Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Google is terminating the technology that I use to publish this blog. It's free technology so I can't complain too much, but I'm busy and changing things takes time. My choices are migrate this blog to Google's new technology, abandon this blog altogether, or create a completely new blog using new technology. Given I'm not taking the time to post much it might make more sense to abandon this spot of e-turf.

Even though I work as an information technology engineer, I am weary of the constant need to change everything. Just when you get something working, then it needs to be ripped apart and reassembled. It's a racket if you think about it. IT workers create obsolescence so more work will be created and they will keep their jobs. In the meantime, we're working 50 hour weeks when we're lucky, more when we're not. When is enough going to be enough?

Death of a Cool Radio Station

I used to brag to my friends outside of San Diego about radio station 94.9 - they had lots of long time local DJs who actually knew the San Diego local music scene. I mean the real San Diego music scene. Bands like Hair Theater and Crash Worship and Crawdaddy and the newer ones as well (of which I'm too old and not cool enough to know). DJs who were at the shows at Iguanas or the Che Cafe. Every morning they had a local band of the day and played a song of the local band's on the radio.

That's gone. Mike Halloran got canned or let go or who knows what a week or two ago. Today I find out they're bringing the hack loud mouth dj from 105.3 to 94.9. So now we get to listen to 13 year old boy humor in the morning - joy oh joy. And it turns out that he and his staff need to pass a drug test. What kind of bullshit is that? Why does a rock n roll DJ need to pass a drug test?

Adios 94.9. I've switched to classical for now until I can find a radio station that supports local music, plays local music and doesn't submit it's employees to drug tests. Lets be real. What's the worst thing a stoned out DJ will do? I know, play good music.

Hope is on the horizon. The great crew at Activist San Diego are trying to create a community FM Radio Station. I don't know if it will reach into the City of San Diego, but if you're interested, check out their website and let them know you support their efforts.

Global Warming And Friends

Global warming is yet one more in a long line of issues that seems to divide people into believers and naysayers. As a person who firmly believes you don't get something for nothing, burning fossil fuels is an obvious no no. How can you burn up energy in 100 years that it took untold millions of years to creating without violating the something for nothing rule? At the very least, we run out of oil and need to find other ways to live in harmony with the planet. Some people argue that American lifestyles require high carbon fuel usage - but at the end of the day that's what's killing us. We're all fat because we're living off the energy of dinosaurs from a million years ago instead of the calories we consumed today.

I don't know what the answer is other than to go forward to the past - to a world were human energy is important, people lived in self-sustaining communities and our homes aren't filled with toxic crap from China. At the end of the day, buying stuff isn't bringing me happiness, hugs are.

In the spirit of local activism and global warming, I want to take a few minutes to share some of my local heroes. Carolyn Chase and Chris Klein - the amazing duo - who live a few blocks from me and who started the huge Earth Fair that happens every year in Balboa Park. I've volunteered with Earth Fair, am saving a creek thanks to a non-profit these two amazing people started, San Diego Earth Works, and have hope that sane decentralized transportation will become a reality in San Diego thanks to Move San Diego - another group with ties to the amazing duo. If it's environmentally progressive in San Diego, this is Chris and Carolyn are your connection.

The dynamic duo is in Copenhagen at the United Nations Conference on Climate change and have put together a website to allow those of us stuck in our mundane lives to hear some of the debates between regular people like ourselves.

Thank you Chris and Carolyn for all you do. You rock.

***From an email from Chris****************

Carolyn Chase and I are in Copenhagen at the UN conference on climate change (COP15). Officially, we are registered delegates of the Sierra Club, of which we are both life members.

We puzzled over how best to make a difference at the conference. We decided to create a special website, Message to America, and post videos of other delegates speaking their "message to America." We have also posted photos, and and there is a blog of updates, quotes, special notes, etc.

The goal is to give you a better picture of the kind of world citizens who are attending the event, and how critical this issue is for much of the world. It's one thing to deal with figures and technical abstractions. It's another to listen to a woman who's island is in danger of slipping beneath the waves.

**************End email from Chris*******************

On Being a Girl

In 5th grade, girls couldn't wear pants. In 6th grade we could wear pants every other Thursday as long as they weren't Levi's brand jeans. By 7th grade, pants were a daily occurrence. In 7th and 8th grade we had separate PE classes for boys and girls. By 9th grade we were co-ed.

I've spent a lot of years doing things that "girls don't do." When I had a life (before my mom's stroke) I used to work on cars, slam dance in the mosh pit and surf (a lot). I also liked to sew my own clothes, bake my own muffins, kiss boys and garden.

I'm still here only now I work with computers (me and the guys on my team, but the other team has a couple of girls who wore pants to school starting in Kindergarten and didn't even know there was a time when that wasn't allowed). I still surf from time to time. Last night I saw friends surfing together and sharing stories with each other about the inside wave they caught or the one that caught them by surprise and bounced them off the sand. They looked so happy together and I wanted that. They were all male.

I have female friends that will go to the beach with me, but they don't surf. I've had that story sharing with male companions before, during and after surfing, but I've never in my entire life gone surfing with a woman and the worst thing is I just realized that yesterday.

When I started surfing, I was recruited for Surfrider's Paddle for Clean Water because I was a woman surfer and they needed more balanced energy. I tried to explain that I suck, wipe out and am basically not physically coordinated, but off I went to paddle around the pier at the second paddle in OB and I've been doing it ever since. These days it's families, young girls, older women and me.

Since I've been locked in a house taking care of my mom, San Diego Surf Ladies has come into existence to foster that type of camaraderie with other surfing women - although they are quite a bit younger than I am. When I go to the beach, I sees women in their twenties surfing in groups of 2 or 3 and having fun as only good friends can do out on the water.

All these things make me very happy. But maybe before I die, I could meet just one woman my age who likes to surf Black's (and maybe isn't that great) to bond with and walk up the road telling stories of the triple bounce off the bottom or the 6 foot wave she caught because she was too scared not to take the ride.

Thought for the day

Went Surfing at Black's. Got pounded. Exhausted but happy.

On the trail up someone had posted a sign, "Don't go with the flow, be the flow."

~ ~ Words to live by ~ ~

Full Disclosure

In the interest of full disclosure, I went to Black's on Friday with an out of town friend (who used to be a local) and the lifeguard tower was gone. My first thought was that I was loosing my mind, but in the interest of proving myself sane, we went and talked to the lifeguards - the ones in the palm thatched hut. Apparently Hollywood was filming a television pilot and had the lifeguard tower on the sand (with 24/7 guards) for a few days.

The rest of the story is true, just this slight update. And thankfully the beach is once again lifeguard tower free.

Friday night the water was incredibly warm, the dolphins came out and frolicked in the surf and even did a few back flips for us, and I caught a couple of waves.

Life is good.

An Unstable Bluff

In more cliched terms, what I have to talk about is a slippery slope, but in the case of this particular cliche, we're also talking about sandstone bluffs and what was once one of the last wild beaches in Southern California.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there was a beach in San Diego where nudity was 100% legal. Black's Beach is at the bottom of a bluff. On top of the bluff are bizillion dollar homes for the rich and not so famous. Just to the south is the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the biggest children's beach I know of (aka La Jolla Shores).

In 1977, voters approved an ordinance banning nudity on the city owned portion of the beach (the northern chunk of Black's falls under state jurisdiction). Life went on as before with people frolicking naked along the entire stretch of Black's Beach. Technically illegal, but in practice Black's was a nude beach. From volleyball to surfing, all the in nude, or in swimsuits if you preferred.

Black's was great. No hordes of touristsfrom Iowa and Nebraska only the nudist variety. Great surfing. Community. Full moons on the beach and a steady stream of dolphins feeding offshore.

A few years back, the City of San Diego decided to start enforcing the wearing of swimsuits on their portion of the beach. I don't know all the details of why, but it probably has something to do with the bizillionaires who live in the neighborhood - and what bizillionaires want, bizillionaires get. The state continues to allow nudity on it's portion of the beach.

At first, life rolled as it has at Black's. But then things started going downhill. First hordes of freshman UCSD students started appearing on the beach in swimsuits with IPods. Then tourists from the hotels in the area started wandering around. Not nudist tourists, but tourists who pay $500 a night for a motel room and drive Mercedes tourists - the death of any cool place.

Then last year, the families started showing up with lots of small children and strollers. I'm not talking hippie families whose idea of a mini-vacation is spending the night on the beach, but people with jobs and brand new cars. People who think that their kids are more important than anything else and who completely miss the idea of a wild beach where you manage on your own and with your friends.

Then on Monday the previously unthinkable happened - the City of San Diego installed a lifeguard tower to watch, I'm assuming, over those middle class families and their children. It's not like we haven't had lifeguards on Black's for ever - we have (or at least almost forever). But the lifeguards used to come in with a camper on the back of a pickup truck, or hung out under their palm thatched shade structure they built on the cliffs. Like everything else about Black's, it was homegrown, not part of some big industry.

I feel violated - like something amazingly precious has been destroyed so people don't have to be responsible for keeping their own kids from drowning. I know the clock never turns counter clockwise, but I wish we could go back to the old Black's full of fat naked men with tiny penises and surfers sleeping on the beach so they could be up for the first light and catch those early waves with the dolphins.

In mourning.

Happiness Lives in the Body

Especially when the body is surfing at Black's Beach at sunset on a warm summers evening with dolphins cavorting outside the break and pelicans swooping across the surf. Happiness is having the energy to catch wave after wave and wipe out, get smacked in the jaw by my board, taste the warm ocean water on my skin and feel my muscles working with joy.

All the best things in life involve touch and smell and exerting my body. I love the climb up the hill, smelling the sweet sage on the bluffs and listening to my breath coming hard and heavy as my thigh muscles power me up the hill.

Happiness doesn't come often enough but when it comes, it is all there as if every moment of life felt this fantastic.

The Listening Gathering

Two years ago, en route to the Arkansas gathering, I decided that I would spend most of time my time listening. I was coming in late, not bringing much and figured I wouldn't have any major projects to deal with so I would sit and listen to what others had to say. Well Arkansas was full of mud and while I spent some time listening, it wasn't until this year that I got my listening gathering.

From formal councils to informal circles, I listened. Main Council. Shanti Sena Council. Hearing the message of the Hopi woman. Shitter digging parties. It was beautiful and I listened a lot. Seems like at this point in my life, listening is what I need to be doing.

The World of Online Dating

Given my limited opportunities to mingle with members of the opposite sex, I've been making fores into the world of online dating. It's all very troubling for a woman whose total dating experience consists of one ill fated date in high school (details not for public consumption). Since high school, I've met partners while living life and things have just clicked. Until recently that is.

Now I'm middle aged and it's harder to meet men in the normal course of my day. I won't date anyone I work with, I have a very limited social life so I don't get out much these days, and all the men I have crushes on don't know about my feelings - and sometimes I don't know. Some of them I've had crushes on for 10 years (through other relationships) so at this point, I'm not sure if I'm just used to having a crush on them or if I still really feel attracted.

I don't know how to flirt anymore and I'm not sure what the hell I'm doing and my once upon a time awesome body ain't what it used to be. If any of you out there have landed at this point in your life and you want to share war stories, I'm all ears.

Dying from Alcoholism

In this year's season of dying, I just lost another friend. The mother of my first long term committed relationship significant other, passion of my youth. His mother, like my father, died from alcoholism. Too many people dying from alcoholism, yet I take it as a given. I grew up in a world where grownups drank a lot. I don't think that at the time, they considered it to much. It just was. These days we consider drinking yourself into the grave a tragedy - and one that should be prevented if possible. But then again, my father drank himself into the grave at 76. He was basically healthy until a couple of months before he died and then he went quickly - a blessing for him and his family.

Most of the people I know who have problems with alcohol have problems with the world. They are lonely or don't fit in or are stressed by the de-humanization of life in the USA. Some of them suffered destruction of the world they thought they were going to lead due to war. Some of them broke ground in changing the world and weren't able to live with the changes.

As a child of an alcoholic I'm supposed to have issues but I can't tell, because I don't think I've ever had a friend who wasn't the child of an alcoholic.

In the end we all die. I may have been hanging out with the waiting to die set far too long, but going quickly is the key. Of course a sudden heart attack while gardening or walking in the woods is best, but even the swift death of liver failure isn't bad. At least it's only a couple of months, not a couple of decades.

Shirin - thanks for everything.

The Deaths Are Piling Up

My friend Sailor passed away on Thursday. I had known him since 1994 or 1995. My best early memory of him was at a regional gathering we did in Imperial County around that time. I was committed to creating an alcohol free front gate. My van and my boyfriend's truck were at right angles with a tarp strung between. This was the front gate shade space.

Sailor came over to sit with us and he brought a beer. Now what you have to understand is that the Sailor I know hates drunken energy at front gate, but he had to be a rabble rouser and push my buttons. Since he and my boyfriend had been friends for a long time at that point, we all got into a bit. I don't remember if Sailor got rid of the beer or not. That's the Sailor I knew. Full of contradictions, always wanting to be a contrarian, but his heart was in the right place. Hey Sailor - keep up the good work.

Bob Nanninga was not a friend so much as a fixture in local politics. He was the gay, green, revolutionary voice of opposition in white new age Encinitas. I met him briefly once or twice at meetings in the way it happens when you're talking to someone else and that person says "by the way do you know...". Since Bob's reputation preceded him, I felt on firm ground saying, "I know of you." What's not being said is that he died of pneumonia (code word for AIDS I'm guessing as who else dies of pneumonia in their 40s). Remember to use a condom folks. AIDS isn't going anywhere.

For more insight into what San Diego will be missing, read Logan Jenkins' column or The Coast News' Obituary.

January Mold

Am I the only person who suddenly notices mold in the corners come January? The corner behind my desk starts growing mold in January. The wall behind my mom's bed. The window sill in the living room behind the couch. I swear it's not there in December. But suddenly one day in January every year I notice spots of mold. It seems to surface about the time I'm getting worn out by the cold and never being home when the sun is shinning. It's a long six weeks of cold weather we get in San Diego that keep the windows closed and the heater running.

I can't get to spring until I rid the corners of mold. Not that it's a big job, but fitting it into an overworked schedule is tough. It bumps the project to clean out the kitchen cabinets and has side tracked my filing job.

I long to be done with January mold and have my arms in the soil planting brocolli.