Anybody know anything about this "Chicago" place?

Get that garbage outta my way
I have places to go.

The systematic chaos of the crowd parted before me, obeisance to my stride, which was suddenly comfortable after three months of lifestyle constipation. I suppose I’d failed at my attempt to move back to the US, but none of that mattered now, because everything was right, the last sunlight through the glass, the bag hanging off my shoulder like it was part of me, a sense of music in my veins.

I was traveling again. I was a traveler again. I was a traveler still! Those months of motionlessness had not been a tombstone on my vagabondery, just a pause, a rest, a Rip Van Winkle snooze button. And god it felt good to wake up.

Yes, on my first visit to the city, I loved Chicago.

O'Hare seemed nice. Not Taipei-Airport-Garden nice, but still

Except that’s all I saw of it. One O’Hare hallway. So no, I’ve never been to Chicago. But next week I’ll change that, inshallah. My lady has a business trip and I can work from there, so Thursday to Sunday, I’ll be Windy.

I’m downright excited about it. Eager to begin. Looking forward to it.

Las Vegas. Feeding addiction until the last minute possible

Except I have no idea what I’m looking forward to. I know nearly nothing about what’s there, what I should do, see, eat, drink, hear, feel. And I’m torn between leaving it that way, arriving in perfect ignorance to take it in as it comes, versus preparing a plan, a schematic for experience.

What do you think? Show up tabula rasa, or do you have any recommendations for a couple free afternoons and an evening in the city of shikaakwa, the city of wild garlic?

What Brussels is to me

A random street in Schaerbeek, a Brussels neighborhood just
across the tracks from the now infamous Molenbeek.

Brussels? The first memory that comes to mind is feeling like an episode of The Office had leaked into real life. These guys, with their corny jokes and awkward attempts at flirting, worked for a paper company. It was just so perfect.

I’d contacted a Belgian tour company and they’d sent me to tag along with these business trippers for an hour. I was fascinated by the improbable story of Belgian independence, but they mostly talked about sports, and the only thing I wrote down was “Don’t talk about something you can’t show.” Can’t say I’ll always obey that edict, now that I am a guide, nor can I follow it in this post

Because how can I show the swirl of emotion as very different images from Brussels slam into the news? The horror and sorrow and empathy and anger and confusion and sick knowledge that this happens much more often in a few other countries, and is no less horrible in commonality than rarity, perhaps only more so.

And fear. That’s in there too. But not fear of a terrorist attack, which I still believe is not something you or I will ever actually experience. Shark attacks, plane crashes, terrorist attacks. They are scary, they happen, but they are not factors in how I choose to plan my life. I like swimming, I take a lot of flights, and I believe there is far more goodness, more peace, in the human soul than violence.

I never did find out what was going on
with this. Somewhere in Brussels.

No, the fear I feel is that we will assist the extremists in their goals. That we will respond in exactly the wrong way. Because that conviction of mankind’s goodness is difficult to maintain sometimes. In myself, when I feel the desire to see someone punished for the violence, and the first image is more explosions, and I wait for my animal amygdala to give way to my human neocortex, which understands that violence only creates more violence.

And that fear is strong, that conviction of human goodness strained, when I watch the Republican primaries, and the bragging demonstration of a viewpoint that scorns such understanding. Scorns much understanding at all, as far as I can tell. It seems clear to me that Donald Trump is running on a platform of willful ignorance, and such arrogant idiocy has never been more dangerous.

Because make no mistake, the lunatics who killed people in Brussels would like nothing better than to see Trump elected. Their gameplan is fear, anger, reaction. Us versus Them. No comprehension, no discussion, no progress, only a devolution to a world of warring tribes and caliphates. That’s what terrorism does. It removes the evolved brain from the decision-making process. As I’ve written before, terrorism is the strategy of the weak.

Brussels is not a city of fear. This statue gives me an idea
of how I'd like to mentally respond to Trump's candidacy.

I for one do not want to live in that kind of world. I’d rather live in this one, where awkward businessmen in semi-fitting suits can ignore tour guides while I sit in the back of the bus, a peaceful piece of person afloat in a beautiful world, because even though that world has its problems, I have faith that humans are determined to make positive progress towards a better future.

Or you can vote for Trump.

Productive peace and slightly ominous quiet

I've boggled the AT&T guys. Well not me personally, but my antiquated apartment building and its wiring. They go in and look at the cryptic cords, then stand around for an hour scratching their jaws before putting in another work order and promising someone else will take care of it tomorrow.

(Or maybe they've just seen something that unnerves them. My building is built on a slope, with two floors of apartments for living people fully above ground, and a sinister labyrinth of padlocked rooms underneath, with random objects in them, from what appears to be a large collection of modern art in one, and unfamiliar rusty tools in another on top of which sprawls a stuffed lion that looks like the congealed depression of a tortured childhood. The phone wiring is down there, for some reason. Perhaps to facilitate ransom calls?)

Abandon all hope (for wifi) ye who enter here.

So it's two weeks since I had internet access at home. My correspondence is preposterously behind (aka I have 315 emails from people asking if I want to give them money or if I feel the Bern; I don't and I do, respectively) but there is something calming about the absence of that flickering green light of e-omniscience.

(That calm is good, since I was reminded that the ominous labyrinth of torture chambers under my feet includes a short stairwell that leads to a hastily constructed and presumably flimsy wall, the other side of which is right behind my bed. So if anyone escapes their chains down there, the path out would lead directly to my pillow. Sleep tight!)

Free from the www.distractions of modern life .com, I have learned about corpses from Mary Roach (rather a grim thread running through this post, isn't there?) hung with Hemingway, and righted a wrong I've been carrying for almost 20 years.

My high school English teacher told me to read All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. I made it about 100 pages by the deadline, then read the last two pages in an attempt to deceive her as to my productivity. It didn't work. I saw the knowledge in her eyes, and it settled on my shoulders while Clinton was president.

But now, thanks to AT&T's ineptitude, and perhaps terror, I know the twist. I know the resolution. I know the secret meaning of life that an interbellum political operative found as his cynicism died.

So I guess the moral of this post is that we should all take a break from the internet. That, or it really pays to live over a spooky maze of malevolent chambers. Take your pick.

Photo Friday - Three years ago

I'm breaking up. It's the end of an era. But I just couldn't handle the constant interruptions to my service... A couple more words of explanation, then the flashback, on today's vagabondurges.com post, here.

A California conspiracy?

Familiar pleasures of air travel: crying baby, neighbor with stanky feet, and person in the window seat with the bladder of a small woodland animal. On my way back from Seattle I was enjoying another: blowhard in the seat behind you.

“Oh yeah, me and Ronnie Lott are good buddies. Yeah, Ronnie always comes over to my place to watch the games. Y’know, I used to take Ronnie fishing in the delta all the time…” As interesting as it was to hear that one of my favorite childhood football players is apparently a really nice guy, I cranked up my This American Life in an effort to escape.

What aspect of sound is it that transcends all barriers to dance right on your eardrum no matter what you do? Is it timbre? Pitch? Whatever it is, this guy had it, but at least he moved on from name-dropping.

Click to enlarge

Transcribing blowhard-speak hurts my fingers, so I’ll summarize: California Governor Jerry

Brown is pushing hard to build two giant tunnels to augment the existing system that carries a buttload of water from the Sacramento River Delta to Southern California. California’s water problems are obvious, as is the fact that Southern California is a desert filled with 22 million people (twice the population of Greece), so I wasn’t surprised that the governor is focused on some response.

The fella behind me denounced a slew of environmental degradation, corporate influence, and violation of democracy, but those themes are the perfect blend of incredibly serious and tragically commonplace that make them kind of impossible to listen to. I turned up my podcast.

But this morning I saw a story about the tunnels, so looked into it over breakfast. I figure the future of my state can have the length of time it takes me to eat a bagel.

-Jerry Brown pushed hard for a similar plan in his first stint as governor, but it was defeated in a statewide referendum in 1982. Now he’s apparently going for it without the pesky interference of democracy.

-Despite Brown’s claims of environmental benefit (water currents for salmon navigation), I am skeptical that draining the delta and increasing its salinity will protect its fish, and the habitat restoration element has already been reduced by 90%, plus is a completely separate project now anyway, so I’m gonna call greenwashing bullshivers on that one.

So, pulling from dark (dried blood) red
to send to lighter (still bleeding) red?

-Taking the water would mess up and contaminate the already devastated ecosystems and water supplies of everything downriver, including the East Bay where I live.

-The governor’s office estimates it would cost $15 billion. Holy crapcakes! Critics say that’s a low estimate for just construction, and the real cost to build, operate, and maintain would be more like 50 billion dollars. $50,000,000,000

-Taxpayers and water customers would pay most of it, though their bills have already been raised since drought measures have succeeded in reducing water usage.

Lots of info, but focus on the blue line

-The Water Districts (Kern County, Westlands, Metropolitan) that are pushing for the project already receive the majority of the water pumped down there, which is publicly subsidized for farming, but often sold for private profit. How is that legal?

-LA uses less water today than it did 30 years ago, and the Metropolitan WD’s sales have already declined by 30% plus a number of their customer cities are planning on buying even less/none in the future, yet the WD wants these tunnels. Why?

-The Municipal Water District includes a number of water-intensive big agribusiness companies, growing the nation’s almonds, cotton, alfalfa, that sort of thing. But there’s another client batch that piqued my attention:

-Big Oil companies down there need billions of gallons of water for their intended fracking operations.

I took this in Sonora with my lady, the water used to hit the underside of that
bridge. Now, a crashed car below it was hard to see. It's further than it looks.

And here is where the blowhard’s story outcompeted Ira Glass. “I called (some reporter) at (news network) and told her all this. She was stoked! Really into it, said she’d look into it more and give me a call back. Days went by, then weeks, I sent her a couple emails asking ‘What’s up?’ but she wouldn’t get back to me. Finally after, like, three weeks, she calls me back and says ‘I can’t report this story. We’re talking about Halliburton, Chevron, those guys. Big money. These people own my network. I can’t report it. I’m sorry.’ They don’t want this water for people, man, the people are already using less and there are better sources. They need this water for fracking. That’s what it’s all about.”

A name-dropping blowhard on a plane is easy to ignore, but what if some of what he says checks out? Plus, as far as I can tell, Ronnie Lott really is a great guy.

Photo Friday - Stairs

I’ll make you a deal. One post per week with words in it, less than a page-worth, circa 500. And one post of photos. Workable?

Wednesday had words in it, and next week just might have a massive conspiracy to reveal, so today is for letterless images, eyes but few i’s.

Today itself is a day between places, step by stepping, heading somewhere I’m sure, where I expect perhaps. But along the way, beauty lives in every detail in this marvelous world of ours.

 This is half of them, the other half are on the vagabondurges.com version, here.

See you Tuesday (unless the government finds out and assassinates me first.)

One of those days

And the bicycle goes where, exactly?

Yesterday was just one of those days. Tasks taking longer, lung-based cold draining further, nothing going forward as fast as I needed it to. (And also, of course my health insurance company messed up the automatic billing and cancelled my coverage just in time for my first doctor’s visit in two years. Why wouldn’t they?) Large scale worries and small scale misfires just sort of leached the feeling of effectiveness from my abdomen. Not a terrible day, just the kind that feels like a low slow growl.

But then! Then I was headed over to the city for Korean happy hour appetizers with three dearly beloved friends. The fresh air of bicycle motion was already soothing, though the day’s misalignment continued as every single stoplight turned red at my approach.

You can go, as long as you don't enter.

I’ve ridden from my house to BART (the subway) approximately seven quajillion times, and I well know that one stretch is the most dangerous. An American-style street of two busy lanes on the left and slanted parking spaces on the right, bikes are advised to float ten feet off the ground I guess.

After merely two mazillion passes, I’d developed an automatic habit of scanning for reverse lights to make sure none of those parked cars wanted to put a windshield between me and my destination, but the sheer normalcy of the passage, splattered with deeply-felt frustration, helped me not notice that the first parking spot was empty.

I don’t know if the driver signaled, since I was alongside them, but it doesn’t really matter. I should have been aware of the possibility of that right turn, crossing right in front of me, if not on top of me.

As it was, they pulled right, so I pulled right, and we both entered the space together, factory-shaped automobile metal somehow not impacting DNA-made me meat, with a good five inches to spare. Good five inches.

I looked at the driver, who looked back at me, both waiting to see if the other would rage and threaten. I love neither of those, so just sort of went around and back on my way.

See now the Dutch, the Dutch
know how to run a bike lane.

Air moving again, limbs still intact, I felt two tugs for interpretation. One, I could be overwhelmed with the frustration and fear of the moment and the day and the week, pour it all into a Republican-style rage of blame against another. Or, I could take that startling moment as a gentle but clear reminder from the universe to get my perspective in order. Sitting on hold while I stress at a long To Do List? Not that bad.

So on Super Tuesday, I elected to vote against anger and fear, and helped myself to a serving of gratitude and serenity after nearly going through a car window. Enjoyed time with friends, determined to take my own advice not to be in such a g’dang hurry all the time, and am happy to be blogging about it today. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have hold music to listen to. And that’s just fine.