Random Droppings

"Why work for peanuts when you can strive for randomness."

-Jeff Slepski, human physiology teacher, Hemet High School, 1982

Yes, I went to school in a different time and place. Creating fake bromides just sort of fit the moment. Jeff also had a homemade wall hanging in his classroom that proclaimed:

"Hemet is so wonderful. God must love us here."

The actual town was a jaunty mix of fundies and Mormons, unusual for California, and Slepski looked like he was trying out for the Eagles. An odd fit. Obviously, this was his way of pushing back.

My view right this moment, from the balcony of 407.

Just came from the yacht club, "feasting" on a cup of soup and a salad because my suit this morning, which I hadn't had occasion to wear for a while, barely buttoned. At least they took me at my word when I said I wanted the Caesar salad light on dressing. That pretty much leaves chopped up romaine with a few croutons. Peg would approve, but I was underwhelmed.

And the salad fork? Ye gods. Has anyone ever figured out a way to eat a chopped salad with dignity using the little fork on the outside of the silverware arrangement? You can't stab a romaine leaf if it's in its floppy configuration, and the chopped bits amount to something the size of a toenail. If you scoop up a few you'd better move fast before the bits fall off the fork back onto the plate, and if you rush things to avoid that contingency you often sort of miss your mouth and it all falls back on the plate anyway, leaving a goopy bit of dressing on your upper lip for all to see.

I need to design a better salad fork. Maybe something like the little steam shovel in the children's book I recall from 55 years ago. Peg and I could retire! Excelsior!

But I guess you'd have to figure out how to fish the lettuce bits out of the bucket, with your tongue or your lips sort of like the donkeys when they're trying to get an apple out of your hand.

This is what senility looks like.

Today I managed to make it to Kiwanis, a small crowd because of the driving rain. An old friend came up and hugged my neck. I asked her how her husband was doing. "He died in April", she replied. This is the price of spending months at a time out of town.

At the yacht club this evening I was struck by the fact that I was the oldest guy there--the room was packed with families and kids running back and forth between the dining room and the pool. A father stopped a conversation with me to introduce his eleven-year-old son, who looked me in the eye, stuck out a hand for a shake, and said he was pleased to meet me. One doesn't encounter this welcome bit of gentility up there.

In New York they are every bit that polite insofar as they're nice and highly unlikely to hit on your wife, but in social settings P and I are usually the youngest folks there. No kids. No 40 year olds feeling that swell of the wave under them that will carry them to a great destiny that leads to a diaper and the experience of having someone else wipe your keester. Don't spoil the surprise for them. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, it is a far better thing to travel with hope than to arrive.

The prosperity among that gaggle of 40 somethings stems from the prosperity of this place, just like anywhere I reckon. The kids back in Mass are computer and internet savants, and they live in a place crowded with that kind of brilliance. Here it's all about selling the Margaritaville fantasy to the rubes, so most of these young professionals are realtors, contractors, real estate lawyers, and the like. It's certainly a different conversation.

As I went on an ill-advised afternoon run to take advantage of a brief dip below 90 degrees in the wake of a tropical rain band, I watched the line of cars coming home from work on Cove Boulevard, and thought a little about economics and population growth. I've always been hugely influenced by Thomas Piketty and his Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century, and in particular his idea that growth in GDP over the last half-millennia, except in moments of paradigm changing technological innovation (think the internet), is pretty much a function of population growth. Get 3% more folks to move to your town, and unless they're dull normals or physicists fleeing a fascist regime, you're going to see a 3% uptick in your economic stats.

That's why the panhandle feels so unlivable these days. We're not drawing Einstein or von Braun; we're drawing, well, not those two guys. And by all measures the economy here is popping, really something at this moment that feels otherwise on the cusp of a grand collapse. But it's just a function of all these extra bodies, with their cars and their kids and their nutty politics. Much better to be up in the uncrowded hills and lakes and nice people who feel like they stepped out of the 1970s in every positive sense.

Easy for me to say. Most people don't have the luxury of picking a home because the community is wonderful and inviting, when they have student loans and car payments and little Cody or Kylie need braces. Why else could Plano exist?

Enough already. Remind me to tell you about the wonderful birthday weekend P pulled off, complete with an airshow, and my attempt to fly into a foolish death the next day before thinking better of it.

I left Perry over 19 hours ago to come to work here. Time to lay my burdens down for the night.