Will Parrish: On The Roosting of Nuclear Chickens

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

Less than a decade after the United States visited a nuclear iki-jigoku (“hell on earth”) upon the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instantaneously killing at least 150,000 and delivering countless more Japanese people to the grim reaper of gruesome radiation sickness, three of America’s leading nuclear technology boosters embarked on a promotional tour across Japan. Their purpose was to help swing Japanese public opinion in favor of the country’s infant civilian nuclear power industry, which was poised for a windfall of technological and financial assistance from the United States.

The international liaison was part of then-US President Dwight Eisenhower’ “Atoms for Peace” program, a Cold War diplomatic offensive aimed at providing nuclear technology loans and exports to so-called “developing” nations, so as to render them reliant on western capitalism for development of their energy infrastructures, rather than on the Soviet Union. A 1955 National Security Council directive framed the matter thusly: “[Atoms for Peace will] strengthen American world leadership and disprove the Communists’ propaganda charges that the [US] is concerned solely with the destructive uses of the atom.”

The American promotional contingent in Japan, which arrived in May 1955, was comprised, respectively, of the man perhaps

Todd Walton: Myth & History

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table Books
Mendocino

“As the heavens are high and the earth is deep, so the hearts of kings are unsearchable.” Book of Proverbs 25:3

“Have you seen The King’s Speech?” asked a friend.

“Marcia has and loved it,” I replied. “I’m waiting for it to come out on Netflix.”

My wife Marcia and I are on the two-movies-a-month plan, and we often don’t find the time to watch even that many.

“Of course,” continued my friend, “they’ve taken great liberties with the historical facts. I read one article that said the movie isn’t even close to the truth and another that said it has some truth in it, but not much.”

“The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.” Henry David Thoreau

Historical facts. Hmm. When I was attending UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960’s (and I really did do that) Norman O. Brown came to teach at our newborn college. His course Myth & History was open to undergrads, so I signed up to hear what the famous man had to say. Who was Norman O. Brown? Having taken his Myth & History class, and having spent a few hours blabbing with Norman about this and that,

Bruce Patterson: Mendocino Stories

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From BRUCE ‘PAT’ PATTERSON
Anderson Valley

A while back in the nearby woods a large gaggle of wild turkeys started raising a ruckus to the high heavens. A veritable convention of agitated gobblers, it was, them being in their tribal mood. By and by a bunch of the turkeys came running out the tree line, hopped the pasture fence and started circling in the grass, not so noisy now that they’d switched over to dancing. One Tom turkey froze, puffed himself up like a balloon, shuddered to make himself a teensy bit bigger by getting his chest feathers to stand on end, then fanned his tail feathers, curled his neck and broke into a skittering little soft-shoe, his movements dainty. “Lookee here,” he was saying, “ain’t I something?”

Self-expression is everywhere in nature, everything from the rocks on up tells a story, and each story is inextricably woven into all. We are the creatures of our earthly surroundings, and Delta Blues rose out of the rhythms of stoop labor and sweltering sun; Jazz mimics the sounds of the city, Bluegrass the songbirds, creeks and breezes. If a writer writes about the desert, his or her prose will be spare; writing about the jungle, florid, the sea, in ebbs and flows reflecting the lack of solid ground underfoot. The creator is made manifest in creation and self-expression, whether animal or human, is meaningful to the extent it is social. Art for art’s sake? How about

Todd Walton: Poets and Artists and…

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTable.com
Mendocino

“The poet’s only responsibility is to write fresh lines.” Charles Olson

With all due respect to the organization known as Poets & Writers, I have always felt that if there’s no poetry in the writing, who needs it? Oh, I suppose a Chemistry textbook needn’t be rife with lovely language, but in the best of worlds all writing would be touched by the writer’s experience of having read and appreciated great poetry and beautifully crafted prose.

I sold my first short story for actual dollars when I was twenty-five. The year was 1974 and the buyer was Cosmopolitan magazine. This was at the very end of the era when that historic magazine along with a few dozen other large-circulation magazines in America still published fiction. Eventually I would sell stories to teen magazines and men’s magazines, along with several more to Cosmo, as my agent called that trashy mag, but I assure you I wrote all my stories with The New Yorker and Esquire in mind. Alas, those lofty literary realms were off limits to the unwashed likes of me. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as I am wont to do.

That first story I sold was about a black female prizefighter who, through a series of bizarre events, gets a shot at fighting a top-ranked male welterweight boxer.

Todd Walton: Your Inner Bushman

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From TODD WALTON
Mendocino

“The five groups of San or Bushmen are called the First People. Most call themselves Bushmen when referring to themselves collectively.” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas from her book The Old Way

I wanted to open this article with that quote from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, a great friend of the Kalahari Bushmen, so I would not be accused of using a derogatory term when speaking of the people from whom all humans on earth are descended. One of my favorite scientific discoveries of the last few decades is that every human being currently alive on the planet can trace his or her lineage directly to the same Bushman woman who lived in Southwest Africa 172,000 years ago.

The gathering of pertinent genetic data from around the world, as well as the complicated figuring that went into determining the identity of our great Mother, has now been duplicated by multiple scientific teams, and there is today universal agreement among physical anthropologists and geneticists (though not among members of Congress) that Eve, as the European-centric researchers have named her, was, indeed, a Bushman. The name I prefer for our Very First Lady is N!ai, the exclamation point indicating a loud click made by pressing the tongue against the top of the mouth and popping it down simultaneously with the sound ai (I).

Among the many groovy things about tracing our collective beginning back to N!ai is that until the 1950’s there were still extant bands of Bushmen in and around the Kalahari Desert living very much as they had for tens of thousands of years, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and her parents and brother were among the first and last non-Bushmen to gently interface with these people and to record in great detail, in writing and film and sound recordings, how our Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors lived. Thus we know, in a tangible way, from whence we came.

“Interestingly, no anthropologist wanted to join us, although my father tried hard to find one and would have paid for his or her salary and all expenses. However, unlike the modern Kalahari, where the anthropologist/Bushman ratio

Gene Logsdon: Tasty Meat Comes From The Kitchen, Not the Field

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

Furious arguments sweep back and forth over the landscape about whether pasture-raised meat is better or worse than corn-fed meat. I think pasture-raised might be healthier food depending on the quality of the pasture, but when the debate focuses on taste, oh my. Years and years ago, a similar argument was popular: whether hogs fed on steamed slop (garbage) tasted better or worse than corn-fed hogs. A butcher could supposedly tell by finger-punching a hog carcass, whether the hog had been slop-fed or corn-fed by how soft or hard it was. We farm boys had a sort of ritual. We would finger-punch each other and, if praise were in order, pronounce the boy so punched as “corn fed.” If he were deemed soft and sissified for whatever reason, a finger punch would draw forth a derisive “slop fed.” In that kind of culture, pasture-raised meat was never going to have a chance over corn-fed even if the hams had no more give in them than anvils.

Then along came my father-in-law who raised and butchered his own hogs and smoke-cured the best-tasting hams in Kentucky, so everyone who ate at his table claimed. He told me that the way to do it right was to feed a hog for two years (none of this modern four to five-month wonder stuff) mostly on acorns and then cure the hams by his own special mix of salt (had to be a particular kind of moist salt he bought by the barrel), brown sugar and pepper, rubbing the mix into the meat every day for the first month of the curing process. He even specified how many rubs (ten) each ham should be given at each rubbing. Then he smoked the meat with hickory just so-so and left it hang in the smokehouse to age a month or more. Corn, or lack thereof, had very little to do with it.

I was out in Nebraska once talking to a tough old cowboy type whose flesh was as dark and sinewy as father-in-law’s hams. He sort of snorted at my praise for a corn-fed beef steak I had eaten in Omaha. He declared that a really tasty filet came out of the back strip of a four- year- old range cow that wouldn’t know an ear of corn from a watermelon.

Gene Logsdon: Heating With Wood Is An Eco-Crime?

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

That’s what a recent (Jan. 20) article suggested in the New York Times. After a few more provocative captions like that and a liberal use of the subjunctive mood to convince us of the dangers of burning wood, the article simmered down to saying what most of us already know: if you use dry seasoned wood and a certified low-polluting heating system, burning wood is as safe as heating with anything, but perhaps not in areas of heavy population like New York City. It is questionable whether automobiles are appropriate technology for New York City either and many people there in fact do not own one. I wonder how the Times would be received if it voiced a notion that driving cars is an eco-crime.

I don’t know the statistics but I will bet anything that the airplanes flying high above us belch out more pollution in a day than the fireplaces and woodburning stoves of New York City emit in a whole winter. I am certain that the millions upon millions of cars, buses, trucks, tractors and bulldozers in this country emit more pollutants every second than all the woodburning stoves do in a year. Furthermore, have the people who think burning wood is an eco-crime ever stopped  to consider how many millions of tons of coal and natural gas and fuel oil are burned every day to provide them with heat or to generate electric heat that they think is so much “greener” than burning wood? Then add on the vast amounts of these fuels that are burned to manufacture the appliances that deliver that heat to all those businesses and high rises and oversized suburban mansions. Then add on the whole energy consumption

Todd Walton: Dead Airplane Kerouac Caen

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Jefferson Airplane: Chauffeur Blues (Signe’s Last)

From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

“The past is never dead, it is not even past.” William Faulkner

When my wife and I joined forces four years ago, she came equipped with the nicely aged Toyota pickup I’d always wanted and I came with a Toyota station wagon ideal for toting cellos, so we swapped. The station wagon was subsequently crushed by a falling pine and replaced by a more commodious sedan, but the pickup lives on and I love the old thing.

Marcia bought the truck from the person who bought the truck new, Jim Young, our superlative chiropractor and friend and coach of the Mendocino High School (boys) basketball team. Now and then when I am under Jim’s thumbs, as it were, he will inquire about his former truck and I am happy to report the old thing is humming right along and still getting admirable mileage in this age of fast-rising fuel costs.

The pickup is faded white, eighteen years old, with the requisite rust spots and windows that must be manually cranked up and down. Otherwise non-descript, the truck sports a subtle ornament that Jim affixed to the rear window, an insignia identifying the vehicle as a chariot of the Dead, the Grateful Dead, the band, not my ancestors.

Todd Walton: Creeping Up On God

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTable
Mendocino

So this guy goes to see a psychiatrist and after fifty minutes the psychiatrist says, “I think you’re crazy.”

And the guy says, “Hey, wait a minute. I want to get a second opinion.”

And the psychiatrist says, “Okay, you’re ugly, too.”

My father was a child psychiatrist. Until I was eight or nine, I had only vague notions of what my father’s practice consisted of. I knew he had a playroom adjacent to his office, and in that playroom there were board games and a sandbox and dolls and trucks and other cool things for kids to play with, and I knew my father wore a suit and tie when he interacted with these kids, and that he was sort of a doctor.

So this guy with a chicken on his head goes to see

Todd Walton: Whales & Predictions

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.” Allan K. Chalmers

Sunday. The second of January 2011. My wife Marcia and I are sitting on a bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean a few miles south of the village of Mendocino, the pale blue sky decorated with flat clouds, grays and whites, the celestial artist in no mood for billowy today. The sea is relatively calm and several pods of whales are passing by close enough for us to see them clearly without binoculars, their impressive water spouts presaging glimpses of their even more impressive enormity, our excitement at seeing them giving way to ongoing joy that the leviathans (my favorite synonym for whales) are right there, sharing the world with us, and saying hello so delightfully.

We have come to this promontory above the deep to give back to the ocean some forty pounds of stones and shells we’ve collected over the last five years for the decoration of windowsills and table tops; and as we throw the pretty gifts into the depths, we send with them our hopes and intentions for the year ahead.

The news of late has been full of predictions by economists and financial prognosticators about what may befall the national and global economies in the coming year,

Todd Walton: All Or Nothing

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTable.com
Mendocino

“Every day: meditation, chocolate, a glass of port wine, and flirting with young men.” Beatrice Wood at age 98 on her secret to longevity

“I’m never drinking coffee again,” said my friend, reciting his New Year’s resolutions. “And no more alcohol. And I’m off all sugar. And I’m joining a health club and I’m gonna work out for at least an hour a day, every day. Without fail.”

“Wow,” I said, having heard similar declarations from this fellow before. “Sounds draconian.”

“Look,” he said, piqued by my hint of sarcasm, “it’s all or nothing with me. One cup of coffee, I’m hooked again. One piece of chocolate, I’m a goner.” He glared at his big round tummy. “Moderation doesn’t work for me.”

“There can only be one winner, but isn’t that the American way?” Gig Young

I’ve often thought ALL OR NOTHING could be our national motto, for the concept infects virtually every aspect of our political, economic, social, and emotional lives.

“The only way I can figure out what I really think about anything is to write about it.” Norman Mailer

Throughout the 1990’s I worked with hundreds of writers to help them improve their writing. Some were beginners,

Todd Walton: Scholar Jim

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTable.com
Mendocino

“There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous.” Mark Twain

I wonder how Mark Twain would feel if he knew his novel Huckleberry Finn has been rewritten in such a way that the meaning of his book is entirely changed, and that such an execrable mutation of his work is about to be afflicted on the next generation of American schoolchildren. I ask because such a crime has just taken place. Yes, it’s true, and I quote from The New York Times:

“Throughout the book [Huckleberry Finn]—219 times in all—the word nigger is replaced by slave, a substitution that was made by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama, which plans to release the edition in February.

“Alan Gribben, a professor of English and a Twain scholar at Auburn University, approached the publisher with the idea in July. Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.

“‘I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think I’m alone.’

“Mr. Gribben, who combined Huckleberry Finn with Tom Sawyer in a single volume and also supplied an introduction, said he worried that Huckleberry Finn had fallen off reading lists, and wanted to offer an edition that is not for scholars, but for younger people and general readers.

“‘I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,’ Mr. Gribben said. ‘The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.’ (The book also substitutes Indian for injun.)”

Gene Logsdon: Oh What A Beautiful Morning

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From GENE LOGSDON

It was 50 degrees and the sun shining here on New Year’s Day. That’s a beautiful morning for this time of year in Ohio, not as beautiful as the one in the musical, “Oklahoma!” when “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, and it seems to be climbing right up to the sky,” but beautiful for January. So I went to the barn singing that song, reminding myself once again of why I like it so much. My father used to sing it in the barn where he thought no one could hear him and we used to break up laughing at his performances. He could not carry a tune in a bushel basket and “Oh What A Beautiful Morning” is a difficult song to sing. In the very first line, all sorts of sly half notes and flats and sharps lay waiting to catch the wariest of voices. If you direct church choirs, the perfect way to audition singers is to have them sing that line. Anyone who can do it without accompaniment and nail every note exactly right,  especially on the first syllable of the word ‘morning’, then he or she can sing in anyone’s choir.

But that’s not why this song is so special to me. Its lyrics and that of other songs in “Oklahoma!” are just so very reflective of the farming spirit.  (I write about this at some length in my book, “The Mother of All Arts” if you’re interested.)  In addition to the lines above, there are others just as culturally perfect: “The breeze is so busy, it don’t miss a tree, and that old weepin’ willow is laughing at me.” Even the incorrect grammar is just right. Can you imagine anyone coming up with lyrics like that today?  Especially in the refrain of the song, this line:  “I’ve got a wonderful feelin’, everything’s going my way.”  No one today could write a song that happy. What we hear today mostly in our cowering, fearful environment is: “Uh- uh, baby- baby, eff- word, baby- baby, uh- uh. ”

Whatever happened to joy in this country?

More to the point, how could Oscar Hammerstein II

Neil Davis: Justa’ bikin’ in the rain…

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From NEIL DAVIS
Mendo 2 Mile Challenge

Do I look nutty? No wait, don’t answer that!

What is it about bikes that attracts, no I think inspires, so many impassioned nutcases, zealots, and holy roller bike preachers? What is it that makes so many of us feel that we need everyone else to join us? “It’s not enough for me to love this bike riding, I need you to as well”. How do I know when I’ve crossed the line and become a wing nut bicyclist? Are we the nutcases, or is it everyone else? And why don’t more people see the reason behind our passion and join us?I was bundling up to ride home from work the other day – it was pouring down rain. Really wet. I was happy, done with work for the day and getting ready to ride home in the rain. How could I not be happy?

A coworker walked by and offered me a ride home, “really, we can throw your bike in the back of our truck”. I laughed and declined. Another coworker walked by, “I can give you a ride home”. I countered her offer with an offer to give her a ride home on my bike, “You can ride on my back rack”. She laughed and declined.

They think I’m nuts.

I don’t think I am. I know I had more fun on the way home than they did, I can feel it in my bones. They think it was a big ordeal for me, that I went to all kinds of trouble, just to prove a point ( I suppose). I can imagine that it appeared that way. After all, they saw me pulling on my rain gear. They didn’t have to do all that. I suspect they didn’t see that they got as wet dashing to their cars as I did riding home (I arrived with the bottom inch of my left pants leg wet). I’m not sure they appreciated that I only took about 2 minutes to pull my rain pants on, probably roughly the same time it took them to settle into their cars and buckle up etc.

Oh well, they think I’m nuts.

Todd Walton: Propaganda of Childhood

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.” Cynthia Ozick

The propaganda of my childhood said that Santa Claus rewards children for being good by giving them what they want. And long after I figured out that my parents were Santa Claus, I continued to believe that the reason I never got what I wanted was because I was not good. Every year I was given clothing I did not want, books I did not want, and things my father wanted, so that as I unwrapped those gifts he would chortle, “What a coincidence. Just what I needed.”

However, when I was ten-years-old, my parents gave me a real bow and arrows with steel tips, something I had been asking for since I was old enough to ask for something. And when I went outside to shoot that bow and arrows, and found that my father had also bought a bale of hay to which he had affixed a beautiful target, I was more than happy; I was filled to bursting with the sense of being good.

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.” Shirley Temple

In response to the depressing fact that the latest tax bill signed into law by President Obama actually increases taxes on the poorest 150 million Americans while allowing the super wealthy to pay no taxes at all, a friend remarked, “That doesn’t fit with the propaganda of our childhood.” And her comment struck me as a cogent explanation for why my peers and I continue to be so deeply disappointed by the machinations of the corporate overlords as carried out by their trusty puppets. And her comment also explained why we, the people,

Bruce Patterson: The Darkest Night

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From BRUCE “PAT” PATTERSON
4Mules Blog
Anderson Valley

“When steam first began to puff. . .the wild child humanity was caught and put in a harness. What we call business habits were invented to make the life of man harmonious with the steam engine, and his movements rival the train in punctuality. The factory system was invented and it was an instantaneous success. Men were clothed in cheapness and uniformity. Their minds grew numerously alike, cheap and uniform also.”
–G.W. Russell (1867-1935)

Maybe 30 years ago, back when my wife and I were living “off the grid” (back then we called it living without electricity and indoor plumbing) up near Mountain House, a friend told me of a tribe of people—I think they were Patagonian highlanders—who navigated by the night sky but without using the stars. Instead of focusing on the stars, galaxies and constellations, war chariots, Greek gods and wild animals, they used their peripheral vision to see the web work of black pathways connecting them. Myself having always been a stargazer—under High Sierra skies, Mojave skies, Montana skies—I was skeptical because I’d never noticed such a thing.

Yet my friend was well schooled in life’s mysteries and so I decided to put it to the test. It was a hot August night, clouds were about as scarce as January tourists, and after the last of the sunset’s afterglow had gone out to sea, and before the moon had risen, and in order to get away from the glare of our cabin’s kerosene lamps, my wife and I followed a sheep trail to a nearby a point of land.

The wet blanket of hot air was stone still and, while we were getting settled on our sitting spot, we heard the faint echoing chugging of a locomotive pulling a train up the Russian River Canyon.

Todd Walton: Slow Going

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table Books
Mendocino

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” Lily Tomlin

Five years ago, a few weeks before I made my move from Berkeley to Mendocino, I came within a few inches of being killed by a young man who was driving his pickup truck very fast while simultaneously using his mobile phone. I had just stepped into the crosswalk at the intersection of San Pablo Avenue and Gilman Avenue, having been given the go ahead to cross by the illuminated symbol of a human being taking a walk. The young man who was driving his pickup very fast apparently did not see the red light or me or possibly anything as he sped through the intersection with his phone pressed to his ear. I don’t know if he was talking to someone or listening to someone else talking, or perhaps he was listening to music; I am only certain he was pressing his phone to his ear as his two-ton missile shot by within inches of my puny little flesh and blood body. And whether there is such a thing as fate or whether life is a muddle of meaningless happenstance, had I been one step further along at that moment, I would have been smashed to smithereens.

So today I’m driving our old truck into our soggy hamlet to get the mail and groceries, a cold rain falling, and because I am the unelected president of Mendocino Drivers Not In A Hurry To Get Anywhere, I’ve only gotten a few hundred yards down the Comptche-Ukiah straightaway before my rearview mirror is filled with the sight of a pickup closing fast upon me. As is my custom in these situations, I move to the outer edge of the road and slow to a crawl, timing my move so that whoever is driving that oncoming pickup will have an easy time passing me—the road ahead empty, the broken yellow line entirely on our side. But this particular pickup (going at least seventy miles per hour) zooms to within a few feet of my bumper

Bruce Patterson: Harvesting Christmas Trees

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From BRUCE ‘PAT’ PATTERSON
Anderson Valley

I’d driven down this particular beaver slide twice already this year, but never with a full trailer during a cloudburst. My brand-new, one-ton diesel, company pickup truck’s full blast windshield wipers were allowing me flickering peeks of the straight-shot clay road down below, the distant bottomlands seemingly as flat as a pond, and the road looked like a yellow-brown waterfall slicing in two a pure green munchkin Doug fir forest planted at double-arms interval. If I slid out of control, I knew, I was going to wipe out some Christmas trees and, worse, get my truck and trailer mired axle-deep in mud. I’d also scratch the truck’s pristine paint job and maybe even give its front side and fenders some inaugural dings. Imagining such a veritable catastrophe, I could see my boss’s face lengthen and redden and then lengthen and redden some more as I bashfully spilled the beans.

Yet we were already late getting to the landing, and I couldn’t very well sit there idling at the top of the beaver slide awaiting a change in the weather. I couldn’t back out of there, either, or ignore my three soaking wet and shivering compadres huddled atop the load. The only way to take the chill off their bones was to get them back to work, and the best thing about off-loading Christmas trees was how it got your body warmed up and put the feeling back into your fingers. Then, if worse came to worst and I crashed, my body wouldn’t get hurt and we had a D-7 Cat tractor parked not two miles away that could come get us back on the road. “Better late than never,” I recited to myself while steeling my nerves.

After telling my three compadres to climb down off the load and then walk behind me down the hill,

Todd Walton: Happiness

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table Books
Mendocino

“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.” Edith Wharton

November thirtieth. The weather report said Mendocino could expect rain tonight and for the next several days, so in anticipation of the deluge I spent an hour giving my three garlic beds their second mulching with some well-aged horse manure. I planted my garlic on October 17, my birthday, and now all but a few of the hundred and forty cloves I inserted into the friable soil have sent up sturdy green shoots.

“The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.” Mark Twain

Both garlic and humans gestate in their respective wombs for nine months before arriving at the optimal moment for emerging into the light. The poet in me finds this similarity delightful and significant.

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette

I am sixty-one and have grown garlic every year for the last thirty years. I began growing garlic while living in Sacramento where I had a large vegetable and flower garden in the backyard of the only house I ever owned. I have grown vegetables since I was six-years-old, but waited to sew my first bed of garlic until I was certain I would be living in the same place for more than a year.

Before I planted my first garlic crop, I consulted pertinent chapters in gardening books and interviewed an elderly Italian woman who grew gorgeous garlic plants in a large circular patch in the center of her impressively green lawn a few blocks from my house. I gathered from my research that in the event of an early and persistently wet winter I might not need to water my garlic until spring, but if no rain fell for some weeks at a stretch

Neil Davis: Is it just me, or is this nutty?

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From NEIL DAVIS
Mendo 2 Mile Challenge
Ukiah

Somehow my second month of winter town biking has slipped by. It’s been chilly to cold, in a Northern CA kind of way, so not really that cold. But I am glad to have my gloves and a nice wool cap on in the morning.

We had 3.8 inches of rain (less than normal) in November and not very much of it landed on me, or my bike, despite my riding at least twice a day five to six days a week. There were two days when I rode in a light rain, a couple when the road was wet (but my fenders handled that) and one day when I decided to skip a meeting rather than ride to it in the pouring rain. So the weather hasn’t really provided any excuse to drive the car, nor have I needed to be particularly valiant in my quest to leave the car at home.

I felt kind of guilty when I realized I was deciding to skip a meeting rather than ride in the rain and it made me question my moral fortitude (actually I think I just regretted losing the self righteous high ground). Then as I thought about it more, I realized this makes sense. Is it really bad to decide to stay home when it’s stormy out? Is it bad to actually think about, and weigh the pros and cons, of travel in dirty weather? Is it worth it to go out? Is it safe? I don’t have the stats to back it up, but I suspect there are many more accidents, bike or car, in stormy weather.

Staying at home when it’s stormy is likely the age-old norm. There’s no way Cro magnon Neil would have

Todd Walton: Changing Seasons

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table Books
Mendocino

Every year for the past four years I have been commissioned by Bay Woof, a Bay Area Dog magazine, to write a Christmas story for them, a short short story about dogs and their people at holiday time. I hope you enjoy the tale.

1

Early December. A sunny kitchen. Tea and cookies.

“The dog is the problem,” says Carol, wasting no time stating the case to her brother Ben. “And because I have four cats, two little kids, a busy husband, a formal Japanese garden ill-suited to a large dog, and no time to take the dog for walks; and you are single, self-employed, have a big unkempt, pardon my French, backyard, and your grown daughter visits only rarely, you should take the dog.”

Ben waits before responding, certain his sister has more to say.

“We’re so close to resolving this,” she adds with a hint of ferocity. “He needs to move.”

“Pop or the dog?” asks Ben, the quip irresistible, though he knows Carol will take him literally.

“Pop, of course,” she says, exasperated. “He spends half his time at Fall Creek Village with Mary already. He’d move tomorrow if he could feel okay about leaving the dog behind.”

“Kirk,” says Ben, stating the dog’s name, short for Kierkegaard, their father a retired philosophy professor. “The last time I talked to Pop

Nicholas Wilson: Whiny Wendy and the MCN Listservs

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From NICHOLAS WILSON
Little River

[You may have thought the recent elections here in Mendocino were over. The votes were counted, the winners announced, now time to get on with our lives, right? Well, not so with one losing Supervisorial candidate who can't seem to reconcile herself with her overwhelming rejection in the 5th district. This is a followup report to these prior posts: MCN Discussion List To Be Shut Down; Regarding The Transition Of The MCN Discussion List; True Colors: Wendy Roberts now has a public record; Mudslinging in Mendo; Wendy Roberts’ Dirty Tricks Campaign; Sorry, Wendy. Money can't buy you love; and A vote for Wendy Roberts is a vote for the Right Wing, Privatizing, and Dumb Growth. "MCN" is an Internet Service Provider Owned and Operated by the Mendocino Unified School District. -DS]

First, the good news that the MCN-Discussion listserv termination has been canceled or postponed. MCN General Manager Mitchell Sprague wrote in a list post dated Dec. 6, 2010 at 9:26 AM titled “MCN Cancels December 15th Discussion List Closure”:

After hearing the various comments and opinions raised in the last few days, I have spoken with Dave Miller, MUSD superintendent. The December 15th timeline for the closure of the discussion list has been removed.

The MUSD board will take up the discussion of the future of the unmoderated, open subscription discussion listserv at a *timed* item at a future board meeting. Superintendent Miller has asked me to pass along that he and the MUSD Board are aware of the other important public meeting regarding the Navy on the same night as the December 16th MUSD Board Meeting,

Bruce Patterson: Back-to-the-Landers?

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From BRUCE ‘PAT’ PATTERSON
4 Mules Blog
Anderson Valley

Bruce Anderson, the esteemed editor and publisher of the Anderson Valley Advertiser—about the best little weekly in the West—once told me that he has never considered himself a Back-to-the-Lander. A child of the Great Depression born and raised in San Francisco, Bruce “went country” to escape The City he loved that was getting devoured by the car-crazed megalopolis spreading in all directions like a steel, smoke and concrete rash.

Dave Smith, the noted environmental activist and the owner of Mulligan Books in Ukiah, once told me how his farm stock mother reacted when he told her that he was washing his hands of the wheeled rat race and going back to the land.

“The land?” His mother huffed indignantly, “You can keep the land.”

And that was reasonable enough seeing how, traditionally speaking, the worst thing about rural poverty was being forced from cradle-to-grave to bust your ass in order to maintain it. I’m a second generation American, half Irish and half Slovak, and while growing up I wasn’t ever allowed to forget that I was only two measly generations removed from centuries of hunger, filth, disease, heartbreak, slavery and peonage. The Statue of Liberty was built with folks like my grandparents and me in mind, and stepping ashore in New World was supposed to mean leaving behind the ancient, senile and soiled aristocracy of the moneybag.

Even if my ancestors hadn’t’ve been forced to contend with bloodsucking Feudal landlords, Church-State totalitarianism, brigands and rapacious imperial armies, still tilling another’s land was seldom easy and never profitable, living hand-to-mouth being their version of living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Todd Walton: My Black Heroes

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From TODD WALTON
Mendocino

“A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.” Bob Dylan

The black athlete I am currently most enamored of is Michael Vick, the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles who recently spent two years in federal prison for financing a large and illegal pit bull farm where dogs were raised and trained to fight and kill other dogs, and where dogs deemed unfit to be successful fighters were ruthlessly murdered, some by Vick himself. Several of my friends are unhappy with me for liking Michael Vick, just as they were upset with me for liking Mike Tyson, and for liking Muhammad Ali before it became politically correct to like the man who started out as Cassius Clay, and for liking Sonny Liston before I liked Cassius Clay.

I don’t like that Michael Vick treated dogs cruelly and killed them, but I understand that raising and fighting pit bulls is an integral part of southern culture. I sojourned in South Carolina in the 1970’s and attended barbecues at the homes of both white people and black people, and the climax of every such party came when the man of the house took me and a few other men to visit the kennel wherein he kept his illegal fighting dogs and the coop wherein his illegal gamecocks were caged. And as we stood in the presence of these ferocious dogs and ferocious birds, our host would proudly regale us with tales of grisly battles fought by his dogs and cocks, tales for which he expected to be greatly admired.

I don’t recount this southern lore to defend Michael Vick, but to suggest there is a cultural context for his actions. Had he come from China and been the son of a cat breeder providing cat meat

Todd Walton: Attention Deficit Nonsense

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“Tell the children the truth.” Bob Marley

1957. Las Lomitas Elementary School. Menlo Park, California

“I invite those people with ants in their pants,” proclaimed Mrs. Davenport, my third grade teacher, “to run to the oak tree and back before we get to work on our projects.”

Those people always included me, so I and several of my cohorts, boys and girls, walked sedately to the classroom door from where we bolted into sunlight and fresh air to run across the playground to the gigantic oak that overshadowed the playing field. Upon our return, Mrs. Davenport would say, “Todd, Jody, Wendy, I invite you to circumnavigate the oak one more time because I can see you’ve still got a little jitterbug in you.”

Mrs. Davenport was from Oklahoma and proudly one-eighth Cherokee. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in all my eight mortal years. She was astute, funny, musical, athletic, and she enjoyed using words somewhat beyond the official Third Grade vocabulary. We loved Mrs. Davenport because she loved us and had great empathy for our collective predicament: being eight-year-olds.

In 1957, may the fates be eternally blessed, there was no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder, nor were hideous drugs routinely and epidemically administered to children with ants in their pants. Thus I was spared the pharmaceutical suppression of my true nature, which was, as our beloved Mrs. Davenport so aptly put it, “To jitterbug.”

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Nelson Mandela

Todd Walton: Critical Delusion

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

“The fraudulent practices that got people into homes they couldn’t afford are at the heart of our problem.” Robert Scheer

There is no doubt I am happier and more productive and healthier and much more hopeful when I lose touch with the world outside the local watershed; and I am especially happier when I don’t read articles by Robert Scheer and Chris Hedges and Jim Kunstler and other brave and intelligent left-of-the-now-non-existent-center pundits. When I do read articles by these folks, or essays by relatively moderate commentators like Paul Krugman, I feel depressed and hopeless and mentally bludgeoned because these well-meaning folks keep saying the same things over and over again, week after week, month after month.

So to climb out of my slough of despond, I abstain for days on end from news of the outside world, and the bloom returns to my cheeks, and my writing picks up steam, and new melodies present themselves, and I improve as a husband and friend and neighbor, and I start to think life is pretty okay; and then someone sends me an incisively gruesome article or someone emails me a link to a frightening treatise, and I am once more sucked into reading commentaries elucidating how and why things in the great big world are, indeed, going from bad to worse, and I feel bludgeoned again, and while I’m being bludgeoned I try to make sense of the avalanche of facts about the legions of crooks who own and run the world, though the ultimate sense to be made is the same sense I’ve been making since they ran Jimmy Carter out of office in 1980

Todd Walton: Le Village

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

“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.

Todd Walton: Sport

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTable
Mendocino

“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.” Thich Nhat Hanh

My maternal grandfather, Myron “Casey” Weinstein, went to the University of Michigan in 1918 on an athletic scholarship to wrestle and play baseball. Casey was the backup catcher behind the great Ernie Vick, and proudly recited this historic tidbit even after Alzheimer’s had robbed him of virtually every other memory. My paternal great grandfather, Charles Walton, was a world champion roller skater in the days when skates had steel wheels. His world’s records for sprints and long distances stood for decades after steel skates were things of the distant past.

Even so, my parents were horrified to discover they had given birth to a son, yours truly, who shortly after learning to walk wanted to do little else but play ball. My father was a non-athlete and openly contemptuous of men who played or followed sports. My mother was fond of saying that only boys who weren’t smart enough to do anything else became athletes. I knew this was nonsense because I was one of the smartest guys in my class (judging by the number of silver stars after my name on the class chart) and I adored sports. In fact, the smartest guys I knew, the best guys, were crazy about sports. Kickball, dodge ball, four-square, tetherball, baseball, football, basketball. If a ball was involved, sign me up. I liked bows and arrows and spears, too, but I was most enamored of balls. In an earlier epoch, I would have been a warrior and a hunter.

Gene Logsdon: The Best and Worst Smells On A Farm

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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

Pat Leuchtman brought up an interesting subject when she reviewed my book, “Holy Shit,” on www.commonweeder.com. She reminisced about her early experiences on the farm and how much she liked the smell of cow manure in the barn when she was a child. Lots of us agree with Pat but it has been awhile since I’ve heard anyone praise the smell of manure right out loud. It got me to thinking about the subjectivity of nasal sensations. I wonder if you, dear reader, would agree with my list, below, of the worst and best farm smells, or if you have riper candidates.

The worst farm smells:

1. A bucket of decaying potatoes.
2. An egg so rotten that what remains inside the shell is just a rubbery, almost dry remnant of yolk.
3. Liquid manure slurry from factory hogs fed with a high soybean meal protein supplement. When this manure is being stored in underground pits, the odor will lay you out prostrate on the ground.
4. Buzzard vomit. I don’t know this from experience but my father always said this was “by far the worst smell God ever created.” If you are innocent enough to approach a buzzard nest, this might be your fate.
5. Rotting plant residue on a cabbage field after harvest.

The best farm smells:

1. Wild grape blossoms
2. Good quality hay curing in the mow
3. Freshly-turned, rich, moist soil
4. Air filtering through a woodlot in the spring after a rain shower
5. Blooming apple trees over an orchard floor of white clover.

The odor of barn manure after it has been soaked up and mixed with straw bedding and aged a bit is not offensive to me. It smells like money. As I try to show in my book, high quality manure is going up in value. That’s because commercial chemical fertilizer prices are skyrocketing…

Full article here
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Todd Walton: Disappointment

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTable.com
Mendocino

Whilst discussing my hopes and expectations for the San Francisco Giants with Mark Scaramella, he suggested I try my hand at writing about disappointment. I just hope my attempt doesn’t disappoint him.

“Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy — the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.” Eric Hoffer

What is disappointment? The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines disappointment as: dejection or distress caused by the non-fulfillment of desire or expectation. Substitute the word suffering for distress and we land smack dab at the outset of Buddhist philosophy. The First Noble Truth (and I have yet to read a satisfactory explanation of why the Four Noble Truths are noble rather than big or unavoidable or groovy) is that life is suffering. I recently read an article in a Buddhist magazine suggesting that suffering might not be the most accurate translation of the Sanskrit word Buddha purportedly used. The article suggested that annoying might be a more accurate translation. And in some texts the First Noble Truth is stated as: Life is full of suffering (though not necessarily completely full, which would allow for the occasional pizza, chocolate bar, or delightful flirtation).

But seriously folks, the Second Noble Truth states that the cause (or origin) of suffering is attachment. If we can learn not to be attached to things and people and baseball teams winning the World Series, or even just to being alive, then our suffering will lessen and might even disappear entirely.

Marylyn Motherbear Scott: Speak clearly. Vote for Dan Hamburg!

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From MARYLYN MOTHERBEAR SCOTT
Fifth District Mendocino

Everyone wants to enjoy life. That’s one of the reasons we live in Mendocino County. Relatively, we are a small community, nonetheless noticed on a larger map. Why? Simply because we have spoken clearly with our voting voice. We have a strong model of being green, being organic, voting down GMO’s, building up Farmer’s Markets, and caring for our citizenry. We are in a lineage of old time ranchers and farmers, hippies nee neo-pioneers, artists, and small business entrepreneurs. Both the heritage and the promise — a creative individualism that runs deeply and proudly through our county’s esprit de corps and esprit de force.

When I look back to consider why I came here, it was the land pure and simple, the clean water, the clear air, the good earth, the Back to the Land Movement, the neo-pioneering lifestyle that was a part of it. Translation? Do It Yourself — grow your gardens, build your houses, teach your children well. A growing awareness. We are a treasured part of the Garden that is Mendocino County. Our part? We need political leaders who will keep us in good tilth, to help our gardens grow, to support independent means of survival, one that finds the means of support for a vibrant community, one that helps itself and has enough and some to share.

Changes are inevitable. The change we now face is more critical than ever before. In District Five, we have an opportunity to elect an experienced representative to the Supervisor’s Chambers, one who will work toward keeping our county healthy and independent, a reflection of its inhabitants. Dan Hamburg proved himself as a responsible and accessible Supervisor and Congressional representative. We need what Dan has to offer.

Gene Logsdon: The Lonely Hickories

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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

Along the one lane country roads in our county, the traveler encounters an occasional roadside tree, all by itself at the edge of the endless fields of corn and soybeans. The casual passerby may see nothing unusual about the trees but those of us who have lived here almost as long as these trees have, think of them as quite remarkable. They stand as monuments commemorating the passing agrarian life we cherish.

These trees are hickories, already bearing when I was born seventy some years ago. To understand why they are precious, visualize this landscape when these trees first sprouted at least a hundred years ago. Much of this land was originally forested, and was still in the process of being cleared. All through the 20th century, more trees vanished every year. By the time I worked in the fields, there were still a few sentinels of the old forest dotting the grain fields and pastures. They were left there mostly for shade. In those days farmers spent a lot of time in the blazing sun, not in tractor cabs, and all of you who have felt the July sun bearing mercilessly down on you know what a pleasure it is to be able to rest a bit in the shade. Worth losing a little bit of corn for. A few trees in the pastures were spared for the same reason— shade for the livestock.

One by one, these silent sentinels from the past were cut down or died. It was not much of a bother to dodge a field tree with two-row equipment,

John Cesano: What’s behind the hype surrounding Natural Process wines?

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From JOHN CESANO
John On Wine Blog
Ukiah

[...] What is natural process wine? It begins in the vineyard, whether certified organic, or biodynamic, or uncertified but making the same choices, not for paper but for flavor, and extends into the winery where as little of the winemakers influence as possible is involved. It is letting grape juice become wine with little intervention. Wines made naturally the way they would have been made 1,000 years ago, before the advent of harvesting machinery and the development of enology and viticulture science, before artificial yeasts, before fining with animal products, before gums, before catalogs of chemical additives and processes of manipulation.

From The Natural Process Alliance’s website:

We believe that expressive soil is sacred, responsible farming is a requirement and natural winemaking is the only option. In the creation of wine, there are innumerable natural processes that are elegant in their simplicity and astonishing in their effectiveness.

Neil Davis: An inconvenient convenience

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From NEIL DAVIS
Mendo 2 Mile Challenge

What’s the sweetest experience you can have as a “round town” bicyclist? I’ll entertain submissions, but right up toward the top of any list has to be “passing cars”. When I lived in a more urban setting it was pretty frequent. Rush hour commutes would almost always include a section or two where I could breeze past cars stuck in a line at stop signs or lights. Passing jammed cars may provide the pinnacle of self-righteous, cycling smuggery. “I’m cheap, I’m green, I’m healthy, I’m having fun… and I’m passing you”!

In cycling centers like Amsterdam and Copenhagen people ride bikes primarily because it’s the fastest way to get around town. All the other benefits are just gravy. Here in Nor Cal we don’t have enough traffic for driving to be noticeably inconvenient. And yet, the bike it still competitive on short trips.

Now I say “noticeably” inconvenient because of course it’s incredibly, and euphemistically, “inconvenient”. Using a hundred plus horse power and a thousand pounds of metal and hard plastics to move a single 200 pound person around is of course absurdly expensive and wasteful, not merely inconvenient… More: Neil Davis here…
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Todd Walton: Gay

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.” Raymond Chandler

Before the advent of the interweb, I frequented libraries and secondhand bookstores in search of good short stories, my appetite for cuentos pequeños insatiable. I am not keen on most contemporary short stories that find their way into mass media print, so I mainly feed on authors dead and obscure.

When I was living in Berkeley in the 1990’s, I came upon a library cache of short story anthologies published annually in the 1920’s and 1930’s, hardbound volumes featuring now mostly forgotten literary darlings of America and England. Many of the stories were well written, in stark contrast to their equivalents today, though few of the stories were great. And in every volume there was a story by Gertrude Stein, though the word story does not do justice to her conglomerations of words, for her conglomerations do not tell tales so much as they weave verbal webs that may mean something to someone, but mean very little to me.

However, whilst devouring these relatively ancient anthologies, I came upon a particular Gertrude Stein story that excited me tremendously, for I felt I had discovered the origin of the current meaning of the word gay. The story is entitled Miss Furr & Miss Skeene and featured the use of gay in the following manner.

“…she liked to stay in one place and be gay there. They were together then and traveled to another place and stayed there and were gay there. They were quite regularly gay there, Helen Furr and Georgine Skeene, they were regularly gay there where they were gay.

Bruce Patterson: Jesus and the Christian

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From BRUCE PATTERSON
4Mules.com
Anderson Valley

Two unemployed bums were sitting on a park bench in the big city. Spring was in the air, and the day was warm and comfortable. Coming out of a long hard winter, the weather was perfect for getting back to work and making some grub money, although neither mentioned it because around the world were millions of unemployed bums sitting on park benches.

“I’ll tell you,” one bum said. “This depression is going to end here pretty quick and, once I’m back on my feet and climbing up the back of the hog, I’ll never forget you, man, not after all you’ve done for me.”

The other bum blushed. All he’d provided was companionship. “That’s mighty generous, brother.”

Sweeping his arm across the soaring landscape of steel, concrete and glass, the first bum said, “Right now fortunes are being made here and I’m going to make mine. Yet, even after I’ve banked my first million, if ever you are in need, you can count on me.”

“What if my car breaks down and you have two cars? Would you lend me one of your cars so I could get to work and back?”

“Hell, I’ll give you a car, brother. How am I supposed to drive two cars at once?”

“What if you get so rich that you have two houses and, for one reason or another, I’m homeless again? Would you let me live in your second house until got back up on my feet?”

“I’d give you the house. Having two house would mean I was only getting half the value of each but, if you were living in one, the value would double.

Todd Walton: Prostitution

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTableBooks.com
Mendocino

“Working in Hollywood does give one a certain expertise in the field of prostitution.” Jane Fonda

I have never heard of a workshop for writers that teaches the efficacious use of sex to make it big in theatre or publishing or the movie business, but any writer who has toiled in Hollywood or New York, or in the outposts of those Babylons, knows that sexual linkage to people in power is of paramount importance to success in The Biz; and anyone who denies this is either a phony or grossly naïve.

Grossly naïve describes moi when the sale of my first novel to the movies landed me in Hollywood circa 1980, though my naïveté was not so much intellectual as grounded in a fierce unwillingness to accept reality. That is, I knew a good deal about the sexual machinations of the theatre world, yet clung to a mythic notion that by creating highly desirable plays and books and screenplays I would be allowed to travel sexually unmolested into collaborations with creative people possessed of sufficient clout to get books published and movies made and plays produced.

The sale of my first novel to a major New York publisher and the subsequent sale of the movies rights to a Hollywood studio were accomplished

Todd Walton: Desnatchification

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

“Bodies devoid of mind are as statues in the market place.” Euripides

Have you ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? I’m thinking particularly of the 1978 remake starring Donald Sutherland. I remember two things most vividly about the movie. First, the invading fungus (or fungus-like alien) left everyone it snatched seemingly unchanged on the outside, but on the inside those who got snatched were full of fungus. Hence the expression: the fungus amongus. Secondly, I had the distinct feeling the film was not fiction, but rather a docudrama. It seemed to me that Americans by the millions were being snatched and having their hearts and minds turned into sticky gray fungus; and I kept meeting these people and dating them.

“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein

Now it is 2010, thirty-two years since I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and here comes the news that a wealthy television producer just won a MacArthur Genius Award. If nothing about this news strikes you as strange or untoward, then I would say you have been snatched. The news that an award intended to support daring unknown artists has been given to a well-known commercial hack reminds me of that terrible day some years ago when the abominably sophomoric musical fungus A Chorus Line won the Pulitzer Prize. When I heard that news, the first thought that came to my mind was, “Those judges have been snatched.”

“Of one thing we can be sure. The quality of our life in the future will be determined by the quality of our thinking.” Edward de Bono

What do I mean by snatched, assuming the snatchee’s body and brain isn’t actually filled with alien fungus? To my way of thinking (which I grant you is not necessarily a simple or popular way of thinking) a person qualifies as snatched when he or she has surrendered his or her powers of discernment to propaganda disguised as contemporary culture. Sadly, horribly, fungaciously,

Neil Davis: Transition Town + Town Bike = Transition Bike!

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From NEIL DAVIS
Mendo 2 Mile Challenge
Ukiah

This idea of “transition towns” is pretty new to me. If it’s new to you here’s the skinny (if it’s not you can skip the rest of this paragraph); many communities, primarily as grass roots efforts, are responding to the reality that we’re going to run out of oil. These folks acknowledge that as the world’s oil supply dwindles, energy costs will soar with myriad nasty effects. So instead of hiding their heads in shopping bags, they are getting together in small self guided “support groups” and working together to reduce their energy dependence. In the process they’re reconnecting with their neighbors and finding joy in community

That’s pretty cool.

So my google search of “transition town” got me loads of info – all very inspiring. But as I waded through this stuff I was struck by how little talk there was about the energy glutton that is our single passenger vehicle. It’s probably that I just naturally love bikes, but it seemed to me that leaving our cars at home (or better yet, at the dealership) would be the big easy win, but maybe that’s a bad assumption. So back to my guru google.com, and I found this:

“Counting the overall energy demand for use in homes, versus cars in 2008, the EIA estimates U.S. consumers use … about 30 percent more energy in their homes than their car. (These numbers don’t include diesel fuel or commercial energy usage.)”

“The numbers point out that consumers can make a bigger difference in saving energy by insulating doors and windows, buying energy efficient appliances, and installing programmable thermostats, for example, than by buying the latest hybrid car.”

- Consumers Report: Cars Blog August 27, 2009 –

Bruce Patterson: Animal Husbandry

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From BRUCE PATTERSON
4Mules
Anderson Valley

Wheeling his pickup to town for an after work beer, Dale glanced at his Lady sitting all dainty-like beside him. What a fine young thing she was. Her nose out the open side window, her ears flapping in the wind, the tip of her long tail gently tapping the seat, Lady was just as pleased as punch to be off the ranch and taking in the smells and scenery. “What a sweetheart,” Dale thought to himself. “What a pal.”

Dale never did believe in keeping animals as house pets. With every living thing, counting humans, having to earn its daily bread, why would Dale want to make an exception for, say, a kitty cat? Even the best damned kitty cat sleeps about 90% of the time and, if it ain’t sleeping, then it’s sitting and hallucinating, or sharpening its claws on your curtains, or licking itself from one end to the other. About the only time a cat ever gets interesting is in the dead of night when a person is trying to sleep, and Dale never would stand for that, not with him rising with the sun. So every cat he’d ever owned he kept as a barn cat. He’d feed and water it enough to encourage it to stick around to fill out it’s diet with field mice, wood rats, pocket gophers, fence lizards and what all. If the cat was a decent enough hunter, it’d stay fat and happy and, if it was to its liking, Dale would bring it inside the house often enough to show his appreciation. While relaxing on his couch, he’d even let the cat rub and rub on his pants leg while he stroked its flagpole tail. Then when a mouse invaded Dale’s bedroom, he’d bring in the cat at sundown, shut his bedroom door behind it, sleep on the couch and, come morning when he let the cat back outside, it’d have a cute little bump in its belly.

Who’d ever pay good money for a yappy little pedigree lapdog? Better yet, how about buying yourself a yappy little lapdog with a pedigree face as ugly as a moldy, dripping honey bun?

Todd Walton: Meaning of Meaning

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

I first encountered the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1967 when I was eighteen, a freshman at UC Santa Cruz. Wittgenstein’s little treatises The Blue and Brown Books were required reading for all freshmen enrolled at Stevenson College, the campus within the campus named after Adlai Stevenson and dedicated to the social sciences. I was a gung ho anthropology major, though my gung ho-ness would soon be replaced by the awareness that anthropology was a deeply conflicted realm best avoided by the already conflicted likes of me.

But in my early weeks on that lovely campus, free for the first time in my life from my parents’ incessant intrusions, the breezes eloquent and optimal for Frisbee, the bevies of braless beauties making of life an erotic potpourri, I was inspired to give academia the old college try. So I dove into my studies with youthful zeal, and things went swimmingly for a month or so, and then…Wittgenstein.

I beg the forgiveness of any Wittgenstein devotees who may read this dispatch. My sense of the man, based on a few biographical sketches and the four pages of his work I have labored through, is that he was an intimidating German charlatan for whom Oxford and the higher realms of academia were a field of clover, he a ravenous cow. But I don’t know.

In the introductory lecture on Wittgenstein given by a professor who would soon thereafter kill himself, we teenagers were told that the brilliant German transplant was initially intrigued by the meanings of meanings of words, but soon grew tired of such pedestrian mental gymnastics

Lucy Neely: Crazy about ‘maters

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From Lucy Neely
The Gardens Project
Ukiah

I felt like I needed to buckle down and really write some news, instead of just musings. I asked myself, ‘what’s the news right now? What’s happening?’ It only took a short moment: ‘Ah hah! Tomatoes!’

What is it about tomatoes? What makes them arguably the most popular vegetable plant with United States of American home gardeners? What makes them hold such a place in our hearts and minds? And what is the state of tomatoes in Mendocino County and in Ukiah?

Mendocino County Agriculture Commissioner Tony Linegar estimates that 40% of households in Inland Valley Mendocino County have at least one tomato plant. Ukiah Mayor Benj Thomas estimates that 30-40% of households in Ukiah have at least one tomato plant.

Scott Cratty, manager of the Ukiah Farmers Market and co-owner/operator of the Westside Renaissance Market (WRM), the most local food store in Ukiah – says that a lot of people won’t come to the Farmers Market until there are tomatoes. Cratty theorizes that tomatoes symbolize summer, abundance, and eating dinner outside. Melanie Underhill, an AmeriCorps VISTA with First 5, points out that she can really tell the difference between a fresh tomato and a not fresh tomato, more so than with other vegetables. Is the tomato the symbol of the glory and importance of fresh food?

Linegar tells me that tomatoes are technically a berry (as are grapes) and that Inland Mendocino County has “some of the best tomato growing conditions in California.

Bruce Patterson: PTSD

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From BRUCE PATTERSON
4Mules.com
Anderson Valley

“It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself to resist invasions of it in the case of others.” –Thomas Jefferson

The late comedian George Carlin did a bit about Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (back then it wasn’t called a Disorder). During WW1, Carlin reminded us, we called it “shell shock.” Now those two words pack some punch, don’t they? It’s shocking language, really. So during WW2 we started calling it “combat fatigue.” As if war makes a soldier sleepy and, after a nap, milk and cookies, he’s as good as new. During Vietnam we started calling it Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? You’re given a choice between “trauma” and “post-trauma”—which are you going to take? Experiencing “Stress” is something we can all sympathize with. Getting stuck in traffic is stressful. And who knows what a “Syndrome” is? Yet it’s a pretty word that rolls off the tongue…

Gene Logsdon: Selling A Book That Has No Name

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From GENE LOGSDON

Prairie Public Radio interviewed me recently about my latest book, Holy Shit. The interviewer was kind about my writing. He knew a lot about farming which is rarely the case but always a relief when discussing agriculture before an urban audience. The only problem was that he did not mention the title of the book during the entire interview! He said that he would get fired if he did. Regulations forbid the utterance of that awful word, shit, even when it is in the title of a book.

It happened again. The excellent website, The Chronicle of Higher Education, referred to my book with kind praise, even calling it “charming.” But never once did the reviewer give the title of the book. Policy, he said.

Several years ago, I wrote an article for The Draft Horse Journal in which I felt obliged out of sheer honesty to use the naughty word. This proved to be a problem for Maury Telleen, the editor. He didn’t have a problem actually, but his lovely wife, Jeannine, (they are two of my favorite people) ruled the roost when it came to proofreading and she did not intend for the naughty word to soil her publication. They compromised and rendered the word

Todd Walton: Art Rant (includes favorite films)

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

Books

“Rae’s eyes were red and swollen. They sat on the couch side by side, in silence, waiting for the doctor.” from Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott

The silence of the eyes rings true, and the eyes being side-by-side seems plausible, but how in heck did those eyes get onto that couch without Rae?

I was thirteen and had devoured a thousand books before I discovered the first typo of my reading career, an error that struck me as a scandalous affront to the artistry of writing. I was an insatiable reader, and wanting to be a professional writer I did not skim, but read every word. And when I found passages that wowed me, I copied their lines longhand to teach my sinews the feel of great writing.

Neil Davis: On your bike, you’re not a pedestrian.

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From NEIL DAVIS
Ukiah Valley Trail Group
Mendo 2 Mile Challenge

Can’t we all just get along? Well sure, in theory…. it just hasn’t happened yet. Put two people in a shared space, and you’re likely to see some level of conflict. Add more people, divide into unequal subgroups, add a dash of power differential, and bingo – you have cars bikes and pedestrians driving one another crazy.

Felix Salmon recently wrote an interesting piece entitled “A unified theory of New York Biking” in which he describes his frustration with bicyclists’ not following the rules of the road (he is, by the way, a cyclist). Here is a summation of his perspective that he calls a “bicycle manifesto”:

“Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And — of course, duh — they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it’s the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom follow nearly all the rules,

Dan Hamburg: Supervisor Campaign Update

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From DAN HAMBURG
Mendocino County

Friends,

We hope all of you had an excellent summer. Here at Campaign Central, we are moving into high gear. We hope you will find time to work and play with us, because we are playing to win!

Our website calendar is up at votehamburg5.org. Please check it often for event updates and locations where I will be speaking. I always appreciate seeing friendly faces at debates and community events. And if you have an event in your community you think I would be interested in attending, please let us know here!

Here’s a brief update.

We will have a booth at the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show, the weekend of September 17th. We will be giving out samples of grain grown right here in the 5^th District. And we have plans to participate in the parade! We are looking for volunteers to help staff our booth. Please contact Laura Hamburg here if you can help!

Friday, September 24th is our kickoff “Fun Raiser” event at Crown Hall in Mendocino. Come groove to the music of Rogerwood with special guests Steven Bates and David Hayes. Chris Skyhawk and Sherry Glaser are our Master and Mistress of Ceremonies, and a delicious gourmet dinner catered by Garnish Daly will be available at 6:00 PM with music to follow.

Will Parrish: Mendo’s Biggest Wine Country Corporations

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From WILL PARRISH
Laytonville

“We have chosen as our first topic of discussion the reality of the business — cash. Everything we do eventually finds its way back to this common denominator. That is, cash in and cash out. … At Duckhorn Vineyards, we earn approximately 24% cash profit. … Our bank, Bank of America, is more willing to support our growth because of our relatively high cash profit levels, our confirmed reinvestment of earnings and our shareholder support.” — newsletter to shareholders, Duckhorn Vineyards, 1998 (now owned by CB Richard Ellis, the world’s largest real estate conglomerate)

“The Problem Now: What To Do With All That Cash,” a 1995 Business Week headline intoned.  It could well have been describing the impetus for the California North Coast’s premium wine-grape bubble.  Throughout the 1990s and up to the present, the battalions of bankers, lawyers, and business magnates who presided over the boom-time economy in the San Francisco Bay Area (and elsewhere) have plunged a huge portion of their surplus wealth into upscale wine culture – pricey tasting room tours, $50,000 collections of high-end vintages in home cellars, and $230 bottles of, for instance, ’93 Opus One.

Many of these regional economic elites went a step further by purchasing their own North Coast wine-grape plantations, those monocrop slices of the “bucolic” wine country lifestyle running from the Russian River Valley to Napa Valley to the Anderson Valley.

Silicon Valley tycoons landscaped their vacation homes with

Neil Davis: Road Rage

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From NEIL DAVIS
Ukiah Valley Trail Group

Are there any documented cases of bicycle or pedestrian road rage? I’ve not heard of them. Apparently there’s something about cars that triggers the phenomenon.

When I was in college I took a research methods class and came across a series of studies investigating the “frustration – aggression hypothesis”. As a bicyclist, it tickled my funny bone when I read of researchers negotiating their cars to the front of the line at a red light – when the light turned green they would just sit there and count the seconds until people started to honk. “Wow” I thought, “this sounds like enough fun to make it my career.” I proposed a study that would compare how frustrated we could make drivers by making them wait for bikes, baby strollers, etc. and perhaps compare those responses with something that the drivers would consider a reasonable delay. There were two problems; 1) I couldn’t think of any delay a driver would consider reasonable, and 2) my professor refused out of hand to consider what he apparently considered an insanely dangerous research study. “Fine,” I concluded, “I’ll switch majors”. My career as a research psychologist was over before it started, how frustrating.

The frustration- aggression hypothesis -which like most psychological theories is not accepted by everyone who cares, and no one who doesn’t – is that aggression is a by product of frustration. So if that’s the case, our road raging drivers must have somehow, somewhere – become frustrated.

I started thinking about this when I read some comment about the importance of “play’ in our adult lives. I realized that there is a playful element to riding a bike, even when you’re riding for transportation. Something about gliding along under your own power,

Todd Walton: Poor People

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From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
Mendocino

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” Anne Frank

On my way out to water the garden, the living room radio tuned to our local public radio station, I hope I didn’t hear what I think I just heard, especially since I recently renewed our membership to that radio station. But when I come in from the garden, Marcia confirms that some nincompoop guest on said station did, indeed, say, “You shouldn’t give money to the homeless people in Fort Bragg because they’ll just use it to buy drugs.”

If I had a hundred dollars for every person I’ve heard say that about homeless people, I’d be rich. And if I had a hundred dollars for every person I’ve convinced to think otherwise, I could buy each and every homeless person in Fort Bragg a delicious organic apple. I choose to call the guest of that listener-sponsored radio show a nincompoop because the word describes him precisely. A nincompoop is a simpleton, a shallow thinker, someone who speaks without knowledge. And this nincompoop’s statement is not only false, but also cruel, and his cruel lie makes me so angry I absolutely must refute him.

Henceforth I will address you directly, my dear nincompoop. Here are some ironclad facts for you to consider.

1. Many poor and homeless people are not drug addicts.

2. Many people with homes are drug addicts.

3. The only difference between homeless people and people with homes is that homeless people do not have homes, and people with homes have homes.