dan

Painful, Part 1

Now two weeks into recovery, I am, for the first time, attempting to keyboard and feeling ready to tell the story.

I’d estimate that, since taking up road biking in 2008, I’ve rolled at least 40,000 miles. The only mishaps have been encounters with drivers who chose to pull across the double yellow line directly into my path, suddenly and without warning–one in 2009 and another in 2012. Otherwise, despite the obvious hazards of the sport, I’ve been unscathed.

No longer.

What’s more, I am a far-from-cautious cyclist. On the urban arterials, I’ll challenge cars for right of way. On winding mountain roads, I’ll enjoy the thrill of a fast descent.

However, on February 27th, I was doing just what any kid or adult might do when taking a spin around the neighborhood–just riding along at an easy pace in the company of friends. In other words, this could’ve happened to anyone on a bike.

I do have a woulda coulda shoulda about it, though. The trauma probably affects my memory, but I do seem to remember thinking, oh, railroad tracks, they look like a hazard, angled 45 degrees across the roadway like that, but they’re not really, because you can just roll right across…

Except this time I didn’t. I distinctly recall the unexpected tug on the handlebars, and looking down at my front tire wedged alongside the iron rail, and heading at terrifying speed for the pavement.

And the sharp crack of the bones in my forearm breaking.

I didn’t hit my head or lose consciousness or anything. I think I was mentally calling for 911 before my body came fully to rest.

Because I wanted everything to be as calm and routine as possible. I wanted to be in that ambulance on the way to the hospital with no damned chaos or excitement and delay before I got there.

For the most part, I got what I wanted. Randy and Kyle were shocked and asking me questions, but a passerby said he’d already made the call. Then, somewhere behind my head, on the other side of the tracks, some lady angel had stopped, was making calls, bringing me a mask–mine was still in my jersey pocket–offering to come back with a truck to pick up my bike, making sure BNSF was told to stop the trains. I focused on breathing–in, then out– and moaning just as much as I needed to, and no more.

I heard the sweet sound of a siren in the distance. They were coming for me.

Yeah, I knew my name, and DOB, and the year. I was amused that they didn’t ask me the standard question of who’s the President. Too loaded, I guess.

The arm was kind of a problem. There was no way to get a splint on it, bent as it was. Eventually the EMTs just wrapped it loosely in gauze. I stopped them from trying to lift me. I could roll onto my good side while I cradled the arm against my body, and then I could walk on my knees to where I could swing my butt on to the gurney. From there it was a cinch for them to load the crumpled mess through the bay doors.

Inside, the paramedic was unwrapping supplies and hooking me up to the monitors. I was asking for the pain meds. It wasn’t long before she had a 20 gauge IV in my arm and 100 mcg of Fentanyl on its way.

It wasn’t near enough, but we got to Kaiser’s Oakland ER anyway.

From there, the care was attentive, professional, reassuring. They gave me a solid IV dose of ketamine while they put the arm back straight and plenty morphine as I whiled away the afternoon hours. And then it was time for surgery.

March 16, 2021 by dan Cycling Personal Status 1

I come to praise 2020

as well as to bury it.

2019 was exceptionally tough for me, personally. My household broke up, and my mom committed suicide, and my main work client succumbed to chaos for a time. I had flood cleanup and repairs to do at the river house, and an evacuation during fire season. It seemed like one damn thing after another all year.

But 2020?

Mostly, I feel badly for my kid, and all kids who lost nearly a year of their childhood to the lockdown, and are still losing. And of course I feel badly for people who got sick, or died, and for the people who took care of them, all the time being ill-led and poorly resourced.

Ever since reading Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, back in the ‘90s, I’ve known a pandemic was coming. This disease, this pandemic? It’s still in progress.

So far there are many silver linings.

First silver lining: It happened on Donald Trump’s watch, and drove his incompetent and corrupt presidency into the realm of the ridiculous–and contributed to his defeat. Remember, in the wake of the 2016 election, we actually had some people,–even sober and well-intentioned people–saying GOP supporters were just ill-informed, or economically anxious. This time around it’s clear that Trump is (and was) a convenient focus (not even a leader, really) for an ongoing, broad-based fascist movement rooted in the masses of uneducated white people.

We are polarized, to be sure. Is it a bad thing that so many progressive Americans finally, in 2020, woke up to that?

The Bernie-Sanders-and-leftward left, which seemed kind of resurgent in 2016, and carried some momentum through to the 2020 primaries, has now–by the hand of its own arrogance and cluelessness–made itself practically irrelevant.

In its place, there is an upsurge in political participation–an upsurge that is most urgently anti-fascist and pro-democratic, but also includes new discussion and debate about the country’s history, about whiteness, and about capitalist economics. Many now expect and anticipate radical change, and foresee that change coming over years, via existing democratic structures. Many self-defeating shibboleths–it’s the corporations, it’s the electoral college, it’s money in politics, it’s Fox News–have given way to the realization that American conservatism and resistance to change is rooted in white supremacy, and the scale and nature of our battle is more akin to the American Civil War than to the revolution of 1848 (in Europe), or to the labor movement of the 1880s through the 1930s here, or to the 1960s social upheaval.

The movement for Black lives–at its height over the summer–revealed the potency of this upsurge, not just because the demonstrations were widespread and persistent, but more importantly, because attention was soon directed to demands that are specific, achievable, and far reaching. The Democratic Party, acknowledging its African-American base, embraced that movement. Progressives, who have in the past dallied with “critical support” (or half-hearted support) for the Democratic Party, were required to take a side. All to the good.

As a second silver lining, the response to the pandemic is a dress rehearsal for the required response to climate change: Massive, rapid change is necessary. Trillions must be spent. Competent government is required, or the entire population suffers. A majority (or at least a near-majority, and headed in the right direction) accepts this.

There are other silver linings: Expressions of anti-scientific prejudice now get, in 2020, howls of derision and not merely tut-tuts. There is, to my perception, a marked abating of the “personal solution” attitude that came in to vogue in the early 1970s and has persisted throughout my time. The same goes for various forms of reactionary nostalgia, or the idea that “technology won’t save us” (then what, pray tell, will?).

So overall, I find the country’s political and social milieu much improved over where it was a year ago.

As for my personal situation, as in the past few years, not everything went right, but the things that I did–where I took action–not only turned out mostly right, but were if anything aided by the extraordinary situation of the pandemic. I got a new solar roof on my house, and the house painted, and am happy with the result. In the middle of the year, I signed a new contract to continue assisting my main client.

Around the same time, while dating under pandemic restrictions, I found a great new love relationship.

With no Club rides, and no commuting to the barber or therapist, my mileage on the bike was way down (2,343 miles from 3,660) but I kept it up consistently.

I meditated 20 minutes on each of 364 days during the year.

A brief for a troll

Has there ever been a time when one’s facility for dividing truth from BS has been more needed–and yet more difficult to do? My daily sorting through spam exercises it; my news aggregator and Facebook challenge it even more.
The deliberate lying and misleading–in the service of taking your money or infecting your computer, or obtaining your political support–is annoying, even painful, and it’s all too easy to just hate on it.
At the same time, I think we all admire, secretly or not, a good prank or hoax, when it’s funny and it’s especially when it’s directed at someone, or many someones, whose beliefs and behavior are over the top.
And I’ve done it from time to time myself, but never as effectively as this guy.

July 17, 2020 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

Andy Gill

My 7th grade band teacher, Mr. Preble, was a slim and elegant man. In retrospect, I can see that he was enormously patient, and we tested that patience considerably.

I liked him right up until the time he made a comparison–a comparison I found insufferably arrogant–between the pop music we liked and the classical music he wanted to teach us about. His point, as I recall, was that while pop music was almost invariably about young romance, classical music evoked a refined and subtle reflection on many aspects of the human experience…

I interrupted him there, and not politely. “It depends on what you listen to,” I said. “Pop songs are about all kinds of things.” Mr. Preble and I couldn’t be friends after that.

If my objection was true in 1969, it was even more true a decade later. While I like a love song or a broken-hearted song as much as the next fan, I was still hanging on to my conviction that there were more important and revolutionary things to be found in lyrics and liner notes and in the rhythm and noise. Something is happening here, but you don’t what it is, do you Mr. Jones?

So in the late 70s I found myself defending my view all over again, this time with older colleagues in my Marxist-Leninist collective. Their tastes had moved on from their early appreciation of Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones, and had ended up in that 1970s place where one’s music was no longer an expression of alienation or revolt but had become mellow background for getting an after-work Rocky Mountain High– which is to say, it could be about romance, or not about romance, but it really didn’t need to be about anything at all.

And then, amazingly, the alienation and revolt came back to rock ‘n roll, this time fueled by Thatcherism. I loved the Sex Pistols and the Clash and most of all I loved the Gang of Four, whose music had things to say about social theory that were considerably more profound (and profoundly Marxist) than what I was getting from the collective’s study group.

Some young hangers-on recruited me into a Marxist-Leninist wannabe punk rock band–we called ourselves the Prols–and I learned how to play drums, sort of. One night Ricky, our leader and guitarist, told us Gang of Four was going to be playing at Hurrahs and we were all going together.

Which brings me to this article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the current New Yorker. She gets the Gang of Four’s contributions to the funk/punk genre mostly right, I think, and she includes a vignette from that show, along with a link to omigod, video:

When Gang of Four came to New York in 1979 and performed at Hurrah, they did a version of “Damaged Goods,” which was already enough of an underground hit that the audience sang along to most of it.

Well, we were singing along to it, all of our bandmembers there in the mosh pit, because we wanted to make that sound and sensibility part of our own. Besides, the lyrics could have been written about my unrequited love for the girl I’d followed out to New York two years earlier:

Damaged goods
Send them back
I can’t work, I can’t achieve
Send me back
Open the till
Give me the change you said would do me good
Refund the cost
You said you’re cheap but you’re too much

Which of course actually is about young romance, but what Mr. Preble wasn’t getting about rock ‘n roll is that it’s always all about young romance, but it’s also about rage and alienation and a burning desire to turn the world upside down. When it’s not about some other aspect of human experience.
Or as the Gang of Four’s lyricist, Jon King, put it in a slightly later song, “Why Theory”

Each day seems like a natural fact.
And what we think, changes how we act.

The Gang of Four’s leader and guitarist, Andy Gill, died Feb. 2 of pneumonia. He was just three years older than me.

February 19, 2020 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

Zuckerman asks for regulation

This news less surprising than it looks.

“Regulatory capture” isn’t just about avoiding regulation entirely; more often, it is a way that industry leaders (and occasionally, savvy upstarts) tailor entry requirements to give their own business an advantage over their competitors.

This can go either way, and the same business may find it to their economic advantage to lobby for more or less or different regulations in different times and different circumstances.

My guess is that that Facebook’s main concern is that the EU regs align with their own plans and innovations and not those of current or potential competitors.

Savvy regulators can use that competition to the public’s benefit, by lining up support from companies that stand to gain from needed regulatory initiatives.

February 17, 2020 by dan The Nature of Belief 0

Programs and Purposes

I’ve been preparing comments and ideas and proposals for the up-for-reissuance San Francisco Bay Municipal Regional Stormwater NPDES Permit, and for the statewide NPDES permit covering small municipalities.

NPDES permits are issued for 5 years, and this is, by my count, my fifth go-round.

Here’s a challenge: Can anyone involved describe, in a few words, what these permits are intended to do?

Because in their written expression, and in the programs that implement them, you’ll find a bunch of intents and purposes and mandated actions–all kind of cobbled together. Trying to piece it together is like digging into a closet where stuff has been accumulating for decades. Every part has a story, but there’s no unifying theme.

I do trainings and presentations, mostly on implementing the land development requirements of the various permits. At the beginning of each presentation, I implore the trainees to bring their own purpose, and their own creative energy, to the task at hand. The permits give us a mandate and authorization, I tell them, but it takes creativity and personal engagement to achieve something useful for our local communities.

For a land development project, that creativity has expression in the grading, drainage, and landscaping, and in the placement of bioretention facilities in relationship to the buildings and pavement. At its best, the result solves many problems with simple strokes–that is, elegant design.

I want to bring that same lesson, and that same aspiration, to the jumbled, overstuffed permits I’m now commenting on. What is the unifying theme that could make sense of the mess? And how could that result in more meaningful, creative programs going forward?

Picking through the accumulation of decades… there’s the problem of dumping and illicit discharges, and enforcement against the dumpers, and inspections of commercial/industrial facilities, and public education about preventing discharges, and then public education about use of products like pesticides, and then public education about watersheds, and their function and value, and then, for while, actual attempts at watershed management, and then seeing those attempts subsumed by the demands of implementing load reductions for specific pollutants (like heavy metals, and PCBs), and then mandates to eliminate trash, and now, retrofitting streets and drainage infrastructure to mimic natural drainage.

The unifying theme, and the opportunity, I see here is: “Changing our relationship to drainage.” Each of the parts, each of the permit mandates, and each piece of the shared history of local stormwater program implementation, connects in some way to that idea.

In a future post, I’ll apply that idea to assessing some of the successes and failures of stormwater programs, and to where they might go next.

May 21, 2019 by dan Stormwater Pollution Prevention Work Status 0

I got off easy

The liquor cabinet came through unscathed.

I’ve been agitated—not really worried, but not at ease either, ever since I left the river house early Tuesday afternoon. That was just ahead of the evacuation orders, but I also needed to get through the storm to make a 3 pm work meeting in Martinez.

Just before I drove away, I walked into the backyard, to be enveloped by the sound of the rushing river. I could see the water boiling up the slope, already nearly to the house level and rising a foot an hour.

The next morning—Wednesday— I was up early to drive to Napa and deliver a half-day training workshop. Then back to Martinez to facilitate a big multi-agency meeting.

Then driving-like-hell-in-the-still-pouring-rain to pick up the kid at the Albany library. She’d arranged a playdate, so I let the two girls make a mess in the kitchen while I sat in the El Cerrito home office and refreshed the data on current river elevations, over and over.

The data wasn’t surprising—the surprise had come a day and a night previously, when, after a listening to hours and hours of nonstop downpour, I’d checked the flood forecast and saw the river was going to get to 46 feet in Guerneville, which is higher than most of the big floods of record.

But viewing the real-time data was distressing, because it meant that the water was eight feet deep under the river house right now, and still rising. I’d moved the power tools and some unused furniture out of there, and stowed some of it upstairs in the living room, and some of the rest on the porch outside. But the boats and paddleboards, the hand tools and some work tables, were all down in the flooded basement swirling around in the dark. And the water was creeping up toward the loft, where I’d put some boxes that I was too tired to move, and too short of time to move, up on the seats of some old chairs and was just hoping for the best.

And now there was nothing to do but wait for the water recede. I couldn’t even get near the house if I’d wanted to go there, because the roads were closed.

I realize that it’s kind of crazy—especially since I’ve consulted, during my career, on flood management and how to avoid flood damages—that I’ve become an owner of floodplain property. I’m a fan and exponent of Gilbert White (“floods are acts of God, flood losses are largely acts of men”).

The flip side is that a floodplain is a lovely place to have a house, which is why people build there. It’s especially lovely to have a house nestled under towering redwoods, which keep it cool on the hottest summer days, and to have a beach and swimming hole just down the path.

The way to have it all, I guess, is to build houses that are suitably elevated above floods—in the case of the river house, that means a first floor about 13 feet above grade, which is 2 feet above the 100-year base flood elevation (BFE).

(I’ve been fired as a consultant only twice in my career. Once was by a big-shot manager of a flood control agency. And it was for advocating, a bit too avidly, to make 2 feet above BFE a standard for single-family home construction within that agency’s jurisdiction. Tonight I’m feeling validated.)

The house was raised to that elevation, and rebuilt, with FEMA funding after the 1995 flood. Last night was the first time the now-elevated house has been hit with a comparable flood, and so the first time to test the FEMA standards in effect at the time.

I was distracted all Thursday morning. Around noon I got a kind-of-urgent request from a client. I could have just let it go and headed north to check on the house, but the data said there was no point in doing that—the flood was slowly receding, but the water was still well above the elevation of the roads in and out.

So I finished the what I needed to do for the client and waited until after dinner.

I left El Cerrito at 7:20. The drive up Highway 101 was strangely routine. I got used to seeing this during the fires—just outside a disaster area, everything seems almost hyper-normal, as everybody goes about their regular business.

That lasted as I drove the limit all the way down River Road toward the lower river, even past the Forestville turnoff at Mirabel Road, and on down the leafy, winding canyon where the Russian River cuts through to the Pacific Ocean.

And then there were flashing lights and barriers, and I was diverted on to Old River Road, and up and down steep hills for a mile or two. And then I was across the street from the house. I could see the lights were on, and I could pick up my wifi signal.

And I could see that the street itself was still flooded a few feet deep.

I waited. I watched an abandoned truck left parked on the street, now slowly emerging from from total inundation. When the water level fell below its bumper, I figured the water in the street was shallow enough to drive through the remaining current, and I could make it to my driveway.

That done, I pulled on some hip waders and started walking around. The backyard brush pile was distributed around the yard and some if it had floated through the open door and into the basement. The 250 gal. propane tank was gone, the anchoring hoops now advertising their own failure. Inside the basement, the boats and ladders still where they belong. The work tables and a lot of odds and ends redistributed amid a lot of mucky sediment. The in-line water heater had been about half-immersed; it might be OK, or not. In the loft, the legs of the chairs were wet, and the seats, and the boxes they held, still dry. I could see the high-water mark just a couple of feet below the rafters.

All in all, I got off easy. I’ll get a good night’s sleep and start the cleanup in the morning.

March 1, 2019 by dan Personal Status 0

Kick it to the curb

In a few minutes, Melanie, Zoe, and I will get on our bikes and ride from Cannery Row to Monterey’s downtown to join the “First Night” New Years Eve festivities.

It’s an annual tradition for us, in the way traditions should be—involving, each time, an evaluation of other options, and due consideration of possible variations, followed by a decision to do the same again, and pretty much the same way we did it last year, because we like it that way and we don’t see any good reason to change. Traditions should be nothing more, or less. We’ll decide about next year, next year.

In the big picture, for everybody and the world, 2018 was goddamned awful. I’m happy to kick it to the curb. The thing to celebrate is this: In all that goddamned awfulness, it became more apparent that the awfulness is more of the same again, as it has been in previous years, and maybe what’s changed is us, and our willingness to continue in the same vein. There is nothing really new in the planet being destroyed, or placing toxic sexual deviants in high office, or Mississippi being an affront to civilization, or that most Americans are cowards and choose to believe outright lies. These phenomena are all so constant and repetitious in my lifetime that they are like traditions. But I have a feeling we all, collectively, might not decide to do it the same way next year. We can hope, and be optimistic.

In 2018, I tallied some bits and pieces along this stretch of my journey to the grave.

I biked on 108 occasions, traveling 3,695 miles and climbing 235,109 feet. I expect to do the same or more in 2019.

I began a daily meditation practice on April 30, and meditated on 263 of the following days, most times a 20-minute silent sitting meditation, totaling a little more than 87 hours. I expect to meditate more than 350 days in 2019. More than the hours, though, is the purpose of this practice. In her excellent book, How to Meditate, Pema Chodron describes nurturing five qualities through practice; I have condensed them, for the purpose of recall, as follows: loyalty to self, clarity, courage, presence, humility.

I billed a little over 1,000 hours of working time. In a reversal of my earlier plans for semi-retirement, I anticipate working a bit more in 2019. There are some things that I want to spend money on, and I don’t think it’s wise to dip into my retirement savings for them. And I continue to see a lot of demand for my services, and who am I to argue with that?

There are some things I’ve meant to do, or wanted to do, for some time, and I guess this is the time to restate those intentions:

First, there’s my yoga practice, which is essential if I’m going to keep up the biking. Back in September, I had to cut way back on riding for time until I could get my muscles stretched out again. Also, I’m getting, you know, old, and I’d better make this a regular habit. Besides, I like it. So I’ll make the resolution to start a regular once-a-week yoga class, plus a half-hour before meditating at least twice a week, plus continuing my 10-15 minutes yoga prelude to meditation most other days.

I plink on the guitar occasionally, but I didn’t get any better, and may have lost some ground, during 2018. I won’t commit to lessons, quite yet, but I’ll aim for a 30-minute practice session twice a week—mostly for the therapeutic benefit.

And then there’s the business of getting my affairs in order. I use that phrase as a way of getting at the mystery of why I haven’t straightened that shelf in my bookcase, or cleaned out that closet, or caught up with my accounting, or completed my estate planning, which I feel are really the same mystery. Moreover, that same mystery encompasses, in some essence, why I haven’t expended the effort to make this or that thing—my wardrobe, or various aspects of my personal space and effects—more to my liking. So my goal for that is not so much about completing any of these things in the sense of putting them behind me, but more to understand better my relationship to them, and to my motivations for doing them or, as has been the case, not doing them.

Last—perhaps it should be first—there is my personal big picture of striving to live my values. I wear a bracelet that says, “Express Yourself,” by which I mean to bring myself to the job of living, and especially, or parenting, and to help and inspire others, and particularly my daughter, to do the same. Meditation, and some other forms of self-discipline, helped me to significantly advance that effort during 2018, and I mean to realize the benefits of that, and make further advances, in the coming year.

January 1, 2019 by dan Personal Status 0

Her Name Is Justice

We’d opened all our presents, which were now scattered about the living room along with the wrappings and the remains of our breakfast.

I stepped out the front door to the street. I got our old pickup truck started and backed it into the driveway. I opened the camper shell and stood there a while, thinking through how to pack everything we were taking on our family road trip: Suitcases and bedding. A camping stove. Pots and pans. Wet suits and boogie boards. Three bicycles.

I was fitting the first of these items into their spaces when I sensed someone standing behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a small lean girl. Hair worn natural. Cappuccino skin. She wanted something. I asked her to wait a minute.

I finished what I was doing and turned around to face her. I had guessed she was going door-to-door, and I was already braced to refuse another scam.

But it wasn’t that at all. This girl’s face was soft, and her lip was trembling. Her voice was a child’s voice, and it was so faint that I could barely make out what she was asking.

A ride. To get home. Where was home? Near Ashby Avenue. I knew that neighborhood well. Could I offer her BART fare? No, she didn’t want to get back on BART.

Then I saw she was shivering, and starting to cry. Her backpack, the kind kids take to school, looked like it would slip off her shoulders.

She wouldn’t come in, but I got her to sit on the porch steps, in the weak winter morning sun and away from the constant wind, while I grabbed a couple of energy bars from the kitchen. Inside, I told Melanie I was going to need some help. It was Christmas Day, and this kid needed a ride home, and I wasn’t going to get in a car with her alone.

I went back out on the porch and took a place next to the kid. She told me her name was Justice, and that she was 15 years old. She looked younger, in the way undernourished children do. I coaxed her into eating one of the bars. She put the other in her backpack.

I asked her what was wrong.

Here’s one thing about having PTSD: Other people’s experiences remind you of your own experience—that much is normal. Except that with PTSD, being reminded of a traumatic experience can cause you to relive it, and pretty soon you are not where you are at all. Instead, you’ve disappeared inside your own head, and then you aren’t of much use to yourself or to anyone else in the here and now.

And I wanted and needed to be present to hear what Justice was telling me.

Her story was sad; it was not entirely coherent, but held few surprises. She’d had trouble with her mom’s new boyfriend. She liked school but didn’t feel connected to it. Someone had promised to meet her today and didn’t show.

I told her that life was tough for me when I was her age, and it had got steadily better. I told her that if you hang on, in a few years you get old enough that you can get a job, and have some of your own money, and then maybe you can figure out how to find a place to live that’s safe, and next you can figure out who you want around you and who you don’t, and in time you can make a life for yourself.

Melanie came out of the house, car keys in hand. I said goodbye to Justice and went back inside the house—inside, to be with my own 8-year-old daughter.

The love I have for my daughter heals me and also scares me half to death. Each day I struggle to make her experience of childhood—and my experience of parenting—all about her, and about us, and about the here and now, and to make my own childhood experience a source of understanding and compassion for the present, and nothing more.

Melanie came back after a while. There’s a neighborhood in South Berkeley where the infant mortality is about four times what it is in the wealthy white areas of town, and the life expectancy about 20 years shorter. Justice asked to be dropped near a corner, and Melanie had waited in the car a few minutes as Justice walked up the block. Driving away, she maybe saw Justice approaching a disheveled middle-aged woman in a housecoat.

And that was all.

In the days that followed, I had a frustrating time when I told story to friends. I heard a lot of opinions about what Justice could or should have been doing differently, or could or should do next.

I imagine Justice was probably doing what made the most sense that Christmas morning, which was to leave the house and wander the cold streets for a while, and come back home a while later and try to duck back inside without being noticed too much, and to try to stay safe and out of the way, and hope some adult would put some food out, and hope that nobody got so mad or crazy that she had to leave again, and hope she could live from one day to the next like that, until things changed, and to hope that when things did change, that they would get better rather than worse.

I think it’s that way for quite a few kids trying to grow up. My own path was adventurous and fairly successful, in large part because white men like me have so many privileges in this society that you really have to screw up badly to go wrong. It was only much later in life that I came to appreciate what family can mean, and to learn to cope with everyday interactions without dissociating myself from my feelings.

I’m still learning. And there’s still part of me that remembers, and understands, why it would make sense to walk a cold unfamiliar street rather than going home. I hope this Christmas, a year later, Justice will be somewhere warm and safe, and feeling loved and protected. However, on the good chance she isn’t, I wish her the strength and resilience to find her own way, alone, in whatever way she can.

December 22, 2018 by dan Personal Status 0

NYC, 1983

In 1983, when summer came, I took an opening on the lobster shift. It was full-time work, and I needed to save some money to get through the next academic year.

In the cool of the late evening, I’d take the IRT down to Times Square and walk over to the type shop near 38th and Madison. I was always glad to see the folders of work, freshly arrived from the ad agencies and the corporate headquarters, marked up and ready to go. Working made the overnight hours go by.

I had a special deal with management: I could leave at 7:30 am, so I could make my 8:30 class at City College. Third-semester calculus and analytic geometry. Some of the those mornings, as the summer heat built in the classroom, I could scarcely keep my eyes open.

At 11:15, class over, I’d make my way back to my place on 109th Street. There was no air conditioning, so I’d set up the fan to blow toward the bed while I tried to sleep. The noise helped cancel out the voices and the sirens out on the street.

One Sunday morning, I woke up with the thought that I wanted to make a record of neighborhood life, at that time, in that place. Our building was on rent strike, and some of us were organizing a block association to deal with some of the neighborhood problems.

Anyway, I loaded up the 35mm with a roll of Tri-X and headed out. I walked around the block, keeping my attention on the block on which I lived, bounded by 109th St., Columbus Ave., 108th St., and Amsterdam Ave.

This is what I saw.