Mendocino County Today: Monday 3/25/24

Dry Day | Gordon Black | Boonville Vista | MUSD Cuts | Brown Pelican | Palace Neglect | Civic Club | Narcissistic Gall | Beyond Hope | Bananas Sluggeta | Landline Service | Drip Fixed | Boonville Bard | Better Memory | Ukiah Jailbreak | Branscomb View | Three Questions | Yesterday's Catch | Cougar Attack | Circus Dogs | One-Legged Athletes | Women's Basketball | Extraordinary Belief | Mt Rushless | Last Harvest | X-Ray Dept | Time Stopped | Otter Quest | Teenage Mentality | Collective Punishment | TJ Letter | Cafe Table | Holy Bloopers

A MIX OF SUN AND CLOUDS and mainly dry conditions is expected today and Tuesday. A few showers are possible this afternoon in Humboldt and Del Norte counties. Rain and winds are expected on Wednesday. Additional weather systems may bring more rain late in the week and into the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): I have a cloudy 50F on the coast this Monday morning with .26" more rainfall. Dry skies today & tomorrow then 3 more days of rain to end the work week. Dry skies are forecast for after that, at least so far...

GORDON BLACK, Mendocino, long-time KZYX music host, poet and coast raconteur, dead at 88.

Marta McKenzie: With great sadness let it be known that Gordon Black passed away on Thursday, March 21 in Fort Bragg. A poet, a teacher, a gentleman and a truly fine man.

* * *

Ann Brown: Ahhhhh… Gordon Black, a fine actor musician and friend of all the arts. And what a unique voice! Just hearing him say Good Morning was a pleasure. He will be missed.

* * *

Liz Helenchild: Thank you, Marta, for posting the sad news about our esteemed longtime local radio & theater star/poetry creator & promoter. He wore his several hats with flair. It comforts me to report that Gordon's last days of a fully packed 88 years were graced by Marta and a small group of his good friends. Quoting Jesse Colin Young: We are but a moment's sunlight fading in the grass.

* * *

David Jones: Here’s a poem Gordon sent to me awhile back. He was a strong man who kept me centered. I’m very sad.

NEW YEAR

quiet in the canyon enough

to hear the whistle in the head

afar a kerthunk and there distant surf

.

that said its value is what's not said

escape to football Rose Bowl interpret

both defenses are getting the best of it early

.

let as if life itself hang on disambiguation

or ride the perimeters of sense in nature at repose

light withdrawing from some but not all last things

Gordon Black

* * *

TO POETS

for Gordon Black

the quiet in the canyon was enough—yea,

the noise in our heads was too much

.

there's something to be said for what's not said

something to be said for in nature in repose

.

something to be said for the Anasazi's ancient secrets

something to be said for the sun-washed waste of sands

.

there's something to be said for the giant cactus

waving with their hands in the sky

.

waving goodbye to all last things

as stars come out or hide, as thunder goes rolling by.

.

John Sakowicz

Sedona AZ

March 24, 2024

I am heartbroken to hear of the death of Gordon Black, friend, teacher, poet, public radio broadcaster, classical music connoisseur, motorcyclist and daredevil in his own boisterous. luxuriously fine, lavish, large and powerful way. 

John Sakowicz

Ukiah

* * *

BACK IN 2021 Blake More hosted Gordon on her radio show at KGUA FM, Gualala, with this introduction…

On Saturday, June 5, 2021 from 7-7:30, Cartwheels on the Sky (always the first Saturday of the month) features the poems and process of Mendocino Coast poet Gordon Black.

Born in Detroit, Black is a second generation, of Polish background, American. His father was a firefighter, later Battalion Chief, and his mother a social worker and theater director in stage and radio productions, and in his words he “was expected to succeed!” 

He says he stumbled out of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan with an M.A. in philosophy and pointed advice to go “get a job”. 

“It took decades and luck to turn that degree into some steady bread and water, and I have been a happy adjunct as a professor in philosophy at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC),” says Black.

He arrived on the Mendocino Coast in 1972 and engaged with the nascent poetry community and turned from extended prose efforts to “the stand up / sit down of completed poems, written and rewritten until the creatures fly without further assistance.” He has been doing live radio during much of that time, programming classical music for KZYX, Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, and has been involved in the annual Mendocino Spring Poetry Celebration for sixteen consecutive years. 

“I owe my own development in poetry to all my fellows in the regional scene, so I try to help keep it going,” credits Black. 

* * *

* * *

ON OF OUR FAVORITE RECOLLECTIONS of Gordon Black’s many interactions with the AVA (most in defense of KZYX in addition to his elegant poetry) was back in 1999 when Vassar English Professor Don Foster nailed Gordy as the author of one of the Wanda Tinasky “wanna-be” letters that Gordy wrote in a failed attempt to imitate the inimitable Wanda Tinasky (which Foster later convincingly sleuthed to be an old SF Beatnik named Tom Hawkins of Cleone). Gordy insisted his parody, which Gordy signed “Wanda Tinasky” was written by Wanda/Hawkins. But Foster, a wonderful writer in his own right, proved otherwise:

“Who was “Wanda Tinasky,” the heartless critic of Mendocino’s high koltcha? Was there more than one “Wanda”? Gordy could never figure out who Wanda really was but he didn’t like her Philistine attitude and he didn’t mind saying so. In fact, he said so all the time. The 10/29/86 issue of the AVA contains a representative Down-with-Wanda! letter from Gordy, duly signed, in which he rightly deplores Wanda’s recent use (10/15/86) of the antisemitic epithet, “heeb,” to denote Saul Bellow. Appearing in the same issue is a letter from Wanda herself, objecting that Gordy was too severe in comparing her biting literary criticism to the work of a killer-arsonist run “amok.”

“The letter to the AVA in which Wanda says “heeb” (10/15/86) and the one in which Wanda defends herself from Gordy Black’s funeral poem (10/29/86) were both written, I believe, by Thomas Hawkins of Fort Bragg. Two years later, that Wanda Tinasky came to a catastrophic end. In September 1988, Tom Hawkins killed his wife Kathleen, and burned down their home with her body inside. Hawkins then took his own life by driving Kathy’s car over a cliff. Gordy Black may have been whistling in the dark about the identity of “Wanda Tinasky”; and it may be true that he cannot recognize Shakespeare even when hit over the head with the Bard’s collected Works — but he is a shrewd judge of character, even eerily prophetic. He got Wanda right on the money.

A week after Wanda and Gordy crossed swords in October ’86, “Wanda Tinasky” weighed in with still another letter to the AVA. In a refreshing change of pace, Wanda this time spared the local poets, lambasting Bruce Anderson instead:

‘Dear Mr. Anderson, Goodness, you go on!! …Faker, flatterer, calling me a poet…you cryptogink!…& what was that quotation on page 3 from John Henry of the Cardinals? A gentleman never causes pain? Because I have no pretensions along that line, let me plant my dainty Birkenstock right up your ample hypocrisy, Sports Nuts, and let you thank me for it!!!” (11/11/86).’

“Signed “Wanda Tinasky,” the letter closes with a characteristics flourish — a P.S., and a P.P.S., and a P.P.P.S., all written (or so the author supposes) in Wanda’s inimitable style. But this Wanda letter is a rank forgery. It was not written by Tom Hawkins (nor by Thomas Pynchon, nor by a 60-year-old bag lady living under the Ten Mile Bridge). It was written, I believe, by Gordon Leon Black. (Gordy, you can’t just pull off your cravat, wear it on your head babushka-style, and be mistaken for a 60-year-old Jewish bag lady and Russian emigre. To be taken for Wanda, you have to be able to write like Wanda!)

“Would Gordon Black — while writing letters to the AVA and the Mendocino Commentary in which he denounces Wanda Tinasky — also write a letter as Wanda Tinasky? What of Gordy’s published contempt for Wanda? What of his ass-kicking disdain for “ample hypocrisy”? Under such circumstances, who will believe the linguistic evidence that Gordy was himself a Wanda Wanna-be? Incredible! Nevertheless, the 11/11/86 Wanda letter is certainly not by the same “Wanda Tinasky” who wrote most of the other “Wanda Tinasky” letters — and if it was not, in fact, written by Gordon Leon Black, then call me “knave” and hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker or a poulter’s hare. (C’mon, Gordy, fess up! Justice for Judi Bari may depend on your courage and veracity.)

“If I’m wrong in ascribing the 10/86 Wanda letters to Tom Hawkins, or in ascribing the 11/11/86 Wanda letter to Gordy Black, then we can all go home. Certain law enforcement agents can continue to sit on their duffs without investigating the 1990 bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. Tanya Brannan and Nick Wilson can continue to collect money for the Judi Bari Defense Fund. Mike Sweeney can return to solid-waste disposal, and we can all breathe easy again. I will then offer a blushing apology to Mr. Sweeney for having identified him as the ‘Lord’s Avenger.’ 

“I may be wrong, but I doubt it.”

* * *

In 1997 Gordon Black took a motorcycle tour of the Northern United States and Canada on his Harley. Here’s a short excerpt from his report: 

“I’m at a picnic table, assembling notes. Before me on the green are three spirited women, volleying French. I think I need to ask whether lac, as in lake, is la, or le, and I learn it’s neither; it’s lr. The merriest one has the voice of a cello, mezzo-French. An arrow to the heart! I resume writing in an awful hand with scratchouts on lined paper, she is writing on blank pages, bound, with gold stampings. I must invite them to sample the grapes of California’s fabulous Nomanapacino, introducing them to the viticulture editors of the AVA, get them on Marco McLean’s world literature radio review. But when I conclude my piece with its final, perfectly formed period, they’re gone. An ouch to remember.”

(Assembled by Mark Scaramella)

MENDO UNIFIED MAKES BUDGET & STAFF CUTS

by Mary Benjamin

On Thursday, March 14, the MUSD Board of Trustees made the difficult decision to reduce staff to balance the budget. Public and district employees were informed of this probable outcome in February.

Separate motions to reduce certificated and classified staff were voted upon. The motion on certificated staff passed 4-0, with Trustee Griffen recused from the vote. The motion on classified staff passed 5-0. 

Earlier in the meeting, Business Manager Meg Kailikole presented the 2nd Interim budget for 2024 along with projected budgets for the years 2024-25, 2035-26, and 2026-27. Calculations showed that expenditures for the second half of this school year increased by 1.92%, and revenues increased by 1.68%. 

However, the budget projections for the next three years in particular, caused concern. According to Kailikole, revenues will drop consecutively from 2024 to 2026, which means a budget series of deficit spending. 

Although property tax revenue is projected to increase over the next few years, expenses will exceed revenue because the tax revenue increase will not be enough to offset the expenditure increases. 

Salaries and benefits continue to rise and increases are coming to the mandated district contributions to certificated and classified state retirement systems. 

The budget presented does not include wage increases. In response to Trustee Griffen’s question, Kailikole confirmed that a 2% raise next year would likely double the deficit. 

The trustees unanimously approved the 2nd Interim budget and then discussed the Deferred Maintenance budget. Again, this budget will be deficit-spending by 2025-26. 

However, the trustees were committed to proceeding with various projects waiting for funding, such as the K-8 playground, Comptche’s multipurpose room floor, work on Elk’s pitched roof, and a fuel tank for the K-8. 

The trustees then faced the difficult part of the meeting: considering two Reduction of Force actions. At this time, Trustee Griffen recused herself from the certificated action due to conflicts. 

From the audience during public commentary, Amy Frederick, a district teacher, spoke about the need for the district to provide clearer information about these actions. She said that parents were not fully aware of these upcoming actions. 

Trustee Shaeffer responded that the actions were first announced in February. He continued, “I don’t know how to implement in a way that respects the rights of the employees and the rights of families.” 

Superintendent Morse commented, “The information is available to all, but we can discuss it further.” Frederick also suggested that the district consider asking the public for funding, an approach she said had been successful in Sea Ranch. 

The motion for a certificated Reduction of Force equivalent to three full-time employees was approved 4-0. The motion for a classified Reduction of Force equivalent to 50.95 hours was approved unanimously. 

After the vote, Trustee Shaeffer expressed his frustration with the district’s need to reduce employees. “We spend between 80-85% of our budget on salaries and benefits, but it’s the only way to cut our expenditures.” 

He continued, “It’s crazy because you know that you’re disrupting the program every time you do that. What we have here is stuff that wants more money; the only way we can do that is to cut more people. It’s a cycle that is difficult for everybody involved, and nobody takes any pleasure in it.” 

Before the meeting moved on to the final items on the agenda, Amy Frederick made an impassioned plea for counselors to remain on staff. 

She said, “If you do the research, mental health is a national issue right now and has been before COVID. Our region is not immune.” She continued, “We need counselors at our school sites. It is not about how many children we have. It’s taking care of all of them.” 

Speaking respectfully, she continued, “You’re overseeing people’s children. The school is not yours, it’s not mine. It’s theirs, and we’re the guardians.” 

She added, “I know you have a very hard role. But I think we have to think differently about what we cut right now because our times are not the same as they were.” 

Trustee Griffen acknowledged Frederick’s speech, then responded, “There’s some sifting happening to ensure that we preserve as much of that as possible. It’s not a perfect answer. Just one piece of the puzzle.” Trustee Griffen also noted that the counseling cut amounted to a minor amount.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

THE PALACE & THE CITY OF UKIAH

Editor,

A lot of people seem to want to believe that there’s some kind of conspiracy or collusion happening regarding the Palace. The sad truth is that this historic landmark has been neglected by private property owners—for decades—to nearly the point of no return. The City of Ukiah doesn’t own this building; we never have. However, when a private property deteriorates to the point that it becomes a public health and safety hazard, we have to get involved.

A year ago, City Staff and the City Council strongly believed that the Palace was being in the process of being sold to a buyer who had the resources and experience to bring the project to fruition. When that deal didn’t close, it became clear that there was not an eminent project and a) additional pressure needed to be applied to the owner, and b) we needed to inspect the building to evaluate the extent of the deterioration. 

The results of that inspection (9/29/23) were alarming and have been well documented, as well as confirmed by other people who have since seen the inside of the building. Regardless of the fact that the building was again in escrow with a new buyer and regardless of any other circumstances, it was deemed necessary to issue a Notice of Violation to the property owner to force remediation of the situation immediately. That remediation could be stabilization, demolition, or a combination thereof, and the pathway will be determined by the owner. None of those pathways can be completed overnight, so scaffolding and fencing were required. That’s where we are. The prospective buyers have a plan and are actively working through it; those plans are constrained by other agencies’ timelines that they cannot control. We expect to know more soon. 

Shannon Riley, Deputy City Manager

Ukiah

THE KID & HER FUNDERS

Editor,

Thank you for pointing out the effect of lots of money poured into political campaigns. You are so correct in saying the deep pockets of the wine-industry bought that 1st District Supervisor seat. The Farm Bureau and Carre Brown endorsed her because Joe Hurlbutt (on the Bureau) is her uncle, and Carre Brown a relative. Why did people vote for an inexperienced kid? Well, you couldn’t open a social media page without seeing Cline’s picture. Some people said she seemed well-spoken, and after all, she said she had experience. Some folks told me they voted for her because they thought a female would be a good choice. Naive reasons all. Call me a curmudgeon, but I predict she will be a total waste of space on the Board at a time when the County is close to bankruptcy, is drastically cutting services for the public, and at the same time raising fees for everything they can. She is unqualified, has no idea what she’s doing, or she wouldn’t have had the narcissistic gall to run for that position. Just my two cents. That said, I hope I am proven wrong because our little community deserves better.

Julie Beardsley

Ukiah

THE FUNGUS AMONG US

Editor, 

The Ed Notes today started nice then describing the Mendocino Judge's machinations says there should be more press coverage of the situation, not a vacuum. Even the Daily Illini college newspaper had a reporter that covered the local court action. Prop 1, in typical fashion, creates money for the organization and who knows what percentage actually goes to behavioral health. It seems the decline of the conditions society is beyond hope now and mopping up the casualties is the remaining option. Good piece on Hendy's fungi. The world needs a mycelium transplant to properly sustain itself as the mushrooms do for the forest. 

Best, 

Jeff Goll

Willits

LANDLINES AT RISK

About 30 years ago, American Telephone and Telegraph ended its telegraph services. Now AT&T is taking aim at “plain old telephone service.”

The Dallas-based telecom giant has applied to the California Public Utilities Commission to be released as the state’s “carrier of last resort,” a designation the company has held since 1996 requiring it to provide landline telephone service. 

From a business perspective, the request makes sense. Current demand for landline services is very small — less than 5% of households in AT&T’s California territory have landlines, according to the company. And AT&T says it spends more than $1 billion a year to maintain landlines in the state. 

Meanwhile, cell phones, along with broadband and fiber-optic cables, dominate the telecom industry, and demand for these technologies will only grow. The company says the money it spends on landlines could be used to strengthen more-advanced alternatives. And that 20 other states have already relieved the company of its carrier-of-last-resort status. 

But here in California, with floods, fires, earthquakes and rolling blackouts, our relationship with landlines is more complex. Those copper wires are emergency lifelines when the power goes out. And given the distressing frequency of various natural and man-made disasters, approval of AT&T’s proposal should hinge on the availability of equally reliable ways to call for help. 

Unfortunately, those comparable options don’t exist — yet. Currently, most California households get their voice services not as stand-alone landlines but as part of packages offered by broadband and mobile wireless companies. But, according to the state PUC’s Public Advocate’s Office, none of these technologies offer the same reach and reliability in an emergency as the humble landline. 

Until they do, the PUC should not relieve AT&T of its carrier-of-last-resort responsibilities. 

It is true that landlines’ popularity has tanked in the past two decades as consumers flocked to broadband and wireless. Between 2000 and 2021, landline demand plummeted 89%, according to AT&T. But for the elderly, rural populations and those in vulnerable areas, legacy copper-wire telephone service is the only dependable means to call for help when power fails or disaster strikes. 

For example, during the horrific Camp Fire in 2018, thousands of critical cellphone messages were missed, delayed or lost, hampering officials’ efforts to warn residents, while messages on landlines were more likely to reach them. 

AT&T says the company cannot force current customers to give up their landlines, yet its PUC application only guarantees service for six months. What then? The company says the agency’s approval is only the beginning of a multi-step process to help landline customers move to more advanced options, requiring more government approvals ahead. 

But the devil is in the details, and after months of AT&T’s startling letters to its California landline customers about the company’s proposed actions, resident complaints are flowing in, and officials are taking notice. Local governments are requesting more information from AT&T. Members of Congress have launched opposition to AT&T’s plan, and the PUC has set two virtual hearings for March 19 before making a decision, likely this fall. 

Meanwhile, uneven access to broadband services throughout the state could hamper the transfer of landline customers to more advanced voice technology. California is still struggling to bring broadband to rural regions and low-income urban neighborhoods, years after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to bridge the digital divide. In its application, AT&T points to a federal program to ensure broadband equity, which it says is in a “decisive phase” as reason for a speedy approval. 

But the deployment of billions in both state and federal dollars to expand high-speed internet in California remains controversial, with allegations that the process disproportionately reduces funding for urban areas in favor of wealthier suburbs. 

Despite these issues, advanced voice services are available to most Californians. AT&T says fewer than 500 copper-based voice lines are in service in the Bay Area without an alternative. But it’s not clear that the alternatives are comparable. In the event of a power outage and/or natural disaster, will they make people safer? 

Here the efforts of carriers such as AT&T are critical, and yet the industry’s track record in emergency-proofing its alternatives to landlines is less than reassuring. The Federal Communications Commission’s past efforts to make wireless carriers install eight hours of backup power at all cell sites and 24 hours of backup power at all central switching facilities failed in court on procedural grounds after the carriers sued. 

So again, we’re not there yet. 

AT&T is wrong when it refers to “plain old telephone service” as obsolete. When the lights go out and the cell phones go dark, that click and dial tone are often the last resort. Until there’s an equally accessible and reliable alternative to copper wires, the PUC should protect our access to them. 

(Bay Area News Group Editorial (via Ukiah Daily Journal)

THE LORD ON GOD

Editor,

Why is nobody crying for what happens to all of us blowhards, pontificators and other wise ones now?

When I read the horrifying and inspiring tale Bruce Anderson wrote about his own cancer treatment, I confess I first felt sick and sad and yet inspired by a ghastly idea.

I wanted to wait a few weeks and write an obituary for Bruce Anderson while he was still alive. 

Then he would have the opportunity to write the correction he so deserves:

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Bruce Anderson has always been seen by supporters as the Mark Twain of Anderson Valley. Cussed and cursed, Big fish in every pond. Constipated red faced at all times due to all that truthiness he wanted to pass. He was funny, with good ideas and as agnostic and hopeless as the Bard of Hannibal ever was.

He was also the Don Quixote, tilting at board of supervisors after board of supervisors, whom he was determined to tell us were blowhardmills, not the towering representatives of the people. He was followed faithfully on his Crusade by Major Sancho, who handled the nitty-gritty while the dauntless Penalot Anderson, who, with pen raised high, constantly charged some judge, mayor, corporation, or invading mobsters, ruffians or cultists.

When the dragon Tricky Dick fell with his carcass stuck full of ballpoint spears, Bruce Anderson must have joined the worldwide cheer for all journalists. He waited till the 1980s to jump in, buying the AVA for $20,000.

Nobody could know it would be all downhill from there. Nobody could imagine a world where Nixon would be chased away as a raving commie by his own party if he reappeared today. Journalism never imagined that some idiots chasing Princess Diana would make the world turn on all of us.

Bruce Anderson knew the national scene was beyond his reach and hope and instead chronicled the mysteries of mythological Mendocino County, along with its interplay with his vision of the real Mendocino. Nobody did more to both debunk and chronicle the real Hippies and their folklore.

He told us about the rise and fall of the Mendocino Moonies, Jim Jones and even the Manson Gang. He did the same for the mobsters who took over Fort Bragg, turned it into a speculative circus and then how one of their arsonists went off the deep end and burned down the library and Racines and the grand old hotel and the rest of it.

He could record the clueless burps of brain-dead of right wingers and the hysterical shrieking of lefties in one paragraph, then move on to the heroics of the Anderson Valley High scholars, athletes and teachers. He rooted out ubiquitous news media sycophancy while giving enterprising reporters a friendly shout, be they independents or even working for the hideous hedge fund who fired everybody here in a giant tax scam and continue to hold onto the local “newspapers.”

Indeed the fabulous penman Mike Geniella wrote a story that could easily be reprinted on the front page of the New York Times, if that newspaper had not moved from its elitist silo to something of a duck and cover bomb shelter, ducking hand grenades from Fox phony newsers with such fear that they have lost touch with any incoming new ideas.

Geniella told us how Bruce Anderson and Mark Scaramella closing the paper edition of the AVA was the latest domino in a dark storm of newspaper closures. The story is fascinating and should be read, as unlike Bruce Anderson so far, the death of Newspapers has NOT been greatly exaggerated. 

But I see “The World’s Last Newspaper” as something else, a rag that was ostracized by corporate media even more than those who became his targets. One downside of the Bard of Boonville was that once a person got into his crosshairs, the arrows never stopped flying. He got some people wrong. We all do. Bad and some good people have found it hard to pull those arrows out, mostly because they were aimed with precision and knowledge, sometimes preternaturally wise and sometimes hitting someone vital to the community in the heart because they were carrying on in the pragmatic world that Bruce Anderson often had to abandon donning that shining armor for. 

Bruce Anderson could err on the side of being vicious in print and unfair to those political palaces. He gave cringeworthy and inappropriate personal details on those who fell into his sights whom he considered to be public figures and without their side. He stood up for the powerless, even when they were imprisoned for alleged monstrous crimes. Nobody was ever able to pin Bruce Anderson as a right-winger or a left, a Republican or a Democrat. He is one of the most interesting journalists in America but few have ever been willing to write about him, for fear of his acidic and clever pen being aimed at them. 

Bruce Anderson was willing to recognize and collaborate with genius, such as the late Alexander Cockburn, who had opposite views from Bruce Anderson on Israel. (I side more with Cockburn.) Bruce Anderson would spar with trolls and critics in his own newspaper as if he were another troll, not the editor and he was! 

My wife Linda’s description of Bruce Anderson, “a pit bull with a friendly face. You want to snuggle him but don’t dare.”

And he did bite the politicians, often rightly and sometimes not, but with many good effects, like when he was sent to jail for punching that school superintendent then wrote about the horrors inside, resulting in change. He was willing to burn his sources, like the DA, who I could tell he really liked but Bruce Anderson had to hold up his hands and say stop when the DA was frying real people way beyond what should have been or normally was, as part of his effective crusade against the judge in the dog caper.

I have to say I don’t know Bruce Anderson on a personal level. I have stopped in Boonville as often as I could and swapped stories of the old days of journalism. But my account is about the print persona Bruce Anderson who makes so many feel like we know him, some hating, some loving, some in awe of his pen.

Geniella’s piece said many inksters never considered Bruce Anderson and Mark Scaramella “real” journalists. Those people looking down their nose at the AVA worked for newspapers that did not die off, they were taken out back and shot in the head by their corporate owners. We were all making 30 percent profits in the 1990s when corporate ownership refused to reinvest, instead cutting salaries and staff for decades and making their product something that became of zero value to its consumers by cheapening it so much. Now they beg us to support “local journalism” at the papers they killed off and fired the staff.

That’s all 21st century feudo-crony capitalism knows how to do is take something of value and steal its value. Bruce Anderson believed, like me, that “real” newspapers operate under a sophisticated but idiotic premise of the enlightenment called “objectivity.” This is the idea that in any story there are two sides. So you find the truth that PG&E was contaminating groundwater then “balance” that with sophisticated corporate PR. Most of these stories go untold because the “objective” media simply can’t find a way in due to corporate PR and lawyering. You need Erin Brockovich or Bruce Anderson to cut the lies and tell it like it is. Mainstream media ends up with more lies from the palaces than the stories we set out to do. 

Most of the “real” newspaper journalists are gone. Those who remain work for the likes of SF Gate which allegedly practices objectivity but also plants corporate PR inside their stories. These regularly glorified brands often having nothing whatsoever to do with the story. Bruce Anderson did not do this kind of utter rubbish. He never accepted these shameful bribes that would have gotten a reporter fired from the “mainstream media” in the years I was full time, but now is somehow an accepted practice. Us “mainstream” journalists did practice tremendous ethics until recent stuff like this, but could never get around their own format to tell the readers about their professionalism.

Now, the liars at Fox and such direct their gaze at some partisan foolishness or the network’s hate mongering toward immigrants and “report” that story while ignoring real news. Real news is happening all over that you don’t know about and they won’t tell you. Bruce Anderson still will. He prints everything from every viewpoint.

This is a clue to another aspect of the Bruce Anderson that is unlike other modern newspaper persons and which mirrors the myth of Twain. Mr. Clemens operated with a name and persona invented to challenge the dimwitted mundanities of government, media, and religion. He would give a speech and a newspaper reporter would quote him saying something clever like “the coldest winter I ever spent was one July in San Francisco.” Twain would write demanding a correction and saying what he actually said was X. Then he would go to the next town, say that, and then write for a correction claiming he had said what he actually said the first time.

It was a poke at all who could read, but not think.

As I said, I don't know Bruce Anderson intimately but I always felt some of the brouhahas that he stirred up, such as rock ‘em sock em robots with the school board guy and later getting so sick of Douglas Bosco making sausage in Congress that he reconstructed reality. Bruce Anderson presented his take which stepped outside the processed pablum that was accepted as reality.

Or I may have imagined my own fantasy. Either way, Bruce Anderson has been an iconic and inspirational journalist to many reporters throughout California. My jobs included work from sports guy to managing editor at the Gridley Herald, Appeal-Democrat, Sacramento Bee, Napa Valley Register and Fort Bragg Advocate News. I currently write for Mendocino Voice and sometimes other local news outlets. The wonderful motto “War on the Palaces, Peace to the Villages,” from the French Revolution or “Newspapers have no Friends” from Joe Pulitzer, is a concept now foreign to those in the practice of journalism, but this was the role of a free press that the founders envisioned, Bruce Anderson charging the Krakens of power on behalf of a disempowered class who rarely notice, much less thank the media. 

Twain was run out of Nevada City for attacking the civic titans and then writing one too many drunken rants. Bruce Anderson stomped out of the Anderson Valley once when he was so sick of the 91,305 dolts who live in Mendocino County he left town and set up shop in Oregon, only to return and make the count 91,306 know-it-alls again.

But its a different world now.

People have now been conditioned to trust con artists and corporate scammers over all reporters. Americans have become too afraid in 2024 to even glance up from their phones and their AI bosses to listen to that single other side of the story, much less venture into the weed choked garden of real ideas. 

When I started as a reporter, the business was led by old sourpusses who demanded that all the powerful be challenged. Society wanted this. Today, people like official voices and they accept the press-hating of an authoritarian madman who only wants to cover up his own crimes. Corporations and governments now know that anyone asking hard questions is as rare as a Buckey Walter that connects to “landlines” whatever those were. 

So corporate America no longer feels obliged to respond to any media it doesn't own, even if the journalists are from 60 Minutes or the New York Times. 

We don’t have the time or inclination to listen to any ideas that contradict our own, much less those of an eccentric and an agenda without a monetary motive or talking points. AI will continually edit out the edges of the narrow realms we live in, turning us all into a soft middle of Soylent Green that all obey. As a 60 year old its scary to see how all dress identically in baggy designer black and expensive ugly sneakers made in China for about $2 and how nobody really questions their bosses, the fashion makers, wealth or power. Rebellions will be scripted by our masters to distract us from the real issues, like our food, our businesses all being controlled by global and overseas interests and having our thoughts and agendas ordered by a feudal corporate class that has taken everything from America and made us hate and blame each other for their sins. I have bounced from past to present tense to annoy Bruce Anderson and allow him his correction.

What would the redoubtable and unique Bruce Anderson have the matching minions of 2024 remember? Life begins at the end of your comfort zone so always be as radical as reality. 

Frank Hartzell

Fort Bragg

BREAKOUT ON LOW GAP ROAD 

by Tommy Wayne Kramer 

Mid-winter, Ukiah, many years ago. 

The sullen skies, the weary sun, the scheming team of idle men with crafty minds huddled in a cell at the county jail on Low Gap Road, planning an escape. 

Foolproof? Nah, but it looked pretty tight, orchestrated even, and at that point it was simply a matter of the clouds and the sun cooperating. And the Corrections Deputy not going south. 

So, winter weather being winter weather, the several pieces fell together soon enough. The late afternoon sun sank low over the western hills. Game afoot. 

It wasn’t until a few days after the jailbreak took place and dust had begun to settle that I was at the Mendocino County jail sitting in a small room with a small table and two plastic chairs, talking with one of the guys who had helped plan and execute the jailbreak. 

He was a young, cheerful chap, happy to explain how they’d plotted it. I was a fairly experienced criminal defense investigator, intrigued by their little caper that had worked — briefly. 

The plan was proposed by a newcomer, a young Italian guy from New Jersey who’d been arrested and detained on this charge or that, and was determined to depart county lodgings, legally or not. His family was Mafia, he let his fellow prisoners know, and they were particularly anxious to have him back. 

How anxious? 

“He was saying there’d be big money for us all,” said my co-conspirator client, including an outsized payout for any jailhouse guard willing to look the other direction for a very short period of time. That minor contribution, easily explainable when the questions started being asked, would be worth $100,000 said Mr. Mafia. 

And they’d already plucked the on-duty officer out: A young, heavyset fellow recently married and with a baby, and in sufficient need of extra household funding that he’d agreed. Let’s pause to imagine the emotional turmoil the deputy was sweating through. 

My client had been guaranteed 10 grand for his contributions. “Did you really believe the guy?’ I asked. “That he had the connections and the money and he’d actually pay all of you?” 

“At the time, yeah!” he laughed. “Now? Aww hell no. Obviously not.’ 

The small interview room in which this discussion took place opened onto a hallway that ran maybe 40 feet, stopping at a locked and barred door leading to wings of jail cells. 

Walking down that hallway (I’d walked it a hundred times over the years) there were a series of darkened windows on the right-hand side. The 12-foot stretch was the security division. The only illumination visible to passersby were small black-and-white surveillance camera video displays. 

Cameras provided views of all the jail interior, its outside grounds and perimeter. But some prisoner at some point had realized something: An outdoor camera perched atop the jail, facing westward, was briefly blinded by the setting sun in winter. 

Well now. 

Around 4:30 the sun grazed the mountain tops, then splashed onto the camera lens and caused the video screen in the surveillance center to go snow-white. 

Fertile minds of bored prisoners realized a modest patch of jail real estate was invisible for about five minutes on certain mid-winter afternoons. So a team of inmates spent four-plus minutes daily working the cyclone fence loose along the southwestern edge of the jail. 

And then one day winter weather brought sullen skies and a weary sun to Ukiah. And as the late afternoon sun nestled against distant ridge tops, a video screen in the Mendocino County Jail went blank. 

Simultaneously, 100 feet east of where the cyclone fence had been compromised, a trio of prisoners broke into a rowdy, free-swinging fight of shoving, pushing and slamming into each other. 

A corrections officer hurried over to break it up. Inside, the security team was alerted to the brawl picked up by an east-facing camera, but with no idea of a tall guy squirming under the fence off to the west. 

Under, out, and away. 

It ended minutes later with his arrest at the corner of Low Gap Road and North State Street. My client pled to a conspiracy charge, Mafia Man and the others took different routes to their sentencing destinations. 

The only face I remember was that of the corrections officer a few days later, standing in a courthouse hallway, cuffed in the midst of a dozen others, looking shamed, haunted and afraid. 

So much lost on a gamble taken to make things so much better. 

WHEN THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT VISITED BOONVILLE

by Bruce Anderson (May, 2001)

TONY SERRA and Erica Etelson are out as attorneys for the Bari Cult's pending federal case, scheduled to begin the first week of October. Dennis Cunningham is back as lead attorney. Cunningham and the late Judi Bari devised the fiction that the FBI conspired to frame Bari and Cherney because the pair represented a major threat to Northcoast timber interests. When Bari was nearly killed by a car bomb in 1990 in Oakland and were arrested for knowingly transporting it by the Oakland Police Department, Bari and Cherney claimed they were not only innocent of the charges but had been defamed as terrorists by the FBI and the Oakland PD in the month before the Alameda County prosecutor declined to charge them. Susan Jordan was first hired by Bari in the aftermath of the May 24th 1990 explosion. She was removed from the case for wondering at the curious exemption by both law enforcement and Bari of Bari's ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, from suspect status. The pliable Cunningham became the Bari-Cherney attorney. He is an associate of all the lawyers involved at one time or another in the Bari case; they are described collectively as “movement lawyers,” having made their bones, perhaps literally in a number of cases, in the 1960s when they defended criminals posing as political revolutionaries. A dozen or so persons, including several unscrupulous attorneys, have lived off the cynically calculated Bari bombing myth for 11 years now.

BETTER BRING YOUR TOOTHBRUSH, MIKE. The other shocker in the Bari case is that Don Lipmanson is representing the late Bari's ex-husband, Mike Sweeney, the man who made the bomb that blew up his ex. Lipmanson is a local criminal defense attorney of dubious abilities. Sweeney “will definitely testify,” Joseph Sher of the Justice Department told me Thursday when he stopped by Boonville for a chat. 

SHER ALSO SUGGESTED that there is movement on the case from the Who Dunnit perspective in the Alameda County DA's office. Sher asked me exactly three questions: My theory of the case, why it has become so rancorous and, who is Don Lipmanson?

MY THEORY is that Sweeney tried to murder Judi Bari in the context of a failed marriage out of which the two of them emerged with feloniously incriminating information on the other going back to the beginnings of their love when both were members of the same Maoist cult. The pseudo-revolutionary fads of the 1960's and early 1970's having collapsed simultaneously with their romance, Sweeney wanted to become a Mendo Nice Person, a respectable recycling bureaucrat while Judi, seemingly driven by extreme jealously of her famous sister, Gina Kolata of the New York Times, wanted to be a famous radical environmentalist. (The Bari family has always been silent on the tragedy of Judi Bari which, all by itself, indicates they are convinced she was culpable somehow.) As Bari and Sweeney fought about everything from how to raise their two daughters to how to split up the material fruits of their marriage, their loathing for each other grew. Neither being inclined to “Gandhian non-violence,” their relationship became murderous. (The late Bari was in real life an extremely violent person, as is Mike Sweeney.) So long as she was alive, Judi had the potential to yank Mike's chain clear into the federal pen if she wanted to. When he threatened to go to court to get custody of the couple's two daughters, she threatened to go to the police and tell them about all sorts of criminal activity the two had carried out together, ranging from harassment of the first Mrs. Sweeney to their fire bombing of the old air field facility down the street from their then-home in southwest Santa Rosa. Judi knew that her ex was capable of murder but she, as the daughter of the securely upper-middle-class suburbs — Silver Springs, Maryland — didn't know how to defend herself against him. Judi got Pam Davis of Santa Rosa to approach Irv Sutley with an offer to kill Sweeney, later claiming that two separate solicitations to Sutley to commit murder were “jokes.” As it turned out, Mike got Judi first, devising an explosive that would detonate in her vehicle a hundred miles south of the Mendocino Environment Center from whose premises Sweeney placed it in Bari's Subaru the day before it exploded in front of Oakland High School. The two of them, post bomb, were left with no alternative but to conspire to pin the attempted murder on grander forces, in this case the federal government which, with typical blundering, accommodated them by arresting Bari and Cherney prematurely. (Sher says the FBI urged the Oakland PD not to arrest Bari and Cherney until they'd had time to conduct a thorough investigation, but Oakland arrested them anyway.) 

BARI AND SWEENEY being highly intelligent, and both of them convinced of the stupidity of everyone else, their post-bomb construct has so far succeeded. Sweeney and the late Bari have been able to place the stupid, the credulous and the compromised in positions from where their prophylactic version of the Bari bombing can be both promulgated and protected. (For example, Meredyth Rinehart, Sweeney's live-in girl friend at the time of the bombing, and a key witness as to his movements in the pre-and post-bomb hours, sits on the board of directors of the Redwood Summer Justice Project. Ms. Rinehart presently works for the Mendocino County Department of Health.) 

BUT BARI AND SWEENEY couldn't tie up all the loose ends; there were and are too many of them, not to mention certain people who either know the truth of what happened or who are aware of crucial but incriminating pieces of information regarding Sweeney or Bari. 

JUDI BARI, her life abbreviated by the bomb, died a truly tragic figure in 1997. She did what she had to do in the circumstances she found herself in. If she'd told the truth about what had happened to her she and Sweeney would have gone to prison for a long time, lost their children, embarrassed their wealthy and influential families, confirmed the popular but false notion that environmentalists tended to be violent radicals.

AND HERE WE ARE, FOLKS, with a federal law suit set to be heard this fall said by the plaintiffs to be worth $20 million to a very small band of liars and hysterics, the dozen of them informed every step of the way by The Man Who Bombed Judi Bari. The utterly corrupt Redwood Summer Justice Project has raised more than a million dollars, serving as a slush fund for a cadre of unscrupulous propagandists and degraded lawyers. Other self-certified Northcoast environmental charities have been similarly used to propagate the Bari Bombing Myths, as have the semi-public radio stations KPFA (particularly Dennis Bernstein and Noelle Hanrahan); KZYX (of course); and K-MUD. No discussion of the Bari case is permitted at any of these tax-supported, tax-exempt stations. The print media have been even more craven; the Press Democrat ignores the case even though its Ukiah writer, Mike Geniella, is on the subpoena list for October's federal festivities, as are a number of other Northcoast luminaries.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ATTORNEY SHER asked me how I accounted for the intense rancor the case has generated. I disagreed that there was much, and what there was arose when the mighty AVA began to deconstruct the Bari-ite case. And before us there was a furious round of rancor when Steve Talbot's excellent film, ‘Who Bombed Judi Bari?’ appeared. Talbot, assisted by Dave Helvarg, found out more about what actually happened to Judi Bari in two weeks than the FBI has since discovered in the subsequent eleven years. Ironically, much of what Talbot and Helvarg learned came straight from Bari herself who then, when the film was telecast on KQED in 1991, denounced it! Rancor is what the fake left does best, as any person who challenges any of its assumptions quickly discovers. They're mob action types — intellectual and physical cowards who show up in large groups to howl down their critics, at least this critic. 

AND SHER ASKED ME who Don Lipmanson was. I was startled. Lipmanson? Christ save us all. I said that Lipmanson was a thrice-busted dope grower who sued Mendocino County for denying him work furlough after Lipmanson was convicted of cultivation, won the suit (giving us all another example of just how incompetent our County Counsel's office is), and used the proceeds of the great victory to go to law school. Lipmanson will do and say whatever he's paid to do and say, and the Sweeney-Bari combine can pay for. Of course with Lipmanson doing the talking for them they may well pay their way straight into jail, which would be most gratifying. It is more likely, however, that Lipmanson is Sweeney's legal rope-a-dope ploy. With a marginally competent outback attorney representing him in October, Sweeney can hope to appear an innocent, perplexed bystander, forced to hire whomever to represent him as he's hauled into court to defend himself however he can at bargain basement prices. If Sweeney and his wealthy family had gone out and hired a $600-an-hour mercenary, well, I'm sure the Sweeneys hope it doesn't come to that.

THAT WAS IT for Thursday's meeting with the government, and long may our flag wave if there's enough justice left in the land to defeat the series of lies manufactured by a sad lady who died slowly and painfully over four years at the hands of a ruthless and lethal ex-husband. To me, the Bari case is even more fundamentally about the degradation of the American left which, at one time, contained a few truly great figures. But beginning in the middle 1960s and ever since when criminals and pseudo-revolutionary rich kids began to dominate the opposition to capitalism, many very bad people have been romanticized as heroes and heroines of the left. And here it is all over again in the Bari case, with nationally famous intellectuals signing on to a wholly rotten cause. 

AMERICA WOULD BE A MUCH HAPPIER, much less violent place if we were all guaranteed the basics — food, shelter, education, work, health care, secure old age in a carefully protected natural world. What the Bari case, and those other cult-constructed causes built around false gods really mean, it seems to me, is that the accumulating, unaddressed catastrophes now threatening life itself are going to get us all.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, March 24, 2024

MAYA BYRD, Sacramento/Fort Bragg. Trespassing, resisting.

ANDREW CEDILLO, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

DORIAN COON, Lakeport/Willits. DUI-alcohol&drugs, misdemeanor hit&run, controlled substance, paraphernalia vandalism, resisting, bringing controlled substance into jail.

KARINA FLORES-OSORIO, Santa Rosa. Stolen vehicle, no license, suspended license for DUI, probation violation.

DAVID GARD, Clearlake/Ukiah. Resisting.

CASANDRA GUERRA, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, smuggling controlled substance into jail.

LEAH HALEY, Willits. DUI.

RAMON MACIEL, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol. (Frequent flyer.)

ORLANDO MUNOZ, Ukiah. Under influenece, controlled substance. (Frequent flyer.)

JOHN TOVAR-SEVILLA, Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, probation revocation.

NICHOLAS YADON, Fort Bragg. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun on a police officer with likely great bodily injury, controlled substance without prescription, vandalism, disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, resisting, probation violation.

MOUNTAIN LION KILLS MAN in Northern California for first time in 30 years (El Dorado County)

According to the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office, dispatchers received a desperate 911 call around 1:15 p.m. Saturday from Darling Ridge and Skid roads in a rural part of the county about 30 minutes north of Placerville. The caller was an 18-year-old who said he and his older brother had just been attacked by a mountain lion. During the fight for their lives, the two brothers were separated, and the young man wasn't sure where his 21-year-old brother was.…

sfgate.com/bayarea/article/mountain-lion-kills-man-northern-california-19365657.php

(via David Severn)

CIRCUS DOGS JUMP when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

— George Orwell

YOU KNOW what’s probably behind the newfound interest in women’s basketball lately? (Besides the obvious high quality of play, of course.) The doubling of attendance at underutilized but expensive basketball facilities and the associated increase in gate receipts. Is that too cynical? Why has it taken so long for team owners and high-profile colleges who own the fancy basketball venues to figure out how to do the math? Do they really care about women’s basketball? Or their fatter bank accounts?

(Mark Scaramella)

CAPITALISM is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.

— John Maynard Keynes

THE LAST HARVEST 

by Paul Modic

My mature crew, a couple of fifty-something women, clipped and clipped and laughed and sang and talked. Sometimes they just shut up and listened to the radio, KMUD, the voice of the Weed-Woods. When the work was done they returned to their homes in Washington, and I didn't know at the time that they were my last crew.

So now what to do with all this weed, nicely trimmed and ready to smoke? I had one connection that was pretty reliable but all the others had disappeared over the years. She was very nervous and bossy and prone to go off on you with a tirade if you annoyed her, like changing your mind about doing a deal.

“Bring it over now, right now, they're coming!” she said on the phone. Within fifteen minutes I had a bag of pounds out of their hiding place, stashed in the car, and on the way to Redway, a few miles away. A week later she said, “Oh, they didn't show up, you can come get it.”

The industry was in free-fall and I did whatever she said, like a little puppy scurrying for attention. She had pissed off my neighbor with her annoying and aggressive attitude, he had vowed never to deal with her again, but I put up with her bullshit as she was my only steady connection. 

Whenever I brought a bag of weed to her house I always opened the double or triple- bagged pounds and poured the turkey bags on the floor. We counted them together and I made a note of how much was there, with a copy for each of us. It's not that I didn't trust her, it was just good business practice.

In the beginning you always religiously counted the money right when you got paid. Over the years and decades we got more casual and just took some rubber-banded bundles of cash and counted them later. (One guy once handed me a bag of money at the gas station and drove away.) I had a good grower’s reputation: my pounds were always a few grams over weight, well-trimmed, and no duff at the bottom. 

A few years ago I brought a pile of pounds to this guy who paid me and didn't bother to weigh them. He handed them off to another middleman and told him, “You don't even need to weigh this—this guy's always right on.”

A few days later I got the call. “Hey Puffy, every pound is twenty-three grams under. What the fuck?” We had been playing basketball and the ball knocked the scale to the floor and broke it. I had bought a new one but didn't test it out first. I quickly returned the money I owed, took the bad scale back to the store, but the guy never called me again.

For the next few months my steady middle-woman moved my stuff. It was in good condition because I had stored it in a cool place all winter waiting for Spring, the selling season. The dealer lady was living on my road just outside town back then so I could just shuttle it to her place, about a hundred yards. 

Then I didn't hear from her for a while so I took out my little red book, made a list of prospects, and called everyone who I had dealt with, even if they had already turned me down the year before. I came up mostly empty, like a groveling dog, but I did get one call-back from a woman deep into growing who liked to dabble in a little dealing.

“They're coming today,” she said. I waited by the phone all day. Nothing. I waited more hours the next day and finally called her again. “Oh no, they didn't show up. They were out in Briceland looking at some other stuff and...”

The weed biz is so flaky. It also had gotten to be a beauty contest, whose buds were prettier? If I ever tried to deal with that lady again I was going to say, “Hey, you know what kind I have, what it looks like, and how much I want for it. Don't even call me unless you've got the guy with the money right there ready to buy. Then you can come over and get it.” But it doesn't work that way. It's a flaky dance where half the dancers are stoned and you just stressfully wait, sweating it out.

I became that boring person who, whenever I saw someone I knew, didn't even say hello first, just “Hey man, can you help me connect? You know anyone who wants any Sour Deisel?” Didn't even say hello first! Obsessed. Who will buy my wonderful buds? (It reminded me of when I used to stand in front of the Woodrose Cafe ten or fifteen years before with a bud in my front pocket looking for a connection.) 

While desperately driving around I thought about this friendly guy I’d met at the Woodrose a few years before who had told me where he lived in Redway, but probably grew up Alderpoint Road somewhere. I didn’t have his number so I’d have to cold-knock and annoy him in person with my quest: Help me sell this weed! 

He wasn’t home but I recognized his wife as a long-time Ettersburg resident, and she recognized me too. “I don't know if you or Sam are into moving stuff,” I said, “but I'm just trying anything, so I thought I'd ask.” She was nice, didn't seem put out, and said she'd mention it. 

“Okay, thanks, tell Sam I said hi.” I gave her my number and never heard back. 

Soon after I got home there was a knock on my door. It was this guy who had legally changed his name to “Crooked Prairie.” He was a nice guy I'd seen around for years though pretty full of himself. He was a bit of a contradiction, always talking about healthy living while sporting a huge belly, which was not a good sign for the future.

“Hey man, can you help me out?” he said. “I gotta move my shit and my last connection didn't show up this year.”

“Man, I was just doing the same thing, knocking on doors! You're my doppelganger,” I said. “Sorry, I can't help you.”

“I got ninety-eight pounds of OG,” he said.

“Well, I have no idea what to do with it, I can't sell my pounds,” I said. “You got some samples out in the car? I guess I could take one just in case, I've got seventeen OG myself so who knows?”

“I really gotta find someone to buy my weed,” he said. “I'm starting my garden for this year and I've still got all my stuff.”

“Yeah, right, I think it's over. Well, it was a forty-year boom, longer than most.” I thought it over for a moment and then said, “If you're really desperate I know this last resort shit-show you could try. He's a total low-baller out in Briceland and he's probably still moving tons of weed. Do you know Jerold Money?”

“Yeah I know who he is. I talked to him once or twice,” Crooked Prairie said.

“Do you know where he lives.”

“Yeah, right there by the road.”

“Okay, just go out there, bring some elbow samples, and tell him I sent you. Ninety-eight pounds of OG, what do you want for that?”

“Twelve,” he said.

“Okay, then try to get eleven. Good luck, tell me what happens.”

A couple days later I got a text: “All gone.”

I called him up. “Really? You got rid of it all? Amazing. And a good price?” He wouldn't say but I figured eleven. “Shit, well, maybe I should try him too. Do you have his number?” He gave me the cell but it was almost impossible to get ahold of Jerold Money, or J as he is widely known, on the phone. The next day I threw ten pounds of Sour D in my trunk, just drove out there, and found the usual chaotic J scene.

I was standing in the backyard with my big garbage bag of Sour D's, another farmer I knew was standing there with his big plastic bag of pounds, and we exchanged glances as if to say, “Yup, it's come to this, dealing with J as a last resort.” 

Sitting around the picnic table was another middle-woman just hanging out. J's teenage daughter was walking back and forth from the creek in her bikini. About thirty feet away was a brand new white truck, maybe a rental, with a couple people inside. Another guy was shuttling back and forth from the picnic table to the truck bringing samples to the guys from New Jersey.

“We got a situation here,” J said. “He doesn't want to come out of the truck, he had a bad experience or something last time. Lemme see what you have.” He looked over my pounds and sent one over with the runner. “What do you want?”

“I want a thousand,” I said. J looked doubtful if not incredulous. After some back and forth to the truck he said, “He'll give you eight but I still need my fifty cents so you’ll get 750.” 

“I don't want 750,” I said. “I want nine.” Back and forth it went. Really? Settle for 750 for Sour D in 2017? Had it really come to that? I said no thanks and packed up my shit and left.

Later, I saw Crooked Prairie at a party and asked him how his deal had gone down. 

“I will never deal with J again!” he said. “First I hauled all 98 pounds to Briceland where he checked it out and then he told me to take it to Weott where he controls like a block of houses. Then this other guy comes over, checks it out, and wants to take it all down the street. I looked at J and said what the fuck, are you guaranteeing that? He shrugged and nodded. Sure enough the guy came back with all the money, I counted it and got out of there. It was the most stressful deal I've ever done.” 

After that I whined to a friend and he finally turned me on to his connection, who happened to be his father-in-law. He gave me his number and I agreed to run some pounds up to Eureka. So I was driving up 101 with a load to drop off at a guy's house I had never met, a friend of a friend. I was just trying to get done with this, get paid, and reevaluate this whole life. 

Then I lost it and thought wow, really? It's come to this? Hauling a load up 101 to drop off with a stranger? I started crying, sobbing relentlessly. Has it really come to this? And maybe crying in relief that it'll all be over soon, everything will be gone, and maybe even mourning the end of this lifestyle, all the work and the stress, and “selling our souls” for money, in a way. (At the end of the road in a quiet little neighborhood just outside Eureka I met a nice man who helped me move a few.) 

I was finally down to my last ten pounds of Blue Dream and decided to dump it. Prices were dropping, it was July Fourth, and time to get even more desperate. Good trimmed weed for $500 a pound was unheard of, friends said I was crazy, but a couple months later they wished they had also dumped theirs.

I drove back to Jerold Money's place with ten pounds of BD. There were hundreds of budding green girls in the backyard with tarps bunched around the edges of the hoop houses, next to a cabin where some grow lights were glowing and humming. (It's about impossible to put one over on J, but a couple of those last pounds had some leftover Sour D, Blue Cheese, and Green Crack mixed in, though if he gave me any problems about that I’d tell him the interview was off, so no article, book, or movie deal.) 

Jerold came out and I said, “Look, here's ten pounds of nice Blue Dream and I want five grand cash. I don't want to wait for that Black guy from Texas who likes to buy Blue Dream. I don't want to leave it here until someone else comes by who wants it. I want five grand cash right now.” 

J was a little surprised, I was doing his low-balling work for him. The middlemen don't like to use their own money but this was a deal he wouldn't refuse. He checked out the weed and paid me. 

Getting rid of it all in early July was a celebrated feat in this, the year many would be caught holding the bag, the year we knew would come some day. Over the years our kids had gone bad, blew up the tranquil hillsides with annoying generators, and then everyone else came from everywhere to finish the job with multitudes of light deprivation hoop houses trashing the formerly pristine hillsides of Humboldt County. 

Truckloads of expensive dirt were still going out of the garden shops every day, and I wanted to say, “Don't you know it's over?” 

IN MORS, VERITAS

by Marilyn Davin

One day more than 25 years ago my mom called me and asked me to drop by. This was nothing unusual; my parents lived nearby and I saw them regularly. When I walked into their house everything was, as usual, perfectly spic-and-span, with nothing out of place. Also as usual, I reflected on the many unfinished cups of coffee my mom plucked out of my hands to put in the dishwasher and I understood, for the thousandth time, why I never became – and will never become – a neatnik. 

But I digress. I sat down at my mom’s round white kitchen table and looked up expectantly. She sat down across from me and told me she was going to die. Just like that. This was one of those handful of moments over a lifetime when time stops and something in your brain takes a full-color snapshot that will become an unalterable part of you until the day you die yourself - right up there with JFK’s assassination (7^th grade art class with the teacher with the green contacts). Time stopped. My dad stood in shock, a dejected lump with his hands clasped tightly in front of him, the first time I had ever seen him at a loss for words. It struck me that my father, the proudly independent Marine WWII fighter pilot who had hitchhiked before the war to the University of Minnesota from Chicago’s Southside to go to college, would find it nearly impossible to live without her.

I was amazed that I had not understood this sooner. With my mom’s dozens of friends and political activities, she would have missed my father if he had died first. But her life, bound up as it was in her community, would have picked up the beat in short order and sailed right on into whatever time she had left on Earth. But my father drove every weekday to his law office well into his ‘80s; his work was his real life. He always talked to me adult-to-adult, and I adored him, adopting many things he did with my own children. Like leaving the title of a book I wanted to read on a scrap of paper I left on that round, white kitchen table. In the morning he took the paper with him to his San Francisco law office. Walking down to Stacey’s on Market Street on his lunch hour, he bought me the book. In this way I read Lolita and many other books banned by my friends’ parents. He always told me that nobody was ever corrupted by a book, and that books could transport you to every place–and every idea–in the world.

Because my father was self-reliant and considered himself the master of both his fate and his home, when Mom shared her diagnosis of advanced congestive heart failure he resolved to care for her himself. (When my daughter was born and my mom came to stay with me for a week, there were several panicky calls from my father, two inquiring how to run the dishwasher and how to operate the drip coffeemaker.) Not unheard of among his contemporaries but nonetheless an indication of his domestic skills, his notion of caring for my mom was a fool’s errand. I was working 60 hours a week in the city and my brother was a drug addict, so in due course a social worker stopped by one day, saw him struggling to hold mom up while she tried to walk, and put an end to that (being a harm to both mom and himself since, however determined, he was feeble and uncoordinated following a stroke the year before). This ushered in a depressing parade of fulltime caregivers, who were nothing like the cheerful, animated caregivers you see in TV commercials. There was a head caregiver who he called Mother Superior, who scheduled and managed the sorry group of poor young women, most with young children of their own, who tended mom around the clock. When I came by after work each evening I typically found the assigned night caregiver on the phone, outside on the deck, coordinating the care of her own children (though I came upon one who was apparently firming up a cocaine deal). 

Things had finally settled into a routine when Mom, just weeks away from her death, seemed inexplicably to have lost her mind. Having rarely challenged Dad openly throughout their long marriage, her voice emerged with a roar. She told him she was sorry she had married him (52 years before), and on one occasion threw a cup of hot coffee in his face. One time when I was in San Luis Obispo on business she called to tell me that my father had kidnapped her and that, as her daughter, I needed to immediately “bring the car around” to rescue her. In their floor-to-ceiling book cases I found folded notes, written in her tiny, spidery script, pleading for rescue from my father, who she claimed was holding her hostage at home. She railed against him, dredging up half a century of resentment and vomiting it out in front of everyone. She demanded that she be given the deed to the house so that she could change it so my brother would solely inherit it. My younger brother, an impoverished drug addict, was her favorite child. When she looked at me she saw only her own lost opportunities. (“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me I could be a doctor?”) Her rage was a storm that filled the house. When her hapless caregivers put her to bed she bit them. 

There finally came a day – and an argument – where, exasperated, my father told her to get up out of her wheelchair and walk if she felt so imprisoned. She gripped the arms of her wheelchair and clenched her jaw, directing every cell of her body to get up and walk away. Arms trembling with the effort, she collapsed, ushering in the last phase of her life: the bedridden part. Once confined to bed, my mom just wanted to die. Her caregivers tried to force her to eat, a practice my brother fortunately witnessed. There would be no more force feeding. She started sleeping most of the time, and told me upon awaking that she had been in London or Paris. She said it was harder and harder “to come back.” Finally, in retrospect just eight weeks of chaotic drama, she quietly died in her sleep after everyone had left her room. 

When two young people from the coroner’s office picked up her body, my father asked them to unzip the body bag so he could see for himself that she was really dead. He then lived two more long years, passing the days in his battered white leather chair, feeling utterly lost and alone without her. In the final week of his life, when he became delirious, he called me by my mother’s name.

FINGERS TO THE WIND

Dear Editor,

Congress has a teenage mentality. They support what is popular and not necessarily what is right or smart.

For example, they voted to take out funding for the United Nations UNRWA agency because some of those aid workers joined with Hamas on October 7^th.

Some very nice but misguided Americans joined the rioters in D.C. on January 6th, but Congress didn’t cut off funding to the cities and towns they came from. Our politicians respond only to what direction the wind is blowing. They should be more concerned about whether the wind is bringing rain for crops.

Congress is like a cheerleader who dumps her prom date because he says hi to a girl she hates. Better to consider the bigger picture than to act out of jealous rage.

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah

I BELIEVE the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishment is never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean of course the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes, the destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and access to employment, to schooling, to medical services, or as a punishment for hostile military activities in the vicinity of those civilians.

— Susan Sontag, upon accepting the Jerusalem Prize in Israel, 2001

THOMAS JEFFERSON TO GEORGE LOGAN, 12 NOVEMBER, 1816

Poplar Forest near Lynchburg. Nov. 12. 1816.

To George Logan 

Dear Sir:

I received your favor of Oct. 16 at this place, where I pass much of my time, very distant from Monticello. I am quite astonished at the idea which seems to have got abroad; that I propose publishing something on the subject of religion. and this is said to have arisen from a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thompson, in which certainly there is no trace of such an idea. When we see religion split into so many thousands of sects, and I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing, and where the laws permit, burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself. The sum of all religion, as expressed by its best preacher, “fear god and love thy neighbor,” contains no mystery, needs no explanation. but this won’t do. It gives no scope to make dupes; priests could not live by it. Your ideas of the moral obligations of governments are perfectly correct. The man who is dishonest as a statesman would be a dishonest man in any station. It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million human beings collected together are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately. It is a great consolation to me that our government, as it cherishes most its duties to its own citizens, so is it the most exact in its moral conduct towards other nations. I do not believe that in the four administrations which have taken place, there has been a single instance of departure from good faith towards other nations. We may sometimes have mistaken our rights, or made an erroneous estimate of the actions of others. But no voluntary wrong can be imputed to us. In this respect England exhibits the most remarkable phaenomenon in the universe in the contrast between the profligacy of its government and the probity of its citizens. And accordingly it is now exhibiting an example of the truth of the maxim that virtue and interest are inseparable. It ends, as might have been expected, in the ruin of its people. But this ruin will fall heaviest, as it ought to fall, on that hereditary aristocracy which has for generations been preparing the catastrophe. I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.

Present me respectfully to Mrs. Logan and accept yourself my friendly & respectful salutations.

Th: Jefferson

REAL CHURCH BULLETIN BLOOPERS

• Bertha Belch, a missionary from Africa, will be speaking tonight at Calvary Memorial Church in Racine. Come tonight and hear Bertha Belch all the way from Africa.

• Announcement in the church bulletin for a National PRAYER & FASTING Conference: “The cost for attending the Fasting and Prayer conference includes meals.”

• Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8pm in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.

• Miss Charlene Mason sang, “I will not pass this way again,” giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

• Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don't forget your husbands.

• Next Sunday is the family hayride and bonfire at the Fowlers'. Bring your own hot dogs and guns. Friends are welcome! Everyone come for a fun time.

• The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.

• The sermon this morning: “Jesus Walks on the Water.” The sermon tonight: “Searching for Jesus.”

• Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.

• Barbara remains in the hospital and needs blood donors for more transfusions. She is also having trouble sleeping and requests tapes of Pastor Jack's sermons.

• The Rector will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing “Break Forth into Joy.”

• Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community.

• Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say “hell” to someone who doesn't care much about you.

• Don't let worry kill you — let the Church help.

• Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.

• At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?” Come early and listen to our choir practice.

• Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

• The senior choir invites any members of the congregation who enjoy sinning to join the choir.

• Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles, and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

• The Lutheran men's group will meet at 6pm. Steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, bread and dessert will be served for a nominal feel.

• For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

• Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person(s) you want remembered.

• Attend and you will hear an excellent speaker and heave a healthy lunch.

• The church will host an evening of fine dining, superb entertainment, and gracious hostility.

• Potluck supper Sunday at 5pm — prayer and medication to follow.

• The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.

• This evening at 7pm there will be a hymn sing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

• Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B.S. is done.

• The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday morning.

• Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday. Please use the back door.

• The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The Congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

• Weight Watchers will meet at 7pm at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

• Mrs. Johnson will be entering the hospital this week for testes.

• The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: “I Upped My Pledge — Up Yours.”