What's on your mind?

Such a strange tentacled creature, is facebook.™®

This is how facebook®™ greeted me Monday, with a picture of me someone else had posted a long while back:

Shawn, we care about you and the memories you share here. We thought you'd like to look back on this post from 3 years ago.

Really? facebook®™ cares about me? Everybody at facebook©®, or just the executives? Or whoever's in charge of holding onto old posts and showing them to me on the anniversary of their posting?

Or maybe the algorithms and bots and gear boxes assigned to this work have become sentient, developing emotions for those whose posts they aggregate?

Or is facebook©® speaking on behalf of other users?

"This won't show in anyone else's News Feed™®™ unless you share it," facebook®™assured me, and I took it at its word, leaving it unshared.

Last week it designated a Friend's Day — I'm guessing it was some facebook®™ anniversary — and you could watch a video of a pair of hands tossing photos of you onto a surface, along with showcards bearing your name, as if a friend or relative was looking through a photo collection (odd, right, actual tactile photos, with white borders, like from the 20th century before home computers?) and culling the photos of your facebook®™ past for you to peruse and presumably to share.

I didn't oblige. Photos of me are relatively few anyway, and they represent events far between. If I'm in them, I'm part of a group, usually as a reluctant participant (except for portraits with well-traveled swimmers), and it's someone else's photo, posted on someone else's facebook®™ page. Not much to see here; move along.

Many people did share this montage, and on my News Feed®™ toward the end of the day they ran right after another. I didn't look look too closely, just long enough to note I had probably seen these photos from others' pasts. It's the same pair of hands, tossing the same photo shapes onto the surface; only the photos and the names are changed.

I seem to remember that facebook®™ did something like this around the holidays last year, except that it was a kind of music video with your photos. Same music, but your photos, and text with your name in it.

On Sunday, facebook®™ reminded me that the Super Bowl®©™ was to take place later that day, and encouraged me to post about what I was doing to commemorate this glorious day.

I don't really think facebook®™ was asking because it cares about me and wishes I wouldn't be an unpatriotic wallflower and not watch the American Game.®™

Every time I open facebook,®™which is a lot, it asks, "What's on your mind?" Lately it has also asked if I'd like to post onto facebook something I attached to a private email, and gives me to the link to the attachment, making it just a click from world viewing.

facebook©™ is passing strange.

facebook©® regards me likewise, I'm sure.

If facebook©®™ ran an audit, it would fire me as a user. facebook®™ is photo- and video-driven, for one, and I prefer words.

It's the only social media I use, the only one I can handle, the Hoover®™ vacuum of my free thought and time. If I tweeted® and followed others' tweets,™ or snapchatted™® or looked at everyone's Instagram®© pix and gifs, I would lose what little room I have left to exist.

facebook®™ alone has been enough to turn me into one of the folks I used to wonder about, looking into their onyx slabs of magic as the world rocketed by, before I got a shining magic slab of my own.

Now people wonder about me, bent over my magic slab, wonder why I can't or won't give them my full attention. I would tell them it's because I'm following the multifarious lives of people far away, on facebook,®™ but I'm heel and cad enough already by that point.

On days when the world rockets by, taking me with it in a full day of work and away from my smart phone, then I consider it a treat to peruse facebook®™ at the end of the day, to see how other people's days (mostly the swim parts of their day) have gone. It's all the other times, bored and misanthropic, that facebook®™feels conspiratorial, sucking time.

I like facebook.®™ Even as an unsophisticated (photo-averse) user, I find it powerful as a communication tool for special-interest communities. You're probably bored with my adulation of "Did You Swim Today?" a forum for swimmers worldwide; it's still fascinating to witness the global scope of pool swimmers and open water swimmers, of newbies crossing their first pool length, and warriors crossing miles and miles of the ocean's most treacherous and famous crossings.

facebook®™ is the best kind of short-wave radio. I can type a message to a swimmer in the UK, and get a message right back, and have a little conversation in real-time. facebook®™ is wonderful that way.

I have gotten to swim with several people I've met through facebook™®, half a world away. Usually they have had to travel to me in order to make that happen, but still.

On facebook®™ I have met many interesting people, and I like to think that if I somehow lived near them, we could be face-to-face friends.

I also have face-to-face friends who went away, in place or opportunity, and facebook®™ is a way to stay keep connected.

facebook®™ has its limits, though, and overreaches many times every day. I think I may be in the minority here, because what I regard as flaws may be part of facebook's®™ design. It's not good for:

• Politics. It's used for politics, every day, but I'm not sure it's a good medium. True, I have learned more about UK politics than I ever would have without facebook,®™ and I have "liked" and occasionally commiserated with people whose views I empathize with. But facebook®™ is a terrible medium for debate or information.
  
  Much of the political discourse comprises so many slaps of mud on the wall, antagonizing readers to comment or like or rant about. But the idea of carrying on a conversation by following a long string of comment feels anathema to actual debate or conversation, let alone reasoned discussion or a search for information. Which leads to:
• Long discussions. It doesn't take long for me to try and follow a lengthening discussion (about anything, really, though many of these discussions become vitriolic) before I remember I've got matters to attend to in my real life, and this virtual life can and should go on without me.
  
  As with political discussions, I get nowhere. I have neither grown nor helped.
• Personal crises. It's no place for people who need real help. facebook®™ is ostensibly a great and multi-connected community of friends, with vast and instantaneous reach. Yet its immediacy can't overcome its impersonality.
  
  Several times, including recently, someone has posted threatening or at least intimating suicide. I am more or less a stranger except for one tangential common link. I live far away. In short time, more-or-less strangers with the same common ground, more or less, began a lengthy frantic discussion trying to secure emergency help for the person who posted.
  
  By the end of the day, the person posted thanks for others' concern, and something about a small unrelated matter, which spawned posts of anger from others for what they saw as a blithe tone from the person who caused people a world a way to scramble to her rescue.
  
  Occasionally a few post about their hurt lives, and I don't know what to do, so far away, so distant, so ethereal, except give words of comfort and encouragement. I don't know how to ask if they have gotten real, professional help, or if they can get some, or just a real shoulder to cry own.

facebook's®©™ raison d'être is also its weakness. It can't make friendships. It can designate friends, but its definition of friends runs awry of what I imagine of face-to-face friends. facebook®™ friends show me curiosities and breathtaking sunsets and funny videos, which amuse me; facebook®™ friends also show me plates of food, or tell me where they're eating, display vacation videos or show pictures of their children at the amusement park, which makes me uncomfortable.

Please don't take offense if I don't "friend" you on facebook®™— and chances are we already have become facebook©®™ friends, because I post my blog on facebook®™ too, which is probably how you're reading it.

I really enjoy the subject we have in common, and the humor or eloquence or adventure or just the rhythm and cadence of how you share it. But when we become friends in facebook,®™you give me a window into your world, friends and family I don't know, children I wouldn't ordinarily meet and whose lives are best lived away from the window of social media; I give you a window into mine, too, though mine is usually lilliputian and fogged up because it's mostly about swimming.

Your family is your family, and it's fine, and mine is mine, your life your life, and mine mine; if we were face-to-face friends, perhaps our lives would intersect that way, but even then we would keep much private, just like in real life.
 
You could say I don't have to read those posts about people in your world I don't know, and I don't; a thumb flick, and the post rolls away. facebook®™ is about making those connections, and I'm swimming against its tide.

facebook™®© bots, I'm sure, are working on that right now.

False hope

Yo, California,

Can we just pretend the last month never happened?

Can we go on thinking the creeks had disappeared to a trickle, that rivers sank, showing the old ribs of long-forgotten wharves, the hills turned rock gray, the land became hopeless?

Because this — this heavy rain and snow, this gift of such strangeness — is really not helping.

Soon the I-told-you-sos who finally realized that maybe they shouldn't water during a storm, will open the valves once again. The holdouts will start watering again, thinking somehow the drought is over.

It's not. The ground is muddy, the puddles are welcome, the rivers swell and churn, but the drought is still here.

Call Industrial Light and Magic. We need the illusion of dry.

We need billboards blocking lakes, depicting them as sere beds of despair. We need fake sun and blue skies of linen. We need the clacking feel of thirst in our throats.

We need to embrace the three-minute shower, the ones we were taking a month ago, as a permanent practice. We need to keep capturing shower water and tossing it on dying plants outside.

We need to let yellow mellow, and make it law.

Because this — this gift of strangeness — will become more strange, not less, as we become more plentiful and demand more plenty.

After 166 years of this, we can't keep pretending we live in Eden, and making it look that way through wanton water waste. It's not Eden. It's dry desert and chaparral. We've just been extremely fortunate.

Follow the blood money

Suppose everyone is right.

Suppose President Obama is correct, that far too many guns in the United States are far too easy to get, and some of the people use them to commit crimes, or harm others, to kill themselves and/or kill large numbers of people, or fight turf wars in city neighborhoods.

Suppose the National Rifle Association is correct too, that owning a gun is a right, guaranteed to citizens under the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Let's assume that right is inviolable, that the amendment is crystal clear on this.

Suppose, as gun rights advocates say, that no laws will ever keep guns away from people who want to do harm. Suppose instead that existing laws can accomplish this, but our cities and states and federal governments — our representatives, in our name — don't enforce them.

Suppose President Obama's tears were real this week, when he announced executive action to close loopholes in how guns may be sold through legal channels without background checks, direct more resources to mental health and apply new technology to gun safety.

I think they were real, by the way. Obama is genuinely angry and tired of so many horrific gun deaths that have happened while in office — the deaths especially of first graders — little six-year-olds, nary a care, killed en masse. You should shed a tear too. But I'm not so dumb not to recognize an opportunity to spend political capital.

Suppose … well, suppose we are right where we are now, each in our corner of the multi-cornered moral universe.

So if everyone is right, each divided in righteousness —

What do we make of the fact that 32,000 people in America are killed each year by guns, and 80,000 are injured? Not just the horrible and gripping mass deaths that hold the nation's attention too many times each year, but the daily horrors, a shooting death here and a shooting death there, writ small, that take place each day across our country?

More than 100,000 people, killed and injured by guns.

We blink, and move on.

Take a look anyway:

In 2012,

• About 12,000 Americans were killed by homicide, and some 58,000 injured;
• Some 20,000 people died in suicide by gun, and 4,000 were injured in the attempt;
• About 1,000 died accidentally by gun, and 15,000 were injured;
• About 1,000 died in police-related shootings, another 1,000 were injured.

More than 100,000 people, killed and injured by guns.

I could compare that rate to gun deaths and injuries in other Western industrialized countries, but you and I know the U.S. figures far outstrip all of theirs by sadly ridiculous measure.

Mother Jones Magazine (you say libtard mouthpiece, I say street-credible crusader) this year crunched the data and pegged the total annual cost of gun violence in the United States at $229 billion. That includes $8.6 billion in direct costs — medical treatment for the injured, funeral costs, etc. — and $49 billion in the victims' lost wages and productivity.

The direct costs from one murder comes to $441,000, Mother Jones reported — in the cost of police investigation, ambulance transport, hospital care for other victims, mental health counseling, court costs and imprisonment. Taxpayers cover 87 percent of those costs, mostly for imprisonment.

Spread those costs of gun violence across the country, and it comes to $700 per person.

Even if those figures are off by a magnitude, they are still staggering — rampaging-disease staggering.

Yet now, as ever, when the issue of guns arises, as President Obama raised it this week, we go immediately to our corners. We run to the nearest mic and camera, to the nearest TV set, and proceed to feed from our troughs of validation. Maybe we do so more earnestly than ever, given it's an election year, we're talking about guns, and President Obama's enemies are well practiced in whatever-he-says-we're-against-no-matter-what.

Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, once on record for supporting "reasonable limitations" on guns, said into the nearest mic that President Obama was trying to dismantle the Second Amendment.

No pausing to consider complexities, to offer nuance. Just jumping to the simple extreme: Obama wants to quash the Second Amendment.

Rubio is among legislators who earn high ratings from the NRA — which is an odd thing in itself, a badge of political capital from a lobbying group, for a representative of the people — which advocates the absolute interpretation of the Second Amendment, to the point of orchestrating the suppression of research into gun violence, and fomenting fear of job and funding loss among researchers who might try. 

Following the shootings in San Bernardino, as follows most such high-profile shootings, gun sales go up, reportedly because buyers fear the loss of the Second Amendment, or the world's going to hell and we need to go down shooting. The politics of fear is not built on nuance.

The NRA steadily advocates that more arms will equal peace, and that armed guards in schools will be safer.

Yet no one to say, from our opposite corners in our righteousness, that together

• perhaps we should work on this problem
• maybe we should see it as an epidemic of disease in our communities
• maybe the Second Amendment doesn't entirely mean what we practice, that the well-regulated militia part throws gun rights into a new light, for a new consideration, and the proliferation of guns is not the intent
• 32,000 deaths each year by guns, at a cost of $229 billion (almost as much as paid in Medicaid) is egregious and outrageous, a bloodstain on our country?

We blink instead, and move on.

Why? I think we don't hurt enough. You. Me. We don't hurt, God — or luck — bless us.

We go about our days without noticing much more burden than we've taken on over time — mortgages, groceries, college loans, home loans, car loans, gas, taxes. We take them on, beasts of burden, and don't register the costly pain of gun deaths around us.

Unless gun violence affects us directly; but even then we are so efficiently spread across the country that our small voice of outrage and heartbreak and reform loses to the voice of status quo.

It's the same for the care of our Veterans. More and more, we know fewer and fewer people who serve our country in our defense. Someone else goes to battle; someone else pays for the wounded, somewhere. It's the same for public education: My kids are out of school, not my problem.

What could we do with the money we all pay toward gun violence?  Suppose the old saw is true — that guns don't kill people, people do. But guns enable holders of grudges to settle the score once and for all, of those enraged to mushroom their anger with violent finality, of the angry to extend their anger, of the confused to end their demons. Otherwise, they're grudges that need counseling and hugs and forgiveness, rages that need time and space to dissipate, angers to ease, and confusion to be treated.

Those billions spent in gun violence: Could they go instead to help the people for whom guns become the instant and horrific answer?

Gun violence as a public health issue is gaining traction, and it makes sense to me.

What if we made gun violence a pocketbook issue? What if we could show what this country could do with the money spent on gun violence?

I just thought of Theodore Judah, the engineer who dreamed of a railroad to cross the country. He first went to the financial titans of San Francisco seeking investment, framing the railroad as good for the country, for the welfare of all. The titans yawned.

Next he approached merchants in Sacramento, chiefly Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. This time, though, Judah made it plain: Gentlemen, you will make unimaginable profits from your meager investment. They bit, and the rest is history.

What if we could show how much we could save with the reduction in gun violence? Follow our blood money?

Otherwise, what are we to make of more than 100,000 people killed or injured by guns in this country each year?

Is it our cost of living?

First-world hangups

Coat hangers, am I right?

At least once in your life, you wanted to be an inventor, to improve the world and/or become rich and/or famous. Maybe you had to invent something for a school assignment.

[Flashback: Once in school I had to invent a toy, but I had no clue and no time but plenty of tears and tantrums. My dad took over. He cut a short length of broomstick, drilled a hole through its length, stuck it onto the end of a scrap-metal rod, and bent the end of the rod into a kind of hook so the little length of broom handle would stay in place but also spin freely. Then he made a handle out of broomstick for the other end of the rod. Finally, he fished out a one of the back wheels of a long-unused tricycle (no telling why he still had it): A toy.

[You rolled the tire on the ground, and kept the tire spinning with the hook end of the rod, the little piece of broomstick spinning as it touched the tire tread.

[Not once did I hear the conversations that should have/probably did take place, pivoting on:

• Why is your dad inventing your toy? Isn't this supposed to be your assignment?

• Why should we call that an invention, when it's really more of an update (a clever one, mind) of the old hoop-and-stick that boys played in the Good Old Days?

[Ah, parents: Will we ever learn?

[Ah, children: Likewise.

[I still have it, in the garage with the scant remains of sporting goods; it's really quite something.

[Flashback over.]

You probably outgrew this notion, this flair for inventing. A few of you didn't. A few of you grew up to invent really useful, fascinating, earth-changing things, like artificial hearts and variable-speed wipers. Others of you invented things we didn't need but couldn't live without, like twitter®™. Either way, you are not reading this, busy as you are inventing more things, and becoming richer and more famous.

Don't despair. I have a brilliant opportunity for someone among the rest of you, to become rich and famous and, in so doing, disregard this blog forever.

After this post, that is.

You ready? Here it is: Coat hangers.

I am officially done thinking of a way to eradicate them. They are infernal devices of frustration. Tools — dare I say? — of the devil.

Though I have found this burning need to make them better, I can't fill it. Now it's yours to carry the torch.

It won't be easy, take it from me. Coat hangers haunt and taunt me every time I use them. Every mother-loving moment.

They are a big part of the reason my clothes heap on the floor until laundry day. Not a defensible reason, but still.

Why do I hate them? They:

• Hook onto everything you don't want them to. Every single time.
• Come off the hanger rod in twos or threes when you only want one. Always.
• Jam into other hangers when you try to put them away, so they make themselves ready to come off in twos or threes the next time.
• Knock at least one hanger off the rod and between the dresser and the far corner of the closet, unexplored since the Ford Administration. Vast deposits of coat hanger wire back there, I'm sure.
• Wrinkle pants, no matter how neat you I try to drape them.
• Especially the plastic hangers with the little struts that strengthen the hangers but make the pants-draping part too narrow.
• Plus, the plastic ones with the strengthening struts still break — just when you could really use it.
• Break under use, especially the wire hangers with the cardboard tube base. Why do they exist? They are those hangers you get from the dry cleaners, I suspect, and they're not designed for long-term use, but who doesn't try to keep using them? You'd think we go to the dry cleaners twice a week, like people on TV, for all the dry-cleaner hangers we have.
• Remind you you're getting old, especially the coat hangers with their tattered paper lining, advertising some dry cleaner from long ago and far away. We don't tear off the paper — too much work, the paper just bunching at one end of the drapy part when you I try — but let it tatter and yellow on the wire frame.
• Drop your shirt to the floor of your closet anyway, even after you have taken pains to secure it to the hanger. Hanger makers have colluded to make their devices about an inch-and-a-half too narrow to suspend your average shirt. Hanger makers are having a good laugh right now. They always do.
• Make your life harder, especially the ones designed to hang just pants, upside down by the cuff. They're supposed to clamp the cuff and the pants hang straight, no bending. But the clamps don't clamp, and the steps needed to arrange the pants and install them in these devices — bother, I just heap them on the floor.
• Confuse and confound — my half of the closet includes a token number of sturdy wooden hangers, sculptural in their beauty, with a hook that swivels in its base so it can hang clothes facing left or right. I reserve them for fancy slacks and clothes that I don't have, so they remain empty. Sour grapes, anyway: The hooks don't swivel very well; you I still have to turn the hook yourmyself with your my free hand.
• Threaten relationships: My wife and I are left-handed, but she hangs clothes with her right hand, so that the clothes face left. Who in her right mind does that? Clothes hung by left handers must face right! Relationship saved by my washing and hanging my own clothes.

You feel my pain, I know you do. My only hope now is that I've stated my case with passion sufficient to spur you to creating a bold new world, one in which clothes may be draped in a sensible, harmonious fashion, off the floor.

Necessity is the mother of invention, of course, and this necessity is a mother!

When you solve this urgent need, save a few. I must admit two good uses for these terrible contraptions:

• They hang T-shirts really well! T-shirts are 85 percent of my wardrobe, and you I don't have to worry about wrinkling them. For some reason, they hang rather well on these devices, and that saves a lot of dresser drawer space for sweaters I never wear.
• They make great puppets for art class, which I did in fourth grade, by folding my puppet in half when no one else did, and winning a Snickers™® bar.

Aside from that, hangers can go hang.

Good luck to you, Mr./Ms. Inventor. The world awaits amid piles of dress slacks and skirts (how do you hang skirts? Never mind).

Be forgot

All I ever needed to know I learned from Jon Carroll

For Thanksgiving we tried something different — a picnic in San Francisco with our children. Low frills, simple, light on preparation and heavy on just spending time together.

That was my plan, and I was shocked that anyone had even listened to me when I uttered it long ago, let alone agreed to carry it out.

We ended up having the traditional Thanksgiving anyway — in addition to the picnic. It was the multiple-meal, multi-meat, Armageddon-in-the-kitchen Thanksgiving that inspired me to propose a picnic in the first place.

Even the picnic became an extravaganza, our son's girlfriend making something, our daughter making something, all of us bringing too, too much.

Change is hard.

We tried something else different — well, Nancy carried it out, since I'm often useless beyond instigation — called the Untied Way®™. It's not branded, but it should be.

The Untied Way©™is Jon Carroll's idea of charitable giving, and it too is low frills and simple: Withdraw money from your ATM — take out an amount that would sting a bit — and distribute your $20s in a part of town where people might ask for money. When someone asks, give him or her a $20 until you're done.

That's it.

The Untied Way®™ makes no judgments on recipients, Jon Carroll would say, and has its flaws. For example, a giver really doesn't know how the recipient would use the money, and couldn't control it anyway. It could be used for drink or drugs, for example.

You might expect gratitude from your clients, but you may not get it. Some of your clients may not process the denomination of the contribution, and therefore your special virtue will go unremarked. Sometimes, alas, your clients will say insulting or incomprehensible things to you. Other times, they may be overly grateful, and follow you down the street asking in stentorian tones for God to bless you. The Untied Way is not a particularly comfortable charity.

Jon Carroll wrote once of his non-traditional charity.

Sometimes people ask: Won't the Untied Way clients use their money foolishly? Won't they buy drugs or cheap booze or unsavory companionship? And the answer is: Yes, they might. Have you ever spent your money foolishly? Have you ever behaved unwisely? Untied Way clients are human beings like you.

Jon Carroll's words on this and any other subject are harder to find, because Jon Carroll is gone.

Not gone gone, but a funereal gone nonetheless. He retired as columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, about Thanksgiving time, and with his retirement went the weekly dose of words joined remarkably well, words I would have loved to have heard in person across a coffee table.

Carroll started with the Chronicle in 1962 as a reporter, joined a new venture called Rolling Stone Magazine, joined a variety of pioneering journalism projects before returning to the Chronicle in 1982 as a columnist. He's been there, done that.

His are words of level-headed mirth and just the right mixture of satiric rage at so much I rage against but don't have quite the way to say it.

Besides the Untied Way, he spun a description of circus life, specifically the San Francisco-based Pickle Family Circus, which his daughter belonged to, so joyful I wanted to join, and got the next best thing when that circus — no animals, just acrobats galore and hilarious clowns (yes, they can be funny!) in an itty bitty performing space — came to out-of-the-way Hanford, where Nancy and I were working, long ago.

He delighted in Mondegreens — writer Sylvia Wright's coinage for misheard lyrics — and his readers delighted in his delight, sharing their own over the years. "Mondegreens" come from Wright's own mishearing of a Scottish poem: She thought the enemies had slain Earl o' Moray and Lady Mondegreen — when the enemies had really "laid him on the green."

Rock songs are shot through with Mondegreens: Jimi Hendrix singing "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy," or Elton John pleading, "Hold me closer, Tony Danza."

Jon Carroll always sounded like he was just having a conversation — an erudite riff on the day, with witty asides so plentiful they pushed against the main point. Too often I've thought, "I'd like to write like that," and have emulated his writing, whether or not I wanted to.

Now he's gone.

And yet.

In his retirement — while he figures out what to do — he started a blog. His latest post: Make-believe answers to his annual really difficult Christmastime quiz, which he hasn't published in many years but which readers still clamor for. As with everything else, it's a fun read.

I give thanks.

A ponderous chain

“Business!”
cried the Ghost,
wringing its hands again.
“Mankind was my business;
charity, mercy, forbearance,
and benevolence, were, all,
my business. The deals of my trade
were but a drop of water in
the comprehensive ocean
of my business!”

— Charles Dickens 

Go jump in a lake

Nothing focuses the mind quite so well as slinking headfirst into a winter lake, the water hovering just above 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

My mind, anyway.

Your mind might hold a different opinion in this scenario, such as: "Ooooowwwwuuuuuu
hhhhhhrrrrrrGGGGHHH
aaaaashiiiiieeeeeeeoooo
oooooowwww!" Or maybe,
"Get out! Get OUT! GET OUT!!!
GET OUT!!! GET OUT!!!!"

I get it. Perfectly reasonable. "Reasonable" is an excellent word here.

Chances are your mind and body are not used to doing such a thing, may in fact desire very much not to do such a thing, because your mind, being smart, and your body, being precious, would react negatively to this being done — to the point of avoiding the near occasion of this precise happenstance.

Being used to it, however, I do not think such things. I get in immediately anymore, have done so for more than two years now, after the buddies I used to swim with decided they weren't putting up with my ritualistic easing-into-the-water bit, and left me behind.

I first think, upon first slink, "This is cold," in a detached, Spockian (Mr., not Dr.) manner, simply acknowledging a fact. But about 120 strokes (counting every other stroke), I think, "This is ideal now, so I might as well start slowing my stroke and practice slipping my arms in without making bubbles."

Sure enough, 120 strokes in (it's not an exact science; sometimes it's 117, others nearly 145) I am calm. I am suspended in solution, my limbs carrying on as if they had become the water, my left eye (I flunked bilateral breathing) checking progress, but both eyes looking down mostly, into the streaky green nothingness of my lake, my mouth frowning a little at the sight of bubbles.

I think spend a spare bit of thought to keep my arms wide and straight out, and resolve that I shouldn't be able to see them when my face is straight down in the water. It's an ongoing experiment.

In the chooka-whaush-splick-splacka-chosh of my moving, constantly moving, breathing and letting all the parts do their thing, I think things.

Sometimes I mean for such thoughts to happen. I think, "Something has been bugging me for a while; maybe this is a good time to work it out."

Sometimes the thoughts present themselves without warning, and I begin mulling unexpectedly. I suspect my mind has a mind of its own, and worries that I'm not worrying enough about such things.

In the former category are work things. A drawing I want to do is just not getting drawn, because it is literally a puzzle I'm trying to solve. Just a couple of days ago, the drawing appeared before my eyes in the green nothingness, bright little atoms of tiny things floating around each other to form a big thing. In the chooka-whaush-splick-splacka-chosh, in the mantra of sound and movement, I could see and think no other thing than these floating atoms, moving about at my will.

Many other days lately, I have been thinking about a writing project I need to finish, which wouldn't be so bad except I've barely started, and too much depends on it, too soon. I have been writing about the trees and ignoring the forest, I decided in the green nothingness, and have gone back to work trying to write the forest instead. I know a tremendous amount about bark, but bark won't get the job done.

These problems don't get solved entirely in the water; almost none of them do. But the sensory deprivation chamber of cold Lake Natoma helps me to see around and through them in a way that sitting in front of a computer in a warm office never will.

In the latter category of things my mind urges me to think, are things my conscience knows but won't admit to. More and more lately, for example, it urges me to consider I have gotten larger. And larger. I am regarding this thought these days in the green nothingness.

It is my own doing, of course. My life has changed; I am an office now, a real office and not a former bedroom, and nearby are snacks for everyone, that other office workers consume judiciously, The only diet plan that has worked for me is to not have snacks around in the first place. It worked fairly well at home; don't buy the stuff and they won't be there to be eaten. Lead us not into tin of cookies. Simple.

But there they are, in the real office, and I take them. It's my own doing.

I used to tell myself swimming would keep my weight in check, and now my conscience is screaming in the green nothingness it's not necessarily so. I swim routinely longer distances than I did in the first two years of open water swimming, but my conscience is pointing out, screaming politely, my body is just used to it now, and all this swimming is doing more wonders for mind than body, this daily solitude of cold green water.

My mind is using the swims to suggest I should do something in addition to swimming, to improve my health.

These problems don't get solved entirely in the water. 

Not enough black ink

Oh, how I wish this was a comic book!

Like the wonderful Watchmen, a grimly layered tale about costumed semi-superheroes who must adapt to a world that no longer tolerates them.

In it, Adrian Veidt, a former superhero who trumps Donald Trump in wealth and chutzpah, plots to unleash a horror so catastrophic that it fulfills his grand wish — the entire world abolishes divisions to unite and vanquish the horror.

I want Donald Trump to be that horror — a thing so devastating, so harmful, that people denounce their own ugliness and hate to turn against him and choose civil, reasonable leaders.

I want Trump to be what some pundits have proposed: So awful an impersonation of a human being that he'll drive followers away so that he can back out of the race, or drive voters to the Democratic ticket. I want him to be playing such a monumental prank on us all, if only to massage his giant ego, with the breezy gall of someone who has more money than God.

I want him to be a Democratic conspiracy, a trick deployed on the Republican Party, a massive inflated parody of itself, a hulking chicken having come home to roost.

But I'm afraid Donald Trump is real, and that he is in fact the runaway leader of the Republican ticket, and that he may win that party's nomination to the presidency.

And that makes me angry.

This cartoon, this little exercise with typing paper and Pilot®™ Razor Point pen, doesn't even begin to express my anger. I thought it would, but it's an ineffectual doodle.

I wanted to portray what makes me angriest: Joke or not, Trump has now made it OK for people to act out their hate. Like the bully he is, the demagogue he has become, he encourages followers to demean and demonize, even hurt those not like them. He cracks fear like a whip, pitting one group above another, and followers hear his whipcrack as permission to blame an entire group for the actions of a few, and to diminish them and compartmentalize them, and to act with violence against them.

Followers say many times Trump tells it like it is; Trump himself insults his critics and says they're just upset because he's not politically correct. Neither are right: Trump doesn't tell it like it is — he calculates to tell it like people want to hear, things on their hearts already, things written in fear and anger and blame. As if Trump saying it makes it true.

Trump is not being politically incorrect: He is insulting and humiliating and defaming, and stirring up others to do the same, under the strange off-color of authority he has built through the years, in the boorish, piggish televised persona we can't seem to get enough of.

At a Trump rally this week, a "Black Lives Matter" protester was detained by the crowd, one Trump follower flashing what looks like a Nazi salute, another shouting, "Burn that motherf----r alive!"

This is Trump's legacy. Joke or not, this is what he has wrought. Donny Demonseed has sown a dark harvest. Expect worse to come, unless we come to our senses. I'm trying to imagine him as president, the divided mess of a country he purports to make great again.

Um.

I'm really, really hoping I have overreacted. I really hope that months from now I'll look at this post and laugh at my usual hyperbole and misplaced anxiety.

We are a horribly imperfect country, a moving experiment so broken with hypocrisies and sufferings and broken promises upon broken promises — either forgotten or repackaged as patriotism and progress. But we are an experiment; we experiment with this counter-intuitive idea we can rise above our base fears and impulses, that we can, with vigilance and patience and hope for ourselves and one another, be a country that accommodates and accepts. A country that can still be better than itself.

Donald Trump will wreck that experiment, that long-held dream against all odds.

I still hope it's all a joke.

The joke on me is that Donald Trump makes some of the other Republican candidates —namely Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee and Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson (remember Ben Carson?) — who at least (for now) couch their demonization in old-school rhetoric, look almost statesmanlike.

Almost.

Ties that bind

My facebook™© feed has already blossomed with ties, most of them knotted around the necks of semi-naked bodies — all symbols of support for a woman many of us know but have never met.

Swimmers have rallied around her.

She is Helena Martins, and last week in south London, a man attacked her as she walked home from work. She said she believes the attack was because she is lesbian, and that the tie she was wearing became some kind of signal to the attacker.

The attacker punched her in the eye and choked her with the tie. Read more here.

On facebook©® afterward, Helena wrote:

I don't think I'll be rocking a tie in the near future.

Today, one street away from my home, I was assaulted by a man who just went berserk at me, trying to pull my tie off.


I've got a scratched and punched face, a sore neckline by all the tie pulling and a very bruised soul.

I did fight back a little, but when I saw my (cochlear) implant being tossed around on the floor and stepped on, I just wanted the guy to leave me alone and crouched against the wall with my hands and arms above my head and chest.


The all thing was over in 2 minutes.


Please. Homophobia Transphobia are still very much alive. If you hear or see someone making fun with pub jokes, harassing or bullying of LGBT people, making comments while watching TV or a movie or whatever...

Act. Speak out.

Your silence makes them feel that they are right. They're not.

Tell them. Please. Be part of the solution, not the problem.


Some women wear ties, some men wear skirts. Get the heck over it.

One thing is true: I shouldn't be punched in the face for wearing a tie.

Helena became deaf as the result of Ménière's Disease, a disorder of the inner ear that can also cause severe dizziness. The attacker may have identified Helena as an easy target, she said, mistaking her unsteady gait for inebriation.

Almost immediately, swimming fans rallied and began rocking ties. Fiona Bettles, like me, doesn't know Helena personally, but follows Helena and a myriad other swimmers in their daily open water and pool endeavors. She's among several who are organizing today, Tuesday, for wearing a tie in support of Helena.

Swimmer Suzie Dods posted the same on the Marathon Swimmers Forum. The grassroots campaign is #tieforhelena.

Here's my bid.

Many swimmers didn't wait for today, instead showing up at their group events over the weekend in (swim)suits and ties. Their sartorial choices made their way on facebook™® over the last four days.

Helena Martins, as well as those who have stirred this campaign, urge supporters to stand up and speak out against homophobic and racist attacks. Scotland Yard reported that homophobic attacks in London had increased by nearly a third in the year between July 2014 and July 2015.

Rock your tie today.

Those who can't

From a project I keep trying to get off the ground.
Yes, I do know the meaning of the word irony.

Be a teacher, they said.

More than 100,000 teachers in California are leaving soon, they said. See, they're grabbing their car keys and out they go, they said.

You'll make a great teacher, they said.

I did. They didn't. They weren't. Meh.

It seemed like a good bet, becoming a teacher. I read the tea leaves, looked up at the sky, felt the vibe. Be a teacher — try to be a good teacher — 10 years, maybe 15. Wrap up a working life.

I lost the bet.

Those 100,000 teachers? They didn't leave. A little thing called the recession. Pensions crumbled below their feet — for which somebody, certainly not teachers, got filthy rich — and they held on to their jobs.

Schools played musical chairs, each removing two or three chairs at the end of the year. Last hired, first fired. Make do with less. Cram each classroom with a few more kids. Yeah, the law says you can't do that, but it turns out you can, and what're you gonna do, make the taxpayers mad? Can't make the taxpayers mad. That's their money, they decide what to do with their money, and they're not spending it on schools, future be damned. Won't be around to see it, anyway.

So I was gone, sitting in one of those thrown-out chairs, after a full year. My five-year plan to become an effective teacher went to smoke and sputter. My rookie year was thrilling and frustrating and hopeful and hopeless. All the time I tore myself up about whether I was doing right by these children.

I went to the district office to see what could be done with me after I got my dismissal. Lady runs her finger across the line on the spreadsheet where my name is. Zero-point-zero. No official tally of my having taught, of credit toward my credential. I did not gain any ground, any traction, anything. I was a thing that happened. Thanks for being the adult in the room all those days, keeping the kids safe, I guess.

You can substitute. You want to substitute? That's all that I can offer, lady says.

I substitute. One school secretary admonishes, "You're too early! You're not supposed to be here this early!" Thank you, may I have another?

Same school, teacher provides no lesson plans, no map from yesterday to tomorrow. No warning: Hey, you're supposed to take my kids to an assembly; I get six competing voices of opinion from the students instead. Don't you have games or activities you bring with you? Most substitutes do, the teacher says later; it's supposed to be an apology, I guess. Yeah, I say back, but I'd rather help you teach your students.

I go back to school for another credential, but it doesn't take.

It still bothers me wondering whether it just wasn't meant to be, or if I quit before the fight even started, as I have done many times before. If only I was 20 years younger, I excuse myself. But I wasn't, and the time and energy I'd have to spend playing Frogger®™ in alien classrooms, waiting out another opening somewhere or the other, seemed better spent otherwise.

It was the first decision I ever made in which age played a role.

So this week, on the way home from the job I have now — a good job, fun and various, challenging and creative, a teensy tiny bit teacher-y — I hear on the radio that our area's largest school district is scrambling for substitutes. The district needs subs so that the full-time teachers can break away for professional training — need them so direly they're raising the per-diem fee and providing extending health benefits to them.

When the school year began, stories popped up in the news about teacher shortages in districts across the country, and that full-time teachers have to cover multiple classes because districts lack the subs to fill the spaces.

Selfie-palooza

That same large district near us had earlier urged students' parents to come in and sub.

Sure, now the teachers are leaving — eight years too late.

How do I feel about that? Let me know, will ya?

Had I waited — and who would really know this? It's not like hedging the market — then I'd have more chance to continue teaching. Had I acted much sooner, way back when I first thought about teaching, I'd have had a long teaching career by now, and be aces at surviving the career troughs and bumps.

But I didn't. I bet and lost.

Eating from my harvest of sour grapes, I can conclude I wasn't cut out for teaching. I was in long enough to say it's incredibly hard, and those who teach do so with courage and fortitude and deeply drawn creativity. They are not well served, not by their community, by the families whose children they teach, by lawmakers, by taxpayers, by the schools that are supposed to mold them into teachers.

Sitting exposed atop an iceberg of dysfunctional society, teachers bear blame for the iceberg. The screwed-up world expects teachers to fix it, and buy their own paper and pencils to do it. Make do with less. And less. But save us. Save us all.

Teachers who teach despite it all are valiant.

Which is why I rode home feeling deep conflict, hearing about a district's for subs so teachers and learn how to be better teachers. Teachers were getting help, yet getting no help at all. They can't go be better teachers unless subs take their place in the classroom.

Part of me wants to rush over and help. I can sub! My sub kit is still there in the garage, one small heave into the truck of my car and I'm ready. Part of me reminds I have lost the spark of courage to do that.

And of course, I can't. I have moved on. As have many teachers, far younger far more creative than I, with fresh ideas and strategies; they've gone to other jobs, which compensate fairly and competitively for their skills and talents.

We don't think educating our children, the most important job there is, is all that important.

Go figure.

Pointed criticism

On this occasion, I'm grateful for the Old Sacramento Underground Tours.

They're great — full of little stories, well told, all adding up to one unlikely story of how a city at the center of the Gold Rush overcame one really bad decision through the force of its collective stubbornness.

I'm not just saying so because I manage the Underground Tour program, or because I've been a guide since it began six years ago. Or maybe I am; I'm part of the program because I love it. The tour began with a well crafted guidebook, inspiring guides to spin the facts into the little-known tale of Sacramento's beginning, each from their own perspectives.

Guides have brought their own passion for research, which has helped the tour unveil new facts as they arise. It evolves and gets better. Last year, 20,000 people went on the Underground Tour, and the program is expanding to a newly revamped walking tour about Sacramento's Gold Rush role, and an after-hours tour with adult content.

We're pretty good at what we do. There, I said it.

So I had to laugh when I read this online review about the tour:

"It was horrible I'd rather stab a fork in my eyes than do that again."

This was from the tour program's facebook™® page. Guides more talented than I have made the program better in other realms, including marketing and raising our profile on social media.

I check in to the page, whenever I remember how. facebook®© also alerts me to new activity on the tour program's page.

The only thing I could think to do with this review is send it out to the guides, mostly for a laugh. Otherwise, I don't know what to make of it. The reviewer doesn't elucidate, doesn't say why one fork in both eyes (if I read it accurately) would be better than taking a tour again; doesn't say which tour, or which guide; otherwise we could adapt to this positive feedback.

It could have been any guide, any tour, which is why we sent out to guides.

We can't, and don't, please everybody. Nor can anyone. Sometimes a visitor lets on that he or she thought the Underground comprised caverns, with stalactites and stalagmites; sometimes a visitor will complain online that the Underground is just basements, and I have to confess they're right; but that's where the guides' gift of storytelling kicks in, to explain that they're not just basements, but the spaces where the entire city used to be.

(We still suffer from an identity crisis in our corner of Old Sacramento; our museum is surrounded on two sides by the much larger and wonderful California State Railroad Museum, and many people walk past the great big signs and banners and actual entrance for the railroad museum, into our museum, and still ask if this is the railroad museum.

(Recently a man bought admission to the history museum and asked if we still have Indian stuff. Yes, on the third floor, I answered, referring to the display about this region's native cultures. Forty minutes later the man returned to the front desk. "I thought you said there was engine stuff," he said, and I realized I had misheard his question. I also realized why he pulled such a strange face when he imagined gargantuan steam-powered train engines somehow on the third floor.

(But I digress.)

I'd wager most visitors like the tours. I'll also say the tour program is always eager to make the tours better by force of story or new display innovations.

But I'm not sure that online review always help. This is just me talking, but I'm not a fan of online reviews. Too many reviewers are poorly informed about subjects I know about, which makes me distrust others' reviews for things I don't know about. I'm not going to follow their advice.

Opinions about movies, music and entertainments such as tours are sooooo subjective. One person's viewpoint usually does not overlay another's world view; your preference is probably irrelevant to mine. You likely will not like what I like.

Some online reviewers just want to cause damage, for whatever reason, not just for the Underground Tour but just about anything. Pick anything being reviewed through social media, and you're bound to find reviews posted for no other reason than sabotage and spite.

We're happy to hear what people think would make the tour better; I'm not so deluded to think we've created the perfect tour. We can be better, and we work toward that.

I hope you can the tour and let us know what you think. I'll hide the forks.

Peaceful Thanksgiving.

Crumpled

Mr. Zero-sum Game, that's me.

I cancel myself out. If anything, I do far more harm to my world than good.

My carbon footprint makes Sasquatch's look like Tinkerbell's.

All this car pooling I do, all this allowing of lawn to brown and die, and dumping of buckets of shower water beneath thirsty trees, is folly in the face of all the trees I demand be killed to slake my thirst for paper towels.

Must have paper towels! And napkins! And Kleenex®™ Brand tissues! Former trees of all manufacture! Die! Die! Die, so that I may blow my nose and dry my hands!

Right now — and I mean any right now that you read this — off-white wads of paper towel bank like suspect snow against my elbows on my desk. They fatten every front pocket of every pair of pants and shorts I own, even the rare few draped over hangers. Some are buried deep in the strata, compressed to the size and finish of almonds in the shell.

Wads are probably not in pants now being washed, but I make no guarantee.

In the leather caddy on my nightstand, where men of refinement would keep their keys and moneyclips and chronometers and cufflinks, I have let a hundred paper towels bloom, their petals held intact by snot and the passage of time. It looks like a meringue pie.

I wouldn't, by the way, eat meringue pie or anything else while reading this.

Wads and wads and wads of paper fill a plastic bag in the corner of my office, an untapped and untappable surplus intended for double duty on dog doody walks.

You don't want to know about my car.

Though I use and reuse these fistfuls of paper detritus — runny nose being a chronic side effect, I think, of cold-water swimming — I still grab a new square of tissue or paper towel — preferring the heft of the latter — when I'm near a dispenser.

Apparently I can't help myself.

And haven't been able to for some time. My parents used to remark on our paper towel use on visits to their home — Nancy uses a lot too, though not nearly as much as me … she's an enabler.

Our dog fishes the wads out of the trash and shreds them to pieces across the floor, to shame me for my profligate ways. Or maybe she likes the taste.

Really, don't eat anything right now.

I have a problem needing professional help. Already three wads of paper towel have made their way into my front pockets, and the sun hasn't even risen today.

Handkerchiefs might work. My dad was a handkerchief guy; guys from my dad's generation are. My tour guide characters carry them, though the guy playing those characters still wads up a napkin alongside. Handkerchiefs, in my twisted and unwell mind, seem more disgusting than paper towels.

But recognizing the problem is half the battle, isn't it? Just this morning I reached for a fresh paper towel from the roll, then stopped, knowing I had now seven wads of towel lodged in pockets.

Excuse me — my nose is running.

I can't write about Paris; I can't say anything more or different than anything already said. I can't be helpful or enlightening. What a horrible, wrenching thing, an abomination; it follows the abominations that went on through the Middle East and Africa the week before, the abominations that have passed largely without our notice until a stunning version of it took place in Paris.

We stand by Paris and we are praying for Paris, and we lower our flags to half staff for Paris, when we wouldn't stand by Beirut or Garissa or Sfax or Mogadishu, because Paris is The City We All Think We'd Love to Visit One Day, and those other places not as much.

Their booms and screams and torrents happen beyond our capacity to care.

Now we go to our horrible and predictable corners. We declare war and wage secret missions. Twenty-four U.S. governors say they will not accept Syrian refugees into their states, because if there's a lesson in interning people of Japanese descent during World War II, it's that all Japanese everywhere carried plans to destroy America. Was that the lesson? It was so long ago.

(Alabama's new motto: Whatever's Latin for "The terrorists have won.")

President-apparent Donald Trump pandered pondered that the massacre wouldn't have happened if everybody had been armed, explaining that bad guys glow a certain color when they're doing bad things, so they're easy to spot and kill in a crowd bristling with guns; no fuss, no muss. Third-time's-the-charm-President Jeb Bush said he'd take in Christian refugees but not Muslims. Revisionist-historian-President Ted Cruz says it's not likely Christians would commit terrorism.

Everybody gets to use religion as a cudgel to justify their actions, as everyone has through history, to hate or compartmentalize or steal or kill. Because your beliefs are inferior and you by extension are worthless. My beliefs say so. Or imply so. What's the difference?

We take for granted what we learn on the news, knowing in the past that authorities have been wrong about what they announce, frequently knowingly and willfully wrong, and what they say may not be what really is, which we learn long after, at great and terrible cost.

We once again become afraid to die and afraid to live.

I can't write about Paris.

Fruit of the vindication

Forget politics. Forget child tax credits or the lunatic photo-op of pushing 11 million across the border. Enough but-but-Benghazi! and titanic comb-overs. No more grain-fed Egyptian pyramids. No more about the plain red cups.

Let's focus on what really matters:

I'm right about the folly of wine.

Overwhelming evidence has just come to light — well, this is from May, but I was distracted by all the war and pestilence and refugee crises and other trivia.

Not Vox, the news site where I learned this six months after the fact. Vox had its priorities straight.

Vox has blown the lid off this scandal: People wrongly buy more expensive wine because they think it's better. And it isn't.

I have been trying to warn the world about wine time and again, and I've been marginalized and ignored — mostly ignored — for it.

Maybe nobody took me seriously when I said all wine comes from one municipal tank somewhere near Modesto, and that the flavor and nuance of wine comes from the power of wine servers to suggest this wine tastes different or better than that wine.

But the world is going to listen to me now!

In something called Vox Observatory, Vox reported "Expensive Wine is for Suckers," and had its staff members taste three Cabernet Sauvignon wines, one $8, one $14 and one $43.

The most expensive is a 2011 Honig Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley," explained the video voiceover. "Wine Spectator Magazine rated it "Outstanding." And it costs five times more than the ($8) one on the right."

(The video shows Wine Spectator Magazine's 93 out of 100 score for the wine, and its opinion, "Extremely well done for the vintage, with style and panache."

"So," says the narrator, "does it taste five times better?"

Vox staffers gave the same average rating for the cheapest and most expensive wines in this taste test. This is consistent with a 2008 study that compiled more than 6000 blind tastings from 17 events across the United States.

"It found that unless they had undergone wine training, people didn't actually enjoy the taste of expensive wines," said the narrator. "In fact, they enjoyed them slightly less."

See?! Education, man, it's only gonna get you in trouble.

Vox implicates the power of suggestion, specifically the 2004 movie Sideways (great movie, even if you don't like wine; plus, you get to see the places where I grew up, in the proper light), which skyrocketed sales of Pinot Noir over other red wines, based on Paul Giamatti's character's fussy adoration of the variety ("That's 100 percent Pinot Noir. Single vineyard; they don't even make it anymore.").

Conversely, his character's infamous trashing of Merlot damaged sales of that variety.

Who judges what's good in wine? Why, wine judges! But Vox pointed to a study that showed not only are professional judges so inconsistent they cancel out each other, but their awarding of gold medals to wines are statistically no different than the awarding of gold medals by random chance.

Judges aren't even good judges of their own tastes. When some judges were secretly given the same wine to taste three times, only one in 10 gave it the same medal each time, Vox reported.

Not all professional critics from wine publications taste the products blindly, and are privy to the wines' prices. An Australian study Vox cited showed wine tasters consistently preferring the most expensive of wines selected, even though though the creators of the study had been adding acid to the most expensive wine to make it taste worse.

Another study even strapped wine tasters to brain wave machines, and gave them the same wine to drink. When told one of the wine was nine times more expensive than the other, brain wave activity increased in pleasure centers for taste and smell.

"So, expensive wines may taste better after all," said the narrator, "as long as you know they're expensive."

That's not quite the conclusion I draw. I say winemakers use the most cynical selling point — unmitigated profit from arbitrary pricing — to bamboozle wine drinkers, who must. have. their. wine!

I'm not against wine. I don't like it, but I don't care if others do. What I can't stand is the pretense and flim-flam and mind-meld that goes into the selling of wine.

Even wine expert and former Sacramento Bee TV critic Rick Kushman says the fuss over wine is ridiculous.

"There's two things you need to know with wine," Kushman told local public radio yesterday. "How to get the cork out, and which end of the bottle to drink from. After that, it's all minor."

Here's what I want wineries and restaurants to do: Simply give someone a glass of wine. Let the patron drink and enjoy, or not; if the patron wants to know things about the wine — what grape, where grown, how long in the barrel — despite the overwhelming evidence that it's been sitting in a giant tank with all the other wine — then the patron can ask. Otherwise, live and let freaking live.

But enough with the sell job. And enough with the arbitrary prices.

Idiot American

This is more like it: Plenty of information about the designer, Chris Bilheimer,
who has made his mark in a wide array of rock visuals in the last couple of
decades. Usually the part about graphic design is hidden away, as if the
musicians either don't want listeners to know, or want to imply that maybe
the musicians created the art too. This design not only evokes Saul Bass, but
feels like two iterations before the final art, shapes just a tad too awkward
and close together. I would have fussed with it more. But what do I know?

My apologies for submitting the tardiest music review ever.

I like "American Idiot" by Green Day.

(Wait, wasn't that, like, last century?)

OK, you know what? Let's call it a music appreciation instead. I think that's what it's called when no one really wants your opinion of the arts, or when every story has already been written about a recently deceased celebrity, but you write something anyway.

Because I'm not writing this to say you should like it too.

A hater of music reviews, I'm not about to do unto you what I wouldn't want done to me.

Music has to be the most subjective subject there is, rendering music reviews useless to me. No muscle of a writer's description is going to make me buy music, because the writer can't quite qualify why the music appeals.

It could be, and usually is, nothing to do with beat or structure or the front man's voice. It could have everything to do, and usually does, with my geographical and psychological place when I encounter the music.

Music love is an accidental thing. It is snuck upon you while you're doing other things. So it was when I first heard Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" in the days when if you wanted to watch TV, you had to watch what your parents wanted to watch. They wanted to watch something that showcased Copland, and after that I wanted to hear everything else he wrote.

Tom Waits sang my angst over long frustrating winter nights researching a project when I was a newspaper reporter. He always brings me back to those nights.

Caught up in The Colbert Report's final goodbye, I got caught up in "Holland 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel (album cover art also by Chris Bilheimer), and the possible reason Stephen Colbert chose it as the last sounds we heard.

"Sweet Disposition" by The Temper Trap is a song I never would have come by, except for its use as the soundtrack for the video of a swim in which I got to take part, and the music is ingrained in me.

No music review imploring me to listen to those pieces would have succeeded.

I also understand the irony in linking these songs here, because your music tastes are scattershot, defy reason, and may even be embarrassing, like mine, and you prefer not to be spoon-fed but have the music find you accidentally. But what the heck; the link function is easy and available, so why not use it, am I right?

Our son bought American Idiot when he was in high school. He bought it electronically as a good olf-fashioned CD 11 years ago, from iTunes™® I'm sure. I bought mine 11 years later as I always have, browsing the bins at a used-records store.

I didn't know much about Green Day at the time, but trusted his exploration. I teased that Green Day was part of UBT (Unified Band Theory), my idea that all the music he was listening to came from one band, relabeled and packaged for a different audience, the only tell being the lead singer with the odd Valley-Boy-slightly-Australian pronunciation of certain words.

I'm not Green Day's audience, nowhere close. Even when I fit the demographic long ago, I wasn't into sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. I didn't, and wouldn't, go to concerts.

And yet …

I appreciate what Green Day is saying and playing here. Call it punk-pop (here is where I betray my weakness as a music reviewer, because I don't know what I'm talking about), powerful guitar and explosive drums but with simple, infectious melody.

I appreciate the rage displayed in American Idiot, the anger and pain of suburban kids trying to get through their screwed-up world. The video made for the suite "Jesus of Suburbia,"  (NSFW I guess) doesn't feel like actors playing confused and untethered teenagers, but like real kids opening the dented door to their messed up lives.

I feel their pain, and attach the sound to my own frustrations, however different.

I appreciate the energy with which Green Day delivers its message. YouTube®™ has put me close to the concert stage I wouldn't get near in person, and I get to see the manic drive as Green Day performs, all rockstar poses, windmill arms and ridiculously wide stances and twisted faces. I couldn't tell you whether lead guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre´ Cool are personas or their real selves, or some of both, but they don't hold anything back. You paid your ticket, they're going to give you a show.

American Idiot is written like a rock opera, its songs tracing a story thread of young people in the time of George W. Bush and Iraq War II and the toppling economy, all of its dislocation and anger and hopelessness and redemption and resignation.

Which may be why it's still being performed as an actual rock opera, Green Day having turned its collection into a Broadway musical (where the actors do feel like actors, play-acting as disaffected young people).

The song-story suits me at the moment. The CD rests in my car stereo, ready to blare when National Public Radio recycles a story for the third time, or sports talk radio waxes eloquent about the 3-4 defense. Or when I just want to swing the windmill arms of my mind.

It'll be there until something new accidentally comes along.

Artist's rendering

It came as quite a shock last week when one of open-water swimming's leading voices — and most thoughtful critics — announced he was quitting the sport.

He is Donal Buckley, though most know him as LoneSwimmer, the moniker under which he blogs about everything swimming. Who knew there was so much to say about one subject, but Buckley does did with great energy and eloquence.

An accomplished marathon swimmer, Buckley wrote how-tos about swimming in pools and oceans, reading tides, nutrition for different purposes, training for marathon swims, equipping properly, swimming safely alone, acclimating to cold water, you name it.

He wrote with poignant self-deprecation about his own swimming misadventures, and with piercing scorn about aspects of the sport he found distasteful or dangerous, including the fairly new sport of ice swimming.

He wrote so gorgeously of his home waters off County Cork in southern Ireland that I'm sure swimmers have flocked there to see for themselves. I certainly want to go, based on what he's written.

But last week the swimming writer who tags his blog with "Who dares swims," dares not to swim any more.

"My days of being an open water swimmer are over," Buckley began. "The sea is lost to me now and I don’t think I can ever go back."

I may have given away the reason with my illustration.

Long story short — and you really have to read this, swimmer or no — Buckley was ending his swimming routine for the season anyway. It was dark, the swells gave pause, and he was swimming alone through a sea cave one last time before fading day kept him out again until spring.

Maybe he had become complacent to the dangers of the cave, swimming by himself as he often does, but told of still being aware of how precise he must be, how mindful of how the water plays through the entrance, even with heavy chop, so that he can get in without hurting himself on the reefs.

Once in, he told of going through his usual routine to calm himself, of planning his exit, of taking account of factors in the dark waters and dancing dim light of the cave:

"The faint light bouncing past two outcropping rocks knocked out the dark adaptation of my eyes as I looked back to the cave And in front of the table rock, into a pair of eyes.

"It wasn’t a seal. I tell you I know it wasn’t a seal. Some people are terrified of being in the water near a seal, and I’m not one. I’ve swum past rocks with seals on them, had them pop up in front of me or seen them behind me or behind others in the water, seen them from kayaks and boats and land. A seal is as recognisable (sic) as a dog.

"Seals don’t have large faintly luminous eyes and no obvious nose. Seals don’t look long and thin and scaly and somehow hard. Seals don’t have a head that tapers to a bony ridge or crest.

"Seals don’t have eyes that evaluate you. That do more than see you, that look at you. That judge you, and find you insufficient.

"Seals don’t have hands."

Next he described the terror of trying to escape this being, of the water like so much sand under his flailing arms, giving him no traction to the exit through the other end of the cave, before the being could overtake him.

You'll just have to read what happened. It is something Ray Bradbury might have written. Buckley invokes H.P. Lovecraft by name.

This thing I drew may not be what he saw, but it's what I saw through Buckley's words. Illustrations are bound to ruin things for others' imaginations, I know, but I just had to draw what Buckley had conjured in me. I just had to.

One of Buckley's blog followers, who shared this post with various online swimming communities, noted the date of the post, Oct. 31.

We'll just see, the follower said, if LoneSwimmer ever posts again.

Influence peddler

Five hundred hashmarks, it turns out, takes a very long time to make.

This is blog post No. 500.

High time, then, to examine how I've done in changing the world from my little virtual outpost these last five years.

Not all of these posts have been phoned in. Not even most. Oh, they comprise so much navel gazing, of course, but almost always in thoughtful consideration of the fuzz therein. Occasionally I have looked beyond myself, out into the crazy beautiful stinking tragic foregone world, rolled this blog into a megaphone and used it to shout at the world: Hey, fix that!

And how did that turn out?

Let us review: I, in chronological order:

• Got Jerry Brown elected governor. That has turned out rather well, especially considering the Schwarzenator he replaced. Third time being the charm, Brown is the older crank caretaker who doesn't really care what you or I think. He loves high-speed rail despite the cost, wants to build tunnels shoveling precious water to Southern California with greater ease, and could possibly be on the new Bay Bridge when its corroded cables snap in a massive CG effect gone real, but other than that, a nice change of pace. The guy who'd rather live in an unfurnished apartment his first time around now will move into the old haunted governor's mansion in which he was raised, remodeled with oodles of high-end restaurant-style kitchen appliances, but we'll give him his due.
  
• Stopped our sycophantic Yankee adoration of the British royal family. We only pay attention to Queen Elizabeth and her kith and kin now when one of them has a baby. Or gets engaged. Or married. Or breaks off the engagement. Or divorces. Or says something inappropriate. Or breathes.
  
  Of course, I showed the world how to make money off it all.
  
• Exposed the great wine fraud. It all comes from one source, and "winemakers" use the power of suggestion to get you to believe different "wine" "varieties" taste different from others. Again, you're welcome.
  
• Ended war in our time.
  
• Sustained the Occupy Wall Street movement by sheer force of will, and reduced the owners of our money to the petty government-sponsored thieves that they are. Our political landscape is forever changed. You're welcome, once more.
  
• Gave veterans and public education all the resources they need.
  
• Finally saw the light and heard the screams, and stopped war in Syria. ("Ending war in our time" still results in stubborn little skirmishes, like spot fires). Oh, and turned the tide for equality in marriage. Apathy is over!
  
  Though — funny thing! — war was harder to end than I had given it credit. But I finally made our leaders tell the truth. President Obama thanked me for making it so, which was nice.
  
• Changed Scouting policy to include Scouts who are gay.
  
  All attempts at facetious self-deprecation aside, I feel like I was on the "right side of history" on this subject, or at least in the right place at the right time. It's one of the few issues for which I can speak from the heart, about which I know more than a little.
  
  Of course, I don't really expect to move anyone's thinking on anything I write here, just to turn my own thoughts to concrete. Part of me — the ego part — couldn't help but wonder if I could, somehow, compel someone to see another side of an issue. Maybe that's why I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote — and wrote — on the matter.
  
• Stole Christmas. And good riddance!
  
• Ended gun violence … stopped the unbelievable tragedy … before it could get any worse … mopped up the blood … so much blood … really, a lot of blood. But now it's mopped up. All is well.
  
• Made government transparent. And not just that thing President Obama did, where he said his government is transparent when he meant, no, it is not. Now our overseers are exposed to daylight.
  
• Shortly after, brought peace and common sense to our government.
  
• Sorted out our official religion, the National Football League. Now we play nice.
  
• Set our minds free.
  
• Ended drought in California. Taught homeowners the error of their false bounty.
  
• Trumped presidential aspirations, for the good of the country.

It stands to reason all this saving the world stuff can be overwhelming to process, which is why I peppered the blog with bits about swimming and Giants baseball and paid doodles.

Now, if you'll excuse me, time to work on No. 501. But really, what problem could possibly be left to solve?

That is, except for determining if this counts as a blog post.