On Sabbatical

More sooner or later...

Unrealistic Expectations

I found myself lecturing a whole bus full of people on the subject of unrealistic expectations the other night. Not what I’d planned and not one of my best moments but these things happen. What can you do?  Life is to be lived and it’s unscripted. Sometimes you have to speak up and try to electrify the somnambulant moment with a few choice words.

Let me explain. I was trying to get down town. I had tickets for a lecture by Richard Dawkins. It began at 6pm so by the time I finished work at 4.30pm in La Jolla I had no time to waste. With the unpredictable Friday traffic and parking I figured my best option was to take the bus. The Downtown Express leaves campus at 4.39pm and the schedule promised a downtown arrival by 5:17pm via a brief stop at the Old Town Transit Terminal.  It sounded perfect but the Padres were playing the Dodgers in the season opener at Petco Park and it was also Good Friday so there could be a cruise ship or aircraft carrier at the port so I suspected it might be a little tight.

The bus arrived on schedule and I was surprised to find the freeway pretty clear. In no time at all I was lifting my eyes out my book to gaze at the sparkling water and palm trees of Mission Bay. It was ten to five, ‘Great’, I thought, ‘I might even be able to squeeze in a quick pint in the Ulysses Grant.’

I realize now this was an unrealistic expectation. Public travel is often hindered for no good reason by the public. Every bus or train around the world usually contains at least one mad person and at least one dangerous idiot. I don’t know why this is, it might be a ploy by automobile companies to ensure solo car use, it might be a Federal requirement or it might just be the statistical social odds, whatever it is the ‘public’ part of ‘public travel’ often gets in the way and causes delays.

Recently, I was held up by an obese lady on a motorized scooter who was too heavy for the hydraulic lift used to carry disabled people on board. I had to wait for twenty minutes while she was raised up and down a half a foot while the driver tried to make it work. In the end she got off the scooter and gingerly climbed onto the bus through the front doors like the rest of us. The lift was fine bringing the bike on board without her.

Several times in London I’ve missed appointments because of suicides on the tube. The train would stop and word would arrive of a jumper on the track at Waterloo or Kentish town. There would be a group sigh and 1.2 seconds of socially permitted passenger interaction involving no more than eye rolling before the shutters of English stoic etiquette encased us all again in silence. Sometimes there would be an electronic map available showing the hold up spread around the whole tube system in flashing red. It was hard not imagine the red as the suicide’s blood flowing on the tracks, filling up the deep underground veins of London from St. Pancreas to Shepherd’s Bush. 

We pulled into Old Town and fell back into my book. I was reading, ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ by James Hogg. It’s a gothic crime story from 1824, at its core is a fascinating study of religious fanaticism. It reminds me a lot of Crime and Punishment but with the added kick of being set in Edinburgh. I became consumed by a wonderful description of the justified sinner harassing his estranged elder brother at a tennis game and so it took a while for me to realize, as I turned page after page, that the bus had not been moving for some time. I looked at my watch. Somehow it was already 5.15pm, the time we supposed to be in the Gas Lamp District, and we were still in Old Town and the driver had turned off the engine.

There was a young man talking to the driver at the front of the bus. Some other passengers were slowly getting off with confusion on their faces. There had been no announcement. I went to the driver and asked her what the hold up was.

‘We’re waiting for the police,’ she said. ‘The woman in the purple hat hit him on the head with her bag.’

The young man had a sulky look on his face.

‘Are you ok?’ I asked.

‘Yes’ he said.

I looked around the bus for the woman in the purple hat. There was nobody that fit the description.‘So where is she?’

The driver pointed off across the station towards the metro stop. It was busy. The woman in the purple hat was long gone.

‘It looks like she got away,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should get off the bus and wait for the police and then we can continue downtown.’ The boy shook his head.

The driver spoke up, ‘I’ve been told to wait here until the police arrive.’

Amazing. I was stunned. There’d been a minor incident with what sounded like an unstable woman and now a whole bus full of people and countless others waiting down town were going to be held up for an indefinite period of time while a young man tried to get his pound of flesh for a blow to the head I could only deduce amounted to a cuff.

‘You do realize they could be hours?’ I said. The driver shrugged. People behind me asked what was going on. The young man, who was about eighteen or nineteen didn’t respond.

‘I don’t think you’ve had much experience of the police,’ I said. ‘But trust me on this. This is not going to be a high priority for them. They are not going to set up an incident room with a team of detectives…’

‘What’s going on?’ shouted someone from the back of the bus. It was then that I spoke to everyone, filling them in on the situation.

I can’t remember exactly what I said but I think I referred to the boy as ‘naïve’ and explained how we had to sit here until he had a learning moment with the police and realized he was not in an episode of CSI. I asked a couple of passengers who’d sat near to the boy what they’d seen and the incident had been so fleeting it had barely been noticed by anyone other than the victim. So, pontificating like Ignatius Reilly from ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ I expounded that the police are at best a social ideal and that reality renders them out numbered, under funded and riddled with the bitter and incompetent just like any large bureaucracy… At one point I also changed tack and tried to suggest the driver should speedily take the boy to the nearest hospital to have him checked for concussion…

I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish exactly. I think I hoped to get the boy to step off the bus and have the driver continue the route. It didn’t work and I kind of knew I would fail but I felt like I had to try. At twenty to six the next bus arrived and I boarded it with the rest of the passengers, leaving the young man and the driver alone on the other bus waiting for justice to arrive with all lights flashing.

I was late to the lecture but as luck would have it I didn’t miss a thing, since the start was delayed by protestors from the cult of Christ getting in the way and trying to engage everyone with their wacky ideas of a three-tiered universe and the ‘blood of the lamb’ washing away ‘our sins’ etc etc.

My unrealistic expectations, the young man’s unrealistic expectations and the Jesus freaks unrealistic expectations all kind of balanced out for me at the end like the cozy and lazy ending to a bad TV show or blog post.

Notes Towards a Holistic Index of Waterfalls

Most Beautiful and Frustrating:

McWay Falls, Big Sur, CA

One of the few constantly running beach waterfalls in California. McWay Falls at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park is located on a private beach surrounded by fences and signs proclaiming heavy fines for anyone who attempts to get closer than 500 feet.

Loudest Frog Chorus:

La Mina Falls, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

13 Species of Coqui frog live within El Yunque rainforest. Their competing choirs serenade you as you swim  in the series of waterfalls that run through the park.

Most Likely to be Bestrewn with Rainbows:

Vernal Falls, Yosemite National Park, CA 

If the sun is out, there will be rainbows on this frothy mist producing show off. Busy trail in the high season, lots of tourists breaking bones on the wet rocks while volunteer medics and park rangers shake their heads at the overwhelming variety of improper footwear on display. Fat squirrels and chipmunks beg food from picnickers. Half Dome towers above, leading you on and on to yet more beautiful vistas.

Most Significant in the History of Preservation:

Lower Yellowstone Falls, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming


When painted and sketched by Bolton boy Thomas Moran in 1871 from the vantage point now known as Artists Point there was no such thing as 'a national park'. His landscapes of the falls in the Grand Canyon wilderness of the Yellowstone were presented to Congress on the floor of the House of Representatives and so captured the mood of the nation that the first national park was established to preserve and protect this landscape forever.

Best Swimming after Drinking Mai Tais and Gorging on Chocolate Covered Macadamia Nuts:

Kilaniapia Falls, Hilo, Big Island, Hawaii

Get a room at the Inn, swim in your own private falls. Watch wild pigs grunt and frolic around the nearby nut trees.

Simply the Best:

Mooney Falls, Havasupai Indian Reservation, The Grand Canyon, Arizona

Your reward for a ten mile hike down the remote south west rim of the Grand Canyon is a series of ever more jaw dropping waterfalls you might think could only exist in a Pixar Animation about The Garden of Eden. The warmest, bluest water bubbles up from heated underground streams and flows through the canyon like silk. The hike down to Mooney Falls involves climbing through caves and hanging off bits of improvised ladder.

LOL Cats

Take down the missing posters

They litter the street

Mr. Cuddlepuss is now

A furry turd

At the bottom of the canyon

This is coyote country.

Lament not his passing

You were but his captor

He may even have willingly

Exchanged his life

For a few hours of freedom

In the great outdoors

Away from your maudlin embrace.

I know we see things differently

I know you were part of the group

Who kept changing the Wikipedia page

To read ‘Human Companions’

Rather than ‘Cat Owners’

But if I was to lock you up my house

And make you poo in a small gravel box

I don’t think you’d fight so hard

To call me a ‘companion’.

No, I will not lead you to the furry turd

The idea of you picking it up

And carrying it back to our building

Crying and concocting

Some deeply strange funeral ceremony

Near to the communal BBQ

Fills me with rage.

Wake up woman

This mawkish zoophilia

Is twisted and obscene

There are people everywhere

Waiting for your smile

And you won’t have to work so hard

To personify them

Since they are already infused

With deep human thoughts

And emotions.

Goodnight Seattle

Took a little trip to the Pacific North West a few days ago. Some people told me the place was cool. They were wrong. I now understand why Frasier doesn’t leave his apartment much in the TV show and it’s not because of the cost of outside broadcasts.

The city is so obviously the home of grunge. Never more has a city spawned a more apt music. The oppressive, dank cave-like atmosphere resonates the mood of distorted guitars and sad apathetic lyrics so perfectly I think Nirvana didn’t so much as record music as describe the tortuous effect of having to spend time in Seattle.

If you’re tired of London – the saying goes - you’re tired of life. If you’re tired of Seattle then you’re tired of the smell of fish and wet dog hair, the deification of Starbucks, miserable gloomy people and the angry homeless.

The supposedly beautiful and historic Pioneer Square was full of boarded up shops.

The Freemont Troll was being repaired from water damage.

There were locals in Seahawks hats waving placards in which Obama was portrayed as Adolph Hitler. OK, they could have been plants conjured for some tea-party rabble rousing and not locals but it didn’t add to the overall impression and their were people dropping money into their collection bins.

I was looking forward to seeing the Olympic Range and the San Juan Islands in the bay of the Puget Sound but it wasn’t possible. It was overcast and gray the whole time I was there. I questioned the locals, “the, clouds come in and sit on us for months,” said one poor chap in the Grand Central Bakery. There was a lost look in his eyes that said, ‘kill me now’.

Another friend who sometimes goes there for work told me the sun appeared one afternoon last year and everyone just left the office and went outside. The freak occurrence of nice weather was so rare – work abandonment was allowed and expected. People gathered on corners pointing at the sun and giggling.

At the famous Pikes Place Market the big draw is watching market traders dressed like deep-sea fishermen throw small and expensive packets of fish back and forth to each other like embarrassed teenagers forced to play hacky-sack for the old folks.

At the ‘Space Needle’ they wanted to charge us a hundred dollars to go up to the revolving restaurant to get a better look at the oppressive gray nothing, the industrial docklands, the frozen people marching about like the poor citizens of Pepperland after the attack by the Blue Meanies.

The Bardahl sign and the farmers market are not worth the trip to Ballard. Unless of course you’ve never seen a farmer’s market and can’t possibly imagine an old neon sign for an oil company.

I suppose it’s not all bad. Wild Ginger is as fine a restaurant as you’ll find. The Musiquarium at the Triple Door is a decent bar with live Jazz and Blues. The Arctic Club is a nice hotel. Stick to these if you have to go there.

The Biggest Losers

While spring-cleaning the TiVo last week I found we’d recorded the season finale of The Biggest Loser. It must have captured in error but as soon as I set it going I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The only reality show I usually have time for is Not Torture on Al Jazeera. Watching Republicans get water-boarded until they accept climate change and universal healthcare is remarkably cathartic but this final episode of Loser was pure TV gold.

If you don’t know the show, it’s essentially a chronicle of obese Americans crying about being fat and eating too much and wanting to lose weight. You can pretty much work out the whole show by watching the promos they run in any of the two million ad breaks that occur during live American sport broadcasts. Or so I thought.

For the season finale they travelled to a desert in Somalia for the big challenge. The fatties were made to hand out food aid to starving children and refugees. Ugh, those poor people. It’s sad and tragic, you’ve seen it all before; flies on their faces, distended bellies, and emaciated skeletal adults with eyes full of pain.

It’s truly a failure of humanity that the starving are still with us. I think people like to pretend we solved the world hunger problem in the 80’s or early 90’s, when the first wave of charity fatigue swept in and Kevin Carter committed suicide.

At first the contestants pitched in with the aid workers and distributed food to the starving but then the aid trucks drove away left them behind. The look of fear on their faces was priceless. The tears of pity for the children stopped and they began to get a little crazy. I paused it and went and got a beer and a little cold chicken.

The night passed with them huddled up next to a refugee camp crying in the dark and scaring each other with talk of lions and rebel soldiers and dysentery.

The next day the contestants had to help out the aid workers again, unloading sacks of grain in the hot African sun with only a handful of rice and an apple for breakfast. It was brutal and relentless and it went on and on and on. I’m sure the network producers planned it, by starving them like the refugees, but I was soon watching as one of the teams was caught on hidden camera stealing bags of Hershey Kisses for themselves from the aid trucks.

Yep, actually stealing food from starving children.

“It’s survival of the fittest,” said one of the contestants when confronted about the theft.

“No,” said the actor who played Tony Soprano who had been flown in as a surprise ‘special guest’ for some reason I couldn’t fathom, “It’s survival of the Fattest”.

Cue the dramatic music and tearful look of sorrow and recrimination.

Incredible. The world in a nutshell, right there. Over-consumption versus starvation in a one hour TV special. It was deep and deeply sick. My head is still spinning about it. Surely a new low, turning aid relief into the backdrop of a chintzy Reality TV show?

The whole world could be fed and clothed on a fraction of the money we choose to spend on our military and needless over consumption.

Of course you had to expect the riots across Africa and Middle East that followed the international airing of the show. The burning of the American flags, the viral footage of the fat American stealing chocolate from the mouths of refugees leading Hilary Clinton to apologize at the United Nations. Incredible.

I’m sure you missed it all however. The capitalist American media propaganda machine barely mentioned it at all. There was a two- paragraph story on it in Variety under the headline: ‘Biggest Loser Wins new season while causing International Incident’.

To make matters worse, the winning contestant turned out to be one of the chocolate thieves, much to the chagrin of the show's hosts.

Halloween 2011

One question I am often asked towards the end of October is: ‘Do you have Halloween in England?’

I’ve been asked this question and responded to it enough to realize that I am not being asked if the ancient pagan fall festivals like the Celtic Samhain that predate American culture and grew into what we now know as ‘Halloween’ exist over the pond but rather if groups of children dress up and go from door to door soliciting candy with the phrase ‘trick or treat’.

I do hear there is some trick or treating in the U.K. now but it is all still relatively small scale and has not really taken off so I answer ‘no’ and go on to explain:

‘We don’t do Halloween, we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night instead on 5^th of November and that fulfills our need for the pagan fall festival.”

This statement, if the enquirer is actually seeking a dialogue and not merely chattering along the soundtrack of their preselected thoughts, will provoke the further question: ‘What is Guy Fawkes night?’

I then explain that it is a night devoted to making an effigy of the Catholic Terrorist, Guy Fawkes, and burning him on a large bonfire as a warning against Papist imperialists.

At this point most people check out, sometimes voicing the thought that I might be making it up or stating that they, ‘never know when I’m joking’.

To give these people fair due, I do have a droll sense of humor that can bend towards the surreal. For example, I have been known to state with apparent sincerity that ‘Bjork’ is actually the Icelandic word for ‘shrill little troll’.  However, Guy Fawkes Night is real. I’ve just checked Wikipedia and it’s not a vivid delusion of my own concoction.  We called it Bonfire Night in my area as a child and many Guys were made and burned in my youth. Large public firework displays accompany the bonfires now. I also hear that things are changing and it’s becoming more like ‘Halloween’. The homemade bonfire toffee, the black chewy treacle drooly deliciousness of my youth, is being replaced by generic ghost and ghoul themed candies. Children are not building effigies as much as they once did and are not parading them around and asking strangers for ‘A penny for the Guy’ as is traditional.

The funny thing is, that while I know what people mean when they ask me about Halloween, namely the children and the masked promenading for candy I’ve never actually witnessed this myself in America even though I’ve lived here for many years. 

It is only now that I’ve had my first real experience of the great tradition. We’ve just never lived in a neighborhood with kids so it’s mostly been a time of adult costume parties with horror film themes. In Chicago we lived in the top floor of an enclosed apartment block. In San Francisco in ’96 it was a crazy street carnival but again, no children.

We’ve observed Dia de Los Muertos a couple of times in San Diego, once going over to Tijuana and last year touring the decorated graves in Old Town, but I’ve never really seen the full of convoy of kids going door to door with the old ‘trick or treat’ routine.

I’m am therefore very happy to report that it does in fact exist and it is as delightful, charming and hilarious as episodes of sitcoms and nostalgic Ron Howard movies would have you believe.

My friend JR lives in South Park and it’s a cute neighborhood with set back houses with lots of young families. He invited us over to sit on his porch and drink a beer and hand out candy with him. Last year he said it was so busy that he ran out of candy in an hour.

We arrived about seven and it was all in full flow. He’s a set designer and he’d covered the porch with fake cobwebs and the neighborhood was alive with people. Most of the costumes were home made. Mario Brothers were popular. There were a lot of Princesses. The young ones were the cutest, struggling up the steps in bumblebee stripes and having difficulty managing their stuck on wings. They often had to be coached in the one key line by grinning, doting parents.

‘And what are you tonight?’           

            ‘A cape.’

            ‘A CAPE!’

The things children say, it’s always funny. A confident fat kid arrived and declared he was Zoro but he looked more like a mariachi and was lacking a sword. One kid told us she was ‘A Chinese person’, which was odd and launched us into a big discussion about political correctness.

There was a toddler dressed as a shrimp who was just way too adorable.

JR wore a false beard and was trying to instill a new set of rules this year since he’d run out of candy last year because parents had helped themselves to the treat bowl. This did not seem right and in fact there was a definite awkwardness about some of the exchanges at times with people who were way too old to be collecting candy. So he and his roommate had got an adult basket together for those too old to get treats. The adult basket contained condoms. It was an interesting idea and it proved difficult to enforce since the parents really wanted candy and not condoms and many of the parents were middle-aged Latino women, with little English and were probably Catholic and had received instruction not to block their husband’s semen in any way, so it was kind of embarrassing to see the look on their faces when they discovered what they’d got.

‘I feel more comfortable giving condoms to the men’, said JR after a few dips in the adult box.

‘Yeah, you’ve got to be careful, you could get in trouble, some of the young women dressed as slutty vampires might actually be underage.’

The teenagers on the cusp of adult hood were my favorite group. They were all clearly struggling with the idea that trick or treating may not be ‘cool’ or age appropriate for them anymore and yet they obviously enjoyed being out at night with friends and getting free candy. You could see the cognitive dissonance at play on their faces, teens who normally put effort into trying to be accepted as older suddenly have to decide that they are in fact not older and it’s fine for them to dress up as a chipmunk and go and pick up mini chocolates from the neighbors.

JR put each of them through the whole ritual, making them deliver the trick or treat line and then forcing them to explain their costume. Each question was a challenge with the subtext, are you really old enough to be doing this?

One sulky teen told us she was ‘From the 80’s’. Another one said she had come as ‘Prom Night’.

But of course, it’s not really about the chocolate. Candy is cheap and plentiful, the teens were arriving with iphones, they could probably buy all the candy they could ever want. There is a lot more to Halloween, there’s something in the atmosphere of the night, the smiles, the costumes, the tradition. It’s social connectivity. It’s good, I get it