Signed up for Xanga 2.0..

 

More later.

  

 

https://twitter.com/SaveBradley

 

Today a judge will make a decision that will determine a great deal about who WE are as a people.

 

 

 

 

 

We’re still moving out the old and into the new here.

So far we’ve found out the bathroom doors stick- they scrape and are loud. The dishwasher doesn’t work. And some of the window screens are missing or are dented enough that flies can still get in.

Oh well.

Our almost former landlords have been fairly pleasant overall- after all they told us we had to move a few months and it’s taken every day of those months to get settled. However one of them was somewhat unpleasant to PLC on the phone this morning.

Oh well times two.
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In a bit of  other news I discovered and old friend of some of ours is around and , more or less, about these days.

I don’t know how many of you remember the cam-op and discussion board site  “flyguylive” from the late nineties-earlys oughts.
.
I’m sure at least a couple of you do.

 But if you remember a guy who went by the web moniker “feralelf” I found him again through Google+.
This means of course that GooGoo Plus is officially good for something.

Anyway his story of the last decade and more has been pretty tough. But he is a beautiful soul.

I’m going to have a lot more to say but I wanted to leave you with a link to his youtube site that has an introductory video.

Talk to you later, dears :

We found a place. I feel badly that so much has happened while I’ve been away.
The issues have been that it has been a grueling  process to finally get somewhere to move to.
We should be completely moved in by this Sunday.
 I guess there are some major changes at Xanga. I surmised this by some of Mr. Biggles comments though in truth between being worked very, very, very hard at my job and the frustration and anxiety in finding a place to move to I have had little chance to come here.
I am henpecking this out at the place we’re moving out of. Most of the furniture was moved today. I used over what would be my weekly take-home pay to pay some guys to do most of it. I was at work and PLC directed the actual moving from here.
I’ve actually been working some unpaid overtime at work to try to catch up. It’s a measure of how little time it feels like I have to get the tasks I’m supposed to be doing done.

Anyway I won’t have much more to say except we are fine. Frazzled and tired but otherwise fine.
I look forward to catching up with all of you. Again, my apologies for being such a scarce e-friend.

Once we are “landed” I will begin picking up the pieces of some other life aspects beyond “must keep working” and “must find a place to live”.

I look forward to finding out more precisely what is going on with Xanga.

I hope by Sunday I will have had a chance to at least partially catch up.

Love to all of you and forgive my lack of presence here-we’ll try to remedy that, too.
 

 

I got an email asking me if I wanted to sign a petition requesting that the Nobel Peace Prize committee give this year’s Peace Prize to Bradley Manning. It’s group called “Roots Action” but I imagine their thinking and their sentiment about Manning is echoed by a great many others who remember the stories of the “Good Germans” during World War II.

That story is that even people who regard themselves as patriotic, perhaps especially people who regard themselves as patriotic, owe it to their countrymen, and the rest of humanity, to tell the truth when they see injustice and cruelty done to others- even if these evils are sanctioned by their government.

This was a frequent theme during the Nuremberg War Trials. I’m fairly certain that a large core of the American population who grew up after that war assumed that those war crimes trials established a code of decency more generally thought of as an essential element of “human rights”.

I wrote a short blurb to go with my petition signature as follows:

“It is especially the conscience and commitment of a human being- who has something to lose- that make peace and transparency of moral purpose possible. If we do not come to the aid of and celebrate people like this, what are we really doing that matters?”

Here is the organization- or at least one of them :

http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7612

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Still no place to move to. I have a basic optimism about this- as does PLC. In fact PLC says not to say anything negative because it’s too stressful. We’ve been on a sort of two-track approach. PLC is looking for rentals and I have been looking for reasonably inexpensive mobile homes that I could afford to put a down payment on and, I’d hope, continue to make payments on for a couple of years at least. But it is an uncertainty as to how viable being in Santa Cruz is. It’s just that we don’t have a more realistic alternative.

Well, anyway, looks like it’s time to make that a one-track approach as a rental would certainly be our best option. We’ve had at least two friends say they are sure something will turn up for us that will make our pains worthwhile. Of course we hope so too, but I’m reminded of a birthday card one of PLC’s brothers gave him some years ago. On it are three stern-looking nuns with their hands in prayerful posture. Inside the card says, “The good news is that we are praying for you. The bad news is there are only three of us.” 

That’s almost as funny as the bumper sticker that says in big letters, “JESUS LOVES YOU!!!” and in tiny print at the bottom says “Everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.”

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Johnny Weston who plays  Jay Moriarity (left) and Gerald Butler who plays “Frosty” Hesson

 

PLC and I watched the 2012 film “Chasing Mavericks”. It’s about Santa Cruz surfer Jay Moriarty. Jay was not only from this area but we actually live in the basic neighborhood he grew up in. For years we seen “Live Like Jay” and a cross-shaped logo with “Jay” and “Moriarty” as each axis of the cross. From all accounts Jay was a person who was gifted with lifting others up by the force of his presence and personality. He died tragically in a free diving incident near the Maldive Islands which are in the Indian Ocean about 600 miles southwest from the tip of India and Sri Lanka.

“Chasing Mavericks” is the story of the adversity he had to overcome to surf. His surfing reputation was probably established as the youngest person to ever surf the huge waves of Northern California’s “Mavericks” near Half Moon Bay. Moriarty was from a broken family and a sort of “latchkey” kid due to his single mother’s alcoholism at that time. A neighbor, nicknamed “Frosty”- a sort of crusty character bur caring guy who’d had his own tough luck early in his life developed into a surfing guru and a surrogate father for Jay.

The film isn’t  a stand-alone great film but it is a type of inspirational story of the type that is less frequent than at an earlier time in “Hollywood”. The best known actors are Gerald Butler- a very good actor maybe best known for films in the action genres but definitely an excellent dramatic as well as comedy actor, and Elizabeth Shue – who won an Oscar for lead actress in “Leaving Las Vegas” (with co-winner Nicolas Cage) play’s Jay’s troubled mother.

 Santa Cruz aerial view

 Jay Moriarty is played by Johnny Weston who’s a relative newcomer in film.

The “specialness” of Jay Moriarty was about more than his skill or precocity- it was about his warmth and openness to those he knew and didn’t know. He was someone- I could tell from the bumper stickers, hand written tributes and designs I’d seen casually around the East Cliff neighborhood but more generally around all of the Santa Cruz area since his death in 2001- who inspired people as much as his loss saddened them.

The real “Frosty” and Jay

 There are a fair amount of shots of the East Cliff and the Santa Cruz general beach area in the film that are immediately recognizable to PLC and me- though there are also shots done in distant locations that stand in for the local terrain. It all made for a very different film experience for us especially as PLC has been doing surf photography around here in his healthier times since 2001.

I told PLC I’d had a dream about a tidal wave that very morning. We did see this the night of my previous post but I hadn’t mentioned the dream to PLC until we had watched the film.

Sometimes things are just sort of in the air I guess.

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Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir in Yosemite

 I’m reading “Theodore Rex”, the second in the Teddy Roosevelt book trilogy by Edmund Morris I’d mentioned last post and I am thoroughly enjoying it. It certainly is a good way to gather a perspective on the uncertainties and vagaries of political trends and how people rise or fail to rise to the challenges they pose. President Obama’s latest concession about cutting Social Security and other so-called “entitlements” is a good example of failing to rise to a political challenge. Now a few months after  the election it’s clear the White House will never be ahead of the political wave that demands that the government invest- spend money, not limit it- to create jobs for our future.

This is not a simple-minded request. A majority of Republicans, Democrats and Independents -  whoever these people really all are, or whatever that has come to mean -indicate large majorities showing that they are in agreement that the government needs to spend. The “debt crisis” has a number of automatic adherants in the general population who are habituated to declaiming in any available public forum (think strongly here of “comments” sections of web sites) against anyone who says that spending by the government is specifically necessary when individuals, neighborhoods,  cities and states cannot accomplish this task of investment independently and on their own without a radical realignment of the corpporate nature and status of our current economics.

 It’s even clearer when reading about the OTHER Roosevelt that the issue of corporatocracy has been an ongoing danger at its several historical apexes in the American history.

Bankrupting the middle-class through wage stagnation. Check!

Bankrupting the middle-class through off-shoring and down-sizing domestic jobs to achieve lower wages. Check!

Reversing the progressive tax structure which bolstered the middle-class after World War II but notably accelerating this process to favor the very few at the expense of the general populace after Reagan was elected in the US and Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain in the late ’70s and ’80s. Check!

Knocking down the “public service” requirement for broadcasters as part of deregulation. Check.

Deregulating what was left of legal restraints against multiple  broadcast ownerships and mergers to insure that news is another “economy of scale” victim even though the ideals of freedom of the press and “economies of scale” are not “equals” in almost any moral or economic sense. Check!

Demanding an increase in the numbers of immigrants with the high-tech “skill sets” to take jobs Americans are unwilling to take and pretending it’s not just a shell game to keep wages lower when there in fact are OVER-qualified Americans willing to work these jobs. Check!

And so, my fellow Americans, and my horrified neighbors it is increasingly clear that the “debt crisis” is a construct of the so-called “beltway” pundits and folks who are obtaining their knuckle-dragging etiquette from the oxygen-deprived scribes of Fox News or whatever will be financed by the Koch Brothers and their ilk in its place once that format is finally also as disposable as the needs and wants of the general American population. Clearly gerrymandered congressional districts, and the nauseatingly wealthy among us controlling the mass media are the obstacles to what should obviously be a consensus regarding the direction the United States government needs to go in search of a viable future that’s not “too big to fail”.

Well, I could go on and on. And I certainly have in the past, haven’t I?

Rather than belabor these themes anymore I would direct you to this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&feature=youtu.be   I submitted a couple of posts ago.

There is some simple math that’s been afoot for some time now. It looks as though decades of comparative analysis may finally be bearing fruit now that many of us have acclimated ourselves to starvation rations when it comes to food for thought.

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   Mad Men promotional shot and Don Draper (actor Jon Hamm, right)

 Just to show that I haven’t given up circuses to emphasize bread at all costs  I have to share with you all that PLC and me are looking forward to tonight’s two-hour season six premiere of AMC’s “Mad Men”.
We’ve been talking it over quite a bit and while there have been television programs whose art has enthralled and amazed us upon occasion we seem to have reached a consensus that the writing, direction, editing, certainly acting and overall presentation of “Mad Men”  add up to everything a lot of folks have been saying. Is it the best program ever produced on American television? Maybe. It should certainly be in the running for the title- that seems sure. To be sure, and even in support of my preceding paragraphs NOT of a television show-themed nature, there are many things that matter more than entertainment. But we are hard-pressed to find a more substantive guilty pleasure even so.

We/I know that the latest entertainments that lean heavily on what must be seen as a current Boomer fascination with the eras that led to our current predicament must necessarily indict our much-complained about narcissism as a generation, or two. But we must also maintain that there is revelation and thoughtfulness reflecting on our current reality that we are grateful for even while we acknowledge that “Mad Men” is a comedic drama which compresses many a dull, anxiety-ridden, regressive, anti-human and tedious moment into an unrealistically diamond-like brilliance which is rarely encountered in real time or life directly but which is more common in our mass media version of our collective rear view mirror. And yet, having said and affirmed that, we still have found ourselves bedazzled by the characters and circumstances of the fictional Don Draper, Peggy Olson, Roger Sterling, Joan Harris, et al. .

We’re ready to chow down on this particular circus that doubles as our bread for the evening.

 

This morning my waking dream was about a thousand foot or more tidal wave. I was on an elevated coastal plateau that seemed near Pacifica, which in truth would put it in the hundreds, not thousands, of feet of elevation. Pacifica is a smallish coastal town a couple of miles south and adjacent to San Francisco. In the flow of my dream “logic” it then seemed as the wave hit I was somewhere north of San Francisco that really was thousands of feet above sea level. I was with my blood family and we had been going through sorting out books and belongings that had age or water damage. The idea of water damage seems to have been a bit of time play- again resolvable only by dream “logic” and not the result of a coherent narrative because this seems to have been before the wave. There was a sense of only being able to preserve a handful of items before we evacuated the cabin-like place within a mountain campground where numbers of other people were as well.

I saw the first wave as we were in the middle of this process of talking about and then gathering books and other things we were trying to decide the worth of preserving for the future. As I looked west I felt the instant stab of dread as I saw that the wave was a virtual water wall that appeared to tower over the elevated area we were in by hundreds of feet. As it hit the base of the mountainous plateau we were on we dropped what we were doing and ran as quickly as we could.

The wave roared up the mountain, crashed into the edge of the camp and swamped it. It seemed clear some people didn’t make it and most of the structures of the camp were destroyed but that my family and many others remained running as the wave, somehow, failed to completely submerge us as had seemed inevitable at first sight .

We scrambled inland to a higher incline of some hundred yards or so which then flattened out and led to lower elevations sloping away from the mountain area. But there were three or four more monstrous waves, each as big or seemingly bigger than the first but the flooding seemed only a kind of spill over which, miraculously, didn’t flow over the land to then flood the lower elevations on the inland side of the mountain area where most of us had made it to since the first wave.

There had been a small child- maybe eight years old- who’d lept to the lower elevations out of a combination of panic and a loss of balance. That child landed flat and compressed by the shock of the fall, obviously dead on impact. There was also my own Mom- who, in my real life died last year- but who, in this dreamscape, also fell off one of the edges of the summit area but landed somehow unharmed on a pad of land within the lower elevation of the inland side of our mountain peak area.

As we reacted to our wet reprieve from that last wave and were anticipating the next one which might be the one with no forgiveness I woke up.

**************************************

The last few days I’ve been looking at the attention-grabbing story about North Korea’s threat to “nuke” the US after the US and South Korea had airborne military maneuvers over South Korean air. Certainly this apocalyptic bit of propaganda, hyperbole or hysteria might suggest some parallels with my dream.

But today I read an account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s influence in keeping life-saving drugs artificially higher, by a multiple factor, in America than anywhere else in the world. That particularly odious bit of collusion is typical of the long tradition of the Supreme Court siding with the defacto “robber barons” of any age in the United States’ checkered history. With the brief exceptional periods of the US’s founding era and the mid-twentieth century’s “liberal” Earl Warren court this particular branch of American government has been on a downhill slide toward an unholy marriage between Big Government and Big Business for most our our star-spangled lifetimes.

There are many, many times I’ve felt the drama of my muddied, apocalyptic dream life is more profoundly mirrored in the stark paring away of our common humanity in the shrill din and banal daylight of our allegedly “real” world.

 

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Young TR at Harvard

 

I’ve recently finished part one of a trilogy of books that many consider the definitive biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris’ “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt”.

The somewhat embarrassing part of this is the admission that a conservative Catholic (converted variety) and politically conservative dear friend of mine gave me this volume as a birthday present at least ten years ago, I think.

I’ve episodically waded into Morris’ biographical portrait of the 26th United States President only to get through about 50-60 pages as I became discouraged with the seemingly encyclopediac minutae of the very young boyhood of TR and thereby succumbed to feeling bogged down and then moved on to more immediate projects, chores or pursuits. Fortunately I gave it “the old college try” (remember I dropped out twice, sports fans) and find I was just at the cusp of an enthralling story of one of the most unique yet somehow exemplary Americans in our 237 years as a nation.

Teddy Roosevelt was an unlikely prospect for success due to his frail childhood health and physique and he was a ripe target of ridicule at many of the key points in his life up to and still including his middle age from which he nonetheless became someone greater and transcendant than could’ve been imagined by those with more traditional and auspicious starts in their lives and careers.

Roosevelt was also someone who won over all but the most cynical or compromised of souls and even many of these lived to be hard-pressed not to admire him even when they disagreed with him or feared the particularly muscular genius he undeniably possessed.

His presidency was a bit over one hundred years ago yet his accomplishments and goals as a political leader and his achievement as a human soul are as relevant now as ever – perhaps even more so as the needs of business, government, the military, our shared physical environment, our societal order and democracy itself seem poised on the brink of a major shift in our collective story.

As I said- the first few chapters are a bit more of a challenge than might be preferred but they are also rather like a science-fiction movie that begins with banalities so pat you may wonder if you somehow escaped into the wrong wing of a multiplex in the first half hour only to find the plot explode into crazed landscapes of the imagination for the last gripping ninety minutes. Mr. Morris’ book does sweep us along on the journey of someone whose life is the stuff of legend and maybe even more than a little envy of the kind that is also inspiration even to those of us who are well advanced upon the paths we’ve chosen or drifted into here in our summarizing years. After all, with any luck at all- we’re never too old to be encouraged or imagine turning a new corner.

PLC has the book now and I await his response.

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 “Mad Men” cast

Mad about the Men.

Well, in that same manner that PLC and I stumbled onto HBO’s “The Wire” after an unpromising start, we have now stumbled onto and then down into the rabbit hole of the AMC network’s much lauded show about a group of men and women in the field of advertising during the early and mid 1960s, “Mad Men”.

With “The Wire” PLC and I both felt turned off at the opening tone-setting scene as being almost a cliche of ghetto-ese and maybe more than a bit racist. It took a couple of years to get back to it and when we did we found it was really diffent and compelling television about today’s crime and punishment from those in the throes of it to those who have to interact with it on a daily basis as the “enforcers” of social mores.

We watched “The Wire” on Netflix- clearly one of the best bargains if you are interested in catching up with what all the talk is/was about but decided you can’t afford the cable price to actively participate.

I junked my dvd/streaming Netflix to go for the streaming only one and it has, after about a year, been entirely worth it. It was a difference of paying about $31.00 compared to $7.99 a month. That lower price- and the sudden arrival of Redbox’s kiosks throughout the shopping parcels of our great and glorious land with $1.62 24-hour rental dvds- has probably accelerated the pace at which most of our local video stores and megastores are becoming extinct. A few months ago I tried to go to Blockbuster and then Hollywood videos only to see new non-video stores in their place. The Blockbuster outlet is now a grim-looking “Dollarstore” with butcher papered-up windows- depressing in it’s own way to be sure- but, perhaps, inevitable with the advances and ubiquity of streaming technology.

But back to our prime story we also had sampled the first episode or two of “Mad Men” and while I was intrigued because of the era and my own sense of nostalgia PLC was truly turned off by what appears as the blatant sexism and misogyny of that era. Feeling that we need to do these things together- actually it’s the only practical way for us given our time together- I said, as I had with “The Wire” – that we needed to give it another shot. I have one friend who I have not heard much from lately, a young man who is also an actor- who assured me that if we kept watching we would be rewarded.

It turns out he was right and we are very hooked on “Mad Men”. The acting is very good- all the leads have something worthwhile to offer although Jon Hamm as “Don Draper”- the Alpha male man-in-the-middle of several other would-be Alpha males is superb as is his wife, played by January Jones, and virtually all of the main players in their office on Madison Avenue.

Robert Morse- the elfin Broadway actor who hit the big time in Broadways’ actual 1960s show “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying” plays the eccentric, Ayn Rand-loving senior partner in the show’s advertising firm with John Slattery as his glib, silver-haired partner who is a WWII vet as well as a smoothie womanizer with all the best puchlines in the show. Hamm’s Don Draper is their younger hot-shot ad-man who actually makes the firm go. Elisabeth Moss plays Peggy Olson who begins as a rather Agnes Gooch-type mousy secretary who blooms into something else altogether. Christina Hendricks plays red-headed Joan Holloway who rules the office beyond what she is given credit for and cuts the beautiful, statuesque image formerly referred to as “stacked” along with “bombshell”. Yes I’m so old I do remember these terms as well as the advertising jingles I and many of my “boomer” peers have embedded into our collective media DNA.

We keep finding, PLC and I, that when deciding on what to watch for the evening’s telly that we guiltily go to the next episode of “Mad Men” rather than any of the alternatives. We have covered about four and a half seasons of the five available currently on Netflix and will probably be caught up by the time the sixth season premieres on April 7.

As show go it’s very rare that we’ve found ourselves getting restless- or in my case nodding off because an episode isn’t up to snuff. In fact it’s rarer than with just about anything I can recall in recent memory and that’s high praise indeed- especially with my varied but reasonably steady red wine consumption.

So PLC and I still don’t have a place to move to yet but as long as I have a job and Comcast and Netflix they’ll have to pry my remote from my cold, dead fingers.

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Thanks to my Zeno’s Paradox Clock I have all the time in the world and beyond even though my clock is never right – even once a day never mind twice as in the case of it’s broken cousin- the Neo-Con Clock. But that’s enough politics for one dollop of blogsmithing and a story for a ‘nother time when you have a few infinite moments to spare.

I think you’ve suffered enough for one sitting.

Latah, y’all.

 

Our deadline to be out of our current “digs” is May 1st.

That would be May Day.

By one modern tradition “May Day” is the celebration of the oh-so-brief concessions workers got from the 19th century through the early part of the 20th in which some nations went Communist- usually from a struggle between a serf or peasant class, an aristocracy or economic elite and some semblance of a frustrated middle class or those with somewhat upwardly aspiring ambitions- even very modest ones- who are stuck in the center brokering the “deal” or lack thereof. Some nations went socialist- with a so-called mixed economy of private enterprise and some subsidized amentities for a public good financed by tax-funded government. And some nations ended up settling for a yet more watered-down version ostensibly celebrating the creation of a “weekend” in which it is theoretically possible to be free of laboring for a wage for a day or two rather than waging a continuous struggle to earn money one damned day after another, a lessening of workers’ likehood of being consumed in fires on-the-job and a abolition of child labor- at least within eyesight. The “weekenders” have settled for their official May Day to be held as “Labor Day” in September in symbolically the last day till poorer weather symbolizes a return to the coal mines or cubicles.

An older version of May Day is a celebration- an essentially pagan celebration at that- of the flowering of Spring.

The third popularly understood meaning of the phrase “May Day” is spelled “Mayday!”- as one word with an exclamation mark and excitedly, even desperately repeated. This “Mayday!” signals an imminent disaster is potentially about to occur.

PLC and I are having a rough time trying to find a new place. It’s something of a crapshoot as to which may day we will be celebrating, or not.

Oh, don’t get me wrong- I still have a job. But the only division in “my” company that has any helpful expertise with what I do (though- truthfully I never rely on them because my own jobsite is too neurotically manifesting for me to have any faith that contacting them will do any good- or may even prove undermining for my own job “security”) has just been told it will be disbanded, made redundant, by September. Just in time for “Labor Day” I suppose. Meanwhile my supervisor who has been emphasizing the importance of “managing expectations”- which for him means creating the hype to make our puny division look important but to do it in such a way that we continue to meet or exceed our promise(s)- and reminding us that our jobs could be gone tomorrow appeared to be wavering toward a thinly veiled pessimism. He wouldn’t admit it of course but it’s important, from a management perspective to always assure your workers they have no security.

 

My partner actually has an economic housing supplement due to his disability. The problem is that landlords tend to treat this as a symbol of unreliability rather than what it is- a guarantee of a majority of rent being efficiently being met every month. Our record for providing the supplemental remainder of this monthly sum has been perfect. But perception- and some amount of mental and emotional laziness as well as ignorance- make it simpler for most to declare that they don’t take “Section 8″- the name of the supplement for disabled.

Thus are PLC and I back to being engaged in juggling our economic dishes trying not to miss a plate.

The truth is- it becomes depressing to get so much information and follow through on discussion with agents and sellers only to find you’ve been wasting your and their time as everyone would prefer to rent their dilapidated shack to the more upwardly mobile who just happen to be in the market for more modest digs on their odyssey to the top of the human heap.

You all know this ditty, of course:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03JdA7lCLTo

　

But we increasingly live in a reality where this ditty is at least as instructive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM&feature=youtu.be

　

Yeah, I’m a bit down-hearted at this combination of working and living uncertainty.

I am thinking of trying to buy a modular unit, that is a “mobile home”, as a fall-back strategy if PLC and I cannot find his stipend for disability honored. I have hesitated to do so because of the unreliability of my having a continued gainful employment. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be any more assured than it has the last couple of years- especially since our last buyout from our latest megacorporate Sugar Daddy seems the cruelest of them all so far.

There was recently a lot of discussion during the several awards celebration of film about “Les Miserables”. Every time I see a clip from the film presentation or read a discussion of some particular related to it I imagine the scene I see daily on my way to and from my job. You see, the homeless shelter is a couple of blocks away from where I work and the adjacent neighborhood that spills into the downtown district of Santa Cruz is dotted with individuals and sometimes groups of folks with, often, makeshift shopping carts, overburdened bicycles with bundled possessions strapped onto them and a panorama of wardrobes of largely threadbare and dirty clothing trudging down the streets. Santa Cruz has been a “street person” but also homeless magnet for decades now.

The first big burst of this phenomenon started with those burned out as the heat of the sixties cooled into the ash of the seventies. The seventies also startede the first round of what is now called “austerity” which always impacts those at the lower ends of the economic ladder most directly and harshly.

Of course within these local “miserables” there are scores of habituated druggies, alcoholics and people who have escaped one situation or another and heard that it’s better to be taking their chances with the kindness of strangers in that warm California sun than freezing their asses off in Philly or Minnesota or the mid-west.

It’s not that I am not aware that this reality hasn’t spread to many other locales but it has been an intractable reality here for many decades now. There are a lot of guys who have served in the military and found no adjustment back into the population post-service. There are a lot who were formerly overcrowding a prison and are now out and “free” due to budget cuts.

All in all this scene is a spectacle that invites the thought that “there but for fortune” and is a constant reminder of the rather thin societal veneer that separates my fate from that of others who seem conspicuous victims of this particular culture’s dwindling largesse.

I know there are many people who would tell me that I have the intelligence and the skill to avoid these worst social results but I often feel my particular choices in work have led me down a very unimaginative path in terms of financial security and the like.

It’s not all doom and gloom folks, but I’ve been feeling better about whatever the future may bring. We’ll all just have to see won’t we?

 

 

A young man at another site I occassionally post stuff at had a display of photos from the year 1963. His photos garnered several responses but I really felt there was a combination of older people- many my age or older who seemed a bit rusty or simply uninvolved emotionally to that year’s events. The younger people, of course, I can only accept that they weren’t there so they have only heresay to rely on.

The photos included the first Buddhist monk who self-immolated to protest the South Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists, JFK’s Lincoln speeding away with the secret serviceman climbing onto the trunk  after Kennedy’d been shot, pictures of New York City when  the Empire State Building was still the tallest building in the world and several other iconic images from that year.

Anyway this was my response:

 

 

1963 represents one big fact for me.

JFK’s assassination was for me and others unprecedented. The swiftness with which it occurred and the utter finality of the consequences were unique events because of the confluence of television with it’s particular immediacy and because of the events that were brewing within the country and the world and just as much because of the vitality and magnetic aura that was John F. Kennedy. We’d never had a President who held press conferences and gave as good as he took during it – JFK’s press conferences seemed like truly “living” events. The Cuban Missle Crisis a year before he was murdered had the world on edge, understandably. It was also an unprecidented event. I remember JFK being criticized and just as much I remember everyone else involved with US government and the Russians being criticized as well.

I’ve always felt, in retrospect, that Kennedy’s final choice as to how to handle the crisis with a naval embargo was wise and ended up calling the bluff over the so-called nuclear “option”. It’s not that I or anyone who was alive at the time didn’t find it terrifying but there must have been a sizable portion of humanity that felt that fundamentally no one really wants to destroy everything to make a point.

JFK’d also championed what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also got the Russians to sign a nuclear test ban treaty which was an enormous achievement- it was even more remarkable that the United States houses of Congress approved it than the fact that the Soviets did.

Kennedy had some reputation as a Cold Warrior in the 50s but he also offered direct support to the so-called third-world non-aligned movements in the world’s politics. Kennedy was ahead of the pack in supporting the efforts of African nations. And I think that Kennedy was someone whose experience in politics changed him in ways that many were not comfortable with.

I think those who truly weren’t comfortable with him murdered him.

The main recipients of the spoils from Kennedy’s death were what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial” complex. JFK’s biggest opponents within the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Cuban Missle Crisis thought a nuclear strike on Cuba or even a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union were better “options” to deal with the crisis.

Many who knew Kennedy said he’d frankly told them he wanted to get all US troops out of Vietnam. That could not have been a popular option to many who felt entitled to positions of power- most of them unelected- in these United States.

I’ve felt in my heart that a great deal could’ve been different in the USA the last 50 years. Still we- the actual people- are the ones who started the Civil Rights movement and who kicked open the doors for Gay people and saw the class differences in the way women were treated and opposed the degradation of the very earth we all depend on. The politicians have followed after a few decades of pressure for the most part. And that’s probably the way it should be ideally. But there was a time when some of us glimpsed a possibility that maybe as a people we could’ve used a good quarterback, too.

There’s a book I’ve recently read that puts together a lot of information surround JFK’s death and the realities of those times and does so in the service of certain beliefs. You could call those beliefs spiritual. But the picture that emerges- powerfully summoned here- is a very dark one but it’s literal highlights illuminate much of what I’ve instinctively felt about those days in 1963 and about the repercussions that have followed our fate ever since. Here’s a web site that gives some introduction:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-why-he-died-and-why-it-matters/16273

That November 22nd, a Friday, and throughout that grim weekend it seemed like one big long “day the music died”. I remember reading a woman columnist who’d written that JFK’s death wasn’t about “that we’d never smile again”, but rather, that we would simply “never be young again” in just such a way. Maybe it’s appropriate that a musical phenonmenon was poised to be a welcome distraction- the Beatles. They were unprecidented too.

Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded Kennedy of course and he did push through some key legislation with a big help from an enormous upwelling of sympathy and empathy for those ideas associated with JFK’s “New Frontier”. I think it’s fair to say that LBJ, while a legendary legislator who knew how to pressure his peers, was a very uncharismatic, even homely stand-in for what a nation had in all too brief a time gotten accustomed to in their whip-smart President who was not before and now could never be successfully equated with “business as usual”.

Vietnam, of course snowballed into a major war and went on longer than either or both World War One and World War Two. What Eisenhower had warned against had come to pass and is at this very day more deeply imbedded into our “way of life” than ever.

Most of our Presidents since JFK have been chumps. Let’s face it; they go along to get along. Except when they’re dangerous to our health directly like Reagan and Dumb-ya.

You’re damn right you better “be the change you want”.

And, though, we are here to make the best of our “march of progress” it matters that we realize that our “drone” war continues (at least it takes our minds off asteroids, right?) and numbers of the most honest and noble among us are imprisoned for telling the truth by our “liberal” President and we once again dance to the tune of “austerity” when many of us need a living income in order to buy the things that will sustain a “livable” economy and that large numbers of our countrymen and children are malnourished.

Try not to blame me too much for wanting another “1963″ that gets to have a happy ending this time

Sorry to anyone still wandering into my site to see what’s new. The answer is that :

1. I’ve been “stupid” busy with work,

2. “my” football team the 49ers have been wending their way to the ultimate game tomorrow,

3.  I’ve gone up a couple of weekends to the SF East Bay to check out what we intend to do about my late parents’ home,

4.  and PLC and I were informed we have to move.

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As for the “work” portion we have been inudated with laborious tasks and the scenario unfolding goes something like this: “if you want to remain employed for an uncertain amount of time you will have to do more work, in a shorter amount of time and not complain about it.”

Fortunately I have nothing to fall back on except a suicidal sword so that decision is already pre-fabbed for me.

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Pictured above is SF QB Colin Kaepernick running away from the Pack

In what should be a thrilling journey in the land of make-believe populated by actors, singers and athletes who are crazily and disproportionately over-paid, over-loved, over-idolized, over-indulged, over-worked and over-blamed for the sins of the culture they have developed in- I have hit the jackpot with two teams from my hometown of San Francisco who are entrants in the championship game. The baseball Giants have already won that game the last two of three years. Tomorrow in the late afternoon my and my blood family’s first true love, the 49ers, will be trying to defeat the Ravens of Baltimore for the American football championship.

And it is a thrilling journey in that suspension-of-disbelief, let’s-not-worry-about-the-REAL-problems-of-the-World manner we have come to expect for our circuses to accompany our bread (see second paragragh above).

One rather demoralizing off-shoot story that has emerged within the two-week orgy of  Super Bowl press-versus-jock pirhanna feeding that is typical of the sports press at this time is that first one and then to a slightly lesser extent, two other members of these 49ers made homophobic and then thinly veiled homo-nervous comments. The team spokespeople, management, head coach and a significant number of top players made sympathetic, supportive comments about being accepting of a gay player in their midst, but THAT genie appears to have slipped out of the bottle naked and drunk right when Bunny and the Andersons were arriving by limo to their luxury suites. Oh my goodness.

But for me, the game, the game, the game is the thing. Perish the thought we should have to liberate ourselves without the burgeoning support of our fave actors, players and various and sundry celebs but it used to always be that way back in the days.

I any event while I’ve never been a proponent of throwing the baby out with the bath water and believe that two goals may be pursued at the same time even while they don’t have the same importance I have also never based my vote or my aim in this world solely on the opinion of even those I love, respect or any partial combination of the foregoing.

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Of the third subject- my/our parents home- there have been some disagreeable incidents -but aside from and despite those my sibs, relatives and I have managed to soldier on.

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As to the fourth, PLC is phoning as I type and mostly getting discouraging news about future prospects for our living digs. But we will find a way to prevail and eventually inhabit an acceptable if not palatial substitute sooner rather than later.

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So that has much to do with my current lack of appearance here and at all of my friends’ blogging outposts as well.

I expect to be a more regular participant when we get some much-needed dust-settling done.

We’re hoping the above “dream house” takes Section 8.