Off the Record (May 2, 2018)

THIRD DISTRICT SUPE’S candidate John Pinches missed Saturday’s debate in the friendly hometown confines of Laytonville’s Harwood Hall because, en route, as the Eel River Canyon rancher swerved to avoid hitting an elk, he hit a tree, totaling his pick-up and injuring himself badly enough to get himself confined to Handley Hospital in Willits. He’s out today, and back on the campaign trail.

PAY UP, DADDY! Freshly retired Undersheriff Randy Johnson was unanimously approved by the Supes last week as interim chief of the County’s Deadbeat Dad’s Office (aka Child Support Services). County Human Resources Director Heidi Dunham told the Supervisors that the current chief is out on some kind of apparently open-ended leave of absence, paid leave presumably. There were no questions about who else might have applied, why Johnson got the job, but the guy seems blessed by the goddess of good fortune, managing to elude most public scrutiny for simultaneously being in charge of the County’s dope licensing as he operated a private fingerprinting biz. The guy seems to be a walking conflict of interest case, not that anybody in authority seems in the least perturbed.

THE JUNE 5 BALLOT is a local hot one because of the hotly contested 3rd and 5th district’s Supe’s races, but it also includes five state measures. The following are the AVA's hard-hitting analyses of them:

PROP 68: $4.1 billion in general obligation bonds for parks and water quality. General obligation bonds are backed by the state, and this one is not one of those tricky props stuffed with all kinds of pork for connected entities. Prop 68 continues funding for crucial water and parks programs whose funding is expiring although presumed as a large, ongoing expenditure. No reason to vote no, really, because it doesn't pile on more state indebtedness. The most important thing it does is protect water, and goodness knows water needs protecting. Vote Yes.

PROP 69: Protects the 12-cent gas tax, which needs protection because anti-taxers are preparing an initiative to repeal it on the grounds that the state legislature diverts the $5 billion annually raised to purposes other than road repair. (Which is true, but still….) This prop guarantees that the money all goes for road repair and can't be siphoned off to pay off the sexually harassed, three-hour lunches, fact finding trips to Italy etc. Vote Yes.

PROP 70: Republicans don't think the globe is warming. Science and everyone else believe it's getting kinda stuffy in here. Prop 70 maintains a simple majority vote by the legislature to keep climate cleansing programs in place. The ostriches wanted a two-thirds vote to maintain clean air efforts so they could get rid of them. Vote Yes, although all of us know in our bones that none of these teensy measures do anything at all to reduce global incineration. Face it, folks. We're doomed as a species.

PROP 71: I guess. So many people vote absentee now that it's taking longer — a lot longer in Mendo — to count and certify the vote as signed, sealed and delivered. Under 71, election results would not be "effective" until the secretary of state says so. For most of us, though, the preliminary results are invariably much the same as the final-final, certified count because the absentee votes typically run along the same percentages as the preliminary results.

PROP 72: If you install water-recovery equipment on your property, you will be able to deduct this particular improvement on your state taxes, as you can now by going solar and installing fire sprinklers. Strange that this one's even on the ballot, but it probably got there via bribes, er, campaign contributions from the water recovery installers to key solons. But if you can deduct solar, why not water storage? Yes on 72.

AMONG THE LOST ARTS, large and small, is book cover art. Walking into a book store today, is like walking into a popsicle store, what with all the garishly similar book jackets, complete with large back cover photos of beaming authors, most of whom should be prohibited by law from writing anything beyond grocery lists. Paperbacks from the forties and fifties through the 1960s, were wrapped in distinctive book jackets, original art that commanded the eye of the browser to at least have a look. Paperbacks have since disappeared and book jacket art today? Well, these tired eyes scurry past. It all looks alike, and often insulting to the contents between the covers. Shuffling the aisles of a used book store, I can never resist the paperbacks I used to pack around like an emergency first aid kit to beat back the long minutes of trapped tedium in places like high school classrooms and dentist's waiting rooms. Another amenity gone.

AT AGE 15 the allure of this cover was irresistible. If you somehow didn't understand the implications of the visual, the jacket spells them out for you in all their lurid promise: "Dharma Bums by the man who launched the hippie world, the daddy of the swinging psychedelic generation… Here are the orgiastic sexual sprees, the cool jazz bouts, the poetry. The Love-ins, and the marathon binges of the kids who are hooked on Sensation and looking for the high… The Dharma Bums." Yes! Sign me up, daddy-o!

JACK KEROUAC grabbed me when I was about 16 with "On The Road,” and hustled out to get his second book, "Dharma Bums," both of which first made me aware that there were options to the suburban death chamber recommended by the society of the times — job, marriage, mortgage, living death.

THE TWO BOOKS were truly subversive, with lots of passages like: "Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization."

WHICH COMPORTED exactly with my inchoate, youthful impressions of the lives lived around me, lives I knew instinctively were not for me and were to be avoided at all costs. Of course like most people influenced by these books I was totally anchored by age 30, although with some deviations along the way.

THE BUDDHIST references in Dharma Bums flew right on over my head, and even now with some understanding of them they and the faith they represent have no appeal. But I can still remember how reverential those seminal beatnik writers were towards the natural world, with as many references to John Muir as to obscure pre-history Chinese sages.

THE SUPERVISORS are regularly surprised by random factoids suddenly unearthed from some long buried or seemingly innocuous report. One of our County leaders might even be prompted to comment on the revelation, commenting on the revelation as if it were the sudden appearance of a hummingbird sitting on the end of his nose — it’s low, seems high, it’s odd… Other times, what should be noticed isn’t seen because it’s obscured by the bafflegab it's wrapped in.

ON TUESDAY, for example, when CEO Angelo invited a General Services Manager to the podium to recite some statistics about the County’s huge “fleet” of cars and trucks, the staffer said that the County owned 395 vehicles (not counting heavy equipment assigned to the Transportation Department). Supervisor Dan Gjerde, noting that the County has about 1300 employees, said, “395? That seems kinda high.” The GSA staffer also noted that Mendo rents an additional 5 vehicles for employees to use “whenever they want.” Gjerde wondered if there wasn’t some way to reduce the number of vehicles the County owns and maintains. Of course nobody followed up and that was the end of it. We were left wondering who the favored five are. I'll betcha they are people already paid plenty enough to pay for their own transportation. (Present SoCo DA, Jill Ravitch, when she worked for Mendo pre-Eyster got a free car and fuel to commute back and forth to her West Sonoma County home.)

NOT THAT MANY years ago Supervisor Mike Delbar expressed one of the more interesting reactions to a factoid when he was told that at the time there were 140 people in the Mental Health department. “How did that happen? “the mystified Delbar asked, not realizing that neither he nor his colleagues received any reports about anything from any of their departments. It turned out to be a rhetorical question that went nowhere, as usual. Within a few years the number had dropped to about 40 by a combination of privatization and budget cuts in 2008/2009.

AS BEST we can determine (and it took quite a bit of looking), Sonoma County has a fleet size of about 1300 vehicles and about 4100 employees, which turns out to be about the same ratio of vehicles per employee as Mendo at 0.31. So Mendo’s ratio of vehicles to employees isn’t far from Sonoma’s — although, as Gjerde noted — “it seems kinda high.”

ANOTHER FACTOID — this time a more important one that none of the Supervisors noticed — was the striking number of funded vacancies in Social Services. According to an attachment to CEO Carmel Angelo’s latest CEO report, Mendo has 20 “funded and approved vacant positions in active recruitment” just for eligibility workers II and III. There are an additional 11 vacant social worker III and IV positions, plus 5 vacant social worker assistant positions, and 3 vacant social worker supervisory II positions for a total of almost 40 vacant positions in Social Services.

IN THE PAST when such high vacancy rates in Social Services occurred somebody would at least ask pointed questions like: Why? What’s the problem? What’s the impact? What kind of eligibility backlog do we have? Can we do anything to improve the situation. Who’s not getting benefits they deserve to have?

WE SUSPECT that the reasons have to do not just with Mendo’s still low employee pay compared to neighboring counties for line workers, but that the Social Services pay for line-workers is low even within the County’s payroll. And housing costs for new line workers are outta sight in every area of the County. We've known some smart, capable eligibility workers who had to commute from Lake County to be able to live on Mendo’s low wages. And it’s even worse on the Mendocino Coast.

THE POINT IS, as we have said time and again, that without ordinary reports from department heads, the Supes are flying blind, with no idea what's going on in their 20-some departments.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, CEO Angelo told the Board that she had slashed the Juvenile Hall budget because they were running at about $500 per day per inmate when other counties are sequestering the next generation of criminals for $150 per day per inmate. Or less. Nobody asked how it got so high before anybody noticed. Nobody asked for reports on what was being done to fix the situation, or what changes were going to be made in the Probation Department to reduce the costs.

CEO ANGELO mentioned “metrics” in passing in her CEO report on Tuesday saying that it will be a long time before anything like “metrics” is available because the County has lots of employees and departments. Really? A thousand or so worker bees are too many to track? Simple monthly budget and staff reports by department head are too hard to organize? Angelo started talking about metrics two years ago and in that time exactly NOTHING has been done.

MEANWHILE, we have campaigns underway in two key Supervisorial Districts, and even though the candidates get high marks for candor, only Art Juhl and Johnny Pinches have talked about managerial chaos (albeit without actual reporting gaps). (Mark Scaramella)

SAVING COAST HOSPITAL, an on-line comment we liked:

I’m with you regarding wanting a fully functioning hospital. Which is why I’m part of Friends of the Hospital; we’re doing our best to make the board/CEO more transparent and moving in the right direction. And they are. They’re hiring more local folks instead of visiting staff; they have a new, wonderful doctor in charge of ER; fired the harassing CFO Sturgeon, etc.  The measure indicates just where the money is going and where it is not going to go. It won’t go to administrators’ salaries and the like. It will go to basic services. If the measure doesn’t pass, the people who will be most harmed will be women and children. More than likely, they’ll cut obstetrics and labor & delivery services. I don’t want to imagine what that will mean to the lives of people living here.  The naysayers are much louder than the ayes on this measure. Every time I hear another negative MCDH voice, I think of women in labor having to drive to Santa Rosa in the rain (or give birth in the ER next to accident victims, mentally ill folks, and the like), and it further pushes me to have Measure C pass. For 40 cents a day, $12 a month, we have a fighting chance to keep our hospital and make it work well.

ANOTHER NAIL IN PRINT’S COFFIN

Dear Customer: Re: Newsprint Price Increase:

Printing and publishing newspapers just became more difficult. The United States Commerce Department's decision to impose tariffs on Canadian paper makers has spiked the price of newsprint industry-wide by 30%. Along with this price increase, newsprint supplies are tight. We buy paper from three suppliers and presently have enough paper to meet your needs. However, the price per roll varies by supplier and when it is purchased. We will continue to add surcharges as needed through May 1, 2018. I encourage all of you to participate in STOPP — stop tariffs on Print and Publishers — and urge your readers to do so also. If this decision is reversed, prices will adjust accordingly. Thank you for your continued business with Healdsburg Printing. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Sincerely, Joe Vetter, Healdsburg Printing Inc.,

Healdsburg, California

ED NOTE: Publishing industry comment on this tariff says that  it is an oblique  attack on the media, which is largely despised by the current federal administration. Despised by us, too, but at our level of media we’re merely collateral damage in the larger Gotcha Game.

THE AVA GOES DEEP: A good physical metaphor for the true state of the nation is the Potter Valley Diversion where huge gulps of the Eel River are siphoned south through a hole in a ridge dug by Chinese labor at the dawn of the 20th Century. The Diversion was originally intended to power primitive turbines to electrify Ukiah, then an outback farm town, now an outback franchise fast food town. Today, more than a century later, several million downstream Americans as far south as Sausalito depend on the Diversion to live and to farm, assuming you consider industrial wine production farming. If the Diversion collapses, as it probably will in an eventual earthquake, it will take with it a large part of the NorCal economy, which is a crucial part of the Diversion-like larger economy, a paper construct based on faith that it will provide agua forever. The Potter Valley Diversion, dear readers, is as improbable and as tenuous as America! The metaphor works!

BUT JIM ARMSTRONG points out, “Ava can’t go any deeper, it’s already over its head.” The Potter Valley cowboy’s got a point. Even the vaguest reference to the Potter Valley Diversion gives Potter Valley the heebie jeebies. You can’t live in Potter Valley if you don’t think the Diversion is swell because it provides virtually free water for PV’s noble sons of the soil, not to mention the welfare grape growers of inland Mendo County.

THE SUPERVISORS spent a couple of hours last Tuesday discussing a $50,000 report they'd commissioned on the growing homeless populations in the Ukiah Valley. Willits doesn't have much of a homeless prob because Willits doesn't offer the array of free stuff available from several different Ukiah-based charities, all of them dependent on tax money. Fort Bragg's homeless population is primarily dependent on a largely publicly-funded charity called Hospitality House, which is located in the center of town, resulting in a permanent sidewalk population of persons unwilling and unable to care for themselves. Like the Potter Valley Diversion, everyone downstream of homelessness assumes it will continue to just kinda work out.

THE STICKLER in the debate about what to do about the growing population of the walking wounded is the terror our public officials have in saying "compulsion" out loud, or even whispering it in private, as if anything good for the homeless and its host communities can happen without it, as if small towns and lightly populated counties like Mendocino County can treat and house a large population of troubled, permanently dependent people without the serious support of the federal government. A national problem needs a national plan. There is none. In fact, there may not even be a national anymore given the political divisions in the country.

THE REPORT on Mendo’s homelessness was written by a portly, brisk Republican named Marbut. A Democrat of the Mendo type couldn't have managed it. Freed of the boilerplate necessary to leaving Ukiah with fifty grand — you can't hand in a statement of the obvious confined to a few sentences and expect to get a big pay day with another $25,000 for checking in occasionally for a progress report on your recommendations, the Marbut Report said this: Do what you reasonably can for the homegrown population of dope heads, drop fall drunks and miscellaneous incompetents before you do nice things for the north-south transients who simply take advantage of whatever freebies are available and will stick around so long as you feed them. Maybe give these professional sponges a meal or two but don't try to house them or otherwise make them comfortable. Keep 'em moving.

THIS SIMPLE (and obvious) recommendation inspired a howling and gnashing of teeth among the several hundred paid local doers of good that could be heard clear over in Boonville. Why the inhumanity of it!

BUT WHAT'S HUMANE about the present strategies by this crew of nicely paid enablers? Is it humane to assist a growing population of drug and alcohol-addicted people to commit public suicide? It's humane to subsidize an even larger population of people who refuse to contribute to their own maintenance? (The old distinction between hobos and bums remains useful: hobos would work and move on; bums, like stray cats, stayed as long as you fed them.) Mendocino County is subsidizing the outdoor suicide of people incapable and feeding more and more people who will stay as long as they're fed, with a bunch of people nearly as numerous as the bums and public suicides getting paid to preside over the whole show.)

THE SOLUTION is a revival of federally subsidized state hospitals for the terminally impaired, a federal housing program for working people who don't make enough money to buy or rent shelter, single payer health care, and a federal jobs program at a livable wage for people who can't find work. Not a chance in the present political context for any of it, and here's what will happen locally: Lots of meetings but no change as the unhoused dependent population grows larger and larger.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. 72% of school-age children in the Ukiah school district qualify for free and reduced lunches. American special ops forces are presently deployed in 149 countries.

INGENIOUS, DOGGED POLICE WORK finally nailed the California Strangler via DNA evidence obtained from an ancestry website. Here in Mendocino County, assuming the authorities would act on the obvious, which is that the 1990 car bombing of Judi Bari was a crime committed in Ukiah and Redwood Valley, that famous felony could also be solved via the DNA found on the bomber's confession letter, now housed at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. Match that DNA to the DNA from the Bari-Sweeney family and bingo! you've got the bomber who is, I and others assume, Mike Sweeney, Mendocino County's former trash czar. On the off chance anyone else is interested, this case is thoroughly discussed at the ava website at www.theava.com/archives/1235

I’VE GOT IT! The Press Democrat itself could pick up another Pulitzer for solving the Bari “mystery” all by itself. They’ve got the confession letter right there in their Rose City bunker.

TODAY'S TYCOONS don't seem anywhere nearly as class conscious as the oligarchs of yesteryear. Jay Gould famously boasted that if it came to it, he "could hire half the working class to kill the other half." Most, if not all of today's ruling class, at least pretend to be liberals, liberal until someone moves on their money and out come the guns.

GAVIN NEWSOM is likely our next Governor. Newsom is way ahead in the polls and he has the Serious Lib Money behind him. He told the Press Democrat's Prufrockian "editorial board" last week that he'll make homelessness his first priority, pointing out the obvious, which is that homelessness is rising and that local jurisdictions don't have the means to address it. ("Homelessness" is the chaste term for the gamut of aberrant behavior conducted in public, but now we see employed people among the shelter-free.)

THE PD's comment line is a dependably seething mass of barely literate bile on all subjects, but it takes "liberals" to get the shut-ins outdoing themselves in vile denunciations and crude insults. Of course the shut-ins, ignoring Trump's technicolor sex life, brought up candidate Newsome’s sociopathic sexual adventure with his "best friend's" wife, who has since changed her name to avoid having her life totally ruined. I've always pegged the guy as an empty suit, but do candidates really have any choice but their sociopathicly ruthless superficiality? Not that I or anybody else has ever lost sleep speculating, "Gosh, I wonder what Huffman, McGuire and Wood are really like? Seriously, what are the possibilities?

WHEN NEWSOM was mayor of San Francisco he looked the libs in the eye and cancelled the city's insane cash dole. The libs pretended to be surprised that the free money went straight to drug dealers and liquor stores. But ending that particular policy madness took some nerve of the type mostly absent among professional officeholders. Newsom called his reform, "Care Not Cash." Of course as we've seen the Care was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of damaged people wandering around the city, whose numbers have grown so rapidly the city has been seriously damaged by them every which way.

"THIS ROOM OF INCREDIBLY talented journalists…" This improbable phrase jumped out of the picture box at me Saturday afternoon. A blonde "journalist" with big white teeth and prominent breasts was describing the White House Correspondent's Dinner, and damned if the hackettes weren't stepping onto a stage like movie stars for their photographs! Really, does it even need saying that the White House reporters are… well, score one for Trump. He was in Michigan talking to one of his unanimous mobs, having decided to avoid this particular journalo-seraglio, presided over by an unfunny comedian whose every cruel barb aimed at the women up front in the Trump administration was met with howls of laughter by the assembled “journalists.”

THERE ARE LOTS of free range drug addicts roaming the County, some of them badly in need of prolonged time outs. But state law says counties can hospitalize people for 72 hours against their will only if they pose a danger to themselves, or others, or are unable to feed themselves. A county, in the form of a medical doctor, can ask a judge for a 14-day extension of that 72-hour hold, and then repeat the process every 30 days. Lots of drug and/or disturbed persons need longer stays in a medical timeout room. There is pending legislation via Scott Wiener, a state senator out of San Francisco, a city under siege by unconfined mental cases, that would qualify severe drug addiction as grounds for conservatorship, a step in the right direction for sure, but given the magnitude of the problem only a state and federal investment in mental health facilities will get the most egregious cases into long-term rehab. And for lots of people out there? They're so far gone they are unlikely to ever again function competently.

FORMER SHERIFF TONY CRAVER, now a resident of that state sanctuary for retired cops known as Idaho, used to say that at any one time the Mendo County Jail was home to a good percentage of people who, left to their own destructive devices, would die, hence the pending psychiatric wing at the County Jail complex. As old line convicts used to say, "Man you weren't arrested, you were rescued!"

EVER WATCH a movie or documentary that so repulsed you you wanted to turn it off but was also so mesmerizing you couldn't? Try "Holy Hell," a film about a psychopathic homosexual whose zombo-ized followers tardily figure out their guru's primary interest is in the young men he recruits with promises of perpetual happy happy happy! This cult, the Buddhafields, makes the Rajneeshees seem rational, but the damage done to the emotionally vulnerable young people who join up is considerable. Remember Chairman Mao's description of the Chinese people as a billion blank slates on whose uncluttered minds the Great Helmsman said he could write whatever political notions he desired? We seem to have produced millions of equivalently defenseless blank slates right here in Liberty Land. The mystery is why these nutball groups flourish. How is it that people become so emotionally estranged that they turn themselves totally over to evil little monsters like Michel Rostand? Of course the cult-brained are not unknown in Mendocino County, as most of us know, but I can't think of any current groupings as awful as the Buddhafield group, still flourishing, we learn from the film, in Hawaii.

ONE OF THE ONLY religious-type epiphanies I've experienced occurred when I was 15 in the defiantly non-mystic context of Funston Field in the Marina, San Francisco. In the 1950s through the middle 1960s, hundreds of NorCal men and, in my case, boys, played baseball year-round. Only severe rains could stop weekend ball games. I played with an under-starred high school all-star team under the auspices of Fisherman's Grotto Number 9. (We once played a weekend series in Fort Bragg, circa 1956-57, I forget which year, during Paul Bunyan Days, at the old FB diamond where Safeway is now. I remember Fort Bragg as being very, very good with a bunch of ex-pros who, I later learned, were recruited and given jobs at the mill, and I remember one of their players threatening to beat up one of our adolescent loudmouths. "I don't care if he's a kid, he's got a big mouth," the Fort Bragg ballplayer had threatened. (Even hint at assault on a deserving teenager these days and you'd be good for a year in the County Jail.) Where were we? O yes. My epiphany. It came in the form of a major league pitcher named Marino Pieretti, a native San Franciscan who made it to the Bigs years before the leagues expanded to include today's Double-A ballplayers. As a kid, I'd already seen some hard throwers but I'd never seen a curve ball like Pieretti threw me and, to this day, am mystified that he bothered. I imagined him saying to himself, "I'll show this punk what the standard is." But his fastball was plenty enough. So, like a true rookie-rube-punk, I fell backwards all the way on my arse to elude what I thought for sure was coming at my head as it broke down and clean over the outside of the plate for a third strike. I still remember it, and I remember thinking to myself, "Jeez, this game is tougher than I thought it was."

THE MAJOR RECALLS accidentally signing up for “Group Games II” at Fresno State in his sophomore year. “We were required to take at least one Phys Ed class each semester. The only one that fit my schedule was something called ‘Group Games II.’ All the other similar ‘classes’ listed on the big sign-up board were called ‘Group Games I.’ I was a varsity tennis player at the time but this was the off-season semester for tennis. I went out to the big athletic field at the appointed time and discovered that I had accidently signed up for Varsity baseball in the off-season. The rules prohibited calling it ‘Baseball’ for some reason. At that time, 1963 I think, it was toward the end of the coaching career of Fresno State’s legendary head baseball coach Pete Beiden. Beiden was considered a master college baseball coach with a national reputation, accumulating an amazing 600 wins in 21 seasons at Fresno State from 1948 to 1969. Fresno State’s baseball park is named after him. Beiden’s wife Alice was one of my mother’s primary bridge partners and the Beidens occasionally visited our home on the outskirts of Fresno State to play bridge. So Coach Beiden knew me slightly. When I walked up to the dugout Beiden was dumbfounded. ‘What are you doing here? You don’t play baseball, do you?’ ‘No coach,’ I replied, ‘I thought this was Group Games II.’ ‘It is,’ barked Beiden, ‘and it’s supposed to be for ballplayers only.’ ‘Well, I play tennis. I played some catcher in little league though,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ replied Beiden, ‘you can try back-up bullpen catcher.’ I wandered over to the bullpen area where some real ballplayers were warming up. They gave me some beat-up old-fashioned catcher’s gear and a mitt and I squatted down to what I thought would be some casual catching. The first pitch from one of the pitchers was a fastball right by my head. I barely saw it. Somehow I caught the next one and it hurt my palm so much I screamed in pain. I’d guess they were throwing 85 mph fastballs. The next one hurt too, and the next one. Hearing my screaming, Coach Beiden wandered over and asked the pitcher to throw me some slower curveballs. I missed the first one completely. I had no idea where the ball was going. I missed a couple more before Beiden said, ‘You can’t play ball. This obviously won’t work.’ ‘I never saw anything like those pitches in little league, coach,’ I replied. ‘Tell you what,’ Beiden grumbled, turning and pointing at a big green wall across the field. ‘Take your racquet and go practice against that wall for an hour and a half for each class and if I can see you doing that every day I’ll give you an A for Group Games II.’ I agreed and spent that semester’s worth of ‘Group Games II’ banging a yellow ball against a wall three times a week for about an hour and a half. I ended up with a much better backhand by the end of the semester.”

WALKING THROUGH FAIRFAX the other afternoon I was not surprised to see a couple of young-ish women, neo-hippies, dancing on top of a rainbow painted truck to what sounded like a Grateful Dead tune. They said they were raising money for the Hopi Indians. I seriously doubted charitable intentions, and walked on. There are more un-reconstructed hippies in Fairfax than there are in all of Mendocino County. Sure, you see a Smithsonian-quality flower child here and there in Mendo, but in Fairfax they're all over, living, walking proof of my Hippie Diaspora Theory. Which is as follows: In the period '68-72, lots of hippies lit out for the country or, as the mass longhair flight from the city is since described, headed Back to the Land. At the time of this diaspora, the Bay Area was awash in hard drugs, street crime, terminally bad vibes, and so totally unlike the rainbow dreams that inspired the Summer of Love (and new varieties of sexually transmitted disease), hippies headed north, with a whole bunch settling just across the bridge in West Marin, especially Fairfax. Some continued north to West Sonoma County, the even more intrepid journeyed on to Mendocino and Humboldt counties. The hippies most traumatized by their urban adventures, and the truly intrepid, kept on north until they plunked themselves down in the snows of Trinity County. Fairfax, though, is the sole remaining community-community in Marin. It still has bars, live music, a bunch of cheap restaurants, a vital local government, and enough citizens concerned to keep the town as is, and for that commitment thank the goddess for hippies. Without them the town would be like the rest of Marin — doctors, dentists, lawyers, medium-size money. No community.

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK

Tesla along with its temp agency is supposedly being sued for not paying contract workers. The same folk way high up on the food chain that proclaim the evils of building a wall themselves live in gated communities behind walls. They tell us that government issued ID is racist yet government issued ID is required of workers to enter those walled oases of calm and wealth and privilege. They’ll ask you with voices of sweet reason, reason and rationality oozing from every pore, isn’t it reasonable to know who it is that works on your property, that walks along your streets? They’ll ask, isn’t it reasonable to know that people that are working here are here legally? Isn’t security a reasonable concern? Sure it’s reasonable, but isn’t it reasonable that what goes for people living in gated and walled compounds goes for the rest of us? Or is that being unreasonable? The disassembly of the inland empire that marks out the USA won’t just be characterized by territorial secession, it will be marked by internal disaggregation, or societal secession where the higher and mighty carve themselves off from the rest, where citizenship isn’t just plain citizenship. Walled compounds are the start. Walled compounds with strongholds are next.  Goes without saying that those living in walled compounds will claim Level One Citizenship. The question is how long can they hang onto it.