Off the Record (Oct 14, 2015)

A WOMAN CALLED Monday morning with a sad tale of being ripped off by a particularly slimy attorney called Dan Russo, and was only in mid-tale when her cell phone gave out. I hope Kelly doesn't think I hung up on her. I am mos def interested in her story, the gist of which, so far anyway, is that Russo took a bunch of up-front money from her and did nothing for Kelly's son before passing the case off to an acolyte of his. Please call back, Kelly.

A READER WRITES regarding the speedy dispatch of Laytonville killer, Talen Barton: "Honestly, what kind of travesty is this? Who was this kid's lawyer? Let's see, on July 19th he allegedly commits the crime, pleads guilty on September 4th and is sentenced to life in prison on October 5th. What kind of incompetent representation is that??? How could his lawyer have possibly fully investigated the circumstances of this case and her client's background, particularly his mental state and history, in such a short period of time in a case of such extreme gravity that demands the utmost caution and care? How can this possibly represent due process of law in such a situation? Count on this outcome being challenged on a writ due to ineffective assistance of counsel."

UKIAH TO PUT UP FUNDS for winter shelter. Or, Inland Lib Does Emergency Shelter. No drugs, no alcohol, no sex offenders, no consumption of booze and dope and pets only if they’re quiet and in carriers. And, only if there’s room after the first 46 people in this order of priority: people with disabilities, then the elderly, then pregnant females or adults with children are in first. All you rummies and dope heads can't come in out of the cold! PS. And don't loiter outside in the rain looking pathetic. If we say you're drunk, you're drunk and you can't come in.

ACCORDING TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, worldwide Google searches on mobile phones surpassed those on desktop computers over the summer, marking the first time that has ever happened. The findings came via Amit Singhal, head of search at Google's parent company Alphabet. This shift is going to impact the search giant's business model as mobile searches mean smaller advertisements, among other consequences.

ON LINE COMMENTS re the Fairfax trail murder: "When I go hiking in remote areas, or areas where I am a little unfamiliar/apprehensive, I whip out my cell phone and take a quick video sweep of the parking lot. This way, in less than 10 seconds, I get a record of each car's license plate. You never know when you might need it. Also, didn't someone take a snapshot of one of these characters around the trailhead? Photographer had a bad feeling, I guess, and it turned out to be a valuable clue in identifying one of the three suspects. Cell phones are great tools; more than just 'omg' and 'lol'."

"IF CARTER (victim of the trail by a trio of tweekers) was carrying a concealed weapon he might have had a chance. But like most people he was just hoping nothing would happen every time he steps out in public, more so off the beaten path."

"AS SOMEONE who will move to a concealed carry state when I retire, and someone who has trained quite a bit in various hand-to-hand styles, I have to say that you're full of it. If a perp just pulls and fires, the chances of doing much about it are pretty small. Unless of course you are already set up and can beat the draw. This guy was kind and gentle. Not that type of person. Both a strength and a weakness. He is a real loss. The losers who killed him will not be. You've been watching too many movies. Give ya a hint. The script isn't reality."

THE MURDER of the Tantric guru Mr. Carter near Fairfax prompted an Only In Marin comment from his best friend. Best Friend said of the killers, “I hope they get the help they need.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING: "Merchants of Doubt" (2015) is a documentary that examines the modern business of disinformation. The primary topic is climate change and how the current purveyors of propaganda learned their trade and techniques from the tobacco industry. This film not only identifies many of the cretins currently involved in this despicable practice of media manipulation but also manages to interview a number of them. It is good to read the names, see the faces, and hear their justifications. The most compelling testimony came near the end, from Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who lost his seat in 2010 when he let the actual science of global warming begin to inform his political position. As a conservative Republican, he speaks with knowledge and authority about how his tribe feels threatened by the idea of global warming. If the science is true, if global warming is caused by human activity -- the burning of fossil fuels -- then it stands to reason that we should stop doing that. This implies change, and these people don't like that. So they choose, instead, to shut out this urgent warning from science, so they can simply continue with their current lifestyle. That's on a personal and selfish level, which is shameful. But these smaller sins have been fueled by the grander deception perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry, people like the Koch brothers, who have obfuscated and orchestrated delay as they continue profiting at the expense of our shared future. That’s shameful squared.

(— Mike Kalantarian)

JEFF BLANKFORT’S PHOTOGRAPHY show will be at the Harvey Milk Photo Center through October 25th. Jeff writes: "If you missed the opening and haven't had a chance to get over to the Harvey Milk Photo Center at 50 Scott Street across from Davies Hospital on Duboce to see the exhibition of my photos, there is still time. The show will be closing at 5 PM on Saturday, October 25, but until then it will be open on weekends from 10 AM to 5 PM and Tuesday through Thursday, from 4 to 9 PM.

For those who hate to drive in the city, there is also good public transportation to the center, both by bus and trolley.

ASHA KREMER is a 26-year-old Australian female with dark, long curly hair. She is 5'9", about 120-130 pounds, pretty thin and has olive colored skin. Her mom has flown in from Australia and is searching Point Arena for clues on where Asha was last seen. Asha was experiencing what her mother believes to be bi-polar episodes and spent the day at Fort Bragg hospital being evaluated. She was later released to her boyfriend, Jamai Gayle.

Jamai (an abbreviation of “Jamaica”?), who lived with Asha in Albion, has told Jeannie that he took Asha for a drive down the coast with Asha's friend Sally. (We suspect that “Gayle” is not Jamai Gayle’s real name — his facebook page indicates that he’s spent a lot of time in Jamaica, specifically a “settlement” in Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica called “Gayle” where he seems to have adopted the white-rasta affect. His facebook page says his “education” is “graduate of McAteer High School,” a now defunct alternative performing arts school in San Francisco that folded back in 2002 under accusations of poor educational performance and bad management.)

AN EMPLOYEE of the Rollerville Cafe near Point Arena where Asha and Jamai stopped said that Asha seemed agitated and got up to go to the restroom and never came back. Somehow Jamai ended up with Asha's cellphone. No one has seen her since. According to Asha's mother, Jamai's story has changed a few times and claims to be at a loss as to where Asha may have gone. Persons who may have seen Asha on or after the day she went missing (Monday, September 21, 2015), are urged to contact Asha's mom, Jeannie at Jeannie.kreimer@gmail.com.

THE FEDERAL AUDIT THAT WASN'T. Rumors of a Federal audit of county Mental Health appear to be widely overblown. Reliable sources confirm that a couple of people from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) did show up on September 22 for a "survey" of the county's "partial hospitalization program" — a program the County has not had for years, although the CDPH says the County still has an active registration number for the program. The "Feds" turned out to be Cindy Purdy, an RN and lead investigator with CDPH and Kristine Monroe, another RN with the same agency. They apparently thought they were on site to review the equivalent of a skilled nursing facility. When informed the County had no such program, they decided to do a site survey anyway, which did include visiting the local access centers run by Ortner Management Group and Redwood Quality Management Group, the County’s two privatized mental health contractors. What the two RN's thought about Ortner's op is not yet known.

THOSE FEDERAL AUDIT RUMORS appear to have originated with a couple of hold-over Mental Health employees. The merger of Mental Health, Public Health, Social Services and Alcohol and Other Drug Programs into one big Health and Human Services Agency a few years ago, never mind the privatization of adult Mental Health services, was never embraced by a diehard group of senior County employees. The false rumor of a Federal audit, or even a Federal takeover of Mental Health, is not grounded in reality, at least not at this time.

THE AVA continues to believe that Ortner is raking off millions in excess profits and that former Ortner executive Tom Pinizzotto is running cover for Ortner. We think an audit is long overdue (and apparently in the works, but no specifics yet), but the visit from CDPH was not in response to complaints and was not an investigation. Meanwhile, residents of the population centers of the County — Ukiah, Willits and Fort Bragg — continue to face a rising tide of the untreated mentally ill.

THE COUNTY'S CHAIN-OWNED PAPERS — The Willits News, the Advocate-Beacon on the Coast, and the Ukiah Daily Journal — are having their premises sold out from under them. The building housing the Journal on School Street has been sold — asking price was about $400,000 — and what's left of the paper's shrunken staff now labors at 617 S. State Street, Ukiah, across from the Ukiah Cinema. That staff worries for the stately old redwoods out in front of the paper's former School Street headquarters and laments that the structure is probably going to become another World Gym. Although one staffer said she is "delighted to be out of that old falling apart structure and into a bright new space with windows where we are feeling more like a team again rather than the leftovers of a bygone era. Truly. We're happy not to have to look at empty rooms and empty desks any more....”

TWO GUARANTEES THE DROUGHT IS HERE TO STAY

A mass mailer and list of endorsers that arrived at inland Water District homes last week. The mailer was undoubtedly funded by the Wine Industry, which of course wants incumbent Al 'Wine Guy' White and Tyler 'Wine Guy' Rodrigue for the Russian River Flood Control District.

NOT MENTIONED IN THE FLYER is the fact that “third generation farmer” and “Sierra Club member” Tyler Rodrigue is vineyard manager/real estate development specialist for Haiku Vineyards in Ukiah and president of the Mendocino Winegrowers Association. Thus we have two hard-line wine people running for the two seats up for election on the Board that controls Mendocino County’s 8,000 acre-foot water allocation in Lake Mendocino. Incumbent Al White is a wine-guy going way back to the industry's beginnings in the Anderson Valley, and at least mentions his “vineyard management” role in his bio. The open seat sought by Rodrigue is the one recently vacated by Ukiah pol Richard Shoemaker who has been hired as City Manager for Point Arena. The two Wine Guys want to ensure that grapes continue to have first dibs on the finite waters of the Russian River.

PHIL BALDWIN is the non-wine candidate for the Flood Control District Board, and the only candidate that inland voters should support because he can be counted on to put the water interests of the wider community first. Baldwin told the Ukiah Daily Journal: “I will bring my 16 years of [Ukiah] City Council experience but, more importantly, I will bring an independent voice. Unlike the two other contenders, my livelihood is independent of interests reliant on District water allocation contracts [aka grape growers]. Retrieve the recent expensive endorsement mailer; look it over and wonder with me why such powerful economic interests [aka grape growers] seek to place their people on our District Board. … It may be instructive for voters to know the full name of this agency: Russian River Flood Control and Water Conservation Improvement District. That’s a big undertaking. And all who’ve read Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert or seen the film Chinatown know that because water projects frequently trump good planning. This election is a big deal. The mass mailer noted earlier attests to that.”

WHILE FORT BRAGG goes to serious rationing, Willits, reluctantly having gone to tapping emergency well water, has not had to ration water. Brooktrails, or North Willits, has had to cut way back on water use and remains at odds with Willits regarding cooperative strategies. There is a water pipe from Brooktrails to Willits within a few feet of the Willits water system but the state would probably have to force agreement on how Brooktrails might exploit it. Lots of Brooktrails residents would like to see Brooktrails buy land down the hill in Little Lake Valley to install a well on, but so far Brooktrails strategy has been prayers for early rains.

THIS JUST IN: Supervisor Woodhouse said Monday that Fort Bragg is buying water from Willits, and that Willits is digging a water line to the Skunk yard, from where it will be hauled by ancient rail to Fort Bragg. FB will likely pay a pretty penny for Willits water, but FB is desperate. (Willits, by the way, took nearly a decade to decide to dig an emergency well, and now that the emergency is here Willits is happy to have water to sell.)

SUPERVISOR JOHN McCOWEN reported last Tuesday that the dispute over how to allocate overhead expenses to the library has been tentatively resolved, a hassle that never should have been, and a hassle started by the County because the Library was being charged for things the Library shouldn't have been charged for.

ALSO LAST TUESDAY the Board of Supervisors “tentatively” decided to uphold the appeal of Redwood Valley residents who disagreed with the Planning Commission that Dollar General chain cheapo merchandise store could move in across the street from the nice little existing Redwood Valley Market, thus turning down the application from “Cross Development,” a Dallas based realty outfit that builds the cookie-cutter stores and then rents them to Dollar General, a sort of mini-WalMart operation.

HIPPIE! THE BEAST THAT WON'T DIE! A gang of the usuals turned out to posture against outside corporations at last week's Supe's meeting. “Twinkling” whenever one of the lock step gang's colleagues said something they liked, they raised their wiggling fingers to demonstrate approval. Twinkling is much less “disruptive,” you see, than clapping or, heaven forbid, shouts of assent.

AT ONE POINT, Board Chair Carre Brown held up a dark photo of a Dollar General Store, asking the young Cross Development representative Janet Kramer, "Is this what your store is going to look like?"

MS. KRAMER, an attractive, articulate young woman, replied, “That is a fair representation of what the store would look like, yes. It is a combination, a mix of masonry and metal sheeting on the building. Neutral colors that enhance the environment and the colors around there. Thank you.”

THE RIGHTEOUS erupted in non-twinkled derisive laughter at Ms. Kramer’s “environmental enhancement” remark, which Chair Brown, who usually doesn't like such outbursts, especially from hippies, allowed without censure.

ALEX CHEHADA, the personable young owner of Redwood Valley Market, redeemed the hippies by pointing out why his popular little rural market is a lot better than any corporate chain operation: “In the last eleven years I have learned a lot about my customers' needs and I have brought in everything that they asked me for. I listen to their stories and they listen to mine. We are just like a family now. I never say no to anyone who asks me for donations. I have helped the fire department with money and I help them with product every year on Barbecue Day and whenever they need it. We have helped all the schools in Redwood Valley through the years. We have helped most of the churches in Redwood Valley. And the Police Department. And the monastery in Redwood Valley. We help the soccer teams. We have the adopt-a-highway sign on Highway 101 so we can clean the roads for 2 miles. We donated a lot of food and water and ice to the fire victims who were camping at the lake and at the fairgrounds. I help Hopper’s Corner Store in Potter Valley: I buy all their groceries so they can buy it from me because no one would deliver product to their remote store in Potter Valley. Don't make me close my business so you can give it to others who don't care about the locals and who do not support local companies. Thank you.”

INCIDENTALLY, the Redwood Valley Market is pleased to carry Boonville's beloved weekly newspaper, the same weekly the very mention of which is prohibited at Free Speech Public Radio, Mendocino County, and stoutly banned for a quarter century now by that great bastion of forward thought and bean curd, Corners of the Mouth, Mendocino.

DURING HER SUPERVISOR'S REPORT last week, Board Chair Carre Brown reported some rather startling if unlikely water developments. Ms. Brown's life mission is water — free, or virtually free water forever for her fellow ranchers in Potter Valley. The mere mention of agua, and Carre is on red alert.

BROWN: “I was on a US Army Corps of Engineers conference call and that has to do with the feasibility study for Lake Mendocino. There are still some more hurdles that they want us to jump over. Janet Pauli [fellow Farm Bureau member and Potter Valley grape grower and a staunch advocate of free water forever for Potter Valley] and I concluded that phone call. [Former Ukiah City Manager] Candace Horsley was on it and we did go to the Mendocino County Water Agency... So we are working towards a meeting on a desalination facility — they want to know if that type of facility could supply water to inland Mendocino County and if so what would be the cost?… " And so on.

DESAL? Great idea, Carre, good thinking, Janet. Let's install a desalinization plant in Fort Bragg and pipe the desal water directly to Potter Valley which Potter Valley can be counted on to on to release downstream after PV's welfare cowpokes and free water grape growers have taken their cut, just like they do now with the diverted Eel River.

WHY, WHY, WHY… In the highly evolved population of Caspar alone there must be at least 500 highly sensitives! (We fell instantly in love with this press release: “Coming soon!!! The Gifts and Challenges of the Highly Sensitive Person Class and Support Group at the Caspar Community Center. Led by Shoshana Susan Dillon, M.A. 25 years counseling experience. Call 707 929-5550.”)

LOU [REED] CALLED HIS SISTER, who was living on Long Island with her husband, Harold, to warn her about the [new] album. “Bunny, I have to tell you something.”

“What did you do now?”

“This song’s coming out.” Lou recited the lyrics of “Kill Your Sons,” which described a sister who’d married a fat guy on Long Island who took the train to work and didn’t have a brain.

“Are you serious?” asked Bunny. “You wipe out my lifestyle and my husband in four phrases?”

“Ah, I needed something to rhyme with train. So I had to take poetic license.”

— Notes From The Velvet Underground by Howard Sounes

THE 19-YEAR-OLD MAN shot and killed Friday night at a Ukiah apartment building in the 200 block of Observatory has been identified as Roman Elliott, 19, of Ukiah. Neighbors of the incident reported that unknown assailants had fired multiple gunshots about 9:30. Responding officers found Elliot dead.

EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT a football fan, this year's edition of the San Francisco Forty-Niners is a fascinating saga. You may know that the team moved about fifty miles south to a non-place called Santa Clara, interesting only for its graceful old mission around which the familiar jumble of alienating suburban housing, medium security schools and negative food value emporiums have sprouted. You may not know that the team has fallen apart every which way. The Ohio-based owners built a new stadium down there, a hog heaven high rise with luxury boxes for the mega-swine from nearby GizmoLandia. Seating prices priced thousands of real fans right out of the ballpark, and the ballpark itself is basically a mall with a football field in the center of it with turf so screwed up no one wants to play on it. The Niners even charge $15 to get into the mall's Niner museum, from which former head coach Jim Harbaugh is non-personed, Stalinist style.

IT WAS A MEASURE of civic Frisco's dysfunction that the team left town. Never should have happened, but Frisco has changed, too. The football fan base has been priced outtathere. We should have been agitating all along for a Green Bay-style ownership — the City of Green Bay owns the Green Bay team, not a family of inheritance gentry, and all profits from the team go to fund city services. But Sports fans seem to think it's perfectly natural that taxpayers build stadiums for billionaires and here we have Santa Clara and Candlestick bulldozed and the land it rested on poised to become yet another mall.

SO THE NINERS LEFT for NoWheresVille — friends tell me it's a four hour round trip from SF on game day — and thousands of fans, whose grandparents and even great-grandparents went all the way back to Kezar with the Niners, said goodbye to the Niners. There are several active boycotts of the team underway but none of them are aimed at bringing the Niners back to town.

BUT THE NINERS have never been more interesting. I thought they were even going to be improved this year, an assumption I've had to throw on my mountain of false assumptions. Instead we have the sad spectacle of the quarterback in some kind of psychological meltdown, having totally lost his confidence, the head coach wandering the sidelines like an amnesiac, players flipping out on national tv from frustration with the suddenly mojo-less quarterback, Kaepernick, and the play-calling and their coaches. Everything has gone terribly wrong. Meanwhile, the owners are suddenly invisible. They haven't stepped up to even acknowledge let alone answer the torrent of abuse rolling over them from Bay Area sports fans.

IT'S 4:30 Sunday afternoon. Kickoff is at 5:30. I'll bet every football fan in the Bay Area will be tuning in to watch the latest chapter of the disappearing franchise. I wouldn't miss it.

I WATCHED THE GAME with the sound off to avoid being influenced by expert opinion and to avoid audio annoyances of the "That guy can throw the football down field." The Niners were beaten on a great pass and a greater catch at the very end of play. It was a terrific game. Last week they looked terrible in every department, Sunday night they looked pretty good in every department. Kaepernick played a good game and made a lot of good throws. The offensive line did well. The defense was ok but not quite good enough. This is a mystery team, with an incompetent management and an even more incompetent family owning the franchise. But week to week there isn't a better sports show going. You never know what kind of team is going to show up on game day.

INTERESTING STORY by Mike A'Dair in the October 8th edition of the Willits Weekly. The piece is called “Test Results Spark Acrimony at School Board Meeting.”

MENDOCINO COUNTY students did not do well on the new computerized Common Core tests in English and math. Willits did even worse than most of the County's school low-performing districts. Willits school board trustee Chris Neary apparently described the test results as “cause for alarm” and “This is a test of the teachers. People in the community are coming to me and talking. And there is a perception in the community that we are under-performing. I think we got an 'F'.”

THE ENTIRE social-psycho-economic context the public schools operate in is cause for alarm, but psycho-social breakdown is unlikely to be arrested by any one school system. I can say from personal observation of a high end private Frisco school, if the public schools had comparable funding American young people might have a better shot at learning to use their native tongue with relative facility and would be odds-on to master the basics of mathematics.

ANYWAY, WHEN NEARY said Willits' pathetic test scores were cause for alarm, teacher's rep John Haschak fired back the way the teachers always fire back, although Haschak was more blunt: “If you would get out of your office once in a while and visit the schools, you would know what the conditions in the schools are. Your remark that the teachers should get an 'F' is just totally wrong. Teachers don't control the curriculum. We don't control the computers. (They don't?) We don't control what goes on in kids’ lives. There's a lot we don't control…"

TEACHERS are in fact part of the problem. So are school administrators. So are school boards. So's Everything, and no part of Everything is likely to change short of, well, pick your apocalypse.

TRADITIONALLY HIGH SCORING Mendocino, managed a 51% overall pass on English, 45% were test-proficient in math, and the results indicate that a high scoring 11th grade Mendo class pulled the entire district's scores up.

WILLITS was indeed cause for alarm. Only 20% of Willits students met math standards, a mere 24% hacked it in English. You could teach a hundred chimpanzees to test out better than this. Something is seriously wrong in Willits' schools. Children of normal intelligence should not be doing this poorly.

HERE IN THE EDUCATIONAL ATHENS of Boonville, we managed a 48% proficiency in English, 38% in math but, like Mendocino, a smart 11th grade pulled the total scores up to, ah, state “standards.”

AS ALWAYS, or at least since drugs and thuggery took over Covelo schools, Covelo managed an almost acceptable 26% proficiency in English but a dismal 5% proficiency in math.

UKIAH DID EVEN WORSE than the perennial County dunce center of Point Arena, scoring 30% in English, 20% math while PA's young scholars came in with 53% of their students more or less English-proficient, while only 25% did reasonably well in math.

DEPARTMENT OF UNINTENTIONAL HUMOR. The Fort Bragg City Council has scheduled an "Ethics, Conflict and Brown Act Training for October 14th. This workshop will be presented by City Attorney Samantha Zutler."

THERE ISN'T ANYTHING necessarily funny in a lawyer giving ethics lessons, but there are lots of other professions where basic scruples are more likely to be found. And Ms. Z is based in San Francisco, meaning she gets paid to drive to Fort Bragg, paid to eat and spend the night in Fort Bragg, paid to tell her employers how to be remain ethically flexible and how to hide the public business from the public and, in Fort Bragg's case, how to go all self-righteous and legalistic when the public complains.

IF YOU know someone who is in need of long-term mental health services you have two choices: 1. find some way to pay for it yourself or with insurance, or 2. take your crazy uncle directly to Sheriff Allman. Such is the current functioning of Mental Health services in Mendocino County for which we pay $15 annual millions.

AT THE BALLPARK A WEEK AGO SATURDAY for the Giants vs. the Rockies in the penultimate game of the season, I looked around for my scalper-dude but didn't find him and had to buy an extortionately-priced ticket for the View section at the stadium box office.

UP IN VIEW you've got a great if vertiginous view of the Bay in between pitches and the fans aren't as irritating as they tend to be in the more expensive seats closer to the field which, increasingly, are bought up in blocs by the new gizmo gentry now dominant in San Francisco. Everywhere people are staring at their handheld toys. The game to a lot of people seems to be just one more accoutrement, as in, "Here I am at AT&T, here I am eating a hot dog, here I am drinking a watery, six dollar lemonade."

THE INSTANT I found my seat my humiliation began. There was an extension of the guard rail right in front of my face. To see the pitch I had to duck my head under the bar. To see what happened when the hitter made contact with the ball I had to lift my head over the bar. The Giants had larceny-ed me. They should not be selling that seat. A midget would have trouble getting the bar out of his viewshed.

SO I MOVED over into an empty seat. The Giants had been eliminated from the playoffs, so I'd assumed a lot of the usual frontrunners wouldn't bother coming out for a game between also-rans. There'd be plenty of unoccupied seats But a few minutes before game time, the park filled up, and I looked up to a Man-Boy scowling down at me.

(MAN-BOYS dress like children. They wear trousers cut off at the shins and jerseys with ballplayer's names on them and, at the ballpark, they carry baseball gloves. A lot of them have big gym muscles. This one carried a batting helmet heaped with nachos, the worst possible food in a whole arena of bad food. We're talking serious social retardation here, and there are armies of them out there.)

"YOU'RE in my fuckin' seat," Man-Boy said. My instinct was to come up swinging but, ahem, at my age swinging is no longer a viable option. "Ask me nicely and I will," I said. "It's my fuckin' seat," Man-Boy repeated, then added, "Fuckin' move, man. Please." Startled that he'd capitulated, but aware his capitulation was pegged to my obvious decrepitude, I moved. "Sorry," I said. "No problem," he said. Beating up an old guy would certainly have been a problem for him and fortunately for me Man-Boy had decided against it. Old people can say and do almost anything with impunity. I play the Old Guy card a lot.

THERE WERE EMPTY SEATS nearby, but I'd been bad-vibed outta the section where I belonged, where I'd paid forty-five goddam dollars for a tiny space, wedged in among the nacho eaters with not even space for my arthritic elbow. I got up and moved down the first base line and sat down in a railing seat where, in a few minutes, a young couple with two little kids appeared. "I'm sorry," the young man said, "but that's our seat." I was on the move again only to be politely removed from a third seat.

I BEGAN to feel sorry for myself. "Goddamit! I'm a senior citizen! A property owner! An employer! A veteran! A voter! I saw Dave Righetti's father, Leo, play shortstop at Seals Stadium! I went to hundreds of ballgames at Candlestick! I have seniority in this city! And here I am wandering around this place like some kind of senile transient trying to find his dentures and a place to sit down and watch the goddamed game! The Giants owe me big time for scamming me like this, for subjecting me to serial humiliations. (I've written directly to the Giants GM, Larry Baer, about all this in a shameless attempt to guilt-trip Lar into laying a free ticket on me for next season.)

I FINALLY FOUND a seat where I sat undisturbed the rest of the game, a game that included an inside-the-park home run by the Giants Tomlinson, a kid who wears glasses that make him strongly resemble wanted posters of the Zodiac Killer. I don't recall seeing glasses on a ballplayer since Dom DiMaggio, but then the Giants are the only team I pay any attention to.

I’D WALKED to the ballpark from North Beach, briskly making my way down urine-scented sidewalks rife with stunned people who looked like civilian war casualties, disoriented, hollow-eyed. Hopped on the 30 Stockton for the return trip. This line is called the Orient Express because it bisects Chinatown and its riders are mostly Chinese, many of them older women who look like they're just off the farm in rural China. A young couple — she tall, blonde, statuesque in a mini-skirt and form-fitting top, he a head shorter in full Man-Boy — a baseball jersey inscribed 'Lincecum,' cargo shorts, running shoes. The young couple distractedly rubbed each other's upper thighs while they gazed at the tiny screens on their telephones. The Chinese women opposite gazed fascinated at the young couple and chuckled to each other at what they undoubtedly regarded as just one more unseemly display on the streets of the Gold Mountain where anything is possible and often is.