Tag: Angelina Jolie

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Takeover Complete

triangle-orn

Triangle Eye drawing by Todd

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser June 2014)

“In individuals, insanity is rare: but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” Friedrich Nietzsche

The takeover is complete, and by takeover I mean the takeover of our collective ability to distinguish reality from illusion. We have been thoroughly conquered and now voluntarily carry devices on our persons day and night to keep us connected to the great corporate propaganda machine. Known as smart phones, these devices are not yet implanted in our foreheads, though I’m sure millions of people will voluntarily undergo such implanting when the propaganda machine tells them forehead implants are hip and super fast and greatly enhance video gaming and keeping up with the lives of celebrities.

Takeover? What am I talking about? Let me count the ways.

Among the tiny fraction of Americans who still read books, there is talk of boycotting Amazon for delaying sales and deliveries of books published by the media arm of the massive multinational corporation Hachette that owns television stations, newspapers, publishers, and aero-space companies and is doing all it can to hasten the annihilation of what little remains of our once thriving literary culture. Yet corporate television talking heads are celebrating this corporate behemoth as “the little guy” and urging book buyers to boycott evil Amazon and buy corporate junk elsewhere.

When will people realize that nearly all the books for sale in their so-called independent bookstores are published by corporations who would be every bit as bad or worse than Amazon if only they had gotten into Amazon’s position first? When will people realize that book reviews and their placement in various media are paid for by corporate behemoths in order to advertise books those corporations want people to buy? And when will readers realize that bestseller lists are lists of books that multinational corporations want to sell lots of, and virtually any new book you’ve heard of in the last thirty years was published by a corporation with politics that would make a fascist feel warm and fuzzy? Apparently never, now that the takeover of our collective intelligence is complete.

Boycott Amazon? How about boycotting Chevron or Chase or General Electric or Monsanto or any of the truly evil corporations?

“Democracy don’t rule the world, you’d better get that in your head; this world is ruled by violence, but I guess that’s better left unsaid.” Bob Dylan

Reading Will Parrish’s excellent and terrifying summary of the dams and reservoirs and pipelines to be built with many billions of our tax dollars in order to transport nearly all the state’s water—should it ever rain again—to southern California for the benefit of corporate farms and to provide water for twenty-five million people who shouldn’t be living there, is to read a declaration of insanity and is further proof of the completeness of the takeover. Our collective willingness to allow this environmental suicide is a testament to how thoroughly brainwashed we are.

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

The number of registered voters in Mendocino County voting in the June 3 primary was a historically low eighteen per cent, which is far less than the percentage of Iraqis and Afghanis who vote in their war torn countries where voting might easily get them killed. But here where anyone can vote at home and mail in his or her ballot, only eighteen per cent of the registered voters—a fraction of those eligible to vote—cast their ballots. Takeover complete.

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” George Bernard Shaw

The news is full of stories about corporate shill Hillary Clinton claiming that she and her philandering hubby Bill exited the White House in 2001, dead broke. Those are her words. Dead broke. And she says that is why she and Bill felt it necessary for Bill to charge 500,000 dollars per speaking engagement and Hillary 200,000 per engagement so they could struggle, as Hillary put it, to make payments on their two new behemoth houses and their various new cars and jets and things, and put Chelsea through Stanford. God, the suffering.

This poppycock is being reported as important news. Takeover complete.

“I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.” Edith Sitwell

Just about every day now, somewhere in America, someone goes on a shooting rampage and kills and wounds several people. For a while, these rampages were followed by cries from parents of the victims and from legislators calling for something to be done to keep guns from falling into the hands of certifiably crazy people, but now that these rampages have become so frequent we hear nothing in the news about the need for gun control. Takeover complete.

“We can end the use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war once and for all. We really can do it.” Angelina Jolie

Reading about the four-day conference in London where representatives from 140 countries gathered with movie star and United Nations envoy Angelina Jolie to discuss the idea of possibly sort of maybe kind of trying to see about declaring sexual violence a no-no for armies and soldiers waging war, I thought Wait, is this a joke? Killing, bombing, and maiming is okay, war is okay, and it’s fine to use drones to blow up wedding parties and women and children, but while we are killing and bombing and maiming and blowing up women and children we must try real hard not to commit sexual violence. Okay. Takeover complete.

“Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence.” Mason Cooley

At noon the boys and girls from the high school spill into the village to buy their lunches at Harvest or Frankie’s or the Goodlife Café or the marvelous Mendocino Grocery across the street from the post office. All the girls clutch their phones, fearing to be untethered for even a moment. Can this be true? Surely there must be one girl not clutching her phone. If I stand here long enough I might see one, and maybe a unicorn, too.

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Celebrity Saviors

magician

Mr. Magician painting by Todd

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser December 2013)

“Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of the influential Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in England say many of the solutions proposed by world leaders to prevent “runaway global warming” will not be enough to address the scale of the crisis. They have called for “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the United States, EU and other wealthy nations.” Democracy Now

You may have heard that Russell Brand, the British comedian and movie star and ex-husband of pop diva Katy Perry, has made quite a splash of late talking about bringing down the current earth-killing systems of government and finance and replacing them with truly democratic socialist systems that serve all the people and stop killing the earth instead of only serving the bloody hell psychotic super rich. Russell isn’t saying anything new, but he speaks well, debates well, and has a lovable fearlessness and charisma that attracts the attention of thousands of previously disinterested people.

Also recently, Angelina Jolie, the mega-famous movie star and wife of mega-famous movie star Brad Pitt, received a humanitarian award from the same folks who hand out Oscars, and she made an eloquent acceptance speech in which she said that there but for fortune she might have been trapped in a refugee camp with little hope of having a good life, and she was determined to continue to work as hard as she can to help those less fortunate than she.

Simultaneously with Russell and Angelina broaching these subjects so rarely broached by super-famous celebrities, I happened to read the transcript of the show on Democracy Now from which I took this article’s opening quote, and I thought, “What if Amy Goodman interviewed Oprah Winfrey and Tom Hanks and they spoke the identical words spoken by these two scientists no one has ever heard of? What kind of an impact would that have on the world?” These scientists are talking about living lives of what many people in America and Europe would consider extreme material simplicity: no more traveling by air, minimal use of automobiles, getting around by bicycling, walking and using public transportation, radically reducing energy consumption in the home, not buying imported food, shopping locally, and so forth.

Then I had an epiphany that goes something like this: since hundreds of millions (and possibly billions) of people around the world care more about what celebrities do and think than they care about anyone or anything else, what if Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and Justin Beiber and Madonna and Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lawrence and Lady Gaga and all the world’s most famous celebrities could be convinced to live lives of material simplicity in order to slow and eventually reverse the destruction of the biosphere?

Impossible? I don’t think so, especially if we, the people, can convince a few key super stars to make the change, and in so doing make material simplicity seem exciting and sexy, which it is, for then other celebrities will follow suit in order to, you know, be among the coolest of the cool.

“There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won’t.” Annie Lennox

While watching sports highlights on my computer, I saw a thirty-second advertisement for shoes or shaving cream, I can’t remember which, that features a mega-famous basketball player going to exclusive parties and driving a million-dollar car and being swamped by fans and living in a mansion and buying diamonds and consorting with gorgeous women. As we watch the footage of the superstar’s high life, we hear the voice of the mega-famous player we’re watching say, “If they took away the parties, the hot cars, the fans, the money, the high life, what would be left?” Now we see this superstar jumping incredibly high and making a fantastic shot as he answers his own question with, “Everything.”

And I took this to mean that this superstar, worshipped by millions of young men and women, cares more about basketball than he cares about all those glitzy, greenhouse gas spewing, meaningless wastes of life and time, which means he is the perfect candidate for assuming a life of material simplicity and modeling earth-saving ways of living for his followers. Okay!

“90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane, and all but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.” Jon Queally

That’s right. Two-third of all the greenhouse gases emitted on earth in the last two hundred and fifty years were emitted by ninety companies producing oil, gas, coal, and cement, and most of the remaining greenhouse gas emissions came from people using that oil, gas, coal, and cement. Thus the solution is clear: we have to stop using so much oil, gas, coal and cement.

According to Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows-Larkin of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the average American is responsible for producing approximately eight (8) tons of greenhouse gas per year. Furthermore, 1.5 billion people in China are catching up to Americans with a per-person average of five (5) tons per year, with 1.5 billion folks in India gaining fast on the people of China in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Kevin and Alice estimate that we must quickly reduce the global per-person yearly average to two (2) tons of greenhouse gas emissions to have any hope of the planet being habitable a few decades hence. They also remind us that the average per-person tonnage is brought way up by the wealthiest people on earth who do lots of flying around in jets, living in huge energy-gobbling homes, driving too many gas-guzzling cars, and buying lots of things they don’t need brought to them from many thousands of miles away.

“On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate.” Buckminster Fuller

So…you check your email. A friend sent you a link. You click on the link and are taken to a headline JUSTIN BEIBER JOINS CO-HOUSING COMMUNITY. The accompanying article reports: “Following a celebratory tweet to his eight hundred million devoted followers, the Beibster rode his bicycle towing the small trailer holding all his worldly possessions to his one-bedroom apartment in the zero emissions and totally self-sustaining co-housing community of High Hopes in Townsend, New Jersey, his ultra-groovy pad to be shared with the Beibster’s awesomely cute wife Gretchen, also known as She (Accordion).

“I’m totally digging working in our big organic garden and teaching guitar at the local community school,” said the Beibster who will be traveling by tramp steamer with Gretchen to Europe next month for their acoustic bicycle tour touting his new album Light As A Feather, featuring his global hit Cleaning Up My Act. “When we get home from Europe, we’ll hang here at High Hopes for a few months and then go gigging by train.”

In the afternoon, you turn on the radio to catch your favorite Eco-Revolution show Get Natural with hosts Tina Fey and Russell Brand, coming to you live from the straw bale solar community center of Quail Run Cooperative Farm a few miles from downtown San Luis Obispo. Tina and Russell, co-founders of Quail Run, have as their special guest today the famous director James Cameron talking about his latest 3-D comedy thriller Turning Down The Heat starring Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, Hugh Jackman, Beyonce, and Adam Sandler as improvisational ecological innovators sent into the way-too-hot center of North America to befriend the desperate people living there and implement zany innovative ways to speed up the reversal of global warming.

What makes Get Natural such a great show is the way Tina and Russell mix movie talk and celebrity gossip with tips on canning, fermentation, compost, communal living, and the new Slow Travel movement. Jennifer Lawrence calls midway through the show to talk about some new tricks she learned while making her latest batch of goat cheese and how much she enjoyed her three-week walk to Florida from her upstate New York intentional simplicity commune to shoot the seventh and final movie in the Hunger Games series, Hungry No More.

“I was exhausted after four weeks of filming,” said Jennifer, “so I took the quantum gravity zero-emissions train home. We had a stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, so the trip took almost an hour instead of the usual thirty minutes, but we produced far more energy than we consumed en route.”

There are still a few celebrities and a few dimwitted fans who have not yet made the shift, but that can’t last now that all the corporations are making such huge profits from their clever de-growth de-hedge fund strategies, and with the fines for profligate energy use so exorbitant. Yes, we’re faced with the problem of what to do with so much wealth and freedom and opportunity to be shared by everyone, but we’ll have to tackle that challenge with the same strength and conviction we brought to convincing our beloved celebrities to change their ways.

How did we do that? How quickly we forget. Let’s see, I know thousands of us barraged our favorite celebrities with persuasive informative heartfelt letters, instead of wasting our time writing to our pea-brained congressional representatives, but I can’t quite recall how we got those celebrities to realize that lip service and driving electric cars wasn’t enough.

Oh, yes, now I remember the turning point, when Brad and Angelina walked from Los Angeles to New Orleans, and hundreds of thousands of people and dozens of super-famous people joined them along the way, and how they gathered in the Super Dome to announce to the world that henceforth they would get around without flying and without the use of automobiles, and they would be assuming lives of material minimalism. Yeah, that was huge, that was when the tide began to turn.

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Thus Spake Angelina

(This essay first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser June 2011)

“Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.”  Montaigne

I used to hate it when I predicted something long in advance of when it happened, and then no one remembered I predicted it or believed me when I insisted I predicted the thing. And I used to really hate it when I invented something but didn’t bother to patent it because I didn’t have the money or the time or the personality, and then someone else found out about the thing I invented and they patented it and became filthy rich from my invention. But now I don’t mind when people don’t believe I predicted important things before they happened. Nor do I mind when people get rich and famous from my inventions. And here’s why.

The writings of my hero Buckminster Fuller convinced me it was a colossal waste of time to worry about people stealing our ideas or not believing us because ultimately the universe (transcendent of human pettiness and ignorance) responds appropriately and exquisitely to our thoughts and actions regardless of whether we own the patents on the lucrative inventions or whether people believe us.

For instance, I invented snail tongs. Yep. That (those) was (were) mine. I knew I would be ripped off (just as I know you don’t believe me) and that’s why I wrote up the invention several years ago, made precise drawings of the device, and sent the write-up and drawings to dozens of gardening supply catalogs, garden tool inventors, and a few hundred people selected randomly by using pages torn from phone books, darts, a blindfold, and the appropriate incantations. The rest, as they say, is history. Snail tongs, with or without teak handles, and with or without the accompanying snail bucket (with Velcro pad or dainty hook for connecting to your gardening belt) are now de rigueur for serious gardeners who don’t like to get slimed whilst plucking mollusks from precious garden plants.

I have no idea how the universe has reacted to the invention of snail tongs. Just because people have made millions from selling snail tongs and now live in abject wealth because of those sales doesn’t mean snail tongs are a good idea. Indeed, the universe may be withholding from me great gobs of money and success and access to daring and creative publishers and brilliant green-lit movie producers because I loosed snail tongs on the world. After all, expensive snail tongs (not the ones made entirely from recycled materials) use valuable natural resources that would be better left in the ground. To be quite honest, I now regret letting anyone know about snail tongs. But I was so curious to see what would happen, I couldn’t keep from letting the tongs out of the bag, so to speak. Fortunately, no one believes me, so I am at least safe from persecution by humans for that crime.

“Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.” Faith Whittlesey

Note the date. June 29, 2011. I predict that Angelina Jolie, the famous movie star, will become the first female President of the United States. When? I’m guessing 2020, but possibly 2016. Why do I make this prediction? Because everything she has done and is doing, and everything that has happened and is happening in terms of the evolution of mass media, the state of the world, and the exigencies of fate (I love that expression) lead me to believe Angelina’s ascendancy is virtually a done deal.

If you think I’m crazy, please view recent video clips (easy to find on the internet) of Angelina visiting Syrian refugees in Turkey or flood victims in Pakistan (and wearing the traditional garb of the women in those locales) or more recently paying tribute to the inhabitants of the Italian island of Lampedusa for giving aid and comfort to boat people refugees from the strife-torn Middle East. Wherever she goes in her role as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, Angelina, without a script, speaks eloquently, knowledgably, compassionately, and with charismatic strength on behalf of the refugees, and refugee women in particular. She has also adopted three children and raised them along with three children she’s had with her movie star and politically sort of left and totally supportive (so far) husband. Angelina is picky about the roles she takes, refuses to play bimbos, is on the verge of portraying Cleopatra in a movie that will probably cost more to make than the Gross National Product of Belgium, and recently directed a serious romantic drama set during the siege of Sarajevo. In other words, she is a beautiful, articulate, feminine feminist; she knows what’s going on and she’s nobody’s fool.

By 2016, the world will be firmly in the grip of widespread social and environmental chaos, at which point Angelina will be forty-one and ready to answer the call of billions of women and poor people and smart people chomping at the bit to make the great global transition to universal socialism, free healthcare, disarmament, material minimalism, and gluten-free dining. I will serve in Angelina’s cabinet if she will have me, but only if I can do so from my home via weekly essays.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Alan Kay

I also invented the bandarang. Yep. That was mine, too. Forgive me if you’ve been bopped by one of the larger ones whilst minding your own business at the beach. Yes, I should have foreseen they’d turn the wonderful thing into yet another tool of competition and consumerism, though you must admit that some of the things people do with bandarangs are absolutely mind-boggling. Sadly, I was recently informed that the military is developing explosive bandarangs as well as new stealth aircraft employing bandarang aerodynamics.

Okay. I know what you’re thinking. You invented the bandarang, Todd? Then why aren’t you rich as Croesus and producing your own movies? Well, because I gave the idea away, just as I gave away the idea for snail tongs and several other inventions you won’t believe I invented. And I gave them away because along with being a devoted follower of Buckminster Fuller (see above theory of adjudication by Universe), I am also extremely lazy regarding anything requiring contracts, lawyers, or government bureaucracies; and though I knew bandarangs would be popular, I never imagined they would be voted Thing of the Century by the Union of Unconcerned Hedonists.

You may be interested to know that I didn’t so much invent the bandarang as discover it. Wikipedia erroneously reports that the inventors of the original bandarang were competing teams of nerdy dweebs at Harvard, MIT, and Oxford circa 2007-2011 using computer modeling and origami brainstorming to perfect the design, but that is hokum. It was I alone standing in the shallows of the American River (up to my knees in the icy flow) in Sacramento on a blistering hot day, August 17, 1989, who first discovered/invented the bandarang.

I had just lost another Frisbee to the swift current. Feeling bereft (as I always do when I lose a Frisbee to a river or the ocean) and wanting to continue playing with the wind, I rummaged in my knapsack and found a large rubber band—three inches in diameter if spread open to approximate a circle. I carried the rubber band with me into the aforementioned shallows, and using the thumb of my left hand as fulcrum, I shot the rubber band almost-but-not-quite straight up in the air. When gravity halted the flight of the projectile some thirty feet above the blessed waters, the elongated band contracted and relaxed into the form of a circle, which, in the dainty breeze, rotated counter-clockwise as it drifted back to earth and settled gently around my upraised index finger. Thus was born the banderang.

On September 9, 1999, after a decade of intermittent experimentation, I settled on an optimal size and weight (and color: neon orange) of rubber band, angle of launch depending on breeze coefficients, etc., wrote a clear description of the bandarang, made precise drawings, and sent forth packets of the salient information to Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and myriad toy manufacturers.

On April 13, 2012, a twelve-foot-long bandarang (flaccid) will be stretched by a pneumatic traction crane to a length of two hundred and thirty-seven feet using a top corner of a thirty-story office building in Oakland, California as fulcrum, and shot up and out over San Francisco Bay. The neon orange, seventy-seven-pound rubber bandarang, with finely tapered edges coated with micro-thin Teflon, will attain an altitude of 1778 feet and a rotational speed of 174 revolutions per minute, catch a friendly westerly breeze, travel 3.7 miles, and gently (erotically) settle upon a phallic obelisk on Treasure Island to the roaring approbation of eighty thousand giddy bandarangists (also known as rubberoos) gathered on the island to greet the mythic rubber ring.

“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.” Sigmund Freud

June 29, 2011. I predict that the ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima marks the beginning of the end of nuclear power (and eventually nuclear weapons) on earth. Safety and decency, however, will not be the reasons the powers-that-be finally grok the insanity of nuclear power. No. What will ultimately tip the balance in favor of livingry (a term coined by Buckminster Fuller to mean the opposite of weaponry) will be the stunning decline in male fertility brought about by the enormous and continuous release of radiation and radioactive particles from Fukushima and other soon-to-be-announced failing nuclear reactors around the world.

As the human population begins a precipitous (and ultimately fortuitous) decline, trillions of dollars will be diverted from weaponry and needless pharmaceuticals and worthless hedge funds and earth-killing genetically modified grain growing into the male-dominated fear-driven medical industrial complex to find a cure for sterility, resulting in the ultimate realization that the best way to keep human love goo viable is to entirely clean up our act, environmentally and emotionally speaking, and never again, one earth under Angelina with liberty and justice for all, ever foul our nest again!

Todd’s books and music and a blog archive of 117 AVA essays are available at UnderTheTableBooks.com

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Mendocino the Great

 

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.