up next to them there on the curvy S-shaped bike rack that is coming unbolted from the cement. Bike racks are a rarity in Concord so I appreciate this one despite its tenuous hold on the ground. 

The younger white woman, wore a pink, midriff, short sleeve knit that showed off a slight, pale paunch. She spoke so fast it was hard for my brain to process her words but what I could gather made sense. It wasn’t salad talk. The shelters were full. 

As she spoke her eyes darted around and she turned her head this way and that as a grass-eating animal might between bites. The short, older black woman (whom I’d had occasion to speak with before) contrasted her friend’s quickness with sad deliberation. 

I can’t say I have her pronoun right. I didn’t have occasion to use it, but, dressed to hide her sex in an oversized, long-sleeve oxford shirt tucked into baggy chinos, her story makes me think she might prefer to identify as him/he:

“I had to leave a shelter because this one woman didn’t like transgender people. She told everyone I exposed myself to her. Now why would I do that? I hate my body. I’ve always hated my body. I’m not proud of it. Why would I try and show it to somebody?”

I had met her this past summer before leaving on my cross-country road trip. Same place. Then, she was distraught over CVS not allowing her to put money on a phone card. I heard more of her story when she told me she was trying to get money together to go on a bus to visit her son in Las Vegas. 

The website Next Door has one of the longest threads I’ve ever seen on the subject of unhoused people in Concord. There is a very minimal amount of Not in My Backyard comments and the concern and thought people have put into the conversation is heartening. There are even a few unhoused people who have shared comments or given a glimpse of their story. 

I ride my bike by the concrete aqueduct under six-lane highway 242 two or three times a week on the way to the climbing gym. The former camp was there along the dirt bank above this human-made floodway but below the sidewalk. It was accessed by a big hole cut in the chain link fence. It’s usually night by the time I come back from the gym. Sometimes I would see the glow from a phone or light inside a tent or hear soft voices. Around Christmas, when it was easy for me to believe in Peace on Earth, I found myself feeling envious of these nomads. It’s easy to make up stories and romanticize from my privileged position… and perhaps there is some joy in these campers who can set themselves apart from the thronging mass of people who seem to carry on with a sort of hive-like mind. 

No doubt, I feel some pride and superiority myself–being one of the few people to dare ride a bike in this car-dominated, concrete town. Being outside of that car-bubble makes me closer to these castaways. But yeah, I’d rather have a bikeable city and they’d probably rather have a place to live. 

So back to protecting my overpriced investment—the current value of my small, 800 sq. ft. house is likely great enough to buy a whole apartment building in some other parts of this country. 

The truth is, I’m not only trying to maintain the house’s value. I’ve grown to like weeding. It’s meditative. When my mother was dying of lung cancer, I spent many hours at my home in San Leandro pulling burr clover from the large grass lawn, foolishly imagining I was helping to eradicate her disease—as if each plant represented some fractional part of the malignancy that I could psychically obliterate. I just had to put in the time and be thorough I imagined. We do what we can to cope. 

My ex-wife’s mom had taught me the name of that particular weed. On one of her first visits to our new house she had disappeared for some time on her own pulling this clover with burrs from our front yard. She suggested it was the bane of homeowners’ existence though I think she might have also gotten some pleasure out of the pulling. 

Most weeds come up nicely if the soil is moist. Burr clover spreads out low to the ground weaving between the blades of grass but if you gather the spread and pinch the central tap root, the whole thing comes up like a scribble scrabble overlay that once lifted reveals the fine, symmetric teeth of the lawn. 

We don’t have grass here. In the back is red lava pebbles and black, wood chip with more wood chip in front. There is chunky, gray gravel along the road and as a second parking area next to the concrete drive. All of these areas still manage to get weeds even with a groundcloth underlay.

I’d guesstimate I spend 30 to 40 hours a year weeding. This could be cut to two or three hours if I did what many do and just douse the areas with glyphosate–the main ingredient in Monsanto’s popular weed-killer Round Up. Or I could do what neighbor Phillip does down the street and just let the weeds take over. Depending on the time of year, he has wild fennel taller than himself and yellow grass up to his waist along with enormous prickly pear. In the back yard, the aptly named succulent, mother of millions, have mostly taken over except for a garden bed of healthy-looking marijuana plants. The seeds apparently run about $10 each for this crop. 

It’s all sort of a secret garden for the birds which seem to be very fond of his place and why wouldn’t they be since he also puts out bird seed on plates set atop large ceramic, glazed pots arranged one atop the other in an hour glass shape that makes climbing the slippery surface impossible for squirrels. 

He still has Bernie Sanders signs up in his front window as well as the listening hours for different programs on KPFA. I can count on him as an ally in braving these mean streets by bicycle. There is a contingent of us here. I want to give a celebratory wave each time I see another bicyclist.

A man named “Smitty” often posts to the Concord bike group on Facebook. I spoke to him at the bike valet parking and pop-up repair shop he helps with at music events at Todos Santos Plaza. I’m interested in doing some bike advocacy work with the city, but it’s not for him. He simply likes getting bikes into people’s hands. 

It’s important for me to remember that there are good people in the world otherwise my misanthropic side starts to creep in. Maybe the meek will inherit the earth and maybe we will get some bike lanes out here in Concord and maybe some small homes too for those people who must be hiding now in some areas that I don’t have occasion to pass by so often. 

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I’ve begun archiving some of my summer trip on this website, so you can go there if you have an interest in reading about my adventures visiting the fourteen places I lived as a child. My visits to my old home states of Texas and Mississippi are now posted. Also, the internet helped me locate one of the few places I lived in Texas that I wasn’t able to find when I was there. I found the address on an old drug store photo processing envelope. The photo below is a screenshot from a Google cam.  (Now the only place left to find is the Shady Oaks Ranch.)

I don’t feel compelled to visit this place in person. There is nothing too special about the Fall Meadow apartment complex except that it was the first place we lived in Denton. It’s also where I lived when I first got glasses and could see the world clearly for the first time in several years. (I believe I had pretty good vision until I was about seven and then there was a steep decline until I got glasses when I was about nine.) Another fairly clear memory from this complex is learning the song Delta Dawn which was popular on the radio at the time. My sister and I got in the habit of singing it over and over again. My favorite line: She’s 41 and her papa still calls her baby. 

I feel very lucky to have land I can dream about going to. I did nothing to earn it. This land was walked on, dug in, slithered across and flown over for millions of years before I existed. It comes to me through the ambitions of my grandfather, a long-time chemistry professor and head of the department at the University of Tennessee. He was likely able to acquire the land at a good price during the great depression. Other people’s hardships worked in his favor.

Before him the land was taken from the original people through occupation, trickery and force by the mass of European-Americans who arrived to this “new world” which was for everyone else very, very old.

According to a neighbor there is the largest black bear he has seen that calls the “cute triangle” part of his territory and I would do nothing to take it from him.

We are all occupiers on some level and it seems to me it is best to learn to share. What we do on land does not stop at fences. Clear cut forests erode neighboring lands and choke rivers. Oil extraction pollutes ground water. Non-native species can destroy habitats. Relocating people, not to mention killing them, creates societal disharmony for many generations to come. Such was the case for the Cherokee who resided here before the European-Americans.

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It is not a metaphor to say I couldn’t see the forest for the trees this past summer. The only boundary I knew was the one that ran along Poor Valley Road. The green briar, poison ivy, downed trees, saplings, vine and bramble made walking through the forest a chore. To avoid a face full of spider webs I had to carry a stick and wave it about like Harry Potter continually casting spells.

My one attempt to start to discover where the boundaries lay was given up after ten minutes of crawling over downed trees, scrambling under overhanging branches, and trying to shake off vines that grabbed my legs like monster tenacles trying to pull me to center earth.

Winter is a better time to walk untended land. The overgrowth is died back. On my recent trip all the leaves had dropped except for the beech saplings whose leaves seemed to hover like drifting copper fog.

The forest was mostly brown. Splashes of green came from lichen and moss on tree trunks and higher up, the needles of various evergreens – loblolly, Virginia and white pine, cedar and around the memorials, hemlock.

More green lived around the memorial stones, in the form of Vinca minor, also known as cemetery plant. It was seeded by my grandmother Robbie three decades ago.

Seemingly absent, but just hiding in dormancy, was the sea of poison ivy that predominates during the summer. There was Christmas fern and a plant with dark green leaves with white stripes called pipsissiwa—a fun word to say.

I learned these plant names from Jeff, the forester I hired to tell me about the land and what was growing on it. I hardly knew where to start when I met him at 8:30 the morning of December 20. The wonders of the internet meant that all I had to do was give him the address of the nearest neighbor.

Back in the 1970s when I first visited this land with my family, my father had a hard time finding it. He’d probably not been back since his father’s burial in 1962. On subsequent trips, every decade or so, it was the same thing. He’d squeeze his eyes peering out the dusty front windshield, mouth agape, then mumbling, now where is that road?  It was like the place he’d known intimately as a child and teenager had disappeared with the death and dispersal of his family.

Going to it makes me feel like I’m resurrecting something that my father was unable to. By the time he introduced me to this place it may have only contained ghosts of what seemed to be a dream-like childhood obliterated by reality. It may be why he went into the theatre—so he could always have fresh dreams.

This was the first winter I’ve ever been to this place. It was not until I was traipsing through the forest with Jeff that my worries were eased about how he would identify trees without leaves. The bark and branching patterns were enough for him. It’s a bit like birders who use wing flap and silhouette to identify species without relying on color patterns or call. Yellow poplar, commonly known as tulip tree is abundant on the property. Jeff showed me how to identify it by the seed pods that hold on high in the limbs. Fortunately tulip poplar is a good wood if I decide I want to mill my own lumber for a cabin.

After watching numerous YouTube videos, I’ve decided I don’t want a log cabin but would rather have a stick or timber frame. Stick frame refers to the most common building method used today with lots of 2x4s. Timber framing uses fewer but more substantial pieces of lumber like 8x8s.

Other species identified on the land include four or five types of oak, red maple, hickory, dogwood, eastern red cedar, and gum.

The largest tree we found was a 42-inch white pine not far from the old shed.

Beyond the lesson of tree and plant species Jeff gave me an introduction to compass reading. I have a long way to go before I figure it out. The survey maps I have give compass readings from established points on the boundary. While I didn’t learn enough to use those I took a closer look at markers on the map and was able to use a downed barbed wire fence to establish a close approximation of the boundary line for the longest side of the cute triangle. Elevation maps also helped me estimate boundaries as well as another tip from Jeff about how to use a consistent stride to measure distance—something that is easier done when the winter die-back doesn’t require as much vertical leg movement.

I want to take my time getting to know this land. It seems like a large percentage of the harm and waste of resources that we encounter in the world has to do with our rush to get things done.

Jillian is a big fan of British narrowboats—a pretty slow, but relaxing way to get around. Yesterday morning she turned me on to the Falkirk Wheel. This is an amazingly engineered lock that can lift 600 tons of barge and water eighty feet in the air using roughly the same amount of energy it takes to boil eight tea kettles of water. It takes five and a half minutes. Five and a half minutes is like sitting through three or four red lights—something that feels interminable trapped inside a car but a whole different thing if you are being lifted heavenward in a boat.

It’s easier to go slow when you affirm that it’s all about the trip, not the destination.

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One last thing…if you look at the “about” section of my blogsite I’ve said “A journal of nature, race and place.” That’s a pretty grand statement and I don’t know how true I will stay to it. My original summer journal had a clear directive to find all the places I’d lived growing up. Travelling back to those places I realized how intertwined they were with our American notions of race.  Talking about my experience with race is a big interest to me and it feels somewhat safe here where I can control the narrative and choose who it goes out to. Perhaps it is an indication of the unsteadiness I feel that I have set these parameters, but confronting issues around race is something I deal with on a daily basis as a public school teacher on a campus with such a wide variety of children from multiple backgrounds.

Rarely are the issues directly about race although sometimes they are, like when I had a discussion with two students who together decided to tease a child by equating racial identity with a sport. I’ve often had to talk to children about making fun of how someone speaks. I suppose this is more about nationality than race.

Mostly I deal with the legacy of racism which involves issues of poverty, privilege, and long-standing hurt. One of my favorite things to do with a kidney-shaped table full of newcomers is to look into their Yemeni, Guatemalan, Salvadorian, etc., eyes and sing “This Land is Your Land” pointing back to them with each “your” and back to myself with each “my”. Six-year-olds know what it is to feel like the land is not theirs and I like to disrupt the narrative that makes them feel this.  

Next up: More cabin and land plans. A continued exploration of the history?