Pere Ubu - Street Waves - 1978 Rock

Meanwhile, in the United States of America.

Brian Eno "Sky Saw"

And about forty years ago there was this.  And it was good.  Still sounds fresh as a daisy, doesn't it?

There's plenty of good music these days, but an awful lot of it sounds like Eno, Can and/or Devo.

California, Water, And Golf

California was in the middle of a drought when I arrived in 1975.  I stayed in Berkeley for a few days at the home of friends that had two sons, ages 7 and 9.  In the bathroom there was a drawing of a big, yellow sun that bore the legend, “in this land of drought and sun, we don’t flush for number one.”  For the next few years it hardly rained at all.  It all seemed normal to me, a newcomer.  At that time, I don’t think the Dodgers had had a rained out home game in all of their time in L.A. 

By the 1980s, the rains had returned with some strength.  There were a few big El Nino years in a row.  In 1982 the storms kept coming with ruthless regularity until May, so even the Dodgers had to deal with it.  There was water aplenty. 

Drought conditions returned in the 1990s.  In the mid-1990s the city of Los Angeles, and maybe the entire county, resorted to water rationing to deal with it.  It was announced that starting the following year, all water users would be limited to a certain percentage of the water that they had used in the previous year.   There were abuses.

A couple of friends and I were weekend golfers at the time.  We played the municipal courses, most of which were of the type that we called “goat paths.”  Those were courses where the fairways were straight, flat and uncomplicated.  There might be one hole with a water hazard that was used as a reservoir for the course, and the grass was pretty beaten down by all of the walkers.  There are lots of golfers in Los Angeles. The best of the municipal courses was Rancho Park, which is really a very nice golf course, a different story altogether.  Rancho is well forested and very green, with long water holes and many changes of grade.  They even play a tournament there.  Ranco had interesting ideas about water.

There was a friend of my son’s working in the cart shack at Rancho at the time.  One day we stopped by after playing to say hello.  While we were having a pleasant natter, I noticed that there were several large diameter hoses lying around, running full on and draining into a big sewer grate.  I asked my young friend about it. “Oh,” he said, “they’re keeping all of the taps turned on so that next year we don’t have to worry about water.”  They were artificially raising their baseline for the coming years of water rationing.  Their solution to the drought problem was to waste vast amounts of potable water, just send it right down the drain.  I’m sure that their explanation would have been that they were just protecting the integrity of their golf course, which was a public trust. 

Southern California is lousy with golf courses, there must be hundreds of them.  I’m sure that Rancho wasn’t the only one with this water wasting plan.  The many big, beautiful private courses are capitalist institutions, so the managers there had directors and stockholders to answer to.  It was more important for them to honor that more limited duty than to consider the public duty to save water.  The number of acre-feet of water thus wasted must have been staggering. 

The current water crisis in California dwarfs anything that came before during my time in California, maybe anything in history.  The state’s reservoirs seem to be mostly empty.  There are a vast number of man-made lakes in California that are used as reservoirs, and they are disappearing.  The floor of the San Juaquin Valley is actually sinking, because almost all of the ground water has been pumped out of the aquafers.  Somehow, though, in aerial photos the golf courses are all strangely green.  Some other blessed locations are also very green.  Lush, in fact.  I’m very curious to see how long their luck can hold out. 

Los Angeles is a desert, so maybe it’s time to go to the style of golf courses that one sees in places like Saudi Arabia.  Courses with a small green tee box, nice green greens, and mostly sand in between.  Or at least links style courses, like the ones found in Scotland.  Those are mostly scrub grass that is comfortable in sandy soil and does not require a lot of watering.  Those are “target shooting” courses.  “See that little green patch out there?  Now lay the ball on it.”  (Or else it’s lost.)  There’ll be a fuss, but you can get used to anything it you try a little bit.  

Obviously, California is going to have to get used to being water poor.  These days all of the geniuses in the world are devoting themselves to figuring out ways to make mischief with fiat money, or avoid paying taxes, or cheat working people out of benefits.  If only a few of the geniuses would apply their talents to problems of water, or food production, or social progress, or peaceful coexistence, boy, that would be so fucking great that I would cry for happiness.  I doubt if it will happen, though.  So I guess we’ll have to settle for the desertification of golf.

A Letter

I thought that I got a letter today.  A letter from America!  A rare and beautiful thing!  Turned out that it was a letter that was being returned as "Return to Sender; Not Deliverable as Addressed; Unable to Forward."

I was disappointed.  Slightly more disappointed that the ninety-nine days out of a hundred when no letter comes at all.

Savoy Brown:-'Train To Nowhere'

I don't know much about most things, and very little about certain things, but I know what I like, and I know what I liked when most people by far were liking something else.  In the late Sixties, I liked Savoy Brown.  I liked them very much.

When I listen now, I flatter myself to think that they've held up very well.

Bangkok Skyline

I'm really loving this balcony.  All my life, I've never had a view before!

The sun from the west is a giant pain in the ass, so I'll be moving next year.  But in the meantime, between the sky and the birds, I'm enjoying myself.

Yeah, We're Old. So What? What's New?

It has never been easy to get old, I’m certain of that.  It’s not getting any easier either, I’m certain of that too.

Most of the hassles are of the bureaucratic kind.  Money hassles in general; dealing with Social Security and Medicare; taxes; doctor bills; working; investments if you’re lucky.  Illness and decrepitude are hassles, that’s for sure.  My least favorite hassles, however, are the ones that come from other people in the form of silly ideas.  Things like, “Social Security and Medicare are entitlement programs (and we can’t afford such giveaways)”; “how long should people have to work before they can start on Social Security?”; and my least favorite, “Baby Boomers fucked up the world.” 

That last one, amazingly, often comes from Baby Boomers themselves.  If that’s the case, usually It’s a Conservative Baby Boomer complaining about Liberal Baby Boomers.  Most often, though, it comes from younger people, and it really gives me a “hey you kids, get off my lawn” moment when that happens.  Young people have been annoying since the dawn of time, but I’m getting to the age when it becomes most noticeable.  When young people today complain about Baby Boomers they have a twofold agenda: 1) Baby Boomers made mistakes that have ruined my planet or my finances and limited my opportunities or something; and 2) when are my Baby Boomer parents going to die so that I can get my hands on “my” money?  Man, I like ISIS better than I like some of these young people.

And by the way, all of you hipsters, with your hipster hats, you’d better hurry up and knew this:

As you are, we once were; as we are, so you will someday be.  (To paraphrase skeletal death on those Middle Ages tombstones.)

And that’s if you’re lucky!  Not everybody gets the luxury of old age.  I was definitely thirty-five-years-old at one time, and I was thirty-five for an entire calendar year.  Many of these whining youngsters will be dead before they reach my age.  Maybe long dead.  Some of them deserve it, too.

Everybody gets the same deal.  Everybody who lives a normal life span, who hits the actuarial predictions, lives exactly one year at each year of age.  Everyone’s year is the same 365 days; the same 525,600 minutes.  My “three score and ten” is the same as everybody else’s “three score and ten.” All young people, including we Boomers, have always shared the illusion that they will somehow beat the odds and remain young forever, because they exercise, or eat right, or will get lucky, or the doc’s will figure something out, forever.  The certainty of death only begins to sink in at around forty-five-years-old.  It all happens faster than anyone expected it to as well.  If you’re alive now, you’ll be dead within only a few thousand heartbeats after me.  We’re alive . . . we’re dying . . . and, we’re gone.  That’s the deal.  And it’s not the fault of Baby Boomers.

It’s not cool to blame shit on previous generations.  Intergenerational struggles are like a Golden Gloves boxing match, where a couple of kids wear huge pillowy gloves and flail away at each other without really accomplishing anything.  Baby Boomers may be in a unique situation, now that I think of it.  When we were young men and women, our parent’s generation was jealous of us, and by now I think these young hipsters are jealous of us as well.  After all, our fun made their fun look like a work camp.  And young people today should bow down and thank us for breaking up the old social status quo.  We died for their sins!  All of the things that they now believe make them cool came from us Boomers.

And here’s a tip, boys and girls.  If you’ve got your eye on mommy and daddy’s money, don’t say that shit out loud.  Keep that as your most closely held secret.  Because we are a nation of laws, and your parents can do whatever they want with that money.  I would encourage them to consider the matter very seriously.

And here’s a tip for Baby Boomers whose adult children are measuring them for coffins and taking inventory of their property and accounts:  don’t forget to put your ungrateful children in your will for $100.  That way they can’t take the battle to the Probate Court arguing that you just forgot to mention them and that you really intended to leave everything to them.