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Q

Our dear friend Quinton Duval died last week at the age of sixty-one, and the world lost a most generous soul and a marvelous poet. Q, as we called him, was a quiet person and a quiet poet, thus he was little known outside of Sacramento. I regret that I could not afford to publish an elegant volume of the collected poems of Quinton Duval while Q was still alive, but it’s at the top of my list of Things I’ll Do If I Ever Strike It Rich.

There is a funny story by Mark Twain entitled Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven in which a Twain-like explorer hitches a ride on Haley’s Comet to heaven and reports on what he finds there. At the height of Stormfield’s visit, excitement ensues as word spreads that the greatest writer of all time has just died and will soon be arriving at the pearly gates. Indeed, so paramount is this writer that luminaries such as Shakespeare and Homer, not seen among the common angels for hundreds of years, descend from their places on high to greet this unsurpassed genius.

Captain Stormfield, a cultured man, wonders who among the most famous writers on earth has died; but the incomparable genius turns out to be an unknown young fellow who only managed to write a poem or two before he was tarred and feathered and murdered by an ignorant mob who found him intolerably odd.

Quinton’s death reminds me of this story, not because I think Q was the greatest poet who ever lived, but because he was, in my estimation, deserving of a much larger audience than he was able to achieve through the careful crafting of his beautiful poems.

You have undoubtedly heard of Poetry Slams. They are all the rage these days among pseudo-educators and extremely extroverted wannabe poets. Slams are poetry competitions (a deeply repugnant idea) in which so-called poets try to upstage and beat their opponents by outrageous dress, comportment, choreography, and vocal pyrotechnics. The poems themselves are largely irrelevant to the proceedings, though the more shocking and nasty and shoutable the lines, the better the chances the so-called poet has of winning the contest. Yuck. If you are a lover of poetry, a lover of the words themselves, a lover of the tender truth of a good poem, do not attend a poetry slam. When teenagers slam, the experience is merely pathetic. When older folks undertake such travesties, it is repulsive.

I think of Q’s poems as diamonds in the sludge of our American-Idolized culture, everything become a contest, a special effect, a showy narcissistic puff of nothing, and I want to stop people on the street and say, “Turn off your cell phones and listen to this. A poem by the late great much missed Quinton Duval.”

Dinner Music

The things in this dish have each been touched

by your fingers. The dough has marks in it

where you shaped it out round and white

and rising slowly. I remember all this

as I begin to eat. It is exciting

in the light given off by the oil lamp

on the table. I smell the kerosene,

your perfume, and the scent of the food you made.

I am touched by the wonder of it all. I mean

your hands are in my mouth even as I eat

what you have made, like other things you make.

After dinner your lips open quietly to the dark

passage down inside you. What is all this,

this odd food we give away? We eat each other’s

love and feel amazed and full.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

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My Bad

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

I first heard the expression My Bad used on a basketball court circa 1975. The expression most likely came into being among jazz musicians, for many of the most popular expressions emanating from black America were first used by musicians and then quickly adapted to the basketball court. By the time these expressions were in common usage among white people, their original meanings were frequently distorted and even reversed. The most famous example of such reversal is the expression Up Tight. Originally an expression of praise for excellent playing by an improvising musician, and used with that original meaning by Little Stevie Wonder singing, “Up tight outta sight,” white folk eventually deformed the phrase to mean tense, as in “I am so uptight.” Fascinating, no?

My immediate inspiration for writing this piece is the catastrophic oil flood ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico and the grief my friends and I are feeling about the catastrophe. I refuse to call this horror a leak or a spill, for it is a flood that will likely render the Gulf of Mexico a dead sea for the rest of our mortal lives. So what does the ruination of the Gulf of Mexico have to do with the expression My Bad? I will tell you.

Nowadays the expression My Bad is generally used to mean My Mistake. Someone spills a cup of coffee and says, “Oops. My bad.” Or someone forgets to bring the beer and apologizes with, “Sorry. My bad.” But the original meaning of the expression was more profound than a simple apology. To illustrate: I am playing a game of basketball. My teammate makes a poor pass and despite my best effort I am barely able to touch the ball before it goes out of bounds. My teammate calls, “My Bad,” thus announcing to everyone playing the game that it was his error that caused the ball to go out of bounds, not my error. By proclaiming My Bad, he is taking responsibility for something that may have appeared to be my fault. Cool, huh? I consider the original use of My Bad a form of gallantry, which is a far cry from how the expression is generally used today.

Which brings me to the massive cloud of oil suffocating the Gulf of Mexico. Though it may appear that British Petroleum and Halliburton and the myriad corrupt presidents and politicians who instituted deregulation are responsible for the ruination of the Gulf of Mexico, I must proclaim My Bad.

I say My Bad because I drive a car that runs on gasoline. I heat my water and cook my food with propane. I illuminate my house and run my computer with electricity, some of which comes from oil-fueled power plants. I say My Bad because after years of trying to start a boycott of Chevron as a component of a meaningful anti-war movement, I gave up. I say My Bad because I moved from the city, where without a car my environmental footprint was minimized, to the country where I drive a car now and depend heavily on oil to live the life I lead. I pay taxes that finance illegal and immoral wars for oil.

I am a car person in a car culture. I can certainly do more than I am currently doing to use less of everything, but especially less gasoline. So I say My Bad because without me and a billion other versions of me there would be no deep water drilling, no tides of death. I don’t say My Bad to exonerate the corporations most immediately responsible for this most horrendous oil flood, but to explain why I feel it is not entirely their fault.

And I am fairly certain the reason everyone I know is feeling depressed and defeated and hopeless about the massive oil flood in the Gulf of Mexico is because along with the loss of so much irreplaceable habitat and the massive suffering that must inevitably accompany such loss, we all know it is Our Bad.

Todd’s web site is Underthetablebooks.com

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Big River Spring (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!

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Carma

(This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser: April 2010)

Yesterday a tree fell on our car. Fortunately no one was in the car when the wind snapped the top third off the pine tree and a thousand pounds of soon-to-be firewood fell twenty feet though the crystalline springtime air and smashed the roof, the windshield, and the hood of our dearly beloved cello-toting 1996 Toyota Corolla wagon.

We had just gone for a brief spin in our old pickup truck, eschewing the wagon because she was low on gas, and I had just said to Marcia regarding the formidable westerly winds, “This is a trees-falling-on-power-lines kind of day if I’ve ever seen one.” Upon our return from the spin, there was Zephyr (so named in a fit of poesy when I bought her five years ago) half-buried under the glossy needles and sappy timber of the former upper reaches of a quasi-stunted pine doing his best to survive in that nutrient-stingy soil known hereabouts as Pygmy. The bottom two-thirds of the still-living tree loomed over the wreckage; the scene only lacking a raven perched on the stub cawing, “Nevermore.”

We were in shock. When we got married two plus years ago we not only exchanged rings, we exchanged cars. I needed a pickup for pruning jobs and toting manure, Marcia needed a zippy little car for the aforementioned cello toting and friend toting in all sorts of weather. Now Zephyr was totaled. Marcia immediately called AAA and within the hour we were on our way to Fort Bragg to pick up her rental car so the cello toting could continue unabated. Say what you will about the decline and fall of the American Empire, if one has comprehensive auto insurance, the system will seamlessly keep you rolling along. Now if only health insurance would work so seamlessly when trees, as it were, fall on your health.

What does it mean when a tree falls on your car? Well, the most mundane interpretation is that a tree falling on your car means that a tree has fallen on your car. But why did that particular tree fall on that particular car at that particular moment in our lives? Is this a sign? An omen? A message? Was this an act of divine intervention or an attack by the forces of evil? We will almost certainly never know. However, when things like this happen to me, I like to interpret them as I would interpret a dream. What for? Fun, of course.

I’ve read numerous books about dreams and dreaming, countless articles both scientific and fanciful, and I’ve even taken a dream interpretation class, which is the only class of any sort I’ve taken since dropping out of college forty-some years ago. My father was a Freudian psychoanalyst and cursorily introduced me to dream interpretation when I was twelve by giving me a copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, a tome I found to be largely useless for my adolescent purposes. But what really got me interested in dreams and dream research was/were beagles.

I was a freshman Anthropology major at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1967, the campus just beginning to spread its concrete tentacles over the former cattle ranch and throughout the third and fourth-growth redwood groves. One of my favorite extracurricular activities was to head off into the largely unexplored woods and hope to get lost, so that in trying to find my way home I would have an adventure. This was a free and fairly safe way to experience the thrill of being lost, because going downhill from anywhere on the campus eventually brought me to a road; and I knew all the roads in that watershed.

So one sunny day I got lost in the forest, had a splendiferous daydream by a sun-dappled pool in a grotto of ferns, and at day’s end I headed downhill. I emerged from the forest in a place unknown to me and espied a cluster of a one-story buildings and a cyclone-fenced enclosure containing several dozen beagles. Curious about this remote installation, I made my way thither. The dogs saw me and charged en masse to the cyclone fence to bark at me. But their barking made no sound. I could see they were barking, but no noise was emanating from their mouths. So, yes, I thought I had gone deaf if not mad.

Totally freaked out (to use a popular expression of that era), I continued my approach and when I was within twenty feet of the pen, several of the hysterical dogs hurled themselves against the cyclone fencing, and I heard the noises their bodies made striking the fence, though nary a sound emerged from their furiously barking mouths. At which moment, a man emerged from one of the buildings, deduced I was the cause of the commotion, and said to me, “Looking for something?”

“I’m lost,” I said. “What is this place?”

“Dream research,” he explained. “We’re using the dogs to map sleep patterns, REM sleep and…”

“What’s REM sleep?”

“Rapid eye movement. Indicates dreaming.”

“What’s wrong with the dogs? Why can’t they bark?”

“We snip their vocal cords,” he said, inadvertently touching his throat. “Impossible to work with the constant din of their barking.”

“Oh,” I said, aghast at his nonchalance about taking away the dogs’ voices. “Why not use humans?”

“We’re laying the groundwork for that,” he said, somewhat condescendingly. “Establishing baselines. Things you probably wouldn’t understand.”

My reports of this canine gulag failed to incite my classmates to storm the lab and rescue the dogs, but something about that encounter and the dreamlike experience of coming upon a pack of silently barking hounds got me reading about sleep and dreams, which took me to Jung and back to Freud and eventually back to Jung, with my simultaneous readings in anthropology leading me to the Dreamtime of the Australian Aboriginals and the Bushmen of the Kalahari who believed there is a dream dreaming us.

Meanwhile, my pal Rico was en route to becoming a psychotherapist, and he, too, was fascinated with dreams and dream interpretation. It was Rico who taught me to recount my dreams out loud in the present tense, which technique invariably improved my recall of important and otherwise overlooked details of the dreams.

Eons later, I would enroll in a ten-week dream interpretation class taught by a brilliant man who was not keen on interpretations that deviated from his, so we butted heads, though I learned many things from him and appreciated the consistency and clarity of his system. And what I especially loved about his class was that we got to act out our dreams, with my fellow students and I taking parts of people and things in each other’s dreams, which enactments often exposed hidden emotions underpinning the dreams.

Then some years ago I caught the end of a radio program featuring a wonderfully articulate woman taking callers’ questions about dreams. A man called to say he wished he had a dream for her to interpret, but that he had never in his life remembered even the tiniest fragment of a dream. And the articulate woman said, “Then tell me what happened to you today and I will interpret that as a dream.”

I don’t remember much else about their interaction, but I have ever since interpreted puzzling and momentous events in my life as I would interpret dreams, from which many groovy insights have emerged. Thus I recommend the practice to you.

Here is the dream version of the tree falling on our car.

Marcia and I emerge from the house we rent and walk toward the Corolla (definition of corolla: the inner envelope of floral leaves of a flower).

“Oh,” says Marcia, “can we take the truck? The wagon’s low on gas.”

“Sure,” I say, noting the Corolla is parked in a place where we almost never park it.

So we take the truck and wend our way along a winding road through the forest, the spring day gorgeous and sunny. The next thing I know we are parking the truck on the side of the road and walking down a wooded driveway to a beautiful house set in a lovely park of old trees and verdant meadows. We pass the house and come to a vast barn-like structure, a fabulous studio on the shores of a lovely lake. In other words, paradise.

“If only this were ours,” we say and think and feel.

We get back in the truck and drive home, each of us lost in fantasies of such a paradise belonging to us. And as we arrive home, we find that a tree has crushed our car.

In short (and drawing from a variety of interpretive schemata): the car (low on gas) represents the means by which the ego navigates the outside world. The tree represents the intelligence and power of Nature. To acquire a house (self) so much larger and more magnificent than our current house (self) and to own (control our destiny) rather than rent (accede control to others) such a grand home (self) would require an entirely different way of conveying our egos in the outside world.

So the question is: do we get another wagon or a sedan? Another Toyota or a Honda? We’re thinking something around three grand.

Todd’s web site is UndertheTableBooks.com.

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Transformation

(This memoir first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser April 2010: photo by Marcia Sloane)

I have read a great deal about dreams and dreaming, and whether you believe dreams are communications from the astral plane or meaningless imagery resulting from cerebral out gassing, they can certainly remind us of people and places and things we have successfully avoided thinking about for the longest time.

I recently dreamt of being in high school again, and of a transformative moment in my less than excellent adventure there. My dream was a fair enactment of the event from my junior year, though the dream ended differently than the so-called real event.

I was a disinterested student suffering from the sudden onset of chronic pain in my lower back that ended my official athletic career in a heartbreaking twinkling. Verbally precocious, I was enrolled in Advanced English wherein my teachers persistently failed to see the genius behind my sloppy prose. In class discussions I invariably scored points with my classmates for wit and irony and double entendre while merely annoying my sadly average instructors on whom subtly and originality were invariably lost. Or so it seemed to my arrogant teenager’s mind.

My English teacher for my third year of incarceration was a very sad woman who never relaxed. Not in our presence. Ever. I will call her Mrs. R. She trembled when she spoke, as if she feared lightning would strike her for pontificating about things she clearly knew nothing about. She was not inherently stupid, but her anxiety rendered her so. Had she not so obviously disliked me, I might have been more compassionate toward her, but she anointed me her adversary from day one, and so we frequently did battle.

The contest, of course, was unfair. Mrs. R controlled the podium, so to speak, while I had all but a few of my fellow sufferers predisposed to my point of view. And I suppose if Mrs. R had merely been a dogmatic nervous Nellie, I wouldn’t have kept up the fight as long as I did; but she had a pet named V who was the grandest thorn in my high school side. Thus when I fought Mrs. R, I also fought V.

Why was V a thorn? Because she was my least favorite sort of sycophant: a perfect parrot, and she loved Mrs. R with a passion verging on the erotic, their heads being often together as they poured over books and poems and V’s insufferable essays that Mrs. R always deemed the best of the bunch so we always had to listen to V read her putrid prose aloud. And to make matters lethal for the miserable likes of me, V was gorgeous and sultry and possessed of a honeyed voice; and she would only date really good-looking college boys.

That is the context. Here is the event recalled by the dream.

Mrs. R stands before us, her outfit annoyingly salmon. She is, as always, trembling, a false smile pasted on her lips. “I was very disappointed in your essays on the first forty pages of The Scarlet Letter. Only a few of you correctly identified the primary recurring symbolism.” She smiles adoringly at V who is posed alluringly in the front row.

“Is it possible,” I say, speaking from my desk at the back of the room and neglecting to raise my hand, “that Nate just wrote the story without any symbolism in mind?”

A ripple of chuckles rolls around the deathly fluorescent chamber. Mrs. R grimaces. “I will remind you again to raise your hand when you wish to speak. I’ll take questions after V reads her essay.”

V rises to read, her slinky garb igniting our libidinous imaginations. She is totally at ease in her body, in stark contrast to Mrs. R, this being the raison d’etre of V’s life: to demonstrate her vast superiority over all us dunderheads. “Color,” she intones, sounding very much like Dusty Springfield singing The Look of Love, “is Hawthorne’s secret weapon; red, rust, and crimson his antidotes to Puritan gray.”

I gaze in open-mouthed contempt at V, for she has essentially quoted Mrs. R verbatim, only rendered the words in gooey singsong. I am tempted to say, “I may puke,” but something stays me, for the best is yet to come.

V takes us on a fourteen-page romp through those first forty pages of The Scarlet Letter, pointing out every word that either is or can be construed to be a variant on red until I and my fellow sufferers are driven to the brink of insanity, with Mrs. R and V exchanging simpering smiles with each crimson revelation.

Now comes the denouement. Deeply moved by V’s regurgitation, Mrs. R says, “Yes, yes, yes. The Scarlet Letter is unquestionably the greatest novel ever written.”

There it is: the ultimate challenge to the likes of me. A proclamation of such incomparable wrongness and badness and inanity, that I gaze around at my friends in disbelief that none have yet cried foul. Thus it is left to me.

“You can’t be serious,” I declaim. “The greatest novel ever written? Puh-leez. Moby Dick? A Tale of Two Cities? Zorba the Greek? All Quiet On the Western Front? To name a few.”

“I will see you after class and again after school, Mr. Walton.”

Here is where dream diverges from history.

In the dream I am simply no longer in the classroom or in high school, but in a bedroom with a woman who might be V, though she is older and rounder and not even slightly concerned about the symbolism in the first forty pages of The Scarlet Letter.

“I just want to relax you, honey,” she says, slipping her arms around me.

And hearing the word relax, I do relax; and that’s the end of the dream.

What happened in so-called reality was that I had to sit in Mrs. R’s classroom for an hour after school for the next three days and watch her and V and a few other pets enacting what I came to realize was a love ritual—sharing favorite poems, working on college application essays, having a sweet, feminine, confidence-boosting time that ultimately convinced me there was no point in fighting them. We were from entirely different universes and would travel through entirely different wormholes to get wherever we got.

And there is also this. I would have forgiven them entirely for everything if only V had given me the time of day.

Todd’s web site is UndertheTableBooks.com.

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Money Ball (Love)

Something marvelously strange is going on with my San Francisco Giants. For the first time since the decline and fall of Barry Bonds, the dead wood has been greatly minimized, money is being spent to retain talent, and it appears management may actually try to win the whole enchilada. The odds are greatly against such a grandiose finale to a season yet to be played, but this is the first time since 2003, the year after we last went to the World Series, that there have been any odds at all. These last six seasons have been less about rebuilding and more of a sports version of Waiting For Godot, as in waiting for the second coming of Willie Mays as we plumb the depths of the existential conundrum: is baseball metaphoric of an intrinsically meaningless or meaningful life?

But enough about Samuel Beckett, our fat cat owners are actually paying Tim Lincecum twenty-three million dollars to start sixty-five games or so over the next two years. That’s approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars per game or about three grand per pitch. Tim is twenty-five years old. Can you imagine what you would have done with twenty-three million dollars when you were twenty-five? Or with three million? Or even with three hundred thousand? I hope I would have been smart enough to buy a farm, but something tells me I would have blown it making a movie. If someone offered me twenty-three million today (or three million or three hundred thousand) I know just what I’d do with it, as soon as I find my reading glasses and that list I made.

Why this sudden loosening of the Giants’ corporate purse strings? My theory, somewhat convoluted, is as follows. Despite our losing ways, our wonderful new ballpark by the glittering bay has been such a fabulous cash cow and tourist attraction that our owners felt no pressing need to field a particularly upscale team. This is a variant on the old “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If making money is their primary goal (and it obviously is) the owners were winning even when the team lost. But last year, for the first time since the new park opened, the cow began producing noticeably less cash. For several years now good pitching alone has kept us from abysmal failure in the weakest division in baseball, but last year (never mind Lincecum’s second Cy Young Award) the crowds began to dwindle. The team couldn’t hit or run and management wouldn’t spend a fat dime to buy us a couple bats; and then the economy tanked and the specter of a half-empty ballpark loomed for the coming season.

Combine this specter with a resurgence of the other teams in our division, and the money boys decided it was time to spend some cash to field a winner, because winners fill seats and pitching alone won’t hack it anymore. And since it is a sure bet our owners gained greatly from the recent economic hijinks that have hurt so many Giants fans below them on the slopes of the pyramid, our owners have plenty of cash to spend.

That’s my theory: a confluence of economic factors necessitating infrastructure upgrade combined with the unfathomable workings of a mysterious universe. Now I’m not saying I think we’re going to win it all this season. Indeed, my linear logical brain doubts very much we’ll even win the division. But we have a chance, and a chance is an exciting thing for a fan weary of starring in Waiting For Willie.

And the other thing I want to say about the upcoming season is this. I know a woman of ninety-six who told me that had the Giants won it all in 2002 she would have allowed herself to die. She was ready to go. Her bags were packed, so to speak. We were three outs away from winning the World Series for the first time since 1954. And then we lost. And in that painful moment this woman knew she would have to stay alive. This is a gal who listens to every game, including every game of spring training. She refers to the players and the announcers and the coaches by their first names. They are, as far as she’s concerned, her family. She is blind, so she can only listen to the games. When the Giants win, she is cheerful. When they lose, she is cranky for an hour or so, then she stows her disappointment and gets ready for tomorrow.

She was not a fan of baseball until she married in her late twenties. She and her husband attended many games at Candlestick and watched or listened to every game together for forty years. Her husband died thirty years ago, but she says he is with her still for every game. When I last saw her, she said she thought this might be our year.

“The boys are entering their prime,” she said, nodding confidently. “You can hear the maturity in Matt’s voice, Tim so confident now. I’m glad Juan came back. He comes through more times than not. And Pablo is starting to show some patience at the plate. John sounds more upbeat about the team than I’ve heard him sound in a long time. I don’t think they’re going to settle for almost again.”

“And if we win it all?”

She smiled and whispered, “My work will be done.”

Ah beautiful irrational hope. Let’s play ball!

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com. His audio books are available from Audible.com.

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Enough Already

(This essay appeared originally in the Anderson Valley Advertiser March 2010)

Many of us traveling into late middle age have by now laid our parents to rest and/or moved them in with us or into transitional facilities. In so doing we have come face-to-face with the detritus of their lifetimes, and having disposed of their stuff (or, heaven forbid, added their stuff to our stuff) we are seized with new ambitions: to downsize and streamline and free ourselves of the burden of so many things we used to think we couldn’t live without. We have learned again what we already knew: things, cumulatively speaking, are a pain in the ass.

Carl Jung in his old age was convinced that all things, including pots and pans and knives and books and shoes and stones, were animate entities and demanded our attention and energy. It is said that when the elder Carl entered his kitchen he would politely greet the knives and pans and forks, and ask them to be kind to him so he might successfully brew his tea and scramble his eggs. He was convinced that by acknowledging the aliveness of these allies they would be less likely to jump from his hands or fall to the floor. Thus his cooking would be a delight rather than a danger.

Indigenous North Americans, dubbed Indians by their irrational conquerors, believed, as Jung did, that spirit animated all things. Stones, water, wind, trees, stars, clouds, and fire were alive, so it was common practice (not crazy) for a person to address a tree or a rock or the sky as brother or sister or friend. Would we want to possess and keep captive hundreds and thousands of things if we felt each was our relation and possessed a soul? I doubt it.

When my mother began her Alzheimer’s adventure, she developed a grave concern about her things. How did they get here? What were they called? And what were they for? I would soon learn that Alzheimerians cannot learn. They only unlearn. But before I gained this awareness, I would patiently explain to my mother that she had bought the things called bowls and books and vases, and they were for putting things in or for reading or for holding flowers. She would nod, see another thing, frown, and ask, “What’s that?”

“That is a teapot?”

“How did it get there?”

“You put it there.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it looks nice there and you can reach it easily when you want tea?”

“But I don’t want tea. I want coffee.”

“Fine. I’ll make some.”

My father was a pack rat of psychotic dimensions. I theorize his junk was the main thing that drove my mother crazy, along with his incessant cruelty. Long before the onset of her Alzheimer’s, my mother would go into rages about the ever growing stacks of magazines and newspapers and junk mail and just plain junk, none of which my father would allow her to throw away. For some years he collected electric motors, though he never did anything with them. When I cleaned out his garage the year before he died, I found fifty-seven little electric motors in various stages of disintegration, thousands of rotting magazines, and over five thousand books, none of which had been looked at in decades.

My father went off to work every day and left my mother alone in a big house full of useless junk. When she would leave the house to visit friends or shop or do volunteer work, or for the ten years she practiced law, she was an entirely different person than the person she was in her dysfunctional house. I’m talking Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde different. Away from the massive jumble of things she was brilliant, competent, funny, and happy. Then she’d come home and become helpless, befuddled, humorless, and miserable.

And isn’t it true, as Perry Mason liked to say, that when you get away from your accumulated things you feel lighter and, dare I say, happier? Why are vacations so refreshing? Certainly because we’re seeing new sights, breathing new air, and breaking free of ossified behavior patterns; but I contend we feel most refreshed because we are free of those myriad animate things, each demanding a share of our psychic energy.

Reading interviews with people who lost their homes and possessions in the Oakland firestorm of 1991 in which nearly four thousand homes were destroyed, I was amazed to discover that after their initial shock wore off, many of the survivors said they were greatly relieved to be free of their accumulated stuff and to be “getting a fresh start.” Which reminds me of cost analyses proving the average American spends a much larger portion of her income providing life support for her things than for herself.

When my first marriage ended, I went from being a home-owning car-owning person to being a room-renting bicyclist pedestrian, and I felt, literally, fifty thousand pounds lighter. Some of this lightness came from escaping an unhappy emotional life, but some of it was unquestionably the result of being freed from the psychic responsibility for a house and a car and the ten thousand attendant things.

My Jewish grandmother, poor from birth until thirty, wealthy from thirty to sixty, and poor again until she died at eighty, told me she was happiest when singing or reading poetry, no matter her financial state. And it is from that perspective I prefer to judge the current economic collapse: the failure of a thing-based economic and social order, but not necessarily the end of happiness.

The mainstream pundits and politicos and economic puppeteers keep telling us that the much-ballyhooed (but essentially non-existent) recovery is mere moments away if only people will resume buying things they don’t need. Never mind that all fifty states are bankrupt and their citizenry bankrupt with them, people have got to roll up their sleeves and start stimulating the economy. Come on! What are you waiting for? A job? Money? Yet despite historically low interest rates, people are saving money as never before, if they have any money to save. People are driving less, shopping less, and needing less than they used to think they needed.

So wouldn’t it be great if this meltdown turns out not to be a meltdown, but a turning point, an awakening? The death of the parent equals the death of the old economic paradigm. In cleaning up the parental junk, we come to terms with the futility of hanging on to huge piles of stuff. In picking up and reforming the economic pieces, we leave out the making and getting of piles of junk. If we aspire to possess anything, it will be a few high quality things we lovingly care for as opposed to crap we stack up and eventually throw away or leave to our children to throw away for us.

I know. I’m waxing utopia here, but maybe, just maybe, there are good times ahead and they won’t look anything like the previous good times but rather more elegant and spacious and egalitarian. There will be less judging people by what they own and more celebrating people for how uniquely they jitterbug, how kind they are, and how fun they are to hang out with.

Todd Walton’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

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Uncategorized

Pathlogical Greed & Electric

Repeat after me. Pacific Gas and Electric is not a public utility. They would like us to think they are a public utility, but they are not. PG&E is a huge amoral corporation owned by an even larger amoral multinational corporation with one goal transcendent of all others: to make obscene profits through the maintenance of energy monopolies.

A year or so ago I reported in these pages that one of those little slips of paper accompanying my PG&E bill, those slips 99.9% of us don’t read, informed us that PG&E would be raising our rates to pay for their new smart meters to improve PG&E’s efficiency and raise their profits and increase their control over our use of energy. I pointed out that the smart meters would pay for themselves within a few years, but we would continue to pay higher rates because of them for all eternity. Alas, my article did not incite a consumer revolt.

Now in last month’s bill, another of those little slips of paper informed us that PG&E is going to raise our rates to pay for the development of a wind power project. We will pay today so they can build wind generators that they, not we, will own forever, and we will pay again tomorrow when the energy from those wind generators we paid for (but don’t own) comes online. Good for PG&E, but not very good us.

And this month there were two more slips of paper accompanying my bill. One slip said PG&E is raising our rates “to recover costs associated with performing seismic studies at Diablo Canyon Power Plant.” DCPP is their (not our) nuclear power plant built on a major earthquake fault, a plant, by the way, that has never and will never pay for itself, and that our grandchildren will somehow have to decommission (at a cost of many billions of dollars) if the murderous thing doesn’t melt down first. The second slip said PG&E is raising our rates on top of the aforementioned raises to “recover costs associated with renewal of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant operating licenses.” As in, they’re going to pour even more of our money down their nuclear power toilet.

Terrible, right? We should create local community-owned power companies and develop solar and wind power that we, the people…hold on. PG&E has just spent several million of our dollars putting Proposition 16 on the June 8 ballot, a measure that would require a two-thirds majority of local voters to approve the creation of community-based power companies, as opposed to a simple majority. And PG&E plans to spend thirty to forty million dollars more of our money to make sure Proposition 16 passes.

Why would they do such a dastardly thing? Repeat after me. PG&E is not a public utility. They own us, we don’t own them.

When I lived in Sacramento, I was privileged to help launch the campaign that eventually closed down the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant. That closure of a fully operational nuclear power plant by a vote of the people is the only such accomplishment in our nation’s history. The only one. And believe me, we did not win with two-thirds of the vote. Nor were we directly up against PG&E, but rather the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which we, technically, owned. But I guarantee you PG&E contributed heavily to try to defeat the will of the people (and no doubt raised our rates to pay for their contributions.) And I am absolutely certain the lesson of that successful democratic process was not lost on those corporate gamers responsible for subverting the will of the people. The lesson is this: if you can’t fool half the people, change the law so you only have to fool one out of three of the people.

Todd Walton’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

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Uncategorized

Travels With Frisbee

Fredrick Morrison, the inventor of the Frisbee, died at the age of ninety on February 11, 2010. I still carry a Frisbee in my knapsack as I have since 1965 when I bought my first one at Woolworth’s for 69 cents, a flimsy little thing much smaller than the smallest Frisbees sold today.

Though it may seem a preposterous boast, I am very likely the first person to introduce Frisbee to the University of California Santa Cruz in 1967. If perchance someone came before me, I was certainly one of the pioneer users there, and took it upon myself to teach dozens of young men and women the fundamentals of tossing the holy disc. I used to joke that I majored in Anthropology and minored in Frisbee, but the reverse is true. The happiest hours of my two years in college were spent running over hill and dale in pursuit of far-flung Frisbees, my college buddy Dick Mead capable of prodigious tosses across the Elysian Fields of that cattle ranch turned university.

In 1970, a year after I dropped out, I traveled through Mexico and Central America as a translator for a marine biologist and his family. I brought along a dozen Frisbees because they were easy to lose and I thought it would be fun to introduce new friends to the delights of the floating disc. Little did I anticipate the sensation we would cause whenever and wherever we started flinging our Frisbees.

Perhaps our most memorable demonstration of the art took place in the central park of San Salvador, the capitol of El Salvador. We happened to arrive at the height of a massive protest we later learned was the beginning of the horrific civil war instigated by the CIA that would lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Salvadorans and the subsequent ruination of that tiny country.

As a result of my tireless tutelage, the eight-year-old son of my employer was by then capable of flinging a Frisbee an accurate thirty yards, and so we positioned ourselves on a spacious greensward and commenced to fling the disc back and forth. As usual, we first attracted children, then adults; and on this day, moments after we began, we were surrounded by hundred of onlookers roaring their approval of our every toss and catch. Cheap thrills, but so what? Darwin, it is chronicled, traveled about South America on his famous Beagle expedition blowing minds wherever he went by using a magical thing called a match to start fires.

So we brought out a few more Frisbees and proceeded to run a clinic for the countless folks who wanted to try their hands at throwing and catching the discs. I will always remember the laughter and gaiety and enthusiasm of those people. We were rewarded for our labors with an invitation to join a group of schoolteachers for a picnic.

At the picnic, we asked about the many placards showing the faces of two handsome young men, and were told that these were the medical student martyrs whose deaths had inspired the protest. We had heard nothing about the political situation in El Salvador except that El Salvador was at war with Honduras—the so-called Soccer War. To reach El Salvador, we had to traverse the war zone between the two countries, and I had negotiated our way past several roadblocks manned by scary soldiers armed with scarier guns, wartime profiteers extorting extra-legal money from tourists and truck drivers willing to pay.

Meanwhile, the CIA-backed despots of El Salvador had ordered the killing of these two medical students for leading a protest of their fellows against the bogus public health clinics that were closed more often than open and lacked adequate medicine and supplies. For their impudence, these young medicos were assassinated by a paramilitary death squad, and their bullet-ridden bodies left on the steps of the university as a warning to other would-be dissidents.

This protest was a spontaneous and wholly peaceful uprising of working and middle-class folks decrying the violent response of the government to the reasonable complaints of the murdered medical students. Tragically, most of the people at this event were themselves murdered or forced into exile during the decades-long CIA-funded genocide that followed.

I eventually returned to the United States. Years went by. Larger Frisbees eclipsed the original Frisbee. Ultimate Frisbee was born. Frisbee Golf came into being. The Aerobie was invented, a plastic ring that can be thrown like a Frisbee and travels hundreds of yards with ease. Frisbees with LED night-lights embedded in their rims appeared. Frisbee competitions proliferated. Frisbee-catching dogs now star at halftimes and during the seventh inning stretch at ballgames everywhere. Over 200 million Frisbees have been sold. So far.

And I, at sixty, stand on Big River Beach and fling my disc into the teeth of a steady incoming breeze, the disc banking off that strong flow of air and returning to me as if on a long and invisible yo-yo string. Adult passersby rarely stop to watch my mastery of disc and wind, but children do, wanting to try their hands at the magical thing, and I am reminded of those bygone days when the world seemed a safer and happier place than it is today, but only because of what I didn’t know.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com

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recordings

The Double

Here’s Todd reading “The Double”, a story which was published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, but is not part of any of his collections:

The Double