Mendocino County Today: Monday, June 6, 2022

By AVA News Service on June 6, 2022

BENIGN, SEASONABLE WEATHER is expected early this week with hot interior valleys reaching the upper 80s under clear skies and regular cycles of marine stratus along the coast. Drizzle with minimal accumulation is possible along the coast late Tuesday into Wednesday. Temperatures will further warm late in the week. (NWS)

HEALTH CARE DISTRICT MEETING: JUNE 6

The Mendocino Coast Health Care District will hold a Special Meeting on June 6th: Closed Session @ 5 PM. Open Session @ 6 PM

Please join us: us06web.zoom.us/j/82760409881?pwd=bXBnbXkyM25GMkZnbmM4ZGpZVXNnQT09

(Norman de Vall)

GRANGE NEWS: PANCAKES AND BEACH BALLS

by Captain Rainbow

First the PANCAKES. This Sunday June 12. It's the 2nd Sunday of the month and the flapjacks will be flying at the AV Grange, from 8:30 to 11:00. The promise of warmer weather means we can be setting some tables outside, and inside windows will be open with plenty of space between tables. Wear your mask please before and after eating. It's the usual great deal, $10 gets you the full house, pancakes (gluten free on request), scrambled eggs, bacon, juice and coffee or tea. The Deep End Woogie Revue will be masked but unless they get out the sax it shouldn't hurt their wide ranging musical tastes. If they keep showing up we may have to call them beloved.

Now, the BEACH BALL. Saturday July 18th at the AV Grange. Pancake breakfasts ain't paying all the bills. So, to keep the doors open we're going to open the doors to a super fun fundraiser. We're not begging for your money we're going to give you a great time for your dough. LIFE’S A BEACH SO LETS HAVE A BALL. MAMA GROWS FUNK kicks off the music at 8. A Variety Show style 50/50 raffle livens up the break while BOONFIRE sets up to carry us into the night. That's right, 2 of our favorite bands one beach. Ongoing will be the classic Grange snackorama, Tasty treats, water and juice, popcorn too. The Lions Club hosts the “Tiki” bar, (beer and wine) with a silent auction of local offerings. The soon to be famous surfing the curl photo op and a rag-top muscle car will add to the ambiance. Speaking of ambiance we are asking everyone to come in formal swimwear, whatever that may mean to you. This IS a fundraiser to keep the Grange community center happening. We are getting it together to accept credit cards, we can accept checks, but cash is king. Along with the fun we are working at making this fundraiser as safe as possible. We urge everyone to get vaccinated, boosted and tested before coming to the event. We operate on the honor system, so have a little respect for your neighbors, if you forget your mask they will be available at the door (but no snorkels). Windows open, fans blowing and even some Hepa air filters will help keep the Grange as safe as possible. Let’s have a blast at the beach!

THE RAY'S ROAD GLAMPING PROJECT, AN UPDATE

Editor,

On Friday, June 3, County Planner Keith Gronendyke showed me a communiqué from Mary Zeeble Radicevic dated May 26 reducing the requested number of event participants from 500 to 200 with 100 cars on Ray’s Road in Philo. Mary also limited the hours of amplified sound/music to 4 hours per day. Also Keith verified the implications of Zoning Ordinance Sec. 20.168.020 (C) that no permit would be required for 99 or fewer persons at an event.

Personally I am still concerned with 200 people and 100 additional cars coming and going at any given time past my house on Ray’s Road in addition to the significant residential use plus guest and workforce traffic for the four guest accommodation venues already existent in the deeper reaches of the neighborhood.

My two grandkids and their visiting friends often play on the road as is common in residential neighborhoods. Neighbors often walk to the store, children walk to and from the school bus, AV community members often visit Ray’s Road on foot for exercise. I, myself, now half deaf, am often times startled by cars that zip by way too fast. If Ray’s Road were a river it could easily be designated as fully appropriated.

And then there is the fact that these proposed events are to take place in the heart of a residential neighborhood while the other venues are on the backside, primarily along the River.

The Zoning Administrator Staff Report recommendation for approval relies on an interpretation of Mendocino County’s General Plan and Zoning Ordinance and it bewilders me how it can be determined “That such use will not, under the circumstances of that particular case constitute a nuisance or be detrimental to the health, safety, peace, morals, comfort or general welfare of persons residing or working in or passing through the neighborhood of such use, or…”

Certainly it will be a nuisance and a detriment to safety, peace, comfort or general welfare to us neighbors and to some degree to those working or passing through. Some folks have expressed concerns about water, some about increased fire potential and, of course, the noise issue. Even if amplification is limited to 4 hours a day it could extend into late evening. The General Plan talks about “filling needs” but whose need does another wedding event venue in a residential neighborhood fill? The General Plan lists three levels, “regional, community and neighborhood.” Even the entire North Bay region does not “need” another wedding event venue.

So, since events up to 99 persons appears to be allowed in the Mendocino Zoning Ordinance, it would seem to me that it would be most respectful to the wellbeing of our neighborhood and the AV community if no permit were issued or even asked for in the face of the reality that the opportunity is there for the proponent to show us what events up to 99 persons (and hopefully at least half that many cars) might look and feel like in our relatively small rural residential Ray’s Road neighborhood.

David Severn, Ray’s Rd., Philo, 895-2011, nsn@pacific.net

TWO VIEWS OF MENDOCINO'S MAIN STREET circa 1868 (photographs by M.M. Hazeltine)

COMMUNITY FLEA MARKET AT THE YORKVILLE MARKET

Hello Yorkville!

It has been awhile since I have written to you and I hope all of you are doing well.

I would like to host another community flea market at the Yorkville Market on the 4th of July Weekend. I am thinking Friday or Saturday (or both?) to capitalize on the weekend traffic out to the coast, from 10-3 or in that general range.

As in years past, I will set up tables with some shade for those of who are interested in participating. You would bring any household items that you wish to sell, new or used, handmade crafts or art, and set them up for sale in your designated space. You would also be responsible for bringing a cash box and your own change to manage your sales. The table fee is $20, and if you want you can share the space with another community member. You would need to take with you any remaining items after the event is over.

Since the Market is closed, this event will take place outside.

Please let me know if you are interested and if you have a preference on which days and times to hold the event.

I know it’s less than a month away so if I could have confirmation from those interested in participating by the 15th it will give me enough time to plan.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best wishes,

Lisa at Yorkville Market <yorkvillemarket@gmail.com>

THE GREAT REDWOOD TRAIL Hits a Roadblock as Bidders Emerge in the Final Hours to Purchase the Railroad

Senator Mike McGuire may have taken his victory lap a little too soon at a town hall about the Great Redwood Trail on Wednesday night. “Tonight we are able to announce — and this is late breaking,” he declared; “We have finally put a nail in the coffin of Big Coal. We have beat back Big Coal and the toxic coal train.” The nail may be in the coffin, but there’s no train in it yet.…

mendofever.com/2022/06/05/the-great-redwood-trail-hits-a-roadblock-as-bidders-emerge-in-the-final-hours-to-purchase-the-railroad/

MADGE RUTHERFORD MINTON, 43-W-4, was one of the first four women in the United States to graduate from the Advanced Civilian Pilot Training Program. In 1943, she joined the newly organized Women Airforce Service Pilots and trained to ferry Army aircraft.

Madge got her instrument rating on a C-46 at St. Joe, Missouri. She flew the right seat for SNAFU in C-54's and B-17's. Later that spring, she went to Brownsville, Texas, where she checked out in the P-39, P-40, P-51, and the Thunderbolt, P-47.

Madge was also a member of the Ninety-Nines, International Organization of Women Pilots. After the war, Madge, a biologist, co-authored several books on herpetology with her husband, Sherman Minton.

Fly high, Madge!

We are honored to tell the story of so many accomplished #WASP like Madge in our upcoming documentary, “Coming Home: Fight For A Legacy.” Please consider donating to our 501(c)(3) as we continue to raise finishing funds to complete our film and share the important forgotten history of the WASP: http://ow.ly/vUJE50H6LRZ

STILL IN DROUGHT: "As of May 25, 2022, rainfall totals for the current rain year (in the town of Mendocino) were 27.84 inches or about twelve inches below normal for this time of year. For the May reporting period, the Mendocino Community Services District documented 0.70 inches of rain, while the average for May is 1.41 inches. Although the area has received 70% of normal rainfall, it is not enough after two years of drought to reduce the drought stage, which remains at level 4." (Michelle Blackwell, courtesy, the Ukiah Daily Journal)

SUPERVISOR MULHEREN’S BRUSH WITH A MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

We so rarely hear stories of things going right I just wanted to share with you my experience this morning with our mental health system and a little background.…

mendofever.com/2022/06/04/ukiah-police-officer-and-crisis-worker-partner-to-address-the-needs-of-a-mentally-ill-woman/

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY: "Come one, come all, step right up to the register and pay your share of Potter Valley Irrigation District’s new water welfare tax. The wine industry and farm bureau can’t wait to have all the residents of this county paying to maintain their water supply. It’s win win! You get dry wells, depleted aquifer’s and high prices for municipal water and they get all the surface water and also get to write the GSPs ensuring they get all the ground water as well. What a deal!"

PUT UP OR SHUT UP

Editor,

I rarely respond to rumors, but let’s make sure that this fact is known. In 2007, during my first term as sheriff, rumors of misdeeds involving the command staff (including me) were loud and boisterous. I contacted the “Government Corruption Unit” of the FBI and assured them that they had Carte Blanche to access any personal or business accounts I had. I ordered (face to face) all MCSO command staff members to report any misdeeds to the FBI. I gave the FBI agent’s business card to every command staff member and I advised all command staff members that any information given to the FBI should not be reported to me, as the Sheriff. This direct order was issued with punitive action promised if anyone had factual information to report and failed to report it to the FBI.

So while others are dissatisfied that their personal conspiracy theories are not being investigated, I concur with the Editor that facts should be reported to the appropriate agencies immediately.

In other words, put up or shut up.

Tom Allman

Willits

ANOTHER BIG COUNTY FAILURE: THE CANNABIS CODE ENFORCEMENT FAILURE

by Mark Scaramella

The following meaningless gibberish was included in the County’s budget narrative for 2022-2023:

“Code Enforcement

“On September 22, 2020 the Board of Supervisors (BOS) directed the Planning & Building Department (PBS) to make a study of staffing and associated resources within the Code Enforcement division, in order to develop a reorganization plan for presentation to the BOS.

“This plan will develop a strategy to adequately respond to increasing complaints from the community regarding such things as illegal cannabis operations, building code violations, abandoned vehicles and health order violations, and would include the use of satellite imagery as an enforcement tool. The BOS would amend existing Ordinances to allow for increased administrative fines for egregious violations such as environmental damage, or non‐compliance with the Cannabis Ordinance. This would ensure that penalty fees would act as a meaningful deterrent to violations of County Ordinances, and that cost recovery would be more commensurate with staff time expended on investigations.

“On April 12, 2021 the Code Enforcement Division, along with the Cannabis Department, the Office of County Counsel and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), was directed by the BOS to develop an enforcement plan based on that utilized by Humboldt County (including the acquisition of satellite imagery products by the Cannabis Department) and bring the plan back for inclusion on the Consent Calendar. PBS began work on preparing staffing needs (based on the direction given in September 2020) and has also worked to incorporate increased Code Enforcement Division staffing during the budget development process.

“On May 11, 2021 the Code Enforcement Division, the Cannabis Department, the Office of County Counsel and MCSO presented their plan to the BOS, (based on the April 2021 direction) known as the Enhanced Cannabis Enforcement Plan (ECEP). This plan was approved by the BOS, with further direction being given to present the BOS with anticipated funding requirements during the forthcoming Budget hearings.

Additionally, Code Enforcement has been working with MCSO on developing unified enforcement strategies regarding illegal cannabis, and in early 2021 presented an updated table of regulatory penalties for all Code violations to the BOS. This was adopted by the Board and is now in place.”

[Our emphasis.]

This sounded familiar, so we went back to last year’s budget narrative and found almost the same gibberish with the same meaningless dates and plans. It’s almost as if they had done so little that all they had to do was simply regurgitate most of last year’s “update” for this year.

In the Feb. 2022 CEO Report we were told that “The Code Enforcement Division continues to work on the Enhanced Cannabis Enforcement plan per the direction given by the Board of Supervisors.”

Also in Feb. of 2022 we found a mention of the “Enhanced” enforcement activity in the Redwood Valley Municipal Advisory Board’s meeting minutes:

Sheriff Kendall: “Last year (2021) we did 68 cases, we seized 60,000 pounds of unauthorized plants and 45 firearms. We would be asking a forensic officer to help. We want to support a legal market because eventually, it will undercut the black market. Prices have tanked and the market is terrible because of the illegal market. We need pretty extreme enforcement because the only thing that makes it a felony is environmental damage. Just growing illegally is only a misdemeanor so there is no real incentive to not do it. … When I ask for peace officers it can’t be from the Feds because it's still illegal. Occasionally the DEA will come to help us but they haven't taken a case in years. I've been pushing for more enforcement officers because we don't have the personnel to deal with the problems we are creating. Funding has been split between multiple counties, but we aren't sure how much of it will even be spent because we only have two people working marijuana.”

Supervisor Glenn McGourty said that some money went to Code Enforcement (in 2020) and “we are hopeful.”

County Code Enforcement Honcho John Burkes said, “Hiring staff, training staff, is happening in stages. One, for creating a structure for departments, and two, for hiring and training, which is where we're at now. We don't have a lot of coverage given how large the county is. We are now bringing in the field officers and were really hoping to get into the stage three element before the end of summer. We are unsure what the market will look like at the end of summer. At the beginning of 2021, we had 117 complaints 16 of which are still active. What you can expect is that we have extra funding but hiring those people has been difficult. We anticipate change within the next 3-6 months. We will blend in direct enforcement as needed. … There is a referral program, if someone applied for a permit and was denied they can be referred, this takes some weight off of our shoulders as well as theirs. We are currently hiring and looking to bring on up to seven more people. … There is a backlog of around 80 or 90 complaints. We are trying to solve problems related to code enforcement on sites that happen to be listed. … Code enforcement is a complaint hub! If you have any complaints send them here and we will get them in the right hands.”

The County’s “complaint hub” can be found at: mendocinocounty.org/government/planning-building-services/code-enforcement/code-violation-complaint/cannabis-cultivation-complaint

But as is obvious, the hub requires the complainer to do quite a bit of advance/investigative work to even submit a complaint. In addition, as we discovered from the one standing-dead-trees nuisance complaint filed a few years ago by Terry d’Sielke about Mendocino Redwoods’ massive hack&squirt fire hazard nuisance, and the noise complaints around the grape growers sleep-depriving wind fans, there are many excuses the “enforcement” people can dream up for not taking any action at all.

McGourty: “We are also working on an aerial contract.”

Burkes added: “Yes, we are working on aerial surveillance, it is a supplement to set the stage when verifying what the complaint actually is. We are excited to see how this will be used moving forward. … We have been sending out letters to properties in violation, but not to anything that we don't have the resources to engage with. We will incorporate some concentrated areas but at a later date. If you get a letter you are already under investigation.”

Frequent Pot Commenter Ron Edwards concluded: “We have a glut in many places and not many buyers. It's a mess and it will take a while to sort itself out.”

Why was the code enforcement “update” even included in the budget package? There’s no financial information involved, and almost everything is in the future tense. Nothing has been done besides “working with” some other people , and “PBS [Planning & Building] began work on preparing staffing needs,” and “worked to incorporate increased Code Enforcement Division staffing during the budget development process.” (Unsuccessfully, apparently.)

Then we are told that “further direction was given to present the BOS with anticipated funding requirements during the forthcoming Budget hearings.”

They conclude with a note that, after all that “work,” an updated table of regulatory penalties was adopted.

This now gets added to our growing list of Major Failures by the County and the Board. They acknowledge direction to “respond to increasing complaints” more than two years ago, yet all they’ve actually done is update the penalties table. They presented a do-nothing “Enhanced Cannabis Enforcement Plan” last year, but there’s no budget presentation, no staffing proposal — much less any actual “enhanced” enforcement.

The County’s attitude seems to be, essentially: We can’t hire anybody, we can’t enforce much, and nobody really cares anyway because the pot market has collapsed and the problem will go away while we keep working on it.

Which may be true.

But that hasn’t stopped the Cannabis Department and Code Enforcement budgets from rising to almost $3 million so that the County can continue to “work” on the problem.

* * *

WE MAY OWE upstart Sheriff candidate Trent James a bit of an apology. In discussing the County’s “Mobile Crisis Response” the other day, James said he didn’t know if it was funded because “I don’t have access to the budget.” To which we replied, somewhat snarkily, “Everyone has access to the budget.”

BUT WHEN the County posted its 2022-2023 budget this week we went looking for the “Mobile Crisis Response Team” in the budget. Surprise: it’s not there. (Although it might be buried in the Behavior Health’s budget under the “regular employees” line item (at about $2.9 million) or the catch-all but undelineated ‘Special Department Expense” (at about $3 million). All we could find on the County’s website regarding its funding was this:

“March 2022 Update: Two full time crisis workers inland. We continue to recruit for coastal response. Additional funding resources will allow additional teams, which we are also recruiting for. Approved Program Budget: $340,000 per year for Four (4) years.”

But the Board and the Measure B committee had previously funded the program (as a pilot program with three responders) at about this level ($340k) for three years back in 2020. They still haven’t fully staffed it. The County has yet to provide a Measure B budget vs. actual report so we don’t know whether Measure B money or state money is being used to fund the Crisis Team. (The state has talked about prioritizing crisis response in their budget lately.) Either way there should be plenty of funding still available for at least several more years. There’s been talk of using state money to extend the program into more days and evening hours, but no particulars have been provided.

Upshot: The program is more than well-funded and even in its early stages it’s become quite useful and helpful (as we knew it would when we started promoting it back in the 1900s). It just takes Mendo years and years to implement anything — if they ever do.

ED NOTES

MARILYN MOTHERBEAR: "The first rosebud took ever so long to open; but then it did. Knowing the sweet scent and tender beauty does not last long, I clipped it, to bring with me for my birthday weekend. In the relatively short drive from Albion to inland climes, it opened to fullness. Sunshine and heat made the rose time fly!! Now it glows with that light and energy."

PROMPTED by Marilyn Motherbear's adventure with her slow-blooming rose while looking at my blue bud vase with ceramic frog ascending that I bought for a song from Alexis Moyer at her little shop of a thousand pottery delights in Philo, I can say this charming little item has brought years of low intensity delight to me and my missus. It's the little things, isn't it?

WILL THE LIBS FIGHT? James Meek, writing in the current London Review of Books, raises the question: “…But the real danger might be that Trump and the Republicans loyal to him cheat and lie their way to a victory that is accepted by Congress, federal power passes to an autocrat, and, after a period of mass protest, most liberals just put up with it, judging it not worth the blood and damage to fight for democracy. If it is a real danger that civil war may threaten democracy, it is also a real danger that democracy may die because its defenders refuse to start one.”

HMMM. I'd guess that the libs would accommodate themselves to Trumpian tyranny as they've pretty much accommodated themselves to the recent wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and the ongoing disaster of Biden, all of it, supported to the max by the present Democrat government and our lockstep Congressman. But so long as the country remains relatively fat and happy, a big if at this point, given that most libs are presently fattest and happiest while working people are living with the wolf permanently at their door, and who knows who they'll back in the crunch with their class enemies squeezing them from both sides. (Libs defined here as the millions of delusionals who vote Democrat on the assumption Democrats are the way forward.)

I THINK there's been a rolling civil war for years but just now threatening, with the return of Trump, to turn violent in unpredictable ways given the catastrophic backdrop of the growing climate crisis and the economic squeeze put on so many people via unchecked inflation. There's already plenty of idiot gun violence with the dumb asses shooting at each other in public places while the many mental cases gun down whole categories of innocents. All this in a country seemingly organized for mental illness.

THERE WILL BE a kind of balkanization of the country, areas of white warlord-ism like Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington and Oregon, and all the small white towns of the Midwest. There could be real fighting in the South and there will definitely be fighting in the cities, but the prosperous suburbs — Marin, for instance — will be largely unperturbed. However the crack-up occurs, it's coming, and sooner rather than later.

MENDO'S pretty much in the lib camp but there are certainly plenty of blocs of armed camo-buddies, more blustery comic figures, except for their arsenals, than threatening. The levels of actual violence in the coming crack-up will depend heavily on the loyalty of the police to democratic principles, and I'd guess the armed forces of the country, unless the Trumpers are able to subvert them, would not support truly heavy-handed measures like the imposition of martial law in areas of the country hostile to fascism of the Trump type.

THIS NOTICE which appeared in the Ukiah Daily Journal at an exhorbitant cost should have appeared in the AVA because it’s in the AVA’s primary readership area.

A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR TWEAKERS

Dear Readers,

This will not be a hateful commentary on how I was framed by the court system, but rather a cautionary tale for those of you immersed in the dope world.

My advice is, be careful who you piss off and who you do wrong!

I was unfortunate enough to piss off the wrong tweaker. The “victim” in my case allowed me to borrow her truck to go purchase drugs. I never returned. She called the police and told them I took her vehicle at gunpoint. Obviously, she was pissed off enough to fabricate the gunfire part of the scenario. At this point I have no reason to lie to you readers, or rather you tweakers that are out there riding dirty. The damage is done! I took eight years which was the best “deal” I could get. If I lost at trial I would have received 21 years. But I'm not mad at the “victim.” I understand her anger and in a sense understand!

I am optimistic due to a three-year enhancement being dismissed once I get to prison and 66% credit on my sentence. I will be free in a couple of years.

So please my homeboys and homegirls who are in the dope world, be careful who you do dirty. I am honestly headed to prison for something I did not do. If it happened to me, it could happen to you.

Alan Crow

Mendocino County Jail, Ukiah

TRENT YES OR NO (Coast Chatline)

Meredith Smith: Does anyone have one of those frameworks that go over it for those who need help settling/aiming on the toilet? We are having floor puddles galore. I will order one on Amazon but I'd rather not. I met Trent today and I think he's family and we should Elect Him!

* * *

Erif Thunen: Even though he is in favor of police in schools, OK with assault rifles (if they're licensed), and against Covid restrictions (like wearing masks in indoor venues)? These positions make me uncomfortable; I would have thought you, too.

* * *

Silver Mangini: He sounds like not a good person to elect to this office. If these are truly his beliefs, those positions make me uncomfortable also.

* * *

Erif Thunen: On the other hand, do we know what Kendall's positions are on these topics? If they're the same, just not mentioned, that says a good deal about /his/ candidacy. But how to find out? If they both felt the same about the gun issues, I'd go for Trent.

CATCH OF THE DAY, June 5, 2022

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS, Willits. Domestic battery.

DIANA ESPITIA-CABRERA, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury.

JUAN ESTRELLA, Ukiah. Battery with serious injury.

JORGE HERNANDEZ, Ukiah. DUI, no license.

JOSHUA HESS, Ukiah. Concealed weapon, loaded firearm in public, loaded handgun not registered owner, failure to appear.

CHAD MALLETT, Arcata. DUI-alcohol&drugs, concealed dirk-dagger, controlled substance, suspended license for DUI.

NINA MARES, Willits. DUI, suspended license, child endangerment.

ALFONSO MARTINEZ JR., Oak Hills/Ukiah. Unpermitted marijuana cultivation in violation of Fish & Game code.

MICHAEL PATEREAU JR., Covelo. DUI.

AARON STILL, Willits. Brandishing, criminal threats.

WARRIORS OVERCOME PELOSI CURSE TO CRUSH CELTICS 107-88

The Golden State Warriors, powered by a 35-14 third-quarter advantage, blew out Boston on Sunday night, winning 107-88 at Chase Center to even up this best-of-seven series at one game apiece. And the Warriors did so by exploiting what has consistently been the Achilles' heel for Boston throughout these playoffs: poor starts to second halves.…

espn.com/nba/story/_/id/34045693/boston-celtics-lament-more-third-quarter-woes-blowout-loss-game-2

UKRAINE, SUNDAY, JUNE 5

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Sunday that if Ukraine gets longer-range rocket systems from Western countries, Moscow will hit targets “we have not yet struck.”

The remark published in state media ahead of a televised interview came after President Biden last week confirmed that the United States would provide medium-range systems that can pinpoint an enemy target nearly 50 miles away. Ukraine has lobbied hard for allies to send advanced weapons, saying they are vital to gain an edge in the 100-plus-day war.

Explosions rocked Kyiv as two districts were hit in strikes Sunday morning — the first time in more than a month that Russian missiles had targeted the capital. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that missiles destroyed tanks sent to Ukraine by supporting countries. An official with Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said one of the strikes hit a military target while the other damaged civilian infrastructure.

An intense street-by-street fight continuesin the key eastern city of Severodonetsk and surrounding areas, where Ukrainian forces said they have regained ground. While Moscow says Ukraine is suffering “critical losses” and retreating, the Ukrainian counterattacks are “likely blunting the operational momentum Russian forces previously gained,” according to the latest assessment from Britain’s Defense Ministry.

Here’s what else to know

Police in the hard-hit eastern province of Luhansk accused Russian troops of shelling a humanitarian aid facility where 40 civilians had been sheltering. There was no immediate information on deaths or injuries.

Aiden Aslin, a Briton captured while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, will soon appear in court and could face the death penalty, according to pro-Russian prosecutors in Donetsk.

Ukraine’s national soccer team lost an emotional game on Sunday, ending its World Cup dream after a dramatic war-delayed run that saw the country and its diaspora rally in support of the squad.

(NPR)

“IF WASHINGTON CONTINUES ON THE PATH OF ESCALATION — by sending weapons systems that can strike targets in Russia — then Putin will respond. We should know that by now. Putin is not going to back down no matter what. If Washington wants to up-the-ante, then they should prepare for an equal response. That’s the way it’s going to work. For now, the “Special Military Operation” is just a “Special Military Operation”. But when it becomes a war, then all bets are off. Then we will see a full mobilisation, a complete rupture in US-Russo relations, and a halt to all hydrocarbon flows from east to west. Do you think Europe and the United States are prepared for that? Do you think the EU can replace the 25% of the oil and 40% of all the natural gas it presently imports from Russia? Do you have a wind-powered car that will get you to work on time or a factory that will run on solar power? Do you have a plan for heating your house with hydrogen or perhaps a battery from an old Prius? No, you don’t, and neither does Europe. Europe runs on fossil fuels. America runs on fossil fuels. And the more fossil fuel that is consumed, the more the economy grows. The less fossil fuel is consumed, the more the economy shrinks. Are you prepared for life in a shrinking economy with high unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, unending recession, and deepening social malaise brought on by your government’s misguided desire to “stick it to Putin”?

— Mike Whitney

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

They’re driving on South Dora, arrive at the stop sign at Observatory Avenue and watch a man tug at his belt buckle, drop his trousers and squat a few inches above the sidewalk. The driver, wife and kid stare as the fellow uses a spare blue face mask to wipe, then stand, hitch up his pants and stroll off. Broad daylight, if it matters. The filthy mask and warm pile remain on the sidewalk.

This is what we are talking about when we talk about Quality of Life in Ukiah, and how quickly and far that quality has fallen in recent years.

A town in which pedestrians casually pause to defecate in front of anyone and everyone is a town insufficiently elevated over the worst slums in the worst cities in India. And in those places the phrase “quality of life” has never been uttered.

In Ukiah, we demand more of our dogs. No responsible owner would allow Lassie to soil sidewalks or parks.

A week later, in the same area, someone who came to Ukiah for all the wrong reasons (free stuff from nonprofit organizations) broke into an empty office on South Dora.

The fire he set inside didn’t burn the building down, but it wasn’t because the homeless cat wasn’t trying. Quick work by the Ukiah Fire Department saved the place, and I suppose the doctor who owns the office (it’s for sale) has insurance. Your home insurance rates probably won’t increase very much when the damage claim is submitted.

Where does it go from here? What are citizens willing to accept? We understand that advocates and activists have persuaded drifters, criminals, mentally ill and homeless to “visit” Ukiah for political and social reasons having not much at all to do with improving the lives of the newcomers.

We also understand people running the city will do nothing about the gross and disgusting conduct, even to the point of acknowledging it exists.

(NOTE: If local officials don’t know Ukiah is under siege by ill-behaved visitors, they are incompetent. If city officials know, but do nothing, they are corrupt.)

State Street Reconsidered

As the loudest and most persistent critic of the streetscape project, I am happy to report I was wrong, wrong, and utterly inaccurate in assessing the year-long ordeal. I thought it was a big gaudy mistake, but it seems to have emerged just the way city officials had predicted.

They were right and I was wrong.

North State Street has benefited from simple, graceful improvements. The downtown is more inviting and traffic flows more smoothly, and I had confidently assured readers neither would happen. Also, the traffic lights are well-timed, and that’s a big plus that we will soon grow so accustomed to we won’t even notice. So next time I advise readers about matters involving the homeless or marijuana, keep in mind I know exactly what I’m writing about except when I don’t.

Welcome To Ukiah

A friend who once lived in Ukiah but now calls Portland home was rolling through Mendo County a week or so ago, enroute to the Bay Area, and stopped for the night. I’ll let him pick up the story:

“So I got to (well-known Ukiah motel) and the parking lot was filthy, with odd people hanging out in groups. I walked into the lobby and it was dingy, with a whole wall scraped down.

“The woman behind the desk asked if I had a reservation. I said ‘Not just one. Several.’

“The room was nice for a prison cell, and there were what looked like a saltine cracker fight between rival gangs of mice, with crumbs all over the floor. Seriously.

“I chose not to stay.”

It’s Another World

A glimpse into life in Las Carolinas: A dusty boarded-up shop at the fringe of downtown appears to have been abandoned years ago, yet in the front window an odd couple still stands.

On the left is a goofy red-and-yellow big plastic (life-size, I guess) doll we all know as Ronald McDonald. Red hair, red nose, yellow drawers, maybe hijacked from a McDonald’s display a long time ago.

At his side, in sombre shades of black and purple with silver accents and with a face of banished gold, is a very realistic four foot tall replica sarcophagus of King Tut.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of town I drove past a pair of older folks on folding chairs in a vacant lot, a Jeep parked nearby. A hand-lettered sandwich board read: “NEED PRAYER? PULL IN HERE.”

E. St. V. M

Hair which she still devoutly trusts is red.
Colorless eyes, employing
A childish wonder
To which they have not statistic
Title.
A large mouth,
Lascivious,
Aceticized by blasphemies.
A long throat,
Which will someday
Be strangled.
Thin arms,
In the summer-time leopard
With freckles.
A small body,
Unexclamatory,
But which,
Were it the fashion to wear no clothes,
Would be as well-dressed
As any.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, self-description

THE FAT ROACH

by Paul Modic

I just finished reading record producer Larry Livermore's memoirs about living in Mendocino County for about ten years called Spy Rock Memories and I have to say he had a story worth telling and told it well. In his book he mentioned a date, June 10^th, 1989, which I remember clearly:

My friends Danni and Melinda flew in to visit me from Texas, a couple of sisters eleven and twelve, and I drove down to The City the night before their flight arrived. Their mother was a folk art dealer who was driving her van full of Mexican art to California making stops in New Mexico and other places along the way. She was planning to visit for a few days then drive her children back. (The girls are now in their forties and I hope to visit them soon: last year one got married and the other had a baby.)

I went to the Pig Store in the Haight, ordered my breakfast, and thirty-three years later still remember the curly black hair I found on the toilet seat as well as forgetting to lock the bathroom door. A woman burst into the tiny stall as I sat there, me embarrassed and she horrified. (I debated whether to even go back to the counter and wait for my food or just charge out of there but decided that I could handle it.)

Outside the restaurant I glanced at the banner headline on the San Francisco Chronicle: It was June 4^th and the tanks had rolled into Tiananmen Square in Beijing the night before.

We drove back north in my stupid K-Car, well it did get me to Central Mexico five times to Matehuala where the girls grew up, and the younger one was sick in the back foaming a little at the mouth—I guess I should have taken the twisting mountain highway more gently.

I had recently added on to my 448 square foot cabin on a steep hillside in Northern Mendocino so that it resembled a house of 1200 square feet and we stopped at the mall in Santa Rosa to buy plates, silverware, dishcloths, and other housewares as well as matching Madras shorts for each of us.

The outgoing older girl quickly made friends with the teens her age in the neighborhood while the shy younger one was sad and cried for her mommy.

Local author and Whale Gulch School junior high teacher Ray Raphael had a sleepover for his class at his new place on the river in Redway and both girls went to that. When the weekend came the older girl went off to a sleepover party at Shannon Juliani's, I took the younger one to see a movie in town, and planned to check out some music later at the Vet's Hall.

It was June 10^th, 1989, the show at the Garberville theatre was “K-Nine,” a Jim Belushi movie, and I quickly became bored.

After half an hour I asked,”Can we leave, Meli? Can we just leave?”

She was enjoying the flick and wanted to stay but after a while I exerted my adult authority, at thirty-five I was barely more mature than those kids, and took the disgruntled girl out of the theatre.

We went down the street to the Vet's Hall where there was a collection of punk rock bands playing a show produced by Larry Livermore, including Green Day, the band he discovered and recorded, playing one of their earliest gigs although I had never heard of them. From our spot on the sidewalk the sound coming out the door was grating and raucous and I could not convince that pissed-off eleven-year-old to go in and check out the scene with me.

I drove the Plymouth Reliant home to the Gulch and when I reached into the ashtray the fat roach, really about half a joint, was gone! I mentioned it to Danni when she got home from the party the next day and what could she do, in the face of the Grand Inquisitor who notices everything, but admit that she had snagged it for the party. And so my petty streak began, a flaw which keeps me from becoming an enlightened being.

(1989 was the year of up-and-coming bands playing Garberville and Redway. Too Short performed later in the year and there was a fight afterward in the parking lot which led to the Mateel Community Center's liquor license being yanked and instigated KMUD's editorial feature “All Sides Now.” Then The Red Hot Chili Peppers played the MCC scandalizing the prudes when they came out for their encore wearing only socks on their cocks.)

On this day, 5 June 1878, Mexican revolutionary military leader Pancho Villa was born in the village of La Coyotada in Durango. Allied with the revolutionary army of Emiliano Zapata, Villa played an important role in many key military victories which led to the overthrow of the regime of Victoriano Huerta.

Learn more about the Mexican revolution in this biography of Zapata: shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/zapata-of-mexico-peter-e-newell

AN ELDERLY WOMAN IN FORT BRAGG....

I've written before about rain dripping through my ceiling, but tonight it's gotten worse than ever! It began dripping through by 6pm. I put down two bath towels, & then set out two of my larger kitchen pans. It's been dripping through constantly since then & now it's 4:20 in the morning! And now a whole NEW section of the ceiling is dripping! This whole dripping area is just between my living room area & my kitchen & is where I have a dining table & chairs sitting. Now one of the chairs is wet, I had to remove my purse which had been sitting in the chair so now my purse is wet. I have to WALK between my living room & the kitchen so I have to walk right through this wet area. There is water dripping on my table itself! I'm seriously worried that my ceiling is about to collapse. If it collapses as I'm walking through here ..

This is Cypress Ridge Apts., on the back side of the hospital, just east of the emergency entrance to the hospital. It's operated by the GOVERNMENT as housing for low-income Seniors. I feel like the situation I'm living in is ABUSE OF THE ELDERLY! I called our manager on Wednesday & told them it was due to rain this weekend, & demanded that a TARP be put up on my roof either Thursday or Friday. NOTHING HAPPENED, I didn't even HEAR from the manager.

I can't just leave. I'm unable to drive & am disabled, am nearly unable to walk, too. I'M SCARED & DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO!

Ellie Green

Fort Bragg

* * *

(Later): Things look MUCH BETTER today, & all twenty-six of YOU sure helped in that! Suddenly today, Billy, our repair guy, SHOWED up! On a Sunday! He usually does NOT work on Sundays! He emptied my pans & wrung out all my bath towels & left them in the bathtub. He laid down a HUGE piece of plastic all over my floor & put down TWO VERY LARGE tubs to catch the drips. He SAYS he & another guy are showing up TOMORROW to carve into my ceiling to get rid of all the wet wood. But he agrees with me they won't start re-building the ceiling until the ROOF is fixed! While here, he called Redwood Roofers & asked them to come out here TUESDAY & begin re-building THE ROOF! Of course on the one hand, I'll believe it when I see it, but .. I feel MUCH more HOPEFUL!

DAN GJERDE, our County Supervisor, sent me a copy of an e-mail he sent to RCHDC in Ukiah, asking “Ryan and Dan” to look into this right away, & told them I have a dripping ceiling in my apartment in Cypress Ridge Apts.! BLESS YOU, DAN!

Jared Huffman, our Congressman, is already on the job. His local representative, a sweet woman named Jez Anderson, has ALREADY BEEN OUT HERE, & had me fill out a form & write-up what the problem is. Jared will get that ASAP.

I dearly love all of you, including Grandma Bear, who PHONED ME & sent her love! I SO MUCH APPRECIATE the time & trouble you have gone to on my behalf! I feel SO MUCH more positive today, what with your generous help, AND Billy showing up!

Of course we can't KNOW that Redwood Roofers will actually SHOW UP on Tuesday - that would really be fast! But yes, I'm VERY encouraged! You all helped in that.

Love, Ellie Green

WHERE'S THE BLACK BOOK?

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is puzzling over why no one at the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has exposed the client list of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — and over why no one in the legacy media appears to be chasing the story.

“Only thing more remarkable than DOJ not leaking the list is that no one in the media cares,” Musk said on Saturday in a Twitter post. “Doesn’t that seem odd?”

Musk attached the comment to a meme entitled “Things I’ll never see in my life,” showing illustrations of a fire-breathing dragon, a dinosaur and a unicorn, along with the words “Epstein-Maxwell client list.”

WALDO HUNTER of Eureka is a man with a long memory. He had never forgotten or forgiven that I once chided the natives up there for pouring catsup over their fried eggs, and has been plotting revenge ever since. Here it is in his own undeniable words:

“On our most recent trip to San Francisco, my wife and I had breakfast at one of those famous restaurants of yours down near Fisherman’s Wharf. Upon entering the place, my wife tripped over a plastic tube that pipes in brown gravy from the oil-reclaiming plant in Richmond. The scrambled eggs tasted like they had been hauled across the country from Ashtabula Ohio, in the trunk of a 1941 Studebaker. The toast seemed to have popped right out of the refrigerator freshly glazed with fireproofing compound for shake shingles, while the chef du jour, in an inspired flash, added a fillip of Dr. Snoramorfles’ Iron Mountain Spavin Liniment to the coffee Moral: Never go anyplace without a bottle of catsup.”

— Herb Caen, 1976

THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE’S FIRST DRAFT: 1922 Design Was An Industrial Mess

by Peter Hartlaub

The San Francisco Chronicle ran the first concept drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1922.

We just passed the 84th birthday of the Golden Gate Bridge and with it came another excuse to appreciate the span’s enduring Art Deco design and timeless engineering.

But with every celebration, the city should also breathe a collective sigh of relief. Because the original bridge design, all but lost in time now, was about as classic as your seventh-grade orthodontia from the 1980s. It combined cantilever and suspension elements, which is like combining demolition derby and ballet. No one would want to put this bridge in a snow globe.

The subject came up upon discovering century-old Golden Gate Bridge concept drawings in The Chronicle archive, which led to a deeper dive into the newspaper’s early coverage of the bridge. While there had been talk of a bridge joining San Francisco and Marin County for decades — with questions about whether it was even possible to bridge the mile-wide gap with such a strong current — a 1922 front page article was the first time the public viewed a sketch of the potential design.

The single image published Dec. 8, 1922, resembles the industrial Carquinez Bridge, except at 20 times the scale. It’s the kind of bridge one designs when all they have to work with is Popsicle sticks and string.

“The Golden Gate can be bridged,” The Chronicle article began. “A feasible plan just submitted, if it obtains the sanction and approval of the War Department, will open a new era for San Francisco.”

The first 1922 concept drawings of the Golden Gate Bridge included cantilever and suspension elements in the design.

Other San Francisco newspapers quickly called the bridge design ugly. One competitor described it as an upside-down rat trap. But The San Francisco Chronicle was strongly in favor of the Golden Gate Bridge, later lobbying heavily for the bonds to fund the structure. Like everything else involving the bridge in the 1920s and 1930s, the first Chronicle article was embarrassingly effusive.

“No structure raised by man, in the opinion of those who studied the design, would be more spectacular than the proposed bridge,” The Chronicle article continued. “The greatest span lengths in the world would be supported by two towers exceeding the height of the Eiffel tower. The view from the tops of these towers, to which visitors would be conveyed by a system of elevators, would be one of the wonders of the world.”

Indeed, additional architectural renderings, which didn’t run in the newspaper but were filed and remain in The Chronicle archives, show bulbous rooms at the tops of the towers that look spacious enough for large observation decks (or very small casinos).

The first logo for the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District used the hybrid bridge design.

In early interviews, Golden Gate Bridge engineer Joseph Strauss didn’t pretend that the 1922 bridge design was about looks. He said cantilever alone would be too heavy, and suspension alone would “lack rigidity and be too expensive.” The hybrid design remained throughout the 1920s, and was even adopted into the logo of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District in 1928.

This August 1930 sketch, found and photographed in the San Francisco Chronicle library, is the first Chronicle archive image that shows an all-suspension Golden Gate Bridge. It's very close to the final design.

The first image of a leaner, all-suspension design finally appeared in The Chronicle on Jan. 12, 1930, although it confusingly wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the news article. The handout drawing, also found in The Chronicle archive, is a sleeker and less angular version of the current bridge.

Confirmation of a suspension bridge appeared on March 10, 1930, in the middle of a Page 5 story. Explaining the change in plans, Strauss simply stated in the seventh paragraph that, “the cable suspension type has been adopted because of the faster construction and lower cost.”

With a major bond measure that would provide $35 million to fund the Golden Gate Bridge set for November 1930, Chronicle writers quickly defaulted back to high praise, gathering a group of artists to rave over the new design, and telling readers the bridge would change the city’s future.

“Every school geography in the world would feature the bridge as one of the world’s wonders and the greatest of man’s engineering achievement,” The Chronicle reported, “giving advertising to the Golden Gate and to San Francisco which the boosters deem priceless.”

This time, they were right.

AMERICA’S GUN FETISH

There will be no gun control, not only because of the gun lobby and a corrupt political class, but because for many white Americans the idea of the gun is the only power they have left.

by Chris Hedges

Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7. By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting. Two decades as a reporter in war zones, however, resulted in a deep aversion to weapons. I saw what they did to human bodies. I inherited my grandfather’s guns and gave them to my uncle.

Guns made my family, lower working-class people in Maine, feel powerful, even when they were not. Take away their guns and what was left? Decaying small towns, shuttered textile and paper mills, dead-end jobs, seedy bars where veterans, nearly all the men in my family were veterans, drank away their trauma. Take away the guns, and the brute force of squalor, decline, and abandonment hit you in the face like a tidal wave.

Yes, the gun lobby and weapons manufacturers fuel the violence with easily available assault-style weapons, whose small caliber 5.56 mm cartridges make them largely useless for hunting. Yes, the lax gun laws and risible background checks are partially to blame. But America also fetishizes guns. This fetish has intensified among white working-class men, who have seen everything slip beyond their grasp: economic stability, a sense of place within the society, hope for the future and political empowerment. The fear of losing the gun is the final crushing blow to self-esteem and dignity, a surrender to the economic and political forces that have destroyed their lives. They cling to the gun as an idea, a belief that with it they are strong, unassailable, and independent. The shifting sands of demographics, with white people projected to become a minority in the U.S. by 2045, intensifies this primal desire, they would say need, to own a weapon.

There have been over 200 mass shootings this year. There are nearly 400 million guns in the U.S., some 120 guns for every 100 Americans. Half of the privately-owned guns are owned by 3 percent of the population, according to a 2016 study. Our neighbor in Maine had 23 guns. Restrictive gun laws, and gun laws that are inequitably enforced, block gun ownership for many Blacks, especially in urban neighborhoods. Federal law, for example, prohibits gun ownership for most people with felony convictions, effectively barring legal gun ownership for a third of Black men. The outlawing of guns for Blacks is part of a long continuum. Blacks were denied the right to own guns under the antebellum Slave Codes, the post-Civil War Black Codes, and the Jim Crow laws.

White people built their supremacy in America and globally with violence. They massacred Native Americans and stole their land. They kidnapped Africans, shipped them as cargo to the Americas, and then enslaved, lynched, imprisoned, and impoverished Black people for generations. They have always gunned down Black people with impunity, a historical reality only recently discernable to most white people because of videos of killings on cell phones.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence writes. “It has never yet melted.”

White society, sometimes overtly and sometimes unconsciously, deeply fears Black retribution for its four centuries of murderous assaults.

“Again, I say that each and every Negro, during the last 300 years, possesses from that heritage a greater burden of hate for America than they themselves know,” Richard Wright notes in his journal. “Perhaps it is well that Negroes try to be as unintellectual as possible, for if they ever started really thinking about what happened to them, they’d go wild. And perhaps that is the secret of whites who want to believe that Negroes really have no memory; for if they thought that Negroes remembered they would start out to shoot them all in sheer self-defense.”

The Second Amendment, as the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” was designed to solidify the rights, often demanded under state law, of whites to carry weapons. Southern white men were not only requiredto own guns but serve in slave patrols. These weapons were used to exterminate the indigenous population, hunt down enslaved people who escaped bondage and violently crush slave revolts, strikes and other uprisings by oppressed groups. Vigilante violence is wired into our DNA.

“Most American violence – and this also illuminates its relationship to state power – has been initiated with a ‘conservative’ bias,” the historian Richard Hofstadter writes. “It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities, and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant, or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals. A high proportion of our violent actions has thus come from the top dogs or the middle dogs. Such has been the character of most mob and vigilante movements. This may help to explain why so little of it has been used against state authority, and why in turn it has been so easily and indulgently forgotten.”

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old white shooter in Buffalo who killed ten Black people and wounded three others, one of them Black, at the Tops Friendly Markets in a Black neighborhood, gave expression in a 180-page manifesto to this white fear, or “great replacement theory.” Gendron repeatedly cited Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old mass shooter who in 2019 killed 51 people and injured 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant, like Gendron, live streamed his attack so, he believed, he could be cheered on by a virtual audience. Robert Bowers, 46, killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old, in 2019 drove more than 11 hours to target Hispanics, leaving 22 people dead and 26 injured in a Walmart in El Paso. John Earnest, who pleaded guilty to murdering one and injuring three others in 2019 at a synagogue in Poway, California, saw the “white race” being supplanted by other races. Dylann Roof in 2015 fired 77 shots from his .45-caliber Glock pistol at parishioners attending a Bible study at the Black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. He murdered nine of them. “You Blacks are killing white people on the streets everyday and raping white women everyday,” he shouted at his victims as he was firing, according to a journal he kept in jail.

The gun enforced white supremacy. It should not be surprising that it is embraced as the instrument that will prevent whites from being dethroned.

The specter of societal collapse, less and less a conspiracy theory as we barrel to climate breakdown, reinforces the gun fetish. Survivalist cults, infused with white supremacy, paint the scenario of gangs of marauding Black and brown people fleeing the chaos of lawless cities and ravaging the countryside. These hordes of Black and brown people, the survivalists believe, will only be kept at bay with guns, especially assault-style weapons. This is not far removed from calling for their extermination.

Richard Slotkin calls our national lust for blood sacrifice the “structuring metaphor of the American experience,” a belief in “regeneration through violence.” Blood sacrifice, he writes in his trilogy Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, is celebrated as the highest form of good. Sometimes it requires the blood of heroes, but most often it requires the blood of enemies.

This blood sacrifice, whether at home or in foreign wars, is racialized. The U.S. has slaughtered millions of the globe’s inhabitants, including women and children, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Libya, as well as in numerous proxy wars, the latest in Ukraine, where the Biden administration will ship another $700 million in weapons to supplement $54 billion in military and humanitarian aid.

When the national mythology inculcates into a population that it has the divine right to kill others to purge the earth of evil, how can this mythology not be ingested by naïve and alienated individuals? Kill them overseas. Kill them at home. The more the empire deteriorates, the more the impetus to kill grows. Violence, in desperation, becomes the only route to salvation.

“A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions,” Slotkin writes.

America’s gun fetish and culture of vigilante violence makes the U.S. very different from other industrialized nations. This is the reason there will never be serious gun control. It does not matter how many mass shootings take place, how many children are butchered in their classrooms, or how high the homicide rate climbs.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, dominated by a corporate oligarchy that refuses to respond to the mounting misery of the bottom half of the population, the more the rage of the underclass will find expression through violence. Blacks, Muslims, Asians, undocumented workers, Jews, homosexuals, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, already branded as contaminants, will be slated for execution. Violence will spawn more violence.

“People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become,” James Baldwin writes of the American South. “The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.” He added that he “was not struck by their wickedness, for that wickedness was but the spirit and the history of America. What struck me was the unbelievable dimension of their sorrow. I felt as though I had wandered into hell.”

Those who cling to the mythology of white supremacy cannot be reached through rational discussion. Mythology is all they have left. When this mythology appears under threat it triggers a ferocious backlash, for without the myth there is an emptiness, an emotional void, a crushing despair.

America has two choices. It can reintegrate the dispossessed back into the society through radical New Deal types of reforms, or it can leave its underclass to wallow in the toxins of poverty, hate and resentment, fueling the blood sacrifices that afflict us. This choice, I fear, has already been made. The ruling oligarchy doesn’t take the subway or fly on commercial jets. It is protected by the FBI, Homeland Security, police escorts, and bodyguards. Its children attend private schools. It lives in gated communities with elaborate surveillance systems. We don’t matter.

(chrishedges.substack.com)

THREE BUS RIDES & ONE TRAIN RIDE

by Doug Holland

At a quiet residential corner, a young man stood on the curb offering his favorite obscene gesture on each hand to all passing vehicles. It's my favorite gesture, too, so I appreciated him holding it extra long for all the bus's passengers as we slowly rolled past.

You don't get two flipped fingers at once most days, and you don't usually get 'em unearned from a stranger as you're passing by, but it happens often enough that I wouldn't think to jot it in my notebook and write about it, if he hadn't been smiling so warm and friendly.

It was a fabulous contradiction, but he seemed so very happy I had to smile and flip a finger back at him. His gesture said fuck you, but his face and his eyes said he was having a good time and maybe hoped I was, too. We were basically saying 'good morning' to each other.

* * *

One of the routes I occasionally ride, the #560 bus, loops through the airport on its way to more interesting places, and stops at the airport's front door.

I never fly, and hate airports — they're miniature totalitarian states — so to me it's a very depressing sight.

Barely a hundred years ago, humans figured out how to lift themselves off the ground and put themselves down somewhere else, usually without dying. Now they take off and land at places like this — enormous, inhuman, ugly and depressing architecture that covers and ruins about four square miles. There must be 25,000 empty cars, parked in block after block of expensive lots and six-story gray garages, almost every space taken.

The bus goes along a series of concrete bridges, alongside cars always maneuvering across several lanes. Vehicles honk, drivers swear, and as we approach the airport's main entrance, there are always 2-4 mean-looking, muscular police vans parked at the side, to remind you that you're passing through a gulag, and that the white zone is for loading/unloading only.

Whether it's 10AM or 10PM, hundreds and hundreds of people stand in clumps of two or three or alone at the half-mile of curbside, most of them lugging luggage. Some look at their phones. Some look at traffic, hoping to see their cab or Uber or Uncle Henry's Volvo approaching. None look at each other, and none look happy.

They wanted to come to Seattle for business or vacation or returning home, but nobody ever wanted to be in the pick-up/drop-off area at the airport. On each person's face is the same expression they'll eventually wear in a drawer at the morgue.

It's a very strange place, the airport — cold, even on the sunniest day.

The bus pulls over, and a few people step off, a few people step on, and then onward we roll through another mile of awful airport infrastructure, and then a second airport stop. Finally the bus turns onto a freeway on-ramp.

In all my travels around Seattle, it's the only ride where merging into an ocean of slow-moving metal and glass on the freeway is more relaxing and scenic than what came before.

* * *

I did a good deed, and I'm so proud of myself!

On the #36 bus, I sat a few rows behind and opposite a scruffy old man wearing in a faded Mariners jacket and a Seahawks cap. The cap was greasy, stained, and bragging that the Seahawks had earned a berth in the 2005 Super Bowl — a very old cap atop a very old man's head.

Eventually the man rang the bell, stood up, and started amblin' toward the door before the bus had stopped. I do that too, a habit learned when I was young and spry, but old folks like me or the scruffy guy really should break the habit, and remain seated until the ride comes to a complete stop.

Instead of the smooth slow-down and stop he was expecting, the brakes jerked a bit, and the scruffy old dude very nearly went tumbling. He grabbed a grab-bar, so he didn't fall, but he dropped the bag he'd been carrying, and his cap bumped a post and got knocked off.

When the bus stopped, he picked up the stuff that had spilled from the bag (clothes and a comic book) and walked toward the bus's back door. He hadn't noticed the cap, though, so here's where I'm the hero.

“Hey, mister,” I said, but he didn't hear me, kept walking, and stepped off the bus. “Hey, mister,” I said again, much louder, and he heard me but seemed confused, looked around on the sidewalk. So I stood up and snatched his hat from the floor, walked to the still-open bus door (the driver had heard me, and was watching me in his rear-view), held out his cap and shouted, “Hey, mister!”

He finally looked at me, understand the situation, and reached for his cap, which, I then noticed, was remarkably icky — what used to be white was yellow, what used to be blue was beige, it was ripped at the back, and there was a blood stain on the bill. He said, “Thanks,” and turned and walked away.

The bus driver yelled at me, “Hey, get on or off the bus, but get out of the doorway,” and he pushed whatever button slammed the bus's back door in my face. I sat down again, and rode the rest of the way feeling so damned full of good citizenship I had to tell you about it.

* * *

Behind my KN95 mask, I belched on the train. Gave it no thought before and barely after, only because it was a louder belch than I'd expected. Usually you can't hear a burp on transit, but I'd come directly from a café cheeseburger.

Sitting in one of the sideways seats, a man in a suit looked at me. His face was under a mask, same as mine, so maybe he smiled, maybe he didn't, but his eyes didn't appear annoyed.

Since he seemed to appreciate the first one, I wanted to belch again, but I didn't have another in me and damn it, I've never learned how to burp on demand.

BEING OLD

by Roger Angell

Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.

Roger Angell and Andy; Central Park, January, 2014. Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe

Now, still facing you, if I cover my left, or better, eye with one hand, what I see is a blurry encircling version of the ceiling and floor and walls or windows to our right and left but no sign of your face or head: nothing in the middle. But cheer up: if I reverse things and cover my right eye, there you are, back again. If I take my hand away and look at you with both eyes, the empty hole disappears and you’re in 3-D, and actually looking pretty terrific today. Macular degeneration.

I’m ninety-three, and I’m feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I’ve forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I’ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb. Shingles, in 1996, with resultant nerve damage.

Like many men and women my age, I get around with a couple of arterial stents that keep my heart chunking. I also sport a minute plastic seashell that clamps shut a congenital hole in my heart, discovered in my early eighties. The surgeon at Mass General who fixed up this PFO (a patent foramen ovale—I love to say it) was a Mexican-born character actor in beads and clogs, and a fervent admirer of Derek Jeter. Counting this procedure and the stents, plus a passing balloon angioplasty and two or three false alarms, I’ve become sort of a table potato, unalarmed by the X-ray cameras swooping eerily about just above my naked body in a darkened and icy operating room; there’s also a little TV screen up there that presents my heart as a pendant ragbag attached to tacky ribbons of veins and arteries. But never mind. Nowadays, I pop a pink beta-blocker and a white statin at breakfast, along with several lesser pills, and head off to my human-wreckage gym, and it’s been a couple of years since the last showing.

My left knee is thicker but shakier than my right. I messed it up playing football, eons ago, but can’t remember what went wrong there more recently. I had a date to have the joint replaced by a famous knee man (he’s listed in the Metropolitan Opera program as a major supporter) but changed course at the last moment, opting elsewhere for injections of synthetic frog hair or rooster combs or something, which magically took away the pain. I walk around with a cane now when outdoors—“Stop brandishing!” I hear my wife, Carol, admonishing—which gives me a nice little edge when hailing cabs.

The lower-middle sector of my spine twists and jogs like a Connecticut county road, thanks to a herniated disk seven or eight years ago. This has cost me two or three inches of height, transforming me from Gary Cooper to Geppetto. After days spent groaning on the floor, I received a blessed epidural, ending the ordeal. “You can sit up now,” the doctor said, whisking off his shower cap. “Listen, do you know who Dominic Chianese is?”

“Isn’t that Uncle Junior?” I said, confused. “You know—from ‘The Sopranos’?”

“Yes,” he said. “He and I play in a mandolin quartet every Wednesday night at the Hotel Edison. Do you think you could help us get a listing in the front of The New Yorker?”

I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.

On the other hand, I’ve not yet forgotten Keats or Dick Cheney or what’s waiting for me at the dry cleaner’s today. As of right now, I’m not Christopher Hitchens or Tony Judt or Nora Ephron; I’m not dead and not yet mindless in a reliable upstate facility. Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, “Holy shit—he’s still vertical!”

Let’s move on. A smooth fox terrier of ours named Harry was full of surprises. Wildly sociable, like others of his breed, he grew a fraction more reserved in maturity, and learned to cultivate a separate wagging acquaintance with each fresh visitor or old pal he came upon in the living room. If friends had come for dinner, he’d arise from an evening nap and leisurely tour the table in imitation of a three-star headwaiter: Everything O.K. here? Is there anything we could bring you? How was the crème brûlée? Terriers aren’t water dogs, but Harry enjoyed kayaking in Maine, sitting like a figurehead between my knees for an hour or more and scoping out the passing cormorant or yachtsman. Back in the city, he established his personality and dashing good looks on the neighborhood to the extent that a local artist executed a striking head-on portrait in pointillist oils, based on a snapshot of him she’d sneaked in Central Park. Harry took his leave (another surprise) on a June afternoon three years ago, a few days after his eighth birthday. Alone in our fifth-floor apartment, as was usual during working hours, he became unhinged by a noisy thunderstorm and went out a front window left a quarter open on a muggy day. I knew him well and could summon up his feelings during the brief moments of that leap: the welcome coolness of rain on his muzzle and shoulders, the excitement of air and space around his outstretched body.

Here in my tenth decade, I can testify that the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news. Living long means enough already. When Harry died, Carol and I couldn’t stop weeping; we sat in the bathroom with his retrieved body on a mat between us, the light-brown patches on his back and the near-black of his ears still darkened by the rain, and passed a Kleenex box back and forth between us. Not all the tears were for him. Two months earlier, a beautiful daughter of mine, my oldest child, had ended her life, and the oceanic force and mystery of that event had not left full space for tears. Now we could cry without reserve, weep together for Harry and Callie and ourselves. Harry cut us loose.

A few notes about age is my aim here, but a little more about loss is inevitable. “Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.

Our dead are almost beyond counting and we want to herd them along, pen them up somewhere in order to keep them straight. I like to think of mine as fellow-voyagers crowded aboard the Île de France (the idea is swiped from “Outward Bound”). Here’s my father, still handsome in his tuxedo, lighting a Lucky Strike. There’s Ted Smith, about to name-drop his Gloucester home town again. Here comes Slim Aarons. Here’s Esther Mae Counts, from fourth grade: hi, Esther Mae. There’s Gardner—with Cecille Shawn, for some reason. Here’s Ted Yates. Anna Hamburger. Colba F. Gucker, better known as Chief. Bob Ascheim. Victor Pritchett—and Dorothy. Henry Allen. Bart Giamatti. My elder old-maid cousin Jean Webster and her unexpected, late-arriving Brit husband, Capel Hanbury. Kitty Stableford. Dan Quisenberry. Nancy Field. Freddy Alexandre. I look around for others and at times can almost produce someone at will. Callie returns, via a phone call. “Dad?” It’s her, all right, her voice affectionately rising at the end—“Da-ad?”—but sounding a bit impatient this time. She’s in a hurry. And now Harold Eads. Toni Robin. Dick Salmon, his face bright red with laughter. Edith Oliver. Sue Dawson. Herb Mitgang. Coop. Tudie. Elwood Carter.

These names are best kept in mind rather than boxed and put away somewhere. Old letters are engrossing but feel historic in numbers, photo albums delightful but with a glum after-kick like a chocolate caramel. Home movies are killers: Zeke, a long-gone Lab, alive again, rushing from right to left with a tennis ball in his mouth; my sister Nancy, stunning at seventeen, smoking a lipstick-stained cigarette aboard Astrid, with the breeze stirring her tied-up brown hair; my mother laughing and ducking out of the picture again, waving her hands in front of her face in embarrassment—she’s about thirty-five. Me sitting cross-legged under a Ping-Pong table, at eleven. Take us away.

My list of names is banal but astounding, and it’s barely a fraction, the ones that slip into view in the first minute or two. Anyone over sixty knows this; my list is only longer. I don’t go there often, but, once I start, the battalion of the dead is on duty, alertly waiting. Why do they sustain me so, cheer me up, remind me of life? I don’t understand this. Why am I not endlessly grieving?

What I’ve come to count on is the white-coated attendant of memory, silently here again to deliver dabs from the laboratory dish of me. In the days before Carol died, twenty months ago, she lay semiconscious in bed at home, alternating periods of faint or imperceptible breathing with deep, shuddering catch-up breaths. Then, in a delicate gesture, she would run the pointed tip of her tongue lightly around the upper curve of her teeth. She repeated this pattern again and again. I’ve forgotten, perhaps mercifully, much of what happened in that last week and the weeks after, but this recurs.

Carol is around still, but less reliably. For almost a year, I would wake up from another late-afternoon mini-nap in the same living-room chair, and, in the instants before clarity, would sense her sitting in her own chair, just opposite. Not a ghost but a presence, alive as before and in the same instant gone again. This happened often, and I almost came to count on it, knowing that it wouldn’t last. Then it stopped.

People my age and younger friends as well seem able to recall entire tapestries of childhood, and swatches from their children’s early lives as well: conversations, exact meals, birthday parties, illnesses, picnics, vacation B. and B.s, trips to the ballet, the time when … I can’t do this and it eats at me, but then, without announcement or connection, something turns up. I am walking on Ludlow Lane, in Snedens, with my two young daughters, years ago on a summer morning. I’m in my late thirties; they’re about nine and six, and I’m complaining about the steep little stretch of road between us and our house, just up the hill. Maybe I’m getting old, I offer. Then I say that one day I’ll be really old and they’ll have to hold me up. I imitate an old man mumbling nonsense and start to walk with wobbly legs. Callie and Alice scream with laughter and hold me up, one on each side. When I stop, they ask for more, and we do this over and over.

I’m leaving out a lot, I see. My work— I’m still working, or sort of. Reading. The collapsing, grossly insistent world. Stuff I get excited about or depressed about all the time. Dailiness—but how can I explain this one? Perhaps with a blog recently posted on Facebook by a woman I know who lives in Australia. “Good Lord, we’ve run out of nutmeg!” it began. “How in the world did that ever happen?” Dozens of days are like that with me lately.

Intimates and my family—mine not very near me now but always on call, always with me. My children Alice and John Henry and my daughter-in-law Alice—yes, another one—and my granddaughters Laura and Lily and Clara, who together and separately were as steely and resplendent as a company of Marines on the day we buried Carol. And on other days and in other ways as well. Laura, for example, who will appear almost overnight, on demand, to drive me and my dog and my stuff five hundred miles Down East, then does it again, backward, later in the summer. Hours of talk and sleep (mine, not hers) and renewal—the abandoned mills at Lawrence, Mass., Cat Mousam Road, the Narramissic River still there—plus a couple of nights together, with the summer candles again.

Friends in great numbers now, taking me to dinner or cooking in for me. (One afternoon, I found a freshly roasted chicken sitting outside my front door; two hours later, another one appeared in the same spot.) Friends inviting me to the opera, or to Fairway on Sunday morning, or to dine with their kids at the East Side Deli, or to a wedding at the Rockbound Chapel, or bringing in ice cream to share at my place while we catch another Yankees game. They saved my life. In the first summer after Carol had gone, a man I’d known slightly and pleasantly for decades listened while I talked about my changed routines and my doctors and dog walkers and the magazine. I paused for a moment, and he said, “Plus you have us.”

Another message—also brief, also breathtaking—came on an earlier afternoon at my longtime therapist’s, at a time when I felt I’d lost almost everything. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this,” I said at last.

A silence, then: “Neither do I. But you will.”

I am a world-class complainer but find palpable joy arriving with my evening Dewar’s, from Robinson Cano between pitches, from the first pages once again of “Appointment in Samarra” or the last lines of the Elizabeth Bishop poem called “Poem.” From the briefest strains of Handel or Roy Orbison, or Dennis Brain playing the early bars of his stunning Mozart horn concertos. (This Angel recording may have been one of the first things Carol and I acquired just after our marriage, and I hear it playing on a sunny Saturday morning in our Ninety-fourth Street walkup.) Also the recalled faces and then the names of Jean Dixon or Roscoe Karns or Porter Hall or Brad Dourif in another Netflix rerun. Chloë Sevigny in “Trees Lounge.” Gail Collins on a good day. Family ice-skating up near Harlem in the nineteen-eighties, with the Park employees, high on youth or weed, looping past us backward to show their smiles.

Recent and not so recent surveys (including the six-decades-long Grant Study of the lives of some nineteen-forties Harvard graduates) confirm that a majority of us people over seventy-five keep surprising ourselves with happiness. Put me on that list. Our children are adults now and mostly gone off, and let’s hope full of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our ambitions. If our wives or husbands are still with us, we sense a trickle of contentment flowing from the reliable springs of routine, affection in long silences, calm within the light boredom of well-worn friends, retold stories, and mossy opinions. Also the distant whoosh of a surfaced porpoise outside our night windows.

We elders—what kind of a handle is this, anyway, halfway between a tree and an eel?—we elders have learned a thing or two, including invisibility. Here I am in a conversation with some trusty friends—old friends but actually not all that old: they’re in their sixties—and we’re finishing the wine and in serious converse about global warming in Nyack or Virginia Woolf the cross-dresser. There’s a pause, and I chime in with a couple of sentences. The others look at me politely, then resume the talk exactly at the point where they’ve just left it. What? Hello? Didn’t I just say something? Have I left the room? Have I experienced what neurologists call a TIA—a transient ischemic attack? I didn’t expect to take over the chat but did await a word or two of response. Not tonight, though. (Women I know say that this began to happen to them when they passed fifty.) When I mention the phenomenon to anyone around my age, I get back nods and smiles. Yes, we’re invisible. Honored, respected, even loved, but not quite worth listening to anymore. You’ve had your turn, Pops; now it’s ours.

I’ve been asking myself why I don’t think about my approaching visitor, death. He was often on my mind thirty or forty years ago, I believe, though more of a stranger. Death terrified me then, because I had so many engagements. The enforced opposite—no dinner dates or coming attractions, no urgent business, no fun, no calls, no errands, no returned words or touches—left a blank that I could not light or furnish: a condition I recognized from childhood bad dreams and sudden awakenings. Well, not yet, not soon, or probably not, I would console myself, and that welcome but then tediously repeated postponement felt in time less like a threat than like a family obligation—tea with Aunt Molly in Montclair, someday soon but not now. Death, meanwhile, was constantly onstage or changing costume for his next engagement—as Bergman’s thick-faced chess player; as the medieval night-rider in a hoodie; as Woody Allen’s awkward visitor half-falling into the room as he enters through the window; as W. C. Fields’s man in the bright nightgown—and in my mind had gone from spectre to a waiting second-level celebrity on the Letterman show. Or almost. Some people I knew seemed to have lost all fear when dying and awaited the end with a certain impatience. “I’m tired of lying here,” said one. “Why is this taking so long?” asked another. Death will get it on with me eventually, and stay much too long, and though I’m in no hurry about the meeting, I feel I know him almost too well by now.

A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way, as well, though we scarcely notice it. We have become tireless voyeurs of death: he is on the morning news and the evening news and on the breaking, middle-of–the-day news as well—not the celebrity death, I mean, but the everyone-else death. A roadside-accident figure, covered with a sheet. A dead family, removed from a ramshackle faraway building pocked and torn by bullets. The transportation dead. The dead in floods and hurricanes and tsunamis, in numbers called “tolls.” The military dead, presented in silence on your home screen, looking youthful and well combed. The enemy war dead or rediscovered war dead, in higher figures. Appalling and dulling totals not just from this year’s war but from the ones before that, and the ones way back that some of us still around may have also attended. All the dead from wars and natural events and school shootings and street crimes and domestic crimes that each of us has once again escaped and felt terrible about and plans to go and leave wreaths or paper flowers at the site of. There’s never anything new about death, to be sure, except its improved publicity. At second hand, we have become death’s expert witnesses; we know more about death than morticians, feel as much at home with it as those poor bygone schlunks trying to survive a continent-ravaging, low-digit-century epidemic. Death sucks but, enh—click the channel.

I get along. Now and then it comes to me that I appear to have more energy and hope than some of my coevals, but I take no credit for this. I don’t belong to a book club or a bridge club; I’m not taking up Mandarin or practicing the viola. In a sporadic effort to keep my brain from moldering, I’ve begun to memorize shorter poems—by Auden, Donne, Ogden Nash, and more—which I recite to myself some nights while walking my dog, Harry’s successor fox terrier, Andy. I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window. But shouldn’t I have something more scholarly or complex than this put away by now—late paragraphs of accomplishments, good works, some weightier op cits? I’m afraid not. The thoughts of age are short, short thoughts. I don’t read Scripture and cling to no life precepts, except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.

I count on jokes, even jokes about death.

TEACHER: Good morning, class. This is the first day of school and we’re going to introduce ourselves. I’ll call on you, one by one, and you can tell us your name and maybe what your dad or your mom does for a living. You, please, over at this end.

SMALL BOY: My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.

TEACHER: A mechanic! Thank you, Irving. Next?

SMALL GIRL: My name is Emma and my mom is a lawyer.

TEACHER: How nice for you, Emma! Next?

SECOND SMALL BOY: My name is Luke and my dad is dead.

TEACHER: Oh, Luke, how sad for you. We’re all very sorry about that, aren’t we, class? Luke, do you think you could tell us what Dad did before he died?

LUKE (seizes his throat): He went “N’gungghhh! ”

Not bad—I’m told that fourth graders really go for this one. Let’s try another.

A man and his wife tried and tried to have a baby, but without success. Years went by and they went on trying, but no luck. They liked each other, so the work was always a pleasure, but they grew a bit sad along the way. Finally, she got pregnant, was very careful, and gave birth to a beautiful eight-pound-two-ounce baby boy. The couple were beside themselves with happiness. At the hospital that night, she told her husband to stop by the local newspaper and arrange for a birth announcement, to tell all their friends the good news. First thing next morning, she asked if he’d done the errand.

“Yes, I did,” he said, “but I had no idea those little notices in the paper were so expensive.”

“Expensive?” she said. “How much was it?”

“It was eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I have the receipt.”

“Eight hundred and thirty-seven dollars!” she cried. “But that’s impossible. You must have made some mistake. Tell me exactly what happened.”

“There was a young lady behind a counter at the paper, who gave me the form to fill out,” he said. “I put in your name and my name and little Teddy’s name and weight, and when we’d be home again and, you know, ready to see friends. I handed it back to her and she counted up the words and said, ‘How many insertions?’ I said twice a week for fourteen years, and she gave me the bill. O.K.?”

I heard this tale more than fifty years ago, when my first wife, Evelyn, and I were invited to tea by a rather elegant older couple who were new to our little Rockland County community. They were in their seventies, at least, and very welcoming, and it was just the four of us. We barely knew them and I was surprised when he turned and asked her to tell us the joke about the couple trying to have a baby. “Oh, no,” she said, “they wouldn’t want to hear that.”

“Oh, come on, dear—they’ll love it,” he said, smiling at her. I groaned inwardly and was preparing a forced smile while she started off shyly, but then, of course, the four of us fell over laughing together.

That night, Evelyn said, “Did you see Keith’s face while Edie was telling that story? Did you see hers? Do you think it’s possible that they’re still—you know, still doing it?”

“Yes, I did—yes, I do,” I said. “I was thinking exactly the same thing. They’re amazing.”

This was news back then, but probably shouldn’t be by now. I remember a passage I came upon years later, in an Op-Ed piece in the Times, written by a man who’d just lost his wife. “We slept naked in the same bed for forty years,” it went. There was also my splendid colleague Bob Bingham, dying in his late fifties, who was asked by a friend what he’d missed or would do differently if given the chance. He thought for an instant, and said, “More venery.”

More venery. More love; more closeness; more sex and romance. Bring it back, no matter what, no matter how old we are. This fervent cry of ours has been certified by Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Munro and Laurence Olivier and any number of remarried or recoupled ancient classmates of ours. Laurence Olivier? I’m thinking of what he says somewhere in an interview: “Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.”

This is a dodgy subject, coming as it does here from a recent widower, and I will risk a further breach of code and add that this was something that Carol and I now and then idly discussed. We didn’t quite see the point of memorial fidelity. In our view, the departed spouse—we always thought it would be me—wouldn’t be around anymore but knew or had known that he or she was loved forever. Please go ahead, then, sweetheart—don’t miss a moment. Carol said this last: “If you haven’t found someone else by a year after I’m gone I’ll come back and haunt you.”

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night. This is why we throng Match.com and OkCupid in such numbers—but not just for this, surely. Rowing in Eden (in Emily Dickinson’s words: “Rowing in Eden— / Ah—the sea”) isn’t reserved for the lithe and young, the dating or the hooked-up or the just lavishly married, or even for couples in the middle-aged mixed-doubles semifinals, thank God. No personal confession or revelation impends here, but these feelings in old folks are widely treated like a raunchy secret. The invisibility factor—you’ve had your turn—is back at it again. But I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.

Nothing is easy at this age, and first meetings for old lovers can be a high-risk venture. Reticence and awkwardness slip into the room. Also happiness. A wealthy old widower I knew married a nurse he met while in the hospital, but had trouble remembering her name afterward. He called her “kid.” An eighty-plus, twice-widowed lady I’d once known found still another love, a frail but vibrant Midwest professor, now close to ninety, and the pair got in two or three happy years together before he died as well. When she called his children and arranged to pick up her things at his house, she found every possession of hers lined up outside the front door.

But to hell with them and with all that, O.K.? Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you. Hook, line, and sinker; never mind the why or wherefore; somewhere in the night; love me forever, or at least until next week. For us and for anyone this unsettles, anyone who’s younger and still squirms at the vision of an old couple embracing, I’d offer John Updike’s “Sex or death: you take your pick”—a line that appears (in a slightly different form) in a late story of his, “Playing with Dynamite.”

This is a great question, an excellent insurance-plan choice, I mean. I think it’s in the Affordable Care Act somewhere. Take it from us, who know about the emptiness of loss, and are still cruising along here feeling lucky and not yet entirely alone.

33 Comments

Lee Edmundson June 6, 2022

Please. Oh Please, Oh Please continue publishing Roger Angell stories. His today was so very much fun to read ,as I can directly relate.
Two Motrin twice a day for the bursitis in my right hip and the osteoarthritis in my left shoulder until, as my orthopedist tells me, “You just can’t stand it any longer”. Only then can I get two more cortisone boosters. There was similar advice posted over Roberta Whiteside’s toilet in her Portuguese Flats house rental in the Town of Mendocino way back in the 1980’s: “Please do not flush until you absolutely cannot stand it”.
We’re all gonna have to memorize that mantra.
Angell’s book, “This Old Man” is a delicious compilation of his articles and columns. Lot’s about baseball. His passion.

And Herb Caen. “Please, sir, may I have some more please”?
I read him faithfully in the late 60s and 70s and later on in the late 90s when at school at SF State.
Some of his pithy aphorisms have stayed with me for over the years:
* “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money”.
* “Cocaine substitute: glue a piece of #2 sandpaper onto the end of a Q-Tip, then run it up and down your nostrils while shredding $100.00 bills”.
* “There are four basic food groups in SF cuisine: Caffeine, Nicotine, Alcohol and Grease”.

On another note: The ill conceived, poorly thought out attempt to piggyback the H2O and Fire District Taxes onto the proposed Library Tax should — if any rational, analytic thinking (still) exists on the BoS — should fall like a souffle Wednesday. Folks need to speak out against it, because it’s passage will spell doom come November if these Tax measures are conjoined. Poorly thought through. Amateur politics. Rookie mistake. Forgiven, but make the correction.

The Giants won. Warriors won. It rained! I’m still alive and kickin’.
Now I have to go take more meds.
Ah…life is but a dream.
Sometimes a wonderful…
Sometimes Terrible

Reply
Chuck Dunbar June 6, 2022

Yes, to Lee’s thoughts above about Roger Angell’s writings. And thanks, AVA, for printing his essay, written in his early 90’a, “This Old Man,” not once, but twice in recent weeks! A gorgeous, generous mind at work, observing this world from the lofty heights of aging.

Reply
George Hollister June 6, 2022

“I THINK there’s been a rolling civil war for years”

Yes, from the beginning. The USA is successful because the Constitution is structured to give the states the power. Problems arise when we try to get everyone to be the same, which we aren’t, and never have been. San Francisco is not Oklahoma City, and we should not attempt to assume the two are the same, or can be made the same.

Reply
- Paul Andersen June 6, 2022
  
  California would be much better off as it’s own nation. We have little in common with the backwards states, especially south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Those who don’t like the way California has moved, by voter choice, move to the South there for a few years and see how it goes. If you love it, probably best you moved. Otherwise, deal with what the majority appreciates about our imperfect state.
  
  Reply
  - George Hollister June 7, 2022
    
    California being a separate country isn’t a bad idea. The rural part of this state would like to separate from the urban part, too. There is little in common between those two as well. But really, California becoming its own country is not needed, if there was respect for state’s rights. Let California do all the dumb things that it does, just don’t try to impose those dumb things on everyone else.
    
    Reply
Chuck Dunbar June 6, 2022

Problems also arise when rights for some portions of the population are denied or restricted, while others have the good fortune of full rights. I don’t need to provide examples of this, they abound and are well known. People don’t need to “be the same,” but all people in American should enjoy the same basic rights. That we still struggle with this foundational issue is self-evident.

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar June 6, 2022
  
  I’ll add one thing–We are about to see this basic issue of rights play-out in a major way, if the Supreme Court trashes Roe v. Wade. If so, women’s basic rights to bodily autonomy and privacy and liberty will be different from state to state. It will be a terrible mess and a horror story.
  
  Reply
  - George Hollister June 6, 2022
    
    There are those who believe strongly that rights extend to the unborn. A resolution to this subject requires acceptance of that, and acceptance of the right of privacy as well. Imposing one believe on everyone is a guarantee this conflict will continue. Think of this issue being similar to the issue of chattel slavery. The arguments are very similar.
    
    Reply
    - Paul Andersen June 6, 2022
      
      “If you’re preborn, you’re fine; if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.” – Carlin.
      
      Reply
John Sakowicz June 6, 2022

SAKOWICZ RESPONDS

To Tom Allman’s comments, all it will take to bring back the FBI’s Government Corruption Unit is for one of those two Rohnert Park cops — Tatum and Huffaker — to flip.

And they will flip.

There’s no way that Tatum and Huffaker could have been operating in Mendocino County without being part of a larger conspiracy involving local law enforcement.

If they flip, U.S. District Court Judge Sallie Kim may accept a deal at sentencing. Tatum faces a maximum of 45 years in federal prison. Huffaker could face up to 20 years in federal prison.

She may. Or she may not.

The other question is whether Acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of California Stephanie M. Hinds will even offer them a deal.

She may. Or she may not.

The victim, Zeke Flatten, unleashed a flurry of similar claims from others. The FBI is investigating.

Anyone looking to file a complaint of cops extorting cannabis or cash should contact FBI Special Agent in Charge Craig D. Fair, and Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigations Acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Daniels.

Also, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Frey is prosecuting Tatum and Huffaker.

Me? I’ll never forget how Frank Brady cleared his conscience. And I’ll do what I have to do to honor what transpired in our last meeting outside the Hillside Clinic. It’s why I’m in Washington D.C. now.

Frank was an outlaw, but he was a righteous outlaw. And he hated cops who pretended to be better than he.

Hypocrisy is the worse crime.

John Sakowicz

Reply
Lazarus June 6, 2022

It’s coming, Civil War:

I and others have been predicting a civil war for years. Depending on where you live and who you run with, the advance of war is not hard to see.
I know of militias in South Carolina, Michigan, and Texas. And they’re not the groups the media harpies like to shit on.
These people are training on weekends and holding recruitment meetings.
For the most part, they are middle-class working people and home and business owners who are tired of the squandering of money, resources, and liberty.
They’re tired of the criminals, the homeless, and the dangerous to others mentally ill roaming the streets of their cities and towns.
They’re tired of their children being taught that white is wrong and color is right. And their numbers are growing at a startling rate.
I don’t know when civil war is coming, but it’s coming.
Not every state in this Un-United States is like California. Ask around.
Be Well,
Laz

Reply
- Jurgen Stoll June 6, 2022
  
  Appreciate the warning, could you give us a heads up when it’s eminent?
  
  Reply
  - Jurgen Stoll June 6, 2022
    
    Sorry, should have been imminent.
    
    Reply
  - Lazarus June 6, 2022
    
    Yeah, don’t hold your breath…
    Be well,
    Laz
    
    Reply
- George Hollister June 6, 2022
  
  I don’t buy civil war, or end of days, either. Yes, California is very screwed up. Just look at the endlessly mindless government policies we have. But other states are not perfect, either. I have faith that people will vote to upend the most outrageous government policies, when it begins to effect them directly. And I have noticed even a good number of voting Democrats have learned to not trust the party line narratives, provided free by mass media, and NPR. Keep an eye on San Francisco.
  
  Reply
  - Lazarus June 6, 2022
    
    Every great power has come to its end. What would make you think the good ole USA is any different?
    Be well,
    Laz
    
    Reply
    - Marmon June 6, 2022
      
      They think they have to first destroy America in order to “Build Back Better”. And, they’re doing a good job at it, the destroying part anyway. I agree with George:
      
      “I have faith that people will vote to upend the most outrageous government policies, when it begins to effect them directly. And I have noticed even a good number of voting Democrats have learned to not trust the party line narratives, provided free by mass media, and NPR. Keep an eye on San Francisco.”
      
      Marmon
      
      Reply
      - Marmon June 6, 2022
        
        Anyone who wonders who they are should look in the mirror.
        
        Marmon
        
        Reply
        
        Marmon June 6, 2022
        
        What they’re doing is mean.
        
        Marmon
        
        Reply
        
        Paul Andersen June 6, 2022
        
        Keep going Marmoron. The only person replying to you…is you. 😂
        
        Reply
    - George Hollister June 6, 2022
      
      You are right, but not now. As long as the USA respects the Federalist system, and states rights; and continues to embrace personal freedom we will endure. If or when the USA becomes a single central socialist government, adios. That will not work, and never does, at least not for long.
      
      Reply
      - Bruce McEwen June 6, 2022
        
        Fascinatingly tangled thread you Liberace libtards weave but our old George is still a shill for the Fishers (and, full disclosure, I guzzle Franzia’s boxed wine like mother’s milk, despite the affiliation to the Fisher’s) and that hog riding fool (and you know who you are) Is still and always will be a conflicted bi/polar sichzoid goofball for any charlatan mountebank who dares take such a unholy clustrrflubbber on, eh?
        
        Reply
        
        Bruce McEwen June 6, 2022
        
        Oh, alright, let’s imagine a civil war. The rural red states will arm and train, store food and await the starving degenerates from the blue cities to come like hordes to be mowed down until all the ammo is gone. They have been plotting this scenario since the Mormons invented the two year storage program back in the Cold War.
        Then a bunch of back to the landers got ahold of it but the most tenacious grip on this fantasy has been embraced by you know eho
        The war ‘tween the rednecks and the blue dogs; but what if the hordes of loser liberals don’t come to take your MSG & GMO goodies? WTF u gunna do den dipsoid?
        
        Reply
  - Rye N Flint June 7, 2022
    
    Here’s a decent response to ya’lls Murica problems:
    
    Reply
George Dorner June 6, 2022

Folks forget Zeke Flatten is ex-law enforcement. He just may stun everyone with the facts he holds, if he cooperates with the FBI.

Reply
- Marmon June 6, 2022
  
  Yeah, there’s a lot going on behind the screen. An appeal is forthcoming. This is a big case, the judge chose to punt, politics.
  
  Marmon
  
  Reply
- Marmon June 6, 2022
  
  RE: IN THE KNOW
  
  Zeke has been working closely with Trent. So has Borges and Gurr. Win lose or draw, I don’t think things are going to fare well for the “good ole boys club” going forward.
  
  Marmon
  
  Reply
Rye N Flint June 7, 2022

RE: ANOTHER BIG COUNTY FAILURE: THE CANNABIS CODE ENFORCEMENT FAILURE

Can I get a quick show of hands to see how many other people have been violated by Daniel Knapp’s unwarranted searches and trespass on their property? I know of 6 other friends that have very personal stories. I’m assuming there are more out there.

Reply
- Stephanie McBride June 8, 2022
  
  Seriously Rye N Flint??? Weren’t you caught shitting on your property and not disposing of it properly? Then you decided to go work for the County in Environmental Health. Are you mad that you didn’t know how to do your job so all you did was drive around looking for people doing something on their property that you weren’t okay with. You went back at the end of the day, wrote up complaints and tried to submit them to CE. They got sick of you and finally said enough!! Funny how you wanna talk about CE yet you were the biggest Snitch of all!! Because Daniel Knapp didn’t run out and follow up on all your constant complaints?? Tell the whole story bud!!!
  
  Reply
  - Rye N Flint June 8, 2022
    
    I would love to hear where you heard your version of my life, since you have never been to my Domestic partner’s property, where Daniel Knapp, Brian Webb, from CE (code enforcement) and Nicolas Duncan from the Cannabis Department showed up for a surprise “Cannabis complaint” on Jan. 6th, 2020, The morning of my interview with the Environmental Health Department? That took 4 months to get an interview? When the complaint was filed by my partner’s ex-employee back in June of 2019? And my fully cannabis compliant permitted partner was away on the coast at a retreat? And… She has a permitted California water code approved greywater system? And, like I stated earlier, is responsible for helping make compost toilets legal in this county. Oh, maybe you are talking about our friends that were living in their triple axle, brand new 5th wheel “tiny home”‘s greywater system, that Daniel Knapp accused them of being shitwater. They got booted anyway. Said they had to go. No housing for you. Oh what does Mr. Knapp have a degree in again? Does he even know the building code he is supposedly sworn to “enforce”? Nope. I know for a fact he does not, because every time my partner asked him a question, he would defer it to the building inspectors, that actually do know what they are looking at. Daniel Knapp is just bull in a china shop that generates revenue for the county in the worst way. Unlike you, I will not go into Daniel’s demons that he would bring to our shared workplace.
    
    Didn’t know how to do my job? WTF are you talking about. Since I DID get the job at Environmental Health, all of my reviews are public record, Not only did I do an amazing job, I am one of the only few that actually has R.E.H.S. credentials. I quit the county job because they paid too little, for college educated workers, and I was doing 3 people’s jobs. The county has a BIG problem with keeping good workers right now. I wonder why they pay high school grads more money for Planning jobs? Oh, hey, maybe you were thinking of my co-worker Radomir, who almost went postal on CE and PnB (planning and Building)? Is he still on the payroll? Want to know if I did my Job? Ask any septic designer and any well driller in this county.
    
    I don’t jump fences, or trespass against constitutional rights. NOT ME SISTER! I took inspection training classes from the State of California. I talked to the head honcho, John Burkes, and he said that the Code Enforcement should probably take a training like that too. I bet they haven’t.
    
    And to the accusation that I’m the biggest snitch… The only people I “snitched” on were illegal cannabis growers that were running waterlines across our property into a steelhead laden pool in a year round creek. AND the Neighbor down the road from Mr. Burkes and I that has his 5th wheel trailer permanently parked on his property without a Admin permit for construction, AND he graded his entire hillside. Wouldn’t have been a problem if he didn’t buy the property that everyone on the road can see in plain eysore. On top of that, he parked his Watertruck, with phone number, and advertising, right in front of his trailer. What did Daniel do about him? I think he must have got a pretty stern warning, because all of that is still there. So, I complain about actual code violations and I’m a “snitch”? Which ones do you take seriously then?
    
    So back to my main point. Why do they get away with Warrentless searches in this county? Because Cannabis farmers are their target, and they don’t know how to lawyer up, and are too afraid of retaliation. Why do you think Rohnert Park police came to Mendo to run their illegal search game? Because they know how things really work up here.
    
    Hey Stephanie, ever heard of a defamation lawsuit?
    
    -Rye N Flint (My pen name if anyone hasn’t figured that out yet)
    
    Reply
    - Rye N Flint June 8, 2022
      
      Oh Hey, What ever happened to that Cannabis equity grant fund money? Wasn’t that allocated by the State for only that purpose? I hope it didn’t pay for the new spy satelite… opps! I mean “Enhanced Cannabis Enforcement” program. That would be illegal.
      
      Reply
      - Rye N Flint June 8, 2022
        
        One more thing. I realize this is a very personal post, about a government code issue, in a local pubic media. If you didn’t catch the timing on the series of events, we basically lost our little mini community in March 2020, right before the pandemic, on a dirt road, before fire season. Didn’t really realize the impact these code enforcements had on my life, until I wrote it all out just now. I have now gone private, but my life as a public health worker started a decade ago at the County of Santa Cruz. Many of you may not know that Government workers, formally myself included, are bound by the 4th Amendment. Here’s what it’s all about:
        
        “Fourth Amendment case law deals with three main issues: what government activities are “searches” and “seizures”, what constitutes probable cause to conduct searches and seizures, and how to address violations of Fourth Amendment rights. Early court decisions limited the amendment’s scope to physical intrusion of property or persons, but with Katz v. United States (1967), the Supreme Court held that its protections extend to intrusions on the privacy of individuals as well as to physical locations. A warrant is needed for most search and seizure activities, but the Court has carved out a series of exceptions for consent searches, motor vehicle searches, evidence in plain view, exigent circumstances, border searches, and other situations.”
        
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
        
        Reply
Rye N Flint June 9, 2022

I set up an email address a few months ago. I couldn’t get my exact spelling, because it was already taken, but if anyone wants to contact me directly, here it is:

ryye.n.flint@gmail.com

“Opening up the hate mail phone lines” -Bob Odenkirk on HBO’s Mr.Show

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Monday, June 6, 2022

33 Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply