(This one’s a little loopy.  I’ve had the flu.)

Greetings, Comrades!  The capitalists are now so entangled in their own greed that the end of the corporatist, globalist world order can be clearly seen.  The means of production will be freed from theownership classes and their running-dog lackeys, and given to the people. They will be equitably used by all, and for the good of all. And soon!

How do I know this?   Because today’s capitalists, most of them, won’t make a microwave oven that lasts five years.  Not can’t do it — won’t do it.  At least that’s what it looks like from where I sit. We got our first microwave in the mid-80s: an Amana of moderate size and feature set.  Even in those days microwaves had a million modes — of which we used maybe three or four, as most do today. Fast-forward 25 years.

The Amana finally died.  It didn’t really have to — we had a decent appliance repair shop back then, and the techs found the problem.  But the (inexpensive) part that we needed was no longer available.  The faithful Amana went to recycling.

And in the seven years since, we’ve bought  three more microwaves.  They die in two to four years. We just got our latest.  They all look like the Amana; they all have the same feature set.  Their magnetron tubes are a little more powerful,

But they don’t last.

They all cost about $140; pay more, and you get power and features and size that we don’t need.  The Amana cost about $260 back in the ‘80s — I remember this, because I was and am cheap.  Inflation-adjusted, in 2018 dollars, it cost us around $550.  So you get what you pay for,right? In 1986, sure.  But not now.

If you spread that $550 across 25 years, the distributed capital cost is about $22 bucks per year. If you spread the $280 we’ve spent for two ‘waves that died in the seven years since, the distributed cost is $40 annually. We’re paying more for microwaves now — not less.

It wouldn’t cost much to make microwaves last longer; somewhat better parts, slightly better engineering. If they’d lasted even seven years each at $140 a unit, the cost per year would match the old Amana’s.  But then the corporations wouldn’t sell as many microwaves. They wouldn’t keep the factories humming — factories sited in the cheapest possible labor markets. And people who buy microwaves would hang onto money that they could be giving to the stockholders of the world.

So: thirty years of technological advancement have NOT been applied to make microwaves cheaper and better.  In fact, they are now expensive and worse.  And more waste is produced: the endless stream of shoddy microwaves has to be recycled.

Intentionally inferior goods, waste of resources, regulation flight, the decline of first-world manufacturing, and higher prices: this is what globalism has brought us.  While it has created and fattened a surfeit of billionaires who want to buy the governments of the world, and are doing a good job at least at that.

So I’ve got this new, really cool-looking stainless-steel Panasonic microwave that will probably be dead in just over four years.  I know this because the retailer offered to sell us a “free return” insurance policy on the oven — for up to four years.  Everybody knows.

Your mileage may vary, but if a modestl microwave can’t last last at least seven years, after decades of microwave production, somebody’s doing it wrong.  On purpose.

And the world can’t take it forever.  It can’t waste the resources.  The people can’t continue to be paid less for their labor but pay more for the goods that they must buy.  The swelling billionaires cannot hoard the wealth of the world at a time when we’ll need that wealth to save the world.

Left to itself, it will all collapse.  But people are starting to catch on. This past Year of Trump has mobilized progressives and Democrats (there is some overlap, he said with a bit of sarcasm). And it has caused honest conservatives to consider the difference between true conservatism and a shameless, honorless kleptocracy which has stolen conservatism’s name.

Let’s hope this year’s elections at least kill the momentum of the kleptocrats and rock them back on their heels.  It’s for their own good, after all. Because if the people aren’t taken care of by the system, they will eventually take down the system itself.

All it would take is for Americans to start asking themselves: “If somebody works hard all their life, or as hard as they can, isn’t that enough? Should their worthiness to survive depend on knowing how to invest?” Americans believe in “fair;” if things get bad enough, we have the mindset to act on that.

And the Glorious People’s Revolution will come at last! I remember a quote attributed to hero socialist Eugene Debbs: essentially, that the United States will be the last advanced country to go socialist, but the first to go communist.

We do tend to get overenthusiastic when we buy into something new.  I see a wondrous wave of all-American communists spilling across America in red electric SUVs with gun racks, wearing t-shirts of Karl Marx hoisting a beer glass and shouting, “To each according to his needs!”

It’s so American.  And the capitalists and their lackeys will be issued blue uniforms and s be put to work building low-income housing or teaching underprivileged children to read.

Believe me: it’s much, much better than the tumbrils.

It’s a little-known fact that the fabled Library of Alexandria had an annex for a small but select collection of t-shirts.

Tees were an integral part of Graeco-Roman culture. When Caesar led his army to Gaul, his vanguard of muscular young Legionnaires wore the message VENI VIDI VICI block-printed on oversized tees (to accomodate their armor).

No visitor to ancient Greece would ever return home without WHAT HAPPENS IN ATHENS STAYS IN ATHENS written across his back on a fine tee of Egyptian cotton: beige for the masses, purple-dyed for the upper classes. Or the ever-popular PLATO DID IT WITH LOGIC.

Then as now, people wore t-shirts to make a statement.  Roman t-shirt shops were busy printing tees with the cultural and political statements of the day.  Woe on the man wearing a POMPEY THE GREATEST tee shirt in an alley full of Crassus’ supporters. But a VISIT BEAUTIFUL VESUVIUS tourist tee would get no one in trouble.

Tragically, the fabled tee shirt archive vanished with the rest of the Alexandrian Library collection.  And the tee itself vanished from western civilization for 1500 years.

But it’s back.  And I’ve taken it upon myself to rebuild the Library.  In my garage.

For years now I’ve been chasing this mutant white whale: the meaning behind t-shirts.  Not the ones that people sell to make money, but the ones that people make to represent themselves: tees for business, sports, causes, personal events, hopes, fears, and particular times and places where — something happened.  Or was supposed to.

Tees are powerful. If you don a tee with a message on it, you become the message.   Everyone around you will see you that way. There’s almost no other medium that makes people into walking memes  with their full cooperation.

Why do people make these tees? What are they saying? What’s the word they want to get out? And why do people happily slip a meme-on-cotton over their heads and wear it off to the Olive Garden?  Or, and this is the kicker, even pay for the privilege of doing it by actually buying the tee shirt?

I’ve been chasing meaning ever since I picked up a tee at Goodwill for a Minneapolis beer ba, one that read FEAR THE CHEESE across the back in dire block letters. What the hell did that mean? It was like a secret message. You had to be there, to know.

I took it home and found out over the Internet.  And I’ve been taking them home to find out ever since.  Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.  Sometimes there’s little to know.  Sometimes there’s a lot. And sometimes it’s a trip to Oz, only — and here’s the important part — the people who made the shirt think they live in no such place.  They might wonder, doesn’t _everyone_ live in a place nicknamed HogSkin County? What’s there to be curious about?

I’ve got tees from the Guantanamo Bay prison guard detachment. From the poor devils who spent years in Iraq looking for the weapons of mass destruction.  From some tiny town in the Carolinas that held a Collard Greens Festival because they had nothing else to boast about.  I got a tee from a bunch of musicians who gathered in a quake-ravaged city to set a world record for the most people to play “Shake, Rattle, and Roll!” at one time. Outside, among the ruins.

And more: surfing carpenters, apes in hard hats swinging drywall hammers, Sarah Palin in a dirndl serving beer (for “Sarah Pale Ale,” and yes, it’s real). I’ve got tees from the godfsaken base where  death drones launch themselves to terrorize Yemen, and from the bar with the only decent margaritas on the Persian Gulf. Heartfelt memorial tees for teenagers who died young, or for firefighters who died in 9/11 — standing with one foot on the bar rail while Jesus mixes their drinks.

And many more that I can’t remember.  See, that’s the problem.  Most of these shirts are stuck in the Catacombs, a shack out back filled with  towering stacks of silver-brown 30-gallon plastic storage tubs (available from Target at the low everyday price of five dollars plus tax). Every one of those tubs is stuffed with tees.  Some of them have been sealed for years.

What good is a collection you can’t see and search? Can barely even remember? For all I know, the concentrated presence of all those message tees ripped the fabric of the universe, so that alien tees from strange dimensions are spilling into the Catacombs even as you read this.   Peek  inside one of those tubs, and you can’t say it’s not true.

So over the last few months, a plan has materialized.  The garage walls have been painted and patched.  Racks sufficient for a thousand tees have been constructed on one wall.  Hundreds of hangers have been purchased, and protective plastic sheathing. A database has been created, and a system of color-coding by which each particular shirt can be located. There’s even a heat pump in the garage now to keep things from getting too cold, too hot, or too damp.

Now all I have to do is unpack, photograph catalog, color-code, and hang 1000 tee shirts.   It’s slow going. Talk to me in six months.    At which point the Great Library will stretch out before me, and I will be able to find for you an Italian restaurant tee shirt illustrated in the low-art style of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth with the flick of a key or a sharp eye for the right color code on a clothes hanger.  Or a U.S. Army basic training tee with homoerotic themes. Or a tee commemorating Sarah Pale Ale  Or a tee memorializing the life and death of a local tee-shirt artist.  How meta can you get?

Why dot this? Why not? I want to show off.  I love this stuff.  I love the stories behind the tees.  So many things in this world come, go, and leave nothing behind but a tee to say that they were even there.  Tees are a small thing, but I like to find the big in the small.  It’s in there, somewhere.

And after the Library is in order, I’ll write up the history of every single tee, as best I can.  It’ll be, practically, a book.  And then, who knows? Put it all up online and let the world have a shot, I’m thinking; I could call it “The Tees of Mystery.”  Californians will get the joke.

Because four out of five people hear about what I’m doing and go cross-eyed with puzzlement and boredom.  But the fifth smiles oddly and wants to know more.  Here’s to the lucky fifth, and I’ll see you on the Internet someday. In the meantime — stop in for a tour if you’re ever in the ‘hood.

My wife Rhumba and I went to a movie a couple of months back: “Coco,” the latest animated film from Pixar, and the first Pixar flick in a while that isn’t a sequel.  “Coco” is about Mexico and the folklore of the Dia de Muertos.  It’s beautifully conceived and animated, respectful to Mexican traditions and to the Mexican people.

And it’s about 20 minutes too long.  Rhumba dropped off twice.  “You okay?” I asked.  Her eyes were closed. “Oh yeah, it’s a quality picture…. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”  She’s an easy sleeper, but her eyelids drooped not at all for “Wonder Woman” or “The Martian.” Still, it was hard to leave the theater, and “Coco’s” warm and endless Mexican night.

But no worries: we stumbled out of the theater into… a warm Mexican night.  Seventy-five degrees, humid as the tropics. Five hundred miles north of the border.  In late November.  It reminded me of Costa Rica.  Later I’d check the weather forecast for downtown San Jose (Costa Rica), and find it similar.

Rhumba must walk with walking sticks these days. They glow: she wrapped them with strings of multi-colored LED lights, battery-powered. Citizens turned and smiled as she strolled past, and called compliments.

The night was indeed merry. Visitors and locals in lightweight clothing crammed our downtown streets .  Music gusted out through open doors, rose from the street musicians and spiraled up into a black-velvet sky.  Long lines of cars cruised by at walking speed. No one seemed in a hurry.

We were almost, it seemed, in “Coco’s” dark but colorful city of the dead: full of spirits who let no little thing like death ruin a good time. I saw no calaveras, of course, those skeletal spirits of Mexican lore. No bony specters strode down the boulevard or danced to the music as they did in life, and in “Coco.”  But in a way, they’re always with us. And we are always them.

Calavera figures — skeleton figures in wood, maiche, wax, and on paper — are popular around the Dia de Muertos in Mexico, and increasingly in the States. They remind us of who’ve gone on before us. Who never really die, as long as they’re remembered.That’s “Coco’s”  main plot point.

I think about the past around Thanksgiving.  You can’t give thanks without remembrance.  If I built an altar to long-gone friends and relatives, as is common around the Day of the Dead, many would be the calavera figures and drawings:

There would be the calavera of a short woman and a tall man, holding hands tightly.  The woman will smile anxiously;  the man is a skeleton that does not smile.  That’s no mean trick; but I’d expect it of him.

Nearby, the calavera of a plump old woman tells dirty jokes in Portuguese and laughs at them herself. A skeleton in a polo shirt holds a bottle of beer in one hand and offers a beer to you from the other.  He stands next to a horseshoe pit. There are tools in his pocket.

Nearby a fat calavera in chef’s whites and a short beard offers food to the living and the dead.  He draws on a joint. The calaveras of long-gone aunts dress a table for Thanksgiving, while my many dead uncles — bonier than in life — puff cigars and pipes until they vanish in the haze. One of them, the drunkest, falls into the horseshoe pit.

Farther back, the calaveras of dead lady friends primp and beckon. Skeletal  co-workers from long-gone companies wander the streets with PC keyboards strapped across their chests like bandoliers. A tweedy calavera, elegantly bearded in silver,  sits at a bar and toasts me with a G&T.

And a hundred others besides. I’m old, I’m old.  I remember too much.  But that’s okay: if you remember long enough, you’ll always find something to smile about.

Even death.  What’s death but part of life, to be acknowledged and enjoyed? Mexican culture has a nuanced view of the matter: death is omnipresent and inevitable. But… why not have some fun with it?  Hence the calaveras, in drawings, in sculpture, in candy.  Skulls and bones meant not to intimidate, but to celebrate.  American culture has warmed to this idea. Ask the Grateful Dead, among others.

The master of the calavera was a Mexican lithographer named Jose Guadalupe Posada, active from about the 1870s into the early 20th century.  He produced a flood of engravings for all sorts of popular publications, including cheap broadsides and pamphlets for the masses.

His calaveras were famous: they both celebrated the dead and mocked the pretensions of the living. In the end, Posada’s calaveras said, we are all bones: but that truth makes life no less sweet.  I’ve scattered some of his calaveras through this article: calaveras of the revelers, of the warriors, of the great and exalted and pretentious.  Even of the cats.

A woman in these parts does wonderful — and affordable — calaveras painted in on ceramic tiles.  Some are original, some not. She offered me one that looked for all the world like — me, as a calavera. At least, I saw it that way.  (A handsome devil, to be sure, long and lanky in a blue hat with a colorful serape, much like the aloha shirts I wear.  And smiling, of course.  I took the painted tile home and hung it on the wall.

Don’t ask me why.  I’m not dead.  Don’t want to be, either: I plan to go at  age 114 in a traffic accident.  And yet, it tickles me to see myself as bones.

Later, the woman offered us more calaveras: my favorite was that of a cat, and again I had to have it.  It is the prettiest skeleton you ever saw.  Like our cat: she’s a cutie, even in her old age.

And kitty’s had a hard year:  three times now she’s clawed at the scratching post of death.  She’s not in the greatest of shape even now, though she’s sitting next to me, purring, as I type this.  The next week or two are… uncertain.

Perhaps for that reason, I’ve not put her calavera on the wall.  I might mount my own calavera while I’m alive, for my own amusement. But not someone else’s, not even a cat’s.  Not until it’s time.

She will probably be our last cat. As Rhumba and I age, taking care of only ourselves will be more than enough work. And so when our cat passes, the calavera will go on the wall to honor her, and also all the other good old cats who’ve come and gone from our lives but not from our fond memories.

And then I will put up one more calavera on the wall:  one of her and I together, or seemingly so.  The artist even got my shirt right.

Remembrance: it keeps the past alive, and the present more precious.

I’m an ordinary guy with a minor super-power: I rarely get a cold, or a sore throat, or even much of a cough. I have 600 hours of accumulated sick time, and rising.

For this superpower, I have to thank to the second-grade class that I student-taught, over a decade back.  The idea was to get a teaching credential and then switch careers.  It didn’t work out, but the memories will be with me always. And apparently, the immunity.

You know how kids are: they’re still building their defenses to the diseases of the world.  In the meantime, they sneeze, they spew, they drip, and they leak. And then they wipe it all up with their hands and borrow your white-board marker.  And give it back.  I had a head cold for four months.  More precisely,  I had head cold after head cold for four months.

Eventually, I had them all.  Every variety. There was nothing left to have.  I felt normal again.  Months went by and I didn’t get sick.  Then years. I was bulletproof!

More years later, the bullets are hitting a little harder than they used to; rhinoviruses mutate like no one’s business. But I remain mostly snot-free with the help of a few tricks: a slice of raw onion to suck on, for a sore throat; a tumbler of warm water spiked with tabasco for clogged sinuses.

And I learned to never, ever, ever touch your face unless you’ve washed your hands, first.  Ever. An old master teacher taught me that one.  Your eyes may be the windows to your soul but viruses and bacteria clamber through them — and your mouth, and nose — to get at your body.

I learned to go an hour without rubbing my eyes, no matter how badly they wanted me to. Horrible things lurked in the classroom: Flu. Impetigo. Noro. Rotavirus. Hep. Strep. Worms. And more. Someone posted a list of them all by the sink in the teacher’s washroom, under the command WASH YOUR HANDS. And I did. And I do.

So you might think I’ve kind of got it all handled, this infection thing. But I don’t.  In recent years I’ve had staph in one foot — it swelled up like a football.  Just from a tiny scratch.  They call it a skin infection, cellulitis. But if the staph had reached my bloodstream I might not be writing this.

A year or three later, I laid bare a leaking pipe by bailing water out of a hole in the ground.  I forgot to wear gloves.  A few days later I found myself on an operating table with a hand surgeon bending over me.  His mission: save my thumb above the knuckle, else I’d be nine-finger touch-typing for the rest of my life.  He succeeded.

Yes, I’m careless.  But those bacteria had help.  From all of us.

The urgent-care MD who checked my swollen foot was pretty sure it had a brand of staph called MSRA.  For safety she could assume nothing else because MRSA is a super-staph that looks at most penicillin -type antibiotics and laughs. It has jousted with our antibiotics for decades, and only grown stronger.

The MD gave me an old-school sulfa drug that she said still worked.  It did.  But does it still?

The bug that tried to take my thumb was some random form of strep, the tests said.  Or was it? The primary care doctor had dispensed some basic antibiotics that didn’t help one bit.  It wasn’t long before my thumb was dripping pus in the emergency room and pissing off the ER doctor.

Even after the operation, they kept me another day to drip vancomycin into my bod and hope that it would handle any nasties that might catch a ride into my system.  Vancomycin is the bad-ass antibiotic that used to the last line of defense against MRSA.  These days, maybe not.

Before I checked out, an elderly wound nurse came by my hospital room and said terrible things about bacterial adaption.  Your own backyard isn’t safe, she said.  Wear gloves, always, she said, in the backyard or even when cleaning house.  “It’s not the old days anymore,” she said gloomily.  “The bacteria are winning.”

On her way. out, she made a few cheery comments about hoping that she’d die before it all went to hell.  Pretty much in those words.

So the germs are winning.  Maybe antibiotics were always a loser’s game.  We were sloppy, and overconfident, and the bacteria had more tricks up their sleeves than we ever expected.  If bacteria have sleeves.

And yet, we’re not trying to keep up.  Few new antibiotics are in development. Big Pharma has walked away from the problem.  Oh, the job’s not impossible: but antibiotics are expensive to develop, and not wildly profitable.

After all, you only need antibiotics once in awhile.  The investors want drugs that you’ll need every day, forever. An anti-baldness drug? A better erectile drug? Bring it!

Funny, isn’t it?  I cope well with the common cold — with all the viruses that mankind never learned to cure.  It’s the viruses we did learn to cure  — and then treated lightly — that are coming back to eat us.

Good job, humanity.  You’ve painted yourself into a corner — again. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: I trust that we will collectively do the right thing…

..When all else has failed.

I found it at a thrift store: probably the most heavily prospected thrift store in the county. Collectors favor it; eBay resellers and flea market vendors do, too.

But if you go often enough, a treasure or two will drop into your hands.  It’s two blocks from my house. I go often.

Besides,“treasure” is a subjective sort of concept.  Treasure to my eyes is trash in the eyes of others.  And that makes me a lucky man.

I collect t-shirts with printed designs: not rock ’n roll tees, necessarily, or sports tees, or tees boasting a catchy phrase.  What I’m looking for is hard to explain; but I know it when I see it.

That day, what I found was a mint-condition Hanes Beefy-T, in red. It bore the image of a thorny rose and four heads of wheat; below that appear the words “Bread and Roses Festival of Music, October 7, 8, and 9. UC Berkeley.  Greek Theater.” That was it.

“Bread and Roses:” the name struck a chord, old and rusty.  No year was given.  But to me it looked like a 40-year-old mint-condition concert shirt. Once you’ve pawed through 50 or 60,000 t-shirts, you can date some of them, roughly, by the maker’s tag inside the neck.  I’m fairly good with Beefy-Ts.

Age alone means little to a tee’s value.  But money value isn’t where I’m at.  The tee itself is just an excuse to go hunting on the Internet.  It’s a map, a signpost, the first line of a story — or the last. Here is what I found:

The story begins in 1912; the year before the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City burned 150 women to death thanks to management villainy.

That year, the pioneering women’s labor organizer Rose Schneiderman made a speech to a group of well-to-do liberals. She spoke on behalf of all women laboring in dangerous conditions for little money.  And yet, she told the crowd, they wanted more than mere money.

“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

Bread and roses. Sustenance, but also dignity: a life worth living.  That phrase became a labor slogan, and soon gave rise to a poem:

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew —
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for Roses, too.

Decades later the folksinger Mimi Farina turned the poem into a song.  She later staged concerts in support of an organization she founded called — Bread and Roses.

The organization sends musicians and other performers to put on shows for inmates of prisons, hospitals, homes for the abused, homes for abandoned children — anyplace where the people are perhaps starved for beauty — and a few roses. It’s been 40 years now.

My tee came from the first big Bread and Roses benefit concert, in 1977. I confirmed this with an email to the Bread and Roses organization, which still exists.

The Bread and Roses Festival of Music was an all-acoustic music series, because Mimi Farina hated the music industry and had a grudge agains recording engineers who tried to make her sound like a lounge act.

The Bread and Roses people also sent me an image of the festival poster.  It boasted quite the lineup: there was Pete Seeger; Joan Baez, Farina’s sister; Ramblin’ Jack Elliot; Arlo Guthrie; Buffy St. Marie; Country Joe MacDonald (“Fish!”); Dave Van Ronk, who was all that Bob Dylan ever aspired to be; Hoyt Axton; Malvina Reynolds of the “little boxes” and much more; the Persuasions, the greatest a capella group you never heard of; and more. Robin Williams emceed.

I don’t have a set list, but articles about the concert said that Seeger, Baez, MacDonald, and Axton all “sang their classics,” which means that song of reform, songs against war, songs of the dispossessed and the land and of labor, all rang out across that stage.

And it’s an interesting stage: the Greek Theater at UC Berkeley is a replica Greek amphitheater of the classic era, built into a hillside. The Greek is all stone and sunlight and good sight lines to a stage that’s intimately close.

The Internet told me that the Greek  was built in 1903 by the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. Hearst, when all was said and done, was no friend of the working man.  Or truth, beauty, democracy, or anything good.

So I get a warm feeling when I envision this crowd of populist folkies and street performers prancing atop Hearst’s concrete Greek ego trip a mere 25 years after they slid Bill Hearst into the ground.  At a concert that cost five bucks: inflation aside, an amount that was pretty easy to come by even if you flipped burgers for money and lived with your mom.

A year or so later I went to the Greek to hear Randy Newman songs of society and its follies. I wonder what the ghost of Hearst thought about the words to “Political Science.”

The ‘60s and early ’70s were good times, at least on the West Coast.  If you were the right color and gender, there were plenty of roses to go around. Work was plentiful, school and houses were cheap. And there was hope that someday soon, color and gender wouldn’t matter so much. And everyone would have roses.

But that time was soon to end; it was beginning to end even the day of the concert.  A month or two earlier, housing prices had started to rise in Silicon Valley.  People couldn’t believe that a three-bedroom house in Silicon Valley could go for — $80K.

A co-worker and I talked about this era at lunch a few days after I bought the shirt.  He’s a grinning leprechaun of an old hippie in wire-rimmed glasses and a blue cotton work shirt rolled up to the elbows.  I asked him if he’d been to the ’77 Bread and Roses Concert; we’re not very far from Berkeley, after all.

“God,” he said, gazing off at yesterday.  “Who was there?” I named them; he couldn’t remember.  Too many concerts, too much music, too many yesterdays.  He might have been, or not.

He’d been a music promoter for awhile and hung with the greats.  We talked about that, but what we mainly talked about was the university we both work at.  It has a counterculture reputation, not these days so much deserved; but in the 70s, it was a quiet and magic place, newly built in the middle of a redwood forest.

“You could walk across the entire campus and not see anybody,” he told me.  ‘It was that peaceful.  And the town was just this sleepy little place.  But people were standing in the streets playing music.  A sleepy little town — but with music in the streets.”

“Times were better then,” I said, and he agreed. Old men always like then better than now.  But this time, we may be right.  Because life is harder for our students, and the the people in the town, than it has ever been.

We took our eye off the economic regulations that kept all the money from piling up in a few hands.  Soon the economy turned from a rose nursery to a series of self-assembling traps that stripped wealth and power off the common folk.

Want to go to college? Well, it costs more now, because government support was pulled. Because taxes were lowered. And there are few grants anymore; you could be indebted for life by private-industry loans with tricky and subtle penalties, that can ambush you like a blow to the back of the head.  It’s especially bad for women and minorities.

But you need a degree to get a good job, see, because the good non-degreed work was allowed to flee overseas.  Of course, compliant foreign tech workers can be imported cheaply to work here because of “shortages.” Yeah right.

Just take away restraints and regulations, and capitalism naturally makes traps. You can dance the same dance about healthcare, retirement, housing, consumer protection, antitrust laws…. in our once sleepy town, the university is jammed and students pay $800 to share a bedroom.  It’s a Silicon Valley bedroom town now, and a lifestyle playpen where the weathy have second- or third homes that stand empty 350 days a year.

Most service workers work two jobs just to survive. There is less music in the streets than ever before. Roses grow in small gardens with high admission prices.

The Bread and Roses organization still exists, as I said. Its core mission has never changed: It still brings light and music to the institutionalized These people will always need more roses in their lives.

But as the world outside becomes more rose-less, Bread and Roses looks only inward. It is a noncontroversial community-based cause, and nothing more.

And that’s fine.  But while the populist folksingers of the first festival danced on William Randolph Hearst’s marble stage back in ’77, Hearst had the last laugh after all. Because in a very strong sense he is now the president of the United States.

To learn about Donald Trump, read a even a simple biography of Hearst.  The telltales are the same: inherited wealth, grandiose ambition, boundless narcissism, underlying disrespect for democracy, and astoundingly bad judgment. I’m not the only one who thinks this, I was surprised to learn.

Now you understand what I’m looking for in a t-shirt: a story. A story that can be assembled from all the facts and circumstances and ideas that left behind a t-shirt to give testimony that once upon a time, something happened.

This is not a nice story: it’s a story of battles won, and lost again.  But it has a lesson: no battle against an unfair system is ever won forever.  It must be fought again and again, or the bad system will reassert itself, as it always has.

And there will always be apologists among the comfortable class who are sorry for the bad things that happen, but don’t really want fundamental change. They were the people that Rose Schneiderman talked to.

So we will fight again, and with luck we will win again.  And maybe this time, or next time, we will break the trap-making economic machine for good and all.   And bread and roses will be the base right of all people everywhere. Forever.  As the old poem reads:

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days —
The rising of the women means the rising of the race —
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes —
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

I had expected a quiet evening.  And yet somehow I found myself outside in the dark and wind, guiding a short convoy of emergency vehicles into the church parking lot. Beyond it lay a man who might need their help.

The farting klaxon of the paramedic engine, the warbling siren of the ambulance, the flashing red lights: they all lent urgency to the scene. Never mind that these screaming, flashing vehicles were crawling along at 10 miles an hour, trying not to overshoot the church’s driveway from the ill-lit boulevard That’s why the deputies sent me out there.

All this effort for a guy that nobody cared about until he looked to be dying. And so a call went out, and programmed caring kicked in.

Step back a moment: my wife’s knitting group meets each Thursday evening at St. Bob the Informal’s Presbymethertarian Church.  The knitting group is open to the community, and nothing much is discussed except yarn and the knitting of it. And there is tea and banana bread, and a knitting DVD on the church flatscreen.

I don’t knit. I stay around to mind the door and walk the knitters to their cars. The church neighborhood is industrial: dark and deserted at night.  Homeless campers come around when night falls, because almost no one is here to care.

Some sleep on the church grounds. That’s not so much an issue; except when they set up camp right in front of the main door.  Or try to come inside the church  uninvited.

The “main door” is actually in the back of the church, by the parking lot.  At first glance, a camper might judge the doorway to be a good flop: secluded, with a covered porch.  But it’s not, as campers find out when cars roll up for evening meetings.

You might say: you’re a church.  Why won’t you give them shelter?  Why won’t you give them help? And I’ve yielded to that very human impulse a few times over the years.

It has never worked out.  Never. The clear-headed ones just move on.  They want quiet, not trouble.   Do they really leave, or just move to some shadowy corner of the lot? We don’t care.

But the ones who refuse to move, or want to get inside, have too many demons for me to cope with.  Or for them, for that matter.  The last time I let someone stay camped in front of the door — it was going to rain that night — she eventually stormed inside screaming,  because she was sure that the voices in her head were the knitters, laughing at her.  And the law came to drive her off .  It did rain that night, and hard.

After that one, the pastor asked us to lock the door during meetings.  Seemed to help. But in a way, nothing does.

A couple of months later, the knitting group again did not lock the church door.  We couldn’t; a volunteer group had booked the big hall for a night of training, and some of them were making cell calls in the church parking lot. I kept one eye on the front door and the other on my laptop.   But I expected no issues.  Not with so many people around.

Heh.  I walked down the hall to the bathroom and found a guy sleeping on the floor.  He’d wrapped a blanket around himself and wedged himself against the wall between a bookshelf and a tub of preschool equipment.  You know how messy churches can be; I almost didn’t notice him.

He was sawing serious wood: a lean, battered guy in his 40s in a tee and jeans and reasonable shoes.  And now I remembered seeing his face as he walked in: tired, distressed.  But that’s in the normal range these days.

I sought his attention for a few minutes, but he wasn’t having it.  I thought about shaking him, but couldn’t bring myself to touch him.  And I had a problem: all the people would leave the church within the hour. There was no staff in the building to take over. Just me. I needed him out of here.

So I called the sheriff, and told them he wasn’t causing problems except by being there, and that he wouldn’t wake up.  They promised a response, and I gave the score to the knitters and the volunteer group and asked them not to freak. They didn’t. This happens.

But I resented him.  I resented that he disrupted my  orderly evening.  I resented having to see to him instead of relaxing.  I resented being bothered.

Two deputies showed up in reasonable time, and I led them in.  Both were linebacker-sized in clean brown uniforms, backs as broad as love seats.  One was older than the other, and led the festivities.  Neither was interested in my opinions on anything; so I just showed them the gentleman.

It became their turn to shout at him. They took turns screaming in his ear.  The man on the floor remained happily oblivious.

The older deputy sighed and slipped on a pair of blue nitrile exam gloves.  Then he leaned down started shaking him.  I felt a little better about not wanting to touch the guy.

“See the bruises down both arms?” the older deputy asked.  “These are typical of IV drug abusers.” He shook the man again and yelled in his ear again.  “Hello! Sir! Wake up!”  Then he noticed something.

“Look, he’s pissed himself. I’m going to call in a Code 3.” The deputies didn’t bother to explain anything to me; just asked me to go out to the street and guide in the emergency vehicles.

So there I was, waving the trucks into the parking lot.  Belatedly I realized that Code 3 meant “lights and sirens;” and that the deputy thought he might have an overdose on his hands.

The trucks rumbled toward the rear of the church. I trotted after them waving hand signals and, oddly, felt a little better.  Yes, the wandering man had upturned my evening.  But in his way he was just a man in bad shape looking for help on some visceral level: for warmth and light at least. Should he have overdosed out in the darkness, alone, where nobody could help him?  Maybe this was all happening as it was supposed to.

But in the end: not really.  I led the line of medics in the door to find the unconscious man surprising on his feet and answering questions.  The older deputy turned to me:  “Looks like I wasted the taxpayer’s money,” he called cheerfully.

The medics spread out around the man anyway and started doing business.  The deputies got the man’s name and point of origin out of him, and punched it all into handheld terminals.

“There’s a warrant out for him in Louisiana,” the older deputy said.  “But they don’t want him back.”

“What do you mean?” the younger deputy asked.

“They don’t want to send someone out here to get him.”

“Why not?”

“Money,” I said.

“That’s right,” the older deputy answered.  “It costs money to come get him, and it costs money to keep him, and Louisiana doesn’t want to spend it.”

The younger deputy looked bewildered. He must have been very new indeed.  But processing went on and soon the medics walked the confused man out the door to God know where, packed up their trucks, and left.  The two deputies thanked me for my assistance with mechanical smiles and handshakes of identical firmness.

And in a few days, most likely, the man no one wants will be out on the street again, a loose cannon rolling across an America that doesn’t care a thing about him — except that, wherever he is, he should be elsewhere.  And millions like him. More every day.

Don’t say that America doesn’t make things any more.  It makes men and women like him, out in those parts of the country where money is scarce these days.  Strip away the jobs, don’t fund the schools, bring the drugs to kill the boredom. Let them slip into degradation, become anti-social and unemployable to boot. Arrest them for something. Then drive them away with a warrant and make them somebody else’s problem.

Oh yeah: don’t forget to blame the victims.

I got up this morning and girded myself for battle as only a man of 60-odd must do.

I fed the cat.  I sat down at the rowing machine for 500 strokes, making sure to fully flex my lower back as I rowed.  I  stretched for 20 minutes.  I popped a couple of anti-inflammatory pills.  I ate a breakfast strong in protein and fiber.  And at last: I was ready to move heavy objects with some hope that my joints or spine would take no subsequent revenge.

Getting old is a process of constant negotiation with your own body.  When I was young, I could do what I wanted with it.  Now, my body has the whip hand. If I want to lift heavy objects, we have to talk.

Today’s heavy objects were store fixtures from a dying Radio Shack: big roll-around shelving units made from heavy-gauge steel.  They’re just what my wife Rhumba needs to build the crafting studio of her retirement dreams in our garage.  And they had to be out of the Shack by 5 pm, when it would close its doors forever.

Those suckers were huge, too. I had no idea how I’d load them into the pick-up I’d rented.  But  I drove over to the store and hoped for the best.  After all, things are never as bad as they seem they’ll be, unless they’re worse.

I backed the truck up against the entrance of the store and went in.  Locusts had stripped the place: nothing left but cables, batteries, and 90 PERCENT OFF banners.  It was going to be weird not having a Radio Shack around.  It’s that store you seldom go anymore but know that you’ll need at some point, for a cable or a coupler or even a resistor.  And now it’s gone.

I grew up with Radio Shack.  I never made friends with electricity, but I had my battery club card and bought my cassette tapes there. It was always the source of strange electrical gadgets and somewhat educational toys that made bleeping noises or just raced around in circles under remote control.  Whatever was electronic — components, TVs, music keyboards, test equipment, computers — they had.  It might be cheap and no-name, but they had it.

And sometimes, they had it first.  In the late 70s when personal computers were still expensive and mostly build-it-yourself, Radio Shack’s cheap TRS-80 computers were the first computers your average family could afford.

We called them Trash-80s, and they weren’t much.  But they got a generation of young people — and not so young — learning to code while Rupert Holmes crooned the Pina Colada song on the family stereo. A couple of years later Radio Shack rolled out the TRS-100, the very first portable computer worth a damn; some call it the very first laptop.  They sold like shaved iced in Hell.

And then the Shack went into IBM-compatibles and software, but still sold supplies and equipment for the home electrical dabbler,  plus light-up My Child’s First Circuit educational toys, and music systems and video and telephones and every damn thing.  A hole-in-the-wall Radio Shack might not count for much in the big city.  But in the nameless suburbs of America, it just might be the only game in town.

Radio Shack stores weren’t always wonderful; but if you looked hard enough, you could usually find somebody who knew what was what. They might be 18 and geeky, but who else would be genuinely interested in helping you pick the right video cable? At minimum wage? Some of those young people went on to manage data centers and networks, design chips, and write the code that America runs on.

Radio Shack rode the tech waves for decades, but they missed out on smartphones. Bad mistake. And of course e-commerce hit them hard. And now, seventeen years and two bankruptcies into the new millenium, the local Radio Shack was going down, and hundreds of others with it.  The only people in the store when I walked in today were there to strip it.

Like me.  The shelving units we’d picked out had been put aside for me. They were even larger and heavier-looking than I remembered.  “How are you going to load them?” the assistant manager asked.  He was a brisk young man, hairless but for a severely trimmed beard.

That was a good question. “I don’t know,” I said.  “Roll them out there, tip them up over the tailgate and hope for the best, I guess.’

“They do come apart,”  he said, and produced a screwdriver. And he spent the next five minutes showing me the basics.  I took over, but he came back to help several times between other duties.  It was honest-to-God classic Radio Shack service even as the ship went down.  The store manager wandered over to remind me that I could have ten removable shelves with each unit.  Then he wandered away, only to wander back again and tell me to take as many shelves as I wanted.

The assistant manager even helped me load the truck.  For my back’s sake it was good that we’d taken the display units apart, because even some of the pieces weighed 50 or 60 pounds.  Soon the pickup was full to the brim with miscellaneous metal crap, and my back remained happy.  Reassembling all those heavy components later would prove to be the real hell.  But I made it, and my back and body kept the deal we’d struck that morning.

It’s not that this town will actually suffer for Radio Shack’s absence.  We have a perfectly good electronics store a mile or so down the road.  It’s more on the serious side, but its employees will gladly tell newbies more than they’d ever want to know about anything electronic.  They’ll even build you a computer from scratch.

And the gigantic Best Buy next to the Home Depot will sell you any consumer electronics you want, from computers and peripherals to smart phones (and dumb ones) to music players to DVDs and even appliances and solar panels.  There are even geeks to help you with the stuff you bought — though you have to pay to see them.

But Radio Shack was an excellent starting point, where real electronics and cheap thrills overlapped. A lot of kids rich and poor made the transition from toys to tech at the Shack.  Now they’re left with e-commerce, which will sllt you anything you want, but can’t tell you why you should want it — or help you figure out what you bought.

To me, the real paradigm of retail is a pile of physical merchandise to handle, a counter, and a clerk who knows what they’re doing and what questions to ask.  The “best buy” is the one that gets you what you really need, with all the service included in the price.

And if that paradigm is simply outmoded, why is it still there for high-end stores and high-end products — but not for the rest of us?

A couple of days ago I helped some young man in Iowa to find his car keys over the Internet. Every day of the year the Internet make the improbable, probable.

I found him calling for help on a social media site. Somewhere between Saturday afternoon and returning home the previous night, his keys had gone missing. He had to go to work in a few hours, too. He needed his keys. Badly.

“I have no idea where they are.” he said. “I’ve looked in all of my usual spots. Can you suggest some spots I may not have thought of?

No. But I introduced him to St. Anthony of Padua.

“You think you’ve looked everywhere, but you haven’t,” I wrote. “Your keys are somewhere that you’ve assumed they couldn’t possibly be. But they are.

“Here’s a mind trick that may help you search. It is technically religious, but you needn’t believe a thing.

“There’s a prayer to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things, that goes simply, ‘Help me, St. Anthony, to find that which I have lost.’ Chant it over and over, and start searching again.

“The chant breaks your assumptions about where the keys could and couldn’t be. It keeps you from giving up until you search every single place, not just the places that you think are realistic. Because ‘St. Anthony’ is helping you.”

And I told him of a time and place where it had worked for me. Then I posted the comment and wandered off for a little bit.

When I returned to the laptop, a message was waiting:

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT, thank you dude and thank you Saint Anthony wherever you are! It was in the recliner which I checked about three times before!”

Score one for the big guy. St. Anthony comes through again. And I made a guy in Iowa chant the St. Anthony prayer while he ransacked his apartment. Double win!

I would be happy to believe that St. Anthony actually exists. I can see him in a cavern filled with silvery light, somewhere deep beneath Padua. He sits atop a colossal pile of all the lost car keys, cell phones, wallets, pocket knives, and styling combs of the world

He listens to the pleas of the faithful. He sends them strength and guidance to find that which they have lost. He idly flicks a solid gold Zippo lighter that somebody lost down a storm drain in Las Vegas. It’s pretty.

I would be happy to believe that, but I do not. As I told the young man, he was St. Anthony. The chant — or prayer, or spell — opened his mind and widened his vision to include all the places where his keys “couldn’t possibly be.” Until he found them.

And I know this because I’ve been where that young man has, only in even more despair. And yes, it was about keys.

This was nearly 30 years ago. I had driven eighty miles to San Francisco to visit friends: attend a party, stay overnight, and visit a friend’s newly-rented craft studio.

I parked near my friend’s apartment house and locked the car. Then I walked over to the studio, fifteen blocks away in a business district. Parking down that way was hopeless; and as a recent San Franciscan, fifteen blocks was nothing. It’s a walking town.

But instead of putting my key ring back in my pants, I stowed it in the breast pocket of my old leather jacket. The pocket was torn half open on one side. But secure enough, right? All seemed well.

The studio was in a converted flat above a storefront; San Francisco has thousands of such buildings. I knew about the building was: between 11th and 12th. But — was its number 1134 or 1143? Or something else? I couldn’t remember. I always forget addresses.

I tried the wrong building the first time and broke in on a family of gypsy fortune-tellers eating lunch on the second floor. I faded back down the stairs before they noticed me. The second building was correct. And I visited my friend in her new studio. “My friend,” was in fact my current wife Rhumba — still somebody else’s girlfriend, but already a good friend to me for many years.

And after I’d been there a few minutes, I realized: my keys were gone. Somewhere across fifteen blocks of San Francisco. And I freaked out. Eighty miles from home. Car on the street where the feral meter maids would fall upon it. No idea what to do. I think I was hyperventilating.

And Rhumba told me the St. Anthony prayer. “Just keep saying it, and keep looking. Retrace your tracks. It always works.”

And so I did. I searched Rhumba’s studio: every room that I’d been in. Then I retraced my steps across the entire Richmond District, peering in every gutter, under every vegetable cart in front of every produce store, in the doorway of every Chinese bakery, in every street planting and by every tree trunk, all the way back to my parked car. Chanting, “Help me, St. Anthony, to find that which I have lost.”

And I didn’t find my keys. I just about declared it hopeless. But I kept chanting. And so I retraced my steps all the way back to the craft studio again, back along every gutter, every trash bin, under every car and up the stairs again into the studio to search it one more time. Help me, St. Anthony, help me.

And still, nothing. I walked back downstairs to the street. “Help me, St. Anthony…” But I had looked everywhere.

And then I remembered that I had not. The gypsies’ flat: I’d run up the stairs thinking it was Rhumba’s studio. But I hadn’t dropped anything there. I couldn’t possibly have. And for reasons I couldn’t quite analyze, I was reluctant to return there.

“Help me, St. Anthony, to find that which I have lost.” Well, the big guy can’t help you if you don’t help yourself, so I finally tried the door. It was locked. But there was a doorbell. I pressed it; something squawked inside the building.

“What do you want?”

A 10-year-old girl with delicate features stared down through a second-floor window. She had  a bandanna tied over her head.

“I came up to your flat by mistake a little while ago. Now I can’t find my keys. Could you see if they’re anywhere on the stairs?”

She vanished. I waited, really too beaten down even to hope at this point. Then she reappeared in the window, grinning, with something in her hand.

MY KEYS. SHE HAD MY KEYS.

I raised my hand, and she tossed them down. I almost caught them; they hit the pavement. But they were old-school keys of solid metal: no electronics, and no harm done. The girl waved, and vanished back into the flat.

To this day, whenever somebody mentions anything about “a gift from the gods,” I think about a pretty little girl in a bandanna, smiling down from a window with my keys in her hand. And St. Anthony.

But really, it was all me: running halfway across the Richmond District and back because I wouldn’t see, couldn’t see, that the best place to look was right next door to where I started. Only Saint Anthony’s prayer kept me going long enough to figure it out.

You know that old joke about always finding something in the last place you look? Maybe that’s because, sometimes, the last place you look is the place you least want to look. Maybe for me it was a case of “Ooh, gypsies, scary?” I don’t know. Just a thought.

Anyway, seems these days that so many people have lost something, or are about to. A job, security, health care, an election they were sure they’d win, American democracy. And hope.

So where do you find those things again? How do you get them back? Maybe it’s time to say the St. Anthony prayer and start looking. What do you think?

Just keep going. Look everywhere. Look in places you wouldn’t think to look, ask people you wouldn’t normally ask, make alliances with people who aren’t like you. But are also looking.

“Help me, St. Anthony, to find that which I have lost:” but you are your own saint. Look not where you want to, but where you have to. Who knows what you might find?

If you don’t keep an open mind, though, even Saint Anthony can’t help.

She looked like a guy in a dress.  She actually was a guy in a dress.  But she thought of herself as a woman.  And so we treated her that way.

This was at one of those university staff pow-wos that fills a day with workshops and discussion groups, plus an hour in the middle for supermarket sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies.  And Connie was new to the university; she introduced herself and talked about her duties and her background.  She did not talk about her nasal tenor voice, her Adams apple, her stubble, her hipless figure, or her dress.

The phrase is “trans woman:” a “she, her, hers” person.  Those were Connie’s chosen pronouns. She is transitioning toward femininity; soon there would be hormones and someday, an operation.

Not all non-standard gender people are transitioning anywhere, though.  They’re happy where they are: in between, or outside, the standard sexes. They use different pronouns:  ve, ver, and vis.  Or xe, xem, and zir.  Or a dozen other sets. These days in the world of gender, it’s all about your pronouns-of-choice.  They’re putting them in their email footers, along with the phone numbers and street address.

Compared to all this, Connie’s M-to-F transition is dead simple.  But still had the damnedest time using Connie’s preferred pronouns.  She still sounded like a man, and looked like one.  In a dress.

So I was relieved when Connie started hormones.  I met with her again after her chest and hips began coming along. They helped me to see her differently.  So when I pick up up the phone and hear a man’s voice say, “Hi, this is Connie,” the image of Connie with tits keeps me straight.

Now that Trump’s in the White House, the great American march forward to gender-neutral restrooms is on hold.  But college campuses like mine will continue to move forward until everybody, of every gender, can lay claim to a restroom that they can be themselves in.

In the meantime, trans men and trans women have their own points of confusion.  Old habits can die hard even after the transition begins.

Rhumba was at the basin in a woman’s restroom recently when a more or less female figure burst from a stall and made for the exit — without washing hands.  Another woman entered the now-empty stall; a moment later, Rhumba heard a sharp snort of disgust, follow by a sharp CLACK .  The previous occupant had left the toilet seat up.

Okay trans women:  I’m learning not to see you as men in dresses.  But it’s up to you not to act like them.