The Long-Distance Oner

If I were a golfer, this would be about one kind of drive, but I'm not, so it isn't.

In May, 2000, I started work at Excite@Home, which had its sprawling headquarters in a series of tinted-glass buildings just off of U.S. 101, in Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley.

At that moment, I became a commuter. Twenty-nine years after moving to San Francisco, for the first time, I needed to buy a decent car able to withstand the rigors of bouncing along one of the busiest stretches of highway in the country.

Mornings were one type of commute, evenings another type altogether. Mornings feel like you and your car are being swallowed into a giant vortex with thousands of other people in their cars, spun around and then whipped out onto the open road in great clumps of confusion.

You may find yourself on the far right lane of five, which would be okay except that lane will be splitting off in another direction very soon, so you must start frantically speeding up, signaling, glancing over your shoulder at the onrushing cars, many of which have ben dumped out of the vortex into the far left lane, and need to get over to the far right to make their exit.

From above, it appears as chaos to the helicopters ready to relay traffic reports to the radio stations all of us are tuned into in order to determine which route will be the speediest (i.e., less-slow) way to get to work.

At ground level, assuming you've survived this frenetic entry into the morning commute, your racing heart may fitfully slow into merely a life-threatening arrhythmia as you contemplate the multiple dangers confronting you in all directions. There's a madman in a black hummer racing toward your rear, and you wish you had a machine gun mounted back there so you could take him out before he flattens you in his hell-bent mission to prove his manhood through violence against the innocent.

There's the equally hazardous woman speeding past on her cellphone, laughing and talking while her sports car weaves between the lane markers, threatening widespread mayhem as everybody else strains to avoid being sideswiped by her.

Massive trucks thunder past, their unstable retreads one of the main weapons that may kill you if you happen to linger in the lane next to them a second too long. (Don't.) It's all a blur of motion, so it's a while before you notice that the smoky haze is so thick from a thousand forest fires here in Northern California this week combined with the toxic emissions from all these vehicles make your lungs hurt, as if you're becoming asthmatic on the spot.

The traffic report says there a motorcycle down in the north bay and a jack-knifed big rig in the south. A stall slowing traffic over the Bay Bridge, and something that looks like a pile of spaghetti in the second lane from the left on the Dumbarton. A car's hit a deer out in Solano, and rubber-neckers are slowing to eyeball a fender-bender in Brisbane.

Where the hell is Brisbane? A naked person is reported to be strolling along Highway 17, while a truck may or may not be on fire just this side of the Caldecott Tunnel. There's a bale of hay blowing down the freeway at...

Back up! Naked person, where? Nice looking? Female? Which side of which road?

Distraction is your enemy. Concentrate. hands gripped on the wheel, eyes straight ahead, buttocks well-clenched. Do not relax even if it's the lovely Kelly Hu strolling nude down the highway! And, then you see it:

The smoke has reduced the sun to a dull moon, small and dark in the eastern sky. No need even for sunglasses. That is what it is like to load yourself into your racing metal/plastic can down U.S. 101, Monday through Friday, to the richest valley on earth, circa 2008.

-30-

Open Letter to Peter McGowan: Bring Back the King

Dear Mr. McGowan:

The all-time home run king, Barry Bonds, is sitting at home, unemployed. Today, he offered to play for any team who will hire him, at the minimum MLB wage, and also to donate that salary to charity.

How sad is that?

As longtime readers of this blog know, I've been both a big Barry Bonds supporter as well as a vocal critic. It's obvious that he did use steroids, but it is also obvious that anyone else of note in recent baseball history also did so.

Probably, this entire era will end up clouded in the eyes of historians who try to compare the accomplishments of, say, Babe Ruth, with those of a Barry Bonds. But nobody will ever be able to untangle the variables enough to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

So, ultimately, the history of America's pastime will have to be written as a series of separate eras. When that occurs, historians will have to come to grips with the numbers generated during the 1990s and early 2000s; and when they do so, Barry Bonds will be at the top of the list.

In other words, what I am suggesting is that whatever damage the steroid claims have done is a temporary phenomenon. As the controversy cools (as all controversies do), people will still stand back in awe of what Bonds accomplished, whether juiced or not.

It is time to give him the chance to redeem his place in history. He says he is ready to play, and money certainly is not his motivation.

You, meanwhile, are retiring. But you still hold the power to do one last thing that might salvage your reputation, not to mention his.

Sign Barry, Peter. You'll never regret it.

-30-

Life Affirming Blogs

I get all sorts of mail about my blogs, including comments, both negative and positive, kind and mean.



Very rarely, someone truly horrible shows up. It's hard for me to comprehend why anyone would bother to react to a private journal like this one with so much vitriol, but it happens.



Why? Who has enough time to read my simple little blog if it makes them that angry?



All I can do is speculate that there still are so many unresolved resentments held deeply by some among us that somehow even the most benign of writers (yours truly) can trigger some sort of primordial anger.



I hope that nobody who knows me personally could ever summon such anger against me for my words. Because anyone who really knows me that I think out loud, i.e., I write out loud, i.e., I am always experimenting.



My best and honest advice to anybody who finds him or herself wasting unsettled emotions reacting against the likes of me: Try therapy. If that doesn't help, open your own blog, and pour your thoughts and feelings into a venue where you are in control.

This is a tiny space, this blog. It's two-plus years old. It started with a broken heart. It continues with a commitment to the future, our common future, whether we are men or women or in-between; whether we are married or single or not sure; whether we are old or young or rich or poor or happy or sad.

It is a life story, unvarnished and unpolished. Should I take it entirely private, allowing readers only by invitation?

That is the advice I have been given, due to the nature of the comments I have recently received. Anyone that angry could be violent -- so the reasoning goes. Maybe you are becoming the target of a sociopath, they tell me.

I hope not. Writing is only writing after all; stories are only stories. No one should confuse them with "real life," since that is an entirely separate, messy affair.

Love, David

-30-

Letter from Kate Coleman re: Ken Kelley's Death

"Ken Kelley" by Wilma Parker (2008)

Kate Coleman, investigative reporter and close friend of Ken Kelley's, has been looking into the circumstances surrounding his death last January. Here are her conclusions.

"Just to let all of you know what I know, I talked to a family member of Ken's who has seen both the autopsy reports and Ken's medical records at various hospitals where he was sent during his last days.

"It had troubled me and others that Ken had been diagnosed when first admitted with three cracked ribs and a broken eye socket, which suggested the possibility that he'd been beaten.

"What I learned is that Ken told the admissions people at the hospital that he'd been about to use the toilet when he fell, which could certainly explain the broken eye socket, the most troubling of his injuries. The cracked ribs may have been old. He'd fallen (he had epileptic seizures) several times and, as he was very heavy in prison when I'd seen him last, it was certainly conceivable that he might well have cracked some bones if he fell unconscious. As I said, he had fallen unconscious a number of times.

"So I think it's safe to say he might well have fallen on his own and hurt himself.

"There were other questions about his being released from the first hospital before he was really okay (he'd been on a respirator because he'd been diagnosed there with pneumonia) and perhaps because it was an outside facility, the county might have been counting the money it was costing them, along with the guards they had to hire to watch over a prisoner not in their own facility (Ken, not having been a convicted felon was sent to a non-prison facility).

"All of that is not particularly actionable in a lawsuit, primarily because, sadly, Ken's health was rather awful on many scores. Hence, as his family member weighed in as much as to say, anything could have killed him, he had so many different health problems.

"The final point is that at one point in Ken's incarceration, he was, indeed, assaulted. A Mexican gang member, in Ken's telling to me, had approached Ken while he was on the prison pay phone, demanding Ken end his call. Needless to say, even with some prison tough guy, Ken was not easily intimidated and told him to go do it to himself; whereupon, the guy whupped him.

"Ken was so outraged he wrote to me enclosing a letter to the Alameda County District Attorney, Tom Orloff, saying he wanted to press charges against his assailant. (No bones were broken, etc.) Orloff passed on it.

"So, if Ken had been beaten and had his eye socket broken or ribs busted, I doubt he would have covered up about it when he was admitted to the hospital. I'm satisfied that the first of his bad cascading medical problems, at the very least, was not the result of a brutal prison beating as I had first feared."

Kate Coleman

Cultures that Meet Far from Home

The central cliche of America is the "melting pot." Earlier generations have documented how Italians, Irish, Germans and Jews, among others, have smashed up against one another and found their way in this strange new land.

Today, in my neighborhood, other groups are encountering each other, with mixed results. The Mission is mainly a Latino neighborhood, complete with the competing graffiti of the Bloods and the Crips to prove it, but many others also share this space.

There are black families, Asian families, and the Generation X and Y'ers still hoping to survive the ups and downs of the Internet economy well enough to start raising their young families here.

On Saturday, on 22nd Street, a stately former German church was the site of one of the post-modern cross-cultural encounters we've come to take for granted hereabouts. The International Buddhism Sangha Association (IBSA) was celebrating the publication of a new book, H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III: A Treasury of True Buddha-Dharma, which contains the headline-worthy news that the original primordial Buddha has been reincarnated and has returned to earth.

The IBSA organized an impressive performance of dancers and gymnasts to celebrate this joyous event. Those watching, from across the street, were mainly Latino residents of the neighborhood, not at all clued in to what the fuss was all about.

But they did know a good show when they saw it. The dancers performed truly wonderful feats. No one was disappointed. Whether anyone got the message that the Buddha is back is another question, however.

Which raises a legitimate news question: What if your message is so big that our conventional media cannot process it? My advice, FWIW, is this: Keep dancing.

-30-

Ken Kelley, 1949-2008

(Detail of painting by Wilma Parker, June '08)


***

A small group of us gathered yesterday at Wilma's loft in Soma -- the same space that Ken shared with her for a year decades ago. We shared stories and memories of our friend, Ken, who passed away in January. George Csicsery put together a beautiful slide show of his photos of Ken. Many more people wanted to be there than could make it, of course. Here are just a few of the notes they offered from afar.



David, Got an urge this morning to check up on the latest with Ken Kelley, last time I checked was probably a year ago, when I learned of his legal trouble. So, his death was news to me, and now I see that I have almost missed his memorial service. I am writing this in sunny Michigan while it is still early morning in California - so perhaps you will read this before the service. I was the photography person at the Ann Arbor Argus, Ken's paper in Ann Arbor in the late 1960s. Person in this case means: photo technician, photo layout editor, and photographer. In Ken's case, journalism person meant everything: reporter, editor, ad salesman, layout editor (dictator?), printer (at least driving the page negatives to the printer, and then picking up the issue), and finally newspaper boy - hawking copies on the street - the paper lived on almost no money, I certainly never saw any actual cash : )

Ken was bigger than life. He was one of those people with charisma that could carry him through just about anything. I remember his amazing ability at interviews - getting people to talk, the endless tapes to transcribe, and seeing the interviews with significant people printed in the paper. I last saw him probably 35 years ago, but still remember him. What would he like? Probably to be remembered. He had something that I can only describe as an alienation that compelled him in many ways. But he had a powerful urge to create - write, interview, edit, publish. He was similar to John Sinclair in his desire and ability to work even when "under the influence" of whatever state. When we came back from the March on Washington against the Vietnam war in the fall of 1969, he was most interested in photographs of the giant head puppets that were walking around the mall area - an example of the outlandish. Perhaps he would be happy for us to celebrate the outlandish, accept and even value the outsider.


Kip Mercure

***

There will be many wild and crazy stories today about our wild and crazy Ken. I would like to talk about a quieter, more domestic Ken. During the gloomy winter of 1967-1968, Ken and I would spend long hours drinking coffee in South University coffee shops polishing our high school French--he a lonely freshman, I a lonely senior. We were united by a love of good journalism, bad gossip and evocative French verbs.

We reconnected here in San Francisco in the early '70s. He would phone me--"Hi, Kenny," I'd answer. "Hi, Honey," he'd reply. My daughters knew him as Uncle Kenny. He was my older daughter's godfather. For a wild and crazy guy Ken had a supreme talent for friendship. Once we were at Douglass Playground here in San Francisco. He was pushing Mica on a swing while I, pregnant, sat on a bench with a crushing headache. In one of his patented multitasking moments he managed to push Mica while rubbing my head for the 1/2 hour it took to make the headache go away.

At one point Ken lived on Larkin Street, just over the hill from my school in Chinatown. I'd taken to stopping by after work for the snacks Ken would make us. It was a '70s San Francisco version of "Leave it to Beaver" with me as The Beav and Kenny as June.

When people here wonder how I could love an Ann Arbor that they imagine as a homogeneous world of dull, flat mid-westerners I think of Ken. I picture him that bright midsummer day in 1970 as my sister and I drove him to his draft physical at Fort Wayne. Unfolding his long skinny body out of the back seat he leaned against the car, his two-foot halo of blond curls glowing in the sun. Clad in a gold lame suit he stood on the curb and waved as we drove away.

Uncle Kenny, proud son of the great state of Michigan, we are waving back at you.

-- Lissa Matross
***

Tribute to Ken Kelley

Hi David:

I won't be able to be there on the 21st, but am hoping you or Kate can read this for me. Thank you,

Stew Albert and I first met Ken Kelley when he was a young man living at the White Panther commune in Ann Arbor in the late 1960's. Ken's blonde curly afro endeared him immediately to Stew who was also blonde, curly haired and a journalist. I admired Ken's creativity, passion and of course his fabulous use of color in Sundance. Together our movement made an impact on America because we knew how to mix together equal parts of hippie counterculture and new left anti-war politics into a powerful utopian vision of an independent new nation for young people.

And now Ken has joined Stew, Abbie, Anita, Jerry, Bill, Phil, Eldridge, Allen,Tim and Rosemary --- and so many others, all of whom, I'm sure, continue together to plan, plot and publish in whatever world may exist beyond this imperfect one.

Judy Gumbo Albert

***

Wayne Kramer to me

David, Thanks for keeping me in the info flow.

Ken Kelly was a brother in arms for those of us whose arms were art, music, culture and justice. He was the publisher of the infamous "Fuck Hudsons" ad that got the MC5 fired from Elektra Records. I'm proud to have been his friend. He made the most of the short time we all get. He was the real deal in a world of posers.

So long pal.

wayne

***

Hi David,

Thanks for inviting me to the event tonight. I'm sorry but I can't come. I send my best wishes. Ken was a nice man and a fellow writer who helped me with a project. Ken helped out of goodness of heart and didn't ask anything in return. I knew him all too briefly and hope he's found some peace, wherever he is.

Good luck tonight,
Graham Womack

***

Photo by Kip Mercure

***

We are all thinking of you, Ken.

Love, David

-30-