Mendocino County Today: Monday 12/2/2024

Sunset Colors | Persistent High | Blue Slide | Traffic Stop | Homeward Bound | Immigrant Rights | Unity Club | Junkyard Sasquatch | Political Contributions | Depression Talk | Boat Parade | Finnish Mural | Ed Notes | Sea Ranch | To Boonville | Palace Hotel | Yesterday's Catch | Mt. Tam | Mountain Bikers | Niner Loss | Take Sweater | Adultery Pete | Herb Items | Displaced Picker | Black Forest | Health Scam | American Slaves | Lead Stories | My Presidency | Barstool Conservatism | Friends Disagree | Op-Eding | All Hands | Brain Rot | Visitors | Ends Here | Sun Bathing

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UNDER PERSISTENT HIGH PRESSURE, unseasonably warm daytime highs and chilly overnight temperatures will continue. A risk for sneaker waves remains today. A weak front may clip the region mid to late week, mainly increasing cloudcover and maybe bringing a slight chance for light precipitation. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): After the lion November ended up being we enter December like a lamb. A warmer 41F under clear skies this Monday morning on the coast. Off & on sun - fog this week is all our forecast offers with warming temps. And do not forget we still have a large swell & sneaker waves advisory along the shore.

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JUVENILE AND HOPLAND MAN ARRESTED in violent Santa Rosa traffic stop, officers injured

by Matt LaFever

A traffic stop late Saturday night led to the recovery of two firearms and the arrest of a Mendocino County man and a juvenile, the Santa Rosa Police Department reported. The incident unfolded on November 30, 2024, around 11 p.m., when officers conducted a traffic enforcement stop on McBride Lane.

Upon contacting the vehicle’s occupants, officers developed probable cause and obtained consent to search the car. A juvenile passenger exited the vehicle and, as officers initiated a pat-down for weapons, resisted arrest and attempted to flee.

Despite the altercation, officers successfully detained the juvenile, who was found in possession of a loaded .45 caliber Glock 19 handgun and brass knuckles, according to the press release. Two officers sustained minor injuries during the struggle.

Further investigation led officers to discover a loaded .22 caliber revolver inside the vehicle. Authorities identified the gun’s owner as Thomas Shaw, a resident of Hopland, who was arrested and booked into Sonoma County Jail. Shaw faces charges including possession of an unregistered firearm, possession of stolen property, and being a felon in possession of ammunition, as detailed in the press release.

The juvenile, whose name is withheld due to his age, was booked into Juvenile Hall on multiple charges, including possession of an unregistered firearm, possession of brass knuckles, and battery on a police officer with injury. Additional charges include being a prohibited person in possession of ammunition and minor in possession of a firearm.

(mendofever.com)

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SUPERVISOR-ELECT BERNIE NORVELL:

The city of Fort Bragg has been successful with its homeward bound program. We do require a contact on the other end before we send people anywhere. That other end has to be available to meet the traveler at the bus stop. Until recently the county had paid for this program. At some point the county decided to stop the funding and required we send our travelers to Ukiah Building Bridges and allow them to facilitate the travel. Two of the first four clients processed this way failed to reach their destination prompting calls to our CRU program, “where is our family member?”

No longer willing to accept those odds the City immediately decided to appropriate $40k to the program. This will ensure the clients will remain our responsibility from port to port.

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UNITY CLUB NEWS

by Miriam Martinez

Our December 5th meeting will be held at 1:30 in the Fairgrounds Dining Room. After a short business meeting, we will devote ourselves to packaging, labeling and decorating all the Baked Goods Booth offerings. Bring your candies, preserves, cowboy crunch, cookies, cupcakes, breads, rolls and fruit bites, etc. with a label stating what it is and any allergens in it. I'll bring extra labels and pens in case you forget.

Remember to bring your items for Grandma's Attic and Grandpa's Tool Shed. Please put your name or initials on each so you can have it back if it doesn't sell.

It's time for us to donate non perishable food to the Food Bank and unwrapped toys to the AVV Firefighters toy drive.

Silent Auction: Call, text or email Alice Bonner with a list of items you have collected from Vintners, Merchants, and Artisans. She needs a complete list for the Banner and for the labels on each Bidding Sheet. Bring your Silent Auction items to the meeting, or make other arrangements with Alice.

Thank you for signing up and for all the work you have done to make this year's Annual Holiday Bazaar a grand success. See y'all Thursday at the meeting and hopefully, at the Bazaar. If you are one of my angels that does her work at home, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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FROM OPEN SECRETS.org: Political contributions of $250 or more from Anderson Valley, 2024,

Boonville:

Dr. Ron Gester, $7,000 to Movement Voter PAC.

Connie Best, $2,000 to Kamala Harris; $250 to Jessica Morse (D),

Bill Chambers, $2,000 to Kamala Harris, $250 to VoteVets.org, $250 to Tammy Baldwin, $250 to Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D), $1,000 to DNC Services Corp.; $250 to Mark Kelly (D), $450 to John Tester (D), $600 to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $650 to Lisa Blunt Rochester, $250 to Bob Casey, $700, to Katie Porter, $250 to Jon Ossoff, $1,000 to Emily’s List, $250 to Ruben Gallego, $250 to Sherrod Brown. (Mr. Chambers died last August at the age of 88.)

Sandya Abee, $1,000 to Lucas Kunce (Senate Candidate from Missouri); $500 to Leaders We Deserve; $250 to Adam Frisch, $5,000 to Democratic Strategy Institute,

John Vitek, $750 to Kamala Harris

Angela Setzer, $250 to Kamala Harris

Jeff Pugh, $250 to Kamala Harris

Laurie Wayburn, $500 to Climate Champions PAC (D), $350 to Jessica Morse (D), Candidate for Congress from California’s 3rd Congressional District. (She lost to Republican Kevin Kiley.)

Dr. John Rochat $250 to Kamala Harris.

Judith Auberjonois, $250 to Katie Porter (D), $500 to Kamala Harris,

Stephanie Gold, $3,300 to Kamala Harris

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Philo

Deborah Cahn, $1040 to Jared Huffman; $1,250 to Kamala Harris,

Ted Bennett, $250 to Kamala Harris, $1,660 to California Democratic Party.

George Gaines (former owner of Highland Ranch), $10,260 to Nikki Haley.

Val Muchowski, $520 to Democratic Party of California.

Martha Hyde, $2000 to Emily’s List, $500 to Progressive Change Campaign Committee, $1,000 to Movement Voter PAC, $500 to Moveon.org, $1,000 to Sister District Project

Francois Christen, $250 to Jon Tester, $500 to Ruben Gallego

Mary Payne, $250 to Movement Voter PAC

John Scharffenberger, $500 to National Democratic Training Committee; $1,000 to No Labels 2024, $4,000 to Kamala Harris, $1,000 to Campaign for Democracy PAC.

Laura Adams, $1,000 to Movement Voter PAC

Sheila Comombana, $250 to Lisa Blunt Rochester

Coleman Foley, $3,000 to Farmers Rice Cooperative.

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Yorkville

Craig Egloff, $13,400 to Campaign for Working Families.

Alice Frost, $250 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Steve Snyder, $250, Kamala Harris

Anne West-Wepsala, $250 to Our Great Task

Valerie Hanelt, $500 to Kamala Harris

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Navarro

John Newstead, $1800 to Kamala Harris

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For Reference, there were very few donations from Ukiah to Donald Trump:

$1,200 from Raymond Threde.

Sherry Stambaugh $350 to Trump.

William Stambaugh $400 to Trump.

Leland Kramer $900 to Trump.

Ron Marino of the Bottle Shop in Ukiah donated $468 to Trump.

Greg Mathis $900 to Trump.

Mary Geiger, $900 to Trump;

In Willits there was one donation to by Dr. David Ploss who donated $2,970 to Trump.

In Fort Bragg there were only three donations to Trump, all below $250.

Of note:

John Haschak donated $100 each to State Senator Mike McGuire and Assembly Candidate Chris Rogers.

Rose Raiser Jeavons, listed as “Tarot Reader,” donated $3,250 to RFK Jr.; Cynthia Jeavons Raiser donated $2.500 to RFK Jr., and John Jeavons “Ecology Action” donated $250 to RFK Jr.

Bruce Anderson donated $50 to Jill Stein.

Holly Near donated $250 to Barbara Lee.

Mendocino Democrat of the Year, James Mastin of Ukiah, donated $450 to Chris Rogers and $300 to Mike McGuire.

Norm Thurston donated $50 to the North Carolina Democratic Party.

Humboldt Redwood Company (Ukiah) donated $1,000 to Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, an LA Area State Senator.

Retired County School Superintendent Paul Tichinin donated $250 to Mike McGuire, $1,700 to Kamala Harris, and $500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Former Supervisor Dan Gjerde donated $500 to Assembly candidate Chris Rogers.

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LAST MONTH'S AV VILLAGE EVENT

We were delighted to have Dr. Lea Queen with us at our last gathering.  She shared strategies on how to stay upbeat and positive during the winter months.  We went over recognizing signs of depression in older adults: things like…

• Hording worthless items and giving away valuable things
• Giving up or reducing amount of exercise
• Changes/less attention to grooming
• Not maintaining contact with friends
• Blaming others for your shortcomings
• Guilt, regret, beating yourself up

Non-medical responses to depression:

• Walk
• Meditate
• Sing
• Dance
• Sun
• Nature
• Gardening
• 30 mins of exercise a day
• Talking with a friend or therapist
• Vitamin D and B12 (ask your doctor)
• Massage
• Yoga
• Volunteering, helping others
• Good nutrition
• Socializing

Thank you, Dr. Queen, for coming to talk with us!

— excerpt from the AV Village December 2024 Newsletter

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LIT BOAT PARADE, NOYO RIVER

And Holiday Open House

Sunday, December 8

Noyo Center Marine Station

Doors open at 5:30 PM

Parade begins at 6:00 PM

Celebrate a dazzling display of lights at the annual Noyo Harbor Lit Boat Parade with beautifully decorated boats adorned with thousands of twinkling lights. The Noyo Center’s electric boat, the Slack Tide, will be among the boats, participating in her first Lit Boat Parade!

Watch the parade with us at the Noyo Center Marine Field Station for a holiday open house and to cheer on the Slack Tide and other illuminated boats during this holiday tradition. Cozy snacks and warm drinks will be available for sale. Enjoy the festivities from the warmth and comfort of our field station and deck. Beer and wine will also be available.

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LAUREN SINNOTT: My mural about Finnish heritage is featured in Real Estate Magazine - Mendocino Coast Property this month and I need to get a few stacks of the issue brought back to PA. Not heavy and I can tell you where to grab them. And go see the mural! 300 block of N. Franklin down the short, wide alley heading west.

See more here https://historymural.com/finn/

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ED NOTES

THE BIG DIG is what we called that lake-size pond at the Philo end of Anderson Valley Way when it was installed in 2008. The Dig was a project of William Hill and his vineyard development outfit, funding courtesy of California's public employee retirement system.

LAKE HILL could become a local amenity if it were to become a community swimming hole when it wasn't watering the vines. A diving board and a few fish and the kids could have a heckuva summer time venue. Won't happen, of course, this industry is not noted for its devotion to community.

THE LAST swimming hole handy to locals was on lower Indian Creek where Doc Marsh maintained a semi-permanent concrete dam, behind which the water backed up a good 50 yards, the dam being porous enough to accommodate fish travel and a warm weather flow of cleansing waters, and a more idyllic site could not be imagined there among the tall trees not quite a mile west of the highway. Reaching Marsh's pond by the old trail through Indian Creek Park was almost as pleasurable as swimming in it. The dam was removed when the pond became a round-the-clock scene of drunken and drug-fueled debauchery in the 1970s which, as I recall, included a rape and several assaults.

WINSTON SMITH, the famous collage artist, used to live near Lake Mendocino, making him, if he still lives there, Mendocino County's best known artist in the outside world. I think, although there's a Boonville woman whose name eludes me who is regarded as first-rate. Ordinarily not a particularly prescient person, I have occasionally congratulated myself on my prescience in buying two paintings by the great Mary Robertson of Guerneville, and consider myself just as prescient for buying a sardonic Winston Smith called “Hell Next 666 Exits,” perhaps inspired by the stretch of 101 Winston had to drive when he passed Ukiah to get to and from his house near Lake Mendocino. Winston's “Last Supper” hung on the wall of the old Varnish Gallery in San Francisco (on Natoma, south of Market) and was, according to the artist, “at 24 feet in length it may well be the largest collage anyone has ever made. I'm now beginning to realize why Leonardo left so many of his masterpieces unfinished. Maybe they were too damn much work.”

YEARS AGO, in my softball playing days, we were deep in a game at Boonville High School against an Elk team, the great Walt Matson at first base, when a youngish man driving the gargantuan tractor that ordinarily went with a gargantuan trailer appeared in mid-game centerfield and proceeded to do a series of wheelies. This exhibition of gigantic motorized antics caused us Boonville hippies to drop our jaws to our gloves. What the hell was this? (We were new to the mysterious ways of Mendoland.) “Oh,” Matson replied as if it needed no further elaboration, “That's Bobby Beacon.”

BEACON had earlier become the subject of a fascinating story in, of all places, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he was described as “the Howard Hughes of the West Coast.” One episode alleged he'd rigged his toaster so the toast would pop up high enough so he could skeet shoot his breakfast. These days, the unelected but unofficial mayor of Elk, and by far the area's most vivid resident, presides over his famous hilltop bar, Beacon Light by the Sea, described by the NYT as “the best dive bar in America.”

MENDO WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker) Bobby Beacon For Mendocino Co Sheriff 1974

BREGGO CELLARS (now Lichen?) at the Philo end of Anderson Valley Way was once, as I recall, the Rawles Ranch, and I also recall the taciturn Shorty Rawles and his unlit stogie who lived there. Shorty, like the late Buster Farrer, made his way in his old pick-up at least once a day to the Boonville Lodge for the pauses that refreshed them, so I laughed when I read a description of Shorty's transformed ranch house as a “charming 1920 Craftsman style yellow farmhouse” with “contemporary savoir faire inside.” You don't say, I can hear the laconic Shorty saying, his cigar waggling in the side of his amused mouth.

SAME STORY mentioned that the young winemaking Stewart family, who occupied Shorty's place, had bought a grape press designed and developed by the late Michel Salgues, the former boss at Roederer, who made a second fortune selling his high tech wine presses around the world. As it happens, and peculiar friendships are common in the Anderson Valley, Salgues and I became social friends, mostly because our children were contemporaries, and I became quite fond of him and his wife, Sylvie.

MICHEL SALGUES was gone before I could collect on his promise to explain why the billionaire family that owns Roederer had stiffed its harvest crew for their request for a tiny raise, prompting the UFW to briefly organize workers at Roederer in the late 1990s. Michel assured me that when he no longer worked for Roederer he'd tell me why the winery decided to try to beat their vineyard crews for a few bucks right at harvest time. “I will tell you ze true story,” he'd promised.

ROEDERER'S CREWS had refused to be stiffed and struck. Roderer had suddenly told the workers that they’d have to pay the gondala driver who drove the collection bins between the vines during the two-week harvet period out of their own wages. After the strike Roederer bussed in scabs from out on I-5 somewhere who honored the local worker's picket line and also refused to work. Roederer's workers called in the UFW to help defend themselves against the famous, and very rich, French winery. Soon, there was a dramatic election out in the middle of Anderson Vineyards (Roederer’s vineyard operations) to join or not join the union. The vote was to join the UFW. The winery struck back by blackballing workers who'd voted union, and the UFW was outtahere in a year.

LAWYERS had been flown in from France. They stood around out in the fields that day in the hot fall sun in their expensive suits trying to look intimidating. It was a rare event in an industry heavy on romantic propaganda, heavier yet on the people whose labor makes it possible. And absolutely ruthless on the rare occasions their workers fight back.

THE UNPRECEDENTED UFW local was decertified by a team of legal jackals calling themselves Littler Mendelson based in San Francisco specializing in union-busting. That same team of legal hyenas ran seminars for County vineyard owners on how to stop workers from organizing, such was the fright thrown into them by the UFW interlude at Roederer, and there hasn't been so much as an organizing peep out of vineyard crews since. We later learned that Littler Mendelson hired a Mexican informer to masquerade as a vineyard worker, live in Roederer’s worker housing units and inform Roederer management who the union ringleaders were. They were summarily fired without knowing why.

GOOD NEWS, especially for those who down quarts a day: Drinking coffee regularly may lengthen life by nearly two years. It’s associated with a lower risk of heart and respiratory diseases, stroke, some cancers, diabetes, dementia, and major depression, according to a new study in the journal, Ageing Research Reviews. Coffee may have multiple healthy effects, they say, including building up a better resilience to stress.

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ALL ROADS LEAD TO BOONVILLE

by Bruce Anderson (2008)

Last April in London Geoff Thomas carefully packed up his parents and tucked them away on his motorcycle. A fit man in his mid-40s, Thomas was carrying his mom and dad, Barbara and George Thomas, to Boonville, by the longest route possible.

Geoff and his brother Alan grew up in a small town in England called Darlington. Dad worked on a farm, Mom was a school teacher. Mom and Dad, in the words of their sons, “were motorcycle fanatics. They went all over England on their motorcycle, but they never got to ride their bikes outside the UK.”

The two Thomas boys spent many of their formative years in the side-car of their parents' bike. Side cars were still quite common in England,” Geoff remembers, “when my brother and I were children. Many English people got about on them, and on the street where we grew up you'd see them everywhere. My love of bikes probably began then.”

Alan Thomas grew up and moved to the US and, with his American wife Torrey, eventually settled in Boonville.

“Dad died after Alan had left England. I had moved to London where I became a dispatch rider for a business called City Sprint. I carry blood, organs and other time-sensitive essential goods from one end of the city to the other.”

The Boonville connection began with Alan Thomas when the Thomas boys' mother, Barbara Thomas, “came out to visit Alan several times and fell in love with Boonville. She loved everything about it,” Geoff says as he explains how his journey to the Anderson Valley began.

“As parents age, we talk more with them, listen to them more carefully, and when my mom said vaguely that she had two regrets, I couldn't stop thinking about them. She said that dad had never got to California to meet his grandchildren, Sam and Willow, and that because all of their travel on motorcycles had been in the United Kingdom, Dad had never traveled down Highway One on his bike. George would have loved Highway One, loved Mendocino County, loved Boonville, my mother said. It was my mom's death and her regret that my dad never got here that prompted me to do what I'm doing now.”

Which is to circumnavigate the globe on a motorcycle, his parents' ashes riding tandem all the way to Boonville.

“The first book I read on a voluntary basis was Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels,” Geoff says, explaining himself further. “I was 16 when I read it and it has inspired me ever since. Ted went round the world on a Triumph Tiger. Now, years later, I told my brother Alan that I was coming out to California on my bike, following Ted Simon's example. Alan was disbelieving, to say the least. But I told him that I would get myself a Triumph Tiger, the modern version of the bike Ted Simon had traveled the world on, and that I would collect the ashes of Mom and Dad and bring them to Boonville so our mom and dad would get to visit Boonville together, and Dad would finally get to ride down Highway One.

In April of this year Geoff, his family's commitment to the two-stroke engine seemingly genetically inscribed, set out on his improbable journey from London's legendary Ace Cafe, an iconic Brit bike site comparable to Sturgis, North Dakota.

“I wanted my journey to raise money for the local St. Teresa’s hospice because both our parents did volunteer work for hospice, a sort of family tradition with us. It was pay back time for me. I felt I had to give something back to hospice in their name. So I called myself Poor Circulation, the adopted name for my trip and my fund raising effort. I had to do the trip with very little money and before I was too old to do it. I sold everything I owned and bought the bike. My budget was $40 a day. A friend decided to join me and off we went.”

Odd as the trajectories are which have brought many of us to the Anderson Valley, none, it is safe to say, reached here by Geoff Thomas' route.

“I came through Europe, which was beautiful and uneventful, down to Italy, into the Balkans — Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia — and then Albania where,” Geoff says with a wry roll of his eyes, “tourism became traveling, where you lose control of things happening around you.”

Albania was difficult. He was temporarily stranded in a thicket of non-communicative gestures and mutual incomprehension. The land of King Zog and the Maoist isolate, Enver Hoxa, not to mention the country's long history of banditry, mystified him. With bribes hastening the process, Geoff and his traveling partner, Alan Kelly, eventually found themselves on what they thought was the ferry out of the country only to find themselves in another Albanian port. Another round of vigorous but mutually unintelligible dialog accompanied by cash bribes finally propelled them out of the country.

“Then it was on to Macedonia, and Greece, and Turkey. To avoid the tourist areas we stayed on the northern coast of the Black Sea. The Russian-Georgian border was closed — for good reason as events have shown — so we took a ferry across the Black Sea to Russia on the 3rd of June. We had 3 month visas to get across Russia — no maps, just a compass which pointed us east, always east. There were minor skirmishes with the Russian police but otherwise the journey across that vast country was an absolute delight.

“The few run-ins we did have with Russian authority were almost comical. Russian cops make up the offense and wait for you to pay the fine, which is the way they accumulate their personal pension funds. I was accused of crossing a solid white line on a highway with no white lines. No white lines being visible, the white line violation became a change that I'd failed to stop where required, although I was parked alongside the Russian cop in the stopped position. I would have to pay a fine, as cop made clear, or I'd be several days and nights in a very uncomfortable jail. I'd quickly learned how to reduce the size of bribes by negotiation in Albania. The police know you're loaded with dollars and easy pickings, and they're very good at taking bribes because they do it every day while I do it once in a lifetime.”

The Triumph bike proved to be a model of durability. Geoff, who'd tapped British supply houses for charitable donations of anticipated spare parts, suffered no breakdowns, and didn't need new tires until he'd reached Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad.

“I badly needed tires not available anywhere in Russia. And there we were in Volgograd in a country where the tires were, in theory, impossible to obtain. I slipped a note under the only bike shop I could find, a tent, on a Sunday. My plea for help finding tires was in English. It was the proverbial shot in the dark. I came back the next day, a Monday, on the off chance they could help me. I was told to wait when suddenly a huge 4X4 Range Rover appeared with blacked-out windows. The stockiest man I've ever seen got out this rather sinister-looking vehicle, a man named Roman, and started barking orders at everybody. Then he tells us to get into the Rover with him. Not being the kind of guy you argue with, we did as we were told. For five days these guys wined and dined us, complete with boat trips on the Volga. And they found tires that don't exist anywhere in Russia. Roman even called ahead to his Siberian colleagues who were also in the “export-import” business. “That call to Siberia solved all the problems with shelter and other amenities that we might have had there.”

Geoff says that he marveled at Russian hospitality from the day he arrived in the country.

“Everybody everywhere in Russia was amazingly friendly. Everybody wanted you to leave with good impressions of them and their towns. They seemed to respect what we were doing. The people with the least to give, gave most. We knew we slept in very modest homes whose owners had given us their beds while they went off to sleep somewhere else. It was truly incredible and, to me, was a good example of how kind and generous people can be when they're left alone by their governments.”

But the Boonville expeditionary was refused entry to China.

“We weren't refused entry exactly, but entry was made so difficult it was the same as refusal. For instance, the Chinese required that we enter and leave the country through the same border crossing, that we hire a guide at our expense but the guide could only stay in 4 or 5 star hotels. I was budgeted for $40 a day and was staying the night in my tent, not fancy hotels.”

Forsaking China for the Amur Highway to cross Russia where Geoff would enjoy “the most beautiful, most tranquil place I've ever been in my life, an island in the middle of Lake Baikal in the middle of Siberia.”

The Amur Highway is described by Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin as “a seven-lane super highway” but in living fact turned out to be 2,000 kilometers of very bad road, “a gravel and dirt track through extremely rural country thinly populated by “white Russians and Mongolians, and more influenced by China than Russia.”

“We drove across in a heat wave and only three hours a night of darkness to arrive in Vladivostok, the great Russian port. There were nine bike travelers behind us but we were the only ones to make it through this great vastness unscathed, which amazed us, because we were the least experienced at long-haul bike travel and we were on bikes everyone laughed at. There were storms ahead of us, storms behind us. It was like we traveled in a pocket of sunshine.”

“We found the Iron Tigers Motorcycle Club of Vladivostok. They made all their resources available to us — fed us, let us sleep in their club house, entertained us. They were impressed, almost incredulous, that I'd completed my millionth mile on a motorcycle while I was in Russia. They made me an honorary member of the Iron Tigers, giving me the banya (Russian sauna) into the bargain where they beat the crap out of you with sticks before they throw you into the ice cold of the river. Fortunately for me, I was there in July. In December they would have cut a hole in the ice to toss me in. I have the physical and mental scars to show for the experience,” Geoff says with a rueful chuckle.

“In Russia, you have no private life. People ask the most intimate questions, any old thing at all. ‘How much do you earn?’ … ‘How often do you have sex?’

“Here in America, I was approached by two kinds of people, those who called me ‘dude’ and wanted to share their weed, and those who called me ‘sir’' and wanted to share their God. Generally, people in the States are much more reserved, not unfriendly, but reluctant to invade your privacy.

“We were camping but we always checked in with the local village chief; that way we were under the protection of that village. But no matter how remote we were from towns and villages, no matter how far off the road we were, we were found by people who wanted to share vodka and company. Vodka, by the way, is cheaper in Russia than bottled water, and you see drunks everywhere. The Russians consider alcoholism their major social problem.”

Geoff was struck by “how well-behaved Russian teenagers are, very polite, respectful of elders, girls, each other,” and he couldn't help but notice the cannabis growing wild everywhere.

“People didn't even seem to know what it was. I didn't see anyone smoking it.”

The Triumphs and their riders, once they'd crossed Russia, would, they'd planned, fly with their bikes from Vladivostok to Anchorage. That proved impossible.

“No one seemed to have the same rule book. We couldn't do it. We wound up shipping the bikes from South Korea — Pusan — to Seattle, and ourselves from wherever we could with the least hassle.”

Geoff's bike wouldn't get to Seattle for a month.

“That delay, and ticket hassles — ATMs work everywhere in the world except the U.S. I can tell you — made me decide to fly to Bangkok from Seoul to see my girlfriend who works in Thailand as a nurse. I worked one day there, too, as a Bangkok taxi boy in the most congested city in the world. Having raced bikes, crashed bikes, been around the world on a bike I can tell you that Bangkok was as hairy an adventure as I've had on two wheels. I couldn't believe that anyone would insure these guys but insurance was a condition of their employment. Mine, too, but as a tourist I avoided it.”

When Geoff finally arrived in the unaccommodating port of Seattle, a forklift appeared with an enormous box in which rested his indestructible Triumph.

“I had to borrow tools to break it open and I was charged $80 to dispose of the box. Amazingly, my bike started right up after 28 days in the crate. I drove it out and right over the nails in a part of the box I'd just dismantled, puncturing both tires, my first mishap in thousands of miles.”

On the last leg of journey, nearly six months after he'd departed London, Geoff headed south down 101, which he describes as so spectacular “one almost becomes ‘view weary.’

“The thing about the States is that there's so much to see. You go to see one place and someone will say, ‘Another ten miles down the road is such and such.’ There's so much choice as compared to Russia where, once you get out of the cities, there's no choice. You stop for lunch at a roadside diner, Russian style, and you get what they call the ‘businessman's menu’ with one dish on it, a casserole, potatoes and coffee, excellently prepared, but that's it. When I got to a Denny's in Seattle I just sat and stared at the menu for about an hour, stunned at all the options after months on the road. There's no shortages of anything at all in Russian cities, by the way, but out in the country it's a different story.”

Geoff arrived in Boonville at his brother Alan's house after the grandest posthumous motorcycle adventure their parents ever could have imagined. Dad will finally get his drive along the wondrous bluffs of the Mendocino Coast, and Mom and Dad will be at rest forever not far away.

An unexpected gift was presented to the traveler when he learned that Ted Simon, his inspiration, lives in Covelo. When Geoff heads east, “I'll get to meet the man who put me on the Triumph and out on the road.”

“From here,” Geoff says, “I plan a three week loop through the national parks in the Idaho-Utah area and may drop down to Baja, but some time soon I'll be opening the emergency envelope with my get home money in it because I'm running out of time and I'm definitely running out of money. I wore my City Sprint jacket around the world. It's signed by the Iron Tigers Motorcycle Club of Vladivostok. I'll auction it off at the Ace Cafe back in London to benefit hospice. It's all worked out very nicely.”

(Geoff Thomas now lives full-time in Boonville.)

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UKIAH WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)

Palace Hotel prior to addition on the south side. Ukiah Mendocino Co.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, November 1, 2024

LIZBETH BARRALES-GONZALEZ, 30, Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

JUAN BARRERA, 46, Fort Bragg. DUI, no license, failure to obey lawful peace officer order, resisting.

RICHARD MCCORMICK JR., 37, Ukiah. Tear gas.

JAMES YOAST, 51, Redwood Valley. Disobeying court order, failure to appear.

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OFF-PATH BIKES HARMING NATURE, RUINING LANDSCAPE

Editor,

For those interested in maintaining the beauty of our hills and landscape on Mount Tamalpais, I ask that you take a close look at the damage that bikes have inflicted on Blackie’s Pasture and the trail that leads to Tiburon.

Recently, I saw deep bike-tire slices and new bike trails throughout all the surrounding hills. I’m worried that there is no one to stop this destruction. I hope the Tiburon Parks Maintenance Division can do more to stop this.

In many places across Marin, I have experienced bikers roaring around, seemingly going wherever they want. It appears some have little regard for safety, speed, nature, pedestrians, children or dogs. I have seen the landscape damaged. I know many are just “kids being kids,” but they do this at high speeds, some on what appear to be “electric motorcycles.”

Please don’t let our local or visiting mountain bikers destroy our amazing Mt. Tam hiking trails and magnificent landscapes. I have seen too many of today’s cyclists not staying on paths, creating their own shortcuts and damaging the natural flow of nature.

Sandra Macleod White

San Rafael

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49ERS GAME GRADES: Avalanche of mistakes, bad fortune in Buffalo

by Michael Lerseth

Sunday night’s tough task at Buffalo turned into mission impossible for the San Francisco 49ers who lost a game, Christian McCaffrey and possibly any chance of making the playoffs with a 35-10 loss.

OFFENSE: F

The running game didn’t fully implode when McCaffrey left the game with a knee injury — Jordan Mason finished with 78 yards on 13 carries and Isaac Guerendo scored on a 15-yard run. But Brock Purdy had a miserable night. He finished 11-for-18 for 94 yards — the first time he has failed to crack 100 yards in a regular-season start — misfired on several throws, was sacked twice and, on the first play of the fourth quarter, fumbled the ball away while attempting to throw. McCaffrey, coming off a game in which he gained only 68 yards on 14 touches a week earlier, had collected 72 on eight touches before he went down on his own on a play on which he was hurt in the second quarter.

DEFENSE: F

The latest humiliation for this unit was the bobble-catch-turned-lateral to QB Josh Allen, who then dove into the end zone to give Buffalo a 28-3 lead with 5:58 left in the third quarter. Toy meet cat. Other lowlights: James Cook’s 65-yard TD run and Charvarius Ward, returning after unspeakable personal tragedy, being the nearest defender on the Bills’ first and third TDs. In trying conditions, the Bills scored 35 points, averaged 7.7 yards and rolled up 323 yards in the game’s first 48½ minutes. Seemingly immune from the storm, Allen (13-for-17, 148 yards, 141.3 rating) made NFL history as the first QB to score a TD on a pass, run and reception in the same game.

SPECIAL TEAMS: F

Jake Moody missed four field goals in his 17-game rookie regular-season. In nine games this season, he has misfired six times — with Sunday’s errant 45- and 55-yarders joining the list. Deebo Samuel had initially saved this group from a lower grade with kickoff returns of 60 and 42 yards (on his way to averaging 34.7 on six returns), but he also lost a fumble on a return that Buffalo recovered at the Niners’ 31. Pat O’Donnell averaged 41.3 yards on three punts, including one that was downed at the Bills’ 3-yard-line.

COACHING: F

The injuries continue unabated, the losses are piling up and Kyle Shanahan and his staff don’t appear to have at hand any solutions to the problems. There were no game-critical moves to be made Sunday night, but big decisions loom on the proper approach to the season’s final five games after consecutive defeats of at least 25 points.

OVERALL: F

At least they didn’t blow a double-digit fourth-quarter lead, right? It might have been tempting to wave a white flag in the second half, but given the weather in Buffalo it probably wouldn’t have been seen. No amount of snow can hide the fact that this season is likely unsalvageable. Three straight losses have the Niners at 5-7 and two games back of NFC West-leading Seattle. Even allowing for the most optimistic of closing stretches — going 4-1 with the only loss being to Detroit in Week 17 — a 9-8 record likely won’t be enough to make the playoffs.

(sfchronicle.com)

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OUT YOU GO, PETE

Editor:

Adultery is defined as “ voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and a person who is not his or her spouse.” It is widely recognized that Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee to become Secretary Of Defense, is an adulterer. Under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is considered a serious offense in the military, and service members can face severe consequences, including dishonorable discharge and imprisonment, if found guilty.

An adulterer as the head of the Department of Defense? Go figure …

Rex Morgan

Santa Rosa

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LET’S SEE WHAT HERB HAS TO SAY TODAY…

LIFE IS AN ITEM

Items are my game. Items are stories boiled down down to the bone.Some are pseudo-stories, the shorter the better. Somebody said something to somebody that sounded funny at the time. In cold type in the cold light of the morning of the cold cereal and the cold coffee, it doesn’t read funny. It lies there like the oat bran in the bowl. Maybe nobody will read it anyway, any way at all. The paper comes out and vanishes. Forgotten by 10, dead by noon, pulped by dark. And there’s always tomorrow. That’s the hell of it. All these wonderuful people slaving desperately to put out the paper each day, a prodigious achievement, and by 11 a.m., you see it fluttering down the street. More clutter for litterbugs. Please use the trash container. Thank you.

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Life is an item. You ca write it either way, long or short. A beginning, a middle and an end, not necessarily in that order, as writer Herbert Gold said. Some lives end a the beginning but take on a false life of their own and continue to the end, which is always the ame. Curtains, fade-out. The Big Sleep ( Raymond Chandler). In San Francisco, life can be sweet. All the ingredients are here. Good people, good places, good attitude. These are generalities. The luck, she has to be running good (fake Hemingway). Nevertheless, San Francisco is good for most people. For others, life can be be Hobbesian, nasty, brutish, short. A long judgement with short words. My kind of item.

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San Francisco, a small, well-rafted item, rare, expensive, sparkling, depressing. A city you can wear on your charm bracelet or around your neck. A pet of a city that will turn on you without warning. Housebroken but not tamed. Housebroken. A wor that lends itself to jokes about the housing shortage, the high price of housing, the oxymoron joke of affordable housing. Or hosing. San franciso: a problem, a conundrum, a place you love or hate and hate to leave. Deadly, as only a female can be deadly( not even Mickey Spillane). “ I love San Francisco,” No item. It’s something people have been saying since the beginning of Pacific Standard Time. How do you love a city? You love her essence, her midnight song as she nibbles your ear. She is seductive, she can shimmy and shake, she can sing “ Drunk With Love,” but she doesn’t always return your phone calls.

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It gets dark earlier now. No item. I walk the streets, spiral-bound notebook ready. Item all around, unfit to print. Dead and not so dead bodies in doorways and strewn on the sidewalks. Disposable but not recyclable. Dregs on drugs, wackos on crack, mooches on the make. Item: The Tenderloin is getting no better. It is getting no worse. It just is, an endless source of misery, joy and fascination. A place for voyeurs with notebooks and cameras. Sure I am fascinated by the Tenderloin. Hookers of all sexes speaking in tongues. Skinny guys with automatic weapons, right there on the street. Dark laughter in the underbelly. These people love each other right up to the moment they kill each other. They embrace, they kiss, they walk arm-in-arm in the fraternity of the damned. They die with a smile, happy.

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Item: San Francisco is the most beautiful city in the world that has suicide and cirrhosis among its top killers. It is a city where everything and nothing happens. Millions are collected for the homeless, and he homeless proliferate. Nothing gets done. The guy with the spiral-bound notebook calls various people in charge of these things. “ We are doing the best we can.” Plaintively, in the voice of a guy who is late for lunch. Good town for lunch. it is a city that votes right but still gets everything wrong. A city with a unique voting record: McGovern, Mondale, Jesse Jackson, that Greek fellow from Massachusetts with the wife, yeah, that one. In San Francisco, courageous people can demonstrate against the outrages of the right wing in El Salvador and still get clubbed by the police.

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The night comes early now. Even in the dark, the new Marriott Hotel, the Palace of Ming the Merciless, glows like a living thing. St. Ignatius Church shies to its hilltop, a beacon of hope and beauty, but let us not discuss freedom of choice. Did the fisherman of Galilee say, “ Don’t rock the boat?” Not in so many words. The big holidays are with us now through the end of the year. The big holidays and the big depression. Item: San Franisco is a great party town. We may have forgotten everything else, but we can still throw parties, maybe the best in the world. Short days and long nights for dancing till dawn. Then the big hangover, the big depression. The trip to the bridge. The sun is rising out of Contra Costa. The city looks golden, fresh, alluring. What the hell, give it one more day.

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Life is a bad item, short but pointless. You stand at the bar and play liar’s dice with fate. it’s the San Francisco way. You might win, and even if you lose, the scenery’s great and the weather isn’t too bad.

November 26, 1989

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FISHING IN THE BLACK FOREST

https://www.achtung-mode.com/when-i-went-fishing-in-the-black-forest/

(via Bruce McEwen)

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

We're going to run government as a business! Private not public! No one hunts in the King's forest but the King and his friends. Americans are slaves mentally and soon will be physically. Libertarianism is just a different kind of opium.

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LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT

Biden Issues a ‘Full and Unconditional Pardon’ of His Son Hunter Biden

Trump Doubles Down on Defiance After the Collapse of the Matt Gaetz Selection

Syria’s Rebels Struck When Assad’s Allies Were Weakened and Distracted

Mexican Cartels Lure Chemistry Students to Make Fentanyl

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THE RISE OF ‘BARSTOOL CONSERVATISM’

by Matthew Walther

Despite Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, his political coalition was already expanding in consequential ways. Not only did he make notable gains among Hispanic and African-American voters — gains that only increased this year — but he also attracted the support of a loose grouping of mostly young, male voters whom I described around that time as “Barstool conservatives.” This year, as I had predicted, they appeared to swing hard for Mr. Trump.

“Barstool conservatism” was a reference to the media company Barstool Sports and its founder, Dave Portnoy, who became a folk hero of sorts in 2020 after raising millions of dollars on behalf of bars and restaurants whose existence had been threatened by Covid lockdowns. Apart from Mr. Portnoy, Barstool conservatism’s most representative figures today are the podcast host Joe Rogan, the retired N.F.L. punter turned ESPN personality Pat McAfee and various mixed martial arts fighters.

Barstool conservatism is libertarian in the sense that it values autonomy and ambition but not doctrinaire about it in a way that would be recognizable to, say, the editors of Reason magazine. It is a world of fantasy football podcasts, betting apps, diet trends (keto, paleo, carnivore) and more nebulous “lifestyle” questions about the nuances of alcohol and cannabis use. The outlook is culturally rather than socially conservative, skeptical of racial and gender politics for reasons that have more to do with the stridency of their proponents than with any deep-seated convictions about the issues themselves.

As a social conservative with an antipathy to libertarianism in all its forms, I viewed the rise of Barstool conservatism in 2020 with foreboding. And rightly so. This year Mr. Trump ran what was, in effect, a pro-choice campaign. He signaled support for legalized cannabis but not for a traditional conception of marriage. He may have selected JD Vance as his running mate, but otherwise he took social conservatives for granted. Barstool conservatives had the upper hand throughout the campaign, as underscored by the emphasis Mr. Trump’s team placed on Mr. Rogan’s endorsement.

I have long been inclined to make certain hard and fast distinctions between Barstool conservatism and Trumpism of the sort that Mr. Vance represents, which I associate with opposition to abortion, pornography and cannabis, and support for traditional families, shoring up the power of organized labor and protecting religious freedom. In theory these two conservative tendencies are diametrically opposed. Until recently I would have suggested that only Mr. Trump could possibly unite them, by sheer force of personality.

But since this year’s election I have been on an informal listening tour of young men in the part of rural Michigan where I live, which is a nice way of saying that I have spent a lot of time talking to people in bars. What I heard from mechanics, waiters, high school teachers and others often surprised me. The future of American conservatism now strikes me as more complex and less ideologically predictable — and less dependent on Mr. Trump — than I had thought.

My longest conversation was with a 25-year-old garbageman named Collin Tone. Collin is an enthusiastic Trump voter. He enjoys listening to Mr. Portnoy and Mr. Rogan as well as the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. (Our conversation began with a discussion of Alp, a brand of nicotine pouch recently backed by Mr. Carlson.) He seemed to me at first a Barstool type.

But Collin is also a nondenominational Christian. Unlike most of his friends, he is married. On social and economic issues, his views do not line up neatly with either the “don’t tread on me” bro-ism of the Barstool set or the government-backed traditionalism envisioned by Mr. Vance.

Collin told me that while he and his wife have saved about $20,000 for a down payment on a house, he expressed frustration that very few Americans his age will be able to accumulate this kind of money. Unlike a Barstool type, he thinks the government should help young home buyers by lowering interest rates. But while he is open, like Mr. Vance, to the possibility of more generous European-style family policy, he also thinks that the expenses associated with child rearing are often overstated.

When I asked him about the president-elect’s personal life, Collin said that Mr. Trump seemed to have grown in virtue, and that before condemning him for his affairs and his two failed marriages, as a social conservative might, one should consider the temptations to which a man of his wealth would find himself exposed. At the same time, Collin said that divorce has had disastrous consequences for American family life. He has even stronger views about pornography, which he wishes were subject to legal restrictions. (He said that several of his former high school classmates were producing content for OnlyFans.)

If Collin’s hard-to-categorize views are in any sense representative of the Trump coalition — and anecdotally, I gather they are, at least in their unpredictability — I will need to do some rethinking. From my perspective Trumpism looks incoherent: an indifferent assemblage of oligarchic rent-seeking, misguided Fordist nostalgia, mawkish sentimentality and techno-optimism, with the detritus of the George W. Bush-era left (especially its antiwar sentiment and skepticism of public health authorities) thrown in for good measure. What my conversation with Collin brought home to me was that for him and perhaps millions of others, these things somehow hang together.

And why shouldn’t they? Most voters do not think like political analysts. For them the relationship between the seemingly disparate visions represented by figures such as Mr. Portnoy and Mr. Vance might be more like a conversation than an argument. The same young man who might nod along with Mr. Portnoy’s encomiums to self-indulgence might also find in Mr. Vance a voice who can speak credibly — with the force of personal experience — about the consequences of a world shorn of traditional cultural and social restraints. The same young man who might agree with Mr. Vance that low birthrates pose a dire threat to civilization might be more interested in Elon Musk’s suggestion that part of the solution is to colonize Mars.

To me, this vision of the coalition, in which the insights of competing factions subtly influence and refine one another while competing for mastery, looks suspiciously like the Republican Party before Mr. Trump supposedly remade it in his image. That was a time when godless libertarians looking to shrink government vied for dominance with Moral Majority types worried about premarital sex. I now think there are good reasons for believing that Mr. Trump’s coalition will look more or less the same as it does now in four years, when he is gone.

(NY Times)

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A COLUMNIST’S FIRST 50 YEARS

by George Will

It is tempting but mistaken to say that the current administration of the universe is defective because people are not required to read op-ed columns. That thought is too adjacent to progressivism, which, a critic has said, does not care what people do as long as it is compulsory. Besides, a smaller readership can be superior to a bigger one.

Most people do not read newspapers; most who do skip the op-ed page. This means that the few, the happy few, who do read columns do so because their mental pantries are stocked with curiosity, information and opinions. So, the columnist can assume the readers’ foundation of knowledge, which enables large arguments in small spaces.

The 15th century produced what remains the most consequential communication technology ever: Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type. Glassy-eyed Americans squinting at their smartphones for videos of kittens might consider it quaint to ascribe history-shaping potency to mere print, especially during today’s digital typhoon. Media constantly clamor for Americans’ attention, which is increasingly elusive and of decreasing duration.

A newspaper column — one musty option on a rapidly expanding menu of distractions — requires reading, which, unlike passive grazing at an endless buffet of graphic distractions, is an activity. It demands one’s mental engagement. So, a column had better be pleasurable from the start, even if its subject is not pleasant. Here is Murray Kempton (1917-1997), in a column on President Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigning in Florida in 1956:

“In Miami he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some 20 feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled ‘Colored’ and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by laws, and complimenting Florida as ‘typical today of what is best in America,’ a verdict which might seem to some contingent on finding out what happened to the Negro snatched from the Wildwood jail Sunday.”

That sinuous 75-word sentence, although stiletto-sharp, deployed Kempton’s pointed judgments obliquely. His demanding syntax drew readers into participating in his searing perception. His style, suited to concision, enabled him to make arguments by intimation — arguments that readers internalized almost without noticing.

Do notice Kempton’s desert-dry wit: “… which might seem to some contingent on …” A spoonful of humor helps the medicine (information, argument) go down.

An enchanting idea of heaven is this: endless learning. For the self-selected cohort of op-ed readers, learning is treasured as fun. Columns are properly quarantined on “opinion” pages, but a columnist’s opinions will lack momentum for respect unless they are accompanied by platoons of facts that give readers the delight of discovery: “I didn’t know that.”

It has been said that a deadline is a writer’s best friend. But if writing is a chore — a painful duty — for a columnist, he or she should find another vocation. Enjoyment is infectious, and readers will only value, over time, the company of a columnist who clearly enjoys the craft of assembling sentences, paragraphs and arguments.

This columnist is caught in a contradiction: He believes that in our market society, prices are rational. Yet he would pay for the pleasure of doing what he is paid to do. He is in the right city.

John F. Kennedy once drolly characterized Washington as a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. The city he knew was, however, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. It was acquiring a physical and cultural infrastructure worthy of a great metropolis. The Beltway opened in 1964, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971, the subway in 1976.

This columnist is, in a sense, doing what he was doing before he came to Washington. Until then, he had taught political philosophy at the University of Toronto. Since then, he has been working to discern the small kernels of large philosophical principles lurking in the welter of events.

Amid today’s rancorousness, it is difficult to remember when America’s consensus was considered suffocatingly bland. This columnist, now 83, remembers when, as he became politically sentient in the 1950s, many intellectuals lamented the absence of scalding treatises about burning questions: too much Locke, not enough Lenin.

Actually, however, in the unending American dialectic between legislatures and courts — between majorities and restraints thereon — the perennial subjects of Western political argument are constantly contested: the concepts of freedom, equality, consent, representation and justice.

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‘BRAIN ROT’ NAMED OXFORD WORD OF THE YEAR 2024

Following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say, we’re pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’.

Our language experts created a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape the past year. After two weeks of public voting and widespread conversation, our experts came together to consider the public’s input, voting results, and our language data, before declaring ‘brain rot’ as the definitive Word of the Year for 2024.

‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”.

Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.

The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

The term has taken on new significance in the digital age, especially over the past 12 months.…

https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/

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PERHAPS THE WORLD ENDS HERE

by Joy Harjo, US Poet Laureate

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

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