People around the world jumped all over him, calling this “lunacy,” har har, and observing that most thinking folks thought that Newt already lived up there somewhere anyway. But it might not be entirely fair to keep sniping at Newt’s strange remarks. He’s admittedly and proudly “grandiose,” not to mention being a self-proclaimed “visionary” (but not a lobbyist, despite what his paychecks and everybody he’s ever lobbied says). “I think too much,” he admits. “I am now a famous person.”

Very few seem to think he has any real chance at winning anything. But consider this; another “famous” person who harbored grand illusions also adopted “winning” as his slogan, and came back from the bottom. Hence this not-so-outlandish thought:

Newt Gingrich should enlist Charlie Sheen as his running mate.

Hold on – it’s not so outlandish as it might seem. The two have much in common but could unite two disparate wings of fantasyland. Sheen’s meltdown last year was marked more than anything by grandiosity, denial and delusion. And then he quieted down and went away, back to “work,” as it were, planning his comeback. And then Newt started saying things like:

“I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it. I represent real power.”

He’s also said, “You can’t trust anybody with power,” but let’s not be picky. Remember some of the nuggets Charlie gifted upon us, starting with “I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen”?

Newt probably can’t use the “drug” excuse, even if it were true. But he can use Sheen-isms and maybe nobody would notice. Maybe nobody has noticed — until now. So, here are some quotes from the two grandiose gentlemen. Try and guess who is who here:

“I don’t have time for their judgement and their stupidity.”

“A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that’s what freedom is all about.”

“The fact is, we can afford a fairly ignorant presidency now.”

“I have a different constitution. I have a different brain; I have a different heart; I got tiger blood, man.”

“(My) Primary mission, Advocate of civilization, Definer of civilization, Teacher of the rules of civilization, Leader of the civilizing forces.”

“I have defeated this earthworm with my words. Imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists.”

“The problem isn’t too little money in political campaigns, but not enough.”

“(I am) The most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times.”

“These people are sick. They are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending.”

“The left-wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness, and the total right to cripple innocent people in the name of letting hooligans loose.”

“She isn’t young enough or pretty enough to be the President’s wife.”

“For now, I’m just going to hang out with these two smoking hotties and fly privately around the world. It might be lonely up here, but I sure like the view.”

“I read Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them and I found frightening pieces that related to… my own life.”

“The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”

“These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school.”

“I have one speed, I have one gear: go!”

“It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”

“I just didn’t believe I was like everybody else. I thought I was unique.”

“From my big beautiful warlock brain… You’re either in my corner, or you’re with the trolls.”

“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words.”

“Here’s the good news. If I realize that I’m insane, then I’m okay with it. I’m not dangerous insane.”

- One could go on and on with these, but that’s plenty enough to illustrate that you can hardly tell the two apart. Draw your own conclusions from that.

Anyway, back to that first Gingrich quote above, about going to the moon, more delusional than any such lunar plans is his “second term” slip; one needs a first term first? Which is about as likely as me becoming a warlock. But I hope readers will join me in sending some version of this letter I mailed to the powers-that-be at the GOP:

Dear Sirs:

Please please please nominate Newt Gingrich for President.

Respectfully, Steve

Today I fit several important pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of life, having found the first of those pieces a few days ago while I was at Mendocino K-8 School on Little Lake Road, shooting hoops despite the biting chill in the air and…

Wait. Doesn’t it strike you as remarkable, even astonishing, that in Mendocino of all places, a town known the world over as a seething vortex of artists and poets and potheads, that our K-8 school doesn’t have at least a mildly groovy name? Fantasia Archetype School. Raven Big Tree Learning Center. Earthling Haven Academy. Middle Earth Education Fulcrum. Doppelganger Nine. Fields of Elysium Lyceum. Mind Body Spirit Cognition Node. But I digress.

So…I was shooting hoops despite the biting chill when down the steps from the school to the playground came two people, a shapely young woman with hair of spun gold and a boy some four inches shorter than the young woman, a skinny, dorky boy with drab brown hair wearing a blue Mendocino K-8 School sweatshirt. And though I was a hundred yards away, I knew this boy and woman were courting, that they were the same age, numerically speaking, and that they were headed for the swings where many Mendocino K-8 junior high couples go to swing and flirt and talk about whatever junior high kids talk about these days.

Seeing these two physically mismatched lovebirds, I journeyed back through my memory archives to when I was a drab dorky boy in Eighth Grade and madly in love with three shapely young women who were, in every conceivable way (and I do mean conceivable), ready to hook up with men but found themselves surrounded by boys. And remembering those uneasy days of biological imbalance, when Lucy and Hannah and Shari were so obviously women while I and my male classmates were still so obviously boys, and having just finished reading The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas for the third time, I suddenly understood why so many girls today turn into women well in advance of their male age peers, which understanding was the aforementioned first of several pieces I just today fit into the jigsaw puzzle of life.

“We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.” — Richard Leakey

I love the many-times-proven fact that every human being on earth is a direct genetic descendant of the Ju/wasi (Bushmen) of southern Africa, and I am so grateful that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, a keen observer and gifted writer, dwelt among some of the last Ju/wasi to live in the Old Way so we may know how our ancestors lived prior to the ruination of the African savannah and the decimation of the original Ju/wasi way of life.

To quote from The Old Way (with Ms. Thomas’s permission), “If you happen to see a contemporary film or photo showing Bushmen dressed in skins, perhaps beside a small grass shelter or following a line of antelope footprints or handling a bow and arrow, you are seeing a reenactment. Today, nobody lives in the Old Way. All Bushmen, unless they put on skins for a photographer, wear the clothing of the dominant cultures — invariably Western dress for men, and Western or African dress for women — and none live by hunting and gathering, although with these activities they sometimes supplement their meager diet, which today is often cornmeal provided by the Namibian government as a welfare ration. They have jobs if they can get them, although many cannot; they listen to popular music on the radio, dance the popular dances, are influenced to some degree by Christianity, and are aware of the larger world and national politics.”

The Old Way is a record of daily life among one of the very last groups of Ju/wasi living as their predecessors (our predecessors) lived for at least thirty-five thousand years. And guess what? The junior high biological gender divide of our modern times did not exist among our people for those thirty-five thousand years.

“N!ai reached the menarche (began to menstruate) when she was about seventeen years old. At this time an important ceremony was held for her with eland music and dancing — a much more important ceremony than her wedding. But she and /Gunda (her husband) had no child for three years, when she was almost twenty. This was a very normal age for a Ju/wa woman’s first pregnancy.

“In the Old Way, the human population, like most other populations who live in the Old Way, had it own regulation. The strenuous work and absence of body fat prevented hunter-gatherer women from menstruating at an early age…”

In harmony with this biological truth, a Ju/wa man was not allowed to wed until he had killed an antelope, no easy feat even for a strong and experienced hunter. Thus most Ju/wa men spent the years before marriage growing into their full size and strength while acquiring skills that would enable them to provide antelope meat for their families and relatives.

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” — Lewis Carroll

When I was a little boy, my friends and I would pretend to be cowboys fighting Indians, the Indians being in the distance for us to shoot at with our pretend guns. When I was an older boy, my friends and I pretended to be American soldiers fighting Japanese and German soldiers, and these enemies, too, were in the distance for us to shoot at with our pretend guns. But when I played alone, I was always an Indian with a spear (fashioned from a grape stake or broom handle) and the bow and arrows I’d had since I was eight.

My childhood home stood on the edge of an abandoned estate, twenty acres of oaks and olive trees and overgrown vineyards and grasslands and ravines and chaparral teaming with wildlife — paradise. As far as I know, I was the only boy or girl in my neighborhood to habitually pretend to be an Indian; and there were certainly no other pretend Indians in our neck of the woods who took their pretending to the lengths I did. During those long summers when I was eight nine ten eleven and twelve, I lived for days on end in the wilds back of our house, barefoot and naked save for shorts, spending many a night camped out under the stars, with nuts and raisins and beef jerky for food, and a fire of twigs to keep me company as I gave voice to my invisible companions, wise old storytellers who knew everything there was to know about the animals and plants and spirits of that place.

I played tons of baseball with my friends and rode my bike all over the place, adventuring in the world of roads and stores, and I spent hours hunkered down in my bedroom with books, but no matter what else I might be doing, I longed to be in the woods, to follow a bird or butterfly to see where they might lead me; and to sit hidden and still for so long that the quail would forget I was there and resume their foraging around me, and a deer might appear close by, unaware of me, and I would be filled with wild joy knowing I might kill these animals if I needed to eat them to survive.

“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance” — e.e. cummings

I attended school and went insane with boredom, the teachings dead and useless, the only good parts of school being singing and drawing and recess and ball games and socializing with my friends and being secretly in love with girls. And until Sixth Grade all my classmates were boys and girls, and it was only midway through Sixth Grade and from then on that girls became women and boys remained boys, a division that reached a painful zenith in Seventh and Eighth Grade, otherwise known as junior high.

“and down they forgot as up they grew” — e.e. cummings

The summer after Eighth Grade I was hired by a neighbor to move many tons of soil from his backyard to his front yard. I shoveled heavy brown dirt from a gently sloping hillside into a large wheelbarrow and wheeled that barrow a hundred yards up and over an incline to the dumping point. This labor — five hours a day — lasted two months and changed my fast-growing body from skinny boy to muscular young man. Then, with only a month remaining before I started high school, I spent two weeks camped in the woods with my spear and fires and beef jerky, knowing these were the last days of my childhood and never wanting them to end.

“and now you are and i am now and we’re

a mystery which will never happen again” — e.e. cummings

The week before I started high school, I went to a party; and all the girls my age had become women. They saw I was no longer a boy; and Shari who had been a woman since Seventh Grade kissed me tenderly as we danced and led me outside into the moonlight and we kissed unto mindlessness, but beyond that I didn’t have a clue what to do and Shari was clearly frustrated and disappointed.

A few days later, the Saturday before high school began, I came home from my camp in the woods to find Hannah had come to visit, Hannah whom I had secretly loved since Fifth Grade, Hannah with womanly curves and beautiful breasts, Hannah with a deep musical laugh who always got my jokes when no one else did, Hannah who was my primary dream girl and fantasy lover.

We played ping-pong, and as we played I realized I was naked save for shorts, and Hannah was naked save for shorts and a negligible blouse. I had caught up to her, biologically speaking, and she had come to me — never having been to my house before — because she knew I had caught up to her, and because she liked me.

Somehow we went from playing ping-pong on the terrace to walking through the overgrown vineyard to a massive oak, and there we embraced and kissed and kissed some more until she whispered sweetly, “Hey, you wanna do it?”

“I…I…”

“I know how,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “And I can show you.”

I was 13. Looking back, seeing myself with Hannah in those last moments of childhood, I may wish I had allowed her to show me, but now that I have found and fit enough pieces into the jigsaw puzzle of life, I understand that I was not yet fully a man, not yet a killer of antelopes or the modern equivalent, and therefore not allowed to take a wife.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

Ironically, I heard the same thing 25 years ago when – against all odds and defying common sense – I decided to start a record label. Even more ironically, today’s naysayers will typically point to the 80s and 90s as some sort of golden age when anyone capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time could cobble together some shoestring operation that would quickly grow from selling 7’s out of your disheveled bedroom into a multi-million dollar monolith that could be flogged off to one of the major labels for an even bigger fortune as soon one of your “underground” artists broke through into mainstream success.

The fact that this actually did happen on occasion does nothing to diminish the reality that then, as now, most indie label owners never saw their pride and joy develop into more than an expensive hobby. It was a rare (and usually naive) individual who went into the business expecting to make money. If in 1987 you’d asked what sort of financial future I envisioned for Lookout Records, I would have said I was hoping, if things went very well indeed, not to lose too much money. Breaking even or coming out slightly ahead was about as wild as my dreams dared to get.

Nowadays people get annoyed when I tell them that, especially since when doing so I’m usually trying to demonstrate that it can be dangerous and self-defeating to assume you know what is or isn’t possible. “Yeah, it’s easy for you to talk,” I’m told. “You happened to luck out by starting your label right when everybody was having to re-buy their entire music collection on CD and before digital downloads came along and all but destroyed the retail music business.”

That does, in retrospect, look extremely lucky, but more to the point, I think, is the fact that in 1987 I had no way of knowing any of this was going to happen. I didn’t get involved in CDs until the beginning of the 90s (they weren’t “punk,” you know), and as for the digital revolution, well, when an early adopter tried to explain how this whole “internet” thing worked, I was left hopelessly befuddled. “Okay,” I kept asking him, “you hook up two computers so they can talk to each other? But what’s the point? What would a computer have to talk about?”

Still think it was a lot easier to bumble one’s way to success back in those days? You’re possibly right. When I get interviewed, one of the inevitable questions is, “Do you ever think about starting another record label?” My answer is always a resounding NO. Not just because the last one nearly drove me off the deep end, but also because I too would be intimidated by the seemingly bleak outlook facing the music business today.

But does that mean it can’t or shouldn’t be attempted? Quite the contrary. If I were 30 or 40 years younger, there’s every chance I’d be launching some sort of indie music venture, and tackling it with every bit as much enthusiasm, idealism and naiveté as I did the last time around. I can’t guarantee I’d be successful, but I’d give it a pretty good go.

“Aha!” you say. “You’re chickening out because you’re old and you’ve lost your passion.” Maybe that’s a little true, but it’s more a case of wanting to do other things now, like writing, and seeing the world. Besides, and perhaps most importantly, there are others who’ve taken up the challenge, others who are every bit as idealistic and motivated, and probably a lot smarter than I was when I first got the idea I could somehow run a record label. They’re doing all the things I would be trying to do if I were still in the business, signing the same bands, treating them openly and honestly, injecting a much-needed note of innovation and integrity into an industry that has seldom been noted for either.

I hesitate to start naming names, not because there aren’t many that deserve to be named, but because I would inevitably miss so many more. That being said, I do want to give shout-outs to a couple of my favorite indie labels. One is It’s Alive Records  in Orange County. Though the majority of their output comes in the form of vinyl records that I can’t even play because I don’t have a record player (I’m getting one soon, which will be nice, though I’m endlessly chagrined about having given away my 1970s Technics turntable a few years back on the assumption I wouldn’t be needing it anymore), they’re a source of endless inspiration, both for their honorable business practices and their sheer love of the same sort of music I myself love most.

Then there’s New Jersey’s Don Giovanni Records . Full disclosure: Joe Steinhardt and Zach Gajewski, the guys who run it, are friends of mine, and I’d be inclined to support any enterprise of theirs, music-related or not. But having watched their label grow for a few years now, I’m continually impressed by the way they’ve combined a well-run business with an artist-centered attitude, and in the process demonstrated that despite shifting formats, fragmenting markets, and wholesale disillusionment, it’s still possible, by following the same fundamental principles that have always underpinned a successful record label, to thrive and prosper.

One of the reasons Zach and Joe work so well with their artists is because they’re artists themselves: both have been in a variety of bands, perhaps none so notable as the much-loved but slightly star-crossed For Science. Known originally as Skynet (a reference to some science fiction show or movie that everybody except me is familiar with, and which I could quickly look up if I didn’t want to maintain the illusion that I’m immune to popular culture), they dropped that name for fear of lawsuits, left science fiction behind, and went for straight-up science.

They were playing around New York quite a bit around the time I moved here, but I must admit I didn’t really “get” them. Most of my friends were fans, some ravingly so, but every time I saw them it seemed as though one or more members would be drunk and/or otherwise impaired, and onstage chaos would ensue. I remember once asking in all seriousness, “Why doesn’t somebody get those drunk guys off stage so the band can play?” not realizing that they were the band.

“Yeah, sometimes they’re a mess when they play live,” my friends would tell me, “but you have to hear their records.” Which I never did, because, as you’ll remember, I didn’t have a record player. Then one day a new lean, mean and sober version of For Science rolled into an afternoon show at the Cake Shop and I was not only amazed, but grudgingly had to admit, “Yeah, I guess maybe they’re not so bad after all.” Shortly after that, the band imploded, thanks to a member’s LSD freakout (who does that in the 21st century?) and other murky circumstances that don’t need to be delved into here.

End of story, until quite recently, when a) I got a digital copy of two For Science albums; and b) it was rather abruptly announced that For Science were reuniting and would be playing the annual Don Giovanni showcase next weekend in Brooklyn (I say “rather abruptly” because I was somehow under the impression that certain members were never going to speak to each other again; once again, I was proved to be wrong, wrong, wrong). And the other news is that I’ve now listened to the digital albums a couple times and, whoa, my friends weren’t lying. This band really is good. Really, really good. And though they’ll be sharing the stage with such luminaries as Screaming Females and Laura Stevenson and the Cans, chances are that For Science will end up stealing the show, either through the sheer exuberance of their fans welcoming them back to life, or because… well, who really knows what could happen? It’s not the kind of band you’d want to make predictions about.

One prediction, however, that is a safe bet: you won’t want to miss this. Last I heard, tickets weren’t sold out yet, but probably will be soon.

Marcia and I were walking on Big River Beach yesterday, the wet sand firm underfoot—Big River swollen and muddy from the recent deluge, a light rain falling.

As we reveled in the windy wet, free from our various indoor practices, our conversation ran from gossip to silence to politics to silence to memoir to silence to what we might have for supper. And at some point Marcia asked me about a speaking engagement I’ve accepted, a keynote address at a writers’ conference, the dreaded topic—The Creative Process—chosen for me by the conference planners. I say dreaded because I think most of what I’ve ever read about the so-called creative process is hogwash, and I fear that anything I might add to the dreaded subject would be hogwash, too.

Long ago I worked in a day care center overseeing a mob of little kids. The day care center was located ten minutes from Stanford University and we were forever being visited by earnest graduate students writing theses about educational techniques, educational philosophies, educational processes, and God knows what else pertaining to mobs of little kids. Having no degree of any kind, let alone a degree in Small Child Management, I found it highly amusing to be the frequent recipient of attention from these humorless academics, some of whom, I’ll wager, went on to author textbooks for aspiring nursery school teachers, kindergarten teachers, and other Small Child Management educators. Could it be that information gathered from interviews with me conducted by these earnest humorless people helped shape curricula for early childhood education in America? I hope so, but I doubt it.

One day as I was supervising my mob of kiddies in our outdoor playground, a woman named Stella, a doctoral candidate at Stanford, stood beside me, clipboard in hand, asking questions about my supervisory process, a process I had theretofore never tried to elucidate to anyone.

Stella: I note at this time that all the children seem to be safely and happily occupied. I have recorded a current population distribution of one group of five children, two groups of three, four dyads, and three solitary individuals. Would you say this is a typical distribution of the total?

Todd: Um…well, certainly not atypical.

Stella: Would you characterize these as established groups or new and/or developing configurations?

Todd: The configurations are ever changing, though girls tend to hang out with girls, and boys with boys, especially among four and five-year olds. Two and three-year olds tend to be more gender polyrhythmic, if you know what I mean.

Stella: (makes a note) We’ll come back to gender aggregates, but for now I’m curious to know what specific actions you took to precipitate this particular distribution of individuals and groups, and if you employed any specific techniques for settling the children into these successful play actions?

Todd: Are you serious?

Stella: Yes. I have noted zero incidents of crying, fighting, or moping in the entire population for over fifteen minutes now, which defines these play actions and this particular population distribution as successful.

Todd: Could you repeat the question?

Stella: (reading) What techniques did you employ for settling the children into these successful play actions?

Todd: Let me think about that for a minute. (shouting across the playground at a five-year-old boy about to destroy a sand castle just completed by a four-year-old girl) Don’t do it, Lance.

Stella: Wow. (flips to a new page) Would you characterize that as a tone-based warning or a content-based warning?

Todd: Both. And now if you’ll excuse me, Megan is about to slug Bianca and I would like to intervene before their play action becomes highly unsuccessful.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”— Yogi Berra

I want to be helpful to people who aspire to write, so I will try to come up with an inspiring keynote address—because inspiration can sometimes get the ball rolling—though in truth there is no “the creative process.” Each of us has to roll our own ball our own way, and that’s all there is to it: rolling your own creative ball. I use rolling to mean doing, acting, working—everything else is just talking about rolling, which is not the same as rolling, believe you me.

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” — W.H. Auden

Thirteen years ago I published The Writer’s Path, a book of my original writing exercises, and before the silly publisher took the book out-of-print, The Writer’s Path sold ten thousand copies with never a penny spent to promote that most helpful tome. Excellent used copies of The Writer’s Path can be found on the interweb for mere pennies plus the dreaded shipping charge.

I designed each exercise in the book to be a non-analytical way to practice a particular aspect of the writing process (not to be confused with the creative process.) For instance, many writers (as in most writers) have big trouble rewriting their initial drafts. Among the many underlying causes of this big trouble are: 1) rewriting skills are developed through thousands of hours of practice, and very few people are willing to work so hard for so little in return 2) rewriting is all about change, and most people are deathly afraid of change 3) rewriting reveals the inadequacies of the original drafts, and such revelations, especially for beginning writers, can be huge bummers.

So I came up with a series of exercises involving the swift creation and destruction and re-creation and re-destruction and re-creation of lines of words, intuitive processes that obviate fear and short-circuit analytical thinking—the great enemy of spontaneous word flow—to give writers invigorating rewriting workouts.

Writing, drawing, and playing music are muscular activities as well as mental processes, and I have no doubt that all original stories, pictures, and songs result from synergetic collaborations of our physical muscles with our cerebral muscles, along with valuable input from unseen agents of the unknowable, if you believe, as I do, in such fantastic nonsense.

“The world is a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” — Sean O’Casey

When at 19 I embarked on a vagabond’s life and could not take a piano with me, I bought a guitar in the sprawling mercado of Guadalajara and taught myself how to play. A year later, having spent a good thousand hours developing a thumb-dominant style of picking and strumming, I stood on a sidewalk in Toronto, strumming and singing. And lo a miracle befell me. Yea verily, dozens of smiling Canadians threw coins and paper money into my dilapidated cardboard guitar case and thenceforth I was a professional musician. Not long after that initial sprinkle of heavenly largesse, I bought a much better guitar and for a time made a minimalist living as a troubadour.

Eventually my piano regained supremacy in my musical life and my guitar became (and remains) a sometimes friend. Two years ago, Marcia and I produced two groovacious CDs of instrumentals and songs featuring guitar and cello (When Light Is Your Garden and So Not Jazz), though of late my focus is on piano improvisations and Marcia is happily immersed in various classical music pursuits. But I digress.

What I set out to say was that I became a highly functional guitarist through thousands of hours of practice, and I always—this is key—used a thumb pick (on my right thumb) when I played the guitar. And then a few years ago I made a startling discovery, which was that unless my right thumb was actively involved in the playing of a tune, I (this body brain spirit consortium) had no idea where to put the fingers of my left hand to make the chords for any of the songs I knew. That is to say, my right thumb, for all intents and purposes, is the only part of me that really knows how to play my songs.

“People who write about spring training not being necessary have never tried to throw a baseball.” — Sandy Koufax

Marcia’s mother Opal is ninety-three and still drives her car all over Santa Rosa where she lives in her own apartment in a commodious retirement community. Two years ago, Opal took up pocket billiards, otherwise known as pool, playing twice a week with friends in the billiards room across the hall from the ping-pong room. When Marcia and I go to visit Opal, we play three or four games of pool with her every night, Marcia and Opal teamed up against Todd, their dyad getting two turns for every one of mine, which makes for a fairly even contest.

What I find most inspiring about Opal learning to play pool so late in life is that every time we play with her, she not only plays better than when we last played, she plays much better.

Todd and Marcia’s CDs are available at Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino and from UnderTheTableBooks.com  and NavarroRiverMusic.com.

Before discussing the event of January 27, 2012, a little background is in order for those who are unfamiliar with Oxfam. The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief was formed in 1942 by a group of British Quakers and Oxford academics. Their sole purpose at the time was to try to persuade the British government to allow food relief to the starving population of occupied Greece, then under Nazi control. Since that time, Oxford International has grown to comprise 15 organizations in 90 countries whose mission is to promote “lasting solutions to poverty and related injustice.” They are, in short, on the front lines of the war against hunger. By any measure this humanitarian organization is apolitical,universally respected, and in no way viewed as a threat to anyone.

Franklin, however, was, as stated, viewed as a threat for reasons never explained.

Franklin flew to Britain for the purpose of interviewing with Oxfam. He also intended to meet with his editor at the journal Review of African Political Economy, which has published some of his articles on food security in Mali and Niger. His recent Ph.D. thesis was on just such a topic. The journal, by the way, is a subsidiary of Routledge, a respected and long established academic publisher in the UK.

So, you might wonder, once released from what at the very least was unwarranted detention for three weeks, you would have thought Franklin was owed an apology and some explanation. No so. Franklin did not look back. He decided, after visiting his mother in Aberdeen, Washington, to fly on to Bangkok. A friend of his from Peace Corps days in Mauritania had invited him to visit, and to offer him a job teaching English in Cambodia. At this writing, having decided not to remain in Asia, Franklin is somewhere between Malaysia and Turkey, slowly winding his way back to his research area, North Africa.

On the home front (his mother’s house in Aberdeen is his legal address) appear two men with questions to ask his mother. It turns out that the two men at the door are a local policeman and an FBI Special Agent Kyle McNeal out of the Olympia, Washington office. Of course, they are fully aware of Franklin’s detention by the UK Customs and Immigration officials. They know everything about all that. Poor mother.

What is she to do but invite them into her home (mistake 1), agree to answer questions (mistake 2), and show them e-mails from and to Franklin (mistake 3). Franklin’s mother is an innocent. Her life, and by inference the life of her son, is an open book. When asked, she volunteers her driver’s license number, social security number, and God knows what else. She assures them of Franklin’s love of country and that he was only in the UK (that is, tried to visit the UK) for the purpose of interviewing for the Oxfam job in Africa.

All of this boils down to yet one more slice of the idiocy practiced by our vaunted Homeland Security apparatus. They’ve come so far as to demand that you take your shoes off at airports, submit to x-ray screening and pat downs, and surrender three-ounce jars of pesto at security check points. Pesto? Don’t ask! In short, there are no limits to what indignities we must submit to. Homeland Security now proposes to extend TSA Security screening to railroads, buses, and ferries. Yes, before long, if they have it their way, you will have to take your shoes off and submit to pat downs to take a Greyhound Bus to Fresno. And, don’t even think of taking that 3-ounce jar of pesto to a friend as a present.

Stay tuned. Franklin is a part-time resident of Anderson Valley.  He will come. In the meantime, with silly questions in hand, the FBI may be coming to your community. You haven’t said anything to offend TSA, have you?  Or, did you leave a question unanswered on the customs form when you tried to sneak a jar of pesto home? Oh Pangloss, where is that “best of all possible worlds” you speak of so eloquently? As for me, I’m dusting off my copies of Farenheit-451 and 1984 for my private film festival tonight.

The notices currently taped to both sides of the glass doors of the Mendocino Post Office proclaim that starting February 14, 2012, our post office will henceforth be closed on Saturdays, and postal business shall only be conducted Monday through Friday from 8 AM to 4 PM. That our government, otherwise known as the Council of Evil Morons, would choose Valentine’s Day to kick off this latest contraction of our terrific postal system strikes me as ironic and cruel, as well as evil and moronic.

I and most Americans over fifty first learned how the postal system worked when we were in First and Second Grade and our teachers helped us create and operate our very own in-classroom post offices for the purpose of sending and receiving Valentines to and from our classmates. At Las Lomitas Elementary School we had actual post offices (built by handy parents) that took up big chunks of classroom real estate. These one-room offices featured windows behind which stood postal workers from whom we could buy stamp facsimiles (fresh from the mimeograph machine) to affix with edible white paste to our properly addressed envelopes. These envelopes contained store bought or handmade Valentines, and we would drop these childish love missives into cardboard mailboxes located across the rooms from the post offices. Then every hour or so postal workers would open these mailboxes, empty the contents into transport bags, and carry the mail to the post offices wherein the letters would be sorted into cubbyholes bearing the names of the recipients. And we, the children, got to be the postal workers and do all these fun jobs. How cool is that? For a six-year-old, way cool.

These Valentines postal operations stimulated many other sectors of our classroom ecology. Making art took on new and urgent meaning, as did writing. Anyone could send a regular valentine, but only artists and poets could make valentines covered with glitter (affixed to that same edible paste) bearing heartfelt original (or accidentally plagiarized) rhymes. Roses are red, violets are blue, please be my Valentine, shoo bop doo wah.

Valentines were the gateway drugs that turned me into the snail mail addict I am today, which is why I am so sad and angry about the decline and impending fall of our beloved postal system. Yes, I appreciate a good email missive, one without typos or grammatical errors; but the best email pales next to a mediocre piece of real mail found in my post office box, a one-of-a-kind Easter egg of love waiting to be discovered amidst the bills and junk mail, something made just for me that took someone more than a few seconds to compose and send, something steeped in what psychologists call “quality time” — loving attention undivided.

“Love is metaphysical gravity.” — Buckminster Fuller

Get over it, Todd. No. I take Marshall McLuhan’s observation “the medium is the message” as a warning that what we think we’re doing may not be what we’re actually doing. McLuhan was speaking about mass media, television in particular, a medium through which I thought I was watching shows I wanted to watch, when in actuality I was allowing myself to be seduced by processes designed to entrain me to think and feel the way our corporate overlords want everyone to think and feel. Television is a medium of conquest and control. The message of that medium is “Do and be and buy what we tell you to do and be and buy or you will never be safe and happy. Ever.”

So it came to pass that I and many other people figured out the real message of mass media and television and broke free from that enslavement and stayed free long enough to help engender and partake of a brief renaissance of creative freedom known as the Sixties, a cultural revolution largely defined by its independence from mass media and corporate control. Some say the Sixties lasted into the 1970’s, and some say reverberations of that renaissance continued into the 1980’s, but for however long the groovy vibes of the Sixties kept on vibing, the important thing to know is that the innovative energy and expressions of that renaissance were eventually captured and drained of their power by the corporate media apparatus; and the next iteration of television was the computer and the internet and all the attendant satellite devices that define this digital age.

When I quit watching television in 1969, very little else changed in my life. My arts of writing and music were independent of television, and communications for personal and business matters were fast and effective by telephone and through the post office. But a couple years ago when I came out of a trance to find myself watching a basketball game on my computer, having sat down with the specific intention of rewriting a story, it suddenly dawned on me that computers are nothing more than interactive televisions, and now, oops, virtually all my personal and business dealings are inextricably bound to the use of the computer. Today I send my essays to the Anderson Valley Advertiser and other prescient publishers via email, I offer my music and books and art for sale through the internet, and to abstain from using my computer in the same way I abstained from using television would render me immediately and entirely removed from all but the most local of cultures, counter or otherwise.

Yet to stay hooked up to my computer is to be an active and addicted user of a medium that is the message, “Do and be and buy what we tell you to do and be and buy or you will never be safe and happy. Ever.” Except just as there are more layers to the computer/internet interface with our lives than there were with that earlier version of television, so are there more layers to the new medium’s message. Now, along with being told a million times a year what to do and be and buy, we are also compelled through the brutal elimination of alternatives to spend most of our time peering at our computer screens if we wish to feel connected to what we think is most important and meaningful, i.e. what is happening right now in those fields of endeavor we are most interested in.

Post offices, in my view, are among the last few vibrant vestiges of the non-computer way of doing and being, which is the real reason the Council of Evil Morons wants to strangle that marvelous system; so there will be no alternative, none at all, to computers and the internet as a means of doing and being, except on a local basis — very local. Which brings me to my latest idea for kindling the next cultural and social and political renaissance that will save the world and usher in the long awaited age of global enlightenment, which then may or may not precipitate contact with brilliant aliens who have been waiting for us to make the evolutionary leap from stupid selfish poopheads to smart generous sweetie pies.

My idea is that we start our own local post offices, without the aid of computers. We can use telephones to get the ball rolling, but not cell phones. These extremely local post offices will be adult versions of the post offices we had in First and Second Grade, manned by fun loving volunteers. Stamps created by a wide range of local artists will cost a nickel. You will need one stamp for every ounce of mail you send. Post office boxes (cubbyholes) will rent for ten dollars per year. The money collected from selling stamps and renting cubbyholes will go into maintaining the postal buildings with their clean and commodious adjoining public restrooms and teahouses.

Among the many cool things about these local post offices will be that they will be open seven days a week from morning until night, they will have tables and chairs where people can sit and write letters and decorate envelopes and gossip, of course, and they will have multiple gigantic well-maintained bulletin boards whereon anyone may post anything. Neato one-of-a-kind rainproof mailboxes created by local artisans will be scattered throughout the local watershed — and mail will be collected from these neato mailboxes several times a day and transported to the post office in colorful burlap bags. Then the letters will be sorted into our cubbyholes throughout every long day, thus making everyone feel safe and happy.

Yes, it would be easy to set up this kind of local post office using computers, but making something easy doesn’t necessarily make it good.

Todd’s snail mail address is PO Box 366, Mendocino CA 95460. His web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

You take the I-5 south from Sacramento for about three hours to state 41 at Kettleman City. Kettleman City is burgers and gas, but once you turn off, heading north on 41, you’ll drive through some lovely, pastoral rolling hills of burnt golds and still verdant greens.

20 or 25 minutes on 41 to the junction with 46 gives you time to feel James Dean coming, to appreciate his presence, then, now — always.

Roll to a stop at the junction, wire fences, some cattle grazing, low-lying hills, dusty brown, without housing, silence, the tall green and white sign: “James Dean Memorial Junction” — finally set in place several years ago by the area’s local state politicians.

It’s all very real. It could be Wyoming or Dakota. The Dean myths are made real. Truly a California place.

It’s about 3:30pm. Dean will be coming in about an hour.

Time enough to drive east on Highway 46 for a bit and trace the route of Dean’s silver Porsche Spider, the “Little Bastard.”

He’s got a recent cash contract with Warner Bros., a new sports car, a race in Salinas, a drive up from Los Angeles.

Driving up 46 for about 20 miles you’ll come to a still countrified mini-store. There you’ll see a billboard sized Jimmy with laurel flowers by local artist John Cerney. It will sort of stop you in your — and Dean’s — tracks. James Dean stopped here just before the final scene.

It’s beautiful back in here, again, wire fences, ranchland, sensuous, wheat golden hills, little to no traffic.

Here he comes, with his mechanic passenger, full out, James Dean, only seen in “East of Eden,” so far invincible, only 24 years old.

You can stop along 46 and guess at where he was stopped for speeding. His last living act was to sign a speeding ticket: James Byron Dean.

This day’s and that day’s glomming dust is settling in.

No headlights, low to the ground, Dean’s Spider is speeding toward the intersection.

The 54 Ford Fairlane, driven by Dave Turnupseed (that’s right) is coming up to the intersection. He’s east on 46, ready to turn left onto 41 south. James Dean is coming straight on.

“He’s not going to turn…” the Dean myth says. But the 54 Ford Fairlane made of solid US steel does turn left.

Does he see James Dean? Perhaps. Does he try to get out of his way? Perhaps. Does Dean slowdown? Perhaps. Fate? Perhaps.

You can feel it in the front seat of your car. Dean’s sheet-metal Spider hits the Fairlane, Dean’s driver’s side out, shearing it away, snapping Jimmy’s neck, crushing his chest. Instant death? Perhaps — the mechanic is thrown clear and alive.

Roll to a stop, no traffic signals, no weekday traffic. “Two fast too live/too young to die…”

Ah, what might have been — “Easy Rider” with him.

From the junction, stay on 46 for just a bit and you’ll come to the Jack Ranch Cafe and its gravel parking lot — at a spot in the road, Choalme, California. The Jack Ranch Cafe is a true roadhouse ramshackle, ornery and still active — all by its lonesome. A true original, cowboy boots and spurs or red jacket, white t-shirt, jeans, motorcycle boots.

In the gravel parking lot you will see one lone oak tree, tall, thick and spidery. Partially wrapped around the oak like an embrace, tall, thick and silver — James Dean and his life dates.

The memorial has been described as representing a car fender wrapped around a tree, representing the accident?

Not so — it’s a peace garden. You will understand when you read the inscription words of Seiti Ohmishi, on a plaque at your feet. Seiti Ohmishi, the Japanese businessman who gave us this memorial in thanks to James Dean and much more. It can bring you to tears, so unexpected. It did.

You can sit and have a Jack Ranch beer on the low stone wall around the memorial.

Daylight is fading, casting shadows across the open ranchland. Quiet on the set.

Dinner in Steinbeck’s Salinas. Right into “East of Eden” and home.

Tehachapi State Prison, 2012 — Prison is a hustler’s paradise where only the strong survive. It’s full of buyers and sellers and everyone is a con-artist. Hence the term con-artist. The weak are susceptible to the game early and are easy to spot. You can tell when it’s someone’s first rodeo, as they say around here. Their title here is “first-timer” and they might as well have it tattooed on their face. Their fear or lack thereof is easy to spot. They’re still wet behind the ears and a little green, if you know what I mean. Although their ages may vary their demeanor doesn’t. They either have wide eyes and are walking on eggshells, or they carry themselves like they don’t have a worry in the world because they still have no idea what’s in store for them.

Think of your first term as something like your freshman year in high school. Its going to be an experience. I don’t care if you are the biggest guy in class or the smallest. Your surroundings are new and so are the people. You will be tested. Crash course. Your little world just got much bigger and whatever you thought you were just became much smaller.

I think it’s pretty safe to say once you make it through your first term you’re a man. What kind of a man depends on the type of people you rolled with. You could parole with newfound skills that could exceed your criminal expectations, from extracting Excedrin in your microwave to being gone in 60 seconds. The choice is all yours. The professionals are all here only too eager to tutor some new pupils. I promise you we do breed killers, along with any other felonious titles you can think of. We do not discriminate and are accepting all applications. No matter what brought you here to this war zone known as the California Prison System — green you may enter, but only educated you may leave.

A criminal mind is a terrible thing to waste. I tell you from direct experience that all the world’s best artists, poets, rappers and even athletes are all locked up. I tell you Little Wayne would slap himself for saying he is the best rapper alive if he could hear some of these cats spit a few bars of what I’ve been privileged enough to hear while I’ve been down. The artists, the rappers, the ballers. They’re all here.

I swear to you the next Michael Jordan is locked up. Forget the NBA draft, check San Quentin. As for the artwork, it’s almost worth coming to prison to see — and I’m not just talking about prison tattoos either, although that’s so true that it should go without even saying. The portraits, collages and other artworks I’ve seen would blow your mind. Where else does someone find the time to perfect their craft? I’m talking about spending ten hours on an eyebrow, three weeks on a hook, and six years on an album! It kind of makes you forget about that kid’s jump shot in San Quentin, doesn’t it?

I happen to live next door to one of the most talented artists/songwriters the world has never seen. I kid you not. What I’m witnessing daily has to feel something like watching John Lennon and Paul McCartney discover themselves before they become legends. His style in general would have to be labeled as pop or R&B, but with a twist and flavor no one’s ever seen outside the prison walls. He’s got a California drawl and a swagger that is all his own. He could chew up any rapper alive and serenade your girl out of her panties at the same time. To say dollar signs are in his future would be an understatement and no one even knows he exists. He’s never even seen a studio, but vocally he’s on top of his game and lyrically he’s off the charts. Still, with all his talent, will you ever know his name? Will he ever be discovered? You will never see a convict on American Idol. If America’s Got Talent, then Prison’s Got Professionals — or at least it breeds masters of their professions.

How many Michael Vicks got busted before Virginia Tech? Before changing the quarterback position as we know it. What if he was mopping floors at Leavenworth for 12¢ an hour before we ever knew his name? What if the only NFL action he ever saw was in a prison dayroom on a Sunday afternoon?

Look at Mike Tyson. Once upon a time the baddest man on the planet. Heavyweight Champion of the World. Also a convicted felon who had a long fall from grace and went to prison at the peak of his career.

Imagine if that fall from grace wasn’t as far. What if they never reached the top of their profession? What if they were sentenced to prison before they became household names? Would that have made them any less remarkably talented athletically? In short, the answer is no. I tell you this for a fact. I’m surrounded by more talented individuals then all the outsider stars combined.

The sky is a deep purple and a warm night is falling over the mountains that surround this prison yard. My favorite song is being sung by an individual most people don’t even know exists. As he beats on his chest to a soundtrack you’ve never heard he has our full attention and, as a crowd, we react at all the right moments.

I sit on the edge of my seat so I can keep my forward attitude. I continuously soak in my surroundings. In prison the critical subtext of every situation is animal. Never let your guard down. Even in silence everything is territory and dominance. A battle for advantage.

There’s something in the air. I can sense it. A disturbing silence envelops the whole yard. The hushed conversations, the sounds of boots on the pavement, even the crickets are silent. As I scan my surroundings in search of all this tension, a buzzer sounds. That’s followed by a voice over the public address system screening, “Down on the yard!”

The song has been cut short but the soundtrack continues playing out around me. I prone out on my stomach with the other 300 inmates on the yard. We were just trying to enjoy a warm evening out of our cells and now some kid is bleeding all over the grass some 50 yards away from me. He’s trying to hold his face together having just been sliced with a razor. Soon cops and guards and medics are all over the situation. They cuff anyone within 10 feet of the bleeder in the grass. The medics are rushing the bleeder in a wheelchair across the yard to the clinic. All that remains is a black shadow in the grass, staining the area where the boy had bled. Another five minutes of deathly silence is finally broken by that familiar voice over the public address system: “Resume program!”

Slowly I rise to my feet along with the rest of the yard. Boots scrape the pavement, conversations continue and groups re-converge. Now from the top, California picks up the beat on his chest in tune with the soundtrack around us. As the song continues I realize with certainty that this is truly a song I’ll never forget by an artist the world may never know.

To be continued. Submitted and all that mumbo-jumbo as the saga continues. I just thought I’d shoot this to the AVA readers and see what they think. Cheddar Bob still continues to work on his story as the editors very well know. Sometimes it’s worth printing and still other times it’s worth forgetting.

Ronald Rhea

Tehachapi

I used to know a loquacious drunk who punctuated his pontifications with the disclaimer, “Of course, memories are, at best, only fair approximations of what actually happened, so please don’t quote me.” At least I think that’s what he said. And I took his disclaimer to mean that his memory was not so sharp, whereas my own recollections were essentially photographic and therefore highly accurate. Silly me.

A few nights ago we watched the movie Bedazzled (the original work of genius, not the execrable remake) created by and starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, with a stirring cameo by the preternatural Raquel Welch, and we laughed so hard at some of the scenes I felt five years younger at movie’s end. I hadn’t seen Bedazzled in thirty years and feared the sarcastic romp might not stand the test of time, but it did with ease. However, what did not stand the test of time were my memories of favorite scenes from the film, for they were, as the drunk foresaw, only approximations of the actual scenes.

Indeed, I was crestfallen that my most favorite scene (as I remembered it) only barely resembled the actual scene in the film. Which scene? The one in which Raquel Welch brings Dudley Moore breakfast in bed. In my misremembered version, Raquel’s seduction of the hapless Moore lasts a good ten minutes and features the nearly naked Raquel erotically enunciating each syllable of the expression, “hot buttered buns” as part of an excruciatingly slow build to an orgasmic finish; when in actuality Raquel spat that delectable phrase rapid fire in the midst of a badly blurted speech prelude to seductus interruptus. Yet thirty years ago my brain seized on those three little words and made them the centerpiece of a seduction scene far more lurid and glorious than the one they filmed.

“Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.” — Pierce Harris

During one of my many stints as a single man, I attended a party featuring scads of married couples and two single women, one seven-feet-tall, the other a midget, though now I’m not so sure about their heights. I am sure I fell into conversation with a vivacious married woman and ere long her jealous husband joined us. To assure him I had no designs on his wife (though she certainly inspired several marvelous designs) I asked them how they first met.

Vivacious Woman: We were working on the same float for the Rose Bowl parade and…

Husband of Vivacious Woman: No, honey. Rex and Sally set us up on a blind date a couple weeks before the parade.

Vivacious Woman: No, dear, you’re thinking of Tom and Rita. And it was two weeks after the parade. And it wasn’t a blind date because we already knew each other. No. You approached me ostensibly to borrow some pink flowers, but I knew you just wanted to get a closer look at me.

Husband of Vivacious Woman: Honey. Come on. You think I don’t remember how we met? It was only four years ago.

At this juncture, we were joined by a beautiful pregnant woman and her dumpy bald husband, and before Vivacious Woman and Husband of Vivacious Woman could come to blows over their divergent Rose Bowl memories, I asked Pregnant and Bald how they first met.

Pregnant: I was dating his brother…

Bald: You were not. We met long before you ever dated Jack. At the bowling alley. Remember? Then you went out with Jack a couple times, and then…

Pregnant: A couple times? I went out with your brother for a year, and if he hadn’t been transferred to Atlanta…

Bald: Ten months is not a year.

Pregnant: That’s true. Ten months is technically not a year.

“Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.” — Austin O’Malley

Speaking of crazy people and what we think we remember, in my former life as an author of books published by large publishers, I often performed in bookstores, cafés, theaters, and college auditoriums. And though I enjoyed performing and my audiences were generally appreciative, I eventually shied away from such public exposure because crazy people kept coming to my performances and zapping me with their psychic toxins. Here are two such encounters as I remember them.

Encounter #1: I am in a large old bookstore standing on a small dais facing an audience of sixty people. I have sung a couple songs, accompanying myself on guitar, and read a few stories, and the laughter and applause have been raucous. The master of ceremonies (the owner of the bookstore) announces a fifteen-minute intermission, various people thank me for my performance, an aggressively attractive woman hands me her business card and suggests we meet for coffee, and an old friend hugs me and whispers, “Watch out, buddy, she’s crazy as a loon.”

As I make my way outside for a breath of fresh air, a big man with long hair and a neatly trimmed beard approaches me. He is wearing a red plaid shirt, gray slacks and brown hiking boots, and I recall seeing him smiling at me during my performance — smiling gigantically. I stop walking when this man is within six feet of me and I fully expect him to stop at a reasonable distance from me, but he doesn’t stop until his face is within a few inches of mine.

“You kept looking at me,” he snarls. “Why were you looking at me?”

“I beg your pardon, but…”

“Don’t deny it,” he spits. “You kept looking at me because you thought I liked you, didn’t you? You saw me laughing when everybody else was laughing and you thought I was laughing because I liked you but I was only laughing because I wanted you to think I liked you when I don’t like you. I hate you. And if you don’t stop looking at me, I’ll kill you.”

“Now you’ve gone too far,” I say, looking around for help. “And I’m gonna call the police if you don’t leave on your own.”

“Fuck you!” he shouts, running away into the night. “Fuck you famous writer asshole motherfucker piece of shit!”

Encounter #2: I have just finished performing for a good little audience in a small café, (by good I mean they laughed at the funny parts and cheered at the end, and by little I mean more than ten but less than twenty) having larded my reading with improvisations rendered on a remarkably in-tune old upright piano. I am making my way toward a table where a half-dozen people are waiting to buy my books and home made cassette recordings, this being in the days before the advent of CDs and digital everything, when a slender cowgirl blocks my path, her red velvet cowboy hat dotted with silver sequins, her blond hair sprinkled with gold glitter, her black cowboy shirt detailed with creamy white embroidery, her skirt rawhide brown, her shiny boots lime green, her age somewhere between thirty and forty-five.

“Hey,” she says, her voice as breathy as the wind they call Mariah (not really, I just couldn’t resist using that expression), her accent distinctly Serbian, “can I speak with you for little moment?”

“Sure,” I say, happy to see the people waiting to buy my books have fresh drinks in hand. “What can I do for you?”

“You are so generous,” she says, staring at my lips — her eyes shattered blue marbles. “I can hear how generous in your music, and…well…I can see things. Is my special gift. To see things. You know what I mean? What can be and what cannot be when certain things don’t or do fall into place, or not.”

“I think I have an inkling about what you mean,” I say, imagining her face without cowgirl war paint and guessing she is way more than cute. “What do you see?”

“I see you must stop writing.” She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and nods prophetically. “You must give everything to music or gift will be taken away.”

“But why? I like doing both. Music and writing.”

“Maybe you like doing both, but they don’t like you doing them both.” She opens her eyes and glares at me. “Just as I would not like you doing me and doing somebody else, too. I could not stand it. I would go crazy.”

“But music and writing are not people,” I say, relieved to see no holster, no gun. “And I like doing both.”

“No, you don’t,” she says, sudden tears spilling from her eyes. “You are afraid to give yourself completely to music because…such intimacy terrifies you. I can see clear as day. I can see your life on one path or another path. And if you do not stop writing and give yourself only to music you are doomed to play in junky rat holes like this for rest of life begging people to buy your shitty little books and shitty little tapes, when you could be huge.”

“Maybe so,” I say, wondering what it is about me that attracts such cuckoo birds, “but if not for this junky little rat hole, I never would have met you.”

“There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.” — Josh Billings

What are we without our memories?

When I was forty-three, my seventy-year-old mother led me away from the Thanksgiving feast, made sure we were not overheard, and whispered urgently, “I’m losing my mind and it’s not coming back. I’m in a nightmare and I want it to end. You have to help me kill myself.”

I realize now that my mother’s request was perfectly reasonable, but at the time I couldn’t imagine abetting her suicide, which I felt would make me a murderer. Twenty years gone by, I can easily imagine seeking the proper pill to curtail the horrendous suffering I watched my mother endure for twelve long years until finally, blessedly, at the age of eighty-two, she died in the skilled nursing facility where she had spent her last few years, having spent the previous eight years in a storage facility for those suffering from the brand of dementia known as Alzheimer’s.

Every few weeks for the years of my mother’s internment, I would take the train from San Francisco to Menlo Park and walk the half-mile from the station to that pea-green warehouse where Avis was a favorite of the friendly staff of Mexicans. They pronounced her named Ah-vees and identified her as ella que andando: she who walks, for my mother did little else when she wasn’t sleeping.

One day, after my mother had been in the joint for three years, I found her — lank white hair, plaid slacks inside out, yellow blouse wrongly buttoned, mismatched shoes — walking down a dimly lit hallway speaking to no one.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, catching up to her.

“They wanted fifty-seven and I told them where do you think?” she said, frowning at me. “How did you get here?”

“I took the train,” I said, holding her hand.

“You’re allowed to do that?” she asked, shaking her head. “I don’t trust him. Hiding under the mattress over his bandana.”

I took her outside where we could amble along the cement walkway that outlined the facility, my mother trying the locked gates to see if they might open — the air scented with stink from a nearby car fire.

“Would you like to go somewhere else?” I asked, hopelessly. “Into the village for an ice cream cone?”

“I sleep in a refrigerator,” she said, sitting on a bench and looking at her hand. “What a funny fig.”

I sat beside her and she jumped as if shocked.

“It’s only me,” I said, making light of her surprise.

“Who are you?” she asked, frowning suspiciously. “How did you get here?”

“I’m your son. Todd. I came on the train.”

“How dare they,” she said, pouting. “I gave him 57 and he spilled nobody over again.”

“Are you thirsty?” I asked, wanting only to soothe her.

“I had 57 overviews with red disasters,” she said, shaking her head. “But they couldn’t get over the river. Kaput.”

An old man, bent and grizzled, came around the corner, walking with mincing steps and peering intently at the ground.

My mother leapt up, embraced the old man, and kissed him on the lips.

The old man stuttered, “I haven’t… I don’t… why… who… okay.”

My mother took the old man’s hand and walked away with him, forgetting all about me.

“They hid under the milkshake and stayed there,” said my mother, kissing the old man’s cheek. “And pretty soon the shit was dry.”

Todd Walton’s writing and music may be found at UnderTheTableBooks.com.

In other news, I want to do my part in making a case for getting involved in the political process. The time is now folks. I know some of you are not registered to vote and you know “it’s rigged” and all of that. I totally understand. But the point is, you can’t vote in local elections if you’re not registered to vote and We Need Your Votes. Here, locally.

Our kids need good schools, with teachers who make enough to stay at their jobs. Local people need services for housing, mental health, healthcare across the board, and yes, a feeling of abundance. Where are these things? Where is that feeling of abundance?

I feel it here in our community. At the grocery store, the Post Office, and more and more on the street. It is almost like the worse the economy gets, the more we band together. This is my humble plug to band together even more so. I don’t have a list of phone numbers and set groups to attend here, and I am sorry for that. But I do know that by registering to vote, you have the opportunity to make your voice heard. Even if you don’t believe at the Federal Level anyone is listening, the votes you cast here in Mendocino County affect those who live here. If you don’t vote, you are not having the opportunity to have your opinion counted.

Many people don’t even have the right to vote. Argue with me about the efficacy but still register to vote. As a favor to me. As a favor to the kids who have tattered books. As a favor to the homeless families.

Also, let’s remember the man who had a dream.

He wasn’t afraid to say what he felt was right, to walk long hard roads and to inspire those around him to hold themselves to a higher standard. Thank you, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Also, he was a registered voter.

Jim won’t be there but Ray and Robbie will be. Manzarek and Krieger, of the Doors. Jim won’t be and neither will drummer John Densmore.

I sided with John Densmore — his lawsuit against Ray and Robbie: no, you cannot use the name Doors, not without Jim’s permission. We agreed. John Densmore wouldn’t let them and they finally had to give in on appeal to the tune of, well, we will leave that to them.

To the tune of “LA Woman” on the dash CD, I’m heading south from Sacramento to finally bend, to finally see Ray and Robbie. To hear them live. I never have. It’s the 40th anniversary of LA woman. One of America’s classics, and not just in rock ‘n roll.

Got to go. Who knows? Pacific amphitheater, Costa Mesa, California.

Having never seen them, even having grown up with them, but one night on VH1 without Jim I finally heard them, John Densmore still on drums. Holy fuckin’ shit! I had no fuckin’ idea how great they were. I’ve written at length. To sum up here, I made it out to the Badlands of Dakota to listen, to make sure. I recently met John Densmore in LA after his world jazz group performed in a small club on Sunset.

Down there to LA is 99 South again. And not during LA’s Carmageddon (which of course never happened, like Y2K).

“Driving down your freeways/midnight alleys roam…”

It’s August, everything sunburned to a brown crisp. At least there can be everything on 99. I-5 South is Lawrence of Dullrabia.

Expecting to stop in Keene. Cesar Chavez is buried there. And agriculture is to the Central Valley as theatre is to Manhattan. A rather scathing article about Chavez by a Catalin Flanagan in the Atlantic, a first, got my attention. For some reason now I need to stop.

“Cops in cars/the topless bars…”

99 South is local bars, used cars, take out and local clubs, cows, railyards, funeral homes, vegetables, crop dusters, dust, trestles, silos, water towers. If 99 was 66. If six was nine — as Jimi Hendrix said.

“I see your hair is burning/hills are filled with fire/if they say I never loved you/you know they are a liar…”

Can’t say America loves 99 the way it does 66, but the north-south fix of six hours works some magic.

A few hours in, coming up on Livingston, California. Headquarters of Foster’s Farms chicken. Hot and dry, time for breakfast. A close friend from Livingston, her family, but just now just the off-ramp to a sparkling clean McDonald’s. Sausage and egg biscuit breakfast. Hustle down the road breakfast, reserved just for the hustling. And what, Salinas and Steinbeck, do you know, an art gallery to the athletic Wolves of Livingston High School, hung on the walls of the McDonald’s like family portraits, young and immaculate, ladies and gentlemen, golf, baseball and cheering, football, etc.

It’s all very touching, touching me where it counts, in small town America amounts, Salinas and Steinbeck.

99 South amounts to patience and sports talk radio and Rush Limbaugh — Comedy Central.

South past Wasco where once again, once every trip, Route 46 takes James Dean to legendary death. Like magic.

Three hours in and about three hours left.

Stopping for road lunch (did you know that it’s legal to eat roadkill in West Virginia?) At the base of the “Grapevine” at a gourmet Jack in the Box. I forgot Cesar Chavez. Must have been Rush Limbaugh.

Ultimate cheeseburgers and flotilla coke. Just on the road, mind you. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

El Tejon Pass,where you can look back on the green brown desert, orange air pollution and the dust of long-haul bedouins on I-5.

These hills are alive with the 40th reunion of Buffalo Springfield. They’re wonderful, Stephen and Richie and Neil, even though they sound a bit 45 rpm when it should be 78.

Burnt brown all around. We cut through the hills and mountains, no problem. Nothing can stand its ground against us.

The spines of towers and roller coasters like stranded bones of dinosaurs. Six Flags over California. Why, when there is a beach at Santa Monica?

405 South to Santa Monica is fine, always partially bumper-to-bumper, with no remnants of carmageddon.

Turning off above the Getty Center for the Skirball Museum. A Wal-Mart daughter, worth about $29 billion, is building a new Museum of American Art, the Bridges Museum, in Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal-Mart and Senator Thomas Hart Benton of a past America that the New Yorker says takes something from the Skirball.

The Skirball is too much concrete in a dappled setting. That said, in and out of the parking lot and onto Santa Monica.

Santa Monica Blvd leads to the ocean, all the way from the beaches of Long Island, my homestead.

I’ve actually found a parking meter to feed for two hours.

It’s a summer Thursday so the beach is populated but not crowded, the world’s least expensive shrink.

Sounds from the jaunty peer, lifeguard whistles, and the cold surf, the couch in the shrink’s.

Riding the waves, hot, dusty inland doesn’t seem possible, stretched out in the Brian Wilson sun, even a slight tan for this Celtic visitor seems possible.

Just a day at the beach before the remnant of The Doors tomorrow. My usual motel in the Fairfax district, Jewish being the vibe like life around New York City’s now former Ratner’s?

Canter’s Jewish Deli here still very much in business, chicken soup for the soul, corned beef, pastrami on rye, mustard splattered. I’m from Long Island so I’m technically Jewish. You know what Lenny Bruce says: “If you’re from the five boroughs and you are not Jewish, you are. But if you are from Utica and you are Jewish, you’re not.”

Ahh, contented. Now to ruin the evening. Cowboys and Aliens, but at the Arclight on Hollywood and Vine. Fifteen bucks with validated parking. A Disney ride for the 10 minutes the movie was worth it. Then all garbage. Keep ‘em coming, I guess. Pay for the independent banquet.

Sleep, sunburn and sand and surf, Kramer’s fragrance taking over.

The sun never sets in California. In the morning a short jaunt down 405 somewhat almost near the coast, past Anaheim, after Howard Hughes and so forth, Jennifer Aniston, almost totally naked, on a giant billboard for $10 water. Somebody help me! With the recent sale of her $45 million homestead.

Glimpses of the Ocean, about 90 degrees in the later morning.

South to 55 South to Costa Mesa/Newport, California.

Can’t check in at the Motel 6 — $100 until 2pm. So let’s see, the beach at Newport Beach, California. Sunburn browning in so, of course, let’s go down through the stores and shops, sort of a surfing Cape Cod, California.

Hoping for a ham and egger near the beach and sure enough (I can’t remember the name) tables with omelettes and scrambled outside along the sidewalk, sort of Carmely nearby, but the breakfast and a sensuous servers were, “dude, awesome.”

It’s real quiet compared to Santa Monica, smaller, with a short pier, just as cold in the surf, the waves far out, got to swim out to reach them.

Nothing to do but soak up the environment. Palos Verdes cliffs, I guess, down the sand like bookends to a SoCal journal.

Sun and soak, my freckles like a freckle army — armada.

What to do for a few hours? I’ve got it. Why not try the US Open surfing championship in Huntington Beach, California?

Correctamundo. Wrongamundo, taking the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway for those of you who don’t watch Two and a Half Men). Bumper to Mercedes, to Land Rover, to VW van in a crawl, the wide open expanse of Huntington’s beaches, preserved wetland marshes, red lights and honking horns, asking two young girls crawling along beside me if I’m headed to the US Open surfing championship. Without looking up from their texting, they answer in the affirmative. “Main Street,” they tell me.

Slowly, slowly, always surf alongside, when slowly but surely the light beer banners, bleachers and murals of the pro-surfers appear. There’s no way I’m going in. Traffic, crowds, traffic, as the beach bathing beauties start to appear in the dozens, the hundreds, and at the Main Street crossing in the thousands.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. The sun tan beauty so overwhelming, high schools and colleges are emptied. Bless the two-piece anatomy.

I have never seen a rodeo of such luscious, gorgeous, so out of reach proportions. I can’t stop. I can’t get out. I have to roll along slowly and absorb it. You can’t imagine. It’s like Gidget on Steroids. Girls Gone Wild with some of their clothes on. I am forever overwhelmed by such a gathering of so much beauty in one location. Woodstock of the Surf, I guess. But really there is nothing to compare it to.

Finally an illegal U-turn with about 12 other cars, traffic at ease on the other side heading back to Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

Running the gauntlet of statutory hands-off-ness, but good God almighty girls. This is America in recession? Not too shabby.

Okay, I’ve made it back to find the fairgrounds, the Pacific amphitheater for the remains of the band originally from Venice Beach, California.

Got some time for a little Costa Mesa Public Library, checking a roadmap. I’m thinking about doing Death Valley on the way back from San Diego.

Back at the 6, nappy time, with some home-grown that made even Cowboys and Aliens.

Ferris wheel permanent fairgrounds, vast parking. Now remember where you parked with a toke of the homey bowl full.

Folks strolling up, Jim’s famous face in evidence on t-shirts, handbags and other vestments.

I’m in for $45. Nothing special, a sloping outdoor theater with a lawn up above, stage below, ageless rock ‘n roll.

I’m ready to not care at all. Just give me Ray and Robbie solos.

Crowd flies in, young and mostly older, young Chicano/Latinos in the seats in front of me.

Some local legend DJ, skinny, black jacket, leather, thinning orange-tinged hair thrown over his head in Tom Wolfe’s “George McGovern alpine rope throw.” Who cares?

On with the show! Uh-oh! A Christ image appears on a back screen. I’m ready to leave. The image remains as the band comes on stage in the concert darkness.

It begins with Ray Manzarek asking Orange County, “Are you ready to rock ‘n roll?” I’m ready to leave. “Republican base camp, are you ready to rock ‘n roll?”

I think they start in with “Back Door Man,” the singer, John Brock? Doing a real good not-Jim, almost looking the part, hair and dark clothes, no leather pants, moving in a Mo Jo.

That Christ image finally disappears. Everyone stands up. Not me. So I’m peeking in between bodies to get my first, yes, live look at Robby Krieger.

He’s effortless on guitar, the sounds of The Doors from days gone by. With his gray hair and skinny little body he looks a bit like John McEnroe. Doesn’t Johnny Mac wish?

I’d stand up if Jim was here.

Ray’s got the glasses. He is again yelling, “Orange County are you ready?” Agent Orange County maybe. I’m ready to leave again but the songs from the great LA Woman begin.

They do “Hyasenth House” from LA woman. It’s so rare a song Jim’s almost not missing.

And on it goes, in and out of LA and the songbook, the original group so American, so us, so able to go off where they wanted to, needed to, all this so what, with moments to cherish, almost.

Almost worth it as the encore, of course, is Ray and Robbie and their solos on “Light My Fire.”

So I can close the book and introduce my one-man show: Jim — get him out of Paris and bring him on home.

Home to the 6, after not being able to find my car until I realized it wasn’t where I was searching. “Before you slipped into unconsciousness.”

It’s sunny and 80 degrees again in the morning and now a stretch on old US 1, Dana Point and Doheny, the Coastliner train swooshing by, the Pacific stretching out to China.

Stopping at Mission San Juan Capistrano, just to circle the swallows, the miniature downtown around the Spanish and brick and adobe like a stagecoach stop from One-Eyed Jacks.

Back on I-5 to zoom into San Diego, Pendleton, Oceanside, Torrey Pines, La Jolla, brown hills awaiting vacaros, compact skyline, old town San Diego, the ocean, the ocean, Myrtle Avenue stop.

Big brunch at the Big Kitchen, one of the great ham and eggers, well worn in, earthy and authentic.

Cocktails on Nancy’s back porch, San Diego in silence.

Brew pub in an old Wonder Bread brick downtown building near the baseball stadium, San Diego, the patron saint of cities beside an ocean.

Big burgers at Ho-Dad’s inland from their ocean beach location, comrades, former New Yorkers, wisecracks and laughter in extra large proportions.

Sleep like an air mattress afloat on the calm sea.

Breakfast in a local, again, well used, simple yet stylish, out at a sidewalk table, the San Diego so few will ever visit.

On to the Mission Beach Boardwalk without any boards, cement, roller coaster, corn dog on a stick, sun, surf, sand — but we wanted that wooden walk.

And the highlights of a Sunday in Balboa Park, Spanish art, Dali to El Greco, and the overwhelming surprise of Spaniard Sorello. Who the hell was he, letting in all that light? So unlike his famous predecessors.

Up and around the golf course and it’s well rubbed in clubhouse and restaurant with the course and the park and the city beyond basked in its one and only glow.

Then in the evening a crab shack bar against the beach, Ocean Beach, California, cold beer and dep fried shrimp in a seaside town that is “Hair,” still, if you could afford a production of such on your own.

All in all, just might be paradise on earth but surely not the long haul home, minus Death Valley but a 99 north of sorts.

I didn’t say much, except her name out loud, slowly: “A-lot-ta Lip-ski?”

And just then, as if on cue, the door opened and she marched in, slammed her load of books on the table, and sat down, as if to say, “Okay, dickheads, let’s get this over with, I have more important things to do!”

Child rearin’ wasn’t exactly new for the 44 year old meth addict: she’d had four human babies before — two of which got instantly slam-dunked into various dumpsters by her speed-dealing’ heartthrobs of yore, and the other two of ’em sold to Middle Eastern men on the black market by that con artist she ran with in the late ’90’s. But this particular freak about to see the dimming light of the United States of America was a first in her long, homeless and disease ridden lifetime. And all she could relay to welcome it into the world was “Get the fuck outta me!”

Screamin’ in English at a half possum — half human didn’t make a helluva lot of sense. Reynolds was there though — God bless Reynolds and that stanky denim jacket and all four of his teeth — to be with her in the blinds down interior of a Ventura Motel 6 room at the time of delivery. It wasn’t merely the work of a good Samaritan: she’d offered him the rest of her baggie full of peanut butter crank as long as he stayed to make sure she lived through this. And then he’d surely be gone.

“Now-now I can see its whiskers now, uh, Jo-anna,” he alerted her in his frantic, southern drawl, freaked the fuck out but pitching in all the same. The stench of the hatching even overpowered the On the Road funk emanatin’ from his pants. A little homeless crotch musk never troubled Joanna much, and she’d even let Reynolds cop a feel and hump away at her in his jeans that morning while she lip smacked through the half eaten bag of In-N-Out burger he’d surprised her with. “And its snout too!” he hollered. “I can see it! Oh lord god almighty you were right. We got ourselves a Goddamn real live possum baby comin’ out of that snatch! Praise Jesus!”

“Grab it! Pull it outta me! What’re you doin’?! Grab it!”

Reynolds crouched down like a baseball catcher, with his head level with her obliterated birth canal. He was backed all the way up with the TV pressin’ into his tailbone. Responsibility wasn’t too high on the ol’ priority list, and here he found himself in a doctor’s position — well, a village doctor for a traveling circus maybe. Truth is, he was terrified. More than the time he got jumped and slashed with aluminum cans for half of a moldy BLT at the Price Canyon encampment. And even more so than when he was taken hostage by a fraternity in Isla Vista and chained to a fence upside down in the nude by the train tracks. Those meatheads coated him in pancake syrup and feathered him, with two of the drunker jocks stepping in and raw dogging him in his 50-plus year old anus before leaving him for dead. That one took a week to walk off, but the nightmares continued. The astonished faces of those Amtrak passengers that caught the scene in transit still haunted him in his sleep.

That movie Titanic played on the screen behind Reynolds, and he’d bumped two lines before it started ‘cause he’d heard from one eyed Frank down in Albuquerque that it was a four hour movie “worth watchin’ to kill the time” and figured speed would be more appropriate than popcorn, seeing as there wasn’t a micro in the room nor a bag a’ kernels to begin with. But earlier on — just as Leonardo what’s his name was gettin’ the hots for his lady friend — the mattress got drenched by Joanna’s baby flood and next thing he knew he was shimmyin’ off her stained grey sweatpants and spreadin’ those flanks wide open.

“I-I-I can’t just grab it by the nose, Jo-Joanna. There’s teeth in there!” He stuck a hand toward it anyways but the thing hissed at him so loud the next room coulda’ heard it. “Ho lord God almighty it’s turnin’ itself around! It’s flippin’ a U-ey right inside ya no less!”

“Ahhh! It’s climbin’ up in me!” Joanna wailed and then upchucked a pile of grayish brown stew, nearly chokin’ on it ’cause of her face-up position. Most people would see that as a hazard and immediately rush to clear her airway, but Reynolds saw it as a waste of the bag of In-N-Out. But then again, that was some good ol’ fashioned dry humpin’ he was dumpster divin’ for. “Hey whatcha thankin’?! That’s a good double-double y’all’re hurlin’. I ain’t panhandlin’ till sun up’!”

“Fuck yer panhandlin’!” she gargled, hoisting her head up to look at the roving ball beneath her foresty pubic mound that reeked like a sack of decomposin’ Walla Walla Onions. “You listen to me Reynolds! Stop bouncing around like a hillbilly with a car battery hooked up to yer nips and grab that rodent outta me with yer bare hands and stab it good!”

Reynolds ran his hands through his mullet and took a deep breath. It was time. And he knew what he had to do. He had to pull the sucker out and stab it to death with the dull blade of his Swiss Army Knife, then stuff it in the plastic Taco Bell bag and give it some rapid fire dumpster service. Hell, all things considered, that was nothin’ for the snortable reward at stake. He sure had done worse things for the candy.

“All right now, Joanna, all right… Spread ’em-spread ’em wide, baby.” Just then a long pink tail dropped right out of her spasmodic vagina, and that was enough for Reynolds to shriek and wretch his own bile onto the green motel carpet.

“Ya big cryin’ pussy, Reynolds! Look atcha! Don’t make me pull that son-of-a-bitch out by myself!”

Amid the rustic dialect in that tall order, and the pain and the terror, Joanna’s last few remainin’ brain cells traveled back to this little monster’s inception. Drugged by a trucker somewhere along I-5, raped and abandoned in a roadside field in the central valley, she miraculously came to with nothin’ on but a leather jacket and that big white ass of hers pointin’ straight to the sky. But her wrists were broken and she was covered in ants, ticks, dirt and weeds. Unable to push herself up, it wasn’t long till the nearly mythical Perry the Possumman appeared with his band of murmuring marsupials and that sinister whiskered snout of his — from his mama’s side of the family, if you believe homeless folklore. A known fashion imitator of Truman Capote, he ashed his cigar out, unzipped his slacks and had his way with her, while the little ones hissed and nipped away at her sore-covered thighs. Afterward, Perry gave her a hiss and rubbed his snout tenderly against the bridge of her nose, before struttin’ on down the line.

Judging by her newfound precision in dumpster diving, accelerated gestation period, and the tiny pocket this fetus vacated inside of her, she knew this wasn’t any ol’ offspring. This was something else, and it was going straight back to hell where it belonged.

“All right Jo-anna! All right! I’m ’onna rip it on outta there. Jus’-jus’ get ready now.”

“Shut the fuck up in there!” a man’s voice from the next room boomed, followed by pounding on the wall. “I’m watchin’ the game over here!”

“Hey what’s the score?!” Reynolds fired back, earnestly wanting to know.

“Fuck you,” the man replied.

“Reynolds yer about as good as a tater with green branches growin’ out of it!”

“Hey, them are still good eatin’. And you can plant a whole shitload a’ taters with just one a’ them.”

Joanna hoisted herself up and with both hands, gripped onto that slithering tail, took a deep breath through the grey crust all over her lips, then looked head on at Reynolds. “Just have that fuckin’ blade ready, Reynolds. Ya hear me? Can you do that ya fuckin’ idiot?!”

“On a count a’ three?” he asked her, opening up that Swiss Army Knife.

“Count it off!” she screamed.

“Okay, okay.” He got his catcher’s squat going again and squinted his eyes. “Uh… uh one! Okay… okay… five!”

Joanna scowled and looked at him. “Two’s next, shit for brains.”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Two! And…”

She tightened her grip around that tail again and started grunting through her nostrils. “Three!” she screamed on her own and power yanked that creature right out with superhuman force. It swung away from her, all bloody in motion and snarling, before smacking Reynolds in the face and knocking him back off his feet with the possum baby falling with him. He knocked the back of his head into the dresser top on the way down, and was deep in space by the time he hit carpet. They lay on the cigarette burned motel room floor in embrace, the thing cradled warmly under Reynolds’ wing as they snored in unison.

The two were spooning as Joanna snuck right out of room 313, with that baggie of peanut butter crank stuffed down her sweatpants and the air of Ventura tasting just like freedom.

The salary back in the 50s was pretty small, the Judge got as much as $30 a month and the Constable much less, but he was paid extra for serving papers. There were very few automobiles, no traffic problems and livestock ran in the road at will.

One of the early and well-known judges owned a sow that ran around town and did once and while get in somebody’s yard. The town dogs chewed her up at times but were unable to daunt her spirit or stop her marauding. She would raise a litter of pigs every year and in the fall she knew just when the acorns began falling and would lead her family to the woods, not to return until springtime.

In later years animals including chickens disappeared from the highways and were no longer a problem.

When I became Judge the mills were getting well started and many families moved in to the valley. Some of these people were often a problem. One man used to beat his wife about every payday and the neighbors were complaining to me but there was little I could do about it.

One day this man got drunker than usual and really raised a fuss. He beat his wife up good and was dragging her around by the hair. The children, all quite small, ran screaming to the neighbors and then they got upset. The wife came in to sign a complaint and she had a fine black eye and numerous bruises. He had kicked her a few times while he had her down. She looked pretty tough. The husband was brought in to court and was given some probation with a few days in jail. Then the wife had a fit. She said, “But I didn’t want him put in jail.” I have often thought since that she and others in like cases enjoyed those family quarrels and the attendant excitement and tension. It gave them an outlet for their emotions.

We had a good many of those episodes and sometimes the wife would be at fault. A few times the wife got into jail. It took some days in jail and many lectures to convince those people they couldn’t disturb the neighbors and scare their children. There they quieted down and held no grudge afterward. It seemed like they realized there might be a time when they would need a friend in court.

One day a lady called in and said, “There is a man laying in my front yard and he may be dead.” The officer was off duty that day but I knew where to find him. We went down and the man was there and alive and breathing although not too noticeably. The officer tapped him lightly on the head but no results. The third time and a little harder he opened one eye and said, “Quit that.”

He smelled pretty bad but it was over the hill to the jailhouse with him. We transferred him to the Sergeant’s car up on top of the hill and started hurriedly away. I don’t think the sergeant ever forgave us. It was a warm day. Later we found this man had a record and it wasn’t too good.

We had many cases involving too much drinking and in many of them children were the losers, although the county lost also as there was no money to pay the fine so they had to go to jail. Sometimes probation worked but only seldom. Many of those sent to jail for a short time didn’t seem to mind; it meant a rest and a few good meals and they didn’t have to go anyplace else.

I often thought it bothered me more than it did them. I surely hated to shut a man up for a few days. Sometimes though everybody was satisfied. One time in the Ukiah court the judge often brought a man in evidently not of American ancestry. The boys were a little put out with him as he persisted in getting drunk and sleeping under the warehouses and they were afraid he would either get run over or set afire. That was Friday and I asked him if he was a national and he said, “Judge, I’m a Navajo Indian.” His home was in Arizona so I told him I thought he should go back home and suspended his sentence with probation.

Monday morning the boys came to court and told me, “Well, we have your Navajo friend.” I asked him why he hadn’t started for Arizona and he said, “I met another friend, judge.”

Turns out, showing a person the sole of your shoe and making the “it’s-all-good” sign (which was originally coined as sign language by SCUBA divers) are both grave insults in Turkey. It’s a miracle I wasn’t thrown to the bears. It was only weeks later that I learned what a klutz I’d been. I was reviewing a website on faux pas commonly made by travelers, and idle amusement quickly turned to mortification as I recognized descriptions of my own misdeeds. There is nothing to do now but laugh at how many blunders I’ve unknowingly committed through years of visiting strange lands. Anyway, as global travel increasingly links cultures around the world, people everywhere may be growing more accepting of know-nothing travelers like me — and perhaps today the idea of the clueless foreigner is more charmingly comic than it is gravely offensive.

Nonetheless, there are a few things best not to do when traveling — and this list is a start:

1) In Japan, accepting a business card from a Japanese person without using two hands or acting like you are sublimely honored. Because a Japanese person isn’t fooling when he or she hands you a business card. In addition to receiving it with two hands, one is supposed to bow deferentially. Forbes.com addressed precisely this matter, with no intention of parody, in a 2005 article on etiquette pointers for the traveling businessperson. It makes that scene from American Psycho seem not so ludicrous after all.

2) In Georgia, drinking at the table while another is making a toast. Toasts in this former Soviet nation come many times per meal and may last as long as five or 10 minutes. They are sometimes almost hilariously theatrical until one realizes that Georgians are totally serious when they raise their wine glasses and begin speaking. If a guest is present, especially, the melodrama gets thick as the speaker praises the two represented nations, the honor of playing host to a foreigner, the guest’s good fortune as he or she continues their journey, ancestors, God and so on and so forth — though not always in a single toast. I spent some time in Georgia in 2010. Even at such informal sites as the side of the road, men drinking wine sometimes called me over, filled me a glass and embarked on lengthy verbal voyages. It’s a wonder, looking back, that we ever managed to squeeze in a drink.

3) In most of the Middle and Far East, walking into a home with one’s shoes on. Been there, done that — and with gunky fig jam caked to the soles of my cycling shoes, to boot. Yes, I was a walking disaster in Turkey, day after day committing insults so dreadful it’s fortunate I didn’t make the old ladies faint — or the young men call for their weapons.

4) In the Hindu and Muslim world, greeting a person or eating with your left hand. I cannot begin to imagine how many times I have absentmindedly done this in Turkey. Locals, it turns out, traditionally wipe themselves with the left hand. A tad bit presumptuous, isn’t it, for them to assume that I do, too?

5) Also in the Muslim world, eating during daylight hours during the holy month of Ramadan. Being the old hand at social blunders that I am, I’ve committed this crime many times. I was in Turkey during Ramadan in August 2010, and when I caught myself and sheepishly apologized, the folks around me said I had done nothing wrong. I have never known if they were simply being polite. Because in Dubai, anyway, foreigners seen eating during the Ramadan fasting hours can face jail time.

6) In Hawaii, refusing a lei. Don’t feel like wearing a rosary of tropical blossoms round your neck? Tough luck. Put the lei over your head, offer a generous hug in return and consider yourself formally welcomed to the islands. If you really can’t stand the thing, Hawaiian culture considers it acceptable for one to re-gift the lei to one’s spouse — but not, heaven forbid, if she’s a pregnant woman! Tread carefully. Stay vigilant.

7) In Russia, refusing vodka when offered, and sipping it once your glass is filled. Instead, you must gregariously chug your shot glass of Eurasia’s favorite booze. What’s more, having three drinks is sometimes obligatory at an event for one to demonstrate a baseline level of friendliness and social prowess. Meanwhile, women in Russia might do wisely, as custom sometimes demands, to leave the vodka to the men and drink wine instead.

And this one may come as a surprise: In Germany, discussing sports. So I read in this Vagabondish post from Amy Baker, who says German people may think someone “uneducated” if he or she is heard discussing a sporting match.

9) In the United Kingdom, holding up your index and middle finger with the back of your hand facing outward. Britons: Please don’t laugh. Because in America, most people are unaware that this is the equivalent of giving someone the middle finger — and please understand that it’s a mistake if someone makes this sign while ordering two beers across a noisy pub.

10) Finally, in the United States, relieving oneself in public. That’s right, all you gentlemen from France, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic: Turning your back on a person or a crowd and emptying your bladder may be business as usual where you come from, but in my culture, many people consider it dirty and disrespectful. Why, I have friends and relatives who would keel over dead if they saw such an act in public. Me? I’ll forgive you.

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I can remember the first Christmas tree I ever saw and it was about the year 1900 in Murray’s Hall in Mendocino — upstairs in a wooden building with a full audience. Truly a Providence was with the large turnout. A fire marshal would have a fit nowadays. But trouble seldom developed. Disasters were a few but big when they did happen.

That was a big night, a good-sized tree and a program which I don’t remember. There was a stack of presents around the big tree. Many people brought at least some, if not all, their presents from home for Santa Claus to deliver. Lots of coal or oil lights and candles were on the tree which nobody seemed to worry about. The next Christmas tree was a year or so later in the Presbyterian Church and that was a spectacle I have written about in other stories. It may have had electric lights because Albert Brown may have put in his electric plant soon after 1900 and that is a story of its own.

There were several denominations in the town of Mendocino and all of the people celebrated the holidays in their own way. It probably began many thousands of years ago and has survived wars and all kinds of disasters and untold persecutions. People were even fed to wild animals for the entertainment of others in civilizations which were even then on their way out.

People in the interior of the county had it pretty easy to get home for the holidays. Mostly they were not much farther than the Bay Area and there was a railroad to Ukiah and there were stage lines for farther on. A hundred miles was quite a journey then. On the Coast it was different. The towns were small and isolated with poor roads in between and very little real transportation.

It was 50 miles from Mendocino (Big River) to Ukiah a long, hard 12 hours and the fair was $5 per person which was a lot back then. The drivers needed great skill and doubtless a good deal of nerve to get over those narrow mountain roads at a fast trot and get between the many stumps and trees. Wherever the horses went, the stage had to follow and much of the road was very windy.

Even so, accidents were very rare and the stages ran come rain or come shine. Windfalls accounted for much of the trouble along the route. Forest fires occurred in the season for them. Sometimes delay would be caused by a good-sized trees falling on the trail which would have to be chopped out. Those drivers surmounted all their obstacles and troubles, fires, floods and even outlaws. Of course on holidays they would be loaded down with passengers and baggage and mail.

Those drivers made names for themselves over many years of County history. Abe Boos. Hans Stout. John Philbrick and many others. Horses were changed about every 15 miles but not the driver. He went clear through. The change horses would be ready and waiting. There would be a short stop at the halfway house where Grandma Hansen would have a quick lunch and coffee ready where passengers got a few minutes rest and maybe even a little for the driver. There was no passable road up the coast except from Gualala south. Those coming from the city any further north came by boat as far as Fort Bragg. That was a little faster maybe than by land, but not always easier at holiday time. Those little steam schooners — the Point Arena, the Seafoam, the Noyo and others — that ran coastwise rolled badly coming up the coast even with only a few tons of freight and sometimes even in the summer.

One time I came up on the Noyo with Captain Odlund. It was an easy trip and we pulled into about all the harbors on the way. The captain and first mate were very good. They let me ride on the bridge where there was heat from the smokestack and a good view of everything. I was in a state room with a couple of women and some other children. I was bedded on a settee. In rough weather I would have needed to sleep on the floor. The women and children were quite ill most of the night but I slept well and didn’t mind much. I enjoyed the meals — ships always seemed to provide good food. Little River had a wharf and a sheltered cove and boats could land there when it was too rough to land at Mendocino.

Sometimes passegers and freight would be unloaded there and taken on to Mendocino by team. Northcoast ports were noted for being tough at times and it is true that many ships were lost. In time about all of the boats that plied the north coast waters in those early days sunk into watery graves. Ships on the Mendocino Coast had a short life.

About 1900 or soon after and before the wire chute was built at Mendocino, passengers were ferried ashore in small boats and landed on a landing close to the rocks. Then they went up the stairway to the top of the bluff. Freight was the same, except it was hoisted from the schooner by a winch up on the top of the bluff. It was no place for the weak-hearted, although I never heard of an accident associated with it. The wire chute was built a year or so later and it was not for the nervous either — there was a little passenger box that ran on a cable over 100 feet above the water. The men were always extremely careful and I never heard of an accident to a passenger.

In spite of all that somehow, in the end, Christmas was celebrated on the Mendocino Coast.