If There Were Any Money In It...

December 23, 2019

Duarte, California

     I am something of an amateur student and critic of American panhandling.  Throughout my life, particularly as a former briefcase-carrying barrister walking the sidewalks of Hartford and Los Angeles, I've encountered all types of beggars, and I do sometimes give them money.  I don't begrudge a person who has to ask for handouts from the passing public, but sometimes I think they're going about it the wrong way.

     It is important for purposes of this discussion to differentiate between begging, on the one hand, and conning and bullshitting, on the other.  Those who con and bullshit--for instance, the woman carrying a baby on the streets of Pasadena, looking like a gypsy out of central casting and holding a sign saying she needs food for her infant; or the guy in the gas station who tells you he needs money for fuel to get to some remote hospital in order to visit his cancer-stricken mother (there's always cancer involved)--are not worthy to be called beggars, and are beneath contempt.  They're simply criminals trying to obtain money under false pretenses, and are no better than telephone and internet scammers and TV preachers.  They're the ones who try to strike up a conversation with you, as if they were interested in you as a person.  If they don't get to the point right away, that's a dead giveaway.  These people with long involved tales of woe, designed to tug at the heartstrings of the feeble-minded and unwary, are the ones who give street beggars a bad name.  Honest panhandling is a simple proposition: if you have any spare money, may I have some?  It needn't even involve words--just a hangdog expression and an empty paper coffee cup will do the job.  It's the simplest of social interactions.  If you feel like giving you give, and if you don't, you don't. 

     As simple as it might be in principle, panhandling is hard work.  You're outside in all kinds of weather, being looked down upon with contempt and fear and condemnation, run off by police, and often abused by your competing fellow-beggars.  It can be a dog-eat-dog world, especially in urban areas where there are too many mendicants chasing after too few dollars.  No one who begs in the street is on a winning streak of any kind, and no one who does it is getting rich from doing it, as much as we might like to fantasize that they are.  There are no Artful Dodgers and Fagins behind most of the poor schmucks who ask for handouts--they are about as much on their own as a person can be in this country.  The con artists and the bullshitters might do pretty well, but not the beggars, which is not to say that they make nothing at all.  But just put it into context:  they may have to get food, clothing, booze, or drugs, and even in some parts of the city to pay rent or protection money to some self-appointed "sheriff" of the homeless, who controls the block on which they strike their tiny tent.  Those things cost money.  When you and I say we "need money," we generally mean we're looking for an ATM.  When the panhandler says he needs money, he means he needs any amount of chump change you might deign to give him.  Given these sad facts, who am I to criticize any poor hobo's modus operandi?  Well, let me assure you that I only have the beggars' best interests at heart.  I'm thinking of what would appeal most to me, an affluent passer by; that is, what would make me wish to contribute to the exchequer of a bum. 

    My first rule would be to keep it simple, but keep it simple in a positive way.  There was a guy who used to stand at the corner of Hill and Temple Streets in downtown LA, who would sort of lunge out at you from a doorway and snarl "Gimme a dollar!"  Perhaps that was taking it a bit too far in the direction of simple, and it didn't work well, because he scared a lot of people when he approached them.  But I admired his no-nonsense approach, and would occasionally give him his dollar.  Of course, he was completely crazy, and would grab the money and scamper back into the shadows like a wounded dog without even acknowledging the gift.  There was another man who panhandled in the same area who would simply lie in the middle of the sidewalk, looking pathetic, forcing people to walk out of their way to avoid stepping on him.  Come to think of it, I don't know if he ever asked for money, but occasionally I'd drop a dollar onto his filthy, shoeless, recumbent body, and he'd take it.  So I don't recommend either of those two approaches as a way of doing business, as straightforward and stripped-down as they were.

     However, it's equally possible to err on the side of repleteness.  Recently I was coming down off the freeway ramp, and at the bottom a guy sat in a folding chair holding a cardboard sign that was just chock full of unnecessary information.  It started out with something like, "71 years old.  No alcohol or drugs.  Homeless..." and it went on from there for several more sentences.  The light changed before I could come to a complete stop and finish reading it, but I wouldn't have given him anything anyway, because his pitch was just too long-winded.  "Homeless.  Need money" would have sufficed, in my opinion, or better yet, just "Need money."  I don't care where a beggar lives or what he does with his money, any more than I would expect the folks who pay me my pension to ask me what I intend to do with the money they send me each month.  My dollar, when I give it, has no strings attached.  I know that some people don't give to panhandlers as a rule because they'll "probably just spend it on alcohol or drugs."   But you, my gentle readers, probably buy booze, and maybe drugs too, with your money, and nobody would gainsay your right to do so.  If you wish not to give, that's your choice, and indeed, it's the choice of the great majority of people who encounter beggars.  The decision to give or not to give should not be questioned any more than the decision to ask for money should be.  Nevertheless, those who don't give on nominally moral grounds are probably right about where the money is most likely to go.  Of course bums buy booze and drugs.  If you took all the alcoholics and drug addicts, sane or insane, out of the homelessness picture, there wouldn't be very many homeless people left.

     So my advice to the bums out there is to keep it short and sweet.  Another fact that I needn't be told by a panhandler is that he's a veteran.  It's one of those tug-at-your-heartstrings things that repels me.  Also, because it appeals to a general kind of knee-jerk patriotism in some people, I view it askance, and tend to think, "Oh, this guy just wants money from Republicans.  Well, fuck him, then."

     Finally, do not give me any of that God Bless You crap.  Maybe in some cultures the beggar is considered closer to God, and hence more able to rain both the blessing and the curse of the Almighty on the passing citizen, but not in this country, mister.  Here, God Bless You is the most meaningless piece of inflated verbal currency we have, a close relative of Have A Nice Day, and not a whit more meaningful.  If you want my money, leave God out of it.  And if you really think you have the moral authority to call down God's blessing on another person, have a talk with the man upstairs about getting you a more reliable source of income.  It's bad enough that people are forever telling me "No Problem" and "Have a Blessed Day."  Don't add to my irritation by putting a pointless benison on your grubby piece of corrugated cardboard.

     My favorite panhandler--and I've had a few I've liked over the years--is a guy named David who sits at the northeast corner of the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration in downtown LA.  David has been there for several years, and I assume he's still there now, unless he's met with some misfortune.  He likes the warmth of a heat vent near the sidewalk.  Often he has a cardboard sign bearing a few nonsectarian words of wisdom or ironic commiseration, designed to catch the eye of the harried office workers and civil servants who frequent the area.  Sometimes he doodles a caricature of a famous person (Marilyn Monroe is his favorite).  Without asking for anything he manages to do pretty well, for one important reason.  He is completely nonthreatening--diminutive, reasonably clean, a little effeminate.  You know he's homeless and wants money, but you also know he's not going to ask you for it.  As a result, he's the only beggar I've observed to have regular female patrons ("matrons" sounds odd there; perhaps I should say "benefactors").  Women go out of their way to say hi to him and give him their leftovers from lunch, and sometimes a dollar or two.  Now, I know every homeless person on the street does not have his felicitous personality traits, gentle demeanor, and comparative lack of stench and overt insanity.  But if you're looking for an edge out there, you might consider taking a page or two from David's playbook.  He's got it pretty well down.  And he's one of the more fortunate of les miserables, in that he only tends to go off his medication occasionally.  I've seen him at such times, and he can be a bit of a handful.  But the rest of the time he's a peach.  Which isn't to say that he doesn't have extensive health problems, not to mention an inability to adjust to anything like what we'd call regular indoor living.  He's just been homeless too long, and the streets and parks and freeway embankments are his home, to which, despite the best efforts of the social workers and other authorities, he always returns.

     I'm so full of helpful advice about how to beg, that I feel as if I should hold seminars on the techniques of applied panhandling, to try to implement some of the suggestions I've set forth here.  And I'd do it too, by God, if there were any money in it.
   

Who Was Vice President?

February 7, 2019

Corona, California

     There's a game I like to play, mostly in my mind, but also among groups of people, especially those of different ages, if they'll put up with it.  It's called "Who was Vice President on the day you were born?"  Many people know who the President was when they were born, but fewer know the identity of the Vice President at that moment.  That's because, as John Nance Garner (himself the Vice President for eight years under FDR) is supposed to have said, the Vice Presidency "is not worth a bucket of warm piss."  Unless they get lucky and the President croaks or resigns from office, most Vice Presidents go into utter obscurity after their terms have ended.  A few, like Bush Sr. and Nixon, get elected to the Presidency in their own right without having first succeeded to the office through the misfortune of their predecessor, but the great majority do not.

     Knowing who was Vice President on the day you were born requires a bit of knowledge of U.S. history, as well as an understanding of when Presidential and Vice Presidential terms of office begin and end, and also maybe a thing or two about when a President may have left office prematurely.  The answer to the question for some people might be that no one was Vice President on the day they were born.  That can never be said about Presidents.  For someone born on November 22, 1963, for instance, there were two Presidents, or if you want to get really technical, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.  There's always a President, automatically, even if he takes his time getting sworn in.  It's like being the monarch of England--the king is dead, long live the king, and all that.  But the answer to who was Vice President on November 22, 1963 could be Lyndon Johnson, or it could as easily be no one, since after about noon central time on that day there wasn't a Vice President, and wouldn't be another one until Hubert Humphrey took the office in 1965.  For a person who was born on January 20 of certain years, the answer might that there were two Vice Presidents on that day as well as two Presidents.  For instance, if you were born on January 20, 1993, the Vice President was Dan Quayle until noon eastern time, and after that it was Al Gore.  But just to complicate things, if you were born before inauguration day was changed to its present earlier date--to  January 20, starting in 1937--the old inauguration day was March 4.  Then, too, some guys had more than one Vice President.  Franklin Roosevelt had three, and the last of them, Harry Truman, took office on the day FDR died, April 12, 1945, and served without a Vice President all the way until he was elected to a full term that started on January 20, 1949.  Nixon had two Vice Presidents as well.

     The 25th amendment to the constitution, which was adopted in 1967, established that when the office of Vice President becomes vacant due to the death, resignation, or removal from office of the President or Vice President, the new President may himself nominate a Vice President to fill that office.  But that nomination process takes a bit of time, since both the House of Representatives and the Senate must approve the nomination.  Thus after Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President on October 10, 1963, Nixon selected Gerald Ford to be his new Vice President, but the Congress didn't approve his nomination, and he didn't start serving, until December 6, 1973.  Similarly, after Ford became President on August 9, 1974, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President, but Rockefeller wasn't given the green light until December 19, 1974.  Remember that, if you were born in 1973 or 1974.

   With all that in mind, do you know who, if anyone, was Vice President on the day you were born?  I confess that for many years I had no clue who was v.p. on the day I was born, and like some of you, I didn't really care.  When I was growing up, the grandfatherly bald head of Dwight D. Eisenhower adorned the walls of post offices and other public buildings, and as a young child I came to think of him as the only President I had ever had.  Not so.  In fact, on August 3, 1949, the day I was born, Harry Truman was barely into his second term as President (the only one to which he was so elected), and the Vice President was none other than Alben Barkley, a person who has since slid into that obscurity to which I alluded at the beginning of this post, joining such luminaries as the aforementioned John Nance Garner and Dan Quayle, as well as Henry Wallace, Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes, and the slightly more notorious Dick Cheney.  And those are only the ones who might have been around if you play the game with someone who is less than about a hundred years old.  Should you ask a centenarian who was Vice President on the day he or she was born, the correct answer would be Woodrow Wilson's running mate Thomas R. Marshall, pictured above, a man whose main claim to fame was his opinion that "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."  Thomas Marshall was a fairly witty guy.  He was governor of Indiana, and is supposed to have said, upon hearing of his nomination for the Vice Presidency, "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents; home of more second-class men than any other state."  Up to that point there had been three previous Vice Presidents from Indiana, and in the ensuing years we have added two more Hoosiers to the office--Dan Quayle and our beloved current veep, Mike Pence.

     The very existence of the sitting Vice President is often only brought to our attention when he does something exceptional, like tripping on the steps of an airplane.  He is, by virtue of his constitutionally-granted powers, also the president of the Senate, but only in the most technical sense.  He might choose to preside over the Senate from time to time, if he's not busy looking for a five-cent cigar, but he can't cast a vote unless the Senate is tied.  Almost all the time the person who presides over the Senate is a senior elected member of the majority party, known as the president pro tempore.  These days it's Charles Grassley of Iowa.  But just as often the president pro tem delegates the job of presiding over the Senate to a lesser hack.  It's just a matter of banging the gavel.  In all cases the person currently presiding over the Senate is addressed, ex cathedra, as "Mr. President" or "Madam President."  This might confuse the casual watcher of CSPAN into thinking that this country has more than one President.  Unfortunately, we don't.

     One final thought about the Vice President:  because he has been popularly elected to the office, he cannot be removed from office except by death, disability, resignation, or impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanors."  (Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first Vice President, came close to getting the boot.  He was federally indicted for bribes and kickbacks he had taken before and during the time when he was governor of Maryland, and, looking up and seeing the sword of Damocles, copped a plea and resigned from office.)  This means, significantly, that the Vice President can't be fired by the President no matter what he does, and he really doesn't have to do anything at all.  He doesn't even have to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate if he is disinclined to do so.  In theory, the Vice President could refuse to have anything to do with the President at all, or tell him to go fuck himself, and there's nothing the President could do about it except maybe to refuse to let him attend any boring meetings of the cabinet, of which he's not a member anyway.  To my way of thinking this would be like throwing Br'er Rabbit into the brier patch.  This knowledge gives me an even lower opinion of our current Vice President, Mike Pence, than I am already inclined to have.  Because in spite of the fact that he's constitutionally completely independent of the President, he chooses to stand behind him almost all the time, with a half smile on his face, as if he's expecting to get brownie points for being there.  Another second-class man, without at doubt. 

I've Got A Little List

February 2, 2019

Corona, California

[To my international readers:  Sorry if some of the references herein aren't well known to you.  On the other hand, you're lucky if they're not.]

                    As some day it may happen that a victim must be found

                    I've got a little list--I've got a little list

                   Of society offenders who might well be underground

                   And who never would be missed--who never would be missed!

                           --Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado

     I've had a fantasy lately that involves fast food places.  In my imagination, I have the power to eliminate from the face of the earth one fast food franchise per month for a year--signs, advertisements, buildings, and parking lots included.  There are rules involved, of course, which I have created, since I am the Lord and Master of the fantasy.  First, there can be no replacements for the eliminated franchises, that is, other fast food companies cannot increase their numbers to take up the slack from the absence of their competitors.  The locations where they once stood, after I have caused them to disappear, must never again be used for commercial purposes of any kind.  They must be left vacant, to be returned to dirt and dust and bushes and flowers and cracked asphalt.  Second, no remaining fast food franchise can begin to serve items that might have been exclusive to or particularly made by the eliminated ones.  If I eliminate a place with fried chicken made a certain way, for example, then another place that has survived the cut cannot add such fried chicken to its menu.  In fact, all menus of the survivors must remain fixed as they are or reduced, lest they incur my wrath and subject themselves to my righteous hand.  For I am the Lord God of Food, and will not hold them guiltless that attempt to flaunt the rules of my fantasy.  Finally, the franchise in question must be more or less nationwide, if not international.  It need not be present in every state, but must be distributed across a decent portion of the country.  And the smaller, local franchises may not expand, of course. 

     Okay, so what fast food places are on my list?  Remember, I can choose one per month, and during that month I will smite it from the face of the earth.  The first one is Carl's Jr.  Now, some of you in the east may not know Carl's Jr., and therefore may not know that it is the sister franchise of Hardee's. Carl's Jr. in the west, and Hardee's in the east.  So in January all Carl's Jr. and all Hardee's  restaurants will be gone.  Poof.  (And since it is now February, that means they're gone already.  Therefore if you think you see one, it's an optical illusion.  Drive on by.)  Why this franchise? you ask,  I'll tell you why.  Because Carl's Jr. is a stupid name and it makes no sense. "Carl Jr." or "Carl Jr.'s" would be better, but even those names would be dumb.  Carl?  Really?  Sorry if your name is Carl, but don't you dare ever start a business using that name.  Also their signs, with the happy yellow stars on them, are ugly and garish.  I've only been in a Carl's Jr. a couple of times, but I've been in Hardee's many times.  Hardee's is a stupid name too, so fuck them both.  Enough said about that.  In February, Del Taco will disappear.  Like Carl's Jr., Del Taco originated in California, but through franchises spread all over the country.  Why do I want to eliminate Del Taco?  For one thing, it's also a stupid name, and their signs, with happy little sunrises, or sunsets, are ridiculous on a par with those of the late, not-so-lamented, Carl's Jr.  Sorry, but that's the way it is.  For another (and more important) thing, there are plenty of local food places practically everywhere that serve good cheap Mexican street food, which is all a taco is or ever aspired to be in the first place.  Eliminate Del Taco and you still have more than enough taco joints to go around, and surely many more than are necessary.  In March, with great relish, I will eliminate Wienerschnitzel.  I know that Wienerschnitzel isn't the largest fast food outlet by a long shot, but it's particularly offensive to me, the Lord, the Supreme Destroyer of Evil, for a couple of reasons.  The first is the fact that their restaurants are silly-looking, with their yellow A-frame buildings and big red and white "Ws."  The second and more important reason is that they specialize in hot dogs.  So what? you ask, what's wrong with a nice hot dog for a change?  Nothing really, except that in German cuisine Wiener schnitzel, as anyone ought to know, is not hot dogs at all, but a dish made from pounded veal (and sometimes pork) cutlets, breaded and sauteed and smothered with gravy.  It is, therefore, akin to chicken fried steak, and hasn't got a goddamned thing to do with hot dogs.  It originated, perhaps, in Vienna (or Wien, as it's really called), as did, perhaps, the sausage that came to be known as the wiener, or hot dog.  Long gone are the days when a hot dog tasted like a sausage anyway.  Now they're just extruded tubes of American bologna.  But somebody somewhere (Texas I think) thought it would be fun and fancy to name a hot dog joint Wienerschnitzel, with no regard for accurate etymology.  For that reason alone, Wienerschnitzel restaurants deserve to be wiped from the face of the earth, as they surely will be some time during the month of March.

     In the second quarter of the year 2019, three more venerable franchises will meet their end.  In April, Burger King will go bye-bye, along with its idiotic King and its Whopper and all the rest of its hopelessly lame and imitative stuff.  This move alone will clear an enormous amount of space from both the urban and rural landscapes, and will take nothing away from our cravings for cheap calories that can't be found elsewhere.  In May will come one that might make some folks sit up and take notice, if the previous ones didn't.  In May I will eliminate from the planet, from the homes of friend and foe alike, all KFC (formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken) restaurants.  People simply shouldn't do to chicken what KFC does to theirs.  I haven't been there for a long time, but half the time I couldn't tell whether I was eating a back or a front or something in between.  It's either too juicy (fried chicken should never be that juicy) or it's too breaded.  Extra crispy?  My question is, extra crispy WHAT?  Not chicken, that's for sure.  You have to bite pretty damn far into a piece of extra crispy KFC to get to something that was hatched and not grown from the earth.  So to hell with KFC.  As with tacos, there are more than enough local and small places that serve fried chicken, and if they don't take up the slack, then let people eat something else.  Good fried chicken should be cooked in a skillet in at least an inch of melted lard or bacon fat anyway, and there's no way a franchise is going to do that.  In June, you can all say adios to Taco Bell.  For my reasoning, please see the comments above about Del Taco, not that I, the Almighty, have to give you a reason at all.  And add to that the hideous faux-Spanish colonial mission style of its buildings.  Okay, so that leaves the world with no significant Mexican fast food franchises, I realize.  Boo hoo.  Go to a local restaurant or a food truck.  With all the Mexicans Americans there are in this great country of ours, that shouldn't be difficult.  You'll thank me when you taste the difference.

     Moving along to the second half of the year, the decisions by Your Wise and Gracious Creator and Destroyer begin to get more challenging.  As you've seen, there are aesthetic as well as culinary reasons for my decisions.  July's selection (so get it while you still can) is Jack In The Box.  What horrible commercials!  I don't give a shit what the food tastes like, this is a decision based purely on easing the assault on the eyes created every time you drive past one of their restaurants or turn on the TV.  Not to mention that they tried to kill us all a decade or two back.  In August, in honor of the month of my birth, I will eliminate Wendy's.  Now I can hear some of you start to grumble, if you weren't doing so already.  Be careful, and remember the power I have.  Why Wendy's?  Don't they have big square hamburgers?  Yes they do, and that's just plain wrong.  I will miss the Frosty, I'll admit, but it's a small price to pay to get rid of the rest of their shit, and you can get ice cream, or a milk shake, or whatever the hell a Frosty is, somewhere else.  You'll have to anyway, so get used to it.  To round out the third quarter of the year, in September I will eliminate Arby's.  Whoa, whoa, whoa.  What!?  Roast beef sandwiches?  What could possibly be wrong with those?  Seriously, have you seen the pathetically small amount of meat they put in those suckers?  And it can't be that pink in real life--they must do something to it to make it look that way.  So order a French dip sandwich somewhere else, or better yet eat only roast beef that's been freshly carved and bloody in the center.  That's roast beef. You won't get it as often, but you'll appreciate it more, especially if it has a little fat on it.  Mmmm.  

     October brings the beautiful color changes of fall as we prepare for winter.  And it also will bring the end, forever, of Sonic Drive-Ins.   But wait, you say.  Where can we get cheeseburgers as well as chili dogs all under the same roof?  And what about those absurd commercials with the two lovable dickwads in the front seat of their car?  And sometimes the two women who certainly ought to know better?  They can retire into obscurity, or may make car insurance commercials.  Chili dogs and cheeseburgers are sold by every Greek restaurant in America, so not to worry.  November is turkey month in this great land that I have given unto you, and so I'll go after poultry again.  This time it will be Chick-fil-A.  Mostly just for the billboards with the illiterate cows.  I guess if you're an illiterate cow yourself you think they're funny.  Plus they're owned by right wing religious bigots, and the Lord will strike down with a mighty vengeance anyone who engages in right wing bigotry, or right wing anything, for that matter.  And everything I've said already about every other stupid name for a franchise goes at least double for Chick-fil-A.  At last we come to December, and the purge is about to come to an end.  Thus far I have spared one important category of deep fried heavily- breaded food, namely, fish.  So I will destroy all Long John Silver restaurants.  I don't really think I need to give an explanation of any kind for this move to anyone who likes fish.  Fish is supposed to be kind of good for you, or at least healthier than many other alternatives.  Otherwise why bother to eat it?  It's not as tasty as beef or pork unless you like sushi--and don't lie to yourself that it is.  Remember, I am all knowing as well as all powerful.  Anyway, Long John Silver's fish is just the opposite of healthy.  I will grant you that it's no worse than authentic English fish and chips, but that's damning it with faint praise.

     Okay, that's the list.  It's arbitrary, I know, but well thought out.  I'm sure there are a dozen more that deserve to go, but in my fantasy I had to start somewhere.  Now let's talk about the survivors.  You'll notice that I left off McDonald's, which some of you probably figured would be number one on the list.  But in my opinion none of the places that I've eliminated make better crappy mass-produced hamburgers.  The others might be different, but they're not really better.  Mass-produced burgers are inherently kind of crummy anyway, and I wanted to keep at least one major fast food place going.  McDonald's will fill in the gaps--indeed almost every other fast food place, including the ones I  eliminated, started in imitation of McDonald's, and whatever anyone else has come up with, McDonald's has effectively imitated.  Want breakfast?  They make high fat breakfasts, available around the clock.  Want fish?  They make a really unhealthy fish sandwich.  Want candy-like coffee drinks?  They got 'em.  Want chicken?  McDonald's chicken nuggets are admittedly just so much garbage, but they're like crack to little kids, and I don't want to put the children of America into some sort of grim withdrawal.  Kids can get along fine without all of the places I've gotten rid of, but I don't know if they could survive the demise of McDonald's.  And as for french fries, there is no other franchise that does them better--crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, always hot and salty.  Please don't bullshit me or yourselves on this point.  This isn't a health-generated purge anyway.  I also wanted to wipe out the places with the ugliest and most garish restaurants.  The golden arches are so much a part of the universal landscape that they hardly qualify as ugly any more.  You might also have noticed that I didn't eliminate any pizza places.  Pizza isn't fast food, strictly speaking.  Something you have to make to order, even if you do it fast, isn't fast food.  That means Subway and Jimmy John's and all those places get a pass, at least for now.

     There are local and regional franchises that have escaped my mighty hand of justice, too.  For instance, here in the west we have In-N-Out restaurants, but since they're not national I have spared them.  Otherwise they'd be gone like a cool whiff of hot fat.  In-N-Out is offensive, to be sure, and even more so because they're not particularly fast, and often their drive-through lines trail out on the street and impede normal traffic flow, instead of being tucked beside or behind the restaurant.  Also, their food just isn't that good.  Usually the fries are cold and limp and they're cut too long.  And their huge signs are a blight. I could go on about In-N-Out, but they're irrelevant to this discussion at the present time.  

     Well, my children, thus endeth my fantasy, for the time being.  Next year I might start to work on franchise sit-down restaurants, like Chili's and TGI Friday and others.  After that maybe car insurance companies, of which there are far too many spending your hard-earned dollars on TV advertising.  For now, enjoy all those new vacant lots.

     Thanks for reading, and remember: I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, or at least of part of the world.  And as any god in any religion will readily attest, destruction is a lot of fun. 

       

 

10,000 Steps

January 30, 2019

Corona, California

     Happy New Year to you, the few, the proud, the ones who are still following.  

     All right, let’s have a quick review.  I started this thing more than nine years ago, and called it Go West, Old Man.  I went west all right, then stayed there for seven years.  Then I went east last June, back to Michigan.  Now Gretchen and I are back in the west, staying at an RV park in Riverside County, at the foot of the comparatively lush hills of the Cleveland National Forest.

     But is the old man still walking?  In a manner of speaking, yes.  Not moving forward from one place to another, exactly, but I have recently begun to walk in a somewhat dedicated way.  There’s a thing on my iPhone that records the steps taken while in possession of the phone.  Most of you are familiar with it I’m sure—it has a red heart on it and keeps track of various bits of information about one's daily activities.  The only activity I care about is steps.  Steps, people.  For now, I’m trying to log 10,000 steps a day.  Like the original walk I took from Michigan to California, this isn’t difficult, just time consuming and somewhat tedious.    It isn’t twenty miles a day, either, just a comparatively wimpy three-and-a half to four miles.  I’ve been dedicated to doing this since about last October, with mixed results, meaning that I don’t always do it.  In fact, October was the only month in which I averaged more than 10,000 steps a day.  But on the days when I don’t hit the mark, I’m conscious of the fact that I haven’t.  And in keeping with the nature of resolutions generally, I’ve already allowed myself significant exceptions.  One in particular is that on days when I do a full workout at the gym I don’t require myself to walk all 10,000 steps.  Often my total on such days exceeds 5,000, but usually doesn’t reach the full number.  However, because I’ve worked out, after all, and the point of walking all those steps is mostly to get some exercise, I forgive myself the shortfall.  Putting in a half hour on the elliptical trainer machine (not counting the other stuff I do) doesn’t give me anywhere near the total magic number of steps, but the steps I do take are qualitatively better, since I have jacked the incline and difficulty settings up to the max by the time I’m about halfway through the thirty minutes, so I’m trudging uphill in a virtual way, sweating and huffing. You might be wondering why I don’t just get on a treadmill and walk the 10,000 steps that way.  And well might you ask that.  My answer is that walking on a treadmill is about as boring a way to walk as mankind has yet invented, not to mention rather hard on the legs and feet.  I’ve done it a few times, but it just doesn’t compare to walking on real flat ground past real trees and cars and bushes and garbage.  Walking on the elliptical trainer, however, does become a bit more interesting the harder it gets, and seems to be more fulfilling.

     But even the accomplishment of 10,000 steps on real terra firma can get tedious, especially by the third or fourth (not to mention the tenth or twentieth) time one has taken a particular walk.  In Pentwater, Michigan, where we live during the spring, summer, and fall, I took to doing brisk evening walks through the dark and empty streets of the village, often at ten o’clock or later, simply in order to get the rest of the steps I needed for that day.  (Walking from room to room all day with the phone in one's pocket accounts for a few thousand steps by itself.)  I got to know the mean streets of Pentwater quite well, and knew pretty accurately how many blocks I needed to go each way to get to my number.  With the iPod playing a mystery novel in my ears, I would walk from street lamp to street lamp, from one 19th century timber baron's rehabilitated mansion to the next, often taking a quick look behind me for whatever might be lurking—things that the protagonist of the book might be wondering about, too.  Listening to books worked, for the most part, to relieve the tedium, and let me get some “reading” in at the same time.

     Here in California I’ve walked the roads surrounding the RV park where we’re staying, and have gone up into the modern subdivisions nearby, but it hasn’t been as fulfilling, for some reason, as the walks around Pentwater were.  Over the holidays we had occasion to be staying in Los Angeles for about ten days, and there I walked the neighborhoods of the Mt. Washington and Highland Park areas of the city, on what might be called the northeast side, near the Arroyo Seco and the 110 freeway, for those of you who know the area.  And what a dump that is.  I mean, really ugly and litter-strewn and run down.  These descriptors could safely be used to describe just about every part of Los Angeles, with a few minor exceptions over on the west side.

     Let me give you a little taste of my Los Angeles walking:  Walking down the narrow streets at the foot of Mt. Washington toward Museum Drive as it slides into Marmion Way, one is struck by the narrow houses plastered haphazardly onto the hillsides.  It's evocative of another world, and not the first or second worlds, either.  Superficially it has the feel of a hillside village in southern France or Italy, only without the architectural integrity and respect for history of those places.  There's no attempt to harmonize the styles of the buildings with their natural surroundings.  The garishly colored eclectically designed houses haven't so much been built as they have been slapped up onto the sheer terraced inclines, with the hope that they'll stick.  The streets in the neighborhoods are impossibly narrow and steep and could only exist in a climate that never sees freezing temperatures, and very little inclement weather of any kind.  Like all parts of the city, it's better seen at night when the chaos and ignorance of the city planning is obscured by darkness and only glittering street lights show.  It's the money view that movie makers use, usually from some vantage point high up in the Hollywood hills, on some place like Mulholland Drive, where the panorama of the city below resembles a vast and excessively busy airport landing strip.   But down below, what comes to mind is what generally strikes one when driving through almost all of Los Angeles, namely that there is no integrity in this metropolis--no attempt to create something unified.  To be sure, there are many ugly cities in the United States.  But probably no large city has been built with such deliberate disregard for, and indeed violence to, the natural beauty that existed here before humans came in large numbers.  

     Down on Figueroa Avenue, one crosses the Arroyo Seco, a concrete flood control ditch running from Pasadena in the north to somewhere down in the old center of the city.  Arroyo Seco is a charming Spanish name for what would, in English, probably be called Dry Gulch.  Along the Arroyo Seco, skirted by a freeway on one side and train tracks on the other, are the tents and makeshift huts of the homeless, an interesting lot whose presence pervades the city and indeed the whole of Los Angeles County.  They number in the tens, if not the hundreds, of thousands.  Each newly-elected mayor promises to do something about the homeless problem, and each one fails spectacularly, although countless millions of dollars get appropriated and thrown at the situation in one way or another.  A fairly large percentage of the money goes into the pockets of the people who do the "visioning" and the "planning."  What filters down into the wretched depths of the problem itself is usually good money poured after bad, money spent with the best of intentions but that ignores the most important causes of the homelessness problem, in my opinion.  The easy answer to the whole idea of homelessness is to think that the building of housing is the ticket.  Just make cheap affordable places for people to live and they'll go live there and all will be well, the thinking goes.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  And not because that isn't a logically appropriate response to the idea.  However, it simply overlooks the root causes of homelessness.  Sure, a lack of affordable housing is part of the problem, but only a small one, and one whose amelioration would help only a tiny fraction of the homeless.  We're not talking about refugees here, as in some other countries, simply waiting for their chance to enter our national mainstream.  No, our homeless are home-grown, so to speak, folks who have fallen off the grid, and the majority of them are either mentally ill or drug- and alcohol-addicted, or a combination thereof.  What the homeless of Los Angeles need (and I'm sure the same goes just about everywhere in the country) is long term mental health care and alcohol and drug treatment, things we have abandoned as a society because we think they're too expensive, and because older models (scary 19th century era mental hospitals) were too abusive to those they were meant to serve.  We think that long-term confinement of such people is inhumane.  Okay, agreed.  But build them apartment buildings to live in and you simply create unsupervised nuthouses, crack houses, and flop houses.  Build outdoor toilets to relieve public defecation and all you get is filthy and dangerous confined areas where rape and mayhem occur.  Because the homeless tend to carry everything they own with them, and as a result tend to hoard and then discard, up and down Figueroa are piles of abandoned litter, clothing, and the remnants of salvaged food from dumpsters.  The city apparently has higher budgetary priorities than to spend much time or money on picking up things from the street, and so it just accumulates in niches and ditches, like the homeless people themselves.

     So that's a sample of my evening walks in Los Angeles, a city I would be happy never to have to set foot in again, not because of the homeless, but because it's a place that has been running from reality, or creating its own alternatives to reality, for the past one hundred years.  It's one thing to walk through such a place, on the way to somewhere else, or in furtherance of a goal.  It's something else altogether to swirl around in it day after day.  But hey, the weather's nice. 

     All this is in furtherance of the 10,000 step goal.  I think I got this idea from David Sedaris, who started walking around his home in the English countryside picking up litter.  And Mr. Sedaris greatly exceeds the 10,000 step mark most of the time.  How he finds time to write as much as he does, not to mention touring several hundred days a year, I don't know, but I tip my hat to him.  I have no desire to pick up litter, which in any event would be a fool's errand on the mean streets of southern California.  But emulating David Sedaris, even in a small way, is a worthy goal.