Bobby Burns, Time Traveller

The ghost of Bobby Burns shambles along, flashing a sweet, missing-teeth, wasted grin, hollering across the street: ‘Yabba Zabba, Baby!' His signature hepcat greeting shouted with magnanimous wave and flourish, maybe a little mock jig, in loud plaid pants and shiny white shoes. Yeah, there were always vague rumors that he had been a session man on the drums for the likes of Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey—a time traveller from the black and white age of ballrooms and natty suits. The facts of his biography mattered less than how a whole crowd of kids a quarter of his age adopted him, drawn to his singular genius for life, a particular vintage alcoholic, swaggering enthusiasm.

He's a ghost now, and every year a few guys go drink whisky on his grave. Midtown is full of ghosts now—all the stuff that’s disappeared or left behind. The Sam’s Hofbrau sign just got pulled down this year. Odd to see that neon icon unceremoniously hauled away on a flatbed truck, the pudgy, pink cheeked man in a chef's hat still offering up a piping hot roasted ham; and that friendly little spot hidden in the concrete bowels of the downtown shopping mall, with it’s unlikely transportation backstory. In the dark subterranean catacomb of the Preflight Lounge the swingin 70s were archivally frozen in time. It was just razed to make way for a glass basketball arena that will resemble a spaceship.

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The list goes on: a secret lunch counter in the produce docks, the Beat Records, finally swamped over by the inevitable wave of digital music…now it's a suburban chain store. And the Monte Carlo, little corner tavern whose sign boasted ‘Open at 6 am.’ Where are the haunted winos who sat in those dive joints? Sunk deeper into dementia? Or finally reached the last call? ​

​Our crowd of janky midtown punks, scenesters and art freaks rails against the new luxury lofts, high concept eateries and bro bars. But we are getting old and fat, clinging to our antiquated eccentric, late century, counterculture memories. History doesn’t give a shit about our finely honed vintage aesthetic. Time churns and swallows us up as we puzzle over why the things we treasure just don't matter to the newcomers. This is their time, and we have crossed over, the way Bobby Burns did, to some sort of far side from which things must have looked a little strange and unrecognizable. Say it now, with a knowing, wasted sort of enthusiasm: ‘Yabba Zabba Baby!’

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Footage of the fabled Doo-Dah parade, circa 1993, in which Bobby and his drum kit are carried down Capital Avenue on a litter by a worshipful pagan troupe. Video by John Milne.

​Picture of Sarah in a Garden

This is a photo of Sarah many years ago in a little garden in Bodega Bay, at Kelly and John’s wedding. They were so happy that day, Kelly who babysat our kids and worked for Megan’s sister. Kelly who found the man of her dreams after so many years playing an extra in other people’s dreams.

Megan captured this image of Sarah, from behind, the half silhouette of a little girl in her party dress, walking through a spot of sunlight, framed just so by bushes and evergreen branches and flowers, her right arm slightly extended in a wayfinding gesture.

Photographers spend lifetimes waiting for a shot like this, this particular digital arrangement of pixels, proxy of the unexpressed universe. Sarah was maybe five or six, like Alice walking through the tangles of a monochrome wonderland.

John left us way too early, just a few years after their marriage. He had a heart condition, and one day he just pulled over on the side of the road and died, their little daughter Vivian in the car with him. The last thing he did was roll up the windows and lock the doors so she would be safe.
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Now Kelly is raising Vivian. Sarah has grown into a beautiful young lady ready for high school. I wonder if that garden is still there? Megan captured this precious moment—some things happen exactly once.

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​Halloween Ghosts & Magic

Our youngest is in high school, the last kid in the nest. But tonight she is out with her friends, so Meg and I are sitting around the house like lonely old people waiting for the next ring of the doorbell.

On a night like this I can't help drifting back to those times we had, racing around the neighborhood at dusk, the kids in Target costumes clutching pillow cases, animating their carefully chosen alter egos. And my mom, “Mimi,” would make her annual appearance in that goofy outfit, some kind of a mis-mash craft store sorceress. As much as she looked forward to her star turn with the kids, they just couldn't wait to get through the preliminaries and race out the door.

We hit the streets with the efficiency of a door-to-door sales operation, trying to maximize the candy haul. At the end of the night, the kids would dump their bags on the carpet in the front room and commence the serious task of sorting...and gorging themselves on high fructose corn syrup. Like any self-respecting dad, I’d beg for morsels and poach unguarded treats, rebuffed by Audrey’s withering stare.

There is a primal magic about Halloween—the joy of the costume ritual, the flirtation with human terror in a kid’s heart, the departure from normal school night rules. But that magic was a bit obscured from me back then, because we were so caught up in the chaos of managing the whole thing.

The house feels lonely now, but all evening I get a glimpse of that magic framed in the front door: all the runny nosed devils, the wide eyed princesses, trading in the currency of Baby Ruth bars and Starbursts, begging to stay up just a little bit later.

Tonight, the ghosts are real. Memory fills in the missing pieces, and conjures up the things that had been obscured from view—but not until after those things are long gone.

​Vote for Crazy Uncle

Campaign speech to the family on Christmas Eve

Earlier this year, Uncle George suggested I might be a frontrunner for the role of Crazy Uncle in our family. Initially I was resistant, thinking, "how dare you suggest that! I am a normal guy, a low key guy. I'm not that guy."

But the more I thought about it, the more the idea has grown on me. Crazy Uncle...it has a nice ring to it, and it might give me that sense of purpose in life that I've been seeking.

So, I have come around on this question, and am now actively seeking this role. And to be clear, this isn't about me... I'm thinking about the kids, these precious children here, who need a crazy uncle. After all, imagine the thought of growing up without a crazy uncle. What a tragedy that would be.

If you elect me Crazy Uncle, I make the following pledge to you:

I will try to increase my alcohol consumption, and be visibly drunk more often;

I will make more ill advised remarks, will blurt out more things; will downgrade my table manners;

I will tell politically incorrect jokes, and recommend age-inappropriate content. I will make fun of serious things...and I will reserve the right to mock sincere, well meaning people.

I will be that middle aged guy trying a little too hard to be hip and youthful;

I will finally pull the trigger on matching track suits for Megan and me.

If you kids seek my counsel, I will be there for you with questionable advice and get-rich-quick schemes. I will be there for you with apocryphal stories (I will use big words needlessly). I will recommend shallow solutions to complex problems...trust me on this.

If you elect me to the position of Crazy Uncle, we will make this family crazy again! It's going to be tremendous, gonna be really fantastic. I guarantee it. Thank you and God Bless!
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​Coach John Stone

Hey Sean, I just heard from Bill Rapp about the passing of your dad. I’ve been thinking about John all afternoon. I pulled out some of the team photos from when the three of us coached together, and that brought back great memories. He was a steady presence in the dugout and at practices. He gave a lot of his time to the boys...during a period when he was struggling through some health issues.

On the exterior, John was a hard-nosed ball coach. You and I used to chuckle when we heard him grumbling or launching into a rant about the umps. We gave each other a knowing look whenever we heard his ever present advice to the kids to ‘bring a jacket to practice’ so their arms didn’t get strained in the early season weather. But underneath the grumbling exterior he had a lot of love for those kids. I remember him pulling kids aside and asking about how school was going, and telling them that studies came first. And asking about their families. He had a genuinely warm, caring side.

You and I were new to coaching—we were just trying to figure out how to be good coaches. He had coached for something like 30 years. But he didn’t try to pull rank. He let us run the show...making sure he always gave us his opinion (actually the three of us were mostly on the same page in terms of practice and game decisions). He had a real love of the game, and a sense of respect for the game. That’s one of the big lessons he taught me...respect for the game and the right way to do things on the diamond. 

I am looking at the team pic from the 2007 season. It seems like a long time ago. The kids are tiny. The grass is so green in the springtime when team photos are taken. And there’s John in the back row with a River Park Indians cap on. The more years that go by, the more I treasure that time period—when Evan and Jonathan were learning the game. There was a purity to those few years compared to the hyper-competitive sports leagues the boys are now in.

People read a lot of things into the game of baseball. If it gave me a chance to coach with a man like John Stone, then it’s a helluva game for that reason alone. Peace and prayers to you, Johnny and your family. Your friend, ​Justin.

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Breadcrumb

In web design, a breadcrumb is that little string of text at the top of the page that shows where you are in the overall site navigation. It’s a listing of each previous page in the organizational hierarchy that you travelled across from the homepage to get where you are. Each page name is connected with a text character called a caret (>) to show directional flow.

The breadcrumb as a navigational reference dates to the early nineteenth century German fairy tale Hansel and Gretal. Like a lot of Brothers Grimm tales, this one follows an absolutely savage premise wherein two kids have been abandoned deep in the forest by their parents. Things go from bad to worse when brother and sister then encounter a cannibalistic witch who lives in a gingerbread house. But the protagonists are clever, and manage to outwit the witch and return home by following a trail of breadcrumbs they had dropped on the journey in.

The concept of finding one’s way home is loaded with all kinds of deeper existential meaning, the purview of storytellers and crooners and deep thinkers across centuries and cultures. Going home is the mythical human journey, essential element of all story arcs—to make one’s way out and away from home, out into the wide world, to quest and seek and explore...after which the questing hero attempts to return back to the homeland, real or imagined. The catch is that the return home is a futile mission in psychic terms. The word “Hiraeth” is a Gaelic expression for this futility: Homesickness for a place that no longer exists.

This most human of plot lines is found in so many literary examples, from Homer forward to Wolfe’s telegraphic title “You Can’t Go Home Again.” It is summed up with all necessary optimism in this little quatrain by the poet T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

In the maudlin canon of all things concerning “returning home,” there is a more contemporary example from the pop song Fix You by Coldplay, the chorus of which suggests “Lights will guide you home.” But if they’ve forgotten to turn on the lights, here’s hoping you are clever enough to follow the breadcrumbs!

Thru the Windows at Capitol & 21st

Our office windows look out at a bus stop shelter along 21st Street where yesterday morning there was a typewriter sitting there on the sidewalk. I puzzled over the abandoned obsolete machine for a while. Just one random thing in a menagerie out this window...the lost souls and crazy naked people, the hipsters and fashionistas, the purposeful walkers...all manner of relationship drama. “Young lady, forgive him. He didn’t mean it. Oh, he did what? Well Godspeed young lovers...” And the regular appearance of the brew bike people...loud enthusiasms, contrived celebratory madness. Party on Wayne!

For a while in the late afternoons there was this stylish older guy who sauntered along singing opera. He looked like the kind of maestro you might see on a great Italian stage, the gravitas, the mustachio, the silk cloth in his hand as he belted out soaring arias and made supplicant gestures to the heavens. Who is Opera Man, sent to entertain us mortals? There is this other guy who propels himself on a long skateboard via a tall staff, working this novel transport solution like a latter day gondolier. He is a singular figure gliding down the street with long hair, sneakers and mirror shades.

Later in the day the typewriter was gone. I am amused and haunted by all the strange and beautiful scenery thru this urban portal. It fills the space between writing articles and proposals and the other mundane toilings of the information worker. Keep Midtown Janky indeed!

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We Were the Honkys

Of my 664 Facebook friends, exactly two are Black. I’m a middle aged white guy who has watched the explosion of racial injustice from the comfort of an affluent neighborhood full of people unaware of the privileges that history has given them. It is not uncommon to hear from neighbors the whisperings of old law and order arguments that verge on blaming the victims of racism. We’ve all heard these before.

But it wasn’t always this way in my life. I grew up in a series of diverse neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh. We swam at public pools with lots of Black kids, kids from all over the city. We rode city buses with a wide cross section of people. We hung out at the East Liberty YMCA, where you would see dudes wearing African tribal shirts, called dashikis. The era of Black Power was in full effect. In 1973 my well-meaning parents signed up for a voluntary program where for two years I was bussed into the low income housing projects in the eastern part of the city. The progressive idea of that era was that this would speed the integration of society.

We white kids were a tiny minority in an all black school. We were the honkys. We played kickball on the asphalt and had friends from the neighborhood. In the age of big afros and soul stylings we white kids carried hair picks in our pockets and wore platform shoes. You gotta fit in. It was a tough school, and we navigated the bullies just like at any tough school. A third grader doesn’t understand all the racial dynamics...he just wants to be a kid.

After that, we moved to a different neighborhood and my brothers and I went to a different multi-racial school. Then in 5th grade, our mom moved us to an all white working class neighborhood along the river. We ran with this crowd of river rats, kids of the factory workers and tradesmen. It was a typical racist culture of that era and that region, with N-bombs dropped all the time. At that time, Pittsburgh was still very much a melting pot city where you didn’t want to get caught across the wrong neighborhood boundary. Although our family was more educated than that, I joined in on the racism at times to fit in. This gang of kids would venture into Black neighborhoods looking for fights. I am ashamed to say I joined in on one of these terrible missions.

After college I moved to California, partly to get away from the old entrenched harshness of the industrial east coast. And Cali has proved to be more chill and progressive and sunny. And for the past decades my wife and I have raised our family in this white neighborhood and sent our kids to private catholic schools. In this culture, when race and political stuff comes up, I usually just shut my mouth. I know that’s probably not right, but it’s been important to me to live in harmony with my neighbors and allow my kids to fit into this culture.

I just wanted to share my experience with race. These tragic murders of Black people at the hands of the authority structure go back to the Civil War and beyond. Real culture change won’t happen until bad cops are punished severely for violating the public trust (currently 99% are never charged). That won’t happen until we elect leaders with real moral courage. And that definitely won’t happen when the right to vote is being systematically taken away from Blacks and minorities all across the country. Black lives matter. 

June 2020

Sidewalk

Every so often I'll be driving down J Street, past the hospital, and catch a glimpse of the sidewalk along there. And I flash back to so many years ago when we would walk down that sidewalk to the coffee shop on Saturday mornings, a chaotic family unit of three small kids and two big dogs, sometimes with strollers or kids in backpacks. There was the sense of an outing, and dogs, kids and strollers would get tangled up periodically. At the time I probably wasn't thinking about the experience—I was just trying to keep our forward momentum.

I'm not so much for predetermination, but looking back, those were the times in my life, walking with Meg and the kids on that sidewalk, when I was right where I was supposed to be. This is one of the few things amid the vast absurdities of life that makes perfect sense to me.

Pandemic Part 1
Quarantine - March 27, 2020

We had dinner on the porch last night, with Audrey, Sarah and Evan home again. Here's my little rant about these times:

According to Wikipedia the word quarantine comes from quarantena, meaning "forty days," used in 14th-15th-century Venetian language to designate the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.
Nobody ever thought in our lifetime we were going to be in a nationwide quarantine (that only happens in the movies). But here we are in deeply strange times, where in the Land of the Free we are no longer free to leave the house, where the headlines seem fictionalized and absurd, like “Coyotes Reclaim the Abandoned Streets in San Francisco”...some kind of dystopian return to the primitive world. Or the absurd headline of a medical kink store donating scrubs to a real hospital. Or people googling the search term "DIY ventilator." Or the richest empire on the planet undone by the lack of fifty-cent masks. And all of us are reduced to trafficking in the currency of scarce toilet paper.

Then there is my buddy the prepper, who, upon seeing a few empty supermarket shelves, drove 2,000 miles to his newly built doomsday chalet in Michigan. There is a stark contrast between the preparation-obsessed and the complete lack of preparation on the part of the regime in power, who are now tragically encountering the limitations of just making stuff up in the face of scientific realities. It's a perfect storm of neglect, corruption, misplaced priorities, overconfidence and bureaucratic lethargy. These are things we learned back in school that doomed other great empires down through antiquity.

But hey, on the upside, there have been great dinners and cozy times with the family. The kids say it’s a return to the days of them being kids again, our nuclear family living at home together. Even the odd choreography of sidestepping people on a walk feels like a collective good will gesture. We are returning to simple things, like taking walks, whole new patterns of activity, like the Zoom party. People are getting out of their routines.

And underneath everything is the strange clock of this thing always faintly ticking, counting time till the curve flattens or there is receipt of some bad news.

Pandemic Part 2
Caldor Fire - August 31, 2021

The click bait headline about bears roaming the deserted streets of South Lake Tahoe also mentions the casinos are still open for business amid a raging inferno. What? It conjures an image of some ancient desperado dragging his smoke while feeding the one-armed bandit. Marlboro man defiant to the end!

​The news cycles are wall-to-wall apocalypse these days, chaos and dysfunction across the land—floods and hurricanes, climate refugees trudging with all material possessions down ruined highways or stranded on rooftops. Hate and terror leaders here in the homeland, including government officials themselves, now openly talk about a violent coup...right out in the open. They are whipping up grievance and anger based on fairy tales and phony information. Robots, offshore slaves and supply-side swindles may have taken their good paying jobs, but an army of heavily armed, downwardly mobile suburban citizens await orders for the final GI-Joe conflict.

Just like the sci-fi writers predicted, we find ourselves returned to the age of misinformation and superstition. People have lost the ability to tell fact from fiction. Bogus stories and deep fakes have incited so many poor fools to a state of righteous anger against the very doctors and scientists who attempt to save them from a life-or-death plague. Heartbreaking that those who operate selflessly at great personal sacrifice are now being personally attacked. And the latest fake remedy is some kind of equine medication.

If all this is not enough, we finally admitted we got our ass kicked in another colonial war, the greatest most expensive fighting force in history got ragged by a bunch of primitive gangs in Afgan. It's a bitter reckoning after twenty years of no clear mission and bungling and puppet regimes and so many lies by the war experts. Just like Vietnam, with the only difference that there was practically zero moral outrage here in the homeland. That is actually a significant difference, indicating we are too exhausted and cynical to give a damn, save for the smarmy talk show wonks who wag a finger. Or maybe now we better understand how a $2 trillion military industrial welfare system works. Not.

All the while, the apparatus of government, long ago effectively captured by the high-end crooks and their lobbyists, keeps printing money and stage-managing what can only be titled The Fall of America. Watch it on TV, have another White Claw, do a Zoom meeting in your jammies, order some more shit on Amazon. Have an outstanding fucking day!

Manifesto!
Because a Mission Statement Isn't Badass Enough for Us

I would like to take this time at the end of the meeting to address you, colleagues, on a matter of utmost importance. Most teams, groups and work cultures like ours have a “Mission Statement” or maybe a “Vision Statement” or even a “Goals Statement.” What the hell’s the difference anyway? But us? We are a high-functioning team. We kick ass. We spend our time, both billable and overhead, kicking some serious ass. And then we take names…or we take names first…it can work both ways. The point is: a mission statement isn’t enough for us. We need a goddamn Manifesto.

You know, three, four hundred words tops—condensed, actionable, super-charged language, badass action verbs—like the Vin Diesel of action verbs—laying out our operating mode, our uncompromising beliefs, our critical path. And it has to be written in blood…or at least permanent marker. It has to inspire mortal fear in our enemies. Right, we don’t necessarily have enemies per se, so let's just call them competitors, maybe a nemesis or two…but we can all agree, our Manifesto document has to be fearsome. We have to learn it, live it, commit it to memory. No, we are not a cult, but good question. Maybe a crusade. But we are definitely highly motivated and focused on a purpose-driven set of objectives: 1) communicate boldly, 2) win work, 3) build a new Utopian society…that sort of thing.

So I am going to pass out these different colored post-its and we’re going to brain-map out the components of our Manifesto…and hey, there are no bad ideas at this point, people, just get these multicolored post-its up on the wall and no doubt our ideas for world domination will clarify into a unified opus…I mean at least we’ll see a workable structure start to emerge. We will iterate through this process together—transcript, drafts, proofreading. Incidentally, this is not the first manifesto I’ve proofread. What? No, participation is not mandatory? Yeah, sure, you guys are free to leave…no, no, please don’t call HR…wait….come back!

Get Off My Lawn!

After work I poured a whisky and went out front, grabbed the hose and watered my lawn. It occured to me that I had become that old dude in my neighborhood when I was growing up who did this...the guy we always thought was a pathetic old fucker with nothing better to do.

But there was a real sense of zen comfort for me, unstructured time, peace and calm in the evening after a day of sending emails and all the minutiae of communication work. A guy just watering the damn lawn, clearing my head, letting a little of the overspray hit my bare feet. I had not considered the satisfaction of guiding a stream of water across the sidewalk to push leaves and dirt off into the street. The occasional neighbor waving, temporary escape from clocks and computer screens. This is IRL.

In college, my writer friend Bill used to espouse a theory about the old guys in his Pennsylvania coal mining town who were obsessed with the perfection of their front lawns. His insight was that these guys—working guys on the lower-end of the power totum—had only their lawns overwhich to exercise complete control. It was all they had. In every other respect, they were at the mercy of their wives, kids, bosses, neighbors, priests and other authority figures.

Interesting, if bleak, thought that raises questions around the human need for a measure of control over one’s circumstances. And then in the drought-plagued western US there are other questions around why you should even have an ornamental front lawn. But for now we’ll leave those questions alone, and fully savor the domestic tranquility of the front lawn.

Vin Scully Tribute

When I heard the news last night I went back and listened to the Kirk Gibson home run call from ‘88, and the broadcast of Henry Aaron hitting 715 that my brothers and I watched down in our basement TV room...and a few other famous calls, just to hear the distinctive voice again. The poor audio quality and the static of those old videos made them even more magical. I grew up on the other side of the country in a town quite the opposite of LA, and so I hated the Dodgers, as most self respecting Pirates fans did. But like all of America, I loved listening to Vin Scully.

We had a guy named Bob Prince, of the same era of ball announcers. Prince was also a really special personality for many of the same reasons. But where he was rough around the edges, like your crazy uncle who had been out on a bender the night before, Scully was the wise, sweet, smooth grandfather voice. He was profound, but in an understated way, a less-is-more kind of way. Many have noted how in those big historic moments he knew when to pause and say nothing, letting the drama unfold and sink in, letting the crowd noise and your own thoughts do the work. The online obituaries are recalling how he would start his broadcasts by inviting you to pull up a chair and spend some time with him.

As I try to write my own little stories, I begin to understand Scully's genius. He was a master storyteller, every bit as great as authors and people of letters, because he was doing it stream of consciousness, a narrative that meandered along with insights, witty asides and cultural references. He flawlessly mixed the mundane functionary parts of a baseball game with the exciting plays. His cadence was immediate and personal like a conversation. It would put you into a sort of trance. His narrative wound through a whole afternoon and it spanned so many summers. To my Dodger blue friends... Bob Rogan , Erik Hosino , Jimmy Madrigal , Dave Saavedra , Greg Brida , Vince Di Fiore , Damoun Besancon...here's a tip of my cap to your guy in the booth.

August 3, 2022

Fathers: Men & Myth

I. Sleeping Under the Stars
​My old man liked to go camping, and when the weather was good and it was cool enough to keep down the swarms of mosquitoes he was all about pulling his bag out of the old canvas Army tent and sleeping under the stars. To a little kid that had such a rugged, fuck-it quality to it. The cool air would feel good, and there was a little bit of a dare element. I inherited his love of camping and eventually found my way to the champions of outdoor adventure and the expansive American mindset: Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, John Muir, Gary Snyder, Bruce Springsteen and Edward Abbey. And the daddy of them all, old Walt Whitman. I contain multitudes, indeed!

As an overly idealistic hippie adventurer I spent lots of time sleeping in the backcountry, in small clearings, creeksides, beaches and up on mountain perches. Before the ever present forest fire danger it was nothing to stoke up a little crackling blaze. On so many hitchhiking trips camp was wherever you could find a spot in the brush, or those few godforsaken nights sheltering out of the rain under some highway overpass. This was before REI and before so many destitute and forgotten homeless people—the two ends of the camping spectrum.

By my mid twenties I moved on, into what's now called "adulting." Since then I have been sleeping inside every night, in creature comfort houses, living more and more in climate control in front of digital screens. I'm not knocking townie living...It's a hell of a nice life and sort of the natural progression of things. But it is good to remember the feeling of being just a little bit cold but cozy in your bag, and hearing the intermittent sounds of the dark woods, and feeling the immensity of being under the wide convex illumination of the stars.

II. Man & Myth
The genetic lottery doles out superstar fathers and also those without the capacity to express love, and also the total dirt bags. Any which way, a kid spends his life in an evolving relationship with his dad, worshipping a hero and then deconstructing the myth, often in a cruel way. When the myth is gone you are left with just a man, a frail and flawed human. And if you are lucky you come to love the man in a way that is equal to that former myth.
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Today my dad sits in a nursing home, his mind shot, waiting to die.  He was a good man, a flawed man. He shared with me the things in life that he loved. And it turns out as I was trying to establish my own self apart from his influence, those things he loved have secretly made their way into who I am.

Ghost of Tom Joad

I recently came across some disturbing facts about the life story of John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, one of the classics of American lit. It won a Nobel Prize and was made into an Oscar winning movie. I read it in my high school English class.

The power of the story lies in how it shines a light on the tragic story of migrants in the 1930s, and kindles feelings of sympathy for their plight. Back then some 2.5 million people fled the dust bowl, a natural disaster caused by drought and overplowing of the great plains states. Some 200,000 of them, disparagingly called Okies, headed westward to California in shabby caravans looking to survive and find a new life. Steinbeck’s story focused on Tom Joad and his family. In California the Joads and other migrants had to take seasonal farm labor work and lived in squalid homeless camps. They were exploited and met with violence by locals who saw them as dirty and subhuman. 

As a reporter, Steinbeck spent time in the migrant camps. He talked about the internal struggle he went through to get the story out on paper, and the constant self doubt that plagued him while writing it. After the book became famous he started to receive death threats from people who didn't agree with his sympathetic portrayal of the migrants—threats on his life from those aligned with the California locals in the book. The death threats were so persistent that Steinbeck began carrying a handgun for self protection. He would "carry" for the rest of his life. Although the book has been an essential part of the K12 literature curriculum, it has also been banned and burned in various places by people who were incensed by the historical depiction.

The economic dislocation and plight of the Okies parallels the homeless crisis today, where over a half a million Americans are out on the streets, caught up in larger economic structural factors where the wages for menial work no longer cover basic living expenses. These are the victims of the off-shoring of jobs, automation, and an economic system where wealth has been concentrated in the upper stratas of the society—casualties of a second Gilded Age of excessive wealth for a select few.

Compounding the crisis, the once robust social safety net has been slashed to a fraction of what it once was. I don’t mean to simplify a multi-faceted problem, but when basic work doesn’t provide a living wage, there can be no other result than poverty—and all the other compounding problems that emerge when there are no resources and no hope. Like in The Grapes of Wrath, many people today blame the homeless for their own plight, conveniently ignoring the larger structural factors.

Homelessness is especially prevalent in California, due to the good weather and westward migratory patterns that date back to the earliest years of the country. In 2021-22 the State of California earmarked a massive one-time $16B expenditure to address the problem. The known homeless population in the state is 150,000. That works out to about $60K per person. The math, stated like this, is a bit unfair, since there are a lot of costs and bureaucratic hurdles in addressing both long term causes and immediate needs in such a massive problem. Still, one wants to think there could be a fast and efficient response, the way a tent city gets built after a natural disaster, but there doesn’t seem to be the willingness as a society to make that happen. Although there’s no shortage of conferences, commissions and communication around “addressing homelessness,” to date the cottage industry of well-meaning politicians and community leaders have not made a real impact.

It’s easy to throw blame at the feet of the politicians. There’s lots of blame shifting and finger pointing with this issue. As individuals we are all culpable in some way, enjoying the many privileges of middle class life in a nation that is wealthy beyond comprehension. The winners in this new Gilded Age, like their predecessors in history, are good at philanthropic gestures, but have no real interest in meaningfully sharing the wealth with a growing permanent underclass.

We have gotten so good at walking past heartbreaking scenes on the streets, averting our eyes in a practiced way, compartmentalizing our faith and our better instincts. On my lunchtime walk the other day I passed a horrific set of tents set up along the sidewalk, and I caught a reflection in the window glass behind the tent of me walking right past a man who was visibly suffering. It was a haunting moment of historical realization as I saw the Ghost of Tom Joad staring back at me.

Hitler's Beer Halls and Today's Authoritarians
A History Lesson on our Summer Vacation in Munich

These are snapshots from our trip to Munich this summer, the first several taken at the Hofbraukeller, a beer garden that Audrey found one night when we were at a loss for where to eat. It’s in a residential neighborhood, not a tourist place. There is a large neo-renaissance building housing a brewery with a massive garden outside, a dense chestnut tree canopy covering overhead. On a summer week night it was crowded with friends and families. Great low key vibe! We had this amazing Bavarian meal of schnitzel, goulash, crispy knuckle of pork, dumplings, rot kol, cheesy spaetzle and liters of Hells Pilsner and Dunkel. Check out the menu. Just a really special night together after a long day touring around the city.

Later I learned that Hitler gave his first public speech in this beer hall:
"On October 16, 1919, 111 attendees crowded the main hall of the Hofbraukeller beerhouse to give an audition to a few speakers, with a young and largely unknown Adolf Hitler as the second spokesperson. The future German fuhrer exceeded the given 20-minute agenda up to 30 minutes…” Years later he wrote in his infamous Mein Kampf tract that that speech was a turning point in ‘the Movement,’ when he first discovered his “rhetorical” powers.

We also visited the most famous Munich beer hall, the Hofbrauhaus in the Altstadt, the old city, and had a great time there, with oompah bands playing for the tourists, and waiters in lederhosen slinging big liters of beer and waitresses with cleavage busting out of their Dirndl maids dresses. We drank liters of Hells and ate giant pretzels out on the crowded patio. It’s Europe so lots of people were smoking. This grand place became Hitler's favorite venue over the years, hosting many key speeches in his rise to power and reign where he would rant for two plus hours to thousands in the larger hall upstairs that we did not visit. ​

​This prompted me to read up on the 1922 Putsch Beer Hall Revolt, Hitler's first grab for power, launched from another nearby beer hall in central Munich (no longer standing), where he instigated armed thugs to march on the seat of government in a coup attempt against the Weimer government. In a shootout with local armed forces they were quickly defeated. Hilter did only 9 months' time in prison, and then regrouped and organized within the political system. It's odd that these places conduct business today with few markers of these events, people going about their lives trying to move on from the crimes of their ancestors, part of a fraught national self image.

Hitler was an authoritarian strong man who appealed to working people’s sense of grievance and nationalism, blaming jews and non-whites for their economic hardship under WWI reparations and the great depression. His expertly crafted, charismatic propaganda appeal found easy targets among the increasingly militant, violent supporters.

Although he was only supported by about 37% of the populace, he maneuvered into power as the conservative party establishment thought they could contain him—what we call 'guardrails' today. They tragically miscalculated. All through the 1930s the rising violence and extremism in Germany was well reported in America, but underestimated, ignored and even celebrated among considerable numbers of American nazi sympathizers and racist organizations. The German populace who opposed Hilter was passive as the violence and lawlessness mounted all around them, either too scared or polite to speak up. In a matter of only a few months he consolidated the presidency and chancellorship and eliminated democracy and rule of law. And then the nazi regime solidified a police state, invaded Eurpoe and committed systematic genocide.

This is a historical pattern: a charismatic leader skillfully sold a series of lies to his people. He understood the inherent suggestibility of the human mind, and he exploited it. Indeed, we now understand people often want to be led by an exciting leader. Those people were ripe to energetically accept these lies. So skillful and comprehensive were the fictions that a whole nation of people committed mass murder on behalf of the leader.

It gets more complicated when you consider Hitler modelled his Eurpoean genocide on American genocide against native Americans.

The term Nazi and Facist have become sort of all purpose slurs in political arguements and as such those labels are less meaningful. But knowing the German history and what is happening in America today you cannot miss the obvious parallels between Hilter's rise and Trump's rise: the macho appeal of the authoritarian personality, the coup attempt and increasing violence, the Big Lie and the complete assault on our democratic system, the installation of extreme partisan loyalists across the local election system, the lawless criminal behavior across so many fronts, the disinformation appeals to grievance, the targeting of minorities. As a sign of how far down the road of authoritarianism we’ve already come, librarians, healthcare workers and election workers are under attack right now by right wing extremists. In America? Who would have thought?

In the Republican Party there are many people who know the Jan. 6 coup attack and the Big Lie are wrong and treasonous, people who go along for strategic advantage or who are willfully ignorant of the blatant disinformation. A lot this amounts to tacit approval of the dismantling of a stable 250-year-old democracy. I don't think this will end well.

Ok, this spun out from a travelog to facist history then and now. What was that quote about history? It doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. The beer halls were fun, tipsy…and strangely informative. Stay safe in the next armed civil war or electoral takeover. Sorry for the politics, not sorry.

Ken Burns, The Holocaust and Authoritarianism Today
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/the-holocaust-and-authoritarianism-today
A discussion based on his new documentary, the U.S. and the Holocaust:
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/

The Nazi beer halls in Munich:
https://war-documentary.info/munich-beerhalls-and-nazis/

Wildlands of January
Brute Nature on the American River

The new year brought weeks of heavy storms to northern California, what’s now being called an “Atmospheric River.” Are the meteorologists just making up new terms at this point? There were a couple nights where the wind blew so hard we could feel our old bungalow shaking on its brick foundation. Big oaks and redwoods crashed down on homes and crushed parked cars. It was a pretty epic span of weeks that saw people hunker down inside for a prolonged time.

To fight off the cabin fever I ended up taking several bike rides in these rainstorms, including one with Adam Bear through a pretty wicked full blown deluge. Things eventually let up and the flooded waterlogged ground began to dry. The storms had flooded the lower American River areas and so the bike trail has been closed for some weeks. Yesterday I figured the trail might still be flooded, but it was finally a brisk, clear day so I headed downriver on the trail anyway, in what turned out to be a pretty adventurous ride from Sac State to Discovery Park. 

Crossing the J Street Bridge, I tracked a Great Blue Heron gliding just maybe ten feet off the water until it disappeared under the bridge. From above, the flight path of this sublime creature seemed aeronautical, a precise vector running parallel to the surface of the river. At the north end of the bridge I followed the detour up onto the gravel levee, skirting past earthmovers that have been rebuilding the riverbank for flood protection.

Along the levee top strong winds hit me head on, bringing forward progress to a slow grind on the pedals like going up a steep hill. The levee route passed alongside Cal Expo with views down into the amusement park, the tilt-a-whirl and multi-colored water slide frozen in winter gloom, and the miniature farm town abandoned for the season—not a farmer or carnie in sight. The route passed the empty soccer stadium and then dropped down off the levee and back onto the trail, out of the wind.

Pretty soon the trail turned all to muck and lakes of knee deep water. At intervals big cottonwood trees were crashed across the path. The dead gray landscape had the feel of a bayou swamp. This was more than I bargained for, but not wanting to retrace my route I elected to try to make it through, shouldering my ten speed around the wreckage, whacking through jagger thickets, pedaling carefully in the water, anticipating the smack of some submerged obstacle. I nearly skidded into the drink a few times if not for a wobbly balancing act.

​Near the 12th Street overpass there was this ominous silhouette ahead, wandering the abandoned urban wildlands. Was this the Grim Reaper himself, self styled in a black cape of rags? I sped past him, the Ramones pounding in my ears…Sheena is…a punk rocker…Sheena is…!

The trail was strewn with trash from the storms, hobo camp debris, upended shopping carts, plastic jugs, clothing and other sad personal items arrayed in the muck. At one point, not far from Discovery, I was portaging over a partially submerged downed tree, when a few scraggly little deer popped out from the brush up ahead. They froze when they spotted me, and we had an intense momentary glance at each other. Some kind of primordial understanding seemed to pass between us. The encounter, far from an idyllic nature moment, got me spooked with the feeling of being a tourist interloper in their everyday creature survival.

“Just make it to Discovery Park,” my mind was racing, “get the fuck out of this hellscape, you trespasser! Hurry on back to your central heat and WIFI and family love!”

Why does a damn fool indoor creature elect to go the hard way? What kind of fun can this be? I have no answer except to share a few words from the original townie tourist, Henry Thoreau. Nearly two centuries ago he advised this type of voluntary adversity: "Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary."

January 23, 2023

Heinz

​We got Heinz and Emmy, brother and sister, from the pound in 2011. They are indoor cats and have integrated into our household over the years with a nice low key spirit…after having big dogs for fifteen years prior. The girl, Emmy, is social and friendly to all, but Heinz is skittish and aloof, and has only bonded with Sarah, spending much of her time in her room. Heinz has never much cared to spend any time with me, and has a long history of being scared of me for no apparent reason other than he is a scaredy cat.

When Meg and I got back from the hospital after her stem cell transplant for multiple myeloma cancer I moved into Sarah’s room to give Meg space in our room. To quote Meg, so I wouldn’t be breathing on her and farting as she is trying to recover. Text to Sarah, our youngest daughter who is in Italy:

Sar,
I am laying in your bed and Heinz is laying on top of me. We are listening to Taylor Swift. I'm pretending he understands as I'm talking to him...isn't that what cats are for anyway. I told him that you would be back, that you are in Florence studying abroad. That was fully over his head although I did show him your picture in hopes he might understand. Heinz is a gentle spirit, your great friend from way back. I told him Christopher Robin is not leaving the Hundred Acre Wood just yet. Well Sar me and Heinz miss you and hope you're having some great adventures over there!
Love,
Dad

April 12, 2023

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