What's Going On

Unnecessary Headlines

From the San Mateo County times, page two of a story about the delay of the execution of Michael Morales two hours before his scheduled departure from this world: "Morales relieved after news of postponement."

No shit, Sherlock!

This was his second near-death moment; the previous night, Mr. Morales was spared when the two anesthesiologists who had agreed to supervise the execution backed out on ethical grounds. They were to be there as a result of an order by US District Judge Jeremy Fogel that two anesthesiologists be available at the execution to ensure that Mr. Morales was adequately anesthetized with sodium thiopental, a barbituate, before the introduction of pancuronium, which causes paralysis, and potassium chloride, which induces a heart attack.

The following night prison officials tried to find someone, anyone, who would meet the terms of Judge Fogel's alternative solution: the direct intravenous injection by a licensed professional of a lethal dose of sodium thiopental alone. No one wanted the job, and the death warrant finally expired.

The state must now go back to the original trial judge for a new death warrant should they decide to proceed again. This judge, Judge Charles McGrath, has now come to believe that the witness on whose testimony he relied when he instructed the jury to deliver a death sentence was lying. In a highly unusual move, Judge McGrath submitted his own letter with the clemency petition delivered to Governor Schwarzenegger. The clemency petition was rejected, of course, we must keep the base happy, which was why the dance of the reluctant doctors played out on Monday night.

An interesting twist to this story is that one of the lawyers who worked on the clemency petition to the Governor is none other than Kenneth Starr, of the Clinton impeachment debacle. It appears he is now trying to make an honest living saving murders from the death penalty. According to the LA Times, one of the reasons he took the case was because he "was intrigued to learn that Morales was a 'deeply sorrowful Christian.'"

Another twist in the story is the affidavits allegedly from six members of the original jury that were included in the clemency petition. Apparently five of the six statements, in which the jurors appealed for clemency, were forged and had to be withdrawn by the defense team, to the astonishment of legal experts across the land. The six statement, which was not challenged, was neutral and asked the Governor to make the decision. Ooops!

The ending of the story is that a second hearing on the constitutionality of death by lethal injection will be held in May. Between now and then many Americans will say they believe murders should suffer agony as they die. None of them will step forward to stick a needle in Mr. Morales's arm.

(Thanks to the San Mateo County Times and the SF Chronicle for the facts in this post).

I-5, U-5

Coming back from Lake Tahoe, we cut south on the I-5, unable to tolerate driving 10 miles an hour for another hundred miles before we got home. Down it took us, past a spectacular sunset, the silhouetted Mount Diablo, then through dark voids of fields, the sprawl of Stockton, to Tracey, where we left it for the terror of Highway 205, our escort through the East Bay to the San Mateo Bridge. I had heard of places like Stockton and Tracey but had never really believed they existed until we drove through them and were able to wonder how many Denny’s the people of Stockton and Tracey really need.

The I-5 starts at the Canadian border and I have travelled it often to escape to the US. The I-5 was my roadway to shopping extravaganzas in Seattle; treks to Portland to admire the civic landscape of a city that tore down a freeway; my first trip to California in 1980 to see the Dead play in San Francisco with my Deadhead friend from university days; retreats to the beaches of the Pacific, the ocean I have promised to never leave.

In California, the I-5 ends at Mexico, and I don't think it ever gets the respect it deserves. It runs along a mere four-lanes wide for hundreds of miles through flat, flat, flat cropland. Farming odors occasionally overpower. I was stunned, and a little shocked, to realize that for much of its traverse through this most paved of states, the iconic I-5 is a spindly two-lanes in each direction weakling, shunted down the middle of what is essentially one big farm, far from the most interesting city in the state, overshadowed by the beefy spider web freeways roaring through the big towns of LA and San Diego, mulitidigited, massive.

Instead of winding out a magic carpet of blacktop, stitching together the people and cars of North America, the I-5 is a lonely, unloved highway, one lane dedicated to giant 18-wheelers, one lane left for the rest of us: the over-testosteroned pickup truck bullies, the entitled and empowered consumers of SUVs, the completely oblivious owners of Mercedes, the drivers of reliable transportation, like me, who nervously navigate amongst the others, driving a bargain between getting home alive and getting home before next Thursday.

Tahoe Tally Ho

This weekend was spent in Tahoe. A full third of the 24 hours that were Friday was spent on I-80 and the roads that lead up to it and almost as many hours were spent on Monday driving along I-80 and then my most faithful, and faithless, of roadways, the I-5.

Coming and going, I cursed the urban sprawl and over population that have lead to this moment, or rather these moments, hours of moments crawling along, averaging the wind-in-your-hair exhilaration of 10 miles an hour. (Later in Tahoe, a friend tells me of spotting a sign warning drivers to reduce their speed to 40 miles per hour -- "I dream of going 40 miles an hour," he wailed). Of course how absurd. I am an immigrant -- one of the hundreds of thousands of strangers cluttering up the shrinking beauty of California. But I live in a small house in an urban center and drive a Subaru. Does this not give me the right to at least 5 minutes, or miles, worth of annoyance at everyone else?

The time we actually managed to spend at the lake and in the snow, once we got there, was fun, although the lack of powder usually supplied by regular and prolific dumpings of frozen precipitation was sorely missed, literally, by day 3 when our local sledding spot was transformed into a vertical ice rink, with a bevy of boulders and death by hypothermia in the frigid lake waters waiting at the bottom. Pine cones, tree roots and other unidentified bits of earth matter were visibly poking up through the thin layer of snow, noticed more by the pain experienced in the body than by the sense of sight in the eye as we went flying along to our certain doom.

We tried cross-country skiing for the adventure component of our trip. For the first time for my athletic husband who was soon swooshing along like a Nordic natural. My son too is a novice, but he spent most of his time falling flat on his face and shrieking with outrage. I have cross-country skied before and nothing describes me better than calling me an optimistic amnesiac. Or an amnesiac optimist, either works. My first cross-country skiing experience involved a lake in Ontario and a bottle of Kaluah. This I remember with far more conviction than an attempt at cross country skiing in British Columbia, that involved steep hills, sharp turns, and growing lines of impatient, experienced outdoors people, rolling their eyes and sighing, I could feel them, as I tried my luck first by sitting on my skis as a kind of impromptu and less lethal sliding delivery device, and then just taking the damn things off and carrying them jauntily over my shoulder. Lake Tahoe offered a modest hill that we somehow slithered down and then crept back up and finally a stretch of flat land that we all three made our way across with some semblance of enjoyment. We did contemplate another, steeper hill at one point. Two snowshoers tried to wave us ahead. “You go first. You’ll just glide down!” said the woman. I laughed bitterly from the tree I was clinging to. I dream of gliding.

The words inside my head

This blog is an experiement to see if I could or even wanted to write something once a day about the world around me. At first I thought of a public service approach -- you know -- summarizing the key events in the news for the people I know who don't read newspapers. People, by the way, who today will miss out on Bad Reporter in the SF Chronicle, which features a panel showing a fake front page with the headline: "Liberals Suddenly OK with Scalia Hunting with Cheney." Best joke so far, by far.

So anyway, with this entry I am cheating by writing about writing and how much harder it is than I thought. I have all these words spiraling around inside my head all the time -- why is it so challenging to let them flow out through my fingers on to the screen?

Gender Wars

My friend was so excited. Her daughter and a few of her neighbourhood pals spent an entire weekend afternoon pulverizing sidewalk chalk so they could make magic dust and act out scenes from their own minds. My friend was happy, it was pure imaginative noncommercialized free play, the kind we parents with an artsy bent crave to see from our children.

My son also spent a fair amount of time grinding up found material on the weekend. For him it was a piece of styrofoam that he industriously rasped against our fake-teak outdoor table. "What are you making there?" I asked, happy to see him pryed free from the TV and Gameboy. "A weapon." He held it up to study its evolving form and went back to work.

Bird bites man

Have you ever seen quails? My friend who has a piece of property in the hills near where I live has them. Sometimes when I am visiting, they scutter nervously across the lawn, or are simply on the march to the next quail destination on the schedule. Other times they are clustered under her bird feeder industriously cleaning up the mess made by the upper story birds. The quails are round and plump and quite charming. They have ridiculously cute top-knot feathers that bobble in the air as the birds bustle about doing what quails do.

These are the birds that our manly draft-dodger vice president likes to blow away for a relaxing time out with his fellow rightist killers. Yesterday, apparently, our chicken hawk VP decided to take a break from preying on small birds and blasted one of his hunting pals in the face. Oh, it was an accident of course, except is it an accident when you have piled up a mountain of bad karma from killing over your lifetime? Small birds, Iraqis, young American soldiers, elderly and sick Americans suffering from a mean and stingy health care system and unending tax cuts --that's quite a list of death that has been scribed beside Mr. Cheney's name. Right, I know, it wasn't Cheney that got hit, and no humans died. Still it looks bad in the news for a guy one heartbeat away from world domination. Especially coming as it does along with increasing attacks on the competence of this Administration, attacks coming now even from their fellow Republicans.

The quails and I take our small pleasures where we can.

Music for the ages

Shopping today at our local food store, which has become a sort of community center for displaced urbanites who also happen to like chemical-reduced foods, listening to Echo and the Bunnymen, and thinking about how much Muzak has evolved from my youth. It used to be all swelling strings oozing out the insipd and unexciting kind of music you would hear on the Lawrence Welk show, if you ever watched it, a smothering aural assault which was an unforgivable form of torture for already paranoid elevator riders across the continent.

At some point in my adulthood though, I started to recognize Beatles music as I white knuckled my way up office towers, or roamed dazedly through sterile Safeways foraging for something edible, eerily familiar songs disassembled and reconstructed to accompany the clatter of grocery cart wheels as they rattle along icy cold shiny bright frozen food aisles. Now, at the groovey food store, where we buy and sometimes stay to eat pure, uncontaminated, unprocessed foods, I find myself humming along to music that is raw, unmessed with, and produced for the generation that came after mine.

It's a shock to realize that the music that came after your time is already fodder for the Muzak machine. It will happen to you too one day, and you will similarily be dismayed. And here's another thought: we're already up to the '80's now in the Muzak continuum; soon I guess will come the 90's and the double oughts. In five to ten years then, will we be listening to unadulterated, straight-from-the-studio-rap as we shuffle along scanning the shelves of organic polenta and unfiltered prune juice? Will this be the shopping sound track of my old age: "Produce answer line 3, someone from produce line 3 please...cop killa... muthafucka...nigga ho'....clean up on aisle 1, clean up on aisle 1...?"

Fat Ladies

The news tizzy for today is the fact that 50,000 or so women over the age of 50 were studied over 8 years. Half of them were put on a low-fat diet, which few of them, apparently, were able to sustain that successfuly. At the end of the study, both sides had the same incidents of heart disease and cancer. So the immediate media conclusion: there are no benefits to a no-fat diet. Nevermind that by age 50 or older it's probably too late; the damage is done. Nevermind that they didn't really follow the diet that properly. It's now official. Eat all the crap you like. My inner libertarian does not want to pay your medical bills.

What the news tizzy should be about is the fact that with criticisms of the warrantless wire tapping authorized by George Bush heating up, and a new revelation by the NY Times that the White House knew on the night of Hurricane Katrina that there had been a levee breach, suddenly Mr. Bush is feeding us information about a planned attack on LA which was thwarted four months ago. You have to flip to the back of the paper to find comments from anonymous intelligence officials who think the plot was just a lot of hoo hah talk from terrorist wannabees, but at least the SF Chronicle did start the story on page 1 and implied that this is pretty much a big ol' PR stunt with the subtitle, "Aides say timing not related to Senate hearing on wiretaps." So, Mr. President when DID you stop beating your wife?

Does this not remind you of the constant yellow or orange alerts, or what the hell ever, all during the 2004 Presidential election campaign? When every time the Democrats scored or the Republicans stumbled there was immediately an upgrading of the alert level? Even though the cause of alarm was equally quickly revealed to be bogus or 2 years old?

While we're wandering down memory lane, how about this happy pairing. Back to the Katrina story for a minute, the NY Times tells us that the day before Katrina hit, the Homeland Security Department issued a report that a levee breach would have catastrophic effects and leave over 100,000 people homeless. Here is the White House on this subject, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Wander with me further and here is Mr. Bush on the subject of the attacks on the Twin Towers, "Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale." Never mind the Presidential Briefing of August 6, 2001: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

The sad group of people who make up this administration apparently can't anticipate what's for dinner and yet they want unchecked, unobstructed power for the President, the kind you usually don't see outside of places like Russia or West Africa. Who could have imagined it?

The Plan

So, the way it works, I think, is that the cuts in education in George Bush's new budget are actually a part of the plan for Defense and Homeland Security. The way it works is the Administration has come to realize that the most potent weapon wielded by many of the nations opposed to the US is a large body of underemployed, undereducated young men with no hope, a sense of victimization, and easy access to guns. So, cut education funding, slash social services, encourage racism, and presto: now the US has its own large body of underemployed, undereducated young men with no hope, a sense of victimization, and easy access to guns. (OK, I can't say that encouraging racism is part of the budget specifically, but cutting services to the disadvantaged while cutting taxes for the wealthy is racist by virtue of the make up of the two respective target populations.) Point them in the direction you need them to go. We will be ready. Lock and load.

A Slogan for our town

"It's close to everywhere else you'd rather be!"