Category Archives: Uncategorized

This mushroom photo is just a bit of a hook to get you interested in reading. It is also one of the reasons I had such a difficult time getting out a post this summer while in Tennessee. I took a lot of photos on my land, but I was overwhelmed about how to present them. The options available to me as a non-techie, non-designer person were pretty limited without upping my game or paying big bucks to someone to do it for me.

Jillian told me about this free graphic design program called GIMP, so I worked hard to learn how to make photo grids. The mushroom one was really difficult and if you look closely you will see that the lines aren’t even. I think it’s pretty good for my first grid and if I ever do one again I’ll have to reteach myself since it’s been over two months, but hopefully the pathways will be slightly less obscure.

I’m at the ending stages of my back patio renovation. I’m currently painting. I may have mentioned in an earlier post that my mom had an indoor apartment painting business for a while. One of the tricks she taught me was that you don’t always need to clean your brush at the end of the day. You can just wrap it in a plastic bag and stick it in the refrigerator. Well, I’ve taken this practice to a whole new level. I’ve been using the same paint brush for over a month now. (Before I entered this serious painting phase I was priming new plywood and lumber as well as painting Presto Patch and other fillers I used to repair rotted wood.) I use Purdy paint brushes which are perhaps the best in the business. And no I’m not fishing for sponsors (but if you work for Purdy or Presto Patch do get in touch). 

The paint brushes (I’ve got a small and large) fit nicely in a Dave’s Bread bag. I put the bag of brushes behind my half gallon of milk which I’ve started putting on the door of the fridge because it’s so annoying to try to dig it out from behind bottles of juice and pickles that make their way in front. (I use the milk every day for tea and often cereal, but sometimes go a whole week without juice or a pickle.) Which reminds me—I was recently talking casually to a nurse practitioner friend about my milk intake and she asked what kind I drink and I told her “regular”, not having “whole” immediately available in my word bucket. She dropped her chin, looked at me sideways and said a little incredulously “You mean red top”?

I’d never really thought of that—how whole milk has that color coding—but yeah, even my cardboard boxed Organic Clover Milk uses red in its type to denote whole milk. Two percent is blue. Skim (which I don’t consider milk at all but just cloudy water) is usually pink or lavender.  Milk is interesting. There is also coding on every milk container that can tell you all kinds of stuff about where it originates from. 

One more side step before I get to some of the pictures I took this summer. 

When I paint–and I’ve actually done quite a bit of it in my life–I don’t tend to listen to the radio or anything. Having sound isn’t my go-to. Quiet is my go-to. Jillian and I are pretty compatible as housemates this way.

At some point during a big painting job though I usually get tired of the quiet and when that happens, more often than not, I turn on NPR and listen to talk radio/news. But the other day I’d had enough of that and turned on KCSM, “the bay area jazz station“. That bought a little more time with Jillian who was also working outside and who would have gone in if I’d turned on news. She said as much and, anyway, I was tired of listening to all that pompous, feel-good-cheery-corporate-sponsored-stuff with the sudden lower-register-voice-drop meant to signal an appropriate change for reporting tragedies. I could have turned the dial to KPFA where I can count on cynicism, but I was just tired of talk. Talk, talk, talk. Elephant talk.

Anyway, KCSM was quite enjoyable and I realized how long it had been since I listened to this station when I heard the DJ introduce himself and didn’t recognize his name. 

After about an hour the light started to fade. I was working after work. Soon it was almost completely dark and I turned on a clip-on work-light. A new radio segment started and the DJ was playing Brazilian jazz. A song came on and towards the end, I started to recognize it, but it was being sung in Portuguese and I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard the tune. I probably would have given up trying, but as soon as it ended another version of the song started up, also in Portuguese. It was nice music. Very pleasant, but by the end of the second one I was bothered. What the hell was this tune?

Oh well, it was time to quit. I dropped my paintbrush in the Dave’s bag, turned off the radio, went inside and showered. 

I warmed up some beans and rice from the fridge and went to my nesting place in bed with my computer. I was still thinking about that song and the name Bruno Mars wormed its way into my brain and I googled Bruno Mars songs on my computer. BAM! The wonders of the internet. “Locked Out of Heaven”.

It was that eight beat refrain that I kept hearing that was making me say I know it! But here’s the kicker. I didn’t.

The refrain is, “Your sex takes me to paradise, your sex takes me to paradise.” I laughed to myself. I had thought it was “You sex-text me to paradise, you sex-text me to paradise.” I’ve never really done sex texting and I always thought, hearing this song, that going to paradise over sex-texting might be an overstatement, but hey, I could see it happening. What I thought was really funny was that it took listening to a song in Portuguese for me to find out what the lyrics were in English. 

Okay, right angle change back to my summer trip and some of the photos.

Spicebush Butterfly were everywhere in the forest. I often saw them at different adult ages. As sippers, not munchers, they only live a few weeks and toward the end the black color has turned dusky grey and they often have holes or chunks missing from their wings.

There was a very popular milkweed plant on the side of Poor Valley road bordering the land and I often saw these first three species there. I only saw one example of the Zebra Swallowtail. In the close-up it is sitting on the shoulder of Stewart’s daughter, Jennifer. I went on a morning canoe trip for a mile or so down the Holston River with her family and friends. We stopped for a lunch break on a sandbar and this butterfly was very attracted to Jennifer. It stayed there on her shoulder for ten minutes or so. I learned from Stewart that I likely saw this species there because Pawpaw trees grow in the fertile soil next to the river and they are host to the butterfly’s caterpillar. Pawpaw trees produce the largest native fruit in the United States. To quote this website, “When ripe, the flesh is soft and custard-like, with a flavor that has been described as a blend of banana, mango, and pineapple.” They become ripe in the fall which may be why I’ve yet to find the fruit or (knowingly) even seen a tree. I’m imagining the fruit is something like the Cherimoya which I have had, but I won’t know until I try it.

Next time on SpottyWestGoesEast…the continued pondering of cabin building and, perhaps, what’s up with this blog that claims, ostensibly, to be about race?

It’s well for me to remember that all this land I enjoy walking and exploring was formerly the domain of Cherokee and the land I now live on, that of the Ohlone.

Also, if you go right now to your Google web browser and type in “bay area radio stations”, KPFA will NOT show up on that list.

Does anyone still want to sponsor me? Dave’s Bread? Clover?

I called emergency services when I was staying in Corryton, TN this summer. 

It was three in the morning and I woke suddenly with a strong smell filling my nostrils. At first I thought it was interesting, but quickly became worried as the smell intensified. What was it? I lay there on the left side of my Aunt Linda’s king-size bed, which for all impractical purposes was cot-width because I’d chained myself to the length of my computer’s short power cord.

I let my mind drift above her 12 unit, 55-and-older condo community to imagine what lays beyond the acres of cow pasture and wide-spaced farm houses. I was pretty sure there were no chemical plants nearby. But how far away were the people in Bhopal, India when chemicals from a nearby plant escaped in the middle of the night and killed thousands?

The smell seemed to be getting exponentially stronger. I rose, turned on lights and set about sniffing. I sniffed in the living room. I sniffed in the kitchen. I sniffed in the front bedroom and bathroom. I opened the back door, went outside and sniffed around the small back patio and over next to the air conditioner unit. After so much sniffing, the smell had so inundated my olfactory that I could no longer smell anything. I knew the smell was there, but it was as if I’d taken a physical blow to the nose. 

Should I call the police, the fire department, wake the neighbors? I was only sure of one thing— I had to get out of there. Maybe it was fertilizer I postulated. But why now? Surely no one was spreading it in the middle of the night. 

I dressed and went out to the car my aunt Linda loaned me. I drove up the hill to the corner of the country road above the little valley where the condos sit. At the stop sign I pushed the button to lower the window.  Was the smell less here? I couldn’t say. I needed more distance. 

At the next corner I paused again. Left or right? To the left, a half mile away, is the hub of Corryton—a library, a post office, a fire station, a tire store and where Aunt Linda and Stewart live. To the right…well I’ve been that way but I couldn’t remember anything but country. Left it was. I drove slowly with my window down. The roads were barren. Night insects sang in my ears. The parking lot of the fire station was brightly lit. I pulled in making a wide arc to park facing the road. There were lights on inside but if anyone was in there they were asleep somewhere in a back room and I wasn’t going to knock on the door. I googled the fire station on my new phone.

Rural/Metro Station 33 was what it was called and it said open 24 hours! Before I pushed the call button I sat there trying to think how I would describe the smell. I knew the person on the other end would ask. Chemical didn’t seem quite right. Aren’t all smells chemical? It’s a poor word for someone who doesn’t like describing, but likes having described. 

The smell was still there in my nostrils although I had the suspicion that it might not be in the air surrounding me. I closed my eyes and focused on the sample of droplets that lined my cranium like condensation in a dark cave. Then it hit me—it was like fresh mown grass times one-hundred. The times one-hundred part was important to get across. This wasn’t just passing a newly mown field, it was like having the super saturated smell of one-hundred acres of newly mown hay compressed into a Binaca blast spray container and then having that injected into each nostril.

When the emergency dispatcher answered my call I suddenly became aware that it might sound like I was pulling a prank.

“I know it sounds crazy but that’s the only way I can describe it,” I said after emphasizing the one-hundred times. 

“Well, would you like me to send someone out?” the woman asked.

“I hate to wake anyone up about this,” I said. 

“We don’t really go on that. I just need to know,” she said. 

“Well, I guess so. I’m really concerned that it might be some sort of chemical leak.” 

After I ended the call, the phone soon rang again and I had to explain the situation all over. This new dispatcher told me that they were having to send people from Union County because there wasn’t anyone available nearby. 

I drove back to the top of the road above the little valley where the condo units sit and parked at the stop sign, facing the road, to catch whoever came before we went down. Fields surrounded me. Porch lights of a farmhouse nearby kept going on and off like there was a short in the wire or perhaps there was an animal activating an automatic sensor. After about 15 minutes, I laid my chair back and closed my eyes. Before drifting off I had the opportunity to reflect on what kind of fool am I? 

In about 40 minutes I heard the sounds of a big fire truck accelerating out of the curves up the road. A fireman in a black Suburban preceded the fire engine. We spoke between open windows. 

“It’s the third unit down there on the right. I’ll follow y’all down,” I said.

The fire truck following the suburban turned in front of me, engine whirring with all the strain of a machine hauling hundreds of gallons of water, ladders and equipment.  I followed and parked behind the fire engine with its rolling red lights and heavy idling engine. I imagined neighbors peaking from behind curtains.

I won’t belabor this story any longer except to say the two men who showed up were very nice. They identified the smell as a skunk that they theorized had sprayed next to the central air unit. How embarrassing! I’ve smelled skunks a thousand times in my life. I can only guess that this one being so close impacted my olfactory in a way that took it out of commission. 

R.C., the neighbor across the little condo loop, made me feel better the next day telling me that a skunk a few weeks back smelled just like burning wood. He also said he hadn’t heard the fire engine, nor had the neighbor who shares a common wall. I saw her at Hammer’s Five and Dime in the town of Hall a week later. Her coworker came around the corner to join in listening to the tale of a fool who called the fire department about a skunk.  ————————–

If I’d known two months ago that I would still be in patio-renovation-mode I wouldn’t have made an optometrist appointment in San Francisco for nine Saturday morning on this labor day weekend. I had to get up at my regular work-rising-time (about 6:15) to catch BART and make it there on time. Ah well. Might as well continue the grind. I got there at 8:45. 

Haight Street Eyecare hasn’t been on Haight Street for about 20 years now. But that’s where they were when I first went to get a screw replaced on my glasses in 1991. I’d first discovered my eye doctor sitting on Haight Street trying to sell a breaker bar that was one of the few tools left after the rest were all stolen from my VW van which I had driven to SF on the path to hippie enlightenment. The breaker bar sat between me and my companion Shigeru with a sign that said $10. Shigeru was a Japanese tourist who had helped me rebuild the engine on the ’69 pop top camper I’d bought from Tiny, a farmer in Ithaca, NY who liked to put beat juice on his cheeks to give him a rosy appearance.

Doctor Chan was maybe a few years older than me then (strangely enough he still is) and I remember thinking how he’d already made something of himself while I was busy being a bohemian. That thought just shows how I’ve never really gotten over my indoctrination in—to use an old hippie phrase—the establishment.

Some beautiful young woman roughly my age, who I would never dare to ask on a date, put a new screw in my glasses for free. That bought my loyalty for these last thirty years. I’ve spent many thousands of dollars with them since then. 

Dr. Chan is very thorough and I appreciate his looking at my eyeballs with all their blown out veins on his big computer screen. I’ve seen pictures of his children appear in his office and watched them grow through these greatly spaced stills. The oldest is now in college. It’s like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade every year.

I had time Saturday morning to go find a cup of Joe. I’d forgotten how deliciously empty San Francisco feels on an early weekend morning. The office at the bottom of Fillmore near the Kabuki movie theater didn’t open until 9 so I went uphill until I found a cafe. They were playing some Violent Femmes and somehow it worked well with the floral wallpaper in their bathroom. It took me back to my youth so I was happy to add a dollar tip on the $3.50 cup of coffee. I sat and sipped it for ten minutes and then carefully coasted back downhill with my to-go cup. I spent $350 on a new pair of prescription sunglasses (that’s after insurance) and another $160 bucks on some contacts. Nothing like purchasing prescription sunglasses to make one feel vain and self-indulgent. 

How much are the contacts I asked the young woman helping me. “$75 for a box of ninety days.”

“Oh, good,” I said elated at the reasonableness. “I’ll take a box.” 

“Okay, that’s for one eye. Do you want a box for the other eye?”

—————

My beard got caught in my windbreaker as I was zipping it up a few mornings ago while riding my bike with no hands. I often do that sort of thing when I’m starting out. Sort of the same thing I do when driving. I almost never put my seat belt on until I’ve started moving in a forward direction. Then I take my hands off the wheel and buckle up. Sort of stupid. I’m much more likely to get into an accident at the worst possible moment, but it has something to do with my desire to save time and the influence of reading the book Cheaper by the Dozen when I was a teenager and the father always doing two things at once for the sake of efficiency like shaving and reading the paper—basically to save time, as if any of it can be saved. Which it can’t. It just flows out through the hour glass and when it’s gone it’s gone and it doesn’t matter if you were safely zipping up your jacket before you got on your bike or zipping it up while riding. It’s all a crapshoot. Over the years I may have saved a full hour zipping up my jacket this way, but I might be killed by a catastrophic head injury and loose all that time and an additional fifteen or twenty years. 

I’m currently on a mission to not have a mission, which means I will likely be zipping up my jacket and putting my seatbelt on before I start moving. I’d like to watch the water flow by rather than be in the stream, if that makes any sense. I’m tired of fighting the current. 

I saw a video a few years ago of a man floating quickly by some tourists who happened to be filming the millions of gallons of water going over Niagara Falls. I believe this footage was verified as the last seconds of a known suicide. The guy wasn’t fighting the pull of the water at all. It would have been futile anyway. He wouldn’t have even been able to stay in one place even if he was Mark Spitz. He had a sad, reflective look on his face. With 20 or 30 seconds before he hit the falls he had time for a full newsreel of his life.  Anyway, this is sort of a non sequitur but it came up when I thought about not fighting the current. To be clear, in this case, I would rather be on shore not fighting it than in the water. 

I have another non sequitur and really, I assure you, I’m not working on a stand-up routine. Why does the rather elegant woman’s prerecorded BART voice say “Arriving out” and “Now boarding out.” It doesn’t even make sense. How can you board out? Don’t you board in? And, why is there a long pause before the stop is named like the computer has to do the calculation at that moment to decide where the train is. “Now boarding out…………Concord”.

———-

The following pictures will explain why I haven’t yet written about my trip to Tennessee this summer or about the cabin I’m still pondering building in the woods. The pictures show the process I’m calling my “back patio renovation”.

The project started before I went to Tennessee in July and picked back up when I returned over a month ago. I’ve basically been going at it non-stop—full days on the weekends. On weekdays, after work, I take a nap, work on the patio for a few hours, eat and watch a little tv, then fall asleep. I’m very lucky to have friends who are helping me on a work trade basis, especially since they are master carpenters and I’ve been perfecting cutting a straight line these past few years. 

Left to do: apply tar paper and rolled asphalt roofing, install new electrical for lights and plugs, tie the patio roof into the main house by going through to the attic and linking the structure with the joists there. Oh, and I want to paint the whole underside structure to make it look spiffy.

Each step of this project has come with dozens of small tasks to prepare for the next part. What I think will take a day takes a week. I’ve shifted from being bothered by all these details to embracing them for what will mean having a job done well-done that will last and be safe.

Below, Jillian’s new puppy, Sasha Moon Piperaceae, aka Shasha Moonbeam Pepper, has also been taking up some of my time though contractually I’m obliged to do nothing but enjoy the fruits of her sweetness. Yes, we have it in writing, but who can resist this face!

p.s.–Jillian told me I used the word sistered in here a bunch of times and that people might not know what it means. I guess it shows my excitement. It’s a new word for me too. To sister a rafter, a beam, or joist (joists refer to floors, rafters to roofs) means to add another one next to it running parallel. It strengthens the board. A 2×4 becomes a 4×4, a 2×6 a 4×6, etc. Incidentally, those measurements aren’t accurate in lumber. 2x4s once were two inches by four inches but now they are 1.5 x 3.5.

Twelve years ago on this date, my mother died one day before her 70th birthday. She’d be 82 if she were alive today. In a sort of surreal moment, a  group of friends called and sang happy birthday to her on the phone as she was dying. 

Mom was such an interesting person. She defied the roles set for women of her time, was a hard drinker (and hard curser when she drank—which was every night) but a loving mother and good cook (she said she couldn’t boil water when she married my dad).

She had many jobs over the years and threw herself into them with a passion. She was a university secretary, but could not suffer fools, so if she worked for a department (school of social work at Florida A & M, physics and then social work again at the University of Southern Mississippi) then the dean was likely an outstanding person. 

She was a direct and unflappable salesperson. Over the years she sold World Book Encyclopedias and Shaklee Vitamins door to door, following leads and making cold calls. She sold life insurance in an office full of men  where she did suffer fools for a short time and was given the most rural, poorest territories. I went with her to collect premiums one time and call on new, potential customers. I was a new teenager, bored sitting in the car waiting for her at each stop. The heat and humidity of a Mississippi summer day were the only thing repressing my near irrepressible hormones. I was revived each time she came back and started the car with its air conditioner and radio playing Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” it seemed every five minutes. 

“Later in life, she was an OPC in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. (“OPCs are the individuals who fill timeshare presentations with potential buyers by pitching them on the beauty of timeshare ownership and, often, offering a thank you gift for attendance”—thank you internet). 

I sat with her once on the street in Gatlinburg as she pitched to tourists wondering by. Between eyeing potential customers (she only pitched to couples and had to assess whether they had “two pennies to rub together”) she sat on a stool in a little shed reading a paperback. This was her pitch:

“Hey, come here.” 

First off, she established whether the couple made the minimum annual income for her to proceed. It was sort of catch and release fishing. The ones who didn’t make enough were let go quickly. I don’t know how she managed to do this without offending people. The ones who did make enough and were hooked were scheduled for a sales presentation and promised dinner at a local restaurant or $100 cash or some other enticing gift. 

She travelled with this same time share company to Park City, Utah one winter and pitched to what she called “the heal and toe clickers”—people passing by in ski boots. I visited her there and watched her in action at a ski resort, sitting outside in a protected area between the lodge and ski lifts. 

In the mid-70s she started an indoor house painting business. She made business cards and called it the Paint Doctors because she started it with my dad who was a PhD university professor and often did summer work not related to his teaching. We lived in a large apartment complex at the time and she ended up getting the gig of repainting every unit that was vacated. She was all about speed. I went with her once and she showed me how to cut in, then set me to doing it while she rolled out the walls. 

Being her own person was what was most important to mom. If Reva Jo couldn’t do that then no job was worth it. 

She had large, car-driven, newspaper routes in Denton, Texas (the Denton Record Chronicle) and in Hattiesburg, MS (the Hattiesburg American). She often rolled papers while driving at the same time, could throw papers with either hand through the passenger window or over the windshield.

While I was starting high school mom began volunteering with a group called WRANPS (pronounced ramps)…the Wildlife Rehabilitation and Nature Preservation Society. I’m not sure how my sister felt. Maybe she was already out of the house, but I know my dad and I sometimes resented the amount of time she spent with WRANPS. I think my dad didn’t like that she wasn’t earning an income. I probably didn’t like that there weren’t as many home cooked meals. Anyway, during this time mom became an expert at rehabilitating raptors and was one of the few people certified in Mississippi to handle golden eagles. 

Reva Jo bred and raised mice in a cottage behind our house and I went with her a few times to watch her pitch live, frozen or euthanized (slung on a hard surface by their tail) mice to hawks and owls being rehabilitated in the WRANPS aviaries. Live mice were thrown to the birds that were almost ready to release. They’d catch it in a talon and then rip it apart with their beak. For the very sick ones I think she’d have to stick a mouse down its throat  or maybe she’d chop it up. I’m not sure. I didn’t witness that, but I know she had to become the mama bird for some of the ones in bad shape. 

Some of the birds didn’t make it, but some did and she got better and better at the job as time went on. 

I’m not sure why I never went to a release. It’s likely that I was just a teenager not that interested in hanging out with mom. But it’s possible she never invited me. Maybe she wanted to keep that part for herself. It’s possible that letting a bird go symbolized something so personal for her that she didn’t want to risk sharing it with a kid who might break the moment and ask what’s for dinner. 

I guess each of us is, or has been, a burden to someone in our life-if we are lucky. Hopefully there is enough joy to balance it all out. 

—————————

It’s been more than two months since my last blog post. I’m sending this off Sunday morning before getting back to a back patio renovation project. I’ve been trying to get a post together for the last month, but one of the things holding me back is pictures. I’ve got too many of them from a three week trip I took to Tennessee and I want to format them nicely. I need to get over that. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Also, I’ve been a little depressed. Also, I worked summer school. I don’t want to say never again…but there is a high likelihood. Lots of “also”s these days but the fact is I just haven’t made time to stick my butt in a chair and put it all together. Thanks mom for giving me a little kick today. 

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. 

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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. 

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*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.