How does a man of substance dress in Santa Cruz? You have several ensemble choices. But my favorite is a good pair of leather shoes, clean denims, an aloha shirt of floral pattern, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. Add a briefcase, and you’re an entrepreneur.

So was I dressed, minus briefcase, as I walked into the Green Vapors vape shop on Cedar Street. And I was received with deference by the sales clerk, a pale young man with the All-Seeing Eye of Ra tattooed across his Adams Apple. In Technicolor.

Damn. Outdressed.

Not long ago there were no vape shops in the Santa Cruz area; now there are three, with names like Green Vapors, Beyond Vape, and E-Smokey Treats. Two of them opened just this past summer. Vaping (vay-ping) is all the rage these days.

For those of you living in ignorance – as myself, three days ago – vaping is the realm of the electronic cigarette, or e-cigarette: a way of delivering nicotine vapor into a smoker’s mouth without tobacco, or even combustion. A e-cigarette is just a portable electric vaporizer in the form of a cigarette: load with a nicotine-bearing liquid, turn it on, and suck the vapor. You get the buzz without smoke or smell. In theory, it’s healthier.

And since you’re not smoking – you’re inhaling a heated vapor, nothing more – you can suck on an e-butt in places that bar “real” cigarettes. Most of these devices don’t even look like cigarettes anymore: they resemble pocket flashlights or metal-bodied marking pens. They’re referred to as vape pens, and by other names.

At Green Vapors I was shown a mind-boggling selection of vape hardware, and an equally mind-boggling array of vape liquids: all different strengths of nicotine, and hundreds of different flavors. Yes, you get flavors. Chocolate. Maple. Floral. Carmel popcorn. Whatever you want. It’s candy in your mouth with no calories.

“Some people buy it (liquids) with no nicotine at all,” the clerk explained. “They just want the taste. We get a lot of people on diets.”

“So, who exactly is vaping,” I asked. “Mostly kids?”

“We get all kinds of people,” he said. “And we don’t sell to anyone under eighteen.”

“To me, eighteen is a kid,” I had to say.

He smiled faintly. “Once in awhile we get an old guy who just wants to quit smoking.” Touche, thought the old guy. Though I don’t smoke.

I dropped in on Green Vapors for one reason: because houses are blowing up in Santa Cruz. And in a weird, indirect way, vaping is responsible.

In the past three weeks, two houses have blown up while their occupants attempted to make hash oil. Hash oil is a sort of marijuana concentrate; you throw a bunch of marijuana into butane, a highly combustible fuel used in camp stoves and barbecues. When the butane evaporates, it leaves a heavy, waxy residue heavy in THC, the chemical in marijuana that gets you high.

People call this concentrate hash oil,  “dabs,”  “honey oil,” or whatever the flavor of the month is. If it’s made with the butane process (there are other ways, but butane’s easiest and cheapest), it’s often called BHO.

Evaporated butane turns into a heavy gas that flows along the floor until it finds an ignition source; a pilot light in the next room, in one case. In another — well, somebody lit a cigarette. Boom. Serious damage to the house, and life-threatening burns to all involved.

Experienced drug makers know all this, and take precautions. These were amateurs. Hash oil has been around forever; it’s the strongest possible marijuana high, but difficult to smoke. You need a bong, a blowtorch, and a titanium nail. I’m not kidding; and I won’t go into details. Suffice to say: you can’t smoke it on the dance floor.

Or you couldn’t; until somebody figured out how to smoke it in e-cigarettes. Probably several somebodies.  It was one of those discoveries that was just itching to happen. See: “The Oil Game: How E-Cigarettes Have Become Stoners’ New Best Friend.”

So hash oil became very, very popular. It’s a huge high; and now you can have it anywhere, without telltale smoke or smell, and without that bloody blowtorch. Stoner entrepreneurs were quick to perfect e-cigs and vape pens that can vaporize the waxy hash oil without clogging up. Some enthusiasts assemble their own out of e-cigarette parts that they know will do the job. See: “Butane Hash Oil, Vaporizer Pens, and a Cheaper Option: E-Cigarettes.”

Right now, hash oil goes for fifty bucks a gram at least; and yet it’s cost-effective. A tiny, tiny bit contains as much THC as the average joint. On the face of it, the BHO process for making hash oil is simple and easy; so a lot of young men would like a piece of that action. But too often the action explodes in their faces.

Exploding houses are now a nationwide phenomenon, through primarily in states like California where medical marijuana is legal and there’s a lot of pot around. Because you don’t even need the prime bud to make oil; waste trimmings from somebody’s grow will apparently do fine.

The local cops are not saying a word about e-cigarettes and BHO; in the papers they’re quoted as saying that BHO-makers are simply preserving marijuana till next season, as Granny canned fruits and vegetables for the winter.  But you don’t need to “can” pot in that way.  It keeps fine for months in an air-tight container. Don’t ask me how I know this.

All I can say: if you see the young men next door bring home a batch of butane gas tanks, it may not be a barbecue they’re planning. Or there may be a barbecue – but not one that was planned. See  “How to Make Hash Oil, Explode Your House, and Blow Off Your Hand in Three Easy Steps.”

Back at Green Vapors, I took a good look at the stock; but there was no way for me to tell which of the devices worked with hash oil, and which only worked with flavored nicotine juice. Maybe the owners of Green Vapors know; or maybe they don’t.  Maybe they just stock whatever sells best and don’t think too hard about it.

I’m reluctant to believe in coincidences: three vape shops open up in town; and in short order, for the first time ever, two houses blow up from BHO manufacture. Is there direct cause and effect here? Most probably, no.  Are the two phenomenon  related? Most probably, yes.

And two blasted houses are just the tip of the iceberg; the bulk of it, beneath the water, is all the guys who figured out how to make BHO safely. Or have been lucky… so far.

The human race is brilliant at unintended consequences. Go back to 1969, when computer scientists were making a first stab at building the computer network that would some day become the Internet. What would those trail-blazing techies have said if you’d told them that their work would someday create a thriving online gambling industry in Costa Rica? Or become the world’s most efficient system for delivering pornography?

What would they say? Probably something alone the lines of, “That’s not quite what we had in mind.”

I’m sure that’s true. But there are those who say that, early on, porn traffic drove the growth of the Internet. I can’t help but think that BHO is fueling this sudden burst of interest in vape shops and e-cigarettes. Time will certainly tell.

I thanked the young clerk for his assistance. I’d made it clear I wasn’t there to buy, and he’d still been very helpful. As I said, a majestic Hawaiian shirt brings cred in this town.

“But what does the “green” in “Green Vapors” signify,” I asked him finally.

He shrugged and said, “That name has never made sense to me.”

I wonder what sense it was supposed to make.

(A reprint from my old blog. JJ)

It came with my change for a meat loaf sandwich.

The cashier handed me paper currency and a few coins. As I stuffed the money in my wallet I saw words written across Washington’s face on a well-worn dollar bill.

People often write things on paper money — say what you want, it’s one way to spread a message. The Federal Reserve may disapprove, but who asked them? Besides, it only costs a buck, which you’ll spend anyway. And your message will travel the world until the bill wears out.

Back at the office I pulled out the bill and examined it. The dollar bore a quote from Shakespeare, printed in the crisp, round hand of a young woman.

And when he shall die,
take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

But who hasn’t been there, at least for a little while? And who wouldn’t feel sorry for someone who’d never felt it?

You know what it’s like: that feeling that the world and all that’s in it is completely and utterly perfect, because you love someone with all your heart and soul and — it must be said — hormones. And because you are absolutely sure that they love you back in just the same way.

You may be wrong. And even if you’re not, that fine madness will not last. But while it does, for a week or a month or a year, you walk with the gods and pity the poor mortals who don’t have what –or who – you have.

I imagine a young woman, smitten and starry-eyed, lovingly printing Juliet’s words on the dollar bill so that some one else out there might read it and know how wondrous love can be.

A year or two or ten down the line, she might remember this gesture and scoff — at her youth, her innocence, her temporary insanity.

She shouldn’t. It may be insane and unwise to let someone else become one’s entire universe. But without a good slog upstream through the fiery torrent of romantic love, how can you truly grow up? Without the memory of passion there can be no wisdom: only dry platitudes of common sense, applied by rote and without understanding.

First love — you have to feel it, once. Who’d want to miss it, no matter how doomed it turned out to be?

I kept the bill in my wallet for a few days. But then I spent it, and send it on its way again. Freeing Juliet to croon again of love and madness from the wallets of strangers, a long-lingering echo of some young woman’s all-too-brief walk with the gods.

My thumb continues to heal. That’s the good news. I also learned several things about myself during my recent hospital stay. Most of them were good.

I have a blood oxygen content of 97; that’s very good. I know the figure by heart because they measured it four times.

My lungs? They’re good. The x-rays came back completely clean.

The ER gave me my first electrocardiogram ever. I passed; electrically, my heart’s a genius.

Mechanically, though, it’s acquired a ding. “I’m picking up a swishing sound every few beats,” said the old doctor with the stethoscope. “Means you’ve got a leaky valve.

“T’ain’t no big thing. Arnold (Schwarzenegger) got his fixed, but that was ’cause he wanted to train with heavy weights for some movie.”

But I like to train with heavy weights, too, so it is a big thing. And in truth really hard workouts have grown tougher lately; I have no energy for an hour afterwards. But are better workouts worth an operation? Don’t think so; I may drift toward the lighter end of the dumbbell rack.

I also learned that I am unusual, a sport, a prodigy, a mooncalf. At least in the hospital’s eyes.

“What medications do you take?” asked the ER nurse. As later in my hospital room, did the charge nurse, a roving pharmacist, and a clerk filling out forms on a computer built into a wheeled cart.

“None,” I answered.

“None at all?” each repeated. Four times I shook my head.

I asked the pharmacist, “So is it unusual for a 57-year-old man not to be taking prescription medications?”

“It’s very rare,” she said.

But it’s not rare; people without insurance often don’t get prescription meds. What she meant is that people with the wherewithal to go to the hospital, of a certain age, are almost always taking prescription medications.

But is that because they need them? Or because the system thrusts drugs upon them?

For two years a young primary care doctor at CorpoHealth Clinix has pushed blood pressure medication at me. MY BP has measured in at around 140/80 for 20 years. That used to be called ‘high normal,’ and not treated. Now it’s called Stage 1 Hypertension, and they want to give you drugs. Not because you need them badly right now, but so that you’ll already be on the drugs later, when you really need them.

Honestly, that’s the logic. I looked it up. Not everybody uses that standard. But when you’re paid by the treatment, you treat as quickly as possible; in a 15-minute appointment, it’s quicker to throw a pill at someone than to have a deep discussion on lifestyle changes. And then the patient has yet another pill to take for the rest of his life.

And that’s why the hospital rarely sees patients who don’t take prescription medicine.

CorpoHealth lays down the treatment recommendations, and my primary physicians follows them. He’s not experienced enough to be cynical, or good enough to listen very well. I’ve lost 30 pounds in two years, and my measured blood pressure has dropped slowly. But Doctor Young still kept pushing the pills.

Finally I told Doctor Young, as he was checking the thumb that would send me to emergency two days later, “My blood pressure actually goes up when I get it taken. I can feel it.” It’s true; it’s always been true. I’ve never been sure how much it skews the measurements, though.

Doctor Young actually listened for about five seconds and gave me a blood pressure log to fill out at home over several days. I guess I’ll have to, for cred against a medical community that wants to treat me more than it wants to cure me.

Two days later I was back to see Doctor Young with the grotesquely pus-filled thumb that would cause him to dispatch me to the ER. I had other things on my mind while the medical assistant took my blood pressure; so I did not think about the test.

“Wow, 116 over 70,” she said happily. “Your blood pressure just keeps getting lower and lower!”

They can all trundle their pillboxes away and come back to me when they actually start practicing medicine again.

Posting will be light for awhile:

I picked up an infection under the nail bed of my thumb, and it went necrotic: giant gray pus sack and everything. The primary care doctor misread the early signs, when I showed them to him. But on second visit he ordered me straight to the emergency room. The infection, said the crusty old ER doctor, was dining on my flesh. And might take the bone as dessert.

And he worried that I’d scatter pus all over his ER.

The ER doctor hooked me up with a surgeon that day – no easy task – and the surgeon cleaned out my thumb that night. I stayed in the hospital until the next evening.  I’m recovering – Rhumba washes and dresses my hand three times a day – but I’m sure the bill will make me feel ill once more.

Fifty-three years have passed since my last hospital stay: a tonsillectomy back in old Petropolis.  But I went back to hospital, this time around, with a clear and observant mind. I tried to understand what the ever-changing roster of nurses and technicians was doing to me, and why. I asked them a lot of questions. And I stopped them from making a few mistakes.

Mainly they were decent, hardworking people. Even so, I fervently believe that my health will be the better if I avoid hospital for another 53 years, no matter what ailment I might suffer.

Because the people are okay; but the system is crazy.

The only guy  fighting that system was the ER doctor, who spent as much time on the phone hacking a path through the bureaucracy for me as he spent in treating my thumb.  He appointed himself  as my advocate to a system that doesn’t automatically grant you one. And I’m fortunate that he did.

Except for his green scrubs, he looked and acted like a plainspoken old country doctor.  Remember Milburn Stone, the actor who played the cynical but dedicated “Doc Adams” on the old TV Western “Gunsmoke?”  Like that. Exactly like that.

Thanks for the thumb, Doc.

That’s all the typing I can do for now. Time to elevate the arm, stroke it, and massage the lymph nodes in my armpit.  See you all in a few days.

Actually, they’re over here, in another lobe of the mighty Boomer blog empire.  Enjoy.

The mail came: a thick manilla envelope with my name on it. I picked it up and read the return address:

Moe’s Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA

Has the past ever sent you a letter? Has a time in your life that you’ve filed and forgotten ever dashed off a quick note just to say, “I’m still here?”

I haven’t seen Telegraph Avenue in 25 years, nor Moe’s in 30 or more. And yet suddenly it was all as real as yesterday.

“Telegraph” is the heart of the student district for the University of California at Berkeley. It was the breeding ground for ’60s counterculture on the West Coast. And as a pimply, callow teenager from a blue collar burb 20 miles away, it was where I wanted to be. For the street theater, the buskers, the underground comix, the endless politicking in Sproul Plaza; and especially for the giant book and record stores, the poster shops, the head shops, and the shops selling all sorts of things that I had no experience in.

Moe’s Books squatted at the heart of it all; the biggest, most successful, longest-lasting bookstore in town. A palace of unexpurgated culture and used books, from cheap paperbacks to the finest volumes. Today Moe’s still carries on with the same management, decades after “the Sixties” became just another marketing ploy.

I finally opened the package and pulled out a small paper-bound book with a picture of Moe himself on the cover: short and balding, pricing a stack of books.

What lay in my hands was Cometbus #51. Cometbus is an amateur ‘zine written over the decades by a punk musician and punk historian who literally grew up on the streets of Berkeley in the ’70s and ’80s. Issue 51 was his history of Berkeley’s iconic bookstores and their owners, written from his own experience and many, many interviews.

The book was a gift from LK, my bookstore-owner friend. We both knew Telegraph well in those days. He’d mentioned that someone had written up the old days of Telegraph, and  promised me a copy. I had no idea that the book would come directly from Moe’s -– or of what a flood of memories that a simple envelope could bring.

Bookstore owners are by their nature a moody and eccentric bunch, prone to odd decisions and random flashes of immaturity, anger, and mania. One fantasy author has posited that massive collections of old books actually warp space and time, meaning that many used book dealers have slipped over from other universes where it’s perfectly good practice to go to work in your carpet slippers, open and close when you please, and set prices based on whim or the current air pressure. It’s as good an explanation as any.

The Berkeley booksellers were as prime a bunch of eccentrics as you could ever hope to find. But I knew a bookman who was perhaps even odder: a man who really did play by the rules of a different universe. He has no book of his own, no biography or history in his name.  For now, this essay must suffice.

He was a knowledgeable book dealer with a true love of literature – and almost no skill at running a second-hand bookstore, nor any interest in developing it. Even though he owned a chain of them and operated them for decades. This man was the contemporary of the Telegraph Avenue bunch. They knew him, he knew them, and he even had his own shop in Berkeley. But he traveled his own road, his own way, and only opened stores (or bought existing used bookstores) where the rent was rock-bottom.

In my mind’s eye, I see a sturdy, elderly man dragging a cheap wire shopping cart up and down the rows of a suburban flea market. The man wears a battered black fedora, dusty black suit coat, and open-neck shirt. The shopping cart holds a few books, two dented cans of fava beans and a carton of smeary supermarket danish that expired perhaps two weeks earlier. Which he has just purchased for 25 cents, and will eat later.

His name was Everett Cunningham and for decades he ran the Joyce Bookshops used bookstore chain in the San Francisco Bay Area. A typical  Cunningham bookshop looked like the reference section of a public library – after somebody dropped a hand grenade in it, and homeless people moved in to sell used golf clubs.

That’s cruel – wait, no it’s not. It’s accurate: right down to the golf clubs

Everett Cunningham came out of the West with a good education from the U of Montana and a head full of languages and linguistics. He put his knowledge to work as a translator at the Nuremberg war crimes trials following World War II.

And he developed a love of modern literature. He named the Joyce Bookshops after James Joyce. He was also a huge fan of dada: that cultural movement that espoused anarchy and ridiculed bourgeois thinking and the meaninglessness of modern culture. Those who worked for him, including my friend LK, might agree that dada would inform his business philosophy.

Somewhere along the line, Everett learned the book trade and began opening or acquiring bookstores: almost always in the skid row district of whatever city they were in.

Over the years various Joyce Bookshops opened and closed throughout the Bay Area, but there were never less than a couple of them: as many as ten at one point. Everett used to call himself “The Last of the Empire Builders, the Largest West of Chugwater.” He gave himself the title of Uberungameinageneraldirektor, which was a German portmanteau meaning, something like heap big major general director. I attribute these statements to Everett’s love of absurdism, distrust of authority (even in himself) and a sense of humor as dry as talc.

Everett Cunningham was expert with many kinds of scholarly and high-end books, and he knew how to dispose of them privately. But when he stocked his own shops, the books were always priced wrong: too high or too low. Much was elderly and uninteresting at any price.

And again, Everett’s bookstores were drab and strange. Where he decorated at all, he did it with intent to befuddle, confuse, and outrage. He would intentionally seek out and buy very bad amateur drawings or paintings at the flea market and hang them on the walls of his stores; he’d label them with  odd captions of his own devising. The most notorious of these was an oil painting of a dead man lying in a casket, captioned “It was in the Trib,” from the advertising slogan of the Oakland Tribune newspaper.

Still, book lovers and collectors visited Everett’s shops regularly. If you had the patience to hack your way through the dross and disorder, there was no telling what you might find. Maybe even Everett. In costume. He liked costumes, though he thought of them as ‘conceptual art.” LK remembers the time Everett attended a stuffy antiquarian book fair in a green cowboy outfit: solid green, down to the chaps. The stuffy antiquarians were not amused; but they knew Everett. What could they do?

Everett’s stores were also famous for their ”quarter books:” drab, ancient hardcovers displayed on big tables or carts near the front of the store. Twenty-five cents each, or ten for a buck. You might find a bit of gold in there if you looked closely, or on the cheap-paperback cart.

But Everett didn’t care. It seemed to me that bookstores were just ways of getting rid of books he personally didn’t have much use for.

I heard stories: he had a vast pile of old comic books in his warehouse – worth several dollars apiece – that he insisted on selling for five cents each in his stall out at the Napa Flea Market. LK recalls the time that he found an extremely valuable first edition propping up the toilet tank in the restroom at Everett’s warehouse.

At Everett’s flea market stall, I once got the full first year of Sports Illustrated magazine in mint condition for almost nothing – including the famous first issue with its fold-out of 1954 baseball cards. It was probably worth fifty bucks even then, if you could find one. I got it for 50 cents.

He had some good employees to help him scout out and acquire books. He paid them little, but they learned on the job and soon knew what would sell and what wouldn’t. They told Everett that he was letting good money slip through his fingers.

But to little avail. He’d just cut them off or give them The Smile: a wry, steady, big-toothed smile delivered with good eye contact. An impenetrable smile that warded off arguments.

And despite everything – or because of it – Everett was both well-known and well-loved in the Bay Area book scene. He’d been around forever, he was knowledgeable in his field, and was a friend to other book dealers both old and new. He was a sweet guy to talk to; and a little eccentric, which always makes a conversation more interesting.

Late in his career, Everett did one of the most constructive things that I ever saw a bookman do. The storefront next to his Gull Bookshop in Oakland went vacant, and he turned it into a co-op bookstore for all the specialty book dealers he knew who dealt books by mail or at events.

There was no eBay in those days, no Internet, so these dealers had no regular place to display their stock to the public. Everett gave them that. They paid a certain monthly fee per bookshelf occupied – which was low, this being Everett – and put a special code in all their stock. At the end of the month, Everett would give them the proceed from any books of theirs that had sold, sans rent.

Everett’s idea worked; the store drew book collectors and dealers from throughout the Bay Area. If you wanted to talk books on a Saturday afternoon, that was the place to go. LK and I rented some shelf space together there, and sold a lot. I’m sure that Everett didn’t get rich, but – that never seemed to be the point.

Around then was when I got to know Everett best; we talked a fair amount as I came by to restock; he took me out to lunch at a terrible, terrible drive-in on MacArthur Boulevard. ”I really like the food here,” he told me. And since he was paying, I agreed. LK later told me he always dragged people to that drive-in, and everybody endured the terrible food.

Linguist, scholarly bookman, slipshod bookstore owner, absurdist, benefactor to others: the man had a lot of sides. He was a politician, too, or pretended to be. He ran a dada campaign for city council in Walnut Creek on the Fun and Games ticket. His slogan: ”Vote for Everett Cunningham, the Cunning Linguist.”

The local newspaper printed a long article on Everett’s nonsensical platform: he promised to establish a community center for low-riders inside Rossmoor, a well-to-do retirement community, so that the low-riders and the elderly Republican residents ”could learn to relate to each other.” He also proposed restoring a defunct pornographic movie theater is Walnut Creek’s prestigious downtown district to improve the business climate in the area.

Everett’s city council campaign generated much discussion in conservative Walnut Creek – and a fair amount of hysterical laughter. And when one considers the antics of today’s politicians in Washington, perhaps Everett was guilty of nothing more than prescience. He came in fifth in a field of nine for a three-seat election; not too shabby for a dada politician.

Everett Cunningham died some years back; once the news got out, old employees and fellow bookmen gathered to honor him and share remembrances. A selection of Everett’s trademark ”quarter books” graced every table. And a good time was had by all as they swapped stories about this kindly if cynical eccentric.

But is “eccentric” is the right label to put on Everett’s file in the Big Archives? Consider a man who went out of his way to avoid success, enjoyed putting people off balance, and rejected “help” offered by others. Personally, I don’t that think help was required. I propose that Everett Cunningham had exactly what he needed and knew exactly what he was doing.

This was, after all, a man who subjected a staunchly Republican community to a crazy dada campaign for public office. A man with such a low opinion of authority that, when was told his warehouse building was not zoned to be a warehouse, promptly renamed it a ”Technical Processing Center.” And got away with it.

And this was a man who, as a businessman and scholar, did everything he could to disparage the very roles that he had taken in life.

I see that wry, big-toothed smile in my mind, and I wonder if Everett the supposed eccentric wasn’t having a long, dry, joke on everyone around him. A decades-spanning dada performance of unprecedented scope. A life as dada. I remember that smile; and I wonder.

(Thanks on this one to LK for the many, many details that made this piece richer and way more accurate.)


Just a quicky post: I’ve started another blog called T-Shirt Empire where I can throw short articles on cool t-shirts I’ve found.  There’ll be a lot of linking back and forth between the two blogs so if you come here first, you’ll always know what’s happening over there.

I plan to keep up both blogs.  Plans are good; whether they’re carried out is another matter. But a post about a t-shirt takes maybe 20 minutes to write, so it may work out.  And if it does take more than 20 minutes to write, I might as well post it over here on Secret Santa Cruz.

Anyway, check it out:  http://tee-shirt-empire.tumblr.com . It’s over on Tumblr, the social networking platform for young people who don’t read much.  Lots and lots of pictures. Don’t miss t-shirts for Team Dead Cat, “A Celebration of Indonesian Scooter Culture” (I had not idea), and various tradesmen who can’t stop themselvs from making penis jokes on their company t-shirts.  I mean, there is a reason I enjoy this hobby. Even though I’ve come to realize that it’s a bizarre, mutant form of stamp collecting.

Rhumba hasn’t stopped drawing caricatures – the pile gets ever taller – so I haven’t stopped compiling them into themed groups and sticking them up on foam core board, with captions.

This week’s theme: the “regulars” at a fictitious coffee house here in Santa Cruz.  I say it’s fictitious, anyway.  That’s my story.  Trust me. Although I think you can find a coffee house crowd like this almost any place you go.

Rather make up names for each character, I’ve labeled them by what they order.  Sometimes the order defines the person who ordered it.

And here’s the whole piece, ridiculously large.  Click on it to see the larger view, then click again to see it even larger and navigate around through it.

Next week? Who knows? I’m looking through the stack and I see good fodder for a display called “Regrettable Roommates.”  Enjoy.

Rhumba can’t stop drawing.  All right, there are occasional bouts of knitting, and of swearing at knitting machines.  But mainly, she draws caricatures.  As a loyal husband, I have to say that she’s getting very good at it.  Fortunately, I’m not lying.

When Rhumba’s on a roll, she can draw a fairly simple caricature in under five minutes.  Complexity takes ten or fifteen.  And when she’s done – she throws it in a pile, or a wastebasket.  And forgets it.  On to the next one.

The damned things are everywhere: an avalanche of faces, wherever I look. Masses of eyes, grins, and grimaces stare up from tabletops, sideboards, in-boxes. It’s enough to make you flinch.

I was finally impelled to put  a batch of them to some use, before she threw them out.  So I took twenty-odd caricatures, put them in some order, and pasted them up on a piece of foam-core board. They are now the Dysfunctional Family Tree, with appropriate descriptive captions.  Here’s the entire image: click on it to see it in a separate wiindow, and click again to see it in truly large size and read the captions.

Amazing what you can do with three dollars worth of form-core and a gluestik. Unfortunately, Rhumba’s just drawn 20 more. So I’d better get cracking.  Next stop: the Dysfunctional Company.

I had no idea that Rusty was so good at grief counseling.

“What with the leaking radiator and the water pump problem, your water level is always low. That’s why the car’s overheating all the time.” The mechanic spoke patiently to his customer from behind a counter spread with work orders.

Rusty paused for a moment: it was time for straight talk. “You know,” he said, “when you’ve got a car worth a hundred and fifty dollars and it needs a thousand dollars of repairs… it’s time to make a decision.”

But she wasn’t ready for that.  In the five stages of grieving – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – she was still on “bargaining.”  Perhaps she didn’t have a thousand to spare – but could not live her life without a car.

“Can I at least drive it in town?” she asked plaintively. Sitting across the room with the magazines, I could see her only from behind. But it was clear that she had entered middle age, and not a very prosperous one.

“Yes,” Rusty answered. “But check the radiator a lot. Keep the fluid level right up to the neck.” He sighed. You can go ahead and use water if you want.”

Meaning, the radiator was toast, and the water pump was leaking badly. No use putting in coolant, because it wouldn’t stay around long enough to be useful.

“So, I just pour the water right into the top of the radiator, right?” came the hesitant question.

“That’s right,” Rusty said. “And keep it filled to the top.”

From Rusty’s words she mined a glimmer of hope. “Do you think I could still drive it over the hill… if I went at night?” she ventured.  The Hill” is the 2000-foot-high mountain range between Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley.

“I think so,” Rusty answered, though his face said, ‘I wouldn’t.’ The Hill shows little mercy on cars with weak cooling systems.

The two of them concluded their business, then she left to retrieve her car. I approached the counter and Rusty shoved a work-order at me: $417 for exhaust system repair. Rhumba and I mainly drive just one car, a hybrid; but we also keep a very old Honda Civic for emergencies; and it had failed the smog check. The car is pretty decrepit, but we use it so seldom that we only fix the most serious problems. Rusty’s aware of this, and doesn’t bug us about the many optional repairs that  the car could use.

I wrote him a check; out the window, I could see the woman driving her car off the lot. She peered through the windshield as if she saw trouble ahead; and she was probably right. Her car was a Honda Civic almost as old as ours. Our Civic has seen fire and rain, and bears more dents than a golf ball. Her Civic was very similar.

“I dunno,” I told Rusty. “My car looks as bad as hers; just, maybe we don’t use it as much.”

He grinned crookedly. “I think even your car’s in better shape than hers.”

“You know,” I said, “I work with two women, older women, who don’t have cars anymore. They can’t afford them and still and keep a roof over her head. Been years since a real raise. Maybe this woman can’t afford to replace that car.”

“Yeah,” Rusty said. And that’s all he said. He’s a good man.

This week the news channels reported that Americans were driving less. Those who had cars drove them less, and many young people were not buying cars.

The theories were endless. The American “love affair” with cars was over; or, cars had lost their “macho” appeal; or, cars did’t make sense to the young people who were settling in dense urban areas.

But I know another reason: people are driving fewer miles, in part, because fewer people can afford to keep cars. I think of that woman herding an ailing Honda over the Hill at night to avoid the hot weather, and “desperation” is the only word that comes to mind.

Desperation: among the stages of grieving, that’s similar to “bargaining.” And after bargaining comes depression, and finally acceptance.  If that woman can’t keep her car, I hope she finds a way to make her life work without it.  And I truly pray that she does not take all the blame for her misfortunes upon herself.

Because the ones who rule us depend on that.  The day when enough hard-working people stop accepting all the blame for their failure to be prosperous, is the day when things start to change.

And you can accept that.