WES SMOOT: There will be a Celebration of Life for Wes Smoot on Saturday, February 1, at 2pm in the the Museum Rose Room of the AV History Museum, 12340 Highway 128, Boonville. (Sheri Hansen)
KENDRA MCEWEN (Philo)
Hi community! Lee and I are looking for a new rental for our family in AV or the surrounding area. We both work here, grew up here, and have fantastic long term rental history. Our budget is $1500 per month and we need at least two but better yet three or four bedrooms. Please keep an eye out for us and let us know if something comes up! We own a landscaping business and I have managed Airbnb rentals for years so perhaps some kind of worktrade might make our budget workable. (We realize that the going market rate for rentals here has climbed way higher…)
THREE ANDERSON VALLEY FIREFIGHTERS and one AV fire engine are joining firefighters from Humboldt and other Mendo departments to form a six-vehicle strike team convoy to rush down to the horrible fires in the Los Angeles area to back up the current crews. Several local Calfire crews have also been sent as available. The Mendo/Humco Team will meet in Petaluma with a Strike Team Leader from Santa Cruz on their way south on Thursday. As of Wednesday night, the ferocious winds were expected to decrease a little, but the firefighting will last for weeks. Strike teams typically commit to up to 14 days on scene with 24 hours on / 24 hours off daily schedules.
JON TYSON
After Sunday's pancake breakfast, I had a chance to update the Anderson Valley Grange's sign …
Burning Down the House is stoked to return to the county for our Feb 1 show! Tickets available now at Anderson Valley Market in Boonville, Lemon's Market in Philo, and Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah (all by cash or check).
THE LATEST TURMOIL at KZYX continues in the aftermath of the firing of long-time station operations guy Rich Culbertson. Some long-time programmers are complaining that current station management is moving towards what they see as a more “top-down” structure without taking listeners’ or programmers’ opinions into account. (Although that particular pattern is baked in at KZYX going all the way back to station founder Sean Donovan.) Reportedly the station’s internal programmer listserves (one for programmers themselves and one for management notices to programmers) have also been “taken down.” This is all occurring in the midst of the station’s slow-mo transition to their new studios in Ukiah.
YEARS AGO, when I was more mobile than I am now, a friend of mine built me a bicycle out of spare parts, a bike perfectly designed to transport my bulk over all kinds of terrain. I rode it everywhere in San Francisco through rain, through the occasional heat, through hurtling traffic, rode it often down to the Bay to watch the Giants from the free view area out in right field, pushed it up Nob Hill, coasted down Russian Hill. That raggedy machine got me to every part of San Francisco and back again. The bike guy who used to have a fixin’ kiosk down on the Embarcadero — the authority on bikes — congratulated me on my homemade two wheeler. “Your bike is way cool,” he said.
THEN came a bad omen. It was the same week that my computer was stolen. It contained the nearly completed manuscript of a book I was writing. Ripped off by a Senior Citizen burglar, I suspected. Undeterred by the theft, which had made me briefly suicidal, I did an exercise self-exorcism, a sure cure for anything that feels like it might be depression.
I HOPPED on my patchwork bike, rode through Golden Gate Park past Hippie Hill, slowly making my way through the drunks and the dope dealers at Stanyan and Haight to BookSmith on Haight, where I leaned my bike against a telephone pole outside while I browsed the stacks inside for maybe 20 minutes. I hadn’t lock it. Why would I? It had no value. Except to me. When I came out of the bookstore my bike was gone.
WHICH WAS MY OWN FAULT in a neighborhood where street people steal urine samples and sell them to French tourists as Frisco chardonnay. But you couldn’t give that bike away at a garage sale, let alone sell it. It was too decrepit. Functional, though, and that’s why it was gone. For weeks afterwards, I scanned the streets for derelicts on bikes. Nope. Gone.
THE DAY OF THE THEFT I strode officiously through the masses of junkies and drunks strewn here and there along Haight Street looking for my bike, but most of the likely suspects were too impaired to walk let alone ride a bike. It was gone, as gone as my computer with months of my work on it. Someone probably smoked my bike, but what became of my computer remains a mystery.
I’VE OFTEN WONDERED if starthistle was Weed World’s ultimate menace, a botanical juggernaut inexorably marching on the unsuspecting villages of the Northcoast, impervious to all efforts to extinguish it. Then I read a letter-to-the-editor from Robin Jeavons of the famous Willits gardening family, in which she said “land infested with star thistle is struggling to regain health,” that the weed produces “an excellent honey,” that spraying it with herbicides “kills off honey bees.”
HONEY BEES, as most of us know, are those crucial little creatures upon which much of our food depends during its pollination stage.. Ms. Jeavons also recommended a couple of books she says caused her to view Weed World with the respect it deserves: How To Enjoy Your Weeds by Audrey Wynee Hatfield and Reading the Landscape of America by May Theilgard Watts.
VICKI WILLIAMS
More clues same folks as last 3 big dumps! The person has gray and white hair. They have a white dog with long hair. They are Costco shoppers and carnivores and they like sugar babies. Somebody has a need for a poop and pee pad and it seems like elder animal situation or something that I don’t want to think about so if this rings a bell, we’ve got our Person. Today they were super blatant. It wasn’t out there long, It was not there on my way to Fort Bragg this morning and was there magically on my way home. It took me from 4:45 PM to 5:06 PM to pick this up. I am getting faster! My car was very stinky to the drop off point but at least I can know that I don’t have to look at it in the morning!
For the love of Highway 128!
MANY THANKS TO UNA MORGAN for coming to the Unity Club to talk about her wonderful tea shop Moon Honey Tea in the John Hanes building 15041 CA 128, Boonville. She is inspiring.
ANOTHER SATISFIED CUSTOMER. A woman I didn't recognize approached me outside Lemons Market in Philo one morning while I was peddling my papers. “I'm really pissed at you, Bruce.” Take a number and have a seat. Which I didn't say because I'm always curious about the reason, and even at my advanced age I still haven't adjusted to women using vulgar language, although the bi-gender air has been blue for decades, and I'm prone to throwing f-bombs myself in male company. Anyway, the pissed off lady said that I was “totally wrong about not voting for Biden.” Why? I asked. I was going to say I wouldn't vote for Biden under torture, but no need to stir the old girl up unnecessarily, and I was on the job, such as it is, and was in a hurry. She said, “We all have to vote for Biden so the election isn't even close because if it's close he won't leave.” I said I understood her reasoning but that “we” have been an ineffective opposition for years because of this kind of lesser of two evil-ism, that this time it's even more depressing because the Northcoast went heavily for Bernie and here’s Biden going around saying stuff like, “I'm not a socialist. I beat the socialist in the primaries.” As if time capsule Bern has ever represented any kind of threat to America's social-economic order. But timid as he is, “we” voted for Bernie and, as usual, the DNC stiffed us and shoved their guy Biden, even then obviously ga-ga, deep down our craws, knowing they could scare us into voting Republican Lite. I said all this and she listened. “Well, you're wrong, Bruce. Can I give you a hug?”
YOU'RE A BONA FIDE old timer if you remember Weise's Inn in downtown Boonville, and you're getting there if you remember Mel “Boom-Boom” Baker as superintendent of the local schools.
IT MAY HAVE BEEN NANCY GRACE, Nancy being a guilty pleasure of mine, where Nance snarled, “Why the hell did it take so long to find her?” I think I might have the answer to that one.
I've mostly lived in tiny, rural Boonville for nearly 60 years. In that time Boonville's population has turned over five times: Old Timers; Arkies and Okies: Hippies; Mexicans; Wealthy Retired and, now, Weekend Credit Cards.
I SEE PEOPLE at the Boonville Post Office I've never seen before, and every time I go to a public meeting I see a person I don't know sitting up front at the power table.
UNTIL 1980 I saw the same people every day, and I silently rejoiced at being a member of an identifiable, coherent community composed of specific people, most of us feeling blessed to live beyond the chaos to the south.
ANY MORE we're lucky if we know the names of our nearest Boonville neighbors, a few of whom take advantage of the prevalent social atomization to do bad things that Nancy Grace would definitely not approve of.
THE ANDERSON VALLEY as described by a Chronicle wine writer: “Anderson Valley was once a quiet, rustic haven, shut to outsiders, but for a long, winding low road and a vertiginous, winding high road. In the 1800s the local Boontling dialect was invoked to confound outsiders. A century later, the valley's foggy, redwood-lined slopes became a magnet for lovers of a subtler style of Pinot Noir.”
I COUNT FIVE errors of fact and six instances of flawed grammar, which isn't bad for a 50-word paragraph. The guy probably was loaded on free booze when he wrote it, but dialects aren't invoked, Boontling isn't a dialect, Boontling's early 20th century purpose was to amuse its speakers, about half of it is wonderfully impolite in ways impossible in the socially constipated times we live in, there's nothing particularly vertiginous about the Ukiah Road, the redwoods run on the west side of The Valley only, we don't get much fog, haven for whom from what?
WENT TO SEE a city doctor for another in a series of tests, ending only when I finally reach my pull date. My MediCare bill must be well into six figures. I try not to think of the basic injustice of all this attention for a guy who has flown way past the very top of the actuarial charts as, say, an uninsured ten-year-old dies for lack of medical attention.
For complicated reasons I got there by Muni.
I was sitting in the middle of the rear seat for the extra leg room. A tiny Chinese woman, also of ancient vintage, with three vacant seats on either side of me and the rest of the bus empty, nevertheless took the seat directly on my left.
Another time I was in an otherwise empty theater in the Kabuki complex at Fillmore and Post, a theater I always tried to avoid because of that nutty assigned seating policy of theirs. “Where would you like to sit, sir?” I don't care, so long as it's at least ten rows back.
So there I am, the only person in the place sitting contentedly in my assigned seat when darned if a Chinese woman sits down beside me. The lights were still on. I silently gestured to the empty theater and asked her, “Why?” She replied by brandishing her ticket with her seat number on it.
And years ago I was the only person in a theater when a retarded guy sat down next to me. I gently explained that in an otherwise empty theater there's no need to bunch up. “No problem,” he said, as he sat down one seat over.
But this Chinese lady, my new Muni neighbor, emitted no negative mental health indicators, but I just had to ask, “Do you mind moving over one seat?”
“Not speak,” she replied. With a martyred sigh because I was there first, I moved over a seat. If she'd also moved over to stay close to me I would have had my first direct experience with a Chinese crazy person. As an ethnic generalization, Chinese are rarely nuts. In public.
I figured this lady probably had taken the seat next to me out of some numerological good luck calculation. Maybe she'd hit a Scratcher the last time she'd sat in that seat.
On the second bus that finally got me to my destination, a white street guy, maybe 50, got on and plopped himself down next to a nicely dressed, plump woman of about 30. (As a second ethnic generalization, white people are frequently nuts in public. But you know that. We all know that.)
“Boy, you're a fat one,” the street guy gallantly remarked to his seatmate, chuckling, “How much you weigh, honey?" At which point the driver yelled, “Knock it off or you're off the bus,” and an old school standing passenger also reminded the street guy, “We're all just trying to get to work here. Be a gentleman, please.” And the street guy shut up.
The insulted woman stared straight ahead throughout, one more urban bummer endured, I imagined her thinking.
I wondered to myself if the street guy had shut up at the threat from the driver to eject him, or if he shut up because he suddenly remembered some long gone instruction from a parent in the days parents instilled basic manners in their children.
I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard an appeal from an individual for polite behavior, of which there is little on public transportation, San Francisco, the constant recorded reminders that the seats up front are for the elderly and the non-ambulatory notwithstanding. Muni drivers often have to get up from behind the wheel to clear those seats for the very old, who are totally dependent on Muni to get around the city, some passengers so ancient they shouldn't be going anywhere unattended. America is not a country where you want to spend your golden years alone.
I REMEMBER the doctors of my youth as vaguely disheveled characters who likely as not dangled a cigarette as they tapped your knee with a little rubber hammer and chucked your pills for hernias as you tried not to cough in their faces. Knee taps and pill chucks comprised the basic sports physical. Everyone passed, including the terminally ill, as one of my football teammates turned out to be after he'd passed his “physical.”
At my house we didn't go to the doctor unless the bone was through the skin. No visible injury, no emergency room. These days gluttony gets you a handicapped parking space, double seats on airplanes and neurotics suffer from chronic everything while medicos run marathons and seem mildly disapproving of you no matter how robust your health is.
Frankly, if there were any, I'd be partial to doctors who smoked and were half-looped on the job like they used to be. This guy I went to last week for a routine once-over occasionally paused for a sip of bottled water as he ran through a Yes-No checklist, paying no attention whatsoever to my responses, all of which were NO to inquiries ranging from, “Have you shared needles in the last year with non-prescription drug users?” to “Have you visited Albania in the last year?”
If I'd turned green and confessed to having unprotected sex with prostitutes, which was one of the questions, he probably wouldn't have noticed, let alone cared.
Responding to ethereal beeps from the electronic gizmo the harried healer carried on his hip like a six-shooter, the doctor, who was long and lean and clearly a man who enjoyed torturing his flesh, suddenly dashed from the room without explanation. He did say, “Excuse me” as he rushed away. For all I knew he was running out of the building forever, abandoning his profession for a permanent bed of nails far from his diseased patients, maybe even far from our cholesterol-choked shores.
I looked around for something to read. But in this absolute vacuum of a space there was nothing, not even a People magazine or the usual depressing repro of a bad painting. It could have been one of those Russian desensitization chambers, the first stop to full-on torture.
I usually carry an emergency old Signet paperback of poems, but I'd forgotten it. These people, these caring professionals, go to a lot of school, so wouldn't you think they'd have at least one item on the premises to delight the senses, to please the temporarily unoccupied mind of their trapped patients?
I've never met an interesting doctor, although I'm sure they exist. Which isn't quite fair because I only encounter them when they're working. There was once Dr. William Carlos Williams after all.
Silently screaming, I sat there in the utter sterility of a room so devoid of interest it could, by itself, cause serious mental illness. I was about to leave just as the marathoner zoomed back in. “What was your name again?” he asked.
I'M IN AN IRRITATING dispute with a bank credit card outfit. After years of usurious interest paid to a band of crooks associated with a much bigger band of crooks at the Bank of America, on a miniscule balance that wouldn't go away, I finally paid off the card, attaching a letter informing the lesser crooks that I'd made a note of their names, and come the revolution they could count on getting Mangioni-ed.
A MONTH LATER I get a statement that says I still owe them a one dollar “service charge.” They list a phone number and an e-mail address to contact them, but when I do contact them telephonically and electronically, they've got it automated so my particular beef, the one dollar service charge, cannot be addressed. And there's no way to talk to a human-type person about it.
TWO MONTHS in a row now I've paid the one dollar extortion simply because I know if I don't pay it I'll be looking at $51 a month — or more — in “late fees.” I haven't decided yet what to do about it, but I feel like a complete sap for paying them twice for no reason at all.
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