THE REPORTS of the man washed away at the foot of the Mendocino Village bluffs over the weekend, later identified as Quinn Greene of Mendocino, reminded us of this horrifying event in the same place in November of 2008:
IT APPEARS that the remains of Maurizio Biasini have been found on the beach at Jughandle State Park, about six miles north of the Mendocino Headlands where Biasini was washed out to sea on November 29th, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. An Italian national working in the United States as a visiting scholar in physics, Biasini, with his horrified family looking on, was overcome by a huge wave when he climbed over the bluffs for a closer look at a rock formation. Waving frantically for help as the powerful surf took him farther and farther offshore, Biasini was visible for some hundred yards until he disappeared forever. His twin sons, 18, were so distraught at what they perceived as the tardy response of rescue teams, they had to be subdued by Sheriff’s deputies who feared that the boys, and the police attempting to calm them at the edge of the bluffs, might also fall into the sea. Biasini’s remains were found by a hiker at Jughandle on Christmas day at about 1pm.
AVA, Dec. 30, 2008
DUSTIN LEE LA STOFKA writes: Goodbye, Quinn:
When you step out of the redwoods, where a person feels small and magic is breath, onto the headlands where the oceans hammering on the shore can be felt in your very bones, A wandering man could lose his wander and grow roots. Many have and many more will. I lost a good friend last Friday, He was someone you always knew was around.. Loud, full of life I’d say... Goodbye my dear friend we’ll toast once it’s my turn, see ya later.
SUPERVISOR MULHEREN: There has been a delay [in sending out supplemental tax bills] because of a software program that wasn’t implemented for quite sometime. Now Supplemental bills are going out, though some are from a few years prior so balancing that payment can be a challenge for some homeowners. … If you received a supplemental tax bill you may be able to have your lender use your escrow balance to pay it and spread any future payments across your monthly mortgage amount.
PORTER DINEHART: And you have to pay it all at once? So if you have paid your taxes up to date through your mortgage payment you may get another bill because of the county not keeping up to date with its own software. That seems more like a County issue.
ED NOTE: Apparently around 7,000 supplemental tax bill notices have been mailed out so far. Some taxpayers can arrange for a five year payment plan with the Tax Collector’s office. Call them if you think you might qualify.
TED KACZYNSKI, aka the Unabomber, can serve as Exhibit A for the psycho-hazards of social isolation. I confess I thought his manifesto was irrefutable but hardly original with Ted. Advanced techno-industrial societies are destructive in unprecedented ways, an opinion millions of us share. And Ted wasn’t very nice. Apart from the almost comic futility of attempting to unravel industrial society one bomb at a time, he wrote taunting follow-up notes to several of his victims. What’s always puzzled me about the guy was his love for the novels of Charles Dickens. When he was arrested in his remote Montana cabin, Kaczynski had a full set of Dickens. It doesn’t compute that a guy can be that deep into a great comic humanist like Dickens and not recognize the cruel folly of his bomb campaign. The FBI, typically, literally didn’t have a clue. If Ted’s brother hadn’t turned him in, Kaczynski would probably still be mailing out bombs. Only the goddess may know what the many Mendo isolates are up to in their remote fastnesses…
NO, MARY, NO! NOT YOU!
You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 ormary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.
DARRYL CHERNEY ON FACEBOOK: “I could use a quick infusion of cash.” Wait here, Darryl, I’ll get my checkbook.
CHERNEY won almost a million dollars in the bogus Bari-Cherney federal libel lawsuit. After raising money throughout the U.S. on the promise that if they won the suit they’d do good things for the environment, Cherney bought a dope farm north of Garberville, Bari’s $2 mil went to her two already wealthy daughters.
YOU KNOW you’re famous when you become a Jeopardy question. But David and Micki Colfax qualify because their renown as homeschoolers three of whose children went off to Harvard, was not only a recent question on the show, a couple of contestants immediately identified them. Those three, not-so-incidentally, have done very well, despite the public school lobby worrying that being homeschooled the boys wouldn’t be fully socialized. Two doctors and a judge, all three fully socialized.
THE UNABOMBER was a fount of reactionary opinions, but he was right in step with the Sierra Club’s ongoing debate as to whether or not to endorse a virtual halt to immigration as a means of slowing environmental degradation. A Sierra Clubber asks, “How can we protect America’s anything, but certainly the things we’re concerned with, if we don’t deal with the rapidly growing U.S. population?”
THE TYPICAL SIERRA CLUBBER? A 2.5 Stanford family with $5,000 bikes, ski vacations, 8,000-square-foot homes raised on fruit and vegetables organically grown in Chile, Guatamalan maids. If the entire membership of the Sierra Club signed over their collective assets to the Catholic Workers then committed mass suicide, pressures on the environment would be eased at least 30%.
AS A YOUNGER old timer in Mendocino County, and the proprietor of Boonville’s beloved weekly, which long ago blossomed as a county-wide paper, with a few hundred thrill seekers in the Bay Area also subscribing, I occasionally get asked questions about past events. The other day, a woman now in her 30s asked me, “What was the Bear Lincoln case all about?” Lapsing into garrulous old coot mode, I began:
OLD COVELO FAMILY FEUDS had erupted earlier in the day of April 14th, 1995 when Arylis Peters shot Gene Britton in the parking lot of Round Valley High School. Later that night commenced the Bear Lincoln saga.
A JUROR would describe the Lincoln case as a “tragic accident,” which it clearly was and which assessment I’ve always seconded. I hustled out to the site of the shootings the day after, and then again a few days later, and I’ve gone over the evidence as presented in court many times, and I’ve discussed the case endlessly with all kinds of doubters.
IN BRIEF, on the evening of the 14th, Bear Lincoln and Leonard Peters, both armed in anticipation of a Britton family counter-attack and ambush, were walking up the hill from the Lincoln home when Leonard Peters was shot and killed by two Sheriff’s deputies, firing at Peters from the top of the hill overlooking the road.
LINCOLN AND PETERS assumed they were being shot at by members of the Britton family. They did not know that two deputies, Dennis Miller and Robert Davis, were at the top of the hill but out of sight on the north bank above the roadbed.
PETERS was a few yards ahead of Lincoln when he was shot. The terrain, and the darkness of the April night prevented Lincoln from hearing the two officers’ identify themselves.
THE INITIAL EXCHANGES of gun fire happened in total darkness. Deputies Miller and Davis shot Peters because they thought Peters was either about to shoot at them or had shot at them because Lincoln, seeing Peters drop twenty or so feet in front of him up the hill, had already moved to the south side of the road and returned fire, shooting blindly up the hill, unaware that he was shooting at police officers.
LINCOLN THEN RETREATED back down the hill then, but a few minutes later, made his way back up the hill in search of Peters but staying out of sight of the road to the side of the grade, at which point there was another exchange of fire during which deputy Davis was killed.
THE MURDER CASE against Lincoln was not accompanied by supporting forensic evidence. And the prosecution of Lincoln was presented in a garbled manner by an assistant DA, the DA herself having ducked it. It really came down to this: Did Bear Lincoln, on his second trip up the hill to check on Peters (lying dead in the road) know he was exchanging fire with deputies?
I’D say probably not, because the two deputies had placed themselves on a tactically obscure knoll overlooking this one seldom traveled road to the Lincoln property. Bear Lincoln would naturally have thought he and Peters were being shot at by the Brittons, not the cops.
DEPUTY MILLER was not believable on the stand because his first account of the shootings was fundamentally different from his second account, and both accounts raised more questions than they answered. Lincoln’s account never varied and squared perfectly with the terrain and scant physical evidence recovered from the scene. I don’t think Miller knows what happened. Nor did I think he was an “Indian killer” or a “racist” or a “nut,” as the more hysterical libs accused him of being. Lincoln told the truth right from the start, but the cops (apart from Miller) came across to the jury and everyone else as a collection of arrogant clowns — every civilian’s nightmare, in other words. The jury knew where the truth lay and took no time at all tossing the case.
(I’D KNOWN MILLER when he Anderson Valley’s resident deputy. I’d heard one account of how he allegedly shot an allegedly harmless dog after the dog bit him, one account of how he allegedly kicked a lady’s door in to confiscate three marijuana plants, general beefs from several pot growers alleging that he was over-zealous in the pursuit of weed, and several complaints from liberals alleging that he singled out Mexicans for special attention. There were never many complaints about Miller. The few times I encountered him after the Lincoln affair he was cordial, which surprised me, actually, because the AVA had been right out front from the week of the shootings as lead skeptics of the official version of that sad series of events.
RECOMMENDED READING: ‘Big Trouble’ by J. Anthony Lukas, Simon & Schuster. I always laugh when I read that Idaho is the preferred retirement state for cops, most of them, I daresay, proudly marching behind the Great Orange Felon. Mendo’s former Sheriff, Tony Craver, headed for Idaho as soon as he was finished babysitting Mendocino County. I seriously doubt that Idaho’s MAGA brigades are aware that in the early part of the twentieth century Idaho was a socialist stronghold, an historical fact documented in Lukas’s brilliant book, ‘Big Trouble.’
IN DECEMBER of 1905, well before the days when America’s owners lived in fortified mansions and moved around in fleets of limos with their amen choruses, the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, was killed by a bomb triggered by the latch on the front gate to his modest home in Caldwell, Idaho. He was so severely injured by the bomb that he died of his wounds a few hours later.
STEUNENBERG had sided with mine owners as they brutally crushed mine workers’ unions, especially in the Coeur d’ Alene area of Northern Idaho. The miners fought back as best they could, often with the dynamite they used as their primary work tool.
A FORMER MINER was pressured into confessing his role in the Steunenberg assassination for a light sentence in exchange for implicating union leadership in the killing of the former governor. That leadership included Big Bill Haywood of the IWW and two other left union leaders, Charles Moyer and George Pettibone. Eugene Debs later threatened to raise an army of socialists to free Haywood and his two co-defendants — the three of them essentially kidnapped from their homes in Colorado and whisked back to Idaho on a special bullet train.
LUKAS lays out the whole story so skillfully that it kept me up one long night reading it. Tragically, the author, fearing that his masterpiece wasn’t up to the standards he’d not only set for himself but imagined existed out there in TV land, committed suicide before the book was published.
AS ENTERTAINING as he often is, DA Eyster may remember an even more amusing trio of DA candidates back in ‘91 with Al Kubanis, Vivian Rackaucaus and Susan Massini. Kubanis came in third in the three-way race that elected Susan Massini DA. She would later fire Eyster at gun point for the sin of not supporting her for a judgeship. (Massini didn’t wield the gun, an investigator did, but Sue was, shall we say, temperamentally unsuited for a judge job. Eyster, incidentally, was backing the cretinous Ron Brown. Whatever else you might say about Massini, she wasn’t stupid.)
THAT RACE also included the wild and wacky incumbent DA, Vivian Rackaucaus, who, one memorable candidate’s night in Elk as the final speaker of the three candidates, declared in her final statement, “I’m the only candidate for this office who can honestly say I have never smoked marijuana.”
MASSINI sputtered, Kubanis laughed. Viv, even a harder rightwing ideologue than Kubanis, who at least has a sense of humor, in her last term in office, sued famous Mendo criminal attorney Richard Peterson for failure to pay child support for their mutual child. What ensued was an hilarious round of fingerpointing as the child’s paternity was variously attributed to an array of members (don’t pardon the pun) of the County bar, including Judge Broaddus then sitting as a Superior Court judge. When defendants complain that justice in Mendocino County is incestuous they have no idea that it can be literally incestuous.
A READER COMMENTS: “I watched the documentary about OneTaste, and...uhh...um...HOLY crap! The cult’s ‘spiritual leader’ is one beyond Elizabeth Holmes in the bullshit dept. The whole schtick to me seems to be about people who want to get laid. And exhibitionists who want to be seen. And adults who are really still children, who want to run around naked and not be yelled at by mommy. I’m glad the cult is in the crosshairs of law enforcement. It’s bizarro that they were your neighbors. But then, not really, when you think about all the crazies who have made Mendo their home. I also read ‘Homegrown,’ the Jeffrey Toobin book about Timothy McVeigh. Good (tho for me, not as compelling as his books on OJ Simpson and Patty Hearst.”
KEVIN BURKE of deep Laytonville with a weather note: “I was snowed out this year until April 10th at the top of Spy Rock. According to neighbors, there was 8-10 feet of snow on the ground in the second week of March!”
FORGOT to add to my yesterday’s item about then-DA Massini firing now-DA Eyster, that as one of his last acts in Mendo, Eyster filed a wrongful termination suit against his hair-triggered boss, which he won to the tune of $18,000. And after years in Sacramento exile, Eyster returned to take the boss job himself.
THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY administration has always maintained, and still maintains, that the sparse traffic on the unpaved 50 or so miles winding over Mendocino Pass between Covelo and the Sacramento Valley does not merit a large investment in pavement. At best, surveys have indicated, perhaps 280 vehicles a day might use Forest Highway 7 if it were paved. But it doesn’t appear as if it will be although merchants in Covelo think a better road between Covelo and inland I-5 would bring more people to their businesses in Round Valley, and lots of people, maybe, to the least visited national forest in the United States, which Forest Highway 7 traverses. Proponents also argue that the road crews a paved road would require would provide a few of the well-paying jobs lost recently to Covelo when Caltrans closed its yard and the Forest Service cut back on its permanent staff.
JUST IN! WEDDING BELLS rang today for Mendo DA Eyster and Lisa Welsh McCurley in ceremonies at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. The newlyweds will, of course, make their home in Ukiah.
MATT GUTMAN of ABC NEWS told viewers last week that he had been advised against appearing live from Union Square or the Westfield Mall in San Francisco for ABC’s 4am Good Morning America because “it’s too dangerous.” The veteran broadcaster instead reported on the latest in a long series of downtown retail closures from a separate part of the “zombie city.”
OLDER AMERICANS are losing $20.3 billion each year to “financial exploitation” by their friends and family, claims a vague and unattributed report wafting into Boonville early Friday morning. Having no money, I don’t think I have to fear being stuffed into a freezer while my heirs and assignees go on drawing my social security checks, but if times get even tougher, I’ll give them permission to exploit my remains however they choose.
JUST SAYIN,’ but I got Covid after I’d been vaccinated so many times I’d lost track. This plague wasn’t all that bad, no worse than the usual flu, which isn’t a recommendation not to get vaccinated. (I believe in immunization and modern medicine generally.) But in retrospect it seems that Sweden had the correct strategy for out-enduring Covid — take every precaution but don’t shut down the whole goddam country.
EVA CHRYSANTHE WRITES: “I don’t know if you know this but Marin is using opioid settlement money to drug-test the wastewater. Seriously, it has to be the dumbest application of opioid settlement money on planet earth.”
ONE OF THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL criminal trials in US history will be overseen by one of the least qualified judges to ever assume a seat on the federal bench, Aileen Cannon. But how did she get there? You guessed it, Democrats. 12 Democratic Senators voted to confirm Cannon’s nomination after the 2020 election as a favor to the GOP majority, which didn’t have enough Senators present that day. The 12 Democratic senators were: Biden’s two Delaware pals Carper and Coons, the two Nevada senators Cortez-Masto and Jacky Rosen, Dianne Feinstein (though who can tell if she even knew what she was voting on), the two Virginia senators Warner and HRC’s running mate Tim Kaine, Maggie Hassan, the now departed Doug Jones, Chris Murphy, Patrick Leahy(!), and Joe Manchin, naturally. — Jeffrey St. Clair
THE REDLEG BOOGIE BLUES, a memoir of the sixties which, in the author’s view, ended in 1973, is the late Jeff Costello’s vivid account of the unique waterborne hippie houseboat and rock and roll community of the Sausalito waterfront, circa 1968. Costello was also Howard Belkamp, his pseudonym when he was a regular contributor to the Boonville weekly. Why the late Costello thought he needed a pseudonym is not known, but there was always a strong paranoid streak among the ground floor hippies, of which Costello, also a talented musician, was a member, and he was central to the Redlegs, a precursor and now mythical band, some people thought was much superior to the Grateful Dead who followed the Redlegs. Costello’s stories are about rock and roll when rock and roll was real, a people’s music, you could say.
Are these stories any good? Well, I liked it very much and I never was a hippie, never paid any attention to rock and roll, would rather go to jail than a rock concert, and hadn’t been to the Sausalito houseboats since about 1963 when Juanita’s Galley was still going full blast. I’d gone to high school just down the road in Mill Valley.
JUANITA, a large woman handy with her fists, was a ground-floor beatnik whose legendary restaurant on an old ferry boat a’mouldering in the Bay tidelands of Sausalito, was the late-night venue for the trendo-groovies of the time. Jeff’s account of the houseboat scene in Juanita’s neighborhood before it went up market, not only held my interest, it often made me laugh out loud, and how often do you read anything that makes you laugh? If you were a Bay Area hippie in 1968 you will want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you lived in Marin county at the time you will want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you’re merely interested in social pathologies of the more benign type you’ll want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you’re an old hippie now holed up in the hills of the Northcoast, you’ll want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. If you simply like to read interesting, funny stuff in a very attractive, fully illustrated, photo-documented special AVA format, you’ll want to read Redleg Boogie Blues. Now a collector’s item, the saga of the Redlegs is findable, mostly at libraries, but a few copies are available for sale on-line.
The series is also posted on our website at: theava.com/archives/6694
The introduction:
After eight years in rock and roll bands on the east coast, living in motels and doing everything from playing frat parties and low-life bars to backing popular singers and working as a session player in New York recording studios, I went west. Sick and tired of the road, and disillusioned with the music business, I caught a flight to San Francisco, a place which seemed to hold some kind of promise... I was invited to visit someone who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito. It was an unusual and colorful sight, but there was more to the waterfront than met the eye.
“Those people on the Oakland [an old boat resembling a ferry], are definitely on their own trip,” I was told. “There’s a guy there named Captain Garbage who eats seagulls. Shoots them right off the pilings.”
In a short time I was carried by fate into the Oakland scene, the mysterious inner circle inhabited by a group of people who called themselves “Redlegs.”
“Drafted” into the Redlegs’ band (they needed a guitar player), I gradually became part of the larger waterfront scene, learning sailing and seamanship as well other everyday survival skills. Life on the road playing music had taught me nothing like this.
There was no law on the waterfront, and while this was frightening at first, I learned that in a community with real trust, authority in the normal sense was unnecessary, and that the System feared and hated us for it.
Meaning only to be free and have fun, we often took things to extremes, including drugs. This abuse ultimately made us vulnerable to our enemy (authority in the form of police, city and county bureaucracies, and real estate developers), and contributed to the destruction of the band and the dream.
The Redlegs were not about money, or success in the traditional sense. We had a built-in failure factor that kicked in every time we encountered record companies or the “Big Time” in any form. But according to one observer, we were “one of the few real rock and roll bands that ever existed.”
Although the bureaucracy and developers eventually prevailed in Sausalito, the spirit of fun and freedom lived on and stayed with waterfront people--the ones who remained, and the ones who migrated to different places.
In the early ‘70’s, the “magic” and wonder of the 60’s were still at work and the “counter-culture” wasn’t yet out of the honeymoon period. The Redlegs band, part of a larger, controversial social phenomenon, became in one sense wildly successful, and in another were a monumental failure.
The Redlegs had brushes with fame and fortune; there were offers from big record companies, gigs at major “showcase” rooms like Winterland and Keystone Korner, a feature film. Something went wrong every time; we always seemed to walk smack into a psychic brick wall, something phony and weird that was intolerable. The bigger the opportunity, the creepier the feeling, the worse our attitudes, and the more offensive our behavior…
Jeff Costello
DUNCAN JAMES: And then there were the good old days, Ronnie Reagan, Mendocino State Hospital (hmm, a state run motel with help for the alcoholic, addict and the mentally ill?’ Just a thought.) Charles Manson, and his family, and the massive motorcycle runs of the Hells Angels. Now we are supposedly going to solve the problem of homelessness by purchasing hotel and motels with no mental health services and pass out needles. Dreamer. It’s just creating an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mindset that can’t accept the reality of the fact that there are those who will never get better in free rooms or hospitals. I guess you are too young to remember the 60s and 70s other than what was printed in black and white. On the streets of Ukiah were the alcoholics of San Francisco and Oakland who were given one-way $5 bus tickets to Talmage that were wandering our streets because they wouldn’t go through the gates and self-commit. We had a forward looking Chief of Police Donn Salisbury who put them back on a bus to return to the Bay Area instead of housing them in a small city jail. A few of the locals who lived on the streets and under the bridges, whose names I’ll omit in respect for their heirs, would go into court in November for being drunks and addicts and actually ask for long enough commitments to jail to make it through the winter. Judge McCowen always accommodated them. The alleys of San Francisco were full of alcoholics and addicts begging for dimes. Did you forget the unromantic days of the Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park and the hundreds and hundreds who fled the city to hide on the streets and communes in Albion and multiple other places in our county? The mentally ill were hospitalized where they got help although not all could ever reintegrate into society. Anyway, just a reminder that a wheel goes around in the real world. Many of our street people then and now were Vietnam vets. I don’t care which political party was in power, both would and still do just sweep them under the rug and blame the other because no one wants to accept their own failure and they think we are stupid enough to believe anything they say so long as it is blaming someone else. Anyway, there is so much more I could say but let’s end with “Happy Father’s Day.”
APOCALYPSE NOTE: As the world seems poised to lurch from international financial meltdown to another deadly global pandemic to rampant inflation and war in Europe, some 20 million Americans, nearly 7% of all US households, are planning for an emergency, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Citizens stockpiling food and ammo apparently come in all varieties, from suburban “guardian moms” to multi-millionaire tech gurus. And while the chances of a meteor strike wiping out mankind or a world war plunging the planet into nuclear winter are still fairly unlikely, there is one thing for certain: “preppers” are willing to pay good money for all manner of products to safeguard their futures whatever the catastrophe.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] In an effort to take a stand against my “toxic masculinity”, today I am wearing sandals that show off the “my little pony” band aids on the toes I scraped yesterday.
[2] I’ve lived a half a century now, my prime is behind me. I won’t endure the “Mad Max” scenario. I will always keep the last round in the chamber of my .357 for myself. I don’t fear death. If there is life after death it will be without a physical body and free of pain, hunger and suffering. If there isn’t life after death then, well, I won’t give a damn anyway. What I do fear is being eaten alive by roving gangs of starving cannibals or being sacrificed to their heathen gods. No, I will fight until there is no longer a reason to fight anymore and then I will exit this world in quiet dignity. That’s my plan anyway.
[3] I read somewhere, I don’t know where, perhaps right here on this blog, that when the two sexes, male and female, become nearly indistinguishable that the empire is near collapse.
Well, here we are. Women adorn themselves with tattoos and piercings as do the men. Women want to be men.
Then there are men who wear makeup and many men want to be women. Gone are the manly masculine males who look and act like alphas. Males today wear skinny jeans, designer shoes and have neatly trimmed little pimp beards.
Many days when I am out and about I pass by some poor soul and I can’t, for the life of me, determine if that was a male or a female.
[4] In the Army, we spoke of three levels of chaos: Cluster fuck, Goat Rodeo and Shit Storm/Show.
A Cluster Fuck was just unplanned chaos you happened to find yourself in. A Goat Rodeo was an elaborately staged event that went South and turned chaotic. The king of all chaos was the Shit Storm/Show.
A Shit Show (a term used exclusively by combat veterans) was an event so disastrous that you were no longer a participant but a horrified observer that could do nothing.
This is where we find ourselves now in the USA. We are witnessing a Shit Show.
[5] Has there ever been a study of prodigies — those pre-pubescent phenoms you read about from time to time lecturing on quantum mechanics at Oxford — and what becomes of them after they fade from the front page? Do they actually go forth and make a difference? Enquiring minds want to know…
A quick look at those running the show right now unearths none with “former prodigy” on their CVs. What does appear are the correct ivy league schools, and one presumes, having attended the exclusive cocktail parties — or put another way, networking. “It’s who you know, not what you know.”
[6] Lots of intelligent people live in fear, as they understand what can happen in life. The trick is learning to just be yourself and push ahead, balancing the fear with what you know you are meant to do deep down. In all honesty, trusting the gut is often more effective than thinking too much, as the “gut” is your subconscious making sense of patterns in the plethora of information your senses take in.
[7] CRIME AND CRIMINALS: It is hard but not impossible. I have many friends with felonies (some served multi-year prison sentences). Some have gotten their lives together but the majority are still doing the same shit at 40 years old as they were when they were 20. The difference between the two groups is the ones that turned their lives around, took accountability for themselves and made significant positive changes in their lives. One of them caught an 8 year prison sentence in his early 20s. He is now a doctor doing his residency. Another, did some time in county and battled a heroin addiction for almost a decade. He is now a finance manager at a car dealership and has a wife and three kids and two beautiful homes. On the flipside I have more friends who are still addicted to drugs, many homeless who have done little to nothing to make their situation better. They don’t want to work or do the hard thing in life and make good decisions. It seems everyone is a victim of the system these days, but in reality they are only victims of their own mentality.
[8] Moms on Facebook often remark that raising boys is mostly a matter of trying to keep them alive until they’re grown. One of the boys I used to babysit was quite adventurous. Once we ran into his aunt and uncle at a restaurant and they told us tales of driving by his parents’ house and seeing a baby crawling around on the roof, and of driving down a busy thoroughfare near their house and seeing a baby crawling along the road. The kid wasn’t even old enough to walk. I had trouble keeping him from escaping, but he never got more than a half-a-block away on my watch.
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