ALWAYS AGREED with the pot brigades about illegal water diversions. Pot gardeners aren't even in it with the wine people whose diversions are not only much more numerous, much more voluminous, they're forever. The pot people, even the large-scale ones deep in the outback, come and go, their battered acres sometimes recovering. The vineyards are not only prone to illegal diversions, the water they have legal access to is expended by them at profligate rates, and the wine industry is almost wholly dependent on destructive herbicides and pesticides on a scale that dwarfs the chemical dependence of pot farmers. An announcement in the Press Democrat the other day informed area “farmers” that the Sonoma County Ag Department was sponsoring a workshop on how to “manage” wild turkeys via “restricted use pesticides.” Doubt this class is for pot farmers.
MARY MOORE OF MONTE RIO REMEMBERS: “We had gathered for a rally for the ‘No on Prop 8’ campaign in front of the offices of the Republican Party on Washington Street in Petaluma. Unlike days prior, the ‘Yes on 8’ bigots actually had a sizable crowd of maybe 15, half of whom were young Latino men, some of whom I recognized from our Food Not Bombs servings. I wondered to myself why these guys would associate themselves with Republicans, considering that Republicans are a party which literally wants to deport every single immigrant in this country and has advocated the militarization of our borders. Well, I thought, maybe they are from the church and their pastor happens to hate gay people. Who knows? As they began to leave, I asked some of the guys why they were out there. They didn't seem to care too much or have any reasons. They said they didn't care who won, and that ‘a job is a job.’ I asked, ‘Are they paying you?’ ‘Yes, of course,’ they said. Here you have a party that relies on fear, xenophobia and immigrant bashing hiring local immigrant day laborers to hold their signs! I confronted the Republicans in their office and asked them to go on record saying they hired immigrant workers to hold their signs for them. Of course they denied it completely. I asked if anyone spoke Spanish. They were outraged at the idea. They got quite mad and asked me to leave…”
NO SOONER had Biden been declared our new president in 2020, and already visibly half ga-ga, than the news was full of big shot Democrats advising him to “govern from the center,” as if Biden's appointments were a gang of Bolsheviks and not the refried Clintonoids they were, and as if Biden had ever been anything better than an unprincipled opportunist. Governing from the center has always meant defending the interests of the banks, the dominant corporations and the war machine. Which is where Biden already was and which is where the Democrats continue to be, which is why Trump is president.
THE NORTHCOAST DEMOCRATIC PARTY for years gaslighted the Northcoast with the fantasy that trains would one glorious day run from Marin to Eureka, as they once did with two trains each way every day when Americans still knew how to do big stuff in the public interest. That fantasy of a revived railroad disguised a cynical property grab that eventually gave former Congressman Doug Bosco private ownership of the profitable parts of the old rail line while Ukiah got the property at the foot of West Perkins for a new County Courthouse nobody wants except our monarchical superior court judges, all but one of them loyal Democrats.
AS THEIR RAIL SCAM played out, the Democrats parked party loyalists — uber-hack Dan Hauser was in charge for a few years as was Bosco’s former Chief of Staff Mitch Stogner — in a few good paying train jobs to promote the myth of a revived Northwestern Pacific again connecting Southern Marin to what they claimed would be a thriving deep water port at Eureka. The prob with that fantasy was there is no sea traffic of any consequence in and out of Eureka, and it would take many millions of dollars to restore the ruined tunnels and track in the Eel River Canyon northeast of Willits.
IT IS NOT fantasy, however, to expect a revived train to run as far north as Willits. Nor is it fantasy to wish that a train would again link Fort Bragg to Willits and Willits to Larkspur. In 1920, as old, old timers will recall, you could board the Skunk in Fort Bragg and be in San Francisco in time for a nightcap at the Top of the Mark
FINE FRISCO DINING of the inexpensive type, and highly recommended if it's still Mango Medley at 3911 Judah, way to hell and gone out by Ocean Beach, where you'll find an amazing menu of unique dishes none of which cost more than ten bucks. Funky little place whose waiter I delivered an errant but avuncular pat on the head as I passed on in to my seat, “How you doing, kiddo?” only to discover she was a tiny woman. And the waitress. She did look rather nonplussed but asked me to come back again when I compensated for my gaffe by doubling the tip. One waitress, one cook. Two women do it all, and the place is always busy, and very, very good which keeps it busy.
ALSO very, very good and much less busy because, probably, of its obscure setting, at 200 6th Avenue, if it's still there in a literal hole in the wall between Clement and California, a young man born and raised in the Himalayas serves up what he calls “Himalayan Vegetarian Fusion.” I'm with the vegans all the way. In theory. Their arguments are unassailable. Cows are not defensible, but I continue to eat them and generally steer (sic) clear of anything advertised as vegetarian. Or even healthy. And “fusion” is one of those No Go words like “envision” and “paradigm,” always an indication you're closing in on crank territory. But this kid's food is excellent, featuring momo, “a Himalayan dumpling stuffed with vegetables” and an absolutely delicious lentil soup. Again, good food real cheap, nothing more than six bucks on a brief menu.
FOR BREAD, try Grain du Jour on Clement near 3rd. For those of us raised on Wonder Bread, one of the great advances in American life has been the development of an honest loaf of real bread. Used to be that to get a bread with any taste to it, and never mind nutrition, you'd have to age date your daily loaf of basic Wonder after dipping it in a mud puddle, kicking it down the sidewalk and throwing it a couple of times for your dog to fetch, and even then it still tasted like cotton. These days you can get excellent bread right here in Boonville at the Boonville General Store. In San Francisco, Grain du Jour, which is French for “Not Wonder Bread,” is the place you want if you're in the city and have a hankering for the staff of life.
THREE MEN —one Jew, two Arabs — were seated three abreast on an Air France flight to the US. The Jew mentioned to the Arabs that he was going to the bathroom, and offered to get them something while he was up. The Arabs thanked him for his kindness and said yes, they would each like an orange juice. Moments after the Jew had left, one of the Arabs noticed that the man had removed his shoes during the flights, and that they were still on the floor. He nudged his friend and suggested that they spit in the shoes. They did. When the Jew returned with the juice, the Arabs thanked him profusely and then suggested that he put on his shoes since the plane was landing. The Jew slipped them on, sat quietly for a moment, then turned to his Arab neighbors, who were giggling and nudging each other. In a soft, sorrowful voice, he said: “When will it end — the hatred, the vengeance, the killing, the spitting in the shoes, the pissing in the orange juice?”
A READER WRITES: Regarding the alleged Bari Bombing mystery, my heart gave a little jump when you wrote about the possibility that something might break loose under the new Kash Patel regime. The thought occurred to write up an FOIA request on Redwood Summer, to get all the juicy cointelpro details, until I realized that the spooks will protect their informants to the grave and beyond, something no doubt written into all their snitch contracts. If revealed, the resulting legal actions would quickly bankrupt the whole enterprise. Their lawyers say no. The assassination of Malcolm X serves as a good indicator of how the maiming of Judi Bari will be handled. Mums the word on FBI involvement, informants included, at least into the foreseeable future. The only sliver of justice that will be served in this case, at least in our lifetimes, will be what you write about it. That is all the solace we can expect, but it's a lot better than nothing. So thank you for your service.
MALCOLM MACDONALD
Adventist Health’s vision is to become a fully integrated care continuum, focusing on operational and clinical excellence, and sustainable growth. In order to reach this goal, we must make structural adjustments in our North Coast Service Area. Administrator Linda Givens (Adventist Health Howard Memorial) will retire in early 2025. Administrator Judy Leach (Adventist Health Mendocino Coast) will transition to a new role within Adventist Health. Administrator David Leighton (Adventist Health Ukiah Valley) will step down from his role in early 2025. Linda and David’s final date of employment will be determined later as they will stay to help ensure a smooth transition. Chuck Kassis, Interim Administrator at Adventist Health Clear Lake, will continue to lead Clear Lake.
A search has begun for two new roles:
- Operations Executive for Adventist Health Clear Lake
- Operations Executive covering Adventist Health Howard Memorial, Adventist Health Ukiah Valley, and Adventist Health Mendocino Coast
These two newly created roles will be responsible for ensuring our services operate in the best way possible to support the needs of our community members and patients.
Eric Stevens will also continue to serve as President of the Northern California Network, which includes the North Coast Service Area hospitals (Adventist Health Clear Lake, Adventist Health Howard Memorial, Adventist Health Ukiah Valley, Adventist Health Mendocino Coast, Adventist Health St. Helena, and Adventist Health Vallejo) plus Adventist Health Lodi Memorial, Adventist Health and Rideout, and Adventist Health Sonora
TOM SMYTHE
I don’t know what they do at the Air Quality agency. It takes a month to get a permit. Not sure how many people work there but why does it take a month to get a simple burn permit? After two weeks I went in to see when I could get my permit. Grant you, it was a Friday mid-day and only one person manning the front desk. After querying when I would get my permit the person pointed to 2-inch stack of permits and said, “I have so many to do, not sure when you will get a permit.” Two more weeks and two phone calls later they finally emailed a permit. Cal Fire gets you a burn permit in three days. Cal Fire will issue permits even before the burn ban is lifted. Air Quality won’t. Complain to your supervisors about the waste of money the agency is when you can’t burn on a no-burn day anyway, you will get turned in. You can’t burn anything but vegetation created on the property. Those are the main criteria for burning required by Air Quality. AI could do that permit review in a split second.
TOM HINE
And now, a Peace & Freedom Update from the midwest bureau, where I held the position of Wood County representative, 1968 ’69.
Meetings at Bowling Green University were far less lively and dangerous than those described by Mr. Anderson, and my chances of being accosted, assaulted, arrested or molested by angry fellow members were zero. My duties, as they came to be understood, were the unpacking of occasional cartons of campaign materials and seeing that they were distributed to supporters. The products were pretty cool and I still have a few “Dick Gregory for President” dollar bills that were semi-faithful reproductions of the ones with George Washington. I left them as “tips” in restaurants and bars, and tried them in various vending machines and change machines with no luck. There were also P&F bumper stickers with “Dick Gregory/Benjamin Spock” heading the ticket and the stickers. Last were black lapel pins with yellow and red stripes that encouraged those close enough to read them that the Gregory-Spock ticket was promising peace, freedom and somewhere to go beside Humphrey, Nixon and Wallace. I still have a few of those dollars, and if I can find them I will make them available to AVA subscribers.
FROM THE MENDOCINO BEACON’S old time notes for November 4, 1883: "Black Bart, the gentlemanly, respectable, patriotic, courteous, charitable, merciful, considerate, pious highwayman, after a successful career of six years during which he has committed 23 stage robberies in Northern California with impunity, has at last been bagged by the police, stimulated by the offer of rewards aggregating $18,400. Capt. Harry Morse is one lucky man who will receive the principal part of the money and glory. His history of the tracking and capture of the wily rascal is equal to anything in Pinkerton's book. The unsuspecting manner in which Bart ran his neck into the noose which Morse held for him evidenced anything but shrewdness on his part. His last dodge is to gain immunity by confession. We shall have no doubt of a pamphlet edition of his exploits, which will be a textbook in the hands of boys ambitious of a similar career." Black Bart held up stage coaches on the Willits Grade and between Cloverdale and Ukiah. There were persistent rumors at the time – c. 1880 – that another highwayman was a Ukiah school teacher.
ON a too brief visit Saturday to home base, Boonville, several locals looked at me as if they'd seen a ghost, which I nearly was last March when I was retrieved by the medical wizards just as I'd stepped into The White Tunnel to The Other Side. I was especially gratified, moved actually, by the warm receptions I got from Pilar Echeverria at Mosswood, Susan Bridge-Mount also at Mosswood, and Sandy Mailliard next door at Farmhouse Mercantile. It was the passersby who seemed most startled at my re-appearance, which I hope to make regular soon, and less startling to my friends and, hopefully, lamented by my enemies.
AS BLACK SWANS darken the skies, events become bloodier and chaos more prevalent. I wasn't moved to mourn the loss of that assassinated insurance executive who made millions killing many thousands of my fellow citizens by denying their paid-up medical claims. His murder is probably the first of many of the more major enemies of the people.
IF DEMOCRATS were Democrats and not the contemptible corporate bagmen they are, we'd have enjoyed MediCare for all years ago. Instead we got Obama Care where a minority of uninsured Americans got to choose which extortionate health insurance combine they paid mightily to be extorted by, then denied care.
THIS ANECDOTE by Doug Holland is a perfect metaphor of how the Democrats lost to the single most improbable person in the history of American politics:
“I have a right-wing neighbor who voted Trump three times, says climate change is a hoax, and hates me for sometimes wearing a tie-dye jacket, but he says with a grin all over his face, ‘Did you hear about that insurance CEO who got shot dead?’ and he laughs and laughs and gives me a thumbs-up.”
HUNTER BIDEN'S blanket pardon by Dad all the way back to 2014 for crimes he wasn't charged with, specifically cited only two — income tax evasion and lying on his gun purchase form. Biden's defenders say lying on the gun form wasn't a big deal and the tax evasion occurred while he was under the influence of drugs. (“Stop that girls! Can't you see I'm doing my taxes.”)
AND AREN'T DEMOCRATS the gun control people, the party that enacted the scant gun control measures we have, including the obligation to fess up if you're buying a gun?
THREE REAL SHORT STORIES in ascending order of terror. Short story one: A Chinese foot doctor told me that he used to fish out of Fort Bragg's Noyo Harbor. The foot doctor fisherman said he never fished for salmon “because that’s what everyone else did back then.” He said he fished for rock cod, which he could sell fresh to “San Francisco's better Chinese restaurants” for upwards of five to ten dollars a pound. Cash. He said the other fishermen laughed when he’d tell them he was fishing for rock cod, which was then regarded as a junk fish. The foot doctor said he and his fishing partner built underwater cages in the Noyo near where they berthed their boat to keep the fish alive and fresh until they'd collected thousands of dollars worth of the despised cod. Then they'd take them to the city where they were paid cash for them on the spot. “I fished out of Noyo until my foot practice got going,” the doctor said. “I made a lot of money from rock cod, more money than I could have made salmon fishing, and I still remember how everyone laughed at me. They thought I was crazy.”
SHORT STORY TWO. A Twenty-two year-old woman, engaged to be married, left her cell phone in a city bar popular with young people. She said she was sure it had fallen out of her purse at the bar because it was the only place she'd gone after work. She’d met friends, including her boyfriend, for one drink and then everyone had said good night and gone home because it was a work night. The young woman couldn't find her phone when she got to her apartment. She hurried back to the bar. The bar was still crowded but no one had found her phone, the bartenders said. (It was a busy place with three or four bartenders.) But someone had found it, a malicious someone, and that malicious someone had sent the nude pictures of herself the young woman had earlier transmitted to the man she was about to marry, transmitting them to every person on the young woman's speed dial roster — her parents, her two sets of grandparents, the people she worked with, siblings… The young woman spent a week in the fetal position on her couch, sobbing, but has since recovered, helped along by the knowledge that no one in her family held it against her.
STORY THREE. PEBBLES TRIPPET, the famous marijuana crusader, told me that she once rented a place in Fort Bragg for her trailer back in the middle 1980s where her landlord was the property owner, Wayne Combash, a young-ish black man who was said to have been affiliated with the Cleaver wing of the Black Panthers. Mendocino County then and now being a kind of rural reinvention center where you can be whatever you say you are no questions asked. Combash had maybe an acre out on Airport Road north of town with a falling down old house on the front part of the acre. His uncle, Louis Webb owned a place nearby. Combash was crazy, Louis Webb was not crazy. I’d seen Combash ranting like a street nut at the No Offshore Oil rallies. He’d stand there and yell that we were all going to hell and communism was evil and so forth, oddly tardy denunciations considering that the No Offshore Oil protests were mainstream preservationist and the last communist Fort Bragg had seen was maybe 1945 in the big mill strike, and the few communists involved in that one were of the unaffiliated type. What I didn’t know was that Combash attacked women, actualized his threats, as the therapists might say. I thought maybe the libs, who all seemed to be on a first name basis with the guy, had brought Wayne up from the city so they could have a multi-cultural prop they could patronize and congratulate themselves for. But Combash had seriously assaulted several Coast women and had gotten away with it each time because Mendocino Coast liberals tended to be suicidally hostile to “the man.” Cops were still blue meanies to be avoided even when crazy people were trying to kill you. So Combash's assaults went unreported. Even his victims would say, “Well, poor Wayne must have been off his meds.” Or, “He’ll be all right if he gets therapy.” One night Wayne went after Pebs. He’d been threatening Pebs all day, and he'd been drinking. Wayne was a lot crazier when he was drinking, though it was often hard to distinguish him drunk from him sober. Pebs had heard of the other attacks on women and had been planning to move off Wayne's property but hadn’t yet. That day Wayne, drunk, had been outside Pebs' trailer shouting that he was going to kill her and burn her house down, that Pebs was putting some bad mojo on him. Wayne's mother told Pebs that when Wayne had acted up as a boy Mom would tie him up in a corner and surround him with lit candles. That discipline strategy just might cause a boy child to grow up with serious mom issues, and a generalized distrust of women. Sure enough, Wayne grew up and went on the attack. That day — Get Pebs Day — Wayne was obviously psyching himself up to do Pebs some serious harm, walking around her trailer yelling that she and the trailer were going to be torched. Pebs went looking for some male muscle to sleep on her couch to fend Wayne off if he came crashing through the door in the middle of the night. She found the muscle, but it was drunk muscle, and feeble muscle when it was sober. Wayne duly crashed through the door about 4am, running through the poor old drunk like he wasn’t there, and began clawing at Pebs’ eye. With blood running down her face, and her eye part way out of its socket, Pebs, literally fighting for her life, was somehow able to free herself and run for her car. She got herself to Coast Hospital where doctors told her she’d arrived just in time to save her vision. Combash had indeed proceeded to torch Pebs' trailer. When the cops arrived, he was dancing around the flames singing out about how he got Pebble's evil eye and how he'd stopped Pebs' “freedom lifestyle.” The drunk bodyguard never touched another drop; he was scared sober. Combash was arrested and, natch, soon released. Trying to pluck someone's eye out and burning her house down was handled as a psychiatric misdemeanor, and that's Mendocino County to this day, folks. Pebs had to hide from Combash because he told everyone he was determined to find her and finish her off. While Wayne looked for her, Pebs was taken in by Nog Johnson out Pudding Creek. But Pebs wasn’t about to let Combash get away with the attack on her. She testified against him and she put a lien on his property. Ha-ha, people said. A lien on a crazy guy’s place. You will get zero damages, Pebs, you're wasting your time. But Pebs persisted, and when Wayne Combash turned up dead at Rainbow Falls near Mendocino with a bullet in his head, Pebs finally got the money, not enough to make up for the scare Combash had put in her or the damage he’d done her, but something, which is a dollar more than anybody thought she'd get. Who shot Combash? The case is still open, but from the day it happened every rumor said that Louis Webb, Uncle Louie, also now deceased, had done it. He’d been heard to say he was tired of bailing his nephew out of trouble, tired of people complaining to him that Wayne had done this, that or the other thing. Louis Webb was a respectable citizen, a Gray Panther not a black one, a veteran, a member of the Fort Bragg VFW. People were happy with his terminal Wayne intervention, and Uncle Louie never argued when people congratulated him for doing it.
SHERIFF KENDALL
Today, we are thankful and inspired at the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. Three of our own have taken the next step to develop their law enforcement careers as deputy sheriff-coroners.
In the presence of loved ones and Sheriff’s Office staff, Travis Hemphill, Jesus Lopez, and Osvaldo Ramirez took the peace officer’s oath of office this morning. The three new deputies graduated from the Police Academy last week in Windsor, Hemphill with top academic achievement in their graduating class.
Jesus, Osvaldo and Travis now start an intensive training program at the Sheriff’s Office. Please join us in offering all three congratulations.
WE RECENTLY WONDERED what happened to that $5 million water storage for the Town of Mendocino that State Senator Mike McGuire and Supervisor Ted Williams so proudly announced back during the big drought of 2021. Soon after the announcement, a local reporter noted that the project was estimated to take up to five years because of California’s enormous bureaucratic hurdles, even though it seemed like a relatively straightforward water storage project. By accident we stumbled across a County Planning Commission hearing item on December 5 entitled “MUSD Water Infrastructure Case #UM_2024-0008,” which is what the project has now become.
It turns out a couple of years after the project was so grandly announced, it merged with a couple of other grant-funded water projects already underway by the Mendocino Unified School District and has now “ballooned” (in the words of some critics) into a much more complicated water project with an estimated cost of over $8 million becaue the project now includes fire protection and school water supplies.
The storage capacity being planned is two huge water tanks with a total capacity of 630,000 gallons to be placed on Mendocino Unified’s school grounds along with a couple of new wells and associated plumbing and pumps as well as monitoring wells to keep track of water table levels.
Nobody objects to the long-overdue project in principle, but some former advocates and school district neighbors are worried that the project will overddraw the town’s shallow aquifer and cause neighboring wells to go dry.
The School District appears to be flexible about how this problem might be addressed, but so far nobody has come up with the specific planning language that will satisfy the school’s and town’s water needs while ensuring that the parcels surrounding the wells (which are on the inland side of Highway 1 where the school is) will not be overdrawn.
The Planning Commission ran out of time trying to come up with the specific language and put the question off until their next meeting on December 19.
The complications involve the potential of having to do a complete Environmental Impact Report on the now much larger project, as well as the need to comply and coordinate with the Coastal Commission, the town fire department, the school district (both an elementary and a high school), and the Mendocino Community Services District (MCCSD) which is responsible for the town’s water sytsem as well as its related sewer system and the County Planning Department and Commission. All this while addressing neighbor concerns. Not to mention the myriad of permits and associated paperwork required and the financing.
There was no discussion of the timing of the project itself. If the Boonville Water and Sewer project’s painfully long timetable (going on ten years now and still not approved by local property owners) is any guide, the initial guess of five years for Mendo’s system upgrade will turn out to have been so optimistic as to be incredible.
(Mark Scaramella)
MEDIA are aghast that a young guy from a privileged background can become an assassin, and an assassin coming intellectually from the left at that. Lenin, Mussolini, most American presidents, Castro, Che Guevara, and the guy who just took over Syria, all came from privileged backgrounds. Why? Because privilege gets the privileged a sound education. Which this kid Mangione has deployed to conclude the obvious — that corporations, aka the rich, are killing us. He specifically went after the health corporations by murdering one of that particular monster’s most egregious chiefs. The kid isn't alone in his estrangement. Millions of Americans agree with him and silently approve of his sacrificial act. But political assassinations are pointless unless they're part of a movement, and who knows, young Mangione may have started one.
IN A WORLD of misunderstanding, and there’s a whole universe of it right here in Boonville, a couple of Spanish-speaking gents took angry exception to a bumpersticker on a Philo woman’s battered pick-up that said “Fuck Beamers,” which the two Spanish-speakers had read as “Fuck Beaners.” Volleys of heated fuck yous were exchanged, the semantics unresolved, and both sides went away unmollified.
A READER WRITES: “In the wanderings of my squandered youth and embittered middle age I came to know more than one individual of the Captain’s (Fathom) thirsty, oblivious tribe. A few it was an absolute pleasure to dismiss with a grunt, but most of those folks had some kind of redeeming or even endearing quality, even if only intermittently apparent. More than one had a long suffering spouse and, of course, multiple kids; with a long sigh does one realize it means all that constantly flaunted Hopeless Loser DNA will likely be carried down through the future of judgment day itself. Well, there’s the human experience for you — we dream of grandeur and transcendence; here on Earth we’re mostly mixed nuts, with legs.”
AS THE PRINT MEDIA DIE off, America's media experts — all of them with non-competitive cush jobs in “think tanks” and universities — proliferate. These experts say the internet and the changing ways that Americans get their information — television and cellphones, mostly — are killing newspapers published on newsprint. Many of us also go to the internet for our daily doses of misinformation. Me, too, plus the remaining County newspapers, and books and two book reviews, The New York and The London, the latter being especially reliable on international events.
BUT MOST PEOPLE under the age of 50 pluck everything they know from either television or cyber-space, or from radio news blurbs wedged in between love yawps and the arrhythmic honks of popular music, hence the aggregate national attention span of three-quarters of a second, hence our quality of government, hence, for instance, growing numbers of young parents failing to vaccinate their children, hence literal millions of crackpots with their own electronic newspapers, hence the growing numbers of people who only talk to each other, hence a population easily manipulated by the owning classes as media place all power in the RC's endlessly acquisitive hands. The internet, like dope, has isolated people and made them dumber and crazier. Television has rotted their brains. And print media, including quality lit, are dying.
MICHELLE HUTCHINS
Had the honor of being sworn in to the MCOE Board of Education today and even got to wear a pair of Glentzer Glasses!
NORM CLOW
Ah, life in the Haight-Ashbury, where my sister lives with her daughter and family. Like I said to my old girlfriend Judy, it’s just as weird, maybe in a different way, as it was when she and I were still innocent, well, maybe me, teenagers. Interesting shops and decor, good food, great architecture, and, of course, lots of street people congregating on the Famous Corner, some of them certainly from 60 years ago. First obligatory photos were of the Grateful Dead house at 750 Ashbury, just a block and a half from my sister’s house, the Janis Joplin house across the street, and the Red House, where Jimi Hendrix once lived (now a pet store). Good eats at Cha Cha Cha, a Caribbean diner where we enjoyed some Jamaican jerk chicken, and Flipping Burgers, and interesting things to pick up at San Francisco Mercantile and its sister company Haight & Ashbury. The one thing I missed was the long-standing Haight Ashbury Guitar Center, where I bought a nice Fender Precision Bass once, now relocated south of the city to the Bayshore Freeway (101). A nice few days to wander around the neighborhood known as Upper Haight and Cole Valley.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] I got thrown out at 17. I went to a friend’s house, then another friend helped me find a JOB and a room in a house share, not drugs. I have a hard time with compassion anymore as our streets are full of folks who expect the rest of us to support them and their addictions, make messes wherever they sit, and generally annoy people by asking for money. Or block our streets with garbage on a “trailer” made of stolen wheelchairs and bikes. Rejecting all offers of sincere help, or even sleeping bags…left to rot in the street…Seriously tired of it. I’m sorry life has been hard, but the central player in that life is….her. All of us have had hard times, we are not drug addicts.
[2] So what you're saying is that under the US capitalist system, unless we exploit immigrants to do the backbreaking work no US citizen wants to do, we can't afford to feed ourselves. Let that sink in.
[3] Advice columnist Abigail Van Buren once received a letter from a Mr. Hooker, a relative of General Joseph Hooker of Civil War fame. “I don’t know how my family name became a synonym for prostitute, whore, or harlot, but I find it very offensive,” he said. The writer went on to say that his son contemplated a name change because his fiancee “doesn’t want to be a ‘Hooker,’ and she says if she has daughters she doesn’t want them to be ‘Hookers,’ either.” The origin of Hooker, as a surname, has nothing to do with “the world’s oldest profession.”
[4] God? Ha. As I progress in age to my twilight years my wisdom has evolved. My faith in God isn't what it used to be in the days of my youth. Today I believe two things about God. 1; God created us and has long since died off. 2; God created us and then took off with its buddies to play eternal golf on a golf paradise world and doesn't give a flying fuck about its creations.
I don't deny there is or was a God. But I no longer have faith that God is intimately involved with humanity. Either way, we are boned. It is up to us to issue justice upon the evildoers and that will never happen.
[5] When a fast draw Sheriff and a Hanging Judge would clean up a Western town, typically the good people would respond by voting them out of office. The disease of "Nice" has taken deep root in our collective psyche and will be the death of us.
[6] No one has achieved the heights of race hustle like Al Sharpton and his lieutenant Alton Maddox, who in 1987 accused the NY attorney general of masturbating to pictures of Tawana Brawley, the 15-year-old black girl who falsely accused four white men of raping her and leaving her in a trash bag with racial slurs written on her in feces. It was a total fraud that Sharpton made a headline case for months. Every word he spoke promoting wretched Tawana's deceit was a lie but it got him fame and fortune.
[7] Why do White people pay big money to try to become darker and Dark people pay money trying to become lighter? Are we all so insecure with our appearance that we can be swayed so easily? I say that every time I see one of these Tatted, pierced punks whose obvious desire is to be a freak.
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