Nous voila, Lafayette

            We were refugees from the annual war that the summer sun wages on the Big Valley.  In a summer when park rangers asked visitors to stop frying eggs on the roads in Death Valley because they were tired of cleaning up after them, we pulled sleeping bags, air mattresses and tents from the stifling rafters of our garage and stuffed them in our trunk.  We pulled out of the driveway with the air conditioning blasting and dared not crack the windows to check the outside temperature until after Doughnut Nation in Los Banos, after the climb past the San Luis Reservoir, and after the first grove of eucalyptus trees on Highway 101.  When the boys were little we called the Dinosaur Trees, suggesting that T-Rexes and Triceratops were hidden in them.

            After a do-or-die left turn in front of a Mississippi of traffic that were for some reason heading to that war zone, we followed my brother’s road from pavement, to old pavement, to cracked pavement, to dirt, to the point where I once heard the GPS lady say, “You are no longer on a known road.”  We had arrived.  If Dad were still around he might have said, “Lafayette, we are here,” as he did now and again after a long drive or hike.  Or once anyway.

            We set up the tents in headlights an under a foggy moon.  Paradise.  We slept to the sultry sounds of yipping coyotes and flapping tent…flaps. 

            The following day more and more friends and family arrived with their sleeping bags, their tents, and their food.  We ate in the shade of an oak at my brother’s home, formally of goats and currently of chickens and bees. Ribs, pinwheel sandwiches, grapes, strawberries, salsa, potato salad, and drinks.

            Dominoes were spread across the table and later replaced by a family 60’s table game called Rack-O.  Rack-O is simple; get dealt 10 numbered cards and put them in ascending order.  When someone asked if it’s a number game or a word game, I’d reply, “It’s a filing game.”  Soon it got cutthroat.

            Wine was opened, beer was opened, and labels were studied.  One invited us to visit the brewery of a Hawaiian beer, located in Oregon and another informed us that Gulden Draak Ale contained caramel. 

            After the food was served and eaten, and after several rounds of table games, a forgotten box of fried chicken was discovered.  It disappeared before rumor of it spread to everyone.  Some missed out.

            My brother’s home in Prunedale is a haven from the bitter heat of Fresno.  Each year when they have the Cooldown, we wonder why we live in Fresno still.  Over the next few months I’ll contemplate it, like I always do after visits to the coast.  At some point I’ll accept it or forget it.  Then next summer will roll around.  PG&E bills will skyrocket, record consecutive 100+ days will be recorded, and for the 20^th  time I’m told, we will pack our car and drive up that road that the GPS lady is unaware of and sleep in the cool darkness of the ancient sand dunes above Monterey. 

            Lafayette, we’ll be there.

I, Me, Mine

“It’s all about me.  It’s all about me.  I am the guy next to you on a plane with the big mouth and the pea-sized brain.  Speaking you see, incessantly, all about me.”

                                                                                          -It’s All About Me, Sean Morey

So a plane crashes at the San Francisco airport.  After the second-guessing of highly skilled pilots with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of flight time and training; after the horrible death of a teenage girl long after the wreckage was no longer a threat to her; and after the absolutely and unbelievably racist prank involving the pilot’s names was played on a local television station, it came out that an executive from Facebook released a statement, via an e-mail to USA Today, that she was nearly on that plane.  Oh wait, that actually happened in the first couple of hours.

            Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, a billionaire and recent author of the book Lean In (surprise, surprise) felt that the world at large needed to know how close we had come to losing her greatness on that morning.  I suppose I should mention how close I came to my life ending on the Titanic.  Considering my station in life, had I been on that ship I would have been traveling in steerage, where the loss of life was many times higher than those in the first class (Facebook Exec Class?).  Only the fact that I was born nearly 50 years after the sinking in a country other than the one where the ship was boarded saved my life.  Whew!

            Last week Justin Bieber, that flavor of the month whose month seems to be going on far too long, stuck it to the man by urinating into a mop bucket as he exited a New York night club through its kitchen.  And by “the man” I mean the janitor who had to clean up after him.  Bieber also sprayed a photo of Bill Clinton with cleaning fluid in that same kitchen and yelled, “Fuck you Bill Clinton.”  While I’m impressed that Bieber knows who Bill Clinton is, or at least can identify him by a photograph, I doubt he could come up with a reason the former President deserved a Fuck You from a teenage idol just one unsupervised evening away from an overdose.  Any why is it that Stevie Ray Vaughn steps onto a helicopter and is gone forever while the Justin Biebers of the world dodge early death and continue to vomit their dreck upon the world year after year?  I’m not suggesting that Bieber deserves to die but if God is listening and has plans to take another musician in a plane crash anyway…

            A couple of days ago a man named David John McCormick appeared in court in San Francisco on charges of communicating a false distress, failing to heave to, and assaulting a federal officer.  What McCormick did was radio the Coast Guard and say his friend had fallen overboard in the fog of San Francisco Bay, for some reason in an Australian accent even though he is not Australian.  When the Coast Guard found him on his sailboat and said they were coming aboard he said his boat is a “peace ship” and that he had “ordinance” on board, before he cut his anchor line and took off.  Showing an incredible amount of patience, the Coast Guard followed him for 6 hours before they boarded and arrested him.  Even more incredibly the boarding office who was struck three times by McCormick never hit him back but instead handcuffed him and after putting him in a life vest, took him into custody.  To put his into perspective, imagine calling 911 and when the cops, firemen, and emergency medical technicians show up (Coast Guard members act as all three sometimes) you slam the door in their faces, threaten them with “ordinance” and punch the cop.

            What do these three have in common?  They all are exhibiting classic behavior of Narcissism.  They individually believe that their own importance in the world outweighs those with real tragedies, those who work hard just to stay afloat, and those who have dedicated themselves to helping the first two when they need it most.  Narcissism gets its name from the Greek myth of Narcissus who was so enamored of his appearance that when an enemy showed him his own reflection in a pool of water, he promptly sat down, whereupon he stared at himself until he died.  Perhaps we could take up a collection to get these three some mirrors.

Film

Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah.

                                           -Kodachrome, Paul Simon

            There was a time when I was a boy that I wanted to be one of three things; an astronaut, a forest ranger, or a photographer.  Or perhaps an astronaut-ranger who takes pictures. Any who, I didn’t make it to space or ever wear a Smokey Bear hat as part of my work clothes, my private life is another matter, but years and years later I got back into photography.  Mostly because of digital cameras.

            I liked how with digital cameras you found out right away whether your lighting, focus, and framing where what you were trying to do.  I liked how I wasn’t restricted to 12, 24, or 36 pictures at a time.  I also liked how I could change film speed and white balance with the flick of a switch, and what white balance meant.

            I don’t miss film photography.  I remember in high school I got the opportunity to photograph the football team practicing with the chance that one of my shots might end up in the yearbook.  But I didn’t load the film properly; I didn’t catch the film’s sprockets on the camera’s gears so every time I thought I was advancing to the next frame, the current frame was just sitting in the same place. When I got to photograph number 100 or so without reloading I thought that I had either made a mistake or somehow was using a magical endless roll of film.  When I rewound the film it pulled it all into the canister where my skills at that time meant I couldn’t get to it.  By then the team had left the field and it was too late for me to start over.  I delivered zero shots from that day so I got zero shots in the yearbook.

            I doubt if Ansel Adams had anything to fear from my photography prowess - I wonder if he ever did the miss the sprocket thing - but I can look back and remember some of the special quirks about film photography.  In the photography course I took in college the instructor said to buy film that is just about to expire, because the manufacturer has set the expiration date far earlier than it needs to be, but mostly because it’s usually on sale.  (Just like my auto shop teacher in high school said when buying motor oil, get your car’s weight on sale).  With film you had to read the box; there was nothing worst than shooting a roll of slide film when you didn’t have a slide projector.  Between Kodak and Fuji film I always chose Kodak.  Probably because the yellow box reminded me of the boxes Matchbox Cars came in when I was a kid. The green Fuji seemed too new, too upstart-y.

            There are still photographers who use film.  They insist that the quality is better.  They say that not being able to review photographs on the fly forces them to take a more critical look at composition of each shot.  It’s likely that film is not going away completely but that market is a very pale shadow of what it used to be.  Case in point would be the implosion of the Kodak Park buildings in Rochester, N.Y., Oct. 6, 2007.  It was attended by many former employees, most of whom documented it, ironically, on their digital cameras.

Control

            I went to high school from September 1977 to June 1980.  Few of my fellow students had their own cars but those that did, using the limited funds of the offspring of middle class parents, usually had something that was more that a few years old.  Say late 60’s through the early 70’s.  Unless it was a VW, most of those cars had big engines, with more horsepower than Tommy Lasorda’s Rascal scooter.  Combine that power with a heavy front end and a relatively light rear end and you get cars that were pretty much built to peal out.  I remember one guy who would pour bleach on his back wheel and then when he took off the squealing tire would make the cleanest white smoke you ever saw.

            One day some city workers put what looked like a mixture of oil, broken asphalt, Cracker Jack, and floor sweepings on Clinton Avenue, which is the southern border of the school.  I kid I knew pulled his car out of the parking lot and as he drove away fishtailed across the yellow line and connected with the front end of a car coming the other way.  It likely wasn’t his lead foot that caused the accident but rather his inexperience with the road conditions.  The kid had to stand in the middle of the street, explaining to the police that he wasn’t drag racing or showing off while likely half of the school populations walked by on their way home.

            The next day I read about his accident in the paper.  All I really remember is something about too much speed and a slippery road causing him to “lose control” of his car resulting in the accident.  I might be wrong on the timing but I think that within a couple of days and elderly woman drove her car over the curb and up one of those guy wires that they have on utility poles, where it stuck.  That newspaper article said that the senior citizen’s car “went out of control” hitting the wire and climbing it.

            I thought then, and I think now, that it’s interesting that when a teenager gets in an accident he “loses control” but when an elderly woman does it, her cars “goes out of control” as if the car grew a mind of its own and decided to try a little tightrope driving.

            My son Robbie is 16 and while he has shown little interest in getting his license, it’s only a matter of time.  I’m okay with it now because I think most of the people out there are lousy drivers, including me, and I’m not really ready to throw my first born to those inattentive wolves.  Yes, I’m a lousy driver but a better motorist because I know I’m a lousy driver.  That's my thinking anyway.  It’s the guy who thinks he drives like Morgan Freeman (in Driving with Miss Daisy, not in real life) when he really drives like the rest of us who is the real danger.  Plus some actuary somewhere has already bought into the teenager’s who can’t control their cars school of thought and calculated about how much my insurance will go up when he does start driving.

            I pledge never to tell Robbie about the bleach/tire thing.

Whatever Power

...you need a bullet like a hole in the head...
                         Put Out the Fire - Queen

         

            Last weekend was the six month anniversary of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut.  I won’t go into the details; we all know them and if you don’t, consider yourself fortunate.  A couple of days later President Obama said he would use "whatever power this office holds" to prevent similar tragedies in the future.  At this six month point what has been done?  An assault weapons ban went nowhere, a bill to expand background checks died in the Senate, and the gun control bill that did pass in New York 5 months ago has been challenged in court and will likely be repealed.  I guess the power that the Office of the President holds amounts to very little.

            You stand over here and way over there a can flips off a fence post or a tight grouping of holes appear in the center of a target.  Shooting guns is fun, but so is driving a car 100MPH through a shopping mall – the Blues Brothers proved that –  that doesn’t mean we should do it. 

             The power of the pro-gun lobby, Second Amendment advocates, and the “from my cold dead hands” posse is like hurricane wind, dashing, demolishing, and blowing away like so many mobile homes even the smallest and most reasonable suggestion that perhaps we should look at limiting firearms in hopes that another group of innocent people don’t find themselves huddled in the corner of a classroom, movie theater, or “insert next mass shooting location here” powerlessly waiting their turn to die violently.  The say to put armed guards at our elementary schools but would that not be the first person in the crosshairs of the next guy who comes to the realization that all his life’s problems will be solved if he can just go shoot some of people.  NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre said about the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, “How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?"  Well guess what Wayne, the people of Boston didn’t need a gun because the police pulled out every stop, left no stone unturned, found the younger brother of the bombing duo and not another soul was harmed.  Now that’s how you use “whatever power” you hold to get the job done.

           Since the shooting I have seen blogs, Facebook posts, and heard statements from the leaders of firearms rights groups suggesting the President wants to take away our guns, trample the Constitution, and generally bring about a gun-less Armageddon where we’ll all be enslaved by the United Nations and forced to eat éclairs instead of doughnuts and drink French wine instead of Budweiser.  Right after the shooting there were blogs and Facebook posts asking that we pray for the lives lost that day.  The latter stopped showing up after about a week.  When did the former stop?  I’ll let you know…

            I need to apologize here.  I apologize to the children of Sandy Hook, the movie patrons of Aurora, Colorado, the onlookers at a Congresswoman’s meeting in Arizona, but mostly to the victims of the next shooting because I did nothing too.  I marched lockstep with Congress and our President as they said that this time it would be different when they, and I, knew it wouldn’t.  More children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers will die and die horribly and we’ll wring our hands, pound our pulpits, and return to our regular scheduled programming having done nothing.  Again.

Only Human

   I'm only human, of flesh and blood I'm made.
Human, born to make mistakes.

-Human League

             Back when I was in the service my ship pulled into Valdez, Alaska for a few days of liberty for the crew.  On the first day there was a posting that said if anyone was interested in touring the southern terminal of the Alaskan Pipeline, there would be a van waiting on the dock the next morning.  Thinking there would be a mad scramble for seats on that van, I went down and found one early.  By the time the van left, my touring companions were the Captain of our ship, the XO (second in command), a gaggle of other officers, a representative of either the Pipeline or the City of Valdez, I don’t remember which, and me.  The mad scramble had never materialized.

            As we made our way to the terminal there was talk of the behavior of the crew the night before.  Some scuffles had happened between Coasties and townspeople, a neon beer sign had turned up missing, and maybe some bar furniture had been damaged.  The Captain started and apology when the rep from the area waved it off and said something like, “Sounds like the Coast Guard recruits from the same human race the rest of us are from.”

            I’ve always remember that line, even if I don’t remember who said it or what he represented.  I think of it now and then when reading about some of the sins we deliver upon each other.  I recently read where reports of sexual abuse in the military were up in 2012.  A whopping 26,000 reported cases.  Before you get as upset as I did when you realize that is 500 cases a week, understand that for every reported assault or abuse, nine likely go unreported. 

           But wait there’s more as they say.  Back in May Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski was arrested for sexual battery.  One more military member added to between 26,000 and 260,000 matters little right?  Well what if Krusinski’s job was say, oh I don't know, to lead a sexual assault prevention program for the Air Force?  Too much to believe?  Believe.

          We throw the word hero at those serving in all branches of our armed forces, and indeed in a career where many literally put their lives on the line, hero seems appropriate.  But just because they wear the uniform, doesn’t mean they are heroic.  Remember, same human race.  Mr. Krusinski certainly had the opportunity to be and was anything but.  Praise those that do heroic deeds, but not all heroism is performed by those on the battlefield.  Sometimes it’s by those who come forward to say “this is not right” and by those who protect and defend them, along with the Constitution they swore to.