Posts Tagged ‘Mendocino’

Newer Entries »

Le Village

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

“I always felt that the great high privilege, relief, and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.” Katherine Mansfield

A soggy afternoon, the last Friday in October of 2010, Halloween two days away. I moved to Mendocino from Berkeley on Halloween five years ago and I have yet to tire of going to the beach. I mention the beach because almost everyone I met during my first two years here assured me that I would soon tire of going to the beach. These same people also told me that after I lived here for a year or two, I would grow stir crazy and hunger for the cultural excitement of the outer world. They were adamant I would want to travel to Mexico or Hawaii or Europe or Manhattan, or at least to San Francisco, but after five years here I have yet to experience the slightest urge to go anywhere but the village, the forest, and the beach.

Today was the last farmers’ market of the year in Mendocino. I love our little mercado. I hope one day to be one of the people selling things in our market. I will vend vegetables and fruit and books and CDs and greeting cards and Giants T-shirts and Giants baseball hats and Cliff Glover and Marion Miller ceramics, and each week zany and eccentric friends will make guest appearances at my booth. I will also have a weekly poetry contest (one entry per person), and a guess-how-many-beans-are-in-the-jar contest, with valuable prizes.

Today I would have bought a farmers’ market pie from the wonderful Garden Bakery people, but I am gluten free now and the Garden Bakery people only sell pies full of gluten. I’m predicting big things for gluten-free foodstuffs in the near future. Whomsoever comes up with decent gluten-free sour dough French bread and a credible gluten-free pizza crust will make out like big dogs.

Standing at the uphill end the farmers’ market, a light rain falling, the vendors few and stoic, shoppers scarce, the atmosphere bracingly local and groovy in the absence of tourists, I watch a local woman carrying a big basket turn away from a vegetable stand and bump into another local woman carrying an even bigger basket.

Big Basket: Hey, how are you?

Bigger Basket: I think I’m okay. I’m just so…overwhelmed.

Big: I know. I know. It’s just crazy.

Bigger: I know. I just…one thing after another.

Big: I know. I keep thinking, ‘Are things ever gonna slow down?’

Bigger: I know. It’s…overwhelming.

Big: Are you okay?

Bigger: Yeah. Yeah. I think so.

Big: Good. You look good. You’ve lost weight.

Bigger: Have I? Wow. I don’t know. Maybe.

Big: But you’re okay.

Bigger: Yeah. I think so.

Big: Good. Great to see you.

Bigger: Great to see you, too.

“Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned.” Swami Nirmalananda

When I come to the village I like to park my truck at the Presbyterian Church and walk what I’ve come to think of as a holy circuit, a labyrinth of invigorating twists and turns around town. I begin by transecting the eternally For Sale eucalyptus-dominated vacant lot, assess the state of the economy by the size of the crowd of caffeine addicts in front of Moody’s java bar, jaywalk diagonally across Lansing, and hang a left onto Ukiah, my first stop invariably the post office (home to a marvelous crew of die hard Giants fans) followed by protein confiscation at the always warm and friendly Mendocino Market (a fabulous deli with a fine wine selection and a growing number of gluten-free items on their menu). Next I visit Corners (zaftig organic groceries in a cozy former church), the bank (our one and only), Zo (fabuloso copy shop), Garth Hagerman’s (gorgeous nature photography and web meistering), Harvest at Mendosa’s (beer and olive oil and notebooks), the bookstores (used and new), the new hardware store (they should sell transistor radios), and I used to frequent our deliciously aromatic bakeries and Frankie’s pizza, but now that I am gluten-free I spare myself the glorious sights and divine scents of their verboten goodies.

So you see, though Mendocino lacks a good Mexican restaurant, decent public bathrooms, a good Chinese restaurant, a town square with comfortable benches and a virile fountain, a good Thai restaurant, a spacious pool hall, a good Indian restaurant, a movie theatre showing foreign films, public tennis courts, and a commodious tea house, we have almost everything else a reasonable human could desire.

There is the excellent Mendocino Café featuring pricey and not-so-pricey entrees, and just across Big River Bridge we have a fine bike shop where one can also rent a canoe. We have three bars (counting the hotel), a liquor store, dentists, a veterinarian, massage therapists, a hamburger joint, and several restaurants, inns, galleries, and shops for rich people and tourists. And perhaps best of all, there are no overhead wires in the village, which makes everyone who comes here feel inseparable from the sky, which uplifts us even if we are unconscious of why we feel uplifted.

I wish everyone (save for the handicapped) would park his or her vehicle in just one place when he or she comes to town, and walk from this one place to all the places he or she needs to go, instead of driving from one place to another to another and another in our very small village; but what are you going to do? Yes, the village depends on tourism and the illegal sale of quasi-legally grown marijuana for the larger part of its economic existence; and, yes, many of the houses in the area are the second and third and fourth homes of people who can truthfully be called filthy rich and only use these tertiary properties as tax write offs and weekend getaways; and I cannot deny there are days when the village reeks of decadence and disregard for the earth and a hatred of whales and trees and poor people, but how is that any different from anywhere else? I don’t know.

On weekdays around noon, dozens and dozens of teenagers come down from the high school and invade the retail sector of the village to buy crap for lunch. Many of these cuties and louts talk at the top of their lungs (don’t ask me why) and are easy to overhear. To wit: three not-quite-old-enough-to-legally-drive (thank goodness) boys stand on a corner across from Harvest Market, gorging on slices of Frankie’s gluten-rich pizza as they watch the girls go by.

Teenaged Boy #1: She is so easy.

Teenaged Boy #2: How do you know?

Teenaged Boy #3: He doesn’t.

#1: Do.

#3: Don’t.

#1: Do.

#3: Lie.

#2: She on the pill?

#1: Oh, yeah.

#3: You don’t know.

#1: Do.

#3: Don’t.

#1: Do.

#3: Lie.

#2: I think she is. Kevin dumped her purse.

#3: So?

#1: I did more than dump her purse.

#3: Lie.

#1: What the fuck, man? You in love with her?

#3: Fuck you, man.

#2: Why would she be on the pill if she wasn’t doing it?

#1: Oh, she’s doing it.

#3: You don’t know.

#1: Do.

#3: Lie

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Krishnamurti

In the post office, I witness two local men greet each other.

Man One: Hey, long time no see. Where you been?

Man Two: Here. You?

One: Mostly here. We went away a couple times. See the boys.

Two: How they?

One: Good. Yours?

Two: Fine. I guess. Who knows? You know?

One: Right. Right. Who knows?

Silence.

One: So…things okay?

Two: Same. You?

One: Good. Same. You still…?

Two: Yeah, yeah. Same old. You?

One: Just, you know…working away.

Two: Right. Business good?

One: Can’t complain.

Two: No. No. Can’t complain.

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Samuel Beckett

As I’m loading my groceries and mail into my truck at the Presbyterian, a little boy rushes up to me.

“Sir! Sir!” he cries. “May I ask you a question?”

“Certainly.”

“Where is the ocean?” He asks with such unmitigated passion he might have asked What is the meaning of life?

“There,” I say, gesturing toward the quite obvious sea.

The boy frowns at the distant breakers. “I mean, how do we get there?”

“Take the trail to the left and you’ll come to a stairway leading down to the beach.” Now a man who might be the boy’s father arrives, a tall fellow, forty-something. “Take the trail to the right and you’ll wend your way along the headlands.”

“Will there be gulls on the beach?” asks the boy, nodding eagerly. “And a tall dark tree on the edge of a cliff?”

“Yes,” I say, knowing the tree of which he speaks. “And there will be ravens and ospreys circling in the air above the confluence of the river and the sea.”

“Yes!” shouts the boy, turning to the man who might be his father. “Let’s go!”

“He’s got some kind of imagination,” says the man, winking at me. “Thanks for the directions.”

“An actor is totally vulnerable. His total personality is exposed to critical judgment—his intellect, his bearing, his diction, his whole appearance. In short, his ego.” Alec Guinness

I take a seat on my preferred bench on the ocean-viewing terrace of the Presbyterian and jot down my conversation with the boy. A young woman commandeers the bench next to mine and carries on her phone conversation without the slightest regard for privacy, hers or mine.

She glares up at the sky and shouts into her little red phone, “I’m like, ‘No way,’ and he’s all, ‘Yes, you will,’ like I owe him? Can you believe it? I know. And I’m like, ‘If you think dinner and wine and a little coca-doodle-doo is the total ticket, you can forget it, buster,’ and he’s like totally furious, and I’m thinking, ‘Who told this dude I was cheap? You know? I mean, like, Jesus.”

She listens for a moment, nodding enthusiastically.

“I know. I know. I couldn’t believe it. Totally.”

She laughs unconvincingly.

“I know, I know. Totally. So I go, ‘No way,’ and he like totally clamps his teeth and gives me this look like he’s gonna kill me. Insane. I know. I so totally know. And I’m like, ‘Excuse me? I don’t think so?’ and he’s like fried out of his mind, and I’m like, ‘How the fuck do I get home because no way I get in a car with this psycho.’”

She laughs dryly, and my throat aches in sympathy.

“I know. I know. He did seem nice. Totally. I know. I know. I mean…I was like having fantasies about him. Totally.”

(This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser November 2010.)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Solar School

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

(This piece originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser June 2010)

Mendocino has a spanking new elementary/junior high school on Little Lake Road about a mile inland from the village, and I am happy to report that her shiny blue metal rooftops are being covered with photovoltaic cells to produce electricity. I was recently at the school shooting hoops on one of the three new outdoor basketball courts, fresh nets affixed to glossy orange rims, and as I huffed and puffed in humbling pursuit of my largely uncooperative basketball, valiant technicians were hard at work affixing the solar cells.

It was a sunny day, and in the absence of students or anyone else making use of the new school, I thrilled to imagine the school’s electric meters whirling in reverse as great currents of electricity flowed from the rooftops into the greater power grid. Such imagining made me happy in the face of the murderous gusher continuing to gush in the Gulf of Mexico. I am aware that solar power is not the ultimate answer to the woes of the world. I have read myriad articles by smart people explaining how electric cars are every bit as bad for the earth as gasoline powered cars. I have read even more articles by these same and other smart people explaining how renewable energy will never replace oil and that we are destined, rather soon, for a new Dark Age of lawlessness and mass starvation. But whenever I stopped to catch my breath from chasing my runaway basketball and saw those fellows affixing solar panels to the shiny blue roof, I felt twinges of hope.

When I was a young man I decided to try to make my living as a musician and a writer. I worked as a landscaper, a gardener, a janitor, a ditch digger, a farmhand, a day care worker, and at several other low-paying jobs. With whatever energy I had left at the end of each day, I practiced music and writing. And for ten years, every person I knew, including my best friends and many smart people, told me with absolute certainty, “You will never succeed as a writer or as a musician. Give it up.” And when I did succeed, these same absolutely certain people said, “I always knew you’d make it.”

Indeed, I have subsequently observed again and again that smart people are often very good at talking themselves and other people out of doing things by stating with absolute certainty that the thing in question cannot be achieved, and they know the thing cannot be achieved because they have the data to prove it. “Oh, so you put in a gray water system to water your garden and conserve water. Big deal. That won’t help. Corporations waste millions of gallons of water every minute. Your little gray water system won’t make a bit of difference. Ditto growing your own vegetables, driving less, having only one child instead of two, vacationing closer to home, carpooling, turning off lights, lowering the thermostat, or cooking your meals with a solar cooker. Won’t help. Don’t bother.”

Alternative energy? Why it takes so much energy to mine the materials for solar cells, to manufacture the cells, package them, ship them, you might as well drive an old Chevy Impala from here to New York and back and stay in air-conditioned motels along the way. Replace oil and coal consumption with wind power and solar power? You gotta be kidding. Can’t happen. Look right here. These are the numbers. Can’t happen. Get ready to subsist on turnips if you’re lucky and huddle in caves and fight off hordes of starving cannibals until you die a premature death.

But I look up at those guys on the blue roof and I can practically hear the electricity being made out of sunlight. Gushers of electricity. I see herb gardens surrounding this new solar school, and fields of tomatoes and squash and potatoes growing where they’re currently gouging out a soccer field. I see these commodious classrooms being used by people who walk here or ride here in electric shuttle buses or come on horses or on bicycles, and I see these people learning from each other, sharing ideas and books and tools, playing music, quilting, weaving, carving, building, making food, feeding each other, and caring for each other.

I don’t think even the smartest prognosticator can predict what humans might do if we allow ourselves to be guided by our creative instincts rather than the analysis of dubious data about things having little or nothing to do with the countless things each of us might do separately and together.

That said, I do think the idea of bio-fuels is horrific on any scale larger than a backyard still, and when I hear about hundreds of thousands of people planning to gather on beaches around the world to protest offshore drilling, my first thought is, “Yes, but how will they GET to the beaches? Because if they’re driving cars, I’m not buying it.” And I agree there is a powerful denial-of-reality mantra etched into our media-warped minds that intones: They (whoever they are) will surely figure something out to solve the crises of energy and food and pollution and over-population and crime and environmental degradation and global warming and the extinction of whales and salmon and krill and phytoplankton so we can go on our merry way living high on the hog, so to speak.

But our collective denial of reality scares me far less than the growing insistence by so many smart people that there is nothing we can do, collectively or individually, that will make any positive difference to the degradation of the planet and society and the future. And I sincerely wish all these smart future prognosticators would spend more time trying to imagine and test new ways to groove efficaciously with the earth, and spend much less time explicating and arguing ad nauseum that nothing we do will make any difference, because I’m enthralled with those solar panels on the blue roof and visions of electric meters whirling backwards; and if I hear one more smart person look up at those solar panels, figuratively speaking, and say, “Won’t help, don’t bother,” I’ll throw my basketball at him. Odds are I won’t hit him, but that will be my intention.

No doubt my years of living in communes informs my impatience with those who pronounce with such certainty that the actions of individuals can’t possibly ameliorate the horrific disasters perpetrated by the likes of BP and the Pentagon and all the other rapacious forces of evil in the world. Had I not proven to myself that I could live happily with few things, and subsequently experienced a quantum improvement in my quality of life as I spent less and less money and used less and less energy as a result of my immersion in small-scale socialism, I, too, might believe that peak oil sounds the death knell for a comfy way of life. Had I not grown, with relatively little difficulty, much of the delicious food I and fifteen other people needed to survive, I, too, might believe that only misery and drudgery and premature death lie ahead. But I don’t think the transition from a greed-based society to socialism will be bad. I think the change will be difficult but ultimately marvelous.

Yes, it may turn out that Things In General will continue to go from bad to worse, and lawlessness and deprivation will soon engulf us all. But Things In General are, for the most part, so stupid and wrong and broken they ought to crash and burn and leave ashes to fertilize the new and very different system we put in place of the old general things. When I read descriptions of how the Mendocino County Supervisors are presiding over the steep decline and inevitable fall of our local basic services, I find their collective myopia and inaction highly instructive. They reveal themselves to be inmates of the larger state and national institutions that would rather take things away from the weak and defenseless than raise taxes on the wealthy. Their stupidity would be comical if the effects were not so terrible for those least able to protect themselves. The obvious solution is standing right in front of our duly elected officials, a perfect hero of a solution named Equality, except our benighted leaders cannot see her, for she wears the cloak of socialism, and socialism is taboo. But I digress.

What I’m suggesting is that there are many ways already known to us that will help spin the meters backwards, and many more ways we have yet to imagine and design and try out. Just because all these smart people have decided things are going to turn out a certain way doesn’t mean things will turn out that certain way or that we should cease our efforts to figure out ways to live less destructively on the earth. Smart people only know what they think they know. And not one of them knows some of the things you know.

We are only doomed to a disastrous future if we buy into those guesses of disaster (and that’s all they are, guesses) and forget that we, individually and collectively, are limitlessly creative. And I predict that if enough of us make it our daily practice to give some of our time for the greater good, however we imagine doing so, all heaven will break loose.

For some reason, Todd is in an optimistic mood this week. His web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Big River Spring (2010)

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

(This essay first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2010)

The copious rains of 2010 made Big River the big muddy for much of the winter, the beach in late April grandiloquent with new sand. The probable summer beachscape is shaping up to be quite different than last year’s when a large shallow lagoon featured prominently and made a perfect swimming hole for kids to play in. I’m guessing we won’t have more than a puddle this year. Summer is the only time when the beach at the mouth of Big River holds its form for weeks on end, whereas the rest of the year the beachscape changes dramatically from day to day.

This will be the first summer, and therefore the first tourist season, since the dunderheads absconded with the Big River porta-potty and moved it to Heeser Drive where a perfectly good brick and mortar bathroom already exists but has been deemed too costly to operate. Let it be known that whichever candidate for the Board of Supervisors representing my neck of the Mendocino woods promises to put the potty back in the Big River beach parking lot not only gets my vote but I will be happy to appear on their campaign brochures standing beside the potty in question holding a placard reading

Candidate’s Name

Knows What Matters Most

But seriously folks, I smell (pun intended) a minor disaster looming as the annual thousands of tourists and locals descend upon our gorgeous beach to swill beer and soda and buckets of bowel-loosening dips and salsas, only to find there is no place to relieve themselves except in the peripheral poison oak-infested shrubbery. Yucko. I can see it now. Driftwood outhouses erected by capitalist vagrants to service the desperate turistas and their hysterical children, the stinky spillage perfuming the beach until the next high tide saves the day.

I have noticed a definite decline in beach usage by humanoids since our blessed outhouse was carted away. Not only do fewer people visit the beach nowadays, but those middle-aged and older visitors tend not to tarry as long as they used to in our pampered past. I, and others of my ilk, can be seen leaping up from our angles of repose and striking out purposefully for the far northern end of the beach where various caves and propitious indentations in the cliff face provide cover for the quick piss. Thus we emulate the myriad dogs running free on Big River beach contrary to the rarely enforced leash law, the dogs and we hoping no one catches us.

In other beach news, resident surfers tell me that this year’s sand bar promises excellent summer wave sets for surfers unable to afford trips to warmer climes. And birdwatchers (identifiable by their binoculars and bird books and furrowed brows) have confirmed my suspicions that this is a stellar year for the birds of Big River.

The resident ospreys (I counted seven overhead just yesterday) are happy and fat and in fine voice as they mingle with the legions of ravens and gulls composing the avian cyclone to be seen for much of nearly every day in the sky directly above the place where the river meets the sea. I assume this confluence of waters is rich with tiny organisms to be eaten by little fish to be eaten by bigger fish to be eaten by even bigger fish and seabirds and seals, and this abundance of foodstuffs explains why so many fish-eating birds congregate here. But why do the gulls and ravens and osprey (and occasional hawks) spend so many hours of their lives spiraling en masse above this collision of waters?

Yesterday, with the avian whirly gig in full swing and fulgent sunshine having brought several dozen humans to the sands at low tide, I asked my brethren why they thought the ravens and gulls spend so much time spiraling around in that particular place in the sky. Here are a few of their answers.

“Oh, wow, I never noticed those birds. Hmm. I don’t know.”

“There must be an updraft there caused by some sort of temperature exchange. You know, inland heat meets ocean cool. Birds love updrafts.”

“It’s a power spot.”

“It’s a magnetic thing.”

“Birds enjoy flying without having to flap their wings. People think animals do everything for some sort of survival reason, but they like to have fun as much as we do.”

“They’re exchanging information about, you know, weather and food and, you know, things of interest to birds.”

In other bird news, pelicans are more prevalent over Mendocino Bay than in any of the previous four years, and our cormorants are wonderfully fat these days as they share their islets off the headlands with platoons of visiting Canadian geese. The headlands themselves, soggy after years of drought, are verdant with mustard and wild roses and calla lilies, the multitudes of swallows and finches and hummingbirds zipping around in high spirits.

And then there are the humans. I was sitting on the beach yesterday, my back against a driftwood log, watching ravens perform the most amazing aerial acrobatics, when a woman walked by followed by a little boy with a bucket filled with rocks and shells.

“My bucket’s full,” said the boy, his sorrow palpable, “but there’s so much more to get.”

“Maybe you could just select the very best ones to take home,” suggested the woman.

“No,” said the boy, adamantly shaking his head. “I need more buckets.”

“But what are you going to do with all those rocks and shells, honey?”

“Keep them,” he said fiercely. “In the backyard.”

As they passed out of earshot, a big black Lab trotted up to me and dropped a soggy tennis ball at my feet. A man yelled to me from the shallows where he was filming ripples with his cell phone.

“If you throw it for him,” said the man, “he’ll never leave you alone.”

So I ignored the ball. The dog barked at me, a piercing bark.

“Leave him alone, Sam,” shouted the man, aiming his phone at me to record the funny scene of his dog harassing a guy on the beach.

But Sam continued to bark. And then Sam picked up the ball and dropped it in my lap, which inspired the following haiku.

Birds wheeling in the heavens

Dog saliva

Time to go

Todd’s novel Under the Table Books and his collection of short stories Buddha In A Teacup just won awards from the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, the former for Best Fiction, the latter for Best Short Story Collection. Yay!

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The Toilets of Mendocino

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

I was going to title this piece Pay To Poop or The Pooplic Option or something else related to the maddening absurdities of the current healthcare debate and the ongoing economic meltdown, but I didn’t want to offend anyone until they started reading. But seriously, folks, the powers-that-be have announced they are closing the only public restroom in the village of Mendocino! And these same enlightened ones just carted away the handicapped-access plastic latrine at Big River Beach. That’s right. The idyllic village and tourist destination of Mendocino may soon have No Public Potties. Why?

According to Sigmund Freud, the short answer is that Americans are insensitive barbarians. Freud made his one and only visit to America in 1909, and his most lasting impression of our great land came not from Niagara Falls, but from the lack of public restrooms. He said, and I paraphrase, “A society that does not provide public bathrooms for its citizens is essentially cruel and maladjusted and barbaric.”

When I first moved to Mendocino four years ago, I was struck by the brusque, dismissive, and sometimes cruel manner in which merchants would respond to my query, “May I use your bathroom?” I was inevitably directed to the state-funded public facility on Main Street, a stinky concrete bunker maintained by the state park people on whose land (our land) the bunker resides. I would sometimes find a homeless fellow bathing in the toilet stall. Sometimes the floors were so slick with piss, the journey across the cement floor wasn’t worth the risk of a fall. But most times the place was relatively clean and usable, and I was relieved and grateful that such a depository was available to the likes of me.

Why aren’t there two or three public restrooms in a village whose economy is tied to the tourist trade? Good question. In my fourteen hundred days as a resident in Mendocino, I have been asked at least three hundred times by visitors in the vicinity of the post office, some doing that telltale jig as they asked, “Is there a bathroom around here I can use?” And I have dutifully sent them to the distant bunker that our public servants tell us they must close because it costs them twenty-five thousand dollars a year to maintain, and the state is bankrupt, so… Really? Twenty-five grand to hose the bunker out every few days? Well, yes, because the hosing must be done by someone in the union, you see, so the numerous offers by the community to maintain the bunker must be declined because, well, hosing out bunkers is, what, highly technical?

The removal of the bathroom at Big River Beach has caused the bushes thereabouts to bloom with toilet paper and stinky residue as needy beachgoers do what any of us would do in the absence of an official portal in which to relieve ourselves. Now the briny air of my favorite beach mingles with the scent of urine and feces. Ain’t it grand?

Let us look a little deeper into this stinky mess. Who will be most impacted by the closure of the public option? Not the wealthy tourists staying at one or another luxurious inn. They will have toilets to use before and after sallying forth to buy trinkets stamped with the local moniker. At a recent farmer’s market I heard a well-heeled couple returning their purchase of jars of honey, explaining, “When we got back to the Stanford Inn, we realized the label didn’t mention Mendocino.” These folks will not miss the missing toilet, nor will patrons of the Mendocino Hotel.

The Mendocino Hotel, by the way, is the current provider of the nicest quasi-public option available in the village, and I will be forever in their debt for allowing me to use their facilities even when I’m not dining or drinking therein. Scruffy folks, however, need not apply. The only time I was ever questioned by hotel staff while en route to the hotel bathroom was on a bad hair day when I hadn’t shaved for a week.

Hmm? Is it too much of a stretch to connect the closure of the public restrooms to the ongoing harassment of the growing population of poor and homeless folks living on the fringes of the village? Not at all. The local grapevine is buzzing with news that our local gendarmes are now arresting folks for sitting or lying down on the headlands overlooking Big River Beach, calling this resting “camping”, which is illegal and punishable with a two hundred dollar fine. I wonder at which sector of the population this new interpretation of the camping law is aimed?

So…for the time being I suggest you take preemptive measures before heading into the village. And should you tarry long enough to need to, you know, make water, be resigned to buying something (or pretending to buy something) at an establishment possessed of a john. Yes, they tell us a portable latrine will be placed somewhere near the Kelly House, and won’t that be an attractive boost to tourism?

But I say let us laugh in the face of economic collapse and start a fund raising campaign to buy the land across the street from the Mendocino Post Office whereupon we will erect a large scale model of the Parthenon in which will reside state-of-the-art toilets and all necessary extras pursuant to a fully satisfying elimination experience. The south-facing roof of the Parthenon will sport highly efficient photovoltaic cells producing lucrative electricity feeding back into the omni-grid, since bathrooms use little or no electricity. All waste will be recycled and eventually certified organic for use on the new community garden where cabbages the size of basketballs will rise from the amply fertilized soil.

Artists disenfranchised from the recently conquered art center will be invited to display their wares in the lavatory courtyard, and in good time a public bath, sauna, showers, and massage parlor will be added to the complex. Bumper stickers will be sold extolling the experience of “going” in Mendocino, and tourists from around the world will come to “have a go” in the famous pooper. I DID IT IN MENDOCINO and I WENT IN MENDOCINO will soon adorn a million bumpers, as locals proudly sport the resident variant I GO IN MENDOCINO.

Let us rise above the barbarism of our time. Let us be a beacon of light and a model for the rest of this plundered nation. Let us come together to build the Parthenon of public restrooms so that in our middle and old ages we can hang out in the village secure in the knowledge that when we have to go, the way will not only be clear, but commodious.

Todd’s web site is Underthetablebooks.com. This essay originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser in November 2009.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Think

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

(This piece was originally published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser under the title “John Trudell and Me”)

John Trudell made an appearance at the Caspar Community Center a few weeks ago. I have listened to his provocative CD DNA a number of times, and I have admired him in the movies Thunderheart, Smoke Signals, and most recently as Coyote in Dreamkeeper. His impromptu 90-minute talk reiterated much of what he says on DNA, with one fabulous (for me) digression about Obama. This digression stated almost word-for-word what I have been saying to people for some months now, but coming from Trudell such intuitive analysis was greeted with applause rather than the snorts of derision that tend to greet my elucidations of “what’s really going on here.”

Trudell is big on thinking. As he says again and again, when we’re believing, we’re not thinking. When we limit ourselves to believing something, we close our minds to the possibility that the thing we believe in may have changed or disappeared. Trudell is skeptical that we have a democracy in America. If we believe we have a democracy, we will be closed to the possibility that we never had a democracy or that our democracy may be swiftly turning into something else.

In his digression about Obama, Trudell asked us to consider the possibility that Obama was installed as president by the ruling elite to further their ongoing agenda, just as Bill Clinton was crowned in order to complete the stalled works of his predecessor George the First. These works included the passage of NAFTA, the dismantling of Welfare and other aspects of the social safety net, the hastening of deregulation (of everything), and the demolition of unions. Trudell did not say what he thought Obama was installed to do, but he asked us to think of the economic meltdown and the government response to it as part of a larger plan, a plan that is working precisely as it is intended to work. He does not think the meltdown and the ensuing breakdown of our local and state governments are merely the repercussions of “some bankers making mistakes.” He thinks the overlords have installed Obama to oversee the next steps of their plan, though he did not specify what he thought those steps might be.

So I’ve been thinking about everything with new zeal, feeling validated by Trudell, and this morning my wife Marcia said something that crystallized much of what I’ve been thinking about. We were talking about the seemingly moronic proposal by the governator and his Republican minions to close our state parks. Such a plan makes no economic sense in the short or long term. It will hurt low-income vacationers. It will hurt local economies nurtured by state park use. And, Marcia said, it sets the stage for the privatization of the parks.

Think. All those wonderful state parks left unattended. Here come the armies of the newly impoverished to squat therein. What can be done? Call out the gendarmes. No gendarmes available due to budget cuts? Call out the National Guard and then privatize the parks. Lease them for, oh, a hundred years to private companies who will manage/protect them with private security forces. Entry fees will have to be exclusively high and those entering cannot be on any list of any sort of suspect. And then to pay for all this (to protect the park for future generations, of course) luxury homes must be built, tennis courts and a golf courses installed, with chic bistros riverside and lakeside and oceanside so the campers/residents won’t have to travel beyond the walls to dine. There will, of course, be high walls encircling the enclaves, er, parks. Far fetched?

Not at all. Consider the latest leaks reported in the mass media. It now appears Obama won’t have enough support in Congress, even among Democrats (imagine that?) to include a public option in any healthcare proposal. In which case, the healthcare situation will worsen and create more recruits for the army of the poor, as will the firing of eighteen thousand California public school teachers, a firing that will leave most inner city schools in California understaffed and essentially unmanageable, except as de facto jails. Oh, yes, and Obama himself has just announced he wants to cut over 300 billion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid, thus impoverishing many thousands more.

Meanwhile, there’s no budget shortfall for the military. In the absence of decent paying jobs, military recruiters are swamped with volunteers and we are swiftly growing a huge and robust military for wars abroad and quelling unrest at home.

As Trudell said several times during his talk, “I’m crazy, okay. I’m just talking. I don’t know anything. I’m just saying…think.”

School just got out for the summer, the kids shouting their goodbyes from the school bus trundling through Mendocino. And a year from now, school, what’s left of it, will be getting out again. If you believe the economy and our schools will be better than they are now because the experts on NPR and in the mainstream media say the economy seems to be stabilizing and a recovery is on the way, you are, to quote John Trudell, not thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Mendocino the Great

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

 

Yes, arguments can be made that Mendocino is an over-priced tourist destination/trap, but having lived here for three and a half years now, I would like to give you eight good reasons why I think Mendocino is every bit as great as Fort Bragg.

1. Does the post office in your town play (loudly) the San Francisco Giants’ day games on the radio for all the world to hear? Do the postal employees in your town’s post office frequently stop mid-transaction to wait and see what happens on the next key pitch of the Giants’ game? The Mendocino post office does and her employees do.

So I’m mailing a couple packages and Sheila types in a zip code and says, “I read your rant in the AVA about the Giants before the Dodgers swept us, and after they swept us I had to admit we’re a minor league team yet again.” Then we launched into simultaneous commentaries on Bochy suffering from Dusty Bakeritis (a malady characterized by leaving a pitcher in the game long after he has proven himself incapable of getting anyone out) when he left Howrie in after he’d been severely shellacked by the Dodgers. And all the while the line of postal customers is growing longer and longer, but we don’t care because we have to finish hammering home this crucial point about the Giants. Is that a great post office, or what?

2. I go from the post office to Corners and pay for my ultra-fresh organic purchases (and a brilliantly fresh Boontberry cookie) with exact change, for which the clerk rewards me by striking a tiny gong hanging above the cash register (a custom of the collective) and the old former church reverberates with the sweet sound of perfection, however fleetingly. What a great store!

3. The big winds of late have brought down hundreds of eucalyptus branches in the vacant lot across the street from the Mendocino Café. I park our old pickup next to the lot and gather a few weeks worth of perfectly-seasoned kindling, which makes starting the morning and evening fires a snap. What a great vacant lot!

4. Speaking of the Mendocino Café. Talk about good food and friendly people. They even have entrees one might call quasi-reasonable in price. We recently met a friend there for her birthday. She had her five-year old granddaughter in tow. No problem. The Mendocino Café has a kids’ menu that offers, among other things, grilled cheese sandwiches. What a great café!

5. I stop at Big River Beach to take my afternoon constitutional on the vast sand flat exposed at low tides. As I’m zipping up my parka to protect myself from the chill air powered by a fierce offshore breeze, a shiny black Mercedes pulls up beside my eucalyptus-laden pickup. A young woman hops out. Gracefully. She would probably win any Angelina Jolie look-alike contest she entered, and I do a double take to make sure she is not actually Angelina. She’s wearing black short shorts, a black belly shirt, a skimpy silver windbreaker, and a black baseball cap (not the Giants, alas.) She brings forth a fluffy white poodle, winks at me (truly), and then saunters down onto the sand with her dog following.

I, Nanook of Mendocino, stride into the wind wondering why Angelina’s twin isn’t freezing to death. When I’m way out on the flats singing to the waves (the perfect place to practice without scaring or offending anyone) I turn to look back upriver, and way in the distance I espy the beautiful young woman striding toward the swollen river. She is now wearing only a diminutive bikini. Without hesitation, she dives into the icy torrent, her poodle barking enthusiastically, and swims out about thirty feet, swims back to shore, gets out and runs away in the direction of her car.

A half-hour later, wind-whipped and cold, I return to my truck. The young woman, now fully clothed, is sitting in her Mercedes reading a book and, drum roll, smoking a cigar. Talk about a great town beach.

6. The next day I’m in the hardware section of Harvest Market, formerly known as Mendoza’s, trying to solve a problem with a defective part I got with the car top box I bought from Sears. The guy helping me spends at least twenty minutes trying all sort of things to help me, consults with two other guys, and in the end we come up with a workable solution that costs me all of thirty-five cents. I celebrate by buying a very reasonably priced organic wine (for cooking) and an organic 73% dark chocolate candy bar. What a great hardware grocery store.

7. I pick up my mail and walk across the street to the Mendocino Market (deli) to buy a Rosie chicken. (You probably think all I do is shop and eat and walk on the beach, but you can ask my wife and she’ll tell you I’m always working on something.) I am invariably greeted by name when I enter the market, and if they are not terribly busy, the quality of my day is inquired about. This alone would make the place great, but the sandwiches here are not just good, they are really good, and reasonably priced. The soup de jour is always excellent, the fish is fresh and locally caught, and they feature an excellent selection of wonderful wines, most of which I cannot in good conscience afford except on extra special occasions. But it is the clientele and the particular sort of milling around that goes on in the Mendocino Market that makes the place stellar. I have had some really good political, philosophical, and meteorological discussions whilst awaiting my ham on rye or waiting to point out which of the pieces of snapper I crave for the evening meal. And when the high school kids come down the hill on their lunch break, and the market fills up with teens in search of nourishment, the conversations to be heard are, like, oh my God, so awesome.

So I’m waiting to order some chicken parts, and while I wait, an apology is made to me for having to wait (can you believe it?) and I reply, “Oh, I’m in no hurry.”

The woman ahead of me (waiting for her soup) laughs self-consciously and says, “I’m always in a hurry. This is my second day of vacation and I still can’t stop hurrying, though I have nothing to hurry about.”

“It can take years to stop hurrying,” I said, thinking of my ongoing transition from city life to life in the country. “But it’s so good for us to slow down.” And then I sighed, having reminded myself to slow down, because I, too, had nothing to be hurrying about.

The woman sighed, too, reflexively mirroring me, and her shoulders dropped about three inches, and she said, “You are so right. I just…wow…forgot how not to hurry. I’ve gotta make some big changes in my life. I really do.”

Is that a great little market or what?

8. I put my Rosie chicken parts (we’re dark meat people) in my cooler, leave my truck unlocked because I’ve decided to wait until someone steals something from my truck before I succumb to my old city habits of locking everything and living in fear of being robbed, and I walk down to the Presbyterian parking lot and from there down the trail to the edge of the cliff overlooking the mouth of Big River, and as gulls and osprey and ravens and vultures circle in the blue above me, I put in two good hours on my novel, write a couple long letters, and draw a pleasing picture of a naturally bonsai pine tree that appears to be growing out of solid stone. And not another person appears in my view shed for the entire two hours. Is that a great town park or what?

 

Todd’s newest novel is Under the Table Books, and his web site is Underthetablebooks.com.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Newer Entries »