I was wrong of course. It turns out one of these classes were a non-negotiable requirement for the graduate program which would afford me the career I have wanted to get into since high school.

All I had to do was enroll and pass with a “C” or higher and I was golden. Sounds easy enough, right? Maybe for you. For me it was my own personal road to psychological Mordor. It was that which I was most reluctant to face. It was something stupid but over the years it had grown large and frightening in my mind. Sounds kindof funny. It was a class, not a warzone. So I did something new. Instead of not trying to get into that program or getting around it somehow I enrolled in the class and then:

I asked for help.

Then universe did that thing where it conspires to make it happen because you have been humble enough to ask. A tutor of great patience and experience was willing to help me. He told me to stop whining about my early-childhood issues with this particular subject and get back to the matter at hand. He was in the ring after every fight (test) offering me water (coffee) and reminding me to keep light on my feet (did you do your homework?).

Why is this story important to you? In my view it is because I could have saved myself literally half a lifetime of stress if I had gotten to this class sooner. The amount of psychological space in my brain dedicated to perseverating in depressed moments about what a dork I was for not implicitly knowing this stuff is absurd. I don’t know where I got the idea you had to know something before you studied it but that was a bunch of crap.

I get wrapped up in fear sometimes. I get so tied up sometimes that I can’t make a choice of my own free will and the universe has to blow me off the fence, to one side or another. When I am on the ground it doesn’t matter what side I am on, just that I am no longer gripping the fencepost with wide fearful eyes. I may not even know it yet, but the world has become my oyster (in a non-manifest destiny, sustainable kind of way).

I am probably not the only one who has some secret they have been running from. I suspect there are more of us out there. I not gonna say everything got hunky dory all of a sudden there is a sense of relief because I worked my way through the woods and found out it wasn’t Mordor after all. It was just a Statistics class.

So go do what you’re afraid of already. We don’t have much time.

Planting sugar snap pea seeds yesterday, I was thrilled to find the raised bed rife with earthworms, young and old. We garden in soil known hereabouts as pygmy, which left to it’s own devices will not grow vegetables or much of anything except bonsai pines and huckleberries and the nefarious Scotch Broom. Thus we have eight raised beds in boxes and four beds in the ground, all requiring manure and compost in addition to the local soil to give us a decent harvest.

This past fall I scored a truckload of rabbit manure and I surmise it is this precious poop that has proven such an elixir to the worms. When I moved here six and a half years ago and set up my above-ground composting bin (and before the bears demolished that flimsy plastic thing) I was dismayed to find nary a worm coming up out of the ground and through the slots in the floor of the bin to gobble the tasty leftovers and give birth to myriad wormlets. In Berkeley where I gardened a small plot for eleven years, my composting bin (a gift from the city to encourage us to do the rot thing), produced gazillions of worms in collaboration with the local ground. But in pure pygmy soil, earthworms are as scarce as pumas, and it took a good three years of feeding massive amounts of worm food to the soil before any sort of worm population took hold.

This rabbit poop is apparently some sort of earthworm Viagra, for now when I turn the soil, the good earth literally dances with hundreds of little wigglers. May they grow large and happy, and may our vegetables and flowers and herbs thrive on their castings.

“Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion.” — Shunryu Suzuki 

One sunny day in my Berkeley garden, about ten years ago, I was enjoying eavesdropping on the conversation raging among three teenaged boys and one seventeen-year-old girl gathered around a table on the deck that jutted out from our house and looked down on my garden, the girl being my de facto daughter Ginger, a beautiful and sociable young woman who attracted males as catnip attracts cats and pineapple sage attracts hummingbirds. As a consequence of Ginger’s charms and sociability, our house was frequently overrun by young men, many of them from good Berkeley homes and heading for college, if they were not already in college. Of these three on the deck that day, one was bound for Harvard, one for Stanford, and the third had recently matriculated at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

When Ginger sashayed into the house to fetch drinks for the thirsty lads, two of them came to the railing of the deck and peered down at me as I thinned carrot seedlings in ground next to my verdant broccoli.

“Is that…” began Jeremy, the Harvard-bound Physics major, “…um…hey, excuse me. Is that like broccoli in those little bushes?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, smiling up at him.

“Oh my God,” he said, his jaw dropping. “Jason, you gotta come see this. Broccoli is like growing on a little bush right in their garden.”

Soon to be studying politics at Stanford pursuant to becoming a lawyer, Jason joined Jeremy and Raul at the railing. “Where?” he said, looking down on the mass of greenery. “I don’t see anything.”

“There,” said Jeremy, pointing emphatically at a head of broccoli. “Right fucking there, man. I never knew it grew like that.”

“Me neither,” said Jason, shaking his head. “Jesus. Look at all that food. Is that like lettuce?”

“Indeed,” I replied, wondering if perhaps they were spoofing me. “Would you like a garden tour?”

“I would,” said Jeremy, skipping down the stairs, “but those guys are like totally fixated on you-know-who.”

So I gave Jeremy a ten-minute tour of my patch of vegetables and herbs. He pulled a carrot for the first time in his life, washed it in the hose while watering the parsley, took a bite and declared, “God, that is so sweet I never would have known it was a carrot.” Then he smiled beatifically. “I’m blown away. I never knew how any of this stuff got here. What a trip.” Then he frowned and shook his head. “Hey, not to change the subject, but we were just arguing about the Vietnam War. Jason said it was kind of an extension of World War II and was about trying to get their resources, and Raul said, ‘Like what resources?’ and I thought it was like to stop the communists. But was it the Russians or the Chinese we were trying to stop? Or…like…do they have oil in Vietnam? I mean, if they had oil wouldn’t they be like rich today?”

“Buddha was more concerned about how he himself existed in this moment. That was his point. Bread is made from flour. How flour becomes bread when put in the oven was for Buddha the most important thing.” — Shunryu Suzuki

I just returned from the farmers’ market in Mendocino with two vibrant young tomato plants, Sun Golds, orange cherry tomatoes with delicious flavor; cherry tomatoes being the only kind of tomato we can grow in our cool clime without the sheltering warmth of a greenhouse. Buying Sun Golds at the Mendocino farmers’ market has become a tradition for me, five years running now, and though I could easily start my own Sun Golds from seed, I prefer to buy my starts from a grower at the market. I suppose if I had a greenhouse, I would be more likely to start my own tomato plants from seed, but maybe not. I like the tradition of going to market to get plants, and I look forward to hunting for the most promising ones, speaking to the growers as I search, maybe sharing a tomato growing story or two. All of which begs the question: why don’t I have a greenhouse, even just a little one, to enhance my gardening experience?

I have now been a renter for eighteen years following fifteen years as homeowner following ten years as a renter, and for all twenty-eight years of my life as a renter some part of me expected to become a homeowner any day now. When I rented my house in Berkeley for eleven years, I did not plant a lemon tree for the first five years because I was convinced that if I were destined to live in Berkeley for more than a few years, surely I would find a way to buy a place and plant a lemon tree there. And now I have lived for six years in this wonderful house we rent on a piece of paradise a few miles from the village of Mendocino, and though my rational mind knows we may never own a house in this kingdom of expensive houses, I have yet to plant blueberries or grapes or fruit trees, or to build a small greenhouse because of that same expectation of possibly owning a home one day. Of course, what makes my reluctance to build a greenhouse entirely silly is that I could easily build the greenhouse to use in our garden now and take the blessed thing with us should we ever fulfill our dream of owning our own place.

“When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything. Without air, we cannot breathe. Each one of us is in the midst of myriads of worlds. We are in the center of the world always, moment after moment. So we are completely dependent and independent.” — Shunryu Suzuki

I vow to be more consciously a swinging door, to do the things I want to do now and with much less care for what may or may not happen in the future. I vow to plant a lemon tree if a place in the ground calls out to me and says, “Hey you with the arms and legs and shovel. We could use a lemon tree right here, whether you stick around after you plant it or not.” I vow to live in this house we rent as if we may never leave here until we die. The moment, as Shunryu Suzuki would say, is what we’ve got. The rest is illusion.

I’ve been here before and made similar vows, which I am just now remembering. Five years ago I was quite ill and wondering if I would be around in this body much longer. I had long been planning to publish my book of short stories Buddha In A Teacup, and I kept saying to Marcia, “I will, I will…after I’m completely well.”

Marcia was wonderfully patient with me through my long ordeal, but one evening she said, “By waiting until you think you are completely well, might you be suggesting to your body and the universe that you don’t entirely believe you will get well? Why not go ahead and publish your book and trust that in doing so you will speed the process of your healing?”

So with great trepidation, I followed her counsel and published my book, and in the process of bringing forth Buddha In A Teacup my health improved and life became rosy again, rosy and suffused with the energy of no longer waiting around for some other moment than this one. And because everything is connected, I have since received a good many letters from people who read Buddha In A Teacup and wanted to thank me for reminding them that when we live in the past or dwell in the future, we aren’t really here; and what fun is that?

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

Rebellion was not as it seemed

Witness to a ravaged whore

His mother pounding at his door

Ignoring her as his mind burned

Poor heart dribbles at the stern

* * *

I’m reading The Day on Fire by James Ullman, a novel written in 1956 inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s life. Rimbaud, born in 1854, was raised in Charleville, Ardennes France. He was a brilliant student who won awards but who later turned into an infant terrible. He had been raised by a single mom who nagged him to death and he would put a chair up against the door to keep her out of his bedroom while he wrote. Rimbaud quit sharing his writing before he turned 20 and became a wanderer and an adventurer. Still young, someone asked him if he was still into writing. The person who asked the question wrote later that Rimbaud gave him a look as though he had been asked if he still played with hoops. He died from cancer at age 37.

That line from John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance proves apt for tales of the Old West time and again. The shootout between feuding members of the Coates and Frost families on Little Lake’s (southern Willits) dusty main street in October, 1867 was fictionalized as early as Lyman Palmer’s 1880 History of Mendocino County. Palmer’s account places the events two years and five days earlier than when three of Pap Frost’s sons rode into town. Elisha, Mart and Isom Frost were all grown men, Isom, the youngest, at 21. Each holstered a Colt navy revolver on their hip. The three Frosts settled in at Baechtel’s store along with their brother-in-law, Frank Duncan. In addition to a pistol, Duncan carried a long-bladed knife.

Once upon a time, so many years ago it might have been another lifetime, I got two kittens, a boy and girl, and after much thought and research named them Boy and Girl. Boy was an orange tabby, Girl was a gray tabby, and in the hallowed tradition of kittens, they played and slept and mewed and ate and clawed things and were wonderfully cute.

When they were about four months old, Boy and Girl played a particular game that made me laugh until I cried. No matter how many times I watched them play this game, I laughed until I cried. Sometimes other people would watch with me as the kittens played this particular game, and some of these people laughed, too, and a few of them even laughed until they cried; but there were other people who watched the game and did not laugh at all, which was amazing to me, and troubling. Here is the game the kittens played.

A heavy brown ceramic vase about fourteen-inches high, round at the bottom and narrowing somewhat at the top, stood on a brick terrace. Girl would chase Boy onto the terrace and Boy would jump into the vase. Girl would sit next to the vase, listening to Boy inside, and when Boy would pop his head up out of the vase, Girl would leap up and try to catch him, and Boy would drop back down into the vase. Then Girl would stand on her hind legs and reach into the vase with her forepaws and Boy would shoot his paws up to fight Girl’s paws, or Boy might leap out of the vase and the chase would resume. Or Girl would be inside the vase with Boy outside and the vase would tip over in the midst of their roughhousing and out would spill Girl.

Why were their antics so hilarious to me? Was it because their play was an enactment of the essential mammalian drama of fright and flight and fight—the thrill and danger of the hunt mixed with the suspense and terror of hiding in order to survive? Yes, I think so. But what’s so funny about that?

“Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.” — Sid Caesar

I don’t have many memories of my mother laughing. My brother and I were forever telling jokes, honing our techniques, and our mother usually responded with a droll, “Very funny,” even if everyone else was howling with laughter.

But there was a time, one glorious time, when my mother and I laughed together so hard and for so long that we literally fell out of our seats and went temporarily blind with laughter. I was fourteen when my mother procured tickets for just the two of us to attend the musical Little Me at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, with the Broadway cast starring Sid Caesar in a dizzying number of roles opposite the ravishingly sexy Virginia Martin, with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, a script by Neil Simon, and choreography by Bob Fosse.

As far as I can remember this was the only time in my life my mother took just the two of us to anything. Even more impressive, she splurged on fantastic seats, tenth row, center, which was also highly uncharacteristic of her. What I realize now after almost fifty years was that my mother was giving me the message that though she officially agreed with my father’s opposition to my pursuing a career in music and theater and writing, she unofficially supported my passion for these things.

The success of Little Me depended entirely on the genius of Sid Caesar and his ability to play myriad comedic roles convincingly, not to mention sing well, too. The same play performed with several different actors essaying Sid’s half-dozen parts wouldn’t have worked at all because the point of the play, in a way, is that all these extremely different men are essentially the same guy falling in love with the same woman over and over again. Try as I may, I cannot imagine anyone other than Sid Caesar successfully playing all those parts without becoming tiresome or silly. I knew that was Sid again and again—stumbling off the stage as one character and racing back on as someone else—yet I always believed he was an entirely new character—an astonishing feat. The songs were great, the dancing was fabulous, Virginia Martin was luscious, the chorus girls were gorgeous, the dialogue was snappy and funny, and young Todd was in heaven.

I can still recite whole scenes from the play and sing several of the songs, though I only saw and heard the musical once all those decades ago; but I cannot remember which scene it was that made my mother and I laugh so hard that we fell out of our seats, laughing along with hundreds of other people laughing so uproariously that Sid and his fellow actors froze for a time to let us get through our delirium before they came back to life and carried on with the show. That play and Sid Caesar and Virginia Martin and laughing so stupendously with my mother are burned into my memory more indelibly than almost anything else I have ever experienced.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” — Kurt Vonnegut

When I saw Little Me with my mother, I was a freshman at Woodside High School attempting to fulfill my father’s wish that I become a medical doctor. To that end, I was slaving away in an accelerated program for scientifically ambitious students, something I most definitely was not. Nevertheless, I had yet to work up the courage to defy my father and so was following the prescribed steps on the path he wanted me to follow. As a consequence, I was one of only four ninth graders in a biology class for upper classmen, and we four sat huddled together in a far corner of the big classroom, though we otherwise had little in common.

There came the day of the big mid-term exam, the results to account for half our grade. Everyone in the class was on edge, we youngsters especially so. Our teacher was not a good one, I was badly prepared, poorly motivated, and certain I would botch the test. As we waited for our teacher to arrive with the tests, the four of us began to free associate, someone saying osmosis, someone replying mitochondria, another adding messenger RNA, and so on until we left science behind and were reeling off the names of pretty girls and sports heroes and anything and everything until one of us said something—the ultimate non sequitur?—that proved to be the verbal straw that broke our collective camel’s back, so that just as our teacher entered the room we four began to laugh hysterically.

Our laughter spread to others in the room, but eventually everyone, save for the four freshmen, regained control and prepared to take the test. But we had gone beyond some line none of us had ever gone beyond before, and we could not stop laughing. Our teacher sent us out into the hallway where we fell to the concrete and laughed until our bellies ached. And finally, one by one, we stopped laughing, caught our breaths, and returned to the classroom. But the moment we entered that place of the test, hysteria caught us again and sent us hurtling back outside, our teacher following us out to threaten and cajole, to no avail.

Because we were thought of as good boys, our temporary insanity was forgiven and we took the test the following day, though we were never allowed to sit en masse again. One of us became a professor of Biology, one a conservative federal judge, one a professor of Art, the fourth a writer and musician and the author of this essay. We were as different as four people could be, yet in that moment of youthful hysterics, the pressures of the world too much for us to bear, we escaped into laughter—together.

Underthetablebooks.com  features Todd’s stories and music and a blog dedicated to his essays for the AVA.

It required careful inspection for my friends and I to locate the steelhead, as well as an assist from the local mailman, who seemingly prides himself as much on being an information courier regarding salmon and steelhead sightings in local waterways as he does on delivering the mail — judging from his enthusiasm. First, we spotted a few right under the bridge that crosses over our street, swiveling in a relatively deep pool we’d previously thought of mainly as a great potential swimming hole. After a few hours of looking, we eventually tracked down two more upstream.

The trouts’ dark-olive back is delineated from its iridescent silver underbelly by a luminous pink stripe. I don’t recall if their dorsel fins were clipped, which I remembered only afterward is the mark of their having been bred in one of the two Department of Fish and Game hatcheries on Lake Mendocino and Warm Springs dam. The hatcheries were initiated about a decade ago after the discovery that too few wild fish were returning to sustain a naturally produced migratory fish population in the Russian River.

Today, the Russian — as with its tributaries, including Gibson Creek — provides little more than a mute testimony to the thrashing, silvery surge that once roiled the watershed. As recently as the mid-20th century, the Russian was nationally-renowned for its prodigious steelhead runs, a bounty that the watershed’s population of village-based native people had lived off of for more than 10,000 years, while hardly depleting it at all.

In recent weeks, I’ve been convening a class on the environmental and cultural history of Mendocino County called “A History of Forgetting.” Its main purpose is to examine what has been taken away from the local environment — filled in, paved over, drained, torn down, burned out, tamed, destroyed — as a guide to understanding the world we encounter here and now. It explores the interdependence between nature and culture as it’s played out across time in the local terrain. It also offering some glimpses into class-based exploitation as it’s existed throughout Mendo’s history, including in the cases of Chinese and Latino populations and of the local First Nations people.

The course description reads, “Through a series of field trips, often involving local experts as ‘tour guides,’ we will deepen our knowledge of such things as: what species and cultures in our bioregion have been driven extinct? What resources did pre-conquest indigenous people rely on? What are the histories of the wastersheds we live in? Which creeks are paved over, which are dammed, which are poisoned? What ethnicities have lived in this area in various historic periods? What exact impact have industries such as logging, industrial viticulture, and marijuana had on the local landbase? Where have these impacts been most pronounced?”

As you might guess, the class has been heavy in its emphasis on Russian River watershed history so far. The trout that I witnessed spawning in Gibson Creek, in fact, provided part of the motivation for the course. I wanted to know as much as I could about the historic factors impacting the fish populations in Gibson Creek, which necessarily involves a deeper understanding of Mendocino County history and all that has impacted it.

I forbear to refer to myself as a “teacher” of the class, since my knowledge of the subject is actually severely limited, owing to the fact that I’ve only lived in Mendocino County for three and a half years — Ukiah for three months out of that. Fortunately, my lack of expertise is entirely accepted, if not encouraged, in this case. The class is part of a new project called Mendo Free Skool, a volunteer-run avenue for local people to exchange skills and knowledge. Anyone can be a teacher/learner/facilitator, so the classes take on the flavor of whatever people are interested in at a given time. People convene classes if they’d like to share something they know a lot about, but also in many cases when they know fairly little about something and would like to bring together a group interested in deepening the knowledge with them.

Taking Aldo Leopold’s admonition that “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds” to heart, I figured it’s always easier on the psyche to learn about such things as the local genocide of First Nations people and the enormous amount of destruction that has been historically wrought on the local terrain as part of a group, rather than as a solitary exercise.

During the two weeks immediately prior to the first class, I read all or most of five local history books, including The Mendocino Papers by Bruce Anderson, Killing for Land in Early California: Indian Blood at Round Valley by Frank Baumgardner (not as good as Genocide and Vendetta, which covers the same general subject, so I’m told, but still an extremely informative read), West of Eden: Communes and Utopias in Northern California (which I reviewed in these very pages recently), An Everyday History of Somewhere by Ray Raphael (which is about Southern Humboldt County, though there’s much overlap), and a 1948 Columbia University history of the Pomo Indians that I picked up at Grace Hudson Museum. The books greatly supplemented my existing knowledge, which I’ve developed mainly through my work as a journalist for the AVA, as well as via my weekly reading of this fine publication. I encourage anyone interested in better understanding the place where we live to read them.

So far, the classes have been lively and well-attended. The first took place on April 7th, a four-hour tour of Ukiah Valley. This was the location of the northernmost settled ranchero in the Mexican state of California, Rancho Sanel, prior the United States’ conquest of California in the Mexican-American War. In a sense, then, the Ukiah Valley was the southern tip of the territorial stretch along the North Coast that remained the exclusive province of First Nations people at the time the United States lumbered in to expropriate it all. I figured it was a fitting place to begin the first-ever class.

To give a small glimpse of how the classes have gone and the terrain they’ve covered, near the start of the first one, the group conducted an exercise where we all pictured, then described, how the place surrounding us might have looked 200 years ago. Impressively, the class’s collective description nearly entirely captured early accounts of nearby Russian River valleys at the time of Europeans’ arrival: Grasses higher than a person’s head. Big game everywhere. The eastern hills covered with brush. Several kinds of oak, fir, pine, madrone, tan oak, chestnut oak, and manzanita. Small stands of redwood growing in a few of the stream heads. Smaller woods included hazel, chemissal, blue blossom, mountain mahogany, nutmeg, yew, and laurel.

Some white oaks had trunks six feet in diameter and were 150 feet high. Golden oaks in the canyons were four feet in diameter and also 150 feet high. Blue oaks covered much of southeastern Mendocino County.

In the second class, we mostly explored the history of inland Mendocino County’s various dams and water engineering projects. On April 29 we met in Boonville for the third of six classes in total. The fourth class will explore Albion and the southern Mendocino Coast (partly inspired by the subject a described in last week’s article: communalism on the North Coast). The fifth class, we’ll visit the hills west of Ukiah leading toward Elk and Navarro. In the final class, we visit Round Valley.

If you are interested in when and where the rest of the classes meet, please drop me a line at wparrish@riseup.net.

My larger interest in developing more detailed knowledge of local history is to strengthen what many environmental historians nowadays like to call “an ethic of place.” That term is, to some extent, a fancy way of referring to the experience of being rooted. As French philosopher Simone Weil once put it, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” An inextricable part of becoming more rooted is knowing what exactly has happened to prevent us people from being more rooted in the first place; i,e., to know the history of our own places and cultures.

I felt how distant most people in this culture are from that sort of knowledge two months ago, as I stood on my own well-manicured neighborhood street, spotting the first steelhead I’d ever seen spawning in Gibson Creek. The people who designed these streets, as with those in so many others cities throughout the world, are part of a culture that worships the linear and find comfort in a geometric order that alluvial streams like Gibson Creek defy. This same sense of propriety and property is bound up with an abiding faith in technology’s ability to box up the wild and separate it from our lives. We’d be better off to take a cue from the migrating steelhead, always collecting information on the history of the natural environment we’re directly a part of as we go.

In Buena Vista Park;

Buried with the smack and meth

With candles in the dark;

Vietnam the only trip

That had the people in its grip.

* * *

Organized by the Diggers, residents of Haight-Ashbury marched through the streets in early October, 1967, carrying a coffin to symbolize the “Death of Hippie.” They carried it to Buena Vista Park, the oldest park in San Francisco. The park sits on a hill whose low end is bordered by Haight Street. The Diggers (a name taken from history) were a radical community action group of activists and street theater performers who operated in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. The protest was against the commercialization of the hippie movement, or the notion that it was a “movement” at all. The Diggers maintained “hippie” was a phenomenon created by the media. The residents wanted the media out of Haight-Ashbury.

* * *

At the time I was living in Mendocino and writing for The Illustrated Paper, a paper published there sporadically from a print shop in Fort Bragg. The editor’s wife, Hillie was a plate maker at the shop which cut the cost of printing way back. The editor, Walter, and I visited Haight-Ashbury several times to talk with the people who put together another underground paper called the Oracle which had offices above Haight Street. Walter was a good graphic artist and wanted to meet the art editor at the Oracle. The first time we went there, a guy was there to see another editor, waiting in the front office with me and Walter. We said hello but he wasn’t in the mood for talking. He wasn’t a hippie, looked straight. He was wearing a hat and sunglasses even though it was dark outside. When we got inside to see the art editor, Gabe Katz, we asked about the guy outside. Gabe told us he was some “nut job named Hunter Thompson who wants to write a book on the Hells Angels and he wants us to introduce him to the San Francisco Chapter”. I was later in a commune with Gabe but that’s another story.

In January of ’67 my wife and I came down from Mendocino in January to attend a festival called the Human Be-in in the panhandle at Golden Gate Park. It was a free event that went from noon until evening. It was organized in an attempt to get the Berkley radicals and the counter culture, represented by Haight-Ashbury, to work together. Speakers included Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Timothy Leary, the poet Gary Snyder, and Richard Alpert who later became Baba Ram Das. The comedian Dick Gregory also spoke. I think the Glide Memorial Church’s Cecil Williams was there, too. Rock bands included the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead. The underground chemist, Owsley Stanley, provided free LSD called “White Lightning.”

It was a beautiful sunny day. What I took from the event was seeing the San Francisco Chapter of the Hells Angels run some poor bastard through a gauntlet of fists and boots and nobody did anything about it. Probably the right thing to do at the time. Wikipedia, with apparently no irony intended, says that the Angels were kept busy returning lost kids to their parents. The Hells Angels had adopted Haight-Ashbury and “protected” it like they did the Grateful Dead.. They also sold a lot of crank in the Haight. The Human Be-in was a prelude to the Summer of Love and the Death of Hippie capped it off.

* * *

As punk rock music started losing momentum and branching into different factions a lot of the original political stances dissolved as well. Hard-core, Post hard-core, peace punk (stayed very political), crust, Grind-core, pop-punk, skate punk, etc. Lots of different sounding music, but most bands would cite punk rock as their roots or inspiration. There were also regional divisions in look, sound, and style. In the Pacific Northwest a bunch of bands started playing heavier, darker tunes with roots in the 60s and 70s hard rock as well as punk. Before it really blew-up in popularity, magazines were starting to take notice and dubbed this “Seattle” style. One of these bands, Nirvana, got huge, so the media was falling all over itself to come up with a better moniker than “Seattle style.” They came up with GRUNGE. Not that big a deal really. Then grunge bands were popping up all over, adopting the media’s portrayal — unshaven, longish hair, flannel shirts. The “look” became more important than music, and I kept hearing about GRUNGE until that poor junkie Cobain ate a shotgun. I could go on and on about this, but this is what I was thinking about after my Rhyme Alert. Postscript. I wish I could somehow thank the Mainstream Media for romanticizing heroin, I lost a few friends that might never have gone near that nasty shit.

* * *

“And all the hippies moved to Albion and lived…” said the Boonville editor.

The animal is a flathead catfish, the number-one target in a game of unarmed man against fish called “noodling.” In this peculiar sport of the Deep South, barehanded men (and a few women) shove their hands into the lairs of catfish and goad the animals into biting. Catfish lack large teeth, and as a fish clomps down the noodler grabs back, and once he or she has firmly gripped the lower jaw of the fish, it only takes some muscle work to remove it from its hole. But here’s the most controversial part: Noodling takes place in June and July, precisely when large male catfish sit on nests of eggs, aggressively guarding the fertile clumps from predators. The big fish, which may weigh more than 70 pounds but usually go less than 20, will bite at almost anything that meets them at the door to their lairs—whether bass, bird or hand of a hillbilly. If the catfish are kept to be eaten or if the flustered animals fail to return to their nests even if they are released, the future brood is doomed.

Noodling, which may have originated in the pre-Columbian era, began going mainstream about a decade ago when a filmmaker named Bradley Beesley, an Oklahoma native, took an interest in the sport. In 2001, Beesley released an hour-long documentary called Okie Noodling in which he follows a group of noodlers doing their thing—laughing, splashing, screaming expletives as huge cats chomp their hands, and erupting from the water in glorious slow motion with 50-pound flatheads latched to their fists. Beesley was so enthralled by the activity and the surrounding culture that he became a noodler himself in the course of his work. In 2008, Beesley released a sequel to the first film, and just two weeks ago a miniseries called “Mudcats” wrapped up, but viewers can still catch reruns. Or you might also go to Oklahoma for the 13th Okie Noodling Tournament, which arrives on June 23. The event, which Beesley helped launch in part to promote his first film, includes live music and a catfish eating contest.

In an interview last week, Beesley described for me the thrills of noodling.

“It’s the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever done,” Beesley said. It is also, he added, “the fairest way to combat these beasts.” Beesley says the sensation of having a catfish the size of a bulldog bite one’s bare hand is a particularly thrilling one. “It hurts,” Beesley conceded. “It’s painful, like a rat trap with sand paper. The fish start spinning and thrashing. You don’t get any deep cuts, but they turn your hand into hamburger meat.” But many noodlers, Beesley said, choose not to wear gloves to better experience the direct skin-to-fish contact.

Beesley is quick to explain that noodling rarely injures the catfish—except for those that get battered and fried, which may be the majority of the landed cats. Though Beesley says many noodlers let their quarry go (and that the fish go straight back to their nests), other sources, like Texas fishing guide Chad Ferguson, quoted last year in a Texas TribuneHYPERLINK “http://www.texastribune.org/texas-legislature/82nd-legislative-session/theres-more-one-way-to-land-a-catfish-in-texas/” article, seem to believe that most cats caught by noodlers are destined for the kitchen. Most online videos of noodlers at work show the hand-fishers tossing their catfish into boats or clipping them to stringers, and many states prohibit noodling precisely due to uncertainty about the negative effects of removing the largest breeding catfish from a population. Only seven states, it seems, allow noodling, with Texas having legalized the sport just last year.

But killing the largest breeding catfish of a population isn’t the only concern of anti-noodling conservationists, rod-and-reel fishermen and authorities; the other is the common noodler technique of tossing junk, like large pipes and furniture, into lakes to provide catfish with nesting structure and themselves with an advantage in finding the fish when the nesting season comes.

At last year’s noodling tournament in Pauls Valley, which drew more than 10,000 spectators, 183 people participated in the hunt for catfish. Among these competitors, 37 landed fish. The biggest was a 60-pound flathead wrested from its den by Mark Rowan, who took $1,000 for the prize and also won $400 more for having the heaviest stringer of catfish—150 pounds, to be exact. The top female noodler was Brandy Sparks, who caught a 45-pounder, and the winner of the kids’ division was Dakota Garrett, who took a 42-pound flathead.

The blue catfish is another resident of American swamp and slough country, and readers of Mark Twain may remember that Huckleberry Finn and Jim caught a catfish as large as a man. That, without doubt, would have been a blue. Noodlers certainly take blue catfish, though in some states blues, if not necessarily flatheads, are protected from the harassment.

Just how many men, women and children shove their hands into catfish lairs in America is uncertain, though officials in Missouri, where noodling is illegal, estimate that 2,000 people hand-fish for cats. Meanwhile, the game is catching on abroad. In the great rivers of Europe, for instance, hands are appearing at the den doors of the legendary wels catfish, which may weigh as much as a bear and which, like catfish in America, get ornery during nesting season.

Noodling has its risks, and every year newspaper reports tell of noodlers drowned when their hands or feet or heads become stuck below the surface, or when surprise currents drag them into deeper waters. Beesley guesses that in Oklahoma, “one or two” people drown each year while hand-hunting for catfish. But alligators and water moccasins are not the threats that the media sometimes makes them out to be. “That’s been sensationalized,” Beesley said. In his 13 years of documenting noodlers at work in Oklahoma, he once saw a man surface with a non-poisonous snake on his arm, and once with a snapping turtle.

“And there was one guy who was bitten by a beaver,” Beesley said.

Finding catfish is not always easy. It takes knowledge of the swamp and its underwater geography, and it takes some luck, too—and many a noodling excursion becomes, in the end, just a walk in the woods, under cypress and sun, waist deep in the big muddy.

About all I remember about kindergarten — this probably happened during the first week — is getting into a “fight” with a custard-colored Okie kid named Paul Custer who also wore a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Turned out the storage shed was filled with giant rectangular plywood building blocks that, during recess and if we’d been well-behaved that morning, we boys got to take out and arrange into a fort. Not just any fort, mind you, but the fort: The Alamo of patriotic legend and sentimental song. So you can see why Paul and me had a problem. Since only one of us could earn the right to die heroically like Davy Crockett, we fought to determine which it’d be. While I can’t remember who “won,” I do recall that Paul scratched my face with his long fingernails and me going away with mixed feelings.

My fondest memories are of my first puppy love. She showed up on the first day of school during the 4^th or 5^th Grade and her name was Diana Young. Tall and lanky like me except with milk chocolate eyes, hair and skin (I’ve still got our class picture), even after she crashed her bike, hit her mouth on the handlebars and put a teepee-shaped gap between her two front teeth, still I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Surely she was much too beautiful for a mixed up, tongue-tied, broken-homed wild child like me. Years later at a party I did get to make out with her once. But even then I was too scared to pursue her.

My first girlfriend was a pale-faced freckled redheaded beauty named Sharon Ryder. We started “going steady” in the 6^th Grade. She lived in the canyon bottom on the other side of the fat grassy ridge we kids called Kite Hill. I went over to her house a few times (she never came to mine) and, because Sharon insisted she insisted, I met her mom once. A single sexy young woman with her red hair sculpted into a beehive, she worked as a cocktail waitress down at Dusty’s Bar and Grill on the corner of York Boulevard and Avenue 64. How do I know? Because my “Uncle Al” Overwater, a partner of my dad’s from back when they were boys in our old West Town neighborhood of Chicago, and who was married to my “Aunt Vi” who’d been my mom’s best friend ever since they’d grown up together a few blocks away, worked at Dusty’s as a bartender. A muscle-bound pug with a gentle nature who’d landed in a glider in Normandy the night before D-Day, I can’t remember Al ever speaking a harsh word about anybody or mentioning the war even once. Anyway, one day my dad went down to Dusty’s and bragged to Al about me having myself a freckled-faced, red-headed English girlfriend, and Al wound up putting two and two together. When my dad told me about how Sharon’s mom was a real nice woman who worked with Al down at Dusty’s, he said it like it was just another example of us living in a mighty small world.

Vi and Al had 2 sons, my 2 “big cousins” Wayne, called “Chip,” and Dale, the elder by 2 years. Chip would later blow his brains out with a snub-nose .38 while playing Russian roulette. I shit you not. I was about 10 when it happened and wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral. (Although my big sister did). At the time my dad explained to me that Chip had foolishly decided to play with the pistol, had accidentally dropped it and had blown his head off (there’d be a closed coffin). That’s how it goes when guns are used as toys, my dad had grimly warned me. I remember how mad he was at Al for having been stupid enough to keep a loaded pistol in his nightstand. It was only after I was long back from the war and Al was dead that my dad finally told me what had really happened to Chip — Dale had been there — and how my dad had never been able to forgive Al for it.

To get to Sharon’s house I used to cut over Kite Hill at the top of Church Street. Across the way was a long pedestrian stairway that led down the steepest part of the hillside and connected Sharon’s canyon to mine. At the bottom of the stairs was a grid of three skinny streets flanked by rows of small crowded houses with peaked narrow faces and tiny moustaches of front lawn. Some of the houses were made of stucco and others of clapboard, and they were usually one-story if on the canyon bottom and two if carved into the horseshoe of hills. Sharon’s house was about smack dab in the middle, and I’d arrive at her doorstep right on time.

I’d ring her electric doorbell once, neeyyyiit, and she’d come out, smile, say hi, hand over her cello and then disappear back inside to fetch her books. Yup, my sweetheart Sharon played the cello. Dressed in a form-fitting cloth case with a zipper running from stem to stern, the damned thing was as tall as I was and, after I’d slung its strap over my shoulder, bulky enough to make me walk with a hobble. Yet, Sharon was fun loving, talked a little funny and, even if at times she seemed a little pushy, she did carry her own books.

Garvanza Elementary was just a few blocks down Figueroa and we went through a pedestrian underpass that, when no other kids were in sight, we used for kissing. We liked kissing and soon we started coming to school a little bit early to beat the crowd so we could linger inside the tunnel and maybe get to kiss to our little heart’s content.

I don’t know what exactly I did that got Sharon so steaming and stomping mad, but I suspect I tried to cop a feel. While I was savvy enough to know that all girls had four places on their bodies no boy could ever touch without bringing down the Holy Wrath of God, I didn’t yet know that each place was surrounded by a vast forbidden zone whose boundaries were unmarked and varied from girl to girl. The only way to find a boundary was to cross it, and I suppose that’s what I must have done. No doubt Sharon was scandalized because she furiously ran up the stairs of the underpass with me trailing behind trying to explain myself while lurching under my burden like Quasimodo.

Sharon waited for me on the sidewalk and, the instant I caught up, she tongue-lashed me and demanded her cello back. Maybe because her yelling had caught the attention of some nearby kids, or perhaps just because she’d pissed me off, I un-strapped her cello, lifted it up above my head and, like I was King Kong and it a squirming merchant marine, I hurled it back down the stairs. It never occurred to me to think about how fragile the cello might be, and when it settled on the floor of the tunnel it looked like a bum sleeping under a blanket.
After that Sharon was forbidden to talk to me and, judging by her cold shoulder and upturned nose, I don’t think it put her out none. I can’t recall ever seeing her in junior high, which makes me think she must have moved away that summer. But I do remember that my dad had to buy the Garvanza a brand-new cello and case, and him strapping my ass with his belt and forcing me to do a whole bunch of yard work in order to demonstrate how much he appreciated the embarrassment of having to defend me to my school principal, not to mention him having to fork over all that money.

From Hauling Horses, a work in progress.

My father taught me how to plant trees when I was six-years-old, and we planted many trees together over the years — fruit trees, redwoods, birches, and pines. He would show me where to dig the hole, and I would dig as big and deep a hole as I could. Then he would deepen and widen the hole considerably; and I would admire how strong he was and how easily the ground yielded to him. Then we would refill the hole halfway with a mixture of peat moss and compost and soil. I remember we stirred this mixture in the hole with our bare hands, and then we would place the baby tree atop this mixture and fill in the hole. With the leftover soil, we would construct a circular basin around the tree and I would fetch the hose to fill this basin with water again and again until the ground around the tree was saturated. And thereafter my weekly chores included watering the young trees.

Speaking of trees, one day when I was ten, my father and I were in a nursery and he saw a little olive tree selling for what he thought an exorbitant price. Our house was surrounded by huge old olive trees that dropped thousands of olives every year, many of which subsequently sunk into the soil and were covered with leaves and eventually sprouted into baby olive trees. My father spoke to the nurseryman and learned that the nursery would pay three dollars each for hearty one-year-old olive trees, as many as they could get.

“Now there’s a great way for you to make money,” said my father. “Pot up olive seedlings, tend them for a year, and sell them to this nursery. Fifty times three is 150 dollars!”

So we got 50 one-gallon pots and I eagerly potted up fifty olive seedlings, placed them in the dappled shade under one of our ancient olive trees, and cared for them diligently for a few months until life intervened and I forgot all about them.

Ten years later while visiting my parents for Christmas, I was wandering around their overgrown yard and came upon the sole survivor of those fifty seedlings, now a tiny bonsai olive tree which I potted in a long shallow bonsai pot, adorned with a miniature granite boulder, and gave to my father to add to his collection of a dozen bonsais. My father was most delighted with that miniature olive tree.

My father loved to body surf and taught me to body surf not long after I learned to swim. Our family went to Los Angeles for a week every summer when I was a boy, and we always went to the beach for a few of those days. The water was warm, the waves perfectly formed, and we would shout for joy when we got good rides. Body surfing was truly my father’s bliss, and after he spent a couple hours in the water he was always so sweet and happy.

My father took our family camping and backpacking every summer. He taught us how to pitch a tent, build a fire, light a Coleman lantern, and many other things a person needs to know to be a good camper. He also taught me how to fish, how to prepare my pole and reel and line, how to bait a hook, how to cast, how to set the hook when a fish strikes, how to play the fish, how to kill the fish, how to clean the fish, and how to dip the fish in cornmeal and fry it on a skillet over a campfire.

When I was in my twenties and became a vagabond for a few years, I was essentially a highway backpacker, and virtually everything I needed to know in order to survive I had learned from my father, including mending my clothes with needle and thread and repairing my backpack and boots with an awl.

Some of my fondest memories of my father are of him fishing for trout in the high Sierras. He was an avid fly fisherman and for some years he even made his own flies. We often had our camps on the shores of small lakes at the base of granite peaks, and it was my father’s particular delight to set out from camp and try his luck all the way around the lake. When he hooked a trout, he would let out a musical hoot that resounded in the otherwise silent wilderness, and I would watch him play the fish, his slender pole bending, his face alight with delight.

I was crazy for ballgames from the moment I could walk, and though my father wasn’t the least interested in sports, he would sometimes play catch with me on the lawn when he came home from work. He was left-handed and I loved watching him throw the baseball — a perfectly natural curve ball. I was tireless and my father was often tired after a long day of work, so he would set a limit on how many throws he would make, a number we would count down together. When we got down to one, my father would call out a new number, and we would play a while longer, and I was overjoyed by his generosity.

When I was twelve, I helped my father install a backboard and basketball hoop atop a tall pole on the edge of our sloping driveway, and every day for the next five years, rain or shine, I shot hoops out there for hours on end. I was often out there shooting hoops when my father got home from work, and sometimes he would watch me shoot a few before going inside. When he was in a good mood, my father would compliment me on my skill and maybe try a shot or two; and I always loved it when he gave my favorite game a try.

My father was a successful psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he taught clinical psychology to psychiatric fellows at Stanford Medical School. He also helped found a ward for psychosomatically ill adolescents at Stanford Children’s Hospital, an accomplishment he was very proud of.

I wrote and published several books while my father was alive, and he was extremely critical of all of them. As for my music, my father barely acknowledged that I was a musician and once asked me, “Why do you write such sad music? You should write music that makes people happy.”

I didn’t think my father would ever like anything I created. But a few months before he died, I sent him the manuscript of my novel Under the Table Books, and he wrote me a letter in which he praised the book and predicted it would one day be a great success. I read his words over and over again because I could hardly believe my eyes. And even more astonishing to me was how he signed his letter,

My son! Love, Dad

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

A wintry April day — rain, cold, our two woodstoves hard at work translating matter into energy so we may carry on in comfort. Yesterday we celebrated the idea of spring, if not the reality, with the delivery of four cords of firewood from Frank’s Firewood of Boonville, so now several days of stacking wood are upon us. I am graduating from my seventh Mendocino winter, and Frank’s fantastic firewood has kept me snug and warm through every one of them. Thank you, Frank!

Yesterday also brought an email from a friend with the subject heading Data Plague, with a link to an article from the New York Times about Big Data, a hot topic in the world of computer science and technology. Big Data is the incomprehensibly large amount of raw data piling up from all electronic activities that leave digital traces, including scientific research and social media. For instance, every minute of every day some forty-eight hours of video are uploaded to YouTube: the equivalent of eight years of content each day.

According to the Big Data article, many people in government and academia and private industry are interested in mining this rapidly growing data universe, and President Obama has earmarked 200 million dollars for his Big Data Research and Development Initiative. And just last month the National Science Foundation awarded $10 million to Berkeley’s AMP Expedition, which stands for “algorithms machines people,” a team of UC Berkeley professors and graduate students working to advance Big Data analysis.

As usual, no one asked my opinion about any of this, but here are my thoughts on the intrinsic and extrinsic value of Big Data. Once upon a time there was this emperor, see, and he wasn’t actually wearing any clothes, but because he was the emperor everyone had to pretend he was wearing clothes even though he wasn’t.

“The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.” — John Kemeny

Stacking firewood, one might surmise, is something like trying to make sense of Big Data. There on the driveway (in cyber space) is a huge jumble of firewood (pile of data) composed of many separate pieces of wood (bits of data). Over time, I will get all that wood neatly organized in eight or nine stacks in the woodshed, and over more time I will burn those stacks to heat our home. Meanwhile, the Big Data geeks will try to organize their ever-expanding pile of data bits (measured in petabytes, one million gigabytes, and exabytes, one billion gigabytes) and then…and then nothing.

“Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.”— Gregory Bateson

Eight years of Youtube video uploaded every day? That’s 240 years per month! Joe points his phone camera out the bus window as we make our way through Chinatown. Okay. Cool. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Here are Margaret and Binny eating ice cream. Good. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Ralph’s three-legged cat named Popsicle is eating a mouse. Ew! Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Becky’s Great Dane Buffy rolls on something dead. Hardee har har. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. Here are millions of videos of people looking into their cameras and making silly faces. Yes! Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube. And here is Zigmund Olafson, pulling down $200k a year (of taxpayers’ money) as Permanently Visiting Professor of Theoretical Cyber Whatever at UC Berkeley running 1700 centuries of such stuff through a supercomputer in the basement of ADE (Algorithms Digest Emptiness) and after nine months of data digestion and crunching and analysis discovering that…kittens and puppies are cuter than heck!

“We’ll judge our success by whether we build a new paradigm of data.” — Michael Franklin, director of AMP Expedition.

A new paradigm of data? Puh-leez. How about a new paradigm of excellent and affordable healthcare for everybody? How about a new paradigm of equitable taxation? How about a new paradigm of funding our parks and schools? How about a new paradigm of peaceful resolution of conflicts? How about a new paradigm of closing all the insanely dangerous nuclear power plants and insulating our homes and solarizing every viable rooftop? How about a new paradigm of generosity and love? Oh, no. What we need is a new paradigm of data. And just what might that new paradigm of data look like? We have absolutely no idea, but we’ll let you know if we think we’re successful in building that paradigm after we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, feeding digital stuff into really fast computers. Okay? Cool. Click, click. Uploaded to Youtube.

“I don’t agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure.” — Stanislaw J. Lec

Of my many unhappy experiences with publishers, one of the saddest had to do with a chunk of data that followed me around like the Hound of the Baskervilles and is no doubt following me still. This chunk of data suggests that my second, third, fourth, and fifth novels did not sell many copies. Never mind that the various publishers involved did absolutely nothing to promote or distribute my books, and in most cases suspended all support for the books before they were published. No, the data says the books did not sell, which translates in corporate parlance to “Todd does not sell.”

Being reminded of this damning data every time I approached an agent or publisher, I nevertheless continued to try to interest mainstream publishers in my work for many years, with and without the services of literary agents. Of course, agents are privy to this same database, and so I was a pariah to most of them. But eight years ago, shortly before moving to Mendocino, I succeeded in interesting an agent in representing my novel Bender’s Lover, a metaphysical love story comedy thriller set in San Francisco and having to do with music, friendship, and power. I warned this agent about the damning data that was following me, but she seemed undaunted. “After all,” she said, “those sales figures are over twenty years old and this book is so good that…”

She sent copies of my tome to fourteen editors in New York, eleven declining to consider the manuscript because of the aforementioned database. Three said they would give the book a read, and lo a miracle occurred (or so we thought.) A senior editor at Viking went mad for the book, called my agent with a fat offer, and asked that we all get together for a conference call the next day, which we did. My oh my, did we have fun, a ménage á trois love fest during which we designed the cover and cast the movie and read aloud our favorite parts from Bender’s Lover; and for the next forty-eight hours I believed the curse had finally been lifted from my career and I would at last be allowed to ascend to my rightful place in the pantheon of American novelists.

This delightful editor’s last words to me were, “I don’t anticipate any problems, since I have carte blanche here, but as a formality I do have to run this by a couple people in Sales and then I’ll call you with my formal offer. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be getting this book. It’s going to be huge.”

Alas, Sales nixed the deal because the data says Todd doesn’t sell, never mind how old the data or what the data is based on. Never mind anything except the raw little numbers, which in truth are miraculous for being more than zeros.

My agent’s voice was trembling as she gave me the sorry news, and then she took a deep breath and said, “So…under the circumstances, I don’t think there’s really any point in our continuing to work together. Do you?”

Cue the howling hound!

And that is just one of many reasons I do not care much for data, big or small.

Todd’s website is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

 — Thomas (“Mental illness is a myth”) Szasz

  “…lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of [society].”

 — Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

* * *

On Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, there is a museum displaying torture devices and other gruesome evidence of the sadistic nature of mental institutions. The guy who greets you in the lobby is really, really nice, and ever so happy to see you. The place, it turns out, is a front, a recruiting arm of Scientology. How nuts is that?

So, in his wonderfully mangled English, he begs forgiveness for saying “I love Fidel Castro…I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that fucker is still here.” But what he really meant, he now says, is ever-so-subtly different: “Everybody in the world hates Fidel Castro, including myself.”

“Mea culpa…”

It’s like watching old newsreel footage of hayseed American POWs in Viet Nam being forced to denounce their “imperialist war-mongering masters.”

As the great Bill Hicks used to chant: “You are free, America, to do as we tell you!”

Moments after Guillen made his pro-Castro remarks, Miami exploded. Metaphorically, of course — not like the commercial airliner that was actually blown out of the sky in 1976 by U.S.-supported anti-Castro terrorists, killing 73 men, women, and children — an act of unspeakable mass murder (much admired by Al-Qeada) whose masterminds were pardoned by George W. Bush. One of these terrorists, Orlando Bosch, walks the streets of Miami today, openly gloating about his slaughter on international TV.

Oh, but it’s not Orlando Bosch, CIA-backed mass-murderer, who deserves our censure; it’s Ozzie Guillen, manager of the Florida Marlins.

And why? Well, “you have to understand,” said a dim-witted Florida sportswriter named Dan LeBatard on ESPN yesterday — “Castro is our Hitler.”

“Our Hitler.”

Castro.

Not the real mini-Hitler he overthrew — Fulgencio Batista, who ran Cuba as a wonderland of torture and a whorehouse for rich Americans — but Castro.

And so, because he committed a Major League Thought-Crime by expressing a verboten opinion about “our Hitler,” a baseball manager is ordered not only to apologize, but to lie about what he truly believes in order to keep his job.

“You are free, America, to do as we tell you!”

John Eskow is a writer and musician. He wrote or co-wrote the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac, as well as the novel Smokestack Lightning. He can be reached at: johneskow@yahoo.com.

Saints’ Head Coach Sean Payton was suspended by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for a year. Williams was suspended indefinitely, and Assistant Head Coach Joe Vitt and GM Mickey Loomis for portions of next season.

I think Williams may be out of the NFL for two years or forever.

The 49ers versus Saints game last season looked to be a regular hard-hitting playoff game won by the 49ers in a high scoring game. But when the New Orleans Saints defeated the Minnesota Vikings in the 2010 playoff season as I watched the game unfold on TV, it seemed clear to me that the Saints’ defensive players were trying to knock Brett Favre out of the game. Plus, it appeared to me and the TV game broadcasters that the refs were letting it happen by swallowing their whistle.

I recall in particular a play in which the Saints’ defenders illegally hit Favre high and low and late and the refs never called a penalty. Plus, this play happened after Favre was playing on a sprained ankle as big as a coconut.

To me, it was clear that the whole league and most of its reporters were anti-Favre — it was “group think.” He had the temerity to argue with Green Bay Packers management that he wanted to come back to the Packers and play another year. If he couldn’t quarterback the Packers, he wanted to quarterback the Vikings. The Vikings were a great and competitive rival of the Packers.

Packer management wouldn’t trade him to an NFC rival so they shipped him out to the New York Jets late in the preseason. Favre had two weeks to learn a new system and to gain knowledge about his new teammates. But, in a flash, the New York Jets were 6-0 in the win-loss column and Favre was playing great. Then he tore a biceps tendon and couldn’t throw deep accurately, so the Jets and Favre began to lose.

Then lonely and depressed, he began to text racy photos of himself to a beautiful young game day host of the Jets. Favre was caught and his name was rightfully smeared.

The next season, he was with the Vikings and they reached the NFC Championship game verses the New Orleans Saints. They lost a high scoring game versus the Packers and a very battered Favre was blamed for the loss.

The loss should have been blamed on Viking running back Adrian Peterson because he fumbled four times inside the Saints’ 10-yard line — two times inside the Saints’ 5-yard line.

A. Peterson is one of the finest running backs in the NFL but he is tall and he runs high. A great player had a bad game.

But, Williams’ defensive teams low hits on the quarterback were concealed by the TV commentator who said essentially, “It’s clear the refs are going to let them play today.” like that’s a good thing because the playoffs give the NFL the largest TV ratings share of the season.

If the refs do their job correctly, Williams’ bounty system would never work.

At the corporate level in the NFL Gregg Williams’ unbecoming conduct was treated as a snowflake landing in the Sierra because the St. Louis Rams hired Gregg Williams immediately after his indefinite suspension was announced because Williams is good at what he does.

Reading Bruce McEwen’s tragic Hug A Kid, Go To Jail, I thought, “My God, there but for the grace of luck and chance and (in my system of belief) the intervention of angels, I, too, might have been arrested for child molestation and been sent to prison and labeled a sex offender for the rest of my life — on several different occasions. What? How?

When I was in my late thirties and living in Sacramento, I played basketball every morning at a neighborhood park. Three days a week I met my friend Bob there for rousing games of one-on-one, and two days a week I shot around by myself. Along with the basketball court, the park featured a big lawn and a swing set and a public bathroom. So one morning I was shooting hoops and these two moms showed up, each with a cute kid in tow, and they wandered to the far end of the park and spread out a big blanket for playtime and snacking and reading and whatnot.

As I continued shooting hoops, one of the kids, a girl, skipped across the lawn to the restroom adjacent to the basketball court and entered the little cinderblock building on the side marked WOMEN. A moment later she let out a blood-curdling scream, and in the next moment I was on my way into the restroom to rescue her. But some unseen power grabbed hold of me, and a loud inner voice said, “Don’t go in there. Whatever you do, don’t go in there!”

The girl screamed again — bloody murder! — and I turned on my heels and sprinted across the lawn toward the moms, waving my arms and shouting, “Your little girl is screaming in the bathroom.”

One of the mothers jumped up and raced to the restroom and found her daughter bruised and bleeding from a head wound sustained when she slipped on the wet floor and smacked into the ceramic sink. The mom carried her daughter out into the sun and said to me, “Thanks so much. We couldn’t hear a thing over the leaf blowers. We’ve got ice. She’ll be fine. You know kids. Always falling down.”

Then the mom and I exchanged long looks, her look saying, “I understand why you didn’t go in there,” and my look saying, “I didn’t go in there because I was afraid I might be accused of trying to harm her.”

But what if I had gone in there and picked up that little girl and…well, I didn’t, though she might have been bleeding to death. Or she might have been in the clutches of a child molester. I was furious for days after, thinking about how if I had tried to help a hurt child I might have…I mean, what if she had said to her mother, “He touched me.”

“I am fond of children — except boys.” — Lewis Carroll

In 1969, 20 years before that Sacramento restroom incident, I was traveling around America in an old GMC panel truck with my friend Dick Mead. On a blistering hot August day we pulled into Starved Rock State Park in Illinois, got a camping spot, and went exploring. That was when I saw fireflies for the first time. There was a huge old swing set overlooking a beautiful meadow, and I was swinging on a swing, marveling at the hundreds of little blobs of light floating and flitting over the meadow in the waning light of day, when suddenly a cute little pigtailed girl took the swing next to mine.

“I can go higher than you can,” she said, kicking off and swinging hard.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, being twenty. “We’ll see about that.”

So we swung together, going higher and higher, and she laughed and I laughed, and then we stopped pumping and allowed our swings to go lower and lower until we were barely swinging, and then she started pumping again and going higher, and I pumped, too, and caught up to her. Then we let ourselves swing to a stop and she said, “Hey, you want to do the spider? Me and my dad do it all the time. It’s so fun.”

“What’s the spider?” I asked.

And before I could blink, that cute little pigtailed girl was straddling my legs, facing me, gripping my wrists and shouting, “Okay, go!”

And I was instantaneously consumed with terror. “Uh, no,” I said, standing up and shaking free of her. “I have to go now. Nice meeting you.”

“But it’s so fun,” she said plaintively. “You’ll love it.”

What if I’d gone ahead and done the spider with her and her father had come looking for her and caught us in the act? What if a park ranger had seen the longhaired stranger from California spidering with that little girl? Or what if that little girl had gone back to her family and when her mother asked, “Where were you, honey?” the little girl had replied, “Oh, I was playing with a nice man on the swings.”

And during further questioning the little girl had admitted, “Yes, we were touching there because we were doing the spider.”

“What is a home without children? Quiet.” — Henny Youngman

I worked in a Day Care Center when I was in my twenties and again when I was in my fifties. There are many truths about little kids, but one of the largest truths about them is that they are keenly interested in genitals, their own and those of others. They, the children, are particularly interested in the genitals of adult males, which are the most obvious of adult human genitals. Little boys are particularly interested in these larger versions because little boys possess smaller versions and are fascinated by the size discrepancy and the possibility that they, too, might one day have larger equipment.

I remember during my initial indoctrination as an employee of the day care center, how we were told that when a child touched us “there,” it was imperative to instantly put an end to such touching, and to make sure the children knew that such touching was absolutely verboten. Never mind that a large part of my job was helping kids pull their pants down so I could wipe their butts and then help them pull their pants up. Never mind that when the kiddies wet their pants or spilled paint or juice over themselves, it was my job to strip off their sodden poopy pissy clothes, to render them naked and wash them clean and clothe them anew. Never mind that any one of those delightful creatures at any time might have reported to a parent, “He touched me,” which report might have led to my arrest.

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” — Helen Keller

For five years in the 1990’s I ran the Creative Writing department for a summer school for the arts. Ambitious and talented teenagers fifteen to nineteen-years-old were my charges, and among these teens were many sexy young women. I had never taught at any level before then and so had not previously been on the receiving end of the romantic crushes of students.

I will never forget one particular summer evening on the campus of Mills College where our school was being held, a one-month intensive wherein the students lived and breathed their art and the influence of mentor artists. I was walking across the greensward on my way to the music building to find a piano to play, when someone called, “Todd,” and I recognized the voice of Dawn, one of my students.

I stopped, and a moment later Dawn was beside me. I thought her the most beautiful and alluring of my students, and I knew of her crush on me because when I worked with her group of writers she responded to nearly everything I said as if she might at any moment have an orgasm. Then, too, she would linger after class and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me as I tried to concentrate objectively on the excellent erotica she’d written and about which she very much wanted my feedback.

“Hey,” she whispered on that memorable evening, her honeyed breath warm on my cheek. “You and me alone in the dark. Finally.”

“Hey, Dawn,” I said, trying to be cool. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is I want you,” she said, pressing close. “And you want me. And you know it. And I know it. And I’m way over eighteen and I’m on the pill so we’ve got nothing to worry about. Please? Please take me somewhere and make love to me? Please? Or we can do it right here and I’ll make you feel so good you won’t believe it.”

“Nope,” I said, breaking away and running for my life.

And had she been crazy or vindictive, she might easily have gone to the school administrators and said, “He followed me last night and touched me.”

Thankfully she was not crazy or vindictive, though she did show up the next morning for our short story section wearing practically nothing, and brazenly handed me a note — crimson ink on lilac-scented stationery — that said, “Any time, any place. I am so ready for you.” ¥¥

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com