Useless Boxes in the Attic (Sweep Off the Plate, Blue)

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I was average at best as a ballplayer but when I played I was primarily an outfielder—left and right mostly since I didn’t have the range you’d normally expect of a center fielder.  My jump on the ball was better from the right side and I had a strong arm accurate to third so my playing time ended up mostly on the right side of the diamond.  At one time or another I played every position on the field—usually a desperation move to cover the position since I was noticeably less skilled defensively the closer I got to the plate.  I had limited range at short, a stone glove at third, was passable turning the double play at second, and a serviceable first baseman for a right-hander.  The only place I was seriously awful was as a  pitcher.  Even on a bad team where you often fill a position void based on the strengths of others, I was never going to be written into the lineup as a pitcher under anything other than duress—I couldn’t find the plate if they put a napkin and silverware around it, served a sizzling rare steak, and opened and poured the wine there.  I was not and will never be a stud on the mound and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Back then I had the mindset and the competitive nature but not the tools– but for the lack of a pitcher’s arm and the inability to throw to a specific plate location at will, I would have made a terrific closer.  They say all the great closers have the uncanny ability to slow the game’s tempo, purge all extraneous crowd noise, take complete control of their thought process and focus sharp only in the moment– to put out of their mind completely the last pitch thrown and everything else that ever happened before that moment and concentrate purely and absolutely on the next pitch needed no matter what disaster preceded.  Just give one up?  No problem.  Bear down and concentrate and we’ll get this next guy.  Just made the pitch of your life and blue doesn’t give you the call?  No worries—he’s human.  He missed it and that’s part of the game—it’s going to happen.  Just put the next toss where he doesn’t have the stones to not give you the call and let’s get outta here.  Forget whatever has happened or whatever didn’t happen that should have and see only what lies ahead.  Compartmentalize all that emotion.  Park it away in a box somewhere so all you know and all you think about is what needs to happen right now, right here, at this precise moment.  Be in the now, make this next pitch right, and make the game and this moment yours.  Close it out.

I’ve always remembered having the ability to suspend thoughts and tuck them safely and quietly away for later so as to not deal with them in the now (though I admit I haven’t always demonstrated that particular skill set consistently, I have at times let random thoughts migrate from the safety of the tiny confined space between my ears to the less well-protected and wide path that traverses across my tongue, and I have on more than one occasion lived to regret allowing that path to be trod). The ability to compartmentalize thought is a double-edged sword—a useful tool in the shed when wielded properly with care and a cluttered and potentially deadly storage hazard otherwise.

The house isn’t especially cluttered when you walk through the front door but the closets and the garage and the shed I built for the garden can have the feel of a minefield.  I reclaim the garage a few times a year before it fills itself up with boxes of ‘please save this’ and remnants of ‘that might come in handy someday’ parts of whatever project crossed my path between cleanings.  The storage attic above the garage floor is a loosely organized chaos of ‘waiting for reclamation’ articles from every phase of our family’s lives.  There are things up there I know in my heart we’ll never touch again other than to finally discard them after a death or a move—but until either life change rolls along the boxes stay where they are waiting for final judgment.  That includes a lot of those long-unopened boxes in the attic but also a few of the well-packed away ones stored away in the attic between my ears.

Lately I’ve been noticing the memory full alerts starting to flicker and it occurs to me I might have to purge things instead of waiting for greater capacity to come along.  I have boxes tucked away that I’ve been dragging around with me for so long I forget what’s inside most of them.  One of my resolutions for next year is to send as many as I can off to the recycle bin and free up some space to lighten the load.  Whatever happened on that last pitch is over.  Time to focus on the next one and close this thing out.

Boy, you’re  gonna carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time
Boy, you’re gonna  carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time

The Beatles – Carry That Weight (1969) 

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Guarding the Herd (In the Moment)

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I suspect it had something to do with the napping deaf Aussie sprawled lackadaisically across my lap as she approached with a mug of herb tea but my wife mentioned this evening how she would like to be reincarnated as a dog.  I couldn’t agree more.  For the most part western religion and western culture in general shuns the notion of reincarnation—but being neither religious nor cultured I’m not so sure they have it right.  In religious terms reincarnation can be about growth and spiritual awakening, enlightenment attained through a series of incarnations allowing the soul or spiritual essence to mature toward a state of worthiness.  Leaving religion and philosophy out of it, I suppose you could make an argument for reincarnation with a nod toward science—the whole physics and conservation of energy thing (I assume the universe is a closed system eventually) could make for a line of reasoning since all that pent up energy in your body and mind needs to transfer itself to ‘something’ out there somewhere when you die.  I’ve thought about it but we really only have the whole space-time continuum thing working for us consciously in arrears (thanks, Einstein).  We grasp the concept of time going backward but we really only have a limited grasp of our forward momentum through time.  Using that backward-facing perspective, there are people from history I find interesting—fascinating even—and certainly more enlightened and aware than me who might be amusing to bolt through a few avatars with but I can’t fathom being reincarnated as a human—even a fascinating one—and living again with the same enjoyment as I would coming back and living as a dog.  The dog has nirvana wrapped up already and lives life without all the messy complications of rational thought.  I could probably do that.

Dogs don’t live lives of quiet desperation, have never read Thoreau, and don’t really judge you by whether you have or not.  Dogs merely love.  They wait patiently by the door until you return, bark anxiously as you turn the lock reinforcing for you their relief at your return, and lick your face with a passion humans do not know until you surrender and reward them with a biscuit treat.  Dogs don’t worry about the mortgage, don’t dwell on the past, and forgive almost instantly even the most egregious of your sins.  They don’t hold grudges and they don’t plot revenge.  You’ll never lie awake at night afraid to sleep or worried about what your dog thinks of you.

As I write this both dogs are asleep on their pillowed beds within reach of my ankles.  They’re herding beasts and they rest when the herd is carefully managed into as tiny a space possible and easily within their range.  Should I walk off and they awaken, I’ll be found—quickly and fervently—unless I leave the house and they don’t see it.  If I do, they’ll search every corner of the house, whimper and wonder, and eventually stand guard near the door—for days, if necessary.  Unless I’m traveling, it’s not possible to remain, for long, out of their sight and away from their reach.  We go out in public with a leash attached though they and I understand the leash exists primarily to make other people feel secure about being near them—they’ll never stray from my side for long and should they be tempted to forage out, they’ll quickly realize my personal herd must be protected and they’ll race to my side fulfilling their most important of responsibilities—assuring I don’t stray.  They are giving creatures programmed by nature to guard and guide me to wherever my destiny might lead.

Casper is deaf and cannot hear my breathing at night.  He compensates by nosing up near my nostrils as I sleep to feel me exhale.  He doesn’t mind waking me twice a night for a pre-dawn check of the perimeter and the occasional leg-lifted squirt to the plants—a warning to all who approach that he is on duty, freshly rested, and ready to stand between me and whatever might come calling in the middle of the night.  He’s beyond alpha in temperament and no one and no thing breaches the security of his domain without consent.  He knows he’ll have time for napping once the sun comes up and I’m safely corralled in my office with a mug of coffee and the morning scan of the headlines.  The older dog, Chip, has retired his nocturnal duties in favor of the other.  He’ll acknowledge the efforts as I lift the latch and throw open the French doors to the yard somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:30 and 4am but he’s old and wise and has learned my patterns and sleeps comfortable in the notion that I won’t stray from the herd during the night.  My deaf sentry, ever vigilant, will make certain of that.  For whatever his motivation– spiritual or otherwise– he’ll make sure I’m safe, well-loved, and that I will never stray far from him for long.  He seems to be guiding me spiritually along some uncharted path forward in time that leads, I hope, to that enlightened state he lives in patiently fulfilling his daily duties without concern for past or future just living happily and lovingly in the moment.  I wonder how many Thoreau-laced lives I will have to live before I am allowed to join him there on a pillow bed just adoring someone?  If he is my guide to the next world, I hope he remains with me there.

I suppose it must be similar to what the Queen feels with all those stoic London Guards surrounding Buckingham Palace—but even they go home to live lives of quiet desperation once relieved and I assure you no sentry has ever licked the Queen’s face as lovingly as Casper licks mine.

Bodhisattva

Would you take me by the hand

Steely Dan – Bodhisattva (1974)

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Possession (Father-of-the-Bride and Odyssey/Autumn)

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Odyssey/Autumn by JB Thompson

I didn’t start out as a collector but I now own 27 pieces of abstract art created by a relatively unknown artist, JB Thompson, the most recent a gift from my daughter and [now] son-in-law presented to me as gifts were being bestowed on maids of honor and best groomsmen at their rehearsal brunch this past Friday before the long-anticipated Saturday wedding.  We learned a few things about the British over that two-day span: it’s customary for the bride and groom to gift just about everyone related to the wedding ceremony something lovely and far more expensive than what Americans typically gift—including to the parents of the lovely couple—and when Brits show up for a wedding it is customary for the bar to be open and ready to pour before the ceremony starts (something I’ve never seen done at an American wedding).  Having ducked in to the room designated as ‘the bar’ for a brief moment with the groom seconds before the ceremony was to begin and, of course, not realizing how perfectly normal it is to carry a cocktail into the ceremony [and unaware that most of the other invited guests were already seated for the wedding drink in hand] I made the terrible faux pas of answering the question “Is this where the baaaa is?” with a short “It’s where it’s going to be…” before realizing virtually everyone in attendance not designated as the father-of-the-bride had already crashed the bar, loaded up for what they thought would be a long drought before the ceremony would release them back for a congratulatory libation and that denying these last-minute arrivals a quick snort was [albeit unintended] rude of me as a host [though, truth be told, the actual ‘marriage’ was actually quite short—the bride and groom, having attended numerous weddings together over the preceding years well-anticipated the fidget factor of their party-hungry guests and were sensitive to the will of the crowd].  To the charming folks, Diella and Danny and others, who were parched and sober 20 minutes longer than was absolutely necessary, I extend my sincerest apologies and plead only ignorance to the customs of a foreign land and beyond my myopic American frame of reference– it shall never happen again, and I hope we made up for it immediately following by getting you all as thoroughly lubricated as good taste and proper wedding etiquette would allow.  Did that mid-party bar reinforcement with extra Maker’s Mark earn me any forgiveness points at all?

The wedding was lovely, I fulfilled my escort obligations down the aisle without incident, and the party afterward was, by all accounts [other than the one my son made describing my dancing skills] a rousing success.  A good time was had by all, a better time was had by some, and only a couple of instances of ‘you’re NOT driving’ cropped up by celebration’s end [some folks just need to understand the premise ‘a little moderation tonight’ will save you from having the leather seats on the new BMW professionally cleaned tomorrow].  For those seven of you who somehow, when your cab failed to arrive and no wireless service could be secured to call for another, magically crammed your way into the half of my car not already filled up with decorative flotsam and jetsam in need of transport back to the bride’s home at the end of the evening, I apologize for the violation of the personal space rules of civilized society—it was that or leave you alone… in the dark… in a remote location… dressed in high heels and party dress… on Halloween weekend—did I mention it was dark?  That one of you seriously thought you might all hike the 5 miles from the Marin Headlands over the Golden Gate into San Francisco—in heels—makes me smile the knowing smile of a local who has just saved someone’s life in some fantastic way that will never be comprehended by the redeemed.  In keeping with the wedding’s theme, keep calm and carry on.

A nice touch was the tag team speech made by the two groomsmen—apparently the custom at British weddings is for the groom’s best men to make speeches more akin to flat out roasts of the groom, and virtually no subject or life embarrassment is off limits [a far more entertaining custom than the traditional boring speeches made by American groomsmen].  Sitting directly across the feast table from the groom’s mother, we watched her face change from absolute delight to sheer terror as the first wave of ‘best men’ remarks filled the microphone [yes, amplified so there could be no escape].   For my own part when the bride’s father’s turn arrived, I had prepared no remarks and merely spoke extemporaneously.  I had given thought to a direction each of the previous week’s mornings when my faithful dog awoke me for a trip outside during the 2 o’clock hour but none of these filled my mind when my turn to speak arrived.  The day before at the conclusion of the rehearsal brunch, I had driven a forgotten purse to my mother-in-law in another town—she and my sister and brother-in-law had driven nearly 30 miles before realizing they would need a credit card to check in to the hotel they decided to stay at near the wedding venue.  The music pouring out loudly during that drive through traffic ended up inspiring my remarks—not Dylan, or Springsteen or Neil Young, Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon or any of my generation’s great song writers.  I had expected to find some magic lyric to riff off for a toast but the lyric never came—only the title of a song by, of all people, a Canadian [which, when mentioned drew a  nice laugh from the mostly British and American guests].   All that evening and into the day of the wedding I was hearing the live and raucous version of Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession” running like an earworm through my brain—fitting that a Sarah inspired my thoughts for my Sarah on that special day.

I spoke of possession– the act, and possession– the state.  Wedding gifts had been arriving for weeks in advance of the ceremony and the whole notion of ‘things’ acquired and possessed seemed fitting.  But more important as the words flowed out was the state of being possessed—the feeling that overwhelms you when you are so deeply in love with someone else that the real treasure is not the ‘thing’ you share together but the feeling that no one in the world has ever felt what you feel, that no one has ever sensed what you sense, and no one has ever loved as you love.  And the real treasure is the moment each day that reminds you of that possession.  The 2 o’clock dog whimper that leads to a cold walk across the floor to the door followed by a return under the covers to a hand held for a brief few moments before you both drift back to sleep—a treasure of possession.  That moment during a walk in the hills when you realize your pace far outstretches hers and you turn to wait while she catches up, takes your hand for a few paces, and stays directly at your side until the trail forces you apart—another treasure.  That glance across the table when your eyes meet and you both realize simultaneously that this single moment in time—this incredible event evolved from all these peoples’ millions of other moments spent living lives around the world and somehow intertwined to be here on this one night in this one place for this one celebration—could only have happened because long ago in a different time and place those eyes were possessed with something far more valuable and far more lasting than any trinket gathered up and placed on a wall or a shelf or in a drawer.

The artwork I collect brings me joy and though it likely will never be worth the money I’ve spent gathering it up and framing it to be hung on the walls of our home, I treasure the chase and the smiles and nods of people when they realize so many pieces surrounding us while we dine are not random.  The world is not random, the people who come and go in our lives are not random, and the things we let possess us are not random.  There is an order to the universe and all we have to do is live long enough to appreciate it.  If you look hard enough into JB Thompson’s art, you’ll see the structure and the detail of an architect rather than the apparent chaos of what seems to be abstract and random.  Beneath everything build to last is a solid foundation, a well-drawn plan, skillful maintenance, and an appreciation for the thing itself that prevents anyone coming along and tearing it down.

Show me something built to last
Or something built to try.

The Grateful Dead — Built To Last (1989)

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Surrender To It (Then Paint It Black)

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The tile man arrived this morning to begin the job of renovating the master bathroom and delivering to us the clean white porcelain shower and interesting flooring I thought we were aiming for when we added the room onto our aging 1950 rancher a decade ago.

Navajo white

At the time we did our addition the bathroom was the one room where we mildly played out the Mars versus Venus controversy husbands and wives inevitably bump up against while engaged in construction projects—we knew we wanted hardwood flooring for most of the added on square footage since it would match the flooring throughout the remainder of our home but the flooring and color scheme for the bathroom became a source for debate.  For most of the new spaces the decision-making process was fairly straightforward.  Once we had a general theme for each room in mind the wall colors were easy to agree on and once we knew we were going to paint rather than wallpaper the negotiations simplified between her ‘final look’ vision and mine.  While there are infinite shades of color on the palette, there are only so many ways you can fundamentally disagree about paint on walls because paint, for all practical purposes, doesn’t generate a significant pattern or create a related image the way a papered wall does.  Both of us lived in student apartments in college and both of us remembered the landlords’ various admonitions—“you can do whatever you want with the walls as long as they’re patched and Navajo white again when you move out.”  The apartment where she lived when we met—the hangout where we played RISK all summer and drank homemade Kahlua cooked up in a turkey roaster—had a large curlicue-shaped design in brightly-painted colors but it was four coats of Navajo white before the landlord would agree to mail a deposit check after graduation.  We knew we wanted color on every wall and that Navajo white wasn’t going to be one of them.  Wood floors and pigment should have been easy for us and, for the most part, it was pretty painless finding our way to a consensus.  But the bathroom is an intensely personal space and settling it was different.  The truth, it seems, is more easily revealed when you step over the threshold into a bathroom.  Nothing remains secret for long in there.

The challenge of the bathroom probably started at birth and became pronounced somewhere during our early childhood and formative years.  Hundreds of miles apart and not to set eyes on each other for decades until college was nearly over, we were already, unknowingly, charting a path toward marital confrontation.  Maybe some brilliantly insightful kindergarten teacher could have noticed it—but likely not.  Even as all the signs were there visibly open and notorious, connecting the dots and recognizing the challenges to come would probably have been undetectable.  My finger painting of a house and a tree and a dog in the sunshine didn’t look terribly different than hers at that age but make no mistake about it– we ‘saw’ things differently in our mind’s eye and we still do.  She, the classic left-brained linear and analytical has a hard time visualizing what isn’t there to be observed; me, the classic right-brained random and intuitive glaringly comfortable with the subjective world and able to look beyond the ‘what is there’ and see into the ‘what could be’ if we only carved it out and made it so.  A recipe destined for kitchen clash if ever there was one.  Funny that, because on the evening of our first date we talked most of the night away with so many conversations about styles and types and looks and feels of houses and rooms we appreciated and it never once seemed like we didn’t see exactly the same ‘lifestyle’ in our minds.  The picture was probably the same deep down but the extraction of the image is always where things go a little wobbly: how the artist chisels a pretty girl out of marble is the difference between some tacky overpriced statuette on the buffet table adjacent to the stairway bannister and the Venus de Milo.  Execution is the thing.

She’s a lot like her father was—linear in approach.  We used to joke about him at Christmas because it was so easy to figure out what he would buy his wife for a gift—just walk through the nice dresses section of Macy’s and look at the mannequins.  He didn’t marry pieces into an ensemble—he bought the mannequin exactly as it had been presented by the retail floor designers.  His brain just wasn’t wired to see the possibilities and he accepted that these kinds of things were best left in the hands of the paid professionals.  It didn’t matter what the mannequin cost, he was buying it—a huge leap for a depression-baby with severe penny-pinching tendencies.  No matter really, I finally figured out.  His wife would be returning it shortly after the holiday and then spending hours shopping the clearance racks in search of the best possible bargain in the store to get what she actually wanted.  She got her way every time despite them dancing the dance that always ended up with the old familiar choreography.  He relented on things that really didn’t matter to him as much as he thought they should and she accepted his graciousness in making the attempt.  How he ever ended up with a turquoise-painted house, I’ll never know and never understand.  She must have hurt him terribly somewhere along the way because turquoise was his idea.  There’s the box, there’s being ‘in the box’ and then there’s a turquoise house making it hard to imagine ever even finding the box much less him having stepped out of it so publicly.  Turquoise paint was his rebel yell—a streak of fiercely independent, non-linear, walk-on-the-wild-side decision-making that she let happen for more than 40 years and several house re-paintings until finally changing the color to a benign shade of tan with brown trim after he passed away.

When the time came where a decision was needed and the bathroom’s look had to become a commitment and not a discussion we both reverted back to safe patterns long honed—patterns of behavior that have worked for us throughout our lives.  She pointed to a specific architectural magazine piece with a delightfully bright and airy bathroom style that would include her cast iron claw foot tub, salvaged from a turn-of-the-century remodel and fresh from a refurbishing with new porcelain and silver feet.  On the floors, small squares of celery-colored tile with butter-colored grouting that would flow out to cream and white wainscoting that drew the eyes to a picture window and garden foliage.  Mannequin in hand, I copied that magazine design exactly for her without another word as to possibilities and color schemes and “wouldn’t this be nice” suggestions.  Not always successfully, I’ve always tried to know, somehow, when it was time to turn away and concede the point.

Every month or so we visit my mother-in-law and do random chores that she’s no longer able to manage on her own.  Awhile back I was on the roof cleaning out rain gutters and preparing the downspouts for the upcoming rainy season.  I noticed a splash of turquoise paint around the base of the sheathing at the bottom of the chimney—a patch of color missed by the brown and tan boys that wiped out my father-in-law’s wolf howl paint job.  It made me smile and remember him fondly one more time and it reminded me how much I love my wife’s left brain ways.  I know whenever there’s a challenging decision we struggle with it’s only a matter of time before she gets her way.  She’s supposed to get her way– she’s the left brain and more linear and logical.  At least I know when I’m gone she’ll never paint our bathroom Navajo white.

And dreams of our moments together
Color my world with hopes of loving you

Chicago — Colour My World (1972)

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Puppy Love (She’s Cute But Just Shoot Me Now)

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Back in the Stone Age when I was in high school I hung around with a lot of different crowds and listened to a lot of different music.  Smart kids with their Beatles and their Stones and their Zeppelin; not as smart kids who paid good money for The Monkees and The Partridge Family; athletes and scholars and pep squad girls—Seals and Croft and America and Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart; Jimi Hendrix junkies and normal fun kids who listened to Marvin Gaye, James Taylor, and Carol King– and occasionally tough kids who proved there might be life after T Rex and Mott the Hoople and Gary Glitter and snoring their way through high school [albeit occasionally in prison].  A few of them went on to do great things—well, good and well-known things if not great.  A few went on to do things better not remembered or talked about.  For most of my time back then, my social circle was fairly diverse; thanks to a District pass as the editor of the newspaper I was a card-carrying member of the ‘I can get me and a few friends off campus any time I want to go to the beach’ club, a skinny-legged staple at the [far] end of the basketball team bench trying unsuccessfully to look like I deserved to be there, and, courtesy of summers as a solid, beer-drinking construction laborer my ‘work skills’ easily converted into evenings and weekends swilling Miller High Life or Michelob with my eventual Best Man, Roy, in a backyard shed converted into a multi-purpose photo darkroom, persistently rumbling quadraphonic concert hall, and permanently Bacardi 151-scented man cave.  There was a volunteer tree sprout beyond the shed and sprinkler range in the corner of that yard—a sprout  that survived for years on little more than piss and backwash from near empty bottles.  Now more than 35 years later, the tree is majestic, fully-canopied, and nearly 50 feet tall—a tribute to the nurturing nitrogen compounds created from rapidly recycled Michelob, pizza crusts, and the occasional beer barf [once again, I remind you, please do NOT puke in the direction of the quadraphonic turntable or the color enlarger].  Add the part-time job working for KEZY, the local Top 40 radio station to my diverse group of friends, schizophrenic co-workers, and related musical influences and you have a record collection entirely worthy of Sansui, Cerwin Vega, and Licorice Pizza.

We listened to a huge variety of things back then and everyone had an opinion as to what was better than what and who was like whom based upon what records they had in their collection.  If you listened to Elvis you were one thing–if you owned David Cassidy, another [you figure it out].   Kool and the Gang was good but if you had Parliament Funkadelic  and Otis Redding it was somehow better.  Your parents listened to Gordon Lightfoot if they were young, Paul Anka if they were a little older, and I remember houses where the only thing you heard besides kids screaming at each other was an Andy Williams or a Doris Day album.  Some houses never played the radio or stereo at all.  You tried to stay away from those places—they smelled like your Grandma’s house, had bowls of apples on the counter and almost never had Pepsi in the refrigerator.  In elementary school you traded marbles.  In junior high it was baseball cards.  By high school it was music.  I will totally trade you that Emerson, Lake, and Palmer for my Sounds of Silence [because I have another one at home, dude].  Morrison Hotel for Innervisions?  OK. Sure.  “But I feel guilty ripping you off like that ‘cause Innvervisions is gonna be a classic….”  To this day I maintain you’ll learn more about someone in 5 minutes by studying their iPod than chatting with them for an hour over a cocktail.  Every first date should start off with a mandatory iPod swap.  Both sides get to listen to the first 5 songs that pop out in the shuffle mode.  After that, if they want to continue the date—game on.  Not attracted to their music?  “Thanks but I have to go now.”  Buy you dinner first?  “Uh, let’s grab some coffee sometime, maybe.”  If guys could have had a way to be forewarned she was a Donny Osmond freak back then, maybe things would have turned out different.  “She was hot, man but I just couldn’t go for it.  Bad enough she owned The Archies, man, but when she whipped out the Portrait of Donny, man, I started to feel this pounding in my brain and I think it was a stroke, man.  Is that possible at my age?”  Clearly it wasn’t the Cerwin Vegas.  Maybe it was a Sugar, Sugar high.

For as long as I can remember I had at least one job and worked more hours than I played [which probably explains why so many ‘friends’ on Facebook are people I knew casually but aren’t necessarily the people I spent a lot of time with doing ‘fun’ things—if I wasn’t at work, I was probably decompressing with cold beers and the friends from work who had the same rotten schedules as I had].  I don’t know why I’m proud to say I never worked in a fast food joint [or any food joint, actually];  I was somehow always able to find other jobs that kept me out of a capped uniform and away from the deep fat fryer.  There were times that meant pushing a broom, mopping the floors, and scrubbing the toilets or cinching down mental patients for their periodic Thorazine shots but it was honest work and taught me the value of a dollar, the merits of self-improvement, and which orderlies to bribe with cigarettes as they strap you down on the gurney [I swear the minute those voices in my head start making sense I’m going out and buying a carton of smokes].  For a long time I worked full shifts at one job only to clock out and dash to another to make ends meet [I, apparently, had longer ‘ends’ than  most and eight hours of low-wages normally didn’t meet them sufficiently].  I made a deal with the folks at the sanitarium to let me start my shift a half-hour late every day since I had to ride a bike from the pallet yard across town to the hospital.  For some reason I always got the shitty clean-ups that happened on my wing—probably supervisory payback for coming in late every afternoon.  I didn’t really mind much—I was swimming in cash, I bought cassettes [an upgrade from the 8-track] three at a time, and my upper body was as buff as any Orange County surfer’s from chucking those pallets into stacks—nobody, including the crazies, messed with me.  Once you’ve used a Georgia-Pacific nail gun for eight hours running, it isn’t much of a stretch to jam a needle at the funny farm.

They didn’t play a lot of T Rex at the Guidance Center and most of the staff smoked menthol but the crowd walking the halls was certainly eclectic.  They grew up on Glenn Miller, the Fontane Sisters and Tennessee Ernie Ford.  I’m guessing they had their own ear worms and didn’t need anybody’s big ass speakers pounding in their brains.  Besides, most of them were already insane when Cerwin Vegas came around.

And if your train’s on time you can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay

Bachman-Turner Overdrive—Takin’ Care of Business (1973)

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Phylogenetics (Apparently Everyone Poops Except Berkeleyians)

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Chip and Casper

If we ever meet on the trail there’s a good chance I’ll have two Australian shepherds trotting alongside me– they’re good walking companions that never complain about the incline to the ridges, the weeds, their sore knees, or the occasional out-of-place something fallen from a mountain biker’s backpack or carelessly tossed by an inconsiderate hiker.  They are  herders and somehow biologically programmed to nudge my calves, redirect my path, circle around me persistently checking my gait, and make certain I don’t stray.  We walk the same trails and paths we’ve walked for years and they know to wait near junctions and trail splits for which direction we’ll take on any given hike knowing where the trails all lead and where the next decision point will occur based upon the route taken that day.  They know where water will be dispensed into my Sierra cup for them to lap up, where ponds might hold a late-season swimming opportunity and where they can stray off trail in an opposite direction from my path and still end up well ahead of me on the trail when I finally round the turn they know I’ll eventually round.  They are smart– among the smartest of breeds– and they understand patterns and routines.  They know I will wait patiently when they need to step off the trail for relief and they know I will dutifully pick up and pack out what they [apparently insensitively] try to leave behind.  And, unlike my genetically closer cousins, the Berkeleyians, they are forgiving of my little indiscretions on the trail and don’t think of themselves as flagrant lawbreakers.  They are dogs and they behave as dogs are prone to behave.  And because they behave as dogs do, if we ever meet on the trail there’s a good chance I’ll have a bag of something warm and brown and decidedly ‘not native’ looped over my belt awaiting transfer to the waste bins sitting near the improved entrances to our open space.

My Aussies don’t have opposable thumbs but they are smarter than most folks I know who do.  They don’t think of themselves as rude, selfish or irresponsible when they relieve themselves in the weeds [I suspect they secretly don't think much about the act at all].  They just do what nature calls upon them [and all of us] to do.  They are animals and, according to what I learned from a children’s book, everyone poops.  No big deal, right?  Well, apparently for a lot of folks it is a big deal that dogs [of all the animals on the planet] poop and apparently it’s an even bigger deal if we dog owners don’t immediately shield the rest of [the dog poop loathing human] society from that reality.  The case in point?  Cleaning up after your dog in the wild.

In the open space where we hike there are deer and coyotes and bobcats and other wild animal kingdom creatures big and small which daily poop on and off the trail.  No one complains about these indiscretions and no one wags a finger and mutters a tsk-tsk when hiking past what is obviously the remains of the day from a wild creature who knows no better than to flaunt the laws of common decency and defecate within sight of the trail only to fail at immediately removing the offending scat to a [biodegradable] bag made up of compostable corn starch.  Cows are grazed on these hillsides and neither they nor their owners choose to follow them proactively cleaning up the piles and piles of dung left after a small herd passes over the trails.  Horses boarded at nearby stables frequent the trails and are groomed and bathed and curry-combed lovingly at the end of every ride– but never once have I seen a rider dismount, tether his steed, and remove to a faraway container the massive piles of dung left blatantly along the trails where other walkers and joggers have to tread judiciously to avoid stepping in or slipping on the excrement.  On more than one occasion I’ve come across, in plain sight of trail walkers, scat remains with a distinctively human look to them [the most obvious clues of which were the strange proximity to the base of a tree or rock and the noticeable protuberance of a white paper-like substance, smeared with traces of the offending animal's manure, laying almost immediately adjacent to the droppings].

I maintain rules about cleaning up after my dogs wherever we go– including the open spaces and in the wild.  If the dog chooses to drop a deuce within eyesight of the trail, perhaps 25 feet in either direction, I go after it and carry it out.  If the dog chooses to bless some mustard weed patch [itself a non-native invader] well up the hillside I tip my cap to the God of plant nutrition and wish that little turd a happy journey back through the decomposition process.  There are times when I hike the ridge trails and my Aussie companions quickly fill the available compartments I’ve allotted for their carry-out baggage.  I handle it simply: if there’s enough bag to wrap around my belt and create a safe tote-sack that leaves one hand for the water and another to pick up a rock and scare off a rattlesnake, I carry the bag.  If not, the bag sits by the side of the trail for [at most] an hour until I pass back through on my exit route back to ‘civilization’ among the domesticated [and the humans].  I wasn’t the first to crack this genius code of saving the ‘carry’ for the return trip out but I admit I’m a willing co-conspirator when it comes to ways I can hike without the likelihood of busting a plastic bag full of dog shit all over my pants.  Apparently that habit offends the Berkeleyians and others who consider my temporary waste storage an affront to humanity and a gross violation of the littering laws.  The subject came up last week in a blog I read and commented on about scooping and the opposition was vehement.  Not carrying the bag– even though I return within the hour and always remove it permanently [oftentimes carrying out some other dog's treasure as well] is “…rude, selfish, and irresponsible.”

The whole thing slipped my mind until we traveled to a small dog-friendly B&B in the Santa Cruz hills this last weekend for a well-deserved anniversary getaway.  The innkeepers were friendly and treated our dogs well.  The place was rural but safely fenced along the perimeters with plenty of acreage and untended forest and garden areas where the dogs could find relief.  Our innkeeper pointed out that under no circumstances should the dogs be allowed to drop their plop on certain sections of the property– specifically those with grass [and coincidentally the areas looking most like the areas where I have trained my dogs to relieve themselves at home so I don't have to wash off the patios and walkways].  Naturally we tried our best to accommodate our hosts.  Naturally, our dogs followed years of conditioning and the pleasant sweet smells of a freshly cut lawn.  Despite my best efforts to entice them over to the woods, including feeding them out near the property perimeters so they’d be ‘right there’ at the time they were most vulnerable, they chose the grass.  And every time they did I sheepishly [I wonder where sheep squat] went for the scat removal tools and dutifully carried the offending piles off to the compost hole we had been directed to at check-in.  I made a good faith effort to be respectful and clean up everything and our hosts made a good faith effort not to seem obsessively crazy about animals and their poop habits.  We coexisted nicely.

Is it litter if it isn't removed immediately?

The last time I walked down Telegraph Avenue I was appalled at how filthy it was, even by Berkeley standards.  The sidewalks of Paris, known for being a minefield of dog droppings, have nothing on Berkeley.  The garbage is everywhere and the homeless population no longer seems to care whether they get access to a Starbucks or a McDonald’s restroom or an out-of-the-way alley when it’s time to relieve themselves.  I literally watched a man step up into a raised planter box within 3 feet of dozens of passersby, drop his [last washed in the 90's] jeans and squat in full view of anyone not too embarrassed to turn away their gaze.  No one said a word.  No one shouted at him to clean up the mess.  No one addressed him in any way different than if he had been an animal in the wild doing what animals do.  Until that happens and Berkeleyians start picking up the litter and the non-native debris in their own front yards and city streets, they can simply shut up and stay out of the areas in my town where I walk and perform my little indiscretions with a bag by the side of the trail for an hour.  Until that happens, I’m thinking we’ve merely evolved into different species and we should avoid each others’ habitats so as not to be offended by what we see in each others’ bad habits.

So you try to pick them all up
Little pieces falling in the dust
Little part of ash we don’t need
So leave it to be taken upon the breeze
The wind is always blowing

Gomez – Little Pieces (2009)

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Manipulating The Market (It’s a Rocky Road)

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Good marketing can be a thing of beauty.  Companies that dissect their targets into precise slivers of buy-ready prospects, feed them the exact messages needed to coax them over their purchase hurdles and march them willingly up the aisle toward a marriage of product and pocketbook and profits drawn from those cash exchanging action steps are magnificent to observe.  Seeing companies do it well creates respect and admiration.  They ‘get it’ and they pay attention to making sure that you ‘get it’ too—so much attention that you’re pleased to shell out your hard earned nickels and want to come back next time and renew those vows again— whether that’s a good decision or not.  A Diamond Is Forever.  Even if your love eventually falls somewhat short of that mark, you’d never actually consider giving her some other jewel when you pop the question, would you?  Just Do It.  What are you, a wimp?  Get off your ass, go outside, and do something!  You Deserve A Break Today (even if In ‘N Out really is what a hamburger is all about).  A little respite from your otherwise dreary life can be savored over two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.  It’s a great jingle and the tagline is somehow more inviting than In ‘N Out’s implied message that you should get over here, get your grub, gobble it down and then just please go away.  Nothing to see here, folks, and no reason to linger (a playground for the kids—are you insane?).  Hanging around only clogs the parking lots and the aisle for the next marketing marriage ceremony.  Good burger or bad burger, a match made in marketing heaven.  Even movies can be marketing genius.  Would you ever order a martini “stirred, not shaken” without looking over your shoulder to see if James Bond was frowning in your direction?

For some industries, the four P’s of the marketing mix—product, place, price, and promotion—have come under attack over the last few years as product and place have been carved away, homogenized, and shunted from relevance in favor of a more strict regimen of price and promotion gimmicks.  Can you think of a burger joint that doesn’t also serve the healthier alternative chicken-something and salad-something to make you feel better about the grease patty you came in for, a gas station without a mini-mart and a [liquefied coffee concentrate] espresso machine to save you a stop at that ‘other’ coffee place, a chain grocery store that doesn’t have a hot food deli counter, ‘warehouse’ bulk-packaged toilet paper, and one of those ‘other’ coffee places so you don’t have to visit the mini-mart?  The same products are lining the same too-narrow and too-high shelves as available square footage and product facings inside your grocer are set and reset to follow schematics built on last month’s sell-through data to maximize profits rather than service the store’s customer base with selection and quality.  New product introductions are too risky for most grocery companies’ financial models and consequently need to be subsidized by manufacturers willing to pay slotting fees offsetting the risk a product intro might not catch on quickly enough nor whet enough of the public’s appetite to warrant devoting space and energy to the offering.  Well-heeled manufacturers with healthy balance sheets pay the fees [kind of feels like extortion, doesn’t it?] and write them down as a cost of doing business while smaller, less capitalized producers struggle to be noticed amidst the smaller outlets with weaker distribution clout despite having superior products.  We buy the same things, eat the same things, and throw away the refuse from the same things like sheep being led because marketing has driven the ‘cost’ out of the business in such a way as to stifle uniqueness and limit the variety of competitors.  Nowhere has this been more evident than at my least favorite shopping experience: Safeway.

I have a strong suspicion the Chief Marketing Officer at Safeway is the devil and that the devil’s toolbox includes the Club Card.  How else do you justify and explain why green leaf lettuce costs $.99 a head on Thursday with your card, $2.99 the next morning, and then moves to 2 heads for $1.99 by Monday?  Did the growers change the pricing of those wilted boxes already sitting inside the massive warehouse out there near the Interstate?  How do you explain or justify the marketing genius of selling a half-gallon of ice cream [oops, excuse me, 1.5 quarts of ice cream in the newly-downsized packaging made to look like the old half-gallon containers] for $3.99 with a card but offer a $.25 discount when I buy 8?  Who besides Dick Van Patten or Betty Buckley buys 8 half-gallons of ice cream?  I bought one and paid full price.  The next week there was a different offer and you had to pay close attention to realize it—apparently I didn’t and ‘paid the price’ for it.  The same tags that announce you can BOGO (Buy One, Get One) at a particular price were hanging on the shelves by my favorite ice cream (I do, occasionally, shop the other aisles of the store).  Seeing a BOGO at $2.99 I grabbed two of the infamous 1.5 quart containers and headed to the checkout with my other items.  After ringing up the totals, I paid $2.99 twice.  What about the BOGO?  Buy one at $2.99 and get a pint, not a half-gallon, er, 1.5 quart container of something for free.  Would I like to return one item and go back and select a pint?  No thanks (dinner was on the stove but I was missing these couple of items and made a quick trip), I and should have read the details in the small 8 point font that was microscopically-inserted underneath the 44-point Buy One, Get One Free headline.  Somewhere the FTC is asleep at the wheel.

I needed a pint basket of strawberries recently—enough for a couple of sliced berries to go on a salad for two people.  Rather than fight my way across town and through the crowed Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck?) parking lot, I went to Safeway.  The only strawberries in the store—a four-pint flat priced at $6.99 with my card and a Buy One, Get Two Free offer.  Really?  I have to spend $6.99 to finish a recipe that requires 6 berries and take home three flats of berries or forfeit my Club Card Savings or else walk out and drive across town?  Call it what it is:  you overbought strawberries in flats, you’re afraid they’ll grow mold before morning, you’d prefer I take them home and throw them away with you pocketing my $6.99 than you throwing them away as a loss, and you have a pallet of pint-sized strawberries just beyond those swinging doors by the cheese and egg gondolas.

For the record, I paid the $6.99, took the strawberry flats home, trimmed them, blended them, and froze them.  The sorbet is delicious and the margaritas are still flowing, but Safeway still sucks!

Diamonds are forever
They are all I need to please me

Shirley Bassey — Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

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It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And Heaven’s A Fairy Tale)

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Harold Camping

It’s amazing to me what some people believe and the lengths to which they’ll go to make you believe it right along with them.  Harold Camping, the Oakland-based Christian radio zealot predicted through a complex interpretation of hidden messages woven into the Bible that Judgment Day would occur on May 21, 1988 [it apparently didn't] and later revised his analysis to predict it was really September 7, 1994 [it apparently wasn't] so he took at least one more well-publicized crack at it recently saying the End of Days would occur on May 21, 2011– at 6pm.  No one really fully grasped which time zone he was referring to when he made his pronouncement and set the clock-watching in motion but those of us born before 1970 knew to be ready to duck and cover.  As was the case during elementary school, no blast arrived and we all dusted ourselves off and stretched out our legs and went about doing whatever it was we were doing before the ‘sirens’ sounded.  After a brief period of confusion not altogether unexpected from an 89-year old whack job, Camping confirmed for the media that he didn’t really understand what happened, was ‘flabbergasted’ and needed to ‘think this out’ before combing his hair, returning to work on Monday, and appearing for the cameras to acknowledge that he was slightly off in his calculations.  The new and improved date for the Rapture will be delayed by another five months and is now slated for October 21, 2011 according to the Family Radio leader.  And I suspect he really believes it.

Jim Jones

He’s not the first charismatic voice to charm believers into parting with their hard-earned dollars [it's reported that his Family Radio operation received about $100M over the last 7 years in donations] and that these last few days leading up to the [temporarily postponed] end have enabled FR to buy as many as 5,000 billboards alerting the expected 200M Christians slated for Rapture to be standing at the ready [the rest of us are screwed, of course, and will soon learn that The Devil is really the lead singer of a Barry Manilow tribute show from Brooklyn].  Charlatans and hucksters have been suckering in gullible wonks since the beginning of time and only the end of the world will stop the selling of snake oil to people willing to be deceived rather than face their mortal fears.  Even Stephen Hawking was appalled by the roundabout deceptions people will delude themselves with rather than face stark scientific evidence and the prospect that perhaps all we are is transient matter and temporary energy amidst a universe that punishes the lack of longevity with the laws of physics– a short half-life is a short half-life and nothing more.  We live, we die, and maybe that’s it.  Energy, temporarily organized into a form we think holds greater significance than it really does.  Or if you prefer the liberal arts to physics, pretend Gertrude Stein was referring to Heaven when she said [about Oakland] “There is no there there.”  Not that she would know but People’s Temple founder Jim Jones’ name is included among the 918 cyanide-laced Kool-Aid drinking followers just memorialized in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery so apparently there’s a little ‘there’ there even though it might have arrived 33 years after the fact.

Stephen Hawking

On the one hand you have the scientist telling you your brain is nothing more than an organic computer and that there “is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”  So life beyond this temporal existence is essentially meaningless and we should merely do all we are capable of in this life and not concern ourselves with chasing meaning or order from anything beyond what we can see and feel and experience on Earth.  On the other hand, the zealots want us charging through this life behaving in such a manner as to bum’s rush our way into the salvation queue such that we’ll be raptured beyond the velvet ropes and into a heavenly afterlife where all will be revealed to us and we’ll finally understand the depth of the mysteries and the subtlety of the madness we’ve come to know here on Earth.  It will all be made clear and we won’t be taking anything with us but our soul [thank you John and Yoko].

I’m a little bummed about Harold Camping’s revised timetable for my imminent departure from this Earth–he has me checking out a little more than a week before my daughter’s wedding and I had really hoped to hang around at least that long and enjoy the party [the budget is taking up a couple of years’ worth of vacation fund, it's almost paid for up front, and it would be a shame to waste all that great wine we have sitting in storage for the nuptials].

Barry Manilow (as The Devil)

Besides, her dress is fabulous, a lot of guests are flying in from Europe, and, well, it’s a wedding after all and they’re meant to be a wild time for everybody that hangs around until after the cake is cut and the dancing starts.  My wife is going to make extra certain she looks Mother-of-the-Bride hot and you know as well as I do that if you wait out a wedding until the dancing starts, you’re bound to get lucky– that will be my version of Rapture.  Besides, sooner or later the DJ is going to cave in to some Great-Aunt’s request and play a Barry Manilow song– and I need to know who to follow when the Conga line leading to the flaming fires of eternity starts weaving through the crowd.

And love is all that I need
And I found it there in your heart
It isn’t too hard to see
We’re in heaven

Bryan Adams – Heaven (1983)

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Unhappy Endings (No Means ‘No’ and Any Means ‘Any’)

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The High Wire Act

Customer service can be a high wire act.  I’m usually the guy in the group that is far more tolerant, far more patient and accommodating when things don’t go as planned, and the one who will shrug off most ‘it didn’t go as I thought it would’ moments with an eye toward ‘Oh well… it’s not the end of the world.’  I’m the one who has the attitude ‘if nobody died, it isn’t a big deal, really’ and I’m quick to forgive and forget a disappointment where the overall effect on life and civilization is relatively minor.  My view is that the best service teams are like the circus– they operate with a net and if the artist occasionally misses the trapeze bar and falls to the webbing, that’s a flash of adrenaline to remind us that the circus is exhilarating but dangerous and that the tigers sometimes come off of their chairs and misbehave and we should all pay attention.  Players don’t always perform as the playwright scripted the play and whether we’re the actor or the patron, the lion tamer or the popcorn-munching audience member, we have an obligation to make the outcome a good one for everybody.  I order a latte—they hand me a mocha.  Oh well, I probably secretly wanted the chocolate infused sugar high anyway and it’s a shame to waste it.  My steak is somewhat beyond the rare I asked for.  No big deal as long as it isn’t as dry as shoe leather– it’ll remind me of my mother’s roast beef.  My car was supposed to be repaired and ready by 3pm.  If there’s nowhere I had to be or I can get where I want to go another way, it isn’t worth making a big fuss about– things happen that can’t be avoided.  But I get as frustrated as the next person when there’s a breakdown in customer service that is avoidable, when things aren’t handled professionally and acknowledged as ‘we’re wrong’ when they were wrong, and when the response to my being inconvenienced as a customer, however minor, isn’t done cleanly and crisply as I’d expect from someone interested in retaining my loyalty.  When my view of how a circumstance should be handled doesn’t match up with the offending entity’s view, there’s a brief tipping point where the relationship can be salvaged or tossed out with the table scraps forever.  Being right is different than winning and winning, consequently, can be losing in a heartbeat.  The whole battle versus the war thing in the wins and losses column is never really good for a business.  The demanding customer who is vocal and persistent, and becomes progressively louder and louder and makes other patrons uncomfortable in a calculated attempt to persuade management to capitulate wins the battle– the business wins the war because they not only retain that customer’s business, they probably get new customers as the whiner brags about how they berated the business into ponying up to make them happy.  This kind of customer… well, it isn’t me.  My pattern is to ask once for a correction and then to seethe quietly for the duration of the moment after resolution isn’t accommodated, then simply cease doing business forever–a massively bad outcome for a business that could well afford to do the one or two little inexpensive things to make sure I never reach for that red button that launches the self-destruct mode and terminates our customer-vendor high wire act forever.  The red button blows a hole the size of Arkansas into the safety net and that means someone is going to get hurt.

I mention this because there are a few ‘don’t mess with me’ things that people who know me well know not to do– not many, really, but those few aren’t really up for debate.  First, you don’t ever drink from my coffee cup– I’ve had the same one since I was 11 and it’s mine, not yours.  It fits my hand perfectly, it holds the right amount of hot coffee at the right temperature, it’s well-balanced and doesn’t spill even while I’m walking.  It’s so well balanced I once drove to the store with a hot cup on my bumper, admittedly spilling a few drops but the cup stayed safely balanced throughout the drive.  I noticed the steam rising as I passed the back of the car on my way inside and carried a hot cup inside on my errand– a testament it was meant to be mine and mine alone for as long as I live).  I’m territorially alpha male when it comes to my mug and you don’t really want to piss off the alpha male unless you’re prepared to kill him.  No one has reached that point yet.  There are others.  Try putting catsup on that steak I grilled you– I dare you.  There’s a reason the chef salted the dish the way they did and it probably has something to do with how they wanted it to taste.  Try and remember that as you’re overpowering the subtle flavors I’ve tried to infuse onto your palate.  White wine at just below freezer temperature?  No, ma cheri, this much I simply will not do for you!  In fact, don’t ‘mess’ with my wine enjoyment at all if you can help it or out might come the red button.  With that in mind, don’t bait and switch me when I want to give you money.  I hate that.

My bride sings in the choir and they meet for rehearsals every Thursday evening.  In the town where I live is a pizza place, Rocco’s, with terrific pies and a nightly special– one night it’s a large for the price of a medium, another night a pitcher of beer is half price, and on Thursday nights, any bottle of wine is only $15 (except one… they specify which one in every ad, every banner, and on the menu). I like wine and $15 is a bargain.  Better still, they carry a red wine grown and bottled here in town, Shadowbrook, that I’ve wanted but never had occasion to try.  We inevitably end up missing the Thursday night special when we come for a pizza– choir will beat out a medium sausage, mushroom, and spinach with a glass of wine every time (being stubbornly chorale-phobic, I don’t really understand why choir always wins but I’ve learned ‘acceptance’ from my periodic interactions with the Presbyterians who do).  But this is Holy Week and last night was Maundy Thursday—just Thursday to me but a night off from choir for my bride as they have rehearsed Tuesday and Wednesday for their Good Friday and Easter performances to the congregation.  We decided to relax over a bottle of wine, Shadowbrook, and a pizza rather than shop and cook at home.  It is, after all, Thursday and “Any bottle of wine is only $15 (except Biali).”  That means we finally get to sample the Shadowbrook.

It’ll be about a 15 minute wait.  No problem– even when 15 minutes stretched to almost a half hour.  Too busy with that table in the back (the City Councilman’s wife and children– I hired him as an entry level sales representative 20 years ago… good kid) to take our order?  No big deal… we’re in no rush.  Water with no ice please.  I’m sorry… excuse me?  The manager says Shadowbrook isn’t part of the special?  How can that be?  The banners and the posters in the door clearly say “Any bottle of wine is only $15 (except Biali).  Is Shadowbrook Biali?”  Oh, I see, there are other bottles excluded as well.  Ahh.  I see.  So the posters and the banners and the menus and the website are all wrong (not accurate, untruths, mistakes, LIES)?  No.  No, no… I’ll just have that water with no ice.  Nope.  No wine.  Thanks, no.  No, I don’t think I’d like to revisit the menu for a second choice before ordering– just the pizza and the water please, no ice.

The Red "Button"

I’m sorry, she ordered the ‘almost’ pint of Stella.  Is this the ‘almost’ pint or the small mug.  Hmm… every other time she’s ordered the ‘almost pint’ it was in that glass and the ‘small mugs’ have always been in these glasses.  This is an ‘almost’ pint?  OK, I’m sure you’re right– after all, you work here and I don’t.  No, everything is fine.  Perfect.  Couldn’t be better.  Happy as a clam.  Thrilled.  The pizza is fine but we’ll take a ‘to-go’ box please.  Nope.  No problem at all.  Thanks very much.

I’m not always able to execute the strategy but I figured out a long time ago the value of thinking it while not saying it aloud.  Seething with an outward smile that belied my frustration, I said none of the things I was thinking.  What difference would winning the battle have made?  I’m sorry, Rocco.  Our time together has come to an end.  When the sausage, mushroom, and spinach cravings strike Mrs. and me, we’ll once again make the longer drive to Melo’s in Pleasant Hill– our former pizza haunt before you came to town.  Melo’s doesn’t have nightly specials, entertainment after 8:30pm, and they don’t sell wine for $15 a bottle on Thursdays.  But they don’t lie to me, they value my business and they don’t put ice in my water when I ask them three times not to– and I’m good with that.

Any means any.  If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.  And, hey, don’t scrimp so much on the sausage!  Customers are paying for it when they order it!

Why, tell me why, did you not treat me right?
Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight

The Beatles — I’m Looking Through You (1965)

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One Man’s Weed (Is Another Man’s Flower)

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The spring equinox has come and gone and today marked the first full day of the season.  It rained so hard yesterday driving actually slowed to well below the speed limit on Highway 101– slowing on California roads when there is no horrendous crash to rubber-neck is unheard of here.  Rain yesterday enough to flood farm fields in the Salinas Valley and overflow the banks of the Nacimiento River but today only sunshine, shadows unseen for days (if not weeks), and bursts of energy from bluebirds and squirrels and other yard inhabitants hunkered down since this latest rash of storms began almost two weeks ago.  Renewal is everywhere– there are blossoms blowing off my cherry tree, the fruitless mulberry I refuse to butcher back to a stump (as my quite unfriendly and unlikeable neighbors to the rear do every late summer) is spewing out allergy-inducing pollen, and the grass is rising faster than I can keep it mowed and has invaded the planter areas abutting the identified lawn with impunity (a tribute to the late spring rains now arriving almost every day with only the occasional storm break– the same rains that render basic weed pulling more like a backhoe excavation than a check and balance exercise between the laws of nature and my hori hori knife).  My roses look like they live down range on an artillery base or maybe amidst the craters of the moon.  Renewal comes at a price and this year’s payment for the privilege of working the land will include new topsoil to replace dirt carted away in the green can along with the trespassing grasses and the weeds to be returned someday as mulch at 10,000 times the mark-up it would cost me to let it mulch directly on site.

We do this dance every year as the spring showers subside and the sun emerges– the reclaiming of the yard from the ravages of winter rains, massive runoffs from up the hill, and the impossible to stop scattering of weeds and debris that flow gravity-fed from the hills farther up our block.  You can’t push back the tide forever and I long ago conceded the December to March mud season to nature’s whimsy and an inevitable backyard flood plain only to try and exert my will beginning with the solstice.  That usually gives me a month before the annual “Paris in the Spring” dinner party we host every year for 30 or 40 starving Presbyterians– just large enough that I’m forced to anticipate outside seating on the back patio and thus necessitating my annual reclamation project.  Nobody wants to savor Côte des Bœuf and a nice Rhone blend while being pollinated by 12 inch dandelions and staring at grey-brown snapdragon skeletons from last season or wafting the sometimes pleasant [and sometimes not] fragrances from the suddenly warming soils of the yard.

My hands achieve a perpetual state of callous within days and the cracking and scaling of workingman’s hands coincides with the still chilly mornings to make dexterity painful.  Workingman’s hands aren’t pleasant for the workingman or the workingman’s wife and I concede easily to hand lotion and gardener’s creams in an effort to remain occasionally invited to wrap my arms around my wife in the middle of the night.  In addition to the weeding and pruning and raking and trimming in my own yard, I work with a small but committed group of dedicated weed pullers to try and eradicate Yellow Star Thistle from our thousands of acres of protected open space.  There are other non-native invasives there… milk thistle, Italian thistle, and yellow mustard.  Most hikers and dog-walkers love the yellow mustard and don’t think of it as problematic but the fields where it has set up shop have slowly squelched out all other life below its stalks and the winters reveal easily the large grey patches of earth where mustard decay has leeched a just toxic enough natural poison from the leaves and pushed back life from the perimeters where the spring growth once staked a claim.  Mustard is at once beautiful and ugly, depending upon your vantage.

There’s a movement afoot to make an attempt at eradicating the yellow mustard but I suspect that movement will rise and fall with the volume of shouts from an uneducated populace seeing only the floral arrangement side of the mustard dichotomy. These will be the same people who have planted Scotch Broom around California and destroyed the native vegetation of the wild lands. They don’t know any better.  Our small group of dike-plugging weeders have tried with some success to focus on winning the solo battle of the Yellow Star rather than all of the other thistles and though we’ve chatted from time to time about the mustard problem, we never seriously carry forward any plan for its removal– impossible as the task would seem it would be even more challenging because most people love the look when spring arrives and the yellow flowers rise above a man’s height and bring bees and butterflies and sneezes and the outcry over trying to pull the stalks out before they flowered and went to seed would echo through the hills louder than the hissing of crickets and ribbets of bullfrogs.

I prefer the bullfrogs.  Besides, like I said, you can’t hold back the tide forever.

But plant your hope with good seeds,
Don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds,
Rain down, rain down on me,
Look over your hills and be still

Mumford and Sons — Thistle and Weeds (2009)

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