So it’s official. The Gealeys are retiring and selling the coffeehouse to longtime employee Juan and his wife.

It’s very odd.

One must understand that I have probably logged more hours at Headlands than anywhere else on earth. More cathartic events in my life have happened at Headlands. More evenings of tea and festivity, good music, barbequed tofu. It’s a place I walk by every day, and I usually stop in while I’m at it, to see what there is to be seen. I’ve eaten everything on the menu, and Headlands has always been like a fixed constant in my life, to the point that moving the phone booth was highly upsetting, let alone the installation of newspaper racks. The coffeehouse and I have always had a good relationship, despite the fact that I haven’t touched coffee in almost ten years. Headlands is the traditional sort of coffee and tea house, a place where intellectuals gather and disputes range on into the night.

So I have mixed feelings about the entire affair. On the one hand, I am really happy for Juan and his wife. He’s one of those employees who is always there and always wonderful and I know he and his wife will take really good care of Headlands, that many traditions will remain unchanged. I have every confidence that they are a good fit–if Headlands is going to sell, Juan is the man who should own it. I’m sure they will have many years of happy business there.

I’m also really stoked for the Gealeys who will get to pursue adventures of their own, more writing and art and all the good things in life without being tied down by the coffeehouse.

But at the same time I feel sort of wistful for the end of an era. I’m used to seeing Pete or Dave or Mary behind the counter, and I know I’ll still see them around, but in a different context. Perhaps even in a better context. Meanwhile I’m trying to accustom myself to the change, because with time inevitably comes change, I know.

The Gealeys have done a lot of wonderful and generous things for this community. They founded Headlands, which serves as a community hub. They award a writing scholarship every year. They are active in the Laurel Street Merchants Association, and in the community at large. I’m sure their contributions to the community are not going to cease with the change in ownership, and I wish them the best of luck in all their new endeavors.

But still. The times are changing. New terrifying Harvest Market, Headlands changing hands, what’s coming next?

[Headlands Coffeehouse]

I’ve tried to stay out of the raging debate over the current escalation in hostilities between Israel and Lebanon, primarily because it’s such a fraught issue. Before you read on, you should probably understand that my stance on Israel is that it does not have a right to exist. If this is an issue for you, I respect that, but I’d rather not discuss it with you. I’d also rather that you not call me an anti-semite, although I understand that’s a personal choice.

Although I would like to take a moment to explain what it means to be Semetic, since there seems to be some confusion: many Near Easterners are Semetic. The term originally referred to a language family which included Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and a range of others. Only later did it come to be associated with a cultural and ethnic group as well. This means that not only are Israeli Jews Semetic, but so are Palestinians and Syrians. Being Jewish does not always mean you are Semetic–being Semetic does not always mean you’re Jewish. It’s amusing to me when I hear pro-Palestinian activists being called “anti-Semetic”. Kids, get your racial pejoratives right, ok? Thanks.

When I read on CNN, of all sources, that Israel and the United States refused to back a ceasefire when Hezbollah was supportive, I felt that the time had finally come to say something.

Clearly, Israel is facing some severe opposition in their current offensive on Lebanon. (Although it’s good to note that Israel and Lebanon have been at war since 1947.) Hezbollah has proved to be far more tenacious than was originally expected, and public opposition comment has also been quite vocal. Even people of my acquaintaince who were moderately pro-Israel before are having difficulty justifying the current military action, which to date has killed 425 Lebanese civilians and 51 Israelis. Here’s a graphical representation of what that looks like, link courtesy of BoingBoing.

The United Nations put out a call for a ceasefire, which Hezbollah backed.

Now, I’m a fan of violent revolution, it’s true. And I have some sympathy for the Arab cause. And Hezbollah does have some history of being socially active, not only resisting occupation but also running hospitals, schools, and agricultural centres. It has also has a political arm, which is active in Lebanese government. It’s not just about ending occupation–it’s about empowering your people to build lives for themselves. Yet, some arms of Hezbollah do commit acts of terror. But others contribute goods and services worth millions of dollars annually to the Lebanese, and a large proportion of the Lebanese population supports Hezbollah. It is a complex organization, and dismissing it as wholly terrorist is unwise.

I understand the desire to resist negotiations with terrorists, I really do.

But the thing is, a ceasefire or cooling off period is not really such a bad thing. Ceasefires allow you to evacuate unrelated civilians, wounded, non-citizens, and others from the war zone. They also allow time to negotiate, and have a table discussion. It’s difficult to have rational dialogue with a country that is bombing the living fuck out of you, destroying your painfully rebuilt infrastructure, and killing your people. Likewise, it’s difficult to have dialogue with a group which not only hates you, but also is shooting rockets at you.

The Bush administration refuses to support a ceasefire because they declare that Israel must sufficiently weaken Hezbollah or hostilities will only begin again, which demonstrates an utter lack of faith in any sort of peace process, although most people are aware the Bush administration doesn’t seem to have much faith in non-military efforts for peace. It’s clear that the administration isn’t terribly interested in cultivating a positive relationship with the Middle East, that’s for sure. Which is interesting, since Mr. Bush mentioned in a statement today that what happens in the Middle East affects our lives in the United States.

Israel resists a cease-fire because they claim they have opened a safety corridor for getting civilians out of southern Lebanon, and therefore a ceasefire is not needed for evacuation purposes. The funny thing is, Beirut is probably outside that safety corridor, and it happens to be Beirut which is getting slammed with Israeli missiles (bought with American dollars). Furthermore, a “safety corridor” may not cut it for delicate evacuations like those for the severely ill and wounded. And what are the specifics of this corridor? Is it actually safe? How do you access it?

The Mid-East crisis is not something to be easily solved, and I don’t claim to hold the answers. But I am disgusted by governments which will not agree to a ceasefire–of course Israel has also refused proposed ceasefires by Hamas, as well. What is Israel proving? A profound lack of compassion for those in urgent need of safe evacuation? A need to continue receiving billions of American dollars? A firm lack of understanding for why others in the neighborhood might be pissed?

Christ, one of the most famous Jewish men of all time, would have been ashamed.

As long as Israel occupies the Palestinian territories, neighboring Arab nations are going to be angry. And organizations fighting for Arab rights are also going to be angry–and that anger may express itself in civilian deaths, and that’s a damn shame. It’s a great pity that Israel continues to ride roughshod over the Middle East, expecting support from the West, and that we continue to support this illegal entity.

[ceasefire]

Thirty years ago, a group of concerned citizens spent more than two months at Mono Lake conducting a full environmental survey. As the Chronicle reports, these college students, now professors, physicians, and inventors, among other things, recently returned to the lake to celebrate their victory.

Today, Mono Lake is healthy, due to mandates that the lake receive enough fresh water to sustain it.

What happened with Mono Lake is a classic example of a group of citizens, young citizens, organizing for a common cause and making a difference. Because of the survey these students conducted, the state Supreme Court ruled that the lake must be protected under the state Constitution. And it was. Instead of being turned into a barren flat salt by the demands of California’s lawns, agriculture, and consumers, it’s a natural area teeming with life.

So what’s up? Why aren’t we organizing now to save our dwindling natural wonders?

Are we too lazy? Too defeated by the government or the times? It just seems like a great tragedy to me to see all these once beautiful things being destroyed. It’s not just about making changes in your own life to protect the environment–it’s about making changes in the way we think about the environment as a people.

I was recently talking with my father about the protest and counterculture era of the 1960s, and I think that in a lot of ways, the people of the 1960s for all their cheesy vans and paisley shirts got more things done. Are we angry? Do we protest? Certainly, the huge marches in Seattle, Genoa, Washington DC, Paris, London, and counless other cities indicate that. But sometimes I think Carlo Giuliani died in vain.

I think that too many have died in vain, and we haven’t taken any lessons from them.

People died protesting in the 1960s as well, and it had a powerful impact on the movement. But the war in Vietnam did end, and partly because of the surge in public opinion about it. Many crucial environmental laws were passed, and many people did take matters into their own hands like the students at Mono Lake did.

Why aren’t we taking things into our own hands? Most “political” organizations are bent on having citizens write their legislators, telling us to elect the right people, lobby for the right things. Meanwhile, the environment is being destablized at a growing rate.

The time for violent revolution has come–not just for our society, but if we are to save the planet.

I see the logic of violent and destructive organizations like ELF, I really do, when all around me I see apathy and helplessness, an unwillingness to step forward and act.

They say environmentalism is a disease.

I hope it’s catching.

[environmentalism]

I worked my opponents thoroughly, thanks to “detacher.”

My final score: 208.

The next closest: 106.

Oh, yes. Scrabble groove, baby.

Fair warning: this post contains a lot of bitterness and vitriol. I debated whether or not I should post it at all and in the end, after talking with a friend, decided that I should. For people not steeped in the timber culture, the attitudes held by a lot of Fort Bragg citizens don’t make sense. I think this post might help newcomers and outsiders understand a small portion of the complex emotional equation they are getting involved in. Be warned–this post is an accurate expression of my attitudes about a lot of issues. It is also not an expression of everyone’s views, and I do not claim to speak for anyone other than myself although I suspect many (not all) residents may find threads in common with my words. Others may disagree vehemently. That’s ok. Life’s no fun when we all get along.

This post is not nice by any stretch of the imagination. It might contain hurtful things about people just like you, or it might not. But if you’re feeling particularly sensitive today, I would skip it. Go look at Friday Cat Blogging instead. It’s pretty cute.

In order to understand the mixed feelings many people born and raised in Fort Bragg have about the mill, and the mill site, it is first important to understand the position that the mill holds in our history. I’ve written elsewhere about my relationship with Georgia Pacific, but I’ll expand upon it here for a moment, because I think it’s an iconic example of the forces shaping public opinion about the mill.

The first thing that you must understand about the mill it that it epitomizes the class divide on the coast. In the class divide lies the root of the conflict, on the one side the old timers and on the other the new money. I think we all know where I fall. This story is about class divides because the mill made them.

I started out at Fort Bragg Elementary School, two blocks walk from the house on Chestnut Street we moved into when we came back from Europe. Due to my limited communication skills, I was placed in the “second reading group,” and I spent my days with the Hispanic and Central American students, learning my place in the world, until I proved that I actually could speak in English, take care of the class parakeet, and that for all my accent I was as white as all the kids in the first reading group.

Every morning, my father would help me to get dressed and then walk me down to school, through a neighborhood that in those days (and not so very long ago they were) was still partially rural. I’d spend my days in school and then my father and I would go for a walk on the logging road that went right by our house, down to the river, where we’d play in the mud and build fanciful structures out of sticks. The open land that we used to walk across has since been paved across with a large housing development of matching cookie cutter homes, and the logging road is inaccessible today from town. I stumbled across it from the back way recently and thought I had crossed into a dream world. I don’t know how much longer that land will be rural, serene and peaceful while only moments from town.

I grew up watching logging trucks haul massive trunks, sometimes so massive that multiple trucks were required. The highway was clogged with big rigs carrying timber everywhere. My next door neighbor in Caspar was a log-truck driver, and in those days you were paid by the load, not by the hour. He made a great deal of money driving dangerously. Too much, maybe. He’s dead now. I remember he used to get cases of produce to use as ballast going back over 20 if they couldn’t load his truck fast enough, and he’d leave them on our porch in the night. We’d wake up to seventy pounds of organic peaches.

The mill whistle went off every day at noon, and you could hear it clear to Mendocino if the weather was right. We all set our watches by it.

Here’s how important the mill was in our lives:

Of the thirty-odd students in my class, the parents of at least 70% of them were employed by Georgia Pacific or some subsidiary of the timber industry. Another 20% or so worked for the hospital, and the remainder found “odd job” work. The father of my best friend was a foreman on the green chain.

They had a very nice house. The G-P kids were better than the rest of us, and they knew it. Not all of them had nice homes–some of them actually came from terrible homes, but all of them were higher on the food chain because their parents worked for the mill. My dad had spent several years working as a private contractor for a sustainable logging company–he used to take me out in the woods with him when I was a baby. Therefore, I was admitted marginally acceptable status among the G-P kids, although they had their suspcions about “sustainable” logging, whatever the hell that was.

Every year, we would go on a tour of the mill for Fire Safety Awareness Week. We’d be given earplugs and goggles and led through the industrial maze that was the mill going full steam. The kids who were lucky enough to have parents who worked for the mill would wave at the people they knew. And then we’d go out to the headlands and watch the fire department extinguish a grease fire, practice stop-drop-roll, and be given baby trees from the G-P nursery to take home and plant. They would, of course, subsequently die, but it was a nice gesture. None of us wondered how many of the trees died when they planted when in clearcut areas.

The mill donated classroom materials. The mill sent in speakers. All of us were little loggers in training. I won a prize at the Redwood Empire Fair in the second grade for my diorama on logging. The diorama is long gone, and so is the pro-logging stance it proudly outlined.

Here’s what we didn’t talk about:

The mill kids missing parents. The disabled fathers roaring like wounded giants from their recliners in front of the television, beer in hand. The missing fingers, the limping, and the other assorted dangers of the timber industry. The declining fish population. The high rate of particulates in the air around the county.

ILater, I transferred to Mendocino Grammar, and it was like entering another world. An affluent world, for starters. Most of the parents there owned their own businesses or were independantly wealthy. Most of my friends had very nice houses. I was actually in a lower strata thanks to my father’s lingering association with timber (though by then he was working somewhere else, he would still act as a consultant). G-P did not donate classroom materials to Mendocino Grammar. We did not go on tours of the mill site. When I introduced my Mendo friends to my old Fort Bragg friends, there was a clear class divide–a class divide I was on the wrong side of.

Only a few years later, in high school, I was protesting Maxxam, chaining myself to trees, putting together graphic illustrations of the environmental devastation of clear cutting, fighting to protect old growth, kissing spotted owls, tree sitting, marching to G-P headquarters in Atlanta and nearly getting myself arrested. My connections and experience with the timber industry made me a forceful spokesperson and nice sound bite. I had found my social niche, and my ethical one as well.

Looking at the devastation Georgia Pacific, Pacific Lumber, Louisiana Pacific, and other corporations have wreaked on Northern California is nothing short of horrific. Don’t believe me? Read Clearcut if you want a better idea. Or step outside of your goddamn car on the “scenic corridor” sometime, walk past the thin greenbelt of trees, and look at the denuded hillsides on which trees used to grow. Look at the rivers choked with silt and valuable topsoil. Look at the raging forest fires due to improper timber management.

I don’t know how many of my readers have visited a commercial logging operation, so here’s a brief overview of what it’s like. First, you drive through forest that looks relatively pristine along a swath of thick road, pounded solid with the heavy logging trucks rushing too and fro. In the winter, the road is soggy and difficult to traverse without the right kind of equipment. Then the forest starts to get more sparse–and then you hear it. And see it. Clouds of dust swirl in the air, so thick it makes you cough and thank god you’re in the cab of a logging truck, not out on the forest floor like the peons. The heavy machinery is grinding, crashing, chugging. The trees are thundering to the forest floor, crashing through the canopy, and the chokersetters are swinging heavy rounds of chain around–stay clear of the choker setters. Everyone’s moving at hyper-speed to get the most out of the timber, and what you see is total devastation. The earth is stripped. Brush piles smolder everywhere while non-native plant species creep along the destabilized earth. If you’re close to a river, you can see that the banks are collapsing, bleeding topsoil into the water.

You wait for the truck to get loaded, and you speed back to the mill to unload so you can get back out to the woods. Georgia Pacific used to have the longest green chain for processing raw timber in the world. It was utter chaos as timber was sorted, cut, and prepared for shipping all over the world. Wood chips littered the earth until they were shovelled into the incinerator which ran the mill’s power plant. (Which, incidentally, provided electricity to large portions of the town during power outages.) I walked through the former sorting facility only the other day, what’s left of it–a rusting hulk with giant holes in it, open to the sky, piles of wood chips resting at intervals. Everything is super scaled for the one mammoth logging operation that ran there.

My sympathies with the timber industries were mocked by my Mendocino friends–my hesitation to throw myself behind Big Timber was derided by my Fort Bragg friends. I was caught in a divide–a divide a lot of us were caught in. How could I protest and lobby for the shut-down of a company that my friend’s dad worked for? How could I not protest a company that avoided paying disability to one of their employees due to a technicality? How could I stand by and let a corporation rape the environment and foul the earth?

The irony is that many G-P employees loved the forest and loved the woods. They went to school, got degrees in forestry, and started cutting down forests when they couldn’t get jobs as rangers. It’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid, after all.

I went away during the crucial period in the mill’s history when they began to phase down production. We could all read the writing on the wall, though. Before I left, the logging trucks were already starting to cut down the number of loads they hauled, and they would be piled high with splindly match sticks the mill never would have wasted time on before. They paid by the hour by then. By the time I returned, the mill had cut their workforce down to a skeleton, and those same friends I had in Fort Bragg were losing their homes. The mill totally fucked their workers over. In an instant the largest employer in town released hundreds of employees to fend for themselves. Many of them had injuries which made alternate work difficult. Everyone fought fiercely for the remaining timber industry positions. The rest applied for welfare or found themselves working in customer service. We discovered despair.

In one moment, Fort Bragg went from being a town where skilled labour (and say what you will about timber work, but it is skilled, hard labour) made up the majority of the work force to being a service economy. Most of the people living here now, including me, work in some aspect of the service inustry. Most of us are deeply unhappy about the positions we have found ourselves in, that in order to live in our home town, we must lick the ass of the very people who are beating us down. Many people working here now, including me, would have places in the timber industry if it still existed, raping the earth just our parents did. Instead, there are a handful of privately held companies struggling to eke some sort of bitter harvest from what Georgia Pacific left behind. Most of those companies, I am pleased to say, promote and practice sustainable logging.

I still remember the last day of the noon whistle. I was working in some crappy service economy job and as it got closer to noon we all looked around at each other, wondering who would say something first. All of us were children of the timber industry. At around 11:57, we couldn’t take it anymore and we all trouped outside, to what end we weren’t really sure. All around us, people were emerging from houses and office buildings to listen to the last three employees blow the noon whistle for the last time. An eerie silence crept over the town before it rang out finally, defiantly. Forgive me my sense of bathos here, but it was a powerful moment for those of us who have our roots here, because we knew it signaled, finally, the end of an era, even if it was an era we disagreed with, sometimes violently. It was the last moment we felt united as a town, cars slowing in the streets and people nodding at each other before we slipped behind the veil.

To this day, I know I’m not the only one who tenses up around noon waiting for the whistle, who has lost all sense of time because my frame of reference is gone.

So what happens now? Flying over Fort Bragg reveals that the mill property is equal in area to the rest of the town. So what in the flying fuck are we going to do with it?

I would like to see it left as it is, to subside back into the earth, opened for walking. I want people to wander the industrial wasteland and ponder what happened, to the town, the environment, the people. I want that open space to be preserved as the buildings fall and are scavanged. I want to remember the past, not pave it over, to embrace it and look it in the eye, not skirt it.

We all know I have an abandoned industrial park fetish, but it’s not just about that. It’s about the fact that Fort Bragg is being eaten by vapid developments which have sprung up in the last ten years, nibbling at our edges. Fort Bragg is not a city, and never will be, because this county could never sustain that kind of growth. Instead, it’s a sad decaying sack of yuppie infested shit. There’s no life, no vibrancy, no culture. The artists have fled in the face of development, the yuppies are only here a few weekends out of the year, and the rest of us have our necks in the yoke for the tourists. We struggle to retain what dignity we can, but it’s slipping and we’re not fooling anyone.

All that glorious open space is going to be covered by cookie cutter houses, or hotels, or more subsidiaries of the service industry. Our great chance to model sustainable development with parklands and tree planting and small modest houses on large, beautiful lots–it’s going to be wasted. It’s going to deepen the gaping class divide between blue and white collar. It’s going to be boutiques. And City Council is going to roll over and take it like the pussies they are, because they can’t see an alternative. This town has caved to development, and all the things that are beautiful and magical about it, all the things that make Northern California wonderful, are slowly being displaced.

There’s an illusion in the minds of the boosters that doubling the population of the town won’t change our character. That there’s enough water to support all those people, enough infrastructure. That the rich out of town cunts who move here and buy multimillion dollar homes will somehow contribute to the economy in a positive way, that we will claw our way out of the pit we’re in. Development is the answer! Trees are for losers! Valuing open space isn’t practical when you can cover that open space in income generating hideousness! It’s a town that wants desperately for the tourist industry to consume it. It’s a town that can’t face facts, can’t realize that this is one of the poorest counties in California, that our children go to classes in a condemned school, that the streets are rotting and the sewage system is about to explode. It’s a town desperate for money, whoring itself out just like its citizens do.

Sustainable living is the answer. Filling the vacant units in town is the answer. Getting rid of empty lots, repairing existing homes and businesses: that’s the answer. Love and joy and open space are the answer. Gardens. And yet a never ending tide of starry eyed idealists moves here because “it’s so beautiful” and they can’t even begin to comprehend what they are destroying. They don’t understand the resentment they encounter, that they are part of the problem, and they can’t comprehend why they are glared at when they speak up at city council meetings.

Building community is the answer. Banding together and promoting sustainable, healthy development, if there is such a thing. Let’s promote urban density so that we may have open space, let’s vote and say hello to each other in the street and go to city council meetings and raise hell. We can’t sit back and let this happen, those of us who remember this place in a different time.

I grew up in the woods. I remember when Fort Bragg was not a stretch of urban sprawl eating the horizon. I remember the fishing and timber industries, and I don’t have any illusions about them. But I do know that when this was a timber town, the bars were rougher and the yuppie fucks stayed out, and that’s the way I liked it. It was a harder place, but it was also a lot simpler, and you could buy a house if you really wanted one, a house that might be a little funky but you could fix it up. We got by, you know. We got by.

Not all the changes in town have been bad. Like most changes, it has been a mixed bag. Some situations have improved while others have gotten worse, some business people are trying to build sustainable, green companies that support the region economically while making money. Some people are active in the community, lobbying for better lives for all of us. Some people still take the time to speak for those who can’t. I greatly admire the efforts a lot of business owners, like the Laurel Street Merchants Association, Joanna Jensen of Cowlicks, Nicholas Petti and Jaimi Parsons of the Bistro, the folks at Dirt Cheap, and a host of others are making. They are trying to make a living, just like the rest of us, and some of them are actively participating in and promoting the tourist industry–but they also aren’t forgetting their local roots, their customer base, the character of the town. They are trying to keep Fort Bragg a healthy and positive place to live in, for themselves and their children. (Although I suspect our positions on development of the mill land would drastically differ.) And I can respect that. Hey man, everyone has to make a living, even Maxxam, right?

I know that some day soon, the first construction company will arrive on the mill site, and then I’ll probably have to give my notice, rather than watching a sea of houses grow to the ocean. As it is now, there are only a few blocks between myself and open space, water to the horizon. I can walk two blocks and hit the mill property, amble across the deserted land and hope I don’t get caught by security. I can revel in the emptiness so close to civilization. The thought that I could wake up and see that distance doubled, or tripled, is unconscionable. Downtown won’t be downtown anymore when rows of cutesy half million dollar homes march across the mill land. And then I’ll move, somewhere else, and continue the chain by being the out of town asshole that moves somewhere because my home, my place, the town I thought I would spend my entire life in, has been destroyed.

This isn’t just a battle about sustainable development vrs urban sprawl, or coming to terms with changes in the economy: it’s a class battle, about driving the last of the old guard inland, to the valleys, where another last stand will be made in another forty years. Earth First is never going to shut down traffic on highway one again. I’m never going to be able to afford a house in the town I grew up in. The rivers will start to run clear again. And the inexorable march of oversized trophy homes will keep on hungrily devouring what little open space we have left.

The question is: what are we going to do about it?

Trying to articulate my bitterness, I feel like a Palestinian sometimes. I sincerely understand how one might find oneself in a situation where violent revolution is the only answer, when it’s time to eat the rich and bomb their infrastructure, when it’s time to strike terror into our oppressors. The invaders have difficulty understanding because they come from a different cultural background, and have a different set of ideals about entitlement and rights. Everyone needs a home, it’s true. But does it need to be my home?

This is probably one of the longest posts I have ever written, but in actuality it’s only a brief overview of a lot of things which mean a lot to me. Understand that there may be gaps here, and if you want me to expand upon them I’m happy to start a Friday Vitriol post series. Despite the aggressive nature of this post, I really do want to foster a dialogue between opposing forces to see if a middle ground can be found, rather than being at loggerheads constantly. I’m not sure where that middle ground is, or how it can be found. But it’s out there, somewhere.

[Fort Bragg]
[Georgia Pacific]

The under things edition.

Loki has quite the love affair going on with this rug. I think he’s under the impression that no one can see him if all his body parts are under it. Unfortunately, his body parts are a little too large to fit under it in totality. In this shot he’s lying in wait for Mr Bell.

Mr. Shadow likes to get up a little later than the rest of us.

Now that Loki’s started the towel trend, they’re all doing it. Strictly speaking, Mr Bell is not under anything, except perhaps the top shelf. But you get the idea.

[cat blogging]

So I was lying on the roof reading the Sunday Chronicle Magazine that I scavenged out of a garbage can and I noticed this article and felt compelled to respond. Read it, and then I’ll tell you my thoughts on it.

It’s ok, I’ll wait.

So the basic gist of the article is “look, loser twenty somethings are living with their parents.”

The thing is, in a not so distant time historically, children lived with their parents. Parents lived with their children. It used to be called the “nuclear family,” the concept of three (or more) generations under one roof. Now it’s called an “extended family,” because it’s apparently a real stretch for us to imagine multiple generations living together. (And several dictionaries now define the “extended family” as “a family group that consists only of father, mother, and children,” which is pretty fucked up if you ask me because I don’t think of that as an “extended family.”)

Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? There’s Charlie and his parents and Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine and Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina. All living under one roof. When Dahl wrote the book, that sort of family arrangement was not all uncommon—the acute poverty of the family might have been but not the shared living situation. Later readers seem deeply perplexed by the whole thing, though—not only is Charlie Bucket poor, but…he lives with his grandparents?

There are a lot of advantages to living in an extended family environment. Grandparents can look after children. Family members can make meaningful connections with each other. Eat together. Play together. And, yes, as the article points out, young adults can save a bundle of money after college. When your student loan payment is close to six hundred dollars a month, it seems rather preposterous to be maintaining your own house and struggling to survive. The cost of living in this society is skyrocketing, but wages are not rising with it. It’s becoming very prohibitive for young adults to actually succeed without substantial help. We live in a cutthroat service economy, not the 1950s.

The article also seems shocked that parents are happy to have their kids move back in. What’s so odd about that? Presumably parents love and care for their children, although they can also be frustrating sometimes. Especially in the big houses a lot of these boomers own, you might not even be aware your kids are home. Is it such an awful thing for parents to want their children to succeed? Perish the thought that parents might actually enjoy being around their progeny, or want to encourage them to find meaningful lives.

Yes, people are marrying later now. But, once again, back in the dark ages, newly married people often lived with the parents of one partner or another while they found their feet. Indeed, in some family models this still happens—I know several Chinese families where the son has brought his wife to live with the parents to take care of them. And what good is marriage, when the divorce rate is rising astronomically and only heterosexuals are allowed to do it? Is marriage truly all it’s cracked up to be?

It’s funny that the article calls it “getting with the program” to move out, find a meaningless office job, and join the daily grind. Apparently only by abandoning your parents can you build a fulfilling life. “Getting married, having kids, and buying a house” is actually not my life goal, or the life goal of most of the people around me. Well, except for the buying a house part. But the point is that the article makes a lot of heteronormative assumptions. Hell, it makes a lot of assumptions period. It assumes that there’s only one way to live your life, and that any other life choice is a “waste.” And that angers me.

It saddens me that American society fosters a disconnect with your own family. It saddens me that people think it’s weird that I still “hang out” with my dad, even though we have separate houses and lives of our own. I know a lot of twenty something working poor who would have much better lives if they were living with their parents, saving some money, making choices based on what they want to do rather than what they must do.

This article is about affluent families and children, presumably because the working poor (the fastest growing class of American society) don’t exist. We are mere shadows in the night, you see. But much of it could refer to us, even though the author has chosen not to. When almost half of young adult college graduates are moving back home, it’s something to sit up and take notice of, rather than writing it off and dismissing it.

Allegedly, my generation is less likely to be politically active, which may well be true by the statistics coming from the polling places. But there’s more than one way to be politically aware and to be connected, and I’m not sure sociology has caught up with communications technology yet. I know that moving back home and living in the area of my roots has left me with a stronger connection to the place I’m in. I go to city council meetings and the like because I do care about the place I live in—I care about it because I grew up here, because the land being developed is land I’ve walked on. And it’s amusing to me that people still criticize me for living here (and I’m not even living in my father’s house). It’s amusing that people find it perfectly acceptable to make judgments about me and my life even though they don’t really know me, because they base their conceptions of “the good life” on what society tells them to. By conventional measures, I’m worthless. It used to cut me to the core when people said things about “still living here” and asked me “what I plan on doing with my life when I grow up.”

I am grown up. This is what I’m doing with my life. A number of people seem to have a problem with it, but perhaps they should be examining their own lives before making comments about mine. According to them, I’m indulging myself, refusing to grow up, and making a nuisance, because I drift from job to job. I’m not married. I’m not spawning. I’m just trying to make a living and to find a career doing something I love, rather than the first job I got after college. It’s shocking to me how heavily we are judged by older generations and their outmoded values. Apparently joy and fulfillment are not socially acceptable things to seek. Money is a good life goal. There seems to be some bitterness from older folks who are angry at us for pursuing our dreams, rather than giving in and breaking our backs under the wheel like they did.

Maybe I’m like one of the interviewees, “put[ing] a lot of stock in Honest-to-God happiness.” Is that such a bad thing?

When obesity surgery first entered the public consciousness, it certainly sounded like a silver bullet. Certainly, there are risks associated with abdominal surgery, but imagine having a procedure which would alter how much you could eat and digest, thus instantly paving your path to thinness. For the chronically obese, surgeons argued, the procedure was a lifesaver. A few hours of surgery, a decrease in stomach size, and almost immediate weight loss results.

The use of bariatric surgery is on the rise in the United States in a big way, partially because it’s a medical fix to a growing issue. Many Americans who perceive an issue with their weight are unwilling or unable to stay the course of long term lifestyle changes such as altering their diet and exercise habits. Bariatric surgery forces the patient to change the way ou eats. Many more patients are coerced into the surgery by medical professionals, some of whom should know better.

Books and articles were written. Angry rants were posted. Satisfied surgical results were also written about.

But now it’s been a few years, and there’s been ample time to study the surgery, along with an expanding base of patients to examine. And the truth of bariatric surgery is emerging. It’s not a pretty one. It turns out that getting thin is complicated.

40% of patients develop complications within six months of the surgery, some of them fatal. That’s an alarmingly high complication rate. It’s also expensive–the average cost patients paid to deal with their complications was $36,542, and if readmitted to the hospital that price tag was a lot higher. Of course, somewhere between ten and twenty percent of patients don’t even get a chance to leave the hospital before complications set in. Surgery comes with complications: this is an unavoidable truth. But there is an acceptable complication rate, depending on the nature of the surgery and why the patient is receiving it. A 40% rate is extraordinarily high for a primarily elective procedure.

Weight is a fraught issue in the United States. The President of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery admits that probably less than 1% of patients who receive the surgery actually need it. In an age where doctors can’t spend enough time with their patients to address issues, and where being fat is tantamount to being a member of Hezbollah, there’s a great deal of pressure to fix the “problem,” and quickly. Preferably in such a way that you can convince your insurance to pay for it, also.

Those who are severely overweight are prone to health risks. This is something that cannot be argued. Whether or not they should be forced onto diets to normalize with society is a personal choice, likewise with those who are moderately overweight. While surgery looks like an “easy” solution to the problem, it’s not. Moderation and slow steps are in the long term a more healthy approach to weight loss.

All surgery is complicated, even “routine” procedures. There’s a certain amount of risk involved in being under anesthesia and being cut open. Medical professionals do their best to alleviate the risks for their patients, but a lot of the risks associated with surgery are complicated by weight. “Elective” surgery is something which should not be undertaken lightly and the patient should work closely with surgical staff to achieve the best result.

People have been dying to be thin for a long time. It doesn’t surprise me that the latest “quick” solution to unwanted weight comes with a heavy cost. As social pressures against the fat and happy (or not so happy) mount, how many more will go on the table to have their sins cut away?

[fat]

This is my 400th post, and it also happens to be my year anniversary.

Precisely one year ago, I made my first post on this ain’t livin’, in its early and dot infested incarnation on blogspot. The site has certainly come a long way since then, from sporadic updates to daily ones, and through a variety of templates. It’s been a fun year, and I look forward to many more. It always saddens me to fall in love with a site which suddenly stops updating, and when I started this ain’t livin’ I made a promise to myself to do it for at least a year. Now I’m going to continue, because I’ve found myself oddly having fun, meeting new and interesting people, and discovering places I would never have found before.

My goal for the next year is to continue updating daily, and also to chronicle more adventures for you. I’d love to hear reader input on topics and places you’d like me to visit, as well. Reader participation always makes things more fun. We shall see where 2006 and 2007 take us, shall we? There will certainly be more parades, more Scrabble, more food, and more cat-blogging.

I have been going through older entries, thinking about the changes the site (and I as a person) have gone through in the last year. I note that my largest category is reflections, and many of my readers have said these are their favourite posts as well. I note that my most popular post is omnis animales post coitem triste sunt, an intriguing choice.

The next largest category, appropriately, is Fort Bragg, and I’m sure there will be many more Fort Bragg posts in the next year, as the city is changing faces very rapidly. This year may see a decision on the mill site, and a decision about whether or not I will continue to live here as a result.

“This Ain’t Livin’” is actually a song written by G. Love and the Special Sauce, and you’ve probably noticed the link to the lyrics in the sidebar. It’s a good song. If you haven’t heard it, you probably should. Something about the song captivates me, and reminds me a great deal of Fort Bragg, and my own life.

Sometimes I really feel like, yes, this ain’t livin’, and sometimes I say, no, this is livin’, and you should grab the moment by the testicles, bite into it, revel in everything around you, and live the life you want to live.

Relish life. It’s too fleeting for any other rational response.

I caught someone stealing flowers the other day.

Purely by accident, actually. I was opening the upstairs windows to get some cross ventilation going on and I noticed a figure furtively skulking in the yard (inasmuch as such a thing is possible in broad daylight), who glanced up when they heard the windows squeaking.

I noted that not only was the person in my yard, but they were holding a substantial chunk of now dead tea rose which had been disconnected from my living tea rose. And they had the gall to look offended, nay, angry that I had caught them in the act.

I happen to think flower stealing is a particularly low thing to do. The thing is, I appreciate flowers. I love that people enjoy the garden, and passerby often stop to admire the plants or bend and smell things from outside the fence. And I deeply prize wandering through town looking at other people’s gardens to get ideas and simply bask in the floral beauty.

I like sharing the garden with the world.

But I wish people wouldn’t steal from it. It seems terribly disrespectful of all the hard work that someone unknown to you has put in to march brazenly into their yard and start cutting flowers. Not only is it rude, it also deprives others of future enjoyment. And it’s bad enough to clip things through the fence, but to invade someone’s personal space in order to mutilate their garden? For shame!

“What are you doing,” I asked, a not entirely unreasonable question.

“Er…what are you doing,” the thief replied.

Seeing as how I live here, I wasn’t quite sure how to respond.

“Well…I mean, I see that you are picking our flowers,” I finally said.

“I didn’t think anyone would mind,” they replied.

“You didn’t think that anyone would mind that you have cut a large chunk of our rosebush off? Or you were hoping we wouldn’t notice?”

“Well, it was a very pretty rosebush.”

“Yes, it was,” I said. “Why couldn’t you leave it for others to enjoy, or ask politely if you could have a cutting?”

“Well, I didn’t want to bother anyone.”

“Yes, and of course stealing never bothers anyone.”

“You can have it back if you like.”

“What good is a branch of dead flowers going to do me? Why don’t you take it and have some more respect in the future,” I said. “After all, not only do the people who live here work hard in this garden, but everyone enjoys the flowers. And now everyone can’t, because they are gone. And if everyone who liked the flowers helped themselves, the garden would be denuded. I think it’s very disrespectful of you to walk into this yard and steal flowers without so much as a by your leave.”

“Oh,” the thief said, and fled.

Presumably before I could call the flower police.

It makes me sad that everyone here with a garden lives in fear of flower thieves, and many people fence off their gardens for that reason. Only the other day I was walking down the street and was struck by a beautiful rosebush, which I bent to smell. I noticed that there was someone working in the garden, eyeing me with deep suspicion.

“This is a beautiful rosebush,” I said. “And it smells wonderful. Is it antique?”

“Why yes, it is,” the older woman said. “Thank you.”

“I love your garden,” I added. “I walk past it a great deal and I think it’s lovely.”

“Would you like a cutting,” she offered.

“Oh, really, could I? That would be wonderful!”

And she came over and gently selected a lovely cutting, and gave me some tips for getting it to take.

That’s how gardens should be, respected and loved, and perhaps their owners would be more willing to offer cuttings or tours. Now I have a lovely cutting of an antique rose which hopefully I can get to take, so that I too can have a lovely rosebush in my yard, perhaps to offer cuttings from someday.

The thing is, most of us will offer cuttings or blooms if our gardens are complimented–we just don’t like having things taken without our will. At this point, I’m tempted to start setting booby traps for flower thieves–perhaps a particularly tempting dahlia close to the fence with a dye pack attached.

[flower thieves]