california

You Get a Proposition and You Get a Proposition

· November 4, 2024 · Musings · , , , , , , , , , · No Comments

You know what I thought would be a super funsy post here in the first week of November of a quadrennial year? Hey, how about a political post!

Wait, where are you going? 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to disparage your favored candidate. Besides, living in California, my vote in that particular election doesn’t mean shit.

But for those of you who just suffered through two months of presidential ads, I figured I’d give you a bit of schadenfreude delving into the crap we actually DO have to vote for in this dystopia: Ballot Measures.

Sometimes we get fun propositions, like if we can eat horse meat or if porn should have condoms. Unfortunately, this year there isn’t anything exciting. At least two of them seem to do absolutely nothing. Then there’s Prop. 34, which I’ve read about ten times and still can’t make heads or tails of. So if I need to suffer through this crap, how’s about we have a little fun?

We’ve got ten propositions this year, numbered, are you ready for this? 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36.

How the fuck did we come up with this numbering system? There are two ways a proposition can get on the ballot: regular people (meaning special interests) can collect signatures on initiatives or the legislature can put it there.

For most of our history, all of those various initiatives and legislative proposals were mixed together and numbered based on when they made it to the Secretary of State’s office. The numbers used to keep going up for 20 or 30 years, then reset, but they changed it to starting over once per decade because having propositions in the triple digits might “confuse voters.”

But ten non-sequential numbers are perfectly fine and not in any way intended to be confusing.

A couple decades ago, the legislature decided to designate some of its “most important” measures as Prop 1, or sometimes Prop 1A, to signal to us rubes “Hey, I’m super serial! This is important. Don’t bother reading it, just vote yes.”

The first “special” proposition I remember was Prop 1A that allowed Indian casinos. If it was just plopped in the middle of other propositions, the stupid voters might… forget they like gambling?

Later, in 2008, we had another Prop 1A that funded the high-speed rail. It was going to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles by 2020 at a price of less than $10 billion. As of this writing, the plan is to connect Merced and Bakersfield by 2035 at a price of more than $30 billion. 

Of course, once they’d established this idea of the legislature’s favorite projects getting special ballot designation, it was bound to get out of hand. How can a bunch of politicians determine which of their brilliant ideas is the MOST brilliant? Especially in the home of virtue signaling.

So we have finally reached maximum skullduggery and clustfuckery. The five single-digit propositions were all put on by the legislature. The double-digit propositions are all the voter-signature ones. In a state that allegedly believes in the power of the people, we’re gonna segregate the chosen propositions from those of the riffraff. 

It’s like every English teacher I’ve ever met, who can simultaneously believe that a) the masses have more validity than the elite and b) Wikipedia is the devil’s tool. 

So anyway, here’s my convoluted attempt to figure out our convoluted ballot.

Propositions 2 and 4. Bonds for schools (2) and a whole bunch of other shit (4). 

Ah, good ol’ bonds. The legislature’s always adding bonds. If you don’t know what a bond is, it’s debt. California loves them, because they pretend it’s free money. Unlike the federal government, the state government allegedly has a balanced budget. Passing bonds is like getting a mortgage. Get the fun stuff now, pay it off over the next thirty years, and your current budget is balanced! No drawbacks!

Unless you’re getting three new mortgages every November. That might not be sound financial advice.

They claim that bonds don’t raise taxes. In the short run, technically, that’s true. But the money needs to be paid back, which, follow me here, will require taxes. Or cuts to other areas of the budget. If you get a loan, it might not increase your costs this month or next month, but you eventually have to pay it back. 

My favorite bond debate of all time was in 1998, when the California government had a surplus of over $4 billion, but also “needed to” pass a $9 billion bond. When you figured the cost of interest and inflation, that $4 billion surplus could’ve bought pretty much everything that was in the bond. But why spend a one-time surplus on one-time expenditures?

I mean, if you’ve got a $5 bill in your hand and want to buy a candy bar, you’re not going to actually spend that $5 bill, are you? It’s MUCH smarter to charge that candy bar, prefereably on a credit card that’ll charges 20% interest or so. Then make the minimum payments for twenty years.

That 1998 bond was scheduled to be paid off over 25 years which, if my math is correct, means it just finished being paid off last year. So that would mean it’s a perfect time to pass a new bond. Except we also passed school bonds in 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2014. Which means my math probably isn’t correct, because obviously our schools are terrible. 

We’ve also passed over twenty other statewide bonds in the same timeframe. I thought schools were #1, but a little research shows that “Clean Water” is the clear winner, with SEVEN bonds being passed in the last twenty-five years. And if Proposition 4 passes, that’ll grow to eight, because one of the “whole bunch of other shit” I referenced above is water.

Holy crap, how bad is our water? And why is it that, after those seven bonds, I still am advised to use a filter?

Proposition 5. Lowering the bond vote for affordable housing and public infrastructure to 55. 

Woo-Hoo, more bonds! This is for local bonds, not statewide bonds. Historically, those required a 2/3 vote because, unlike the statewide bonds which magically have no affect on taxes or budgeting, local bonds are specifically paid for by property taxes. In theory, property taxes are predominantly paid by homeowners. Technically, many landlords will pass some of those tax increases on to renters, but probably not all of it. So to prevent the majority of voters from imposing a tax on a minority of voters, they required a supermajority threshold.

Ah, the good old days.

Nowadays we LOVE taxing small subsets of the population. Any time there’s a tax on smokers or small business owners or solar panel users, we pass it. But not boozers or porn watchers, because they’re probably in the majority. Taxes for thee, not for me.

I think we need a “Tax Someone Else” poo-bah who would ensure that nothing you get “free” from the government comes out of your own taxes. Gas tax collected in S.F. fixes roads in L.A. and vice versa. Because we love, love, love raising other people’s taxes.

That Grand Poo-Bah, of course, would get a million-dollar salary. And if I write the proposition, I should get the job.

I thought we had already lowered the vote threshold on local bonds down to 55, but I guess that was only for school bonds. I remember when that proposition was being debated, it was hilarious because both sides used the same argument. 

PRO: If this passes, eighty percent of ALL BONDS would pass.

CON: If this passes, EIGHTY PERCENT of all bonds would pass!!!

Proposition 3 (Right to Marriage) and Proposition 6 (Involuntary Solitude).

I’m putting these two together because they both seem to be virtue signals that won’t actually accomplish anything.

Proposition 3 would allow for gay marriage. Last time I checked, that was already legal across the country. And yes, I know Roe v Wade shows us that the Supreme Court might occasionally reverse itself, but most of the Supreme Court watchers I follow claim that Obergefell v. Hodges, which established gay marriage, is on much more solid ground than Roe was. Roe was always argued as a privacy issue, not an equal protection or unenumerated rights issue. I kinda feel it always should’ve been argued using the ninth amendment, not the fourteenth. 

Plus, guess what? Abortion is still legal in California. Just like, I assume, gay marriage will be if the Supreme Court reverses Obergefell. Yes, technically we have an old proposition on the books that defined marriage as between a man and a woman, but that was already being ignored long before the Supreme Court got involved. Herr Kommandant Newsom first made a name for himself when, as mayor of San Francisco, he proctored the wedding of some gay couples. Neither he nor they were arrested. Quite the opposite, he used it as a springboard to run for state office. 

Proposition 6 seems even more pointless by ending slavery in California.

Finally!

I can’t tell you how sad it is to see all the slaves wandering around downtown unaware that manumission was won after their state lost the War between the States a scant century and a half ag… wait a second, wasn’t California on the Union side? We never had any slaves here.

Shh… don’t tell the people who are working on California’s slavery reparations…

Oh, wait, our state constitution says that prisoners can work without pay. Back in the 1950s, they cleaned up highways and made license plates. Now the latter is done by machine and the former pretty much never happens. 

Are prisons still using slave labor? No. 

But because the constitution lists this as “involuntary solitude,” someone decided we ought to have a whole fucking proposition. Oh, it also says they can’t be punished for refusing to work. Can I get that to apply to my work, too?

The “For” argument claims they’ll still be able to work for “time credit,” but we’ll see. A similar “For” argument said we’d have a high-speed rail by now.

The voter’s guide says that no “No” argument was submitted. Of course not. Who’s going to make the argument for slavery? 

I will. Here: It’s an utterly pointless proposition. Prisoners aren’t being organized into slave crews. The only things you are voting for is to a) maybe make some “good time” work have to pass through more loopholes, and b) allowing some politician to pat themself on the back. 

Scratch that. Reverse them. The politician is the primary purpose here. The prisoners are merely props. 

Proposition 32. Minimum Wage

Okay, now we’re into the voter-originated measures. Starting with minimum wage.

In California, we raised minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour over the course of the late 2010s. Every January 1, it went up a dollar, finishing in 2022 when it finally hit the mandated $15.

Then it went up to $15.50, then $16.00. Because it’s now tied to inflation. 

This proposition would raise it to $17 this coming January, then $18 by the following January. Considering 18 is only a little more than 5% higher than 17, I kinda feel like there’s a really good chance the minimum wage would be up to $18 by 2026 anyway? 2027 at the latest?

Not to mention that we now pay fast food employees a minimum wage of $20. They probably wanted to “punish” the fast food companies, but they actually ended up making those job more desirable. I know our school has had trouble hiring cafeteria workers because it’s more or less the same job as fast food, but makes four dollars less per hour. 

Come to think of it, the fast food minimum wage was passed by the legislature, not the voters. They could raise the regular minimum wage, too.. Maybe this bill is attempting to return a level of parity to fast food/non-fast-food jobs.

Nah, ballot measures rarely go beyond the knee-jerk reaction.

Proposition 33. Rent Control

Great. Another proposition to make an amateur economist’s head explode.

This proposition won’t implement rent control, but it will make it easier for local governments to enact rent control.

They tried to pass this two years ago and we voted no. In fact, this might be the third time they’ve tried it. Those of us that remember the 1970s and 1980s will keep voting no, so they’re pretty much going to keep trying until enough of us die off. Then there’ll be a whole new generation that learns about how bad of an idea rent control is.

When San Francisco had rent control, there was a waiting list to rent. Which meant landlords had no incentive to make their rental unit livable. They also didn’t make enough in rent to cover the exorbitant price of pretty much everything in SF. 

It’s called supply and demand. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

So it would be a long string of “Toilet’s broken? Call a plumber. Heater broke? Fix it or freeze, what do I care? If you move out, I’ve got a three-year list of tenants ready to move in.”

I know free markets aren’t always the solution, but they do serve a purpose. Rent in San Francisco can’t cost the same as rent in Oakland, because people would rather live in San Francisco. 

Proposition 34 Prescription Drugs/What the Hell?

This one’s a beaut. I used to work at the state Capitol. I’ve followed California politics my whole life. If you write up a proposition that confuses even me, you’ve earned your pay. Good job!

Okay, so this measure will force certain companies who receive prescription drug funding from the federal government to spend 98% of that funding on the actual prescription drugs. 

I understand the sentiment. Most entities that deal with what are supposed to be “pass-through” funds end up taking a sizable chunk as “administrative costs.” (SEE: Bob, Proposition 35)

But this isn’t requiring every entity to pass on 98% of their funds. It only affects entities that:
a) Spent over $100,000,000 in a ten-year span on anything other than patient care, and
b) operated multifamily housing with over 500 health and safety violations.

What the fuck??? How many pharmaceutical companies run apartment complexes?

Only one. But we can’t make laws that target one company. Way to hide your true intentions, Prop 34!

A measure to limit the capacity of ALL operating systems*.
*Only affects OS’s that rhyme with Bandroid.
*Measure sponsored by Apple.

So you might be wondering what this entity is that gets over $100 million in prescription money from the federal government, but that also are slum lords?

Turns out it’s the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Maybe their apartments are for terminally ill patients? Is that why they’re spending less than 98% of their money on prescriptions? Are the health violations because people with AIDS sometimes die?

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions. All I know is the AIDS foundation seriously pissed off some people with deep enough pockets to fund a multi-million dollar proposition against them.

Reading through the entities on both sides will make you rethink all your priors about political bedfellows.

On the pro-side (so against the AIDS foundation) is the LGBT Legislative Chair, the Firefighters union, seniors and Latinos. On the anti-side are the National Organization of Women and some consumer watchdog groups. I did not have Women vs Seniors on this year’s Ballot Bingo.

Well, nature abhors a vacuum, and when you live in a one-party state, you’re going to run into some internecine battles. It’s no longer about electing a certain party, but about controlling that party once it’s in power. 

Unfortunately, I don’t know which of these is the in group or the out group right now. I assume the National Organization of Women is on the outs, because they’re working with consumer groups, which used to lean Republican back when there were Republicans in California. 

Plus I don’t think a measure like this gets on the ballot unless it has unofficial support from those in power. 

I can’t imagine Herr Kommandant wants people focusing on whether pass-through funds actually get passed through.

Proposition 35. Medi-Cal funding.

Medi-Cal is a bit like Medicare except that it doesn’t go to old people. It only goes to poor people. Plus a whole bunch of people who can totally afford their own insurance but fudge the numbers so they can get it for free.

This proposition makes a temporary tax that we previously imposed upon ourselves permanent. That tax was placed on insurance plans of all those evil rich people. Rich being defined as having insurance.

This is pretty much how every California tax and program works. They tell us it’s only temporary, then they say, “See, that tax wasn’t so bad.” 

I mean, we’re already paying the tax. So nothing would change from our financial perspective. Just keep the status quo. Because everything’s working great! Except for slavery and gay marriage and our disgusting water.

Does Prop. 35 actually do jack shit to improve Medi-Cal? Who knows. That’s not the point.

Some bureaucrat has a job funded by this tax. You don’t want Bob to lose his job, do you? Think of all those fun water cooler talks. Remember that Halloween he dressed up as a sexy chipmunk? 

Tell you what, if you agree to just keep paying the same amount you’ve already been paying, Bob promises to bring that seven-layer dip to work next Friday. Deal?

Oh, and maybe some poor people will get some aspirin. But again, that’s beside the point.

Proposition 36. Felony charges.

Many moons ago, we passed a proposition decriminalizing a bunch of minor “victimless” crimes, like drug possession and shoplifting. We were on the “Defund the Police” and “Laws are Mean” bandwagon way before the rest of the country.

The criminals responded by doing more drugs and shoplifting. Sorry, I guess they’re not criminals anymore.

Now we’re not quite so sure that stealing $950 from every Walgreens in the state is really “victimless.” Nor minor, really.

You’ve seen the videos of all the smash and grabs. Of everything from booze and makeup to toothpaste and deodorant being locked behind Plexiglass. Sure, it’s fun having a personal shopping assistant follow you around the store unlocking cases to get you your Snickers bar. But most of those workers can make more money working at McDonalds because of our bifurcated minimum wage. 

Of course, those smash and grab videos appear to be taking a hell of a lot more than $950 worth of merchandise, and have more to do with our inability, or lack of desire, to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators. I don’t know that either of those are going away, regardless of the definitions of misdemeanors and felonies.

But let’s vote on it anyway!

Do people want their toothpaste back? What about their booze?

We’ll have to see.

I know I, for one, am going to be needing some of that booze on election night. You with me?

New Car… Licensin’?

· November 5, 2023 · Musings · , , , · No Comments

I only planned on writing two posts about my new car. One about the excruciating purchasing process, one about all the stupid bells and whistles that are allegedly for safety, but in reality are just too raise the price and add a panache of tsk-tsk. What else could there possibly be to write about? There can’t be any extra layers of bullshit, can there?

You must not be from California

You see, I have a personalized license plate. Never really seemed like something I’d do. Same teason I don’t have a tattoo. I can’t think of anything so important to me that I’d need it on my skin, or on my car, for all the world to see for the next fifty years. 

But five or six years ago, one of the California government’s eternal money grabs spoke out to me. 

Plenty of states are running specialty plates these days. Some of them raise money for cancer or whales or, I don’t know,  hemorrhoids. If you ask me, the last thing cancer needs is more money. It kills millions of us every year. Why the fuck would I buy it a big-screen t.v.?

What? The money goes to fight cancer? They should make that clearer.

Well, like me, the California government decided they didn’t want the money going to cancer, either. They wanted to keep it all for themselves. 

So they came up with fancy new California license plates. That were actually the fancy old California license plates. 

Back in ye olden days, California had colorful license plates. Then again, California used to be known for quirk and personality. Beaches and sunsets and roller blading. Now we’re just known for traffic, regulation, and feces on sidewalks.Makes sense that we’d opt for white license plates with boring blue script.

When I grew up, we had blue plates with yellow digits, reflecting our state colors (See: UCLA & Cal Berkely, plus every other Uuniversity of California). Prior to those, we had black plates with gold lettering. I remember those growing up, but they were all faded on old jalopies, most likely a truck being driven by somebody older than dirt. 

Evidently before the gold-on-black plates we had black letters on gold. Never saw those, not even the remnants. They’re listed as representing the 1950s, but, growing up in the 1980s, I associated the black plates with the 1950s. Turns out they were mostly from the 1960s, meaning cars last a lot shorter than I expected.

The reason I now know about those gold plates is because, before bringing back the old license plates, they had us vote. They were going to bring back one set of plates (for an additional fee, natch) and one set of plates only. Not sure why, because there’s already about twenty specialty plates out there, but nothing draws up interest like scarcity. And online voting. When sales wane on the winner, they’ll release the next one.

I voted for the blue plates of my youth, but unfortunately that didn’t win. The black ones of the 1960s won because if Boomers do nothing else, they vote, as is evidenced by every presidential election from 2016 through 2024. Since it was an online poll, I thought us Gen Xers had a chance, I shoulda known better. We’ll never get a Gen X president and we won’t get our fancy blue license plates.

Much like sports, once my team was out of the license plate race, I figured I’d tune out of the posteseason. But it turned out that those black plates had some exciting players on their team.

When they started showing up on cars, I was surprised at how sharp the black was. Again, when I was growing up, the only black license plates driving around were sporting twenty years of road rash and grime. More gray than black, and the “gold” digits looked closer to tooth plaque than what one might find in them thar hills. 

Unlike those decrepit remnants from 1960, these new plates sparkled like a black hole. Wait, do those sparkle? The pictures NASA has released look nothing like what sci-fi has been promising for a century.

Regardless, when I bought a deep brown car, I thought it totally needed a bright black and gold plate, so I ordered one. Only fifty bucks and maybe if California makes enough money on these plates, they’ll lower some other… ha ha, sorry, I couldn’t even pretend to finish that sentence. 

Here’s the strange thing. A personalized license plate also costs fifty bucks. Not fifty additional bucks. For the same price, you can get a specialized plate, a personalized plate, or both. Furthermore, if you bought a no-personalized black plate, you weren’t getting the random seven digits of a normal plate. Instead it was six digits that were in a weird order, such that people would think it was personalized and you’d constantly be responding to people asking, “Okay, I give up, what does HG25LZ mean?”

So I opted for a personalized plate. I realized the scam of the “same price for specialty and personalized plates” a year later. Personalized plates cost that extra fifty bucks every year, as opposed to the one time fee for the black plates. It’s like drug dealers giving you the first hit for free. Or all those alleged houses giving trick-or-treaters cocaine because the kids will totally remember which random house they got that free cocaine at when unloading hundreds of skittles packs. Then they’ll go back to that house with their one or two dollars of allowance. Do I have that right? Makes total sense.

Anyway, after I bought my new car, I wanted to transfer my personalized plates, even if black plates on a black car are so gauche. You take the plates off your old car when you’re trading it in to the dealership and hold onto them until your generic permanent plates show up in the mail. Then you take both sets of plates into the DMV (or, thankfully, AAA) and have them do the swap on their computer. 

Seems like a gargantuan waste of time when I could’ve just written my personalized plates down on one of the five hundred forms I had to sign when I bought the car and saved everyone the hassle of producing and sending out a license plate that will never be used. Then again, DMV stands for “Gargantuan Waste of Time,” so no harm, no foul. 

Besides, that would require someone at the state to actually read some of the forms I’m signing, and we all know that ain’t happening.

It took about six weeks for my permanent (temporary) plates to arrive. Since I knew I could do AAA instead of the DMV, I didn’t feel the need to take a day off work or anything. Until I showed and was informed that my vanity plates had been reported lost or stolen.

Lost or stolen? What the fuck? I’ve got them right here in my hand. They’ve been riding around in my trunk for six weeks. At no point was it lost, nor was it stolen. “I see that,” the AAA employee said.

Unfortunately, since this was now an issue of potential thievery, the glitch couldn’t get fixed at the interest group level. The polite AAA employee sentenced me to… the DMV… Sans appointment!

When I showed up, the lady at the end of the first line (because there are always multiple lines at the DMV, and you must suffer through the first line to learn which new line you get to go to the end of) asked what I was there for. “Um, these plates are reported as lost or stolen. They’re… not?”

She gave me a ticket starting with the letter G. Probably stood for “Dumbfuck.” Some of the other non-reservation people sitting around me in the next staging area had B tickets and R tickets. It’s a convenient way for nobody to have any clue how long they’re waiting. Now serving B seventy-three. How many tickets away from G thirteen is that?

When I finally made it to the front of the line, the DMV employee wasn’t completely blown away by an alleged license plate thief standing in front of him. While it wasn’t precisely the norm, he claimed it had happened a number of times, and that number was increasing. He’d had one earlier that week. So the good news was he knew what had to be done.

The bad news was that, in DMV parlance, “regular” doesn’t mean “expedited.”

At least they had a form for it.

Okay, it wasn’t a form specifically for missing plates that aren’t missing. Instead it’s a generic “statement of fact.” Unfortunately, my DMV Dude didn’t have that specific form, and when he grabbed one from the sloth next to him, it was in Spanish.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the one who had to fill it out, and he swore he knew what all the questions were asking and it could be answered in English. So then I just had to stand there and watch him fill out the form. And let me tell you, he wasn’t using shorthand. Ugh. 

Then it was on to his supervisor, who needed another twenty minutes or so to sort shit out. Fortunately they at least let me go back and sit down in those super-comfy plastic chairs that feel like they’ve been requisitioned from a local third-grade classroom. Although I had to keep going back up to confirm factoids. Like that the plates were never missing.

I never actually read what they wrote. Didn’t have to sign anything. Probably because the fifth amendment says I don’t have to acknowledge that I stole something that bqelonged to me and never left my possession. That’s what plea deals are for. 

But hey, after it was all done, I was able to leave the DMV with plates ready to put on my car! 

Not my personalized plates, mind you. I had to put the generic plates on.

The Statement of Fact, I was informed, would take somewhere from three to six weeks for the bureaucratic legal process to work its magic. That three to six weeks was the same timeframe it took to get the generic plates in the mail. Considering that my vanity plates had only showed up as missing three or four days before the generic ones came in the mail, I assume my vanity plates will be legitimized at the same time my generic ones will show up as missing. Can’t wait to explain that one to the cop who pulls me over.

This timing seems suspicious. I figure this is one of two culprits. First option is that the dealership where I traded it in finally resold it or auctioned it for scratch metal. But the timing doesn’t seem right on that. A high-volume dealership has to have that process pretty dialed in. I can’t imagine my 200,000-mile piece of shit sat on a back lot for six weeks only to finally be moved at the exact time I got my new plates.

The most likely culprit, then, is the state of California. Here’s my guess. One level of the bureaucracy believes everybody should get their new plates within a set period of time, say, six weeks, and automatically marks personalized plates that haven’t been swapped back by that time must be “missing.” Another branch of the government, the one that actually produces license plates, takes its sweet time with plenty of days off and eight-hour workdays with six hours of coffee breaks. 

Heck, throw in another department that processes the “Statement of Fact” paperwork. Maybe workers from all three departments meet up for happy hour after work (at around 2:30 pm) congratulating each other for the continuous M.C. Escher feedback loop of job security they’ve created amongst themselves. 

Normally I’d throw the DMV into this farce, but for once the epitome of government ineptitude actually carrying its weight. They knew exactly what needed to happen and got the ball rolling. At about two miles per hour. 

Does my new-found confidence in them mean I expect them to follow through and let me know when all is clear? After writing down my phone number on flimsy piece of scratch paper nowhere near the Spanish form with English writing? 

What am I, an idiot?

New Car Buyin’

· October 5, 2023 · Musings · , , , , · 2 Comments

Just got back from buying a new car. Let’s see if I can form any cogent thoughts. Like, for the rest of time.

I was going to make a joke about how chafed my asshole was or some other such metaphor for being used and abused, but it’s not really like that. 

If I had bought a used car, sure. That process is more like waking up in a pool of vomit (not your own) with an already-scratched lottery ticket, and maybe a note about your missing kidney.

But buying a new car is just a fucking drain. On your energy, your lifeforce. Your self-worth and desire to live. Even when you prepare ahead of time. 

Maybe next time, instead of hours online I’ll just lube up beforehand. 

Do they let you test drive if you’re drunk? Because being of sober mind and body only makes the process worse. Instead of offering me bottled water every fifteen minutes, how about a glass of wine? Or a handle of rum.

My old car’s been on its last leg for a while. My commute is a brutal 55 miles each direction, meaning I’m burning through about 3,000 miles a month, 30k a year. Thank God for June and July.

This last car actually lasted a year longer than expected because that whole “schools closed for a year” thing meant no commuting. So in the seven and a half years I owned the car, I *only* drove 204,000 miles. Assuming there’s no new pandemic, look forward to my next “Fuck, I had to buy a car” post around 2030.

Some people like buying a new car every year or two. Not me. If I could’ve driven my last one until it was 300,000, I would’ve. Hell, I’d drive a million if the auto industry would let me. Maybe instead of adding more cameras and monitors and shit, they could, I don’t know, develop an engine that doesn’t fall apart as soon as we finish paying off the car. 

Unfortunately, the engine didn’t agree with my sentiment. About a year ago, the oil started leaking. Not very much, but occasionally after parking the car, I’d get a whiff coming off the engine. Plus there was some drops on my driveway. 

Three trips to the dealership and a couple grand later, the problem seemed to be fixed. Can’t really tell you what it was, because they didn’t fix the right thing the first time. They fixed a gasket. Then it was a mount. When I brought it back the third time, they actually fixed it for free. Like, I didn’t pay for the $500 part they had to order, nor did I pay for the 7-10 hours of labor. Nothing says, “Oh shit, we finally found that thing you were first complaining about months ago” quite like a repair place ponying up for their own labor costs.

That worked for six months or so, but the last time I took my car to the quicky lube (which should totally be the name of a whorehouse), they said there was barely any oil in the engine. They chastised me for going too long between oil changes, and I took it because I couldn’t really remember when I’d done it. I don’t drive much in the summer, so maybe I hit 3,000 miles in May, but had stretched it out another 2,000 when it was mostly trips to the store. Even then, 5,000 ain’t exactly “bone dry” territory, so I assumed my old friend Slow Leak was back.

Three weeks and two thousand miles later, when I smelled what could only be described as a raging inferno of grease and steel coming through my air ducts, I realized Mr. Slow Leak had grown to adult size. Fortunately, I could coast to an offramp with a gas station. Two $12 quarts of oil later, I was able to drive myself the rest of the way to work. 

I bought a third quart just in case this leak became a gusher, but turns out I didn’t need it. In fact, after letting my car sit for a week (I drove a rental until I could go car shopping on the weekend), the oil level hadn’t really dropped much from the two quarts I’d put in. So maybe I could’ve kept driving my old car for another few months, topping off the oil every thousand miles or so, but the writing was on the wall. And it’s not like car shopping in December would be less excruciating than September.

Which leads me to my Sunday through the Wringer.

Theoretically buying a car is easier these days. A little online research will show us not only the price range of new cars, but pictures of the specific inventory currently on the lot. Although the websites I checked listed a bunch of cars “In-Transit” with a caveat that delivery dates are only estimations and should not be relied upon. Except none of them listed arrival dates. So wait, you’re telling me it might not arrive by an undisclosed date? 

Fortunately, there were a couple dark blue hybrids already on my local lot. 

Unfortunately, neither was the car I ended up with. Not entirely sure why. After I showed the guy which car I wanted from his own website, he “went to go grab it.” It looked black, not blue, when I got in it for the test drive, but it was in the shadows and was pretty dirty, so I just figured it was a dark enough blue that the true color wouldn’t pop until it was on the road. Nope. He grabbed the black one. Probably because it’s a “premium color,” despite living in the Sacramento Valley, where summer temperatures regularly top 105.

I did, at least, get a hybrid. With my extensive commute, I figure if I use one gallon of gas each direction instead of two, then over the course of 180 school days, I should be saving 360 gallons, give or take. At $5 per gallon (lol, try $7), I should saved more than the extra $8K for a hybrid pretty quick. I still wasn’t ready to make the plunge on full electric because of the whole plugging in thing. Come back to my 2029 car bitching session to hear about the fire I’m inevitably going to start in my garage when I put in the new docking station.

Yeah, I know I said my next car will be 2030. Maybe I’ll split the difference and purchase it in 2029 after the new model year is released. Speaking of which, the days of getting great deals in mid-September when the new model year came out are long gone. Everything is “What’s on the sticker is what you pay.” Followed immediately by “What’s on the sticker is nowhere near what you pay.”

There’s a dealership closer to my work where the car I wanted cost a couple thousand less. I figured that was my leverage. So the sales guy does the bullshit of bringing in his manager and whatever and allegedly this guy agrees to split the difference. 

Of all the car purchasing steps, this pretend haggling over the price is the worst part. Why the fuck does the “Manager” always use the thick marker and scribble all over the numbers the salesperson wrote down?. It’s not Sharpie because it doesn’t bleed through, but it’s thick and bright. Is that supposed to connote finality? Or boldness because they’re give us “such a great deal”? It’s got to be for some psychological reason, but if they think I’m going to be impressed, it’s a failure. 

Especially when the end result is the same fucking price. I did at least send him back a couple times to tell me precisely what interest rate my 800+ credit rating was giving me. I knew it was going to be terrible after the past eighteen months of Fed action, but might as well scratch off my morbid curiosity. Over six percent, which is a few percentages higher than I had to pay in the late 1990s when the prime rate was… exactly where it is now.  Of course, this was the rate given to me by the car company, so guess who’s going to the bank to get a better rate?

Hell, they didn’t even run my damn credit report. I only found out later when I asked if I could know my rating since I hadn’t run it in a few years. The guy was all, “Oh sure, I can run it. We hadn’t run it, but I’ll run it right now and have you sign off that we did.” Some consumer protection thing. But what the hell? Were they just trusting me when I told them I had an 800 credit score? Kinda defeats the purpose of having a credit score if people can make up whatever number they want and be believed. Then again, if they’re going to be charging over six percent, I guess they’ll just hedge their bets that people like me will offset all the 300 credit ratings who are lying about having an 800. 

Then comes Mr. Extended Warranty Guy, the most hilarious part of the car-buying process. You’ve just spent an hour hearing about how wonderful this new car is, how it’s the height of modern technology, one step away from being able to wipe your ass for you. Now Extended Warranty Guy says “Holy Crap, that’s a piece of shit you just bought. You’ll be lucky if it doesn’t break down on the way home, much less long enough to finish the five years of exorbitant financing were tacking on.”

After I said no for the third time, Mr. EWG told me about a cheaper option that covers dings, dents, and windshield. I splurged on that because Sacramento roads suck. I had to replace the windshield on my last car at least three times, maybe four, plus another half- dozen chip repairs. One time Safelite quoted me a low price on the phone, then said “unless you live in Sacramento, California.” i informed them that i did. They doubled the price. 

I’m sure that what I think is covered won’t be covered when the time comes to fix it. “Sorry, that windshield was damaged by a pebble. Your warranty only covers glass that spontaneously cracks.” But whatever, it only added $20 a month to the payments and if I hadn’t said yes this time, I’d probably still be there today, learning about a $1 a month warranty that covers only the passenger floorboard. We were well past two hours for a car I had already decided on before walking on the lot. I’ll pay $20 a month to make it home before bedtime. 

Then comes the signing. Mr. EWG morphs into Paperwork Dude. Seventy-five pages of initials and scribbling, some on a digital screen, some on paper. I think one of the papers I signed acknowledged the use of tire chains. Highway Patrol won’t let me past the snow checkpoints without them. Can I just sign something then?

Some of the papers were about lead. Maybe asbestos. Probably agreed, under penalty of imprisonment, that I’ll vote for Herr Kommandant Newsom when he runs for president. The state of California probably thinks they’re doing a bang-up job protecting my consumerness, but the more there is to read, the less I’m going to read it. Especially when I’ve already sat through Mr. EWG’s entire timeshare presentation and the Siegfried and Roy tickets will turn back into pumpkins at midnight.

The one paper I slowed down on was the total cost, because I wanted to figure out how the $38k, which I had “negotiated” down to $37k, was now showing up as $44k. The top line still showed the MSRP. When I inquired about that, he said my negotiated price was listed under “rebate,” so the taxes would still be based on the original price. That rebate, by the way, was from the state of California because the car is a hybrid, not because I’d showed them the same vehicle priced lower nearby.

Seriously, why does Manager Dude even do the hardcore haggling? Just say you’re giving me whatever price I’m asking for, then blame the final price on “taxes and licensing.” I wasted thirty minutes “negotiating” money already due to me by the state. Sure, maybe if I hadn’t “negotiated” the rebate, the dealership just would’ve pocketed it. It’s what my district does when the state gives them COLA money to “pass through to the teachers.”

Of course the state is going to give me $500 off right before charging me $4,000 in various other fees. This is the same state of California that’s trying to discourage people from getting solar panels because it made it harder to collect windfall profit taxes from the electric company monopolies. Perhaps if I’d bought a fully electric vehicle, which comes with a $5,000 rebate, the fees would’ve gone up to $9,000. Something about disposal of electric batteries. 

Speaking of that rebate, when they first quoted me my price, it was $50 cheaper per month because they had “fat fingered” the $500 into $5,000. Allegedly. Considering the full electric rebate was $5k, maybe it was less pudgy fingers and more having no fucking clue what the customer was buying before scribbling over it with your marker.

This might also explain why the blue car I’d asked to drive ended up being black when all was said and done. It was all shiny now, so I could tell for certain it wasn’t the car I’d originally asked the salesman for. But what am I going to do, sit through another two hours of new paperwork for something as meaningless as the color? 

If they’ve got a dumbfuck who will accept a rebate as a good-faith negotiation, and who will shrug and accept a monthly payment fifty bucks higher than originally quoted, then why not saddle the schmuck with the black car, too?

Game, set, and match, dealership. 

So now I’ve got a new damn car that I couldn’t be less thrilled with. Come back next week to hear me bitch about all the newfangled shit they’re putting on cars these days.

While telling the damn kids to get off my front yard. 

Random Acts of Mandation

· March 11, 2023 · Musings · , , , , · No Comments

When is kindness not kindness?

Might not as far up the philosophical ladder as, say, can God create a rock that is so heavy that God can’t lift it. But it’s a question I’ve been forced to come to terms with at work recently.  

How does one define kindness? How does one encourage it in others?

When Kommandant Newsom tells us we must be kind or ELSE!

And yeah, you’re gonna need to get that notarized.

We recently went through something called the California Kindness Challenge, where the State Superintendent required all school districts to come up with a kindness plan. Districts, in turn, did what districts do best, which is to pass the buck on to private companies that exist for the sole purpose of milking money out of districts. Nice synergy in that “passing the buck” here refers to both shirking responsibility and also sending loads of cash down the pipeline like a human centipede. Although in this case, you definitely want to be the end of the centipede. The shit is much tastier and you don’t have to do much for it.

These companies are great at mixing and matching their message to the educational issue du jour. We had a group of bike riders come in for two assemblies. They did cool tricks, spinning on handlebars and riding up and down ramps. The students all loved it. In between their radical rotations, they’d grab a microphone and preach whatever they were hired to preach. One year it was about trying hard on the standardized tests. Four years later, the bike tricks were exactly the same, but the messages were about cyber bullying. Maybe they’ll come back next year very concerned about Social and Emotional Learning or Lockdown Learning Loss.

Shit, if you pay me $10,000 a day (plus expenses) to ride a bike, I’ll say whatever message you want me to say. Booze is bad, abstinence is cool, punch your friends? You name it. Raise my daily rate to 20K and your kids can punch me.

This year, it’s all about kindness.

Here’s where I’m torn. I truly believe we need more kindness, especially in high schools. Most of the problems we’re facing as a nation, maybe as a world, come from a general lack of empathy. We assume everyone else is out to fuck us over so we need to fuck them over first. If the members of Congress would do something as simple as holding the door open for members of the other party then, who knows, maybe we could pass a budget.

Unless they’re being forced to open the door. Then it’s some sanctimonious bullshit.

I’ve explained this internal Civil War to my students. Don’t let the fact that California is mandating it, and that our own district will half-ass it to death, detract from the importance of the message. In fact, whatever they tell us to do, ignore it, and just focus on treating other human beings like they’re, I don’t know, human beings? Each of whom is trying to get through this fuck-up of a world without driving off the closest cliff.

What’s that? Some guy was arrested for intentionally driving his entire family off a cliff? Yeah, our society is on a razor’s fucking edge right now.

So how did my district end up half-assing this mandate? 

First, we challenged our students to do one million acts of kindness. Not individually, as that might be a little hard to reach. Unless you count not flipping off the assholes who cut me off in traffic as an act of kindness, in which case I could reach a million by the midpoint of my average commute. But a million acts of kindness, collectively, which they divided out to about forty per student in the district. Although probably need to up that to fifty, because those dumb fucks in kindergarten can’t count to forty.

Sorry, was that unkind? Debit it from the guy I didn’t flip off.

But again, not too bad of a message. If you’re a little bit kinder, and everybody else is a little bit kinder, then we might all be a little less red-ass all the time. I think I can get behind this…

What’s that? We’re supposed to download an app and log into it every time we do something kind? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

These aren’t really “random acts,” are they? This isn’t a general “be kinder” missive. This is something we’re supposed to keep track of. We’re supposed to stand up and acknowledge that we’re fucking awesome. Pat me on the back, mother fucker, because I was just nice to you.

If your empathy doesn’t come with an ounce of humility, then it’s probably just condescension. Not that Gavin Newsom would know anything about that.

I’ve got some questions about this app thing. Does it count if I don’t have my phone with me? Like when I leave my FitBit at home, I sure as hell ain’t gonna move my ass. So sorry, old lady crossing the street, but I ain’t gonna give you the right of way unless I get a cool little virtual badge for it.

Now let’s assume I have my phone on me, so I open the door for five people walking behind me. Is that five acts of kindness or one? If it’s only one, then isn’t the courteous thing to slam the door on person number two? Then he has a chance to open the door for the next person in line. Quantity over quality, amirite?

On the other hand, if I get credit for every person that benefits from my kindness, then I can just delay a quiz by a day and get credit for one hundred. Then I can go rob a bank or something and still be ahead on my karma quota.

Although the kid who was ready to take the quiz today might consider this delay to NOT be an act of kindness. Must the recipient acknowledge a kindness for it to count? Perhaps they should need to sign off in my app with, I don’t know, a sample of their blood to prove my kindness. Kindly insert this anal probe for verifi… oops, looks like your DNA’s already received a notarized act of kindness. Please return to the crosswalk so I can run over you.

My district didn’t stop at the million acts of kindness, though. They wanted to add one cohesive thing we can do all together as a district. Not because the district cares, but because the company they hired to check the state-required wants to put it up on their website so they can get five figures from more half-assing districts. 

After all, we fell for their examples from other districts. One district had students donate their used shoes to a homeless shelter. Another collected canned food for their local food bank, even though most food banks don’t take food anymore and prefer cash. Details, details. The point of this exercise is to look good on local media, not to actually help people.

So my district, in its infinite wisdom, after weeks of workshopping minutes of afterthought, decided that instead of shoes or food, we would collect… 5,000 pounds of coffee!

Not used coffee, thankfully, because coffee grounds might actually be useful for composting. Rather, a full pound of sealed, store-bought coffee grounds. Making it a deliberate act of kindness, not a random one, forcing our students, many of whom have little in the way of transportation, into an explicit trip to the store in order to buy something to bring to school and donate to someone else. Someone who makes more money than the families that are buying the coffee. Or if I was forced to go to Macy’s to buy a dress shirt for a billionaire.

Because you’ll note I haven’t yet said WHO gets the 5,000 pounds of coffee. Not a homeless shelter, where I assume hot coffee would get them through some cold nights. Not a women’s shelter, of which there are a few in the town where I teach. Heck, it isn’t even some mom-and-pop breakfast restaurants, who are struggling to compete against the Dennys and the IHOPs of the world. Not having to pay for the coffee would go far helping that restaurant be in the black for a few months. Provided they could store 5,000 pounds of coffee, because my district wants to deliver the coffee all at once. Better for publicity, and one should not pursue kindness if one is not getting good press out of it. 

You know who, I guaran-fucking-tee, already have enough goddamn coffee? The federal government.

That’s right. We’re giving our coffee to the military. Because… Because… It’s for the Troops! Nobody can get upset about doing something nice for the Troops, right? 

I’m all for supporting the military. Give ’em guns, give ’em armor. It was especially a thing while we were embroiled in multiple foreign wars. One might quibble over whether said wars were just, but the soldiers can’t control that. Even if most of them joined so they could shoot other foreigners. Oh, plus having everyone kiss your ass and tell you how wonderful you are. Trust me, I’m a teacher. Most of the people in my profession regularly spout off about being a special population that ought to be revered as such.

As an added bonus, teachers are allowed to drink coffee. Which, evidently, the soldiers… can’t?

By the way, the district doesn’t provide coffee for us. We only get to drink it if we bring our own. Maybe that’s why my district thinks soldiers are in the same boat.

Maybe we should have our students give coffee to their teachers? That’s a kindness that might benefit them, too.

My daughter is a Girl Scout, and when she’s shilling her cookie madness every year, they have a “Support the Troops” option. She’s supposed to sell at least ten of them to get, I don’t know, a badge or a shirt or something. I usually cringe when she rattles off her spiel. “If you don’t want the cookies for yourself, you can send some to the troops.” I mean, it’s better than “The Governor tells you you have to redistribute your cookies to those less fortunate,” but it’s still a bit jarring. If I ain’t buying cookies for myself, the last thing I want to do is buy some for somebody else. Especially somebody who is gainfully employed in addition to having all of their room and board provided.

But at least with the Girl Scout cookies, I can convince myself that there are troops stationed far from home who might not have access to their local grocery store or cannabis dealer and their ubiquitous cookie stands this time of year. Maybe you’re stationed in, I don’t know, West Berlin, where girl scouts don’t exist. What’s that? We don’t have a lot of troops stationed at the Berlin Wall anymore? Hmm.. Now that I mention it, I bet those guys stationed in Germany or Italy have access to the internet, where they can have cookies shipped to them. Although shipping’s probably a bitch, so yeah, my daughter collecting six bucks from someone who wants to feel like they’re supporting both the Girl Scouts and the military at the same time, I guess it’s not a terrible idea. We’re not saying the military or poor, miserly beggars, only that their job currently requires them to be somewhere far away from the usual comforts of home. 

One might call that an act of kindness.

I assume my district glommed onto “Ferda Troops!” because our school board faced a lot of flack from a certain segment of the population over school closure. Which then morphed into masks. Which then morphed in Critical Race Theory, which we don’t teach, and the Pledge of Allegiance, which we do every day but which this certain segment thinks has been taken out of schools. I’ll let you guess which segment that is, but let’s just say they really like the military.

As an added bonus, Herr Kommandant Newsom probably doesn’t really like the military. Maybe they wanted to throw his stupid mandate back in his face, by showing their mandated acts of kindness toward an entity that Herr Kommandant hates.

Or the school board did as it usually does when it gets an ill-thought-out mandate from the state, which is half-ass its implementation even more. 

Does the military even WANT 5000 pounds of coffee? That’s a lot of fucking coffee. Where will they store it? Will it go stale by the time they use it? It’ll take a school bus to deliver, which is something my district allegedly never has enough of to spare for any reason, whatsoever. The football team can drive themselves to the goddamn away game.

I also assume it’s a logistical nightmare to incorporate 5,000 extra pounds 

Unlike Girl Scout cookies, I’m pretty sure every military base, even those stationed overseas, are able to track down coffee. I’ve heard plenty of former military types complain about what it’s like to be stationed overseas. It’s not all alcohol and prostitutes. A lot of the places they are stationed don’t have quite the infrastructure they’re used to at home. Lots of sand. And long days. Especially when we’re at war. 

You know what I’ve never heard anybody complain about? The food. Maybe back in Vietnam or World War II, when we had millions deployed, the quality of a breakfast might suffer, but these days, they eat pretty well. Even at the height of World War II, when the GI’s were gruelling through winter in northern France, eating dehydrated rations, you know what they had plenty of? Coffee. 

And that was back in the day when the federal government pretended it cared about wasteful spending. Nowadays I jcan’t imagine a Congressmember shutting down the government over a Yuban Conference. They might cut Kevin McCarthy’s Starbucks allowance, but every military base, every outpost, every pontoon and submarine, is chock full of Joe.

The only entity our donation is being kind to is the federal budget. It’s already got 31 trillion acts of kindness. Unless my district is claiming this act of kindness is aimed at maintaining a good bond rating now that we’re past the debt ceiling. That’s a kindness for everyone, provided some bureaucrat notices the coffee rations they proved last month went undrank, and adjusts this month’s requisition. But not next month’s, because then those soldiers will have no coffee and grumpy soldiers with caffeine headaches all month long ain’t a kindness for nobody. 

Ha ha, jk. Nobody at my district office thought this out beyond “everybody likes coffee” and “everybody likes troops.”

So good news, modern GIs, if my working-class students, many of whose entire family makes less than one army brat, can get off their lazy asses, you’ll..  find a random shipment of more coffee than you’ll ever need. 

And if that ain’t an act of kindness, then I don’t know what the definition of kindness is. 

I’d look it up in a dictionary, but my district didn’t consider that a good use of resources.

But What About the Dog Shit?

· January 29, 2023 · Musings · , , , · No Comments

California enacted a new recycling law. 

At least I think it did. Not sure. It’s been around for a year, but so far we’re still being told not to follow it. 

Unless we’re out in public. Kinda fitting for a state run by the fake-outrage, put-on-a-show-in-public-while-burning-tires-in-the-back-yard Twitterati.

Even when we’re putting stuff in the bins at the mall, chances are we’re fucking it up.

Bang-up job of saving the world, California!

Then again, “not being followed correctly” and “having little effect” pretty much put it in line with all the recycling laws that came before, because only idiots learn from mistakes.

I was once a true believer on the recycling front. In college, I worked for my campus’s recycling program, spending most of my weekends knee-deep in warm-soda-infused backwash. Do you want to know what shit people put inside their soda cans? Bruised bananas, half-eaten muffins, and, if not actual shit, then at least urine. Because I’m pretty sure Coca-Cola doesn’t come in lemonade colors.

Back then, you could turn recyclables in for money. In fact, the “company” I worked for (really just a branch of Associated Student Body) was based entirely off that premise. Collect the glass and aluminum (plastic wasn’t really in use for drinks back then) and various grades of paper (newspaper and plain paper, but I’ll miss you most of all, continuous-feed printer paper with your fancy tear-away spool holes) that are disposed on campus, turn it in for recycling, and turn a profit.

Granted, that money came from other Californians in the form of a tax, but it wasn’t going anywhere, so we might as well take it. Technically, they don’t call it a tax. It’s a “deposit” that we got back when we returned the item for recycling. And back in the 1980s, many of us did that. But then those blue bins started showing up in public places and curbsides, so many of us opted for ease over getting our nickel back. The California government saw this as a win-win. They get us to recycle and they keep the money. Not that they give a shit if we actually recycle.

If you want to know how little California cares about recycling, try to recycle some wine bottles. The California wine industry, it’s safe to say, can afford some good lobbyists . Let’s not forget that Herr Kommandant Newsom’s favorite ethnic laundromat is located in a certain valley named after an auto parts store. So when the CRV (California Redemption Value) law was coming into place in the mid-1980s, guess who got an exemption?

How exactly does an exemption from the recycling law work, you might ask? It’s simple. We don’t pay the extra nickel for a bottle of wine. Because, you know, five cents on top of seventy dollars is way more likely to impact the sale than five cents added to a dollar soft drink. I wonder if the wine lobbyists were able to keep a straight face when they claimed it would hurt wine sales. Or maybe they just smirked and said, “Want another (free) ten-dollar glass of cab?”

I never realized I wasn’t paying the CRV on bottles of wine until I took some bottles in to be recycled and the center wouldn’t take them. I claimed I’d recycled plenty of wine bottles before. The guy informed me they used to take the wine bottles and then downgrade the payout to “mixed glass” instead of “regular glass.” So for the last decade, by recycling wine bottles, I haven’t even been getting my full “deposit” back for the beer bottles I’m recycling.

“What are we supposed to do with the wine bottles, then?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Throw them in the trash.”

If the primary concern was lessening waste or ensuring more recycled glass, they’d be gobbling up wine bottles. Not sure you’ve looked at a wine bottle recently, but that’s some thick, sturdy-ass glass. Much better than those flimsy beer bottles. I guess Anheuser-Busch should’ve given better blowjobs. Considering California’s annual budget exceeds $75 billion, one assumes they can throw a few extra nickels our way to ensure those thick 750 ml bottles aren’t, shrug, “thrown in the trash.” Especially considering how many CRV’s go into the state coffers without getting repaid. 

But again, the government’s purpose isn’t really to return that money to us. Its purpose is to show us how “important” it is to recycle, particularly on our own dime. Or nickel.

The reason that recycling guy was no longer willing to count my wine bottle as mixed glass isn’t only because the government isn’t shilling out for it. It’s that the companies and countries that used to actually recycle our shit aren’t willing to anymore. It’s not profitable for anyone. Even China. 

That’s where most of our recyclables went before. Did you know we were supposed to thoroughly rinse our plastic before putting it in the bin? Neither did I, because they never told us to. That’s because the Chinese washed them for us, with labor that was cheaper than the water and soap we would have used. Unfortunately, China’s labor ain’t quite as cheap anymore. The price they get for selling the recycled plastic back to us isn’t worth the labor cost anymore. 

Cans are still worth the cost, because soda companies are still paying. I assume glass is still being recycled, as long as it isn’t wine bottles. Plastic’s the only one that’s cheaper to produce from scratch. Oh, and paper, but we stopped pretending we recycle paper ages ago. Oddly enough, it happened when people stopped buying newspapers, even though newspapers were the worst grade of paper. I work at a school that consumes thousands of sheets of pristine printer paper a day, and there isn’t a spot for recycling. 

Back to plastic, though, it turns out it might actually be worse for the environment to recycle plastic than to produce it from scratch. I’ve heard conflicting reports on this, but they come from both sides of the political news aisle. There was an NPR report claiming that most cities are throwing the plastic you diligently sorted back in with the garbage. The laws only require that it gets separated, not that it actually gets recycled. 

Maybe that’s what they were doing with wine bottles all those years.

By the way, NPR seemed kinda fine with plastic not being recycled. I only believe news media when they’re criticizing their own side. Aside from the cost and environmental damage caused by recycling, a fair amount of the shit we put on open-air boats to China blow off into the ocean. According to their report, that Great Pacific Garbage Heap isn’t coming from stuff us heathens are randomly discarding but the stuff we’re trying to do the right thing with.

But here we go again, with a brand spanking new composting law here in California. 

There were all sorts of stories a year ago that we needed to start separating the food from the rest of our trash. Followed by other stories saying, “Whoa, not YET!” Turns out none of the infrastructure was in place. Not that that’s stopped the state of California from implementing changes before. In a decade or so, we won’t be able to buy gasoline cars anymore, despite there being no plans to add more charging stations. Nor consultation with car manufacturers to see if they can supply enough fully electric vehicles. I don’t even think hybrids will be allowed.

And don’t get me started on the impending disappearance of bacon. Then again, that wasn’t the government, that was the damn voters who passed a “take your pigs to the gym” ballot proposition.

I’m all for composting. We put our coffee grounds, as well as random egg shells and apple cores, in a little bin, then use it to fertilize our garden. At first I assumed that was the purpose of this law. Maybe the state of California wants to go into the fertilizing business to make a little extra money they won’t return to us. Then they’ll ban private fertilizer companies because they’re shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that fertilizer can be used in explosives. Or else maybe they’re worried kids will eat fertilizer.

Seems to be their plan for solar, where they encouraged us all to put solar on our homes, but now they’re worried that we’re producing too much solar. It’s hurting the old-fashioned energy companies that donate to politicians. So now they’re going to make us pay extra for the solar panels we already installed. Plus they’re not going to let us use our excess solar to lower our electricity costs anymore. That’s right, the progressive promised land of California, where Democrats have a super-majority at every level of government, is trying to steer us away from renewable energy.

Just like with the composting, it has nothing to do with fertilizer. Recycling is never about recycling. It’s about separation. If organic matter is mixed with regular trash, it releases methane. But if it’s in a separate pile, it… doesn’t? Despite the fact that every compost pile ever created smells like shit. 

But methane is bad for the environment. Not sure if it’s worse for the environment than thousands of cars idling in bumper-to-bumper traffic because California refuses to build or expand public transit. Why would they provide us with busses and trains when they can just shame us for not taking the nonexistent busses and trains? They can’t extend BART into San Jose because of “environmental studies.” 

Like studying why wine bottles can’t be recycled. 

Can’t wait till the cities just put our organic waste back in with the regular trash. Now that I think of it, what goes into the trash can after all the food is taken out?

We haven’t been given any new bins for this new composting experiment. Many municipalities already have greenwaste cans, so in late 2021, we all assumed we’d just throw the coffee grounds in with the greenwaste. That’s when we got the “No, no, no, not there! Not yet!” message. 

Allegedly the landfills that take the greenwaste can’t handle separating it from the composting. Heck, we get in trouble if dog shit gets in with our leaves. Maybe in the future we’ll be forced to recycle our animal feces, too. Then they’ll throw it all together at the landfill.

A year later, there’s been no update on how and where to separate our composting. Despite the fact that the law was passed in 2018. And people think I’m crazy for assuming California won’t be ready for all electric cars a decade from now. 

Assuming it stays with greenwaste, there might be additional problems. Our greenwaste truck only comes around biweekly instead of weekly. Will that change if we have to throw all of our food in there? Shit, swap it with the regular garbage truck, cause I imagine my regular trash can won’t be filling up quite as regularly without food in it. What else is there to throw away? To-go containers and wine bottles.

Punishments for not separating our organics don’t begin until 2024. But if my math is correct, we’re over halfway since the law was implemented, and 5/6 of the way since it was passed, toward penalties, and haven’t heard shit yet. Maybe California’s grand plan is to never tell us how to do it. That way, they can fine us all for violating it. 

Because, let’s face it, we’re all going to be fined. I like to think of myself as relatively knowledgeable about current trends, rules, and regulations relating to environmental policy, but I sure as shit can’t tell you every item that’s compostable. 

For instance, when I put coffee grounds in my garden, I don’t include the filter. My coffee filter still has a smattering of coffee grounds on it when I throw it in the trash. I don’t know if it’s compostable or not. It’s paper, which means it’s organic. But so is greenwaste. 

Let’s say I’m eating a juicy steak. I know the uneaten portions go into the compost, but what about the bones? When making fertilizer out of it, we would toss those because they don’t break down fast enough, but I’m assuming they still produce methane. 

What about stuff like barbecue sauce and mustard and ketchup? I  assume they’re counted as food, but if I’m tossing half a head of romaine lettuce, that’s got to be greenwaste, right? 

I’ll just throw sliced “American” “cheese” in with the plastic. Let China figure it out what it’s made of.

And dammit, what am I supposed to do with my dog shit? I don’t think there’s a correct answer. Might as well flush it down the toilet.

Restaurants and food courts don’t seem to be helping much, either. It seems like any time I’m somewhere that separates out composting, the stuff they put on the picture is stuff I wouldn’t think to put in there. Napkins and wrappers, which they claim are cellophane, which I thought was the same as plastic, but what the hell do I know? In truth, one time I bought gizzard on a stick in New Orleans and, yeah, by the time I delivered it to an unsuspecting friend a half-hour later, the grease had damn near dissolved the flimsy bag-like cover. 

But now I’m going to be fined for putting some food wrappers in the garbage, or fined for putting other food wrappers in the not-garbage. 

Seriously, California, can I just send you a damn check to leave me alone? 

Maybe we ought to change our state motto. No longer are we the state of “Eureka, I have found it!” Unless what we’re looking for is wildfires and unaffordable housing.

Besides, nobody comes here for gold anymore. They come to make it in Hollywood.

Here ya go: “California: Act Like You Care.”

And anybody else who is trying to get recycling right can borrow it. We’ll even wrap it in plastic for ya.

Bathtub Oasis

· September 29, 2021 · Musings · , , , , , · No Comments

I broke down. Succumbed to a vice. Totally knew I shouldn’t have done it, but my baser instinct was called out and, dammit, I caved.

I took a shower.

If you don’t live on the West Coast of the United States, particularly California, that might not seem like such a terrible thing. But out here in the wild, wild west, a frontierland of scarce resources and harsh realities, we’re faced with the ever-present knowledge that the next drop of water might be our last. Hey Florida, the next time a hurricane hits, can you bottle some of that water and send it our way?

It sounds like I’m joking, but I’m not. Okay, maybe I’m joking a little bit. But if we have another winter like the last one, this shit’ll be as unfunny as a goiter.

Wait, are goiters funny? They seem like they should be funny.

We had a pretty bad drought a decade ago. Four or five winters in a row with less than average rainfall. No one particular winter was catastrophic, but the cumulation over time led tosome parched reservoirs. Somewhere around winter number four (or more accurately, summer number four), we entered the first round of water restrictions. They were as asinine then as they are now.

I’m not critiquing the idea of water restrictions, per se, even if the collective water wasted by the citizens seems paltry beside the farmers and construction and government entities. I swear, if I walk past one more broken sprinkler gushing water into the street while attempting to maintain lush green city parks, I will lose my shit. 

Fortunately, my lost shit will be washed away by a government-funded bidet.

The water restrictions are usually to the tune of “use 20% less water than last year.” Easy enough for people who were wasting water before. For those of us doing the voluntary restrictions in years one through three of the drought, not so much.

I remember a feature on the local news, showing how a Sacramento woman was making the cuts. She opened her dishwasher, filled with maybe five plates, a few cups, and a handful of utensils. “In the past, I would run this, but now I’m going to wait until tomorrow. See how easy that is?”

All I could think was who the fuck runs a dishwasher less than one-quarter full? Even when we’re flush with water, it’s a waste of electricity.

But instead of critiquing her wastefulness, we were applauding this woman for wasting less water than in the past. Meanwhile those of us who did what we were supposed to, waiting till the dishwasher was filled in the beforetimes, now must resort to “If it’s yellow, stay mellow.” Hey local news, wanna come film me on the shitter?

And don’t get me started on the Baby Boomer assholes across the street who still use the fucking hose to clean off their driveway once a week.

What made it more difficult for us during that last drought was that we had a baby between the base year and the twenty-percent-less year. A third member of the house means more bathing, more laundry, more dishes. Not to mention the occasional two-diaper-blow-out days, which require twelve extra showers and fifteen loads of laundry all in the same 24 hours. Plus maybe some napalm.

The city didn’t give a shit that we were now a larger household. Twenty percent is twenty percent. If Dishwasher Lady has to wait until her dishwasher is half full, then it isn’t too much to choose between the life of my newborn or the century-old oak tree in the yard.

I thought at the time (and still do) it would make more sense to focus on who was wasting water beforehand. Shouldn’t be too hard to get a spreadsheet that shows average water usage versus size of the household. Instead of twenty percent cuts across the board, you could make people above the mean cut thirty percent and those of us who weren’t wasteful in the first place only have to cut ten. 

I know, I know. Equal protection, blah, blah, blah. But what else are those Water Board employees supposed to do with their time when we aren’t bathing?

Back then, you see, we actually heeded the call and stopped using water. And the water board thanked us by raising our rates. They were having trouble filling their budget because we did what they told us to do. And dammit, exorbitant government salaries ain’t gonna pay themselves. 

That was 2015, though, not 2021. The last year has shown us that nobody will follow the government’s suggestions anymore. So hopefully my rates won’t go up again. Then when I run out of water, I’ll drink from the Baby Boomer driveway.

And this drought is a bad one. We’re only one year in. The winter we just had was the driest I’ve experienced in my thirty years in Sacramento. I had snow camping plans in Yosemite in January that was canceled due to COVID, because we all know that camping in late January is tantamount to the Sturgis festival. A week or two before it was canceled, I noticed we hadn’t had a storm yet. So it wasn’t going to be “snow camping,” just “really cold camping. Not nearly as fun. So yay for COVID cancellations, I guess?

We finally got a storm in mid-February. Note the singular. One storm. Granted, it lasted for the better part of two weeks, with maybe nine days out of fourteen giving us rain in the flatlands which translates to snow in the highlands. But even those “bad drought” years a decade ago gave us four or five of those stormy stretches per winter. 

We’re already seeing the repercussions of this dry winter. Normally our fire season doesn’t start till September. Yes, we have a fire season. Five straight years of everything from Daughter’s cheerleading practice to my school being canceled due to “smoke” means it’s a season. As predictable as flowers coming out in spring and (at least in theory) rain and snow in winter. But this year, the fires started in July. If you live in the continental United States, I’ve heard you’ve become aware of our smoke, as the wind decided to blow east for awhile. In the past six weeks, two of Daughter’s four cheerleading events have been canceled, plus her Girl Scout “bridging” ceremony. My high school has canceled a football game, too, and if COVID taught us nothing else, it’s that high schools really, really hate canceling sporting events. Cancel class? Sure, no problem. But what if one of our athletes makes it big? What’s our nerdy valedictorian going to miss out on with no classes, failing to save the planet or cure cancer? Big fucking deal. Our linebacker might mention us on ESPN!!!

Regardless, these cancellations usually don’t happen till October or November, when what remains of the foliage is nice and crunchy. These cancellations started in August. If there’s anything left in the state to burn, the next six weeks might be one hell of a hellscape.

Made even worse by my selfish decision to take a shower. 

For real, this drought is extreme. I won’t inundate you with all the easily googleable pictures of what our lakes are supposed to look like and what they actually look like. Suffice it to say that many of the hydroelectric turbines in our dams are no longer running. Ghost towns that were flooded when the lakes were made close to a hundred years ago are all of a sudden above ground and, let me tell you, those ghosts are PISSED!

Actually, it’s the government that’s pissed, because people are taking olde tyme tools and shit from these towns and we’re being told, “No, no, those are historical artifacts. Bad people. No taking them from their watery graves. They need to be studied by historians!”

To which we’re all like, “If this shit was so important, why didn’t y’all scuba to the bottom of the lake over the last eighty years to get them?” 

After all, some of these were gold rush towns. If I find any gold, historical preservation can kiss my ass.

So here we are, once again, with the water restrictions. We have to reduce our water usage by twenty percent. If they set the high water mark (pun intended) to what we used in 2019, I’d be fine with it. But they didn’t. They set it to last year.

Does anyone remember what last year looked like? Hindsight being 2020, and all that.

If you’ve forgotten it, put it all out of your mind like the trauma it was, I’ll remind you. We were in the middle of a pandemic. I know, it seems so long ago now that we all got vaccinated and no longer have to worry about… 

What’s that? Barely sixty percent? And the rest are taking horse tranquilizers instead? I assume they’re taking it suppository style? Horse sized?

Regardless, some of us are at least heading back to work. As a teacher, I spent August and September of 2020 averaging 2-3 showers a week. The only people who might be offended were contractually obligated to live with me. Now I’m in front of classrooms containing 40 teenagers at a time. No Zoom filters for blurring out my grungy hair.

Daughter’s going to school now, too. Wife, similarly, is attending more meetings in person. The social contract dictates showering, y’all.

I came up with a little bit of a workaround. On Wednesdays, we do college day at school. Years ago, I bought hats for a bunch of minor colleges like the Kansas City Kangaroos and the Northern Arizona Lumberjacks to wear on Wednesdays. Not because they’re good colleges or anything, but because I liked their logos. Back then, I wore a tie to school every day and wearing a hat with the tie once a week was my rebellion against a self-imposed dress code.

That’s all gone out the window in COVID teaching. If I have to wear a mask, I’m not wearing a tie. Seems overkill. But like a preacher’s daughter in college, now that the restrictions are lifted, I’ve become like every other history teacher in the world. Cargo shorts and flip flops for the win. I have yet to decide what, if anything, I’ll reverse when the masks come off. But now that Newsome survived his recall, I don’t see masks coming off for a few years.

But since we still allegedly have college day on Wednesday’s (not that it’s ever announced or adhered to by administration or other teachers anymore), Iwent back to wearing my college hats on Wednesdays. Which means I can usually escape without a shower on Wednesdays. Isn’t that why God invented hats in the first place? I can also try to go the weekend without showering. Saturday isn’t too bad but woe unto the poor soul I encounter on that Sunday evening trip to the grocery store.

Unfortunately that’s still four showers a week, double the amount I took last year. And that was before I broke down last Wednesday. It had been a long night and it turns out I use those showers for more than cleanliness. Sometime nothing opens those eyes quite like the stream and the steam. I also use that time to mini lesson plan, in the form of “what the fuck am I teaching today?” Oh right, government policy.

It’s an odd juxtaposition from last year, when that very grocery store trip was the most exciting outing of the week, necessitating not only a shower but maybe a shave and a tuxedo. Not a shave and a haircut, mind you, as the latter required human contact. Nowadays, I’m doing my weekly grocery shopping going on 72 hours of funk. Complete with sweaty ash from brief stints outside

I feel sorry for all the old folks also doing their weekly shopping on Sunday nights. Hopefully they can’t smell me over their arthritis cream. Otherwise they’re in for a rude awakening.

Meh. It’s their own damn fault. They were probably watering their driveways all day.

To Mask or Not to Mask

· June 20, 2021 · Musings · , , , , , · No Comments

Greetings all from the Wild West, a lawless frontier where you can take your own life in your hands by walking into your local saloon or general store. 

Every day, I meet perfect strangers on the street. Our eyes squint as our hands hover near our waist, waiting for the other to flinch before we pull out our instrument of death.

I like in California. The weapon at my waist is the mask in my pocket.

It sounds like we’re behind the curve when it comes to the reopening. But in many ways that makes it worse. 

In California, we like to “follow the science” whenever the science agrees with our preconceived notions. For instance, the science said that masks helped prevent the spread of disease, so we wore masks inside. Science also told us that the virus doesn’t spread outdoors, so we closed the beaches and parks. Oh, and the outdoor dining, which forced everyone indoors where they were more likely to catch said virus. See? SCIENCE!

Well, the science told us about three months ago that vaccinated people are safe. One might even call them “vaccinated.” But because there was no way to know who was vaccinated or not, and because our Herr Kommandant Governor REALLY likes his emergency powers, we decided it was best to make everyone wear masks. For, I guess, solidarity with the people who don’t give a shit about the virus.

Our Herr Kommandant graciously gave us a random date back in early April at which point COVID would be over and the masks could come off. Because SCIENCE! And when the CDC made the same ruling a month or so before Herr Kommandant’s random dart-throw of a date, well, we better not listen to those crazy health officials. June 15 was the date he picked out of his ass and June 15 was the date we could take our masks off. Not a moment before! SCIENCE!

I’m pretty sure dude would’ve extended the date even further if he wasn’t already facing a recall. In the weeks leading up to his Magic Day, we heard scarce information from the government. The only thing that stopped his reneging and moving the goalposts for the seventy-fifth time in the past year, is that fact that minor establishments like Disneyland and the five major league baseball teams in California had taken him at his word and started selling tickets for full-capacity after June 15. And if I was a voter who was leaning toward voting no on Newsom’s recall, but then Disneyland called me up to tell me that my June 16 ticket was no longer valid, I might be changing my vote. Psychology is SCIENCE, right?

Herr Kommandant did say that, although he was begrudgingly sticking by his earlier promise about June 15, he was at the very least going to hold onto his emergency power until, I shit you not, the virus is eradicated. Eradicated as in completely extinct. As in, no new cases, presumably in California but possibly the world. You know, just like all those other viruses we’ve completely removed from the human condition. Like… um… hold on a second….

When June 15 arrived, we were given very little guidance as to how to proceed. Employees, we were told, still had to wear masks. Something about Herr Kommandant couldn’t control Cal-OSHA, he could only make suggestions. Except when he was implementing the stay-at-home order in the first place. Somehow his emergency powers only allow him to make things more restrictive, not less restrictive. He can make new laws but not do away with old ones? Even if they were implemented via emergency powers in the first place? Sounds like some shitty emergency powers. I assume he keeps his primae noctis rights.

So most of the places I’ve frequented the last week, the employees are still masked up. The customers have been a crapshoot. It’s about what you’d expect. Nobody in line at the donut shop wore a mask. Maybe they’re not buying donuts for their health? At the Whole Foods, everyone still wore them. The comic book store was an anomaly, with almost all the customers wearing masks but a few maskless employees. The customers are adults buying comics, so probably aren’t the best with change, but they’re probably conspiracy theorists who won’t rat out the employees to the government. 

Most of the places frequented by the masses, grocery stores and sandwich shops and the like, seem to be split right down the 50/50 range. It’s here where I go back and forth, where I find myself grabbing for the mask in my pocket out of courtesy to the other customer, even though I’ve already been there for five minutes or more. What makes the exchange even more awkward is that I’m relatively certain that masked person is vaccinated, as am I. So each of us are masking up to signal to the other person that we don’t need masks.

SCIENCE!

I know a few weeks ago I said I wouldn’t wear masks longer than I needed to. The unvaccinated aren’t masking up, why should I? Especially considering the masks are best at preventing my globules from getting out, not from stopping the globules already floating around in the air from coming into my mouth. They’re condoms, not diaphragms. Since I’m vaccinated, my globules are great (too bad I’m not still single, that would be a great pick-up line). There’ve been a ton of studies on if we’re acting as conduits from unvaccinated to unvaccinated and it turns out, in over 99% of scenarios, we are not.

So why am I now playing along with the mask wearing? I mean, aside from the fact that now that it’s voluntary, I can damned well do what I please? Part of it is the whole social contract thing. I know we are a dying bunch, but some of us still believe you shouldn’t be a dick to other people just for the sake of being a dick. So fine, other person in the store, if you’re still afraid of people not wearing masks, then I don’t mind a couple minutes of discomfort. I mean, y’all might want to get over that shit and look up on the research, because they’re really unnecessary if you’re vaccinated. When the school year starts up again and I have to wear a mask eight hours a day (in a high school where most of the students will be vaccinated, because SCIENCE!), those extra five minutes of face freedom are mine, not yours!

And if you’re not vaccinated, then fuck you. The social contract means nothing to you. You’re not smarter than the rest of us, you’re just a dick. Quit saying government regulations ruin everything then whine that the government didn’t regulate the vaccine enough. Isn’t it the anti-vaxxers who usually say to trust the free market? Well guess what, Pfizer and Moderna are private companies. Let the free market work its magic.  Although I’ve been vaccinated for close to three months now and I STILL don’t have 5G coverage.

The main reason I’m still carrying a mask with me is because I have a 7-year old daughter. Whereas the douchebag Anti-Vaxxer at the Starbucks can lie and say he’s vaccinated, I don’t think I can pull that with her. And if I’m anxious to avoid being a dick in social settings, the top of that list would be making my 7-year-old wear a mask while I go maskless. 

I go back and forth on whether or not I should make her mask up. On the one hand, kids aren’t likely to catch it and, if they are, they aren’t likely to get symptoms. But at the same time, the law says unvaccinated people must wear masks. I’m not opposed to ignoring unjust laws, but I also don’t want to encourage a future teenager to ignore missives from authority figures. Sometimes it’s tough to be skeptical of authority but still a believe that most rules should be followed. I’m either lawful neutral or neutral good. Or maybe I’m just a dick. What alignment covers that?

We’re going to Disneyland in a few weeks. They still require masks for the unvaccinated, which should be fifty percent of their population. Again, do I want to spend a whole day reminding Daughter that she has to keep that mask tight while I’m off licking doorknobs? I don’t know if she’s comfortable calling bullshit yet, but if she chose that as her first usage, I wouldn’t fault her.

Don’t worry, I’ll blog post-Disney. I’m sure it’ll be enlightening.

So that’s where I’m now at. Do I mildly inconvenience myself to put others at ease or do I follow the SCIENCE! and force them to do the same? Do I model how my daughter should act or do I teach her “Different Rules for Different People”? 

To put it simple: To mask or not to mask, that is the question.

And dammit, where is my 5G coverage and check from Bill Gates?

Another COVID Cancellation

· January 31, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , , · No Comments

Some of my normal camping guys came up with a crazy idea last year, which was to go camping again.

Normally, this wouldn’t seem totally asinine, but in this, the International Year of the Covid, all bets are off.

The wrinkle to this particular camping trip was the date it was to take place. Late January. Snow camping! 

I’ve never done it before. Nor has the other guy who was gung ho about the idea. The third guy grew up on the western bank of the Sierra Nevadas, where it snows a bit but nothing major. It should be noted that the two other Camptathalon mainstays, who grew up in Idaho and Wisconsin, couldn’t say no fast enough. A wise man might note the discrepancies. But fuck it, I’m sure I can get gassy enough to keep that tent as humid as a summer’s eve.

We opted for Yosemite. For one thing, I don’t really know how many campsites are even open this time of year. Our usual haunts don’t open until six to eight weeks after the last snow. In the midwest, there’s snow everywhere, so you can pretty much camp anywhere. In California, to get to snow, you’ve got to go up to 4,000 feet elevation or so, and the roads to those spots are a wee bit pesky. But the roads to Yosemite are plowed regularly. Commerce, as Teddy Roosevelt intended. 

Our second reason for choosing Yosemite was that it’s about as far from “roughing it” as you can get while camping. They’ve got two well-stocked stores and a half-a-billion rangers per square mile. Shit, they’ve got 4G reception and an ice cream stand. Guessing we could get pizza delivered if necessary. Not exactly a spot I’d need to worry about getting lost in a blizzard and wandering off a cliff.

Speaking of which, the valley floor is only about 4,000 feet, so the Wisconsoner and Idahoan really didn’t need to whine about traveling uphill in the snow both directions. It wasn’t supposed to drop below the mid-twenties at any point during our visit. The high was scheduled to be above forty on Saturday.

But alas, my first sojourn into the camping where you don’t need to purchase ice each day did not happen. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow would shut Yosemite down. COVID, on the other hand…

Yep, Yosemite is closed to overnight reservations as part of California’s on-again, off-again flirtation with pretending we’re taking it seriously.

Because, you know, there’s no chance for us to socially distance when we’re camping in the fucking snow. Why, it’s got to be like Disneyland, right? I imagine thousands of people are all ass-to-elbow, because if we know one thing about Californians, it’s that they LOVE being out in the snow in the middle of the night.

To be sure, it’s ONLY the overnight stuff that’s closed in Yosemite. Visiting the park in the daytime is still totally legit. It’s only the campers who can’t be trusted to social distance. Is there some sort of midnight orgy I was unaware of? Maybe it’s a good thing they won’t let me in, as you never want to be the guy who shows up for the orgy wearing snow-camping gear.

When I first made the reservations, I already had to deal with a weird COVID restriction. They were only booking fifty-percent capacity. Fine. Whatever. Except either I didn’t read the fine print or it wasn’t clearly spelled out, because if I were to ask you how to ensure fifty-percent capacity in a campsite, how would you go about doing it? Close every other campsite, right? 

Nope! They booked the entire campground for a week, then went an entire week without accepting reservations. I guess so they could… sanitize the dirt. Besides, who wants to go to a half-filled orgy. 

Just remember this when you go into a restaurant that’s cordoned off every other table to allow for maximum spacing. Tell them they’re doing it wrong. It’s much better to go standing-room only on Tuesday and Thursday, while taking Wednesday off.

This missing week became an issue while reserving, because Yosemite releases an entire month’s worth of reservations at the exact same time. I wasn’t sure what the demand would be for winter camping, but in the summer, if you log in five minutes late, the entire month is taken. So at 7:00 am, I started refreshing like I was loading a pornographic picture back in the dial-up days. 

7:01, 7:02, and I’m still not seeing the dates in question available. I noticed that the previous weekend was available, but I thought maybe they were residuals from the previous month’s availability. At 7:04, I decided to see if the FOLLOWING weekend. The campsite was available. It’s at this point I realize their asinine definition of “fifty percent capacity.” Good news is by that time, there were still campsites available. Bad news was I had to drop down to our third choice.

As an aside, the weekend we originally wanted to go was this weekend, the one in between the AFC/NFC Championship games and the Super Bowl. What better time to go camping than when there are no sports? But Yosemite only made the weekends of major football games available for camping. Maybe this was to further depress demand. Make sure no casual fans come up for the non-socially-distanced camping that is somehow less safe than day visitors.

Too bad I’ll never find out. At least not until next year.

And really, I don’t know why, ten months into the pandemic, I should expect anything less than arbitrary rules that have as much effect on containing the spread of COVID as taking off our shoes prevents terrorism. Remember back when they said we’d have regular testing by the end of May? 

Back then, Hawaii told everybody to stay the fuck away on pain of execution. Now Hawaii’s begging people to come work remotely, but only if you’ve been tested in the past seven days. Unfortunately, desire to go to Hawaii isn’t one of the prerequisites for getting a test. Tests, like vaccines, can only be doled out piecemeal, to those deemed worthy of saving. You need to have licked the bunghole of somebody with all three strains of the virus who is currently in ICU. 

Or you can be friends with the Governor. I have a funny feeling that everybody who was at Herr Kommandant Newsom’s French Laundry soiree has already received their vaccine. And snow orgies.

Speaking of which, sorry if my forthcoming rants are a tad California-specific. But a) that’s where I live, and b) we are the poster child for FUBARing the whole COVID thing. If you live in a place that’s got its collective head out of its ass, then maybe this’ll only serve to make you feel fortunate.

It’s interesting how most of the media say we’re no longer following the rules because of “COVID Fatigue.” Instead, most of us are making constant judgement calls, weighing the trade-offs between having a life or being dead. There’s a sliding scale. Even if we all strictly followed the rules, we have to grocery shop at some point. And I don’t think that I’m out of line that camping in the snow, with the closest human being fifty feet away, is probably safer than going to the grocery store. I’m not being ignorant. I’m trying to follow the rules and guidelines that the government established.

Not that those rules and guidelines mean jack shit. We’re told to meet certain goalposts, then we’re told that, sorry, that’s not the goal we’ve been looking for. Or sometimes we DON’T meet that goal, and Herr Kommandant’s like, “Yeah, you know what? It’s cool. We didn’t really need those ICU beds anyway.”

Over the Christmas holiday, Canada set up space heaters at outdoor parks. The message was clear: You want to be able to see your family and friends, so please be safe about it. In the United States, we opted for the tried-and-true “You want to be able to see your family, so we will tsk-tsk and shame you and not help you do that safely. Abstinence only has worked so well over the decades in this country. Just ask the millions of Americans who had premarital sex or smoked pot.

The ironic thing is we simultaneously tell people to social distance while also banning them from it. I’m on the Board of Directors for my curling club, and we perused the sports rules for hours. They have all sorts of rules for how to do our sports. Limited capacity? We’ve accounted for that. Social distancing and masks? We’ve changed our rules to implement those. But then, at the tail end of the document, they give a list of which sports can operate in which tier. It’s like telling us how we’re supposed to shop safely, but then closing the stores anyway. 

In California, we’ve had at least three different classification systems over the past year. First it was a convoluted “phased reopening.” That was tied more to which companies could open, and as far as I could tell, it wasn’t tied to any sort of caseload count. It was basically “Starbucks can open its drive-thrus, and if the shit doesn’t hit the fan, they can sell a couple Bacon Goudas, but not the bagel store in the same parking lot because Starbucks contributes a lot of money to politicians and fuck you, small businesses.”

Then we went to the color-coded, county-by-county system. Some people whine that the colors make no sense, but I think they’re fine. Yellow, orange, red, purple. It’s pretty standard “danger” stuff. The problem I have is that they set the classifications such that everyone will always be in purple. 

If you have more than 7 positive cases per 100,000 residents, you’re in purple. Seven! Currently, 54 of the 58 counties are in purple, which kinda makes the whole “purple” designation pointless. Sacramento County was at 55, while San Francisco County is at 38, and Los Angeles County was at 150. 

The red tier is set at 4 to 7 per 100,000. Orange at 1 to 4. Again, Los Angeles County is currently at 150, which is the same as 10. But 4 and 7 are hugely different numbers that drastically change what can open.

It seems to me that 150 cases per 100,000 residents is substantially worse than 38 per 100,000. But according to the state, they’re EXACTLY the same. It would be like maxing out the Richter Scale at 4. Or the hurricane classification at 2. “Boy, I wonder how big that natural disaster was?” “Exactly the same as every other natural disaster.”

So again, if they’re going to make their classification for the purposes of scolding us, then we’re going to try to make sense of it ourselves. At one of my staff meetings, my principal was running through the numbers and, at 93 per 100,000, referred to us being in “Deep Purple.” He talked about what preparations we might make if we get into “light purple,” but it was too late. I was already humming, “Smoke on the Water.”

At my curling club, we’re talking about reassessing opening when we get down in the 20 per 100,000 range. Although truthfully, I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad number, because it’s all arbitrary. If there’s no difference between 20 and 150, then is there really a difference between 7 and 20?

Then again, the numbers I’ve been quoting aren’t the real numbers, they’re adjusted for the number of tests. I have no idea what that means, but earlier this week, the New York Times showed Sacramento County with a rate of 23 per 100,000, while the California website claimed Sacramento County was still at 42. That’s a pretty large discrepancy and, unfortunately, the New York Times ain’t the ones who get to put us into red. 

And don’t get me started on the ethnic breakdown of the positive cases.

Yes, the state that claims to “follow the science” says that they get to make up the numbers. Counties aren’t allowed out of purple tier unless all of the ethnicities in the county are catching COVID at the same rate. And before you get started, yes, I know that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to catch it. But most of that discrepancy stems from issues of poverty.

Blacks and Latinos are more likely to work in the service and retail industries, which have remained open. Maybe if we want fewer Blacks and Latinos to catch the virus we could, I don’t know, try to make those activities safer. Like Canada did at the holidays, focus on HOW we do these activities instead of just telling people not to do them. I remember being a sexually-active teenager who had difficulties getting condoms.

Or we could look at fixing poverty and the reasons minorities are stuck in it, but ha ha, just kidding. Why would we try to fix poverty when we can just condescend people from behind the French Laundry barricade. “If you were taking this we were taking this more seriously, you would avoid the grocery store. Honestly, who has to buy fruits and vegetables more than once a year, anyway?”

So after the phases and the tiers failed to not only curb the surge, but actually seemed to make things worse, Herr Kommandant came up with a new metric, which was ICU capacity. So now if you’re in purple, everything is closed, but if you’re in purple and your ICU capacity drops, then… everything is still closed. But maybe they chain up the door now?

A recent article I read posited that closing everything down might’ve actually driven the latest surge. Before the shut down, people could eat outdoors. After the shutdown, they had to go indoors, where they’re much more likely to catch it.

Don’t get me wrong. ICU capacity is hugely important. It might even be something we should’ve been tracking all along. But we weren’t, and because the state couldn’t distinguish between nine sick people and two hundred sick people, they decided to change the playbook again. 

But once again, the ICU capacity numbers appear to be a heaping pile of bovine excrement. The Sacramento region (not county this time) sunk below the 15% availability in early December. We were put on Saint Gavin’s naughty list for a minimum of three weeks, after which it would be reassessed. I kept checking the ICU capacity over that three week span, and it usually oscillated between 14-17%. So I was shocked when Jan. 2 rolled around, and our region was suddenly at 4% capacity!

Four percent? How the fuck did we drop ten percent in two fucking days?

Well, you see, that 4% number wasn’t our actual ICU capacity. It was Herr Kommondant’s PREDICTION about what he thought our ICU capacity WOULD BE four weeks later. So, you know, sorry y’all worked so hard to reach that milestone I told you would get you off probation, but now I’m making up a new milestone that is literally impossible to reach.

Of course, the reason they were predicting our ICU rates would plummet was because they didn’t think we were following their rules over the holidays. In other words, “we don’t think you’re following our rules, so we’re going to keep the same rules.” Wonderful.

Then he reversed gear. A week later, he claimed that the ICU rates weren’t spiking as expected and he was going to reopen Sacramento only, because now his magical eight ball says that four weeks later, we’d be at 17%. I’m sure this decision had nothing to do with the fact Herr Kommandant currently lives and works in the Sacramento region.

And no, if you’re wondering, the French Laundry is not in the Sacramento region.

The irony of the naughty-list/nice-list switcheroo was the actual numbers. When we were told we couldn’t reopen because we hadn’t cupped his balls correctly, the actual ICU availability was around 14%, but when we got the all-clear, we were just under 10%. So why exactly did we set the 15% threshold?

Then a few days ago, he waved his magic wand and reopened the entire state. Poof. Our long, national ICU crisis is over! Even though not a single region (aside from Northern California, where nobody lives) had even come close to sniffing 15%. But now the magical four-week prediction says all is honkey-dorey. The outlook was almost comical. Sacramento is still predicting 17%, the exact number that was predicted two weeks ago, so I guess not a damn thing has changed. But all of the other regions, who were below Sacramento, are predicted to be higher. Bay Area is supposed to be well over 20% ICU availability, but the true kicker is Southern California, which is predicted as having 33% of their ICU beds free in just four weeks! This is the same Southern California that has had 0% capacity for six straight weeks! What the fuck? Are there only three ICU beds in Southern California and Bob is starting to look a little ripe?

I teach social science, so I’m totally comfortable with trends and projected statistics. For instance, Gamestop’s stock is predicted to drop by ten percent, but instead it increased by… what the holy hell? Okay, maybe ICU beds can jump from 0 to 33%. Gavin just needs to get reddit dorks on board.

The latest completely arbitrary shift came with the vaccines. They very clearly laid out the first five groups, confusingly named Tier 1A, phases 1, 2, and 3, followed by Tier 1B, phases 1 and 2. Not sure why they couldn’t just name them one through five, but I guess everybody’s gotta feel special. In the end it really doesn’t matter, because they changed up the order. The first two groups were an amalgamation of front-line workers. Then it was supposed to by those 75 and over in that third group. I know this because I was in the next group, 1B part 1, along with those between 65 to 75. Not sure how teachers and baby boomers were included together, but whatever. How many 75 year olds can there be? I assume teachers will be up any day now.

Except then they decided that those 65-year-olds get to jump ahead of teachers. No real reason. Just because. And I don’t know if you’re aware of age demographics, but there’s a lot of fucking baby boomers. So when it was teachers and boomers together, I was looking at a late March vaccination. Now that it’s boomers, THEN teachers, I just got pushed back to July. JULY! And I’m still in a “special” category. There’s still going to be a group behind me, which I think includes a large swath of retail workers, before getting anywhere close to the general population. So if you’re 50 years old and work a normal office job, you’re probably waiting till 2022.

Remember back in November when people were saying there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and this might be our final lockdown? And Biden promised 100 million vaccinations in 100 days? Well, I hope his math wasn’t dependent on the most populous state in the nation getting its head out of its ass.

I’m pretty sure the real number Lord High Protector Gavin was looking at had nothing to do with positivity rates or hospital beds or millions of vaccines he has in his own personal batcave. It’s the number of signatures on the recall petition. Here’s how I think this went down. The president of the California Restaurant Workers Association called him up and said if he didn’t open the entire state, she was going to tell every restaurant employee to sign the petition. And voila!, state is open. 

I should note that the reason I know that person is a she is because it was her, not the governor, who announced the reopening. He followed a few hours later. Ironic, considering many of the legislators and health officials were angry at Newsom not telling them when big announcements were coming, so they weren’t prepared for the slew of phone calls, making Newsom look large and in charge. But if he outranks them, we now know who outranks him. Be sure to tip your server.

So huzzah! Restaurants are open! Hair salons are open! Swimming pools are open! Unvaccinated teacher coming soon to a recently-opened ICU near you! Just in time for a newly-mutated strain that requires two masks!

But don’t worry, we’re all still safe.

Snow camping is still closed.

Stop Naming Fires!

· September 17, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , · One Comment

Remember L.A. Story? The Steve Martin and Sarah Jessica Parker rom-com was hilariously funny to this SoCal kid when it came out during my high school years. It might as well have been my life. 

Except for the fact that I never touched Sarah Jessica Parker’s boobs. Or fake boobs, in general. Heck, I’m 45 years old now and I still haven’t touched fake boobs. Seeing as how Wife is naturally endowed, I doubt I ever will. Unless you count when they’re skewered into my back like steel girders on a crowded BART train. If anything, those encounters probably played into my utter lack of desire to do anything more with them.

And sure, sure. Those are only BAD boob jobs. Whereas your expensive boob job are wonderful. Like vegetarian bacon.

Sorry, where was I? Oh right, L.A. Story. I doubt it stands the test of time, but at least it predicted text message abbreviations.

What got me thinking about it was the scene where Steve Martin realizes the date, which means it’s open season on L.A. freeways. He pulls a gun out of the glove compartment and everybody starts shooting at each other. Hilarity ensues.

Ah, the good old days, when Mother Nature sat idly by and watched while we all killed each other. Nowadays any human-to-human violence takes a smoke-filled back seat to the orange-skied behemoth smothering us all.

In case you’ve missed the stunning visuals, the entire state of California is on fire right now. As it was last year. And the year before. As we shout into our Zoom calls through COVID-infected lungs: It’s Fire Season, motherfucker!

Although to call it a “season” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s pretty much half the year. In 2018, for instance, my Camptathalon was cut short when we were evacuated due to the Donnell Fire, which razed our campsite less than twelve hours after we left. That was in August. Also in 2018, many school districts canceled school the Friday before Thanksgiving due to smoke from the Camp Fire. Not to be confused with a campfire, which we had to douse when we evacuated the campsite back in August. Or the Carr Fire, also in 2018, which had nothing to do with an automobile.

Incidentally, I looked up the Donnell Fire to verify its name. I googled “Dardanelles fire” since Dardanelles was the resort that burned down. More on the naming of fires in a bit.

According to Wikipedia, “The Donnell Fire was a wildfire that started on August 1, 2018 due to an unknown cause.” Bull fucking shit. That fire, like many others, started as a “controlled burn” that got out of hand. I have photographic proof, from a few days before our camping trip, of a perfect ring of fire, something I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist in nature. Check it out, complete with timestamp.

I’ve never understood why they choose the height of fire season to do these controlled burns. I assume it has something to do with foliage being too wet in April to clear out enough of the debris, but April would seem to prioritize the “controlled” part instead of the “burn” part. A couple weeks ago, with half the state burning and every firefighter elsewhere, we drove by signs reading “prescribed burning ahead, do not report.” When we woke up Sunday morning, smoke was on the horizon. Shocking.

I mean, it’s no gender reveal party, but it’s disconcerting that the professionals are setting fires, too.

Hey, what kind of names do you think they’re considering for the fetus who burned down the whole state? Since the orgiastic pyrotechnics were blue, it’s clearly a boy, so I doubt they’ll go with Fyre. Or whatever Drew Barrymore’s character was named in Firestarter. Would Sparky be too on-the-nose? How about Forrest, to appease the gods?

Turns out Drew Barrymore’s character was named Charlie. An androgynous name! Perfect!

Dumbass professionals and pregnants aside, I really don’t know what’s caused this sharp uptick in fires recently. The Democrats in my newsfeed swear it’s climate change. The Republicans in my newsfeed swear it’s that we’re not allowed to clear underbrush and make fire roads anymore. I assume the truth is somewhere in the middle. As usual, the problems we ignore are only exacerbated  by the problems we attempt to fix. So instead of a breathable climate with firebreaks, we’re left with a sweltering hellscape, complete with kindling!

But whatever. To butcher a Jimmy Buffett line, I ain’t tryin’ to reason with fire season. Like taxes, smarmy Amber Alert signs, and a governor who thinks he’s solved COVID-19 by changing “Phase I, II, III, and IV” to “Purple, Red, Orange, and Yellow tiers” (I wonder if he dropped the mic after that stroke of brilliance), if I want to live in the only state where teachers make enough to buy a steak a month, I’ve just got to make peace with six months of fire each year. 

It’s like hurricane season, only twice as long and with substantially more certainty. Even if my house isn’t specifically in danger, I’m still trapped inside. I think the air outside has more ash than oxygen. When I opened my door the other morning, it smelled like I was camping inside a BBQ. Except if I was at a campsite or a BBQ, I could be drinking at oh-dark-thirty. Whereas that would be frowned upon at work.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’m teaching from home. Nobody would know except my laptop screen. I actually lectured after a couple beers for the first time in my professional career last week. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a live lecture, but I remembered at about 9:30 Labor Day night that I hadn’t recorded the instructions for the next day. Oops.

I remember when California’s most famous natural disaster was our earthquakes. People who live in Tornado Alley or Hurricane Avenue or Locust Boulevard would comment how they couldn’t possibly conceive of living where there are earthquakes.

The great thing about earthquakes , though, is by the time you realize we’re having an earthquake, it’s already over. We don’t have to build an underground earthquake shelter or pack up all of our shit three times a year to drive 1,000 miles away on the chance that this might be one of the bad earthquakes instead of the mundane ones. 

Instead it’s, “did you feel… wait, is that… are we having an… whew, glad that’s over.” Unless you happen to be driving on the lower level of a bridge.

But with fires, we get to experience the looming dread that the rest of the country has always faced. When it gets too windy or too still, or too humid or too dry, we look at each other and know that we better stock up on the N-95s. And that’s before we knew that the fertility gods are now requesting sacrifices of scorched earth.

But whatever. Much like the Gales facing the Kansas twister or the Florida meth whores peddling their wares during Hurricanes Neal and Bob, we’re adjusting to life in Fire-geddon. Hell, it’s 2020, if the world isn’t literally crumbling to embers in your corner of the woods, just wait a week. Oh sorry, “corner of the woods” is probably an offensive statement here in Fire State. Every corner of every woods in the state is now an ember.

The problem that I’m having with the last five years isn’t the fires themselves, but rather our incessant need to come up with quippy little names for said fires.

I never understood the penchant for naming hurricanes. Sure, it helps to distinguish one from another, but that can be done without proper names of real human beings. There’ve been studies about people not taking female-named hurricanes as seriously as male-named ones. I can’t say for certain that Hurricane 2020-B would be any more or less effective. At least then they’d only get useful monikers once they’ve become something we should give a shit about. 

As opposed to our current classification system, where they get their fancy pre-selected name as soon as one drop of rainwater hits the Atlantic Ocean. It starts as Tropical Depression then it’s Tropical Storm, and because it has a name, we’re kinda rooting for it, right? I had a tropical storm named after me a few years ago, and I was really hoping it would head to New Orleans, hang out on Bourbon Street for a while, maybe drink a hand grenade because hurricanes are so gauche. 

It never became a hurricane. Insert sad-trombone noise.

It could be worse. I could be named Katrina. Or Andrew. Sucks for those people. We all want our named storms to peter out around a Category I, right? Worthwhile enough to be noticed, but nothing that’ll be reviled throughout time.

But hey,  the worst two hurricanes have one female name and one male name. And beyond those two, we’ve got Harvey and Sandy, Ike and Maria. Huzzah for gender equality!

At least when they’re naming hurricanes, they do it ahead of time and try to pick non-specific names. Now that they’ve decided to start naming fires, all bets are off. They name it after the fact and try to be as cutesy as possible. I guess all those out-of-work military planners had to get a job somewhere. Remember Operation Enduring Freedom? Good thing we didn’t take a left at Fallujah or we might be calling it Operation Turgid Nipple.

I’ve already listed some of the fire names above. The Carr Fire and the Camp Fire. Really? Oh what giggles must’ve erupted about the command center when those names were posited. “Sure, the town of Paradise is burning to the ground as we speak but, follow me here, guys. Camp Fire. Get it? Campfire? Oh, I’m so clever.”

They come up with some bogus bullshit about the fire starting near Carr Road or Camp Farm or whatever, but it’s clear they’re just trying to be clever. Hey, let me see if there was a Homeowners’ Ass. anywhere near the conflagration and I can call it the Ass Complex.

I perused the Cal Fire website while writing this. Check out some of the names: Oak Fire, Willow Fire, Lake Fire, Valley Fire, and Creek Fire. Clearly somebody was watching Animal Planet recently, because we’ve recently added a Bobcat Fire and a Sheep Fire. There’s also a Schoolhouse Fire. 

“Good thing all of our schools are canceled because of the plague, right boys? C’mon, up top!”

There’s a fire called the Lightning Fire, which may or may not have been caused by lightning. I say “may not,” because there were a lot of lightning fires (we had thunderstorms in mid-August) so it seems odd to name just one of them Lightning Fire. And we’re obviously not naming these fires after their causes or else we’d have “Dumbass Hipster Fire” and “Uncontrolled Control Burn Fire.” There’s an “August Complex Fire,” too. I have learned that a complex fire are when two or more fires merge. So the “August Complex Fire” mentions it was formerly known as the “Doe Fire.” Animal Planet Dude strikes again.

The problem with these names is that they’re confusing as hell, and when I want to check and see if anything is contained or if I’m ever going to see blue skies again, I first have to guess what clever name they’ve come up with. For instance, the county next door to me, bordering Sacramento, is named “El Dorado County.” The “El Dorado Fire,” meanwhile, is 500 miles away in Riverside County.

Imagine if the hurricanes were only named after they had already struck, and then were named random shit like “Cloud Hurricane” or “Wet Hurricane.” Or “Beaver Hurricane.” Then add in that “Texas Hurricane” just ravaged the coast of South Carolina.

I understand that, when there are twenty fires raging at any given time, there’s got to be a way to classify them. But guess what? Those of us living through this shit have come up with a much better classification system. The city that’s getting evacuated becomes the classification for the fire. Camp Fire, my ass. It was the Paradise Fire. Just ask Netflix.

Here’s the conversation I had at work last week.

“It was starting to clear up, but now it’s back. Is this smoke still from the San Jose fire?”

“No, I think that one’s mostly contained. I think this new smoke is from Fresno.”

“Really? Fresno’s an awfully long way away.”

“Whatever happened to the Auburn Fire? Wasn’t that blanketing you house last week?”

“No. Turns out the Auburn fire was minor. I thought it was that, but I was getting Vacaville.”

Super tough, huh?

Although I bet the forthcoming Cougar Fire will be nice and caliente.

Coronavirus Quaran-geddon Part III

· March 30, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , · No Comments

I’ve got a shirt that reads “It’s all fun and games until the beer runs out.”

I usually wear it when I’m man camping or doing some other weekend-style, fun-time activities.

When I threw it on the other day, however, it took on quite a different meaning. The beer running out seems far more imminent a threat now than when I’m out golfing or rafting. And when it runs out, it won’t just be a temporary message that maybe I need to cut back.

That’s a lot scarier than the toilet paper situation, if you ask me.

We’ve shut down all of society to stop the spread of a disease that might kill one percent of the people who catch it,. But it probably kills substantially less because that one percent relates only to those showing enough symptoms to warrant a test. When they started testing more people in South Korea, it seems a lot of people have it but show no symptoms and probably aren’t dying. So maybe the death rate is closer to, I don’t know, one-tenth of one percent? One-hundredth of one percent? That sounds like a good estimate. That would mean that only one out of one hundred who have the virus fit enough of the tick boxes to get tested, and of those, one in one hundred die.

It isn’t so much the death rate, the experts say, as the contagion rate. Each person infects three people, whether they’re on quarantine or washing their hands or whatever. You could lock yourself in your house and that virus will jump out your window and knock on your neighbor’s door. Then those three people will infect three other people. Whereas the flu, which only infects 1.3 people, will grow to something like 14 people, the exponential rate of Coronavirus, they say, means that one infected person will infect 59,000 people by the time you’re done reading this blog post.

At least that’s how it’s being reported.

We’ve had just over 6,000 cases in California, so I guess we only started with 10% of one infected person? We’ve also had 33 deaths, in a state with some 40,000,000 people. Am I prepared to have that number double? Triple? Quadruple? When all it takes to stop that death toll is by shutting down the entire state. I mean, who cares about an extra 5,000,000 unemployed if it can save 20 lives? It’s not like being unemployed and homeless has a high mortality rate or anything.

Although, to hear those in charge, those people are losing their jobs and it’s not even helping. Nothing we’re doing is working. Otherwise why would they continue to change the rules every day? Closing all the bars and restaurants didn’t seem to work, because the next day, we were stay at home and the day after that we were shelter in place. It couldn’t just be that Newsom and Trump love nothing more than seeing themselves on tv, and people might stop tuning in to their press conferences if they aren’t making up some cockamamie new rules. f they’re we’re need to have a new press conference every day. To get eyeballs, they gotta ban something new. Gotta double down on what we did yesterday, regardless of its effectiveness.

Maybe I’m coming at this from a different angle because of where I work. In California education (and I assume education across the country, but California education burns through a lot more money), we continually jaunt and jump from one “fix du jour” to the next. Somebody at the district or county office finds somebody who’s written a book or has a website about how education can be fixed and they pay him or her $10-20,000 to come present to teachers at a specific school or district. One year we had some lady from Georgia who yelled at us about using academic language. I don’t think she intended to yell, but maybe volume modulation isn’t part of academic language. Then we had a principal from a Newsweek article who raised test scores up 100 points. At the end of his presentation, he said maybe if we followed all of his directives (and paid him an extra $100,000 to visit more often), we could be on the cover of Newsweek, too. Of course, after raising his school’s test scores 100 points, they were still 60 behind us. And since he’d started spending more time promoting himself than them, they’d dropped back down, so we were about 100 ahead of them. But tell me again how we can get on the cover of a news magazine? Another time it was a woman who said that she felt sorry for her daughter’s teachers when she goes into parent-teacher conferences, because she knows that teacher already knows who she is and that she’s such a better teacher than they are. It must be daunting. Shocking that the room full of teachers that she said this to didn’t all jump up and applaud, huh?

But I’ve sat through all of them. Sometimes we pretend to follow the new directive for a whole year. Most of the time it’s forgotten by Winter Break, because somebody at the district office has found the next manna from heaven. Or, more realistically, has found the next kickback from the next dude who’s getting $100,000 from us. Sometimes they still give lip service to the previous fix, but usually they don’t even bother. After all, this new thing is a panacea, so who gives a shit about academic language?

We never see any of these things through, even if the presenters themselves say it’ll take a few years to see quantifiable results. So at the end of the year, our test scores go up or they go down or they stay the same. But what caused that change or non-change? Who can know? Ten things changed and maybe one of them had an effect or, meh, maybe it’s just a good/bad batch of kids this year and next year, it’ll be completely different. And if it’s not necessarily a good batch, but rather something we tried for a year back when they were in third grade, then who the fuck cares? We’ll change something again next year to even it out.

That’s what this Coronavirus shut-down has felt like. Every day they come out with new things that they’re shutting down. But there’s never any data to back it up. There’s never any discussion about if anything we’ve done has been effective so far. And how can there be? We barely test anybody, and if we did, it would take too long to get the results. Any numbers they give us now are the people who felt sick two weeks ago and got tested a week ago. They were probably sick before we even started washing our hands. But who needs data?

“We shut all the schools, but there’ve been ten new cases, so now you can’t go to restaurants. We shut the restaurants, but there’ve been five new cases, so now you have to stay at home. Goddammit, people, you’re not listening to us. We’re up to one hundred sick people! Fire every single person from every single job!”

The governor actually took the nicer approach. He commended us for doing what we’re supposed to be doing before saying that it isn’t working, so we’re going to do more of it.

At least we’ve determined that education isn’t “essential.” I guaran-fucking-tee my district will use that as their opening salvo the next time we’re negotiating a raise.

I assume the reason they did this piecemeal was because they couldn’t go for the whole pinata at the beginning. If they told us to shut down on day one, we would’ve said no. So instead they told us to wash our hands and then told us that wasn’t enough, despite no evidence to back that up. The real reason we’re on lockdown now is because Newsom and Trump saw that everybody went along with it, no questions asked, then took the next step.

Great and all, if you buy their rationale, but that’s kinda what Hitler did before World War II, too.

Newsom said if we don’t follow his orders, 25,500,000 Californians will contract the virus. Despite the fact that only 500,000 people worldwide have had it. Think about that. For every one person worldwide, an extra fifty-plus people in California will catch it. And that’s evidenced by the 3,000 or so in the state who already have it.

Now he needs another 50,000 hospital beds for “the surge in cases.” What surge? Where is the evidence of this surge? The few times I drive out, isolated in my car, nobody is out anywhere. Airplanes are flying with seven passengers aboard.

Every day we’re being bombarded by reports of who has it now. Two players from a hockey team. A senator. An actor. A member of a rock band. And each one of them is treated like an HIV diagnosis in the mid-1980s. It’s a surefire death sentence. If the NHL ever comes back, how will the Ottawa Senators field a team with two dearly departed, and I’m sure the rest of the team will have it soon, too. And poor Tom Hanks will never be able to make a movie again. And the Senate… Meh, fuck the politicians. But how dare he go to work when he didn’t know he had the virus? Talk about non-essential…

My local Kaiser has stopped taking non-emergency medical conditions, so I can’t get allergy shots anymore. The last time I went in (the day before shots got shut down like I was Indiana Fucking Jones grabbing his hat as the door dropped) they greeted me at the door with soap and asked me what I was there for, then sent me around to avoid any contact with anyone. But that wasn’t enough, so they shut the shit down. My primary care physician sent a mass e-mailed saying don’t come it unless it’s an emergency. And chances are, any non-COVID emergency will be told to shelter in place. We don’t give a shit about your terminal cancer, fuckface, this county has 50 Coronavirus cases.

Wait, did I read that right? My county currently has 50 cases. Two deaths. So they shut down the entire medical facility for 50 people? How big is this hospital? The good news is that I know of a doctor and a facility that’s more than ready for Gavin Newsom’s 50,000 phantom victims.

Flatten the curve. I get it. But are we really flattening the curve? It seems to me that if we’re just pushing pause on life for three to six weeks. Then we’ll go back to giving hugs and everyone will catch the virus anew. We’re delaying the curve, not flattening it. Okay, maybe the curve will have 50 fewer people in my county.

Unless washing our hands works. Too bad we didn’t bother doing our due diligence to find out.

Maybe we’ll reopen society in stages. We could do some businesses, then the others. But how would we decide who opens first? There doesn’t seem to be gradation in essentiality. You’re either essential, in which case you’re still open, or you’re not. So then maybe we should have every business reopen with only 25% of their staff. We can have a lottery. Then, once those 25% all turn into zombies, we send them home, wait a week, and pick the next unfortunate saps. That would flatten the curve. And it worked really well in World War I. I mean, aside from the whole 60,000 British casualties on a single day of battle.

I know, I know. Y’all don’t come here for the vitriol. You come for the pithy. So let me put away my tinfoil hat and come up with some of my more run-of-the-mill observations. To wit:

– We’ve been doing some spring cleaning. What the hell else are we supposed to do with all of our time? Get to know our family? So I did a really good job of going through some of my old books to clear some space on the bookshelf. So did Wife, and even Daughter okayed a few hand-me-downs.

But what the hell were we supposed to do with these books now? All of the used bookstores are closed and something inside me cringes if I have to throw a book away. It seems so wasteful. And it takes up vital trash space for all the plastics.

Fortunately, we have a Free Little Library. If you aren’t aware of these, people build little wooden mailbox-sized houses with clear doors out where people walk. If there’s a book in there you want, you just take it, and if you have a book that you are done with, you can leave it there. Great. I can just dump all of these books there. Except its got limited real estate, and I notice that it’s filled up recently, probably because every other household in the neighborhood’s doing the same thing as me.

So now I’m like Andy Dufresne taking rubble out to the prison yard in his pants. I’m taking one or two books each day and trying to slip them in. At last check, seven of the thirty or so books came from this house. And I’ve still got a stack ready and waiting. Come on, neighbors, read the shit I’m putting out there.

That might be the motto for this blog, too.

– We’re trying our best to support places that are still open. We’re doing takeout. We’re doing drive-throughs and curbside. I keep going to my favorite brewery to refill my growler. On one trip last weekend, I ran into the Sprouts (a grocery store that doesn’t have the same foot traffic as the behemoths) while Wife did curbside pickup at Joann’s. Then she did curbside at Target, which is super fancy. You don’t have to call them or anything. Just open your app when you’re in the parking lot and Big Brother heads right out. Then I went to the BevMo to pickup my online alcohol order. They’re not quite as high-tech – I had to call somebody to meet me at the front door with my booze – but really, I was picking up booze that I had ordered online, so who the hell cares that they weren’t to Amazon Prime delivery yet. I keep wondering to myself if those in charge would’ve been so ready to shut the whole shit down if we weren’t already living in the future.

But there are other businesses that I want around after the shitshow who aren’t quite as conducive to supporting while in quarantine. There’s an Indian place with a wonderful lunch buffet. Sure, I could order from them a la carte, but that just seems wrong. Why pay for one entree when I’m used to having ALL the entrees. Plus I probably should’ve been paying closer attention to which dishes I like all those times I partook. But then, what’s the point of a buffet if not mindless scooping?

Another favorite that doesn’t have a to-go option is Mongolian BBQ. Perhaps I’m being obstinate with the Indian food, but with Mongolian, I really don’t see how it’s feasible. You have to stand in line and put your grubby paws on the same food that other paws have already grubbed. Even if I could put that into a Doordash order, there’s no way the chef’s going to know the proper number of spicy versus sweet versus salty sauce scoops. I don’t even know. It’s a touchy-feely things, like those old grandma recipes that said q.b., short for quanto basta, meaning “How much is enough” or “as much as needed.” But I don’t think Doordash has a q.b. option.

We need restaurants or businesses like this to establish Patreon accounts. I’d be willing to send them some money to keep them around. And if they want to make it good for a meal when this thing is done, great. But if not, consider it a much better pay-it-forward than buying that fat fuck behind me’s Frappuccino.

Sure, I could get gift cards in the meantime, but if the business doesn’t have an updated website (and let’s be honest, the Mongolian and the Indian restaurants aren’t likely to be the most technologically savvy), that means I have to go in. But are they even open?

So they just need to establish a Patreon. If it’s good enough for podcasts, which don’t even give me an egg roll on the side, it should be good enough for brick-and-mortars.

-The grocery stores seem to be restocking some of the staples. Bread and ramen still seem a little sparse. Meat is still hit or miss, but it’s better than all-miss, as it was a week ago. It’s almost like, follow me here, our economy produces enough for us to consume, as long as we don’t freak out and try to buy the whole goddamned store.

I’m reminded of FDR’s first Fireside Chat, after he’d closed all the banks. Well, he didn’t close all the banks, he only declared a bank holiday that ended up lasting the better part of a week. Back then, can you imagine, presidents and the government actually thought there were limits to what they could do, who and what they could command to stay indoors and close their doors. So when the banks were about to reopen, he got on the airwaves to tell the people to not be numbnuts the next day. Banks, he explained, only keep enough cash on hand to cover normal withdrawals and the rest is tied up in mortgages and shit like that. “[A]n amount which in normal times is wholly sufficient to cover the cash needs of the average citizen.” But if all ya numbnuts go and try to get your money at the same time, it won’t be there.

The same could be said for tortillas and ground beef and pasta. If we had all bought what we needed for, say, one or two weeks worth of isolation, instead of six months, there’d be plenty to go around. Unfortunately, our current commander-in-chief doesn’t seem quite as concerned with calming and quelling the populace. His fireside tweet would probably go something along the lines of, “Go Fuck yourself. Pull my Finger!”

-Somebody posited that the run on flour wasn’t so much hoarding as it was a byproduct of most Americans baking at home for once. Makes sense, since the flour that goes to bakers and restaurants is probably direct from suppliers. I don’t think Krispy Kreme is heading the the Piggly Wiggly each day.

But what does this say about the toilet paper? Are we finally shitting at home instead of work?

-Has everyone else lost track of what day it is? Holy crap!

I was thinking about buying a Nintendo Switch to introduce Daughter to the joy of video games, and possibly Wife and I to the joys of a moment of goddamn peace. Sure, Daughter’s watched me murder some nasty Brits in Assassin’s Creed III on my fancy, high-tech PlayStation 3, but maybe it’s time for her to learn of the existence of non-violent games.

Turns out there are no Nintendo Switches for sale, like, anywhere. Not available on Amazon, no Target or Best Buy or GameStop (before they closed) within 200 miles of me had one in stock. I did a little research and discovered that this shortage was coming even before people were going to be shut in for months. It was just sped along by the Quaran-geddon.

All is not lost, though. Amazon might be able to get some once they end their moratorium on non-essential restocking. The article I read suggested mid-April. No problem, I thought. Why, mid-April must be coming any day now.

What? It’s still March?

Fuck!

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