Mend Our Brokeness

There are tears in the streets today, tears of joys.

There are moments that no words can fully capture. Today is one of those moments. The graciousness of our new President toward his predecessor was wonderful.

His speech was not political in any way. He became President even before he was sworn in, because the program ran beyond noon, the Constitutional deadline for these transitions.

And then, wonderfully, because the Chief Justice of the United States messed up administering the oath, he gracefully saved the moment.

Speaking only for myself. I've never been prouder to be an American. God bless our new President!

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Tonight's Music is Sweet

Some two million people are converging on our nation's capitol tonight in anticipation of witnessing the most emotionally charged moment in our nation's history.

Racism has long been the ugliest thing about this great country.

I witnessed its horrors throughout my childhood. An early memory is when my cousins claimed that black people "smelled different." In every Michigan city, I could see that blacks lived in the worst part of town. My friends and relatives made fun of these people. They told jokes that so disgusted me that later, alone in my bed at night, I swore I would never turn out like them.

It wasn't that I knew any black people or had any black friends.

It was that I myself was an outsider, lonely, awkward, virtually friendless, and considered very weird by others who did not share my geeky obsessions.

In many ways I was a white Negro.

Luckily, when I got to college, one of my roommates was black. He and his friends soon became my friends, to such an extent that I was invited to join one of the two all-black fraternities at the University of Michigan.

But, as much as I appreciated the offer, I didn't like the idea of fraternities. I was so far outside the mainstream in my sensibilities that I preferred hanging much further away from the center of college culture, which is how I discovered journalism.

Journalism is, of course, a profession suited for outsiders like me, for those people who really can never fully fit in, but who feel they have a story to tell nonetheless.

Accordingly, my very best college reportage ended up being devoted to the civil rights movement. Six of us idealistic young reporters drove to Memphis, Tennessee, to cover and participate in what (little did we know) would be the last march ever led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Somewhere, I still have old faded photos of us as we made our way through the gauntlet of troops with guns and bayonets, supposedly there to protect us. I will spare you the racist epithets these "protectors" spat out at us as we passed.

But, tonight, and tomorrow, a new music is ringing across this land. All of the awful, racist hatred that has so stunted our growth as a people will now have to be set aside as we welcome our new First Family to lead -- not just some of us -- but all of us, into a better future.

May God bless the new President of the United States!

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Numberings

A mind like mine is excited by the following things -- women, colors, music, trees, plants, water, and probably most of all by numbers.

So, it is time to take stock of the economic performances of this and its sister blogs, Sidewalk Images, and Seaglass. We have posted 1,866 columns to these three blogs over the past two-and-a-half years.

Thanks to you, dear visitors, we have been blessed by 42,958 visits (23 per post) and 827 clicks (1.9%) on the Google ads that support my work. These clicks have yielded $264.82 in revenue.

Therefore, the monetary value of my work is roughly 14 cents per post.

That number makes me very happy. I was born on the 14th day of the 4th month in the second year following the end of WW2, i.e., in the second wave of the Baby Boomers.

For that reason, if I could earn $0.14 for every one of my posts going forward, I would be a happy writer. I'll be poor but the numerical Gods will be in order.

Thank you!

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Personal Journeys ( e.g., Tricks) of the Mind

I've got nothing useful to say about death today except this: Create some small piece of art every day. It matters not whether it's "good;" it's the act of creation that is satisfying.

I'm defining art broadly. For example, as a congenitally peripatetic experimenter, I shoot images of the streets around me and post them to our sister blog, Sidewalk Images. Much of the quality of this photography is trash, mind you, and qualifies as art only in my blue, blue eyes. As my designer friend Mary once said, "You might want to work at getting them in focus and also on the composition."

She was right about the focus, but wrong about composition. I take the images in exactly the form I see them, often at about a two-o'clock or ten o'clock angle. These are usually cast-off pieces of material on the sidewalk.

Sometimes the granularity of the sidewalk itself is so compelling that the item itself simply serves as a useful focal point, as my main interest is in the tiny, packed-together circles of stone that compose the (never-smoothed) cement.

I recall learning how to pour and smooth cement as a boy, in the '50s, working with my Dad, as we built the carport, where we later hung a basketball hoop. The problem with learning to play basketball there was the ceiling to my stadium was so low, I had to be able to perfect hitting line drives into the basket from any distance beyond a couple feet.

Of course, like a bonsai tree, that's how my game developed. I was stunted.

The next time I got the opportunity to erect a basketball court, it was in the '80s at our little wooden cottage in Mill Valley, on a huge lot with fruit trees, the work of an Italian truck farmer half a century before.

The lot rose gradually from street level in a series of terraces until it reached the ridge where the house sat. Along the way were some of the most exotic, succulent fruits still growing after years of neglect, but in ever-declining numbers.

Growing fruit has long been one of my most persistent fantasies. I love every stage of the process, from the dried seed cracking open, yielding a fresh new sprout, helped by soil, sun and water into a seedling, then hardening (the male phase) into a stalwart trunk supporting many branches (much as in software development), which then, in springtime, sport new buds, excited at this chance at life.

The buds open their tender lips to form luscious flowers with the bud still at the core (the first feminine phase), that then willingly accept the long, vibrating penetrating fertilization by the suitable organs of bees and birds to -- wallah! -- create their children: Rounded, moist, sweet, sour, pithy apples, pears, peaches, cherries, apricots, persimmons, avocados, durian, coconuts, coffee beans, and on and on and on.

Banana trees are probably the fruit-bearing plants I know the best, from my years as a reporter investigating the uses of pesticides overseas. There's nothing quite like the sight of a tight cluster of bananas, yellowing, even if they sometimes are hiding a deadly tarantula in their innermost places.

Fruits are a modern luxury. For my father, growing up in a one-room farmhouse without heat or plumbing in Canada early last century, the winter holiday season meant two treats from fruit trees -- an orange, from the tropics, and maple sugar candy, from the trees standing on the land around their cornfields.

All of my children have, according, received little boxes of maple sugar candy from me from time to time.

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The Biggest Asshole of All

A winter haze has settled through our city this weekend -- it's cold dirty air. Something is happening to our climate. For days and days now we have had only sunny skies; the temp is in the forties at dawn but climbs to the seventies by mid-day.

Sunsets are muted pink and peach; the nights are silent.

New growth covers our yards, fields and hills. But something is wrong. This is supposed to be our rainy season.

Day after day, however, no rain comes. Memories of our last great drought return. Cars, houses, sidewalks all so filthy. People not showering as often. Jokes about the British. Public service ads advising "Shower With a Friend," yielding some of the worst pickup lines of an era.

I had an old car I seldom drove at that time. There were no parking restrictions in most San Francisco neighborhoods, so you could keep your vehicle in the same parking place for weeks or months.

Every few days, I'd check on my old junker, and marvel at the thick coating of black particulates. A drought is an extended bad air event. People start suffering from asthma and other respiratory disorders to such an extent that the City has to issue warnings that the vulnerable should stay indoors.

If one issue above all others has occupied my mind-share during most of my journalism career, it has been the environment. This, I'm sure, dates from my youth, especially my lonely years, from age 10-17.

These were years of illness, isolation, alienation, desperate shyness, and the construction of a thick protective shell that successfully kept others at a distance most of the rest of the first 40 years of my life.

Life unfolds in chapters, like a novel. There are stages we all must go through. It doesn't really matter how intelligent you are, or faithful, or honest, or well-intentioned. Emotional development is an awkward, life-long quest that none of us escape -- except, of course, the arrogant rich bastards who all too often rise to the top of companies, universities, political parties, churches, and most other institutions in our society.

As I've said and written many times, the problem with wanting to be number one is that, in any particular setting, only one person can win. That leaves legions of wannabes stuck in an inferior position.

This type of system leads to dysfunctional organizations, with The Biggest Asshole at the top, and many disgruntled mid-level executives below. Therefore, getting the top job is a mixed bag -- you are likely surrounded by sharks whose toothy smiles conceal the fact that those same smiles can (and will) kill you in an instant.

Et tu, Brute?

Darwin, one of greatest scientists, documented how only the strong survive. But Shakespeare, one of greatest artists, told the other side of the story.

To me, human ecology is as natural as that governing the rest of the animal and plant worlds. The only difference is that we, as a species, are so arrogant that we collectively represent that Biggest Asshole on the planet.

Thus, it remains for journalists, activists, lawyers, novelists, artists, poets, and other truth-tellers to bring the mighty to their knees, so that the truest among us -- the meek, the unassuming, the kind, and the compassionate -- do indeed inherit this earth, and share it with all the other creatures and plants that inhabit this paradise with us.

Should we fail, climate change will render everything we know as dust, and in my view, rightly so.

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Our Superstar

What a week for my 14-year-old basketball star. His team, which is on its way to the city championship for middle schools, won all three of their games by a cumulative score of 96-42.

He didn't score all the much in these three games (12 pts) but he grabbed 22 rebounds, had 8 assists, 10 steals, 11 blocks, and won all 3 jump balls at the start of these games, while playing only three-quarters of each game, on average.

If you are not into statistics, or for that case, basketball, all I can say is that his play elicits only one word: "Wow!"

En folkefiende (1882)

Yesterday, I posted a short piece arguing how journalists are necessary in a society such as this one in order to keep power accountable and to expose abuses of power. This is precisely what an investigative reporter does. (S)he examines the behavior of those in positions of authority, public, private, or non-profit, with an eye to uncovering corruption, unfairness, cheating, misrepresentation, and a whole host of other crimes.

Reporters follow the money, finding out who is paying whom to do what.

Most of the time, this is not the kind of work that leads to glory. (Sorry, Hollywood.) Most of the time, this makes you no friends but a considerable number of enemies. These days, this kind of work is being eliminated entirely from most media organizations, because it cannot be justified on financial grounds.

That presents a moral dilemma for our democracy. Do we believe in our inherent goodness enough to allow this essential "check" to expire. The answer my friend, is...(you can easily fill in the blanks.)

p.s. The intellectual framework for this post is Henrik Ibsen's brilliant play, "Enemy of the People." Please read it and send me your thoughts.

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