Mendocino County Today: Saturday, Oct. 6, 2018

• Clearing Skies
• PHF Unit
• Rex Quote
• Frat Pigs
• Little Dog
• Ed Notes
• Yesterday's Catch
• Kelley Emporium
• Hyper Complex
• Nuclear Stockpiles
• Ruling Class
• Ancient Simplifications
• Gun Protest
• Super Courteous
• Planning Agenda
• Weather Prophet
• Snapdragons
• Marco Radio
• Divine Anarchy
• String Quartet
• Tao House
• Wet Roses
• Biff Trump
• Jazz Event

CLOUDS AND A FEW SHOWERS in the wake of a cold front this morning will give way to clearing skies as high pressure builds in. Dry weather and seasonable temperatures are expected from Sunday through the upcoming week. (National Weather Service)

CAN MENDO UPGRADE MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES ANY TIME SOON?

by Mark Scaramella

AVA website commenter James Marmon observed recently that there seems to be some tension developing between Sheriff Allman and his otherwise agreeable Measure B Mental Health Facilities Advisory Committee. We noticed that too.

AVA Editor Anderson added that Sheriff Allman clearly wants to get a psychiatric health facility up and running as soon as possible, preferably in the existing Old Howard Hospital in Willits, which would require extensive rehabilitation but still be less expensive than a new building — if the entire facility upgrade is compared with a comparable new facility.

Sheriff Allman listened to members of his committee say that they wanted to study some things further at last month’s Measure B Committee meeting, especially, what other kinds of services might be housed in old Howard Hospital since the Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF/Puff) unit probably wouldn't require the entire floor space.

Committee members also expressed interest in increasing so-called “mobile outreach” which Sheriff Allman agreed would ideally be a combination of mental health workers and law enforcement as necessary -- which is essentially what several other North Bay counties call a “mobile crisis van” (or some similar name).

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/crisis-emergency-services-mobile-crisis-teams.page

https://cchealth.org/mentalhealth/mcrt.php

https://www.namisf.org/crisis

https://sonomacounty.ca.gov/Health/Behavioral-Health/Community-Response-and-Engagement/Mobile-Support-Team/

Whatever it's called, the crisis van concept involves dispatching a mental health emergency response team and a cop for crisis calls or family calls for help in emergencies. An evaluation on the spot would determine what should be done. A lot of mental health difficulties can be cooled out without the troubled person being hauled off to a form of incarceration, and sometimes just to cool off in the van or be taken home if circumstances warrant. Most of the time in Mendo, flip-outs are people already known to both law enforcement and mental health staffers.

The concept has been successful, if limited, in other nearby counties like Contra Costa, San Francisco and Sonoma and is long overdue for Mendo. Sheriff Allman and the Supervisors all seem to agree that expanding mobile outreach or crisis response soon would be a big help. Allman even singled it out as a priority in his subsequent presentation to the Board of Supervisors last Tuesday.

The Supes seemed to agree too, and Allman said he had asked Mental Health Director Dr. Jeanine Miller to work up a proposal and bring it back to the Measure B committee for a subsequent written proposal to the Supes.

Frankly we doubt this will happen. Mendo has been hostile to this no-brainer of an idea for decades and there’s very little likelihood that it will happen now, despite the apparent agreement when the Sheriff and some committee members mentioned it.

Also during the discussion at the Measure B committee on Wednesday, September 26, Behavioral Health Advisory Board chairperson Jan McGourty, responding to Sheriff Allman’s statement about the urgency of getting a PHF in place as soon as possible, suggested that a mobile or trailer PHF facility could be set up in the short term while the committee deals with the brick-and-mortar options.

That sounded like a good idea to us, so we looked it up. It turns out that a company called Odulair (for example) offers a wide variety of mobile trailer-based health facilities including a "mobile behavioral health unit."

http://odulair.com/mobile-behavioral-health-mobile-mental-health.html

From the Odulair Website:

“Odulair Mobile Behavioral Health Units are specially designed to provide in person response to those requiring identification, assessment, and/or treatment of mental or behavioral illness. Whether you need a local office for client visits, or need an on-site unit for outreach purposes, your behavioral health team can be accommodated. Every aspect of our units are custom designed to meet your exact needs. No matter the crisis at hand, your team of psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and social workers will need the proper tools to excel. Odulair is here to help your team address crisis situations quickly and efficiently by providing you with an anxiety reducing clinical assessment and therapy department on wheels.

“Odulair Mobile Behavioral Health Units can provide a virtually unlimited number of services including clinical assessment rooms equipped with basic medical exam devices, mental health assessment rooms, individual and family mental health treatment rooms, clinical staff workrooms, double locking narcotics cabinets, client waiting areas with an educational video station, and even kitchens and restrooms. The exterior of the units can also be custom designed with your organization logo or left unmarked for discretion.

“Mobile Behavioral Health Units can be built on any vehicle platform, with smaller units as vans for easy maneuvering in urban locales and truck chassis-based units for rural areas and regions with harsh winters or flooding. We also provide larger transportable and relocatable behavioral health clinics for large-scale disaster relief. The platforms Odulair offers include:

Mobile Behavioral Health Van

Mobile Behavioral Health Truck (Standard and 4 x 4 truck chassis)

Mobile Behavioral Health Trailer (single and double expandable)

Mobile Behavioral Health School Bus

Mobile Behavioral Health Bus.”

So this does not require reinventing any wheels; the concept is not new and is commercially available off the shelf.

(Including Patient #1, apparently, to get Mendo going.)

Mendo would not need to do any construction or design — just find a place (like the old Howard Hospital site, or the Orchard Avenue site, or at a local clinic) to park it and staff it with funding from existing “out of county” client money or Measure B supplementary funds.

Not only would an option like this provide much needed short-term psych unit-type service, but after the interim period, however long that may take, when some kind of brick and mortar PHF unit comes online, the mobile unit could be easily moved to the coast, preferably one on the south coast and one on the north coast, staffed by mental health professionals based in the local clinics in those locations and supplemented by some Measure B services money.

There seems to be agreement that the Coast needs at least one-quarter of the Measure B funding for facilities, and for closer access to crisis services.

So, as far as we can tell, there is no need for disagreement on the subject. Proceed post-haste with developing the brick-and-mortar psychiatric health facility whether it's in Willits or Ukiah, whether it’s Old Howard Hospital or some expansion by the Adventists. Simultaneously set up a crisis van and a mobile facility to cover the interim which, knowing how Mendo works, is likely to be a very long interim. Surely there is enough money and expertise available to expedite the process in exactly the way the Sheriff expects. This would also plug one of the big holes in the “continuum” identified by the Kemper report.

Will Mendo get going on this simple short-term solution? Or will they dither and discuss and analyze the options for years and years before even getting around to doing what Measure B and the Kemper Report calls for?

Experience indicates the latter.

A READER WRITES: “In this week's Fort Bragg Advocate and Beacon about the October 1st Mendocino Coast District Hospital candidates forum, editor Chris Calder made a serious error in attributing the quote, “We need a new CEO, and I don’t say that lightly,” to Amy McColley when Rex Gressett actually made the statement. Ms. McColley, in answering a question about how MCDH Board members should deal with the CEO, had just finished her answer about how to hold CEOs accountable when the same question went to Rex. His first words were the aforementioned quote. Readers and voters expect careful attention to detail from our news sources. This error should be corrected immediately online, along with apologies to both Ms. McColley and Mr. Gressett. Next week's coast papers should contain a front page correction and apology to these two candidates, not a retraction tucked in the corner of an inside page of the Advocate and Beacon.”

SHOOTING THE TV

by Jeff Costello

Elvis Presley shot the TV when Robert Goulet's face came onscreen. That's how I feel when I see Trump's phony-baloney face makeup, fake tan and hairdo. Luckily I don't have a gun. Trump seems to be sticking with places like West Virginia and Mississippi, where inexplicably there are still people who believe his bullshit.

Now it's the phony-baloney Supreme Court nominee, who reminds me of frat parties at the University of Connecticut, and Trinity College, a Catholic school in Hartford where I played sometimes with my little traveling rock and roll band. It was 1965, and there was indeed a lot of drinking-to-puke going on with the rich, fated to be successful "brothers." One night we played at a "pig" party. Pigs were the girls invited there. Over the doorway was a sign that said "To Market, to Market, to buy a Fat Pig." This apparently was the general view of frat boys, and these weren't even Ivy League schools like Yale. But it was the frat party way, the established order of things. The evidence is clear.

What might Kavanaugh's wife make of all this? Obviously there are girls who went to those Pig Parties. What were they thinking?

During a break, I walked over the next frat house and the band in there was singing "Sloppy Seconds," apparently an original song of theirs. The party theme was similar to next door. It was a taste of the frat-boy outlook on women. Despite being from the wrong side of the tracks, I found this sort of thing shocking. I was supposed to be one of the "bad" kids, the "wrong" crowd. But nobody I knew behaved like this. Entitled and arrogant. These guys were future power brokers, corporate executives, politicians, maybe even Supreme Court judges? Is this what it's like?

How it is? These are the good guys in a topsy-turvy world. Whoever said "Question Authority" wasn't taking it far enough.

Trying to imagine a kid passed out in a frat party puddle of beer growing up and going to the supreme court. God bless America, right?

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “Had to break up a fight between Skrag and his girlfriend, Alice. I told her to file a domestic on him, and she said, ‘Why? I beat him like a drum. I always do, and the punk always comes back for more’.”

ED NOTES

"AS A MEMBER IN GOOD STANDING," the letter from KZYX begins as it meanders through dubious assumptions and concludes with the most dubious assumption of all that bi-annual elections will save the station $2500 per election. Narrowly considered that's probably a true assumption. Broadly considered it's not true. Much more money could be saved by combining the general manager's job with the program director's job, neither of them appearing to be full-time jobs of real work. And exactly how many people at the Philo bunker are on the payroll remains murky. How many people are getting paid as reporters? How much does the techno guy make for how many hours of work over what period of time? Is that gray ghost descended from the EST cult still on the KZYX dole?

ANOTHER SHAKY ASSUMPTION is "The board itself will function better if it does not lose experienced members every year." How much experience does it take to say Yes? The present board, like all the station's boards before it, simply ratifies whatever management comes up with, which is also the practice at most boards of directors in the county. But in the case of KZYX, you could simply grab ten paid-up station members at random who present the same general acceptability to station membership as its board of directors, much as a group of Ukiah Rotarians would be instantly acceptable to Guam's Rotary. There's no need here to go to the trouble of an election. The same people are elected however often an anointment is held.

THE FACT IS KZYX membership is stagnant, and it's stagnant because media are much more competitive than they have been, and younger people — the average KZYXer is probably a chronological 60, a psychological 95 — aren't tuning in. Why? Not enough local stuff, and not enough life in what local stuff there is. I don't know if I'm a typical listener, paid or unpaid, but there are only a couple of programs I try to remember to tune in, Takes on the World and Sports Talk, the former requiring a professorial level of foreknowledge to decode, not that I pretend to have that kind of knowledge but I do try to keep up with events in the Middle East so I am able to understand what I'm hearing. Otherwise, I only hear Mendo semi-Public Radio when I'm on the road and temporarily out of books on tape. The national NPR programing dominant at the station is of zero interest to me, but if KZYX tuned in the only real local radio news there is via Joe Regelski out in Fort Bragg, that alone would bring in new people.

I THINK if our local audio club moved their open lines show to five mornings a week with a focus on local matters — Norm deVall prior to his mysterious banishment was quite good at moving the talk along, lots of Mendo people would begin tuning in. But KZYX has always been timid, unimaginative, too much dominated by the tiresome conservative liberals who dominate the politics of the Northcoast to even contemplate doing much of local interest. I'm going to return my ballot with a write-in suggestion: Life time board appointments with an hereditary option.

* * *

MENDO'S HOMELESS POPULATION numbering what? a hundred people? And, uh, that hundred being rather difficult to house given their dependencies and uneven mental functioning, but Oakland, beset by a much larger homeless population, has set up a Tough Shed village. The small structures are most commonly used to store lawn mowers and other tools in backyards, but Oakland has one village up and running with two more planned of about a hundred each housing two people per structure, a privacy curtain separating the roomies. Each side has space for a bed and a few belongings. There are separate toilet facilities at each site and each week, portable showers are brought in. The city also provides two meals a day to the village residents. Each site costs about $750,000 a year to operate with money coming from private donations, Oakland, Alameda County and Kaiser Permanente. Mendo, assuming the political will presently absent, could do a version of the same for less money.

* * *

SPOTTED among the Kavanaugh demonstrators, a pro-Kavanaugh group of portly women holding a sign that said, "Fat Girls For The Truth."

* * *

WONDERING OUT LOUD if the Pamela Heston teaching an administration of justice class at Mendo College is the same Pamela (Markham) whose controversial tenure at the Mendo Probation Department caused so much local comment?

CATCH OF THE DAY, October 5, 2018

JASON ARDENYI, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, probation revocation.

JONATHAN LARSEN, Crescent City/Ukiah. Domestic battery, probation revocation.

BRADLEY MAXFIELD, Willits. Trespassing.

JUSTIN MAXFIELD, Willits. Trespassing.

JOSE NUNEZ, Bay Point/Ukiah. Failure to appear.

RYAN OKERSTROM, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

REBECCA SEARS, Ukiah. DUI.

JOSHUA VIAYRA, Redwood Valley. Domestic battery.

JUSTICE WRISTEN, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.

KELLEY HOUSE EMPORIUM & SPEAKEASY COCKTAIL PARTY SATURDAY NIGHT

This Saturday, October 6, the Kelley House is hosting an Emporium & Speakeasy Cocktail Party, from 5:30-9:30 p.m. at Mendocino's Crown Hall. The evening will feature lavish food, custom cocktails, live and silent auctions, and 1920s era jazz music from the Dorian May Quartet. Optional Speakeasy attire is encouraged. Tickets are on sale in Mendocino at Out of This World and the Kelley House Museum; in Fort Bragg at Harvest Market; and at BrownPaperTickets.com. Admission is $30 and includes sumptuous fare and a bidding number. For more information, please call 707-937-5791 or visit kelleyhousemuseum.org/emporium.

Buy tickets online:https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3605181

Kelley House Museum
PO Box 92245007 Albion Street
Mendocino, CA 95460
707-937-5791
kelleyhousemuseum.org

FISHTAILING INTO THE FUTURE

by James Kunstler

The opening chapters of Michael Lewis’s new book, The Fifth Risk, detail the carelessness of the Trump transition team in the months leading up to his swearing-in as president. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie led the team, with its binders full of possible agency chiefs, before he was summarily canned by Steve Bannon, who would be dumped soon himself by the ascending Golden Golem of Greatness. There was, in fact, a set of rigorous protocols for managing the transition of power based on decades of cumulative practice — and anxiety over the frightening nuclear demons at the core of US power — and they were disdained, to the horror of the permanent bureaucracy waiting in place for leadership.

In those months after the election, Mr. Trump was apparently dazed and confused by his unexpected victory, and completely unprepared to actually run the country. His super-sized “stable genius” brain surveyed the scene and his field-of-view saw nothing but swamp from sea to shining sea, populated by lizards, snakes, raptors, and poisonous insects, with higher-order mammalian predators in the C-suites. When he finally caught on to the game being played, Mr. Trump rounded up his own menagerie of crispy critters and sent them forth to run operations like the Department of Energy — in that case, former Texas governor Rick Perry, who knew next-to-nothing about the department’s responsibilities, and had sworn to abolish it in the primary elections (when he remembered it existed).

The politics around these deadly serious matters are interesting enough, and Michael Lewis, as always, excels at unpacking the fraught mysteries of highly complicated systems run by comically limited humans. But something else emerges from this story, perhaps unintentionally: that the complexities of government are now hopelessly unmanageable, no matter who is in charge of them, and that the actual path of this still-growing complexity leads to criticality and collapse. If Lewis catches onto this later in the book, which I doubt, if only for his cavalier references to the dodgy business of shale oil, there’s no sign of it in the early chapters.

But this is not intended to be a book review based on a so-far partial reading. It is to say that even some of the best analytical minds of our time are missing the main thread of the story: that human affairs in the 21^st century have entered a hazardous period of disorderly change largely due to that age-old pitfall of making ever-increasing investments in complexity with diminishing returns. That is exactly how societies collapse and that is where things stand in the Time of Trump. One might even theorize that Mr. Trump’s simplemindedness is a kind of virtue in the face of runaway complexity. His instinct, at least, is to repel it.

But at the macro level, this system and its subsystems are out-of-control and shaking themselves loose. Government has attempted to prop them up by schemes that amount to racketeering of one kind or another — the dishonest manipulation and representation of money — and now money itself is in revolt, as can be seen in the sudden rise of interest rates, especially the ten-year US Treasury Bond above 3.2 percent just before Friday’s market opening.

The US government can’t handle interest rates at this level, after decades of debt accumulation. Other nations can’t pay back their dollar-denominated loans either, and that has produced havoc at the so-called margins of the global economy — as currencies crash, and companies go under, and sovereign debt instruments melt down. You can be sure that this disorder will eventually spread from the margins to the center, which is the USA. It’s already up-and-running in our politics, which might be considered the early warning system of the larger picture. In my long life of three-score and ten, I’ve never seen a political fiasco as demented as the Kavanaugh confirmation process, with its harking back to Medieval social hysterias and stunning exercises in bad faith.

This riveting horror show has also distracted the nation — and a media fully invested in compounding the psychodrama — from the momentous tectonic movements in the world’s money system, now shaking apart. Among other things, it will blow up the fantasy that Mr. Trump has magically orchestrated a new miracle economy. But it will also bring to an abrupt close the pornographic machinations of his adversaries in Swamptown.

And then we will get on in earnest with the true business of the long emergency — making new arrangements, however difficult — to escape the deadly clutter of our own constructed hyper-complex hyper-reality.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page.)

THE LATEST ESTIMATE of the world’s nuclear weapons stockpile from the Ploughshares Fund

Russia: 6,850 nuclear weapons

USA: 6,550 nuclear weapons

France: 300 nuclear weapons

China: 280 nuclear weapons

United Kingdom: 215 nuclear weapons

Pakistan: 150 nuclear weapons

India: 130 nuclear weapons

Israel: 80 nuclear weapons

North Korea: 20 nuclear weapons

Iran: 0 nuclear weapons

AMERICA'S NEW ARISTOCRACY lives in an accountability-free zone

by David Sirota

"…the United States has been turned into a safe space for a permanent ruling class. Inside the rarefied refuge, the key players who created this era’s catastrophes and who embody the most pernicious pathologies have not just eschewed punishment – many of them have actually maintained or even increased their social, financial and political status."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/05/americas-new-aristocracy-live-accountability-free-zone-david-sirota

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

The process of simplification could be disorderly but the question is what replaces it. I’m not a legal scholar nor a historian but what sticks out like a sore thumb from that collapse of 3,200 years ago are the Ten Commandments.

If you read the biblical narrative, the Commandments had their origins with people on the run out of Egypt, refugees IOW, who no doubt had no time nor resources for the administration of a complex set of laws. So, ten simple two or three word rules that any illiterate shepherd could put to memory would have to do ie one god, no idols, no cursing, a holy day, honor parents, no murder, no adultery, no theft, no perjury, no coveting.

That’s it. That would have to do for a society in the midst of a region wide collapse, one where people were on the move, where cities were being abandoned and new defensible hill-towns were being built and where ethnic groups – in this case Jews – were taking shape.

I’m not saying that we’ll cobble together our own set of commandments out of the rubble of our own civilization. But history gives us one apparent solution to the problem of complexity and what can be done in a dire situation.

What replaces the penal system is the other question. I doubt there will be much in the way of years long or decades long confinements. Probably more along the lines of steal once and get flogged, steal twice and get hanged, steal a horse and get drawn and quartered. Or, as the Muslims do, steal and forfeit a hand. You get my drift.

GUN PROTEST, MENDO

"Our Children -- Our Law Enforcement Officers Are Dying!!

On Saturday, October 6 and Sunday, October 7 there will be a gun and knife show at Portuguese Hall. We ask you to join us to demonstrate your support for the children and law enforcement officers who have been and are victims of gun violence.

Law Enforcement Casualties due to Guns has risen by 24% and the background check loopholes need to be closed!

On Saturday, October 6 and Sunday, October 7 meet across the street from Portuguese Hall at 8:30 am. Demonstration to take place from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm on Saturday and until 3:00 pm on Sunday."

“AS A JUDGE I HAVE ALWAYS TREATED COLLEAGUES AND LITIGANTS WITH THE UTMOST RESPECT! I HAVE BEEN KNOWN FOR MY COURTESY ON AND OFF THE BENCH!”

THE OCTOBER 18, 2018 PLANNING COMMISSION AGENDA has been posted to the department website at the below link:

mendocinocounty.org/government/planning-building-services/meeting-agendas/planning-commission

BORIS has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere… We must get into step, a lockstep toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

LIVE FROM FORT BRAGG. MEMO OF THE AIR: GOOD NIGHT RADIO!

Friday, October 5, 9pm to 5am, there's Memo of the Air, live from the KNYO performance space at 325 N. Franklin, next door to the Tip Top bar. Appear, enter without even knocking, slouch nonchalantly to the brightly lit room at the back, get my attention away from whatever I'm doing, and you can show-and-tell and/or perform your [ahem] act, or talk about your project, or read your own work, or whatever.

If you don't want to change out of your pyjamas just to go to town, the deadline to email your writing to be read on the air tonight is maybe 6:30. Also the number in the Fort Bragg studio is 707 962-3022, so you can read your own work with your own voice right there on the phone (after 9). If there will be swears, please wait until 10pm for that, then go ahead and go nuts.

I've got reams of delightful material to read as well as exotic music to play for breaks, not to mention practical recipes for a better real world, with just a soupcon of adolescent whiny angst and, oh, what's the word I want, here? ...Yes, there it is: weltschmerz. More than a soupcon of that, though. Please imagine the little wiggly tail on the C, by the way.

Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio: Every Friday, 9pm to 5am on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg, and 105.1fm KMEC-LP Ukiah. Also there and anywhere else via http://knyo.org

Bonus tracks: Like a tiger, a CAT in HEAT, she took life in her teeth and GORGED herself! She ran the FULL GAMUT from stable boy to nobleman in a WEIRD WORLD of uninhibited pleasure, of PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS! (The part where she sticks her tongue in the cat's mouth, though, is too much even for my jaded sensibilities. Yuck, honey, don't do that. That is not the Hopi way.) http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/female_animal

The best pumpkins in the world. Everybody else can just concede now. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/10/02/claque-o-lanterns/

And a giant wine silo throwing up like a freshman so you you don't have to at all.

https://gizmodo.com/bottoms-up-8-000-gallons-of-bubbly-bursts-from-foamy-w-1829534083

Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org

https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

KNOW YOUR OWN SELF

My view is that everything stems from the Divine Absolute, which is realizable in one's deepest meditation or prayer. That is one's true Self. What else, correct? As Jesus Christ is reported to have said: "Know thyself!" If one does know one's spiritual identity, then one may consciously center the mind in the heart cave, or one's own svarupa, or anahata chakra. Mentally focused in the heart center, one then witnesses the passing thoughts created by the mental factory. Detachment from all thought is certainly a worthy goal, is it not? After all, non-attachment is freedom. As Master Hua is reported to have said at Talmadge, California's City of 10K Buddhas: "Do not be attached to anything at all!" So what then, you might ask? In conversation with Abbot Lau there some years ago, he said the goal is the Chinese philosophical "wu wei", which he translated as "non-interference". In other words, let the Dao, or Divine Absolute, flow through you and use the body-mind complex for its higher purpose. The individual does not have to do anything else. Indeed, what else?? This morning, I am comfortably typing this up in my air conditioned room at the Plumeria alternative hostel in Honolulu. I've sent out uncountable emails urging others to initiate a spiritual assault on Washington, D.C. in response to the governmental meltdown there. Obviously, the American experiment with freedom and democracy is on the ropes. Additionally, I continue to go to Krishna Temple on Sundays, because I enjoy chanting there and partaking of the Sunday Love Feast under the big banyan trees in the back yard. Am no longer going to Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic church as I was doing previously, because I am not compelled to do so. It's a nice church with nice people, otherwise. I mean, I thoroughly comprehend the shortcomings of Christianity. I grew up Catholic. But then, I too have been to India, and know Hinduism's failures as well. Was on the payroll at San Francisco's Zen Center in 1979 cashiering at the Tassajara Bakery and sitting zazen every morning at 5 AM. I witnessed first hand the shortcomings at the Zen Center. My point is that we must individually continue to remain centered in our own svarupas, or heart centers. I recommend being ecumenical, as the Vatican encyclicals from the 1960s correctly advised under the direction of Pope John XXIII. As my friend Swami Satchidananda said: "Paths are many, truth is one." I am keen to be a part of a direct action oriented spiritual working group. I continue to live on the earth plane for this. As of my 69th birthday on September 28th, have chilled out insofar as visiting the clubs etc. on Oahu. Hung up the beer mug. My time is spent sending out email messages encouraging everyone to "bring in the spiritual mojo" for effectiveness sake. The time of the street protest carnival has waned. Success in political action requires the element of surprise. Nowadays, the prez just flies over the demonstrators in front of the White House in a helicopter on his way to play golf. Certainly you agree that more than street protests is now necessary, although I do not dissuade anybody from conventional protesting. As always, dissent is a part of the democratic process. So what do I want? I would like to leave Hawaii and be part of a spiritual direct action group. (At Auroville in south India, the Mother called what they were doing "Divine Anarchy". That term works for me.) And let the Divine Absolute act without interference. I have paid up here for another week, and am paying on Wednesdays week to week. I've got over 30K in my checking account. I am mobile. There being nothing else to do, I am relaxed. Have a nice day every day. ;-)))

Craig Louis Stehr

Email: craiglouisstehr@protonmail.com

STRING QUARTET IN PRESTON HALL, SUNDAY 3 PM

October 7, this Sunday! Cassatt String Quartet, one of America’s outstanding ensembles, this Manhattan based quartet performs throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East. Recipients of countless awards, they have made 30 recordings and are frequently heard on NPR and this Sunday, at 3 PM, they are going to perform in Preston Hall. This is the second Opus Concert of the season and tickets can be purchased at Out of This World in Mendocino, Harvest Market in Fort Bragg, and online at symphonyoftheredwoods.com and at the door.

More information at symphonyoftheredwoods.org/opus.php

DISCOVERING EUGENE O’NEILL’S SAN FRANCISCO

nytimes.com/2018/10/03/travel/eugene-oneill-in-california.html

TRUMP REALLY WAS BIFF

rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/back-to-the-future-writer-biff-is-donald-trump-190408/

SPECIAL GUESTS FOR JAZZ AT SEQUOIA ROOM SATURDAY

Thrilled and honored to be on board this Saturday 10/6 as the Sequoia Room features special guests Greg D'Augelli on saxes and Matt Eakle on flutes backed by our trio of Nina Mera on bass, Bing York on drums, and yours truly on piano. Both Greg and Matt come from afar and have wide-ranging careers. A longtime member of David Grisman's group, Matt also plays in rock and jazz bands as well as orchestras, film scores, and recordings by diverse artists. Greg works throughout northern California playing a variety of instruments in recordings, clubs, concerts, stage productions, and festivals — including Mendocino's. Times and other info is available here.

northcoastbrewing.com/jazz-event/john-gilmore-quartet-with-special-guest-matt-eackle/