As I write this, a cat is dying in a cardboard box across the room..  He’s taking his sweet time about it, too, and that bums me out.  To be fair, he’s not happy about it, either.

Life is ephemeral; that’s the way it is, and maybe the way it ought to be.  But when they acquire a cute kitten and make it part of their family, experienced cat owners understand that, someday, they’re going to watch it die.  And they push that thought to the back burner for as long as they can.

The cat in question is a gray-and-white short-hair, twelve years of age.  He’s gentle; you could hold him belly-up in your arms, and he’d just purr.

Some weeks back he began to look a bit under the weather; but no worse than if he’d had a cat cold, so we let it pass.  But he did not get better; in fact, worse.  He lost appetite, and became less active.  He walked stiffly, and spent more and more of his time in a cardboard box that was lying around.

He could still jump into my lap with the greatest of ease, and this sort of thing let us believe that nothing was seriously wrong.  But eventually, we knew that it was.

So we took him to the very expensive best-in-town vet, who poked and prodded him and laid down two possibilities: kidney failure, or inflamed bowels. He learned toward inflamed bowels, but highly recommended a full blood panel and urinalysis.

“Before we go further, let’s do a financial review.” He punched up all the procedures on a screen, with a breakdown of the individual prices and a grand total. I looked at it. Five hundred dollars.

The very expensive best-in-town vet has a wonderful poker face.  It betrays nothing: no hint of judgment or encouragement.  He knows the score; not everyone has five hundred dollars to spare on a cat.  Quite a number don’t; in fact, more even year.

There is no pet insurance, at least none to speak of: no deductible, no negotiated price, no network to be in or out of.  The price is the price.   So the best-in-town vet doesn’t muck around. You get the price up front; and then you decide.  It’s entirely up to you; no medical establishment rushes ahead and makes decisions for you; no laws enable them to. It’s your pet.

We could afford the tests; we ordered them.  I was worried about his kidneys; we once spent three years taking care of a cat with kidney failure.  Every three days we had to stick a needle in his ruff and drain 200 ml of Lactated Ringer’s Solution into him from an IV bag.  It wasn’t fun for any of us.  But inflamed bowels? That sounded more doable.

A day passed; the cat grew steadily worse. The vet called me up.  It was the kidneys.  “I’m amazed that he’s alive.  His levels are off the chart.”  Most likely, he told me, a tumor on his prostate was unleashing all sorts of nasty chemicals on his kidneys.  They’re shutting down.  The cat was growing weaker and weaker.

The vet laid out the options: an operation that the cat probably wouldn’t survive; euthanasia; or… Lactated Ringer’s Solution.  It wouldn’t save him; just make him more comfortable.  At no time did the vet actually say “euthanasia,” or even the “D” word. He let me say it. His poker face is impregnable, even by phone.

I’d almost been ready to have him put to sleep; in the past we’d kept a cat alive too long by heroic means.  In the past, I’d also, once, been very quick to put a cat to sleep, to spare him — and me — suffering.  And I’ve questioned that decision.  So I’d been thinking that this cat should die naturally, at home, without intervention.

After all, the vet said the cat was on the edge of death.  It wouldn’t be long, right?

And now there’s a bag of Lactated Ringer’s Solution in the kitchen which we’ll give to him shortly. And antibiotics, which I’ve also just shoved down his throat: the urinalysis showed that he’s massively infected with, of all things, e coli.  It’s also attacking his kidneys.

Pet medicine resembles human medicine in this way: you start out with certain intentions and directives for your loved one. Then things happen and you make decisions that seem logical. And suddenly you end up doing things you’d sworn you wouldn’t: like heroic intervention.

And the cat just keeps going, “edge of death” or not. He gets weaker every day.  He can barely walk. He’s losing bladder control.  He’s almost not eating He doesn’t seem to be in pain, but I’m sure he’s not happy.    The vet, from behind his poker face, gives no firm prognosis.  I get that some pet owners never want to hear the worst, and he wants to protect himself; but this is getting tiring.

The cat slept on me for an evening or two this week, purring.  It was good. But now he has no energy or inclination to do anything but stare into the nothing, and I’m beginning to think that death would be more merciful, after all.

If human medicine was like pet medicine, life would be simpler.  You’d know the price of everything, because you’d have to: you’re paying up front.  You could even comparison-shop; plenty of vets around.

And if you don’t have the money, you don’t get treated.  No bureaucrats, nobody making decisions on whether you live or die.  The market handles it.

This works for pets, because most pets are optional. But humans are not.  The promise of civilization is that we owe something to each other; all are valuable, all should be taken care of.

And you couldn’t get a single politicians in Washington to say otherwise.  They’ll simply propose “solutions” to health care reform that they know won’t work.   Because in their heart of hearts they believe that some people are less worthy than others.  Less than human.  Optional.

It’s time to give the cat his Ringer’s solution.  I hope I don’t stick myself with the needle.

                                                                           

Three days later, and I’m in an exam room at the vet’s.  There’s a band-aid on my left forefinger.  And a very sick, frightened cat in my arms.  He can’t eat.  As of this morning, he no longer walks.  I had to give him water by hand. He’d been crying for it when I came downstairs in the morning; kidney failure made him thirstier and thirstier.  So much for an easy death in familiar surroundings.

So it’s time for euthanasia.  Past time.  I’m sorry, cat, for taking so long to pay you what I owe you: passage from this life, when the time came.

The vet — a different one, a woman — takes him from my arms. “I’m going to give him a sedative so that he doesn’t know what’s happening to him.”  She vanishes into the back, to return a few minutes later.  She hands him back to me, wrapped in a towel. He’s got an IV port on his leg.

“We gave him Valium.”

“He’s smiling,” I say.  Cats smile on the sides of their face, not the front; it’s easy to miss. The cat looks up into my eyes and manages the barest echo of a purr.  I just about cried. The vet allowed us a few moments.

“Do you want to hold him while I give the injection?  All it is, is an overdose of sedative.”

“Yes.” She pushes a needle into the cat’s IV port for a second or two.  The cat grows still. “He’s gone.” Just like that.

“Could you spare us a couple of minutes?”

“Of course!” She closes the door behind her. And then I do cry, and say some words that I thought worth saying.

The law says that I owe a cat nothing.  Treat, don’t treat.  Care, don’t care.  I own him, I can do what I want short of extreme cruelty or neglect.  And yet what’s really right is more than that.  Much more.

And if I can owe that much to a pet, who is optional to our civilization, how much more do I owe to every human being in this nation, even on the globe? They are not optional.  They all deserve good health care, a life without fear.  To even say, “This is true, but we must work towards it incrementally….” while humans wither and die: who are you people? What is in your heads? And what is not in your hearts?

Humans are not optional. Why is that hard?

Every week or two I walk down to the Goodwill Industries thrift store and search for social documents.  You would call them t-shirts.

T-shirts are the wearable memes of modern civilization.  Have a message, a statement, a point of view? Put it on a t-shirt and give them away or sell them; if it’s an attractive design, people will wear it for years and spread your thought to the world.  Even if they don’t understand it.

I research these messages; they were perfectly clear when and where the t-shirts were printed.  But years later and far from home, they are mysterious.  A little digging takes you to surprising places.

So, here’s the graphic from a vintage  t-shirt that I bought a couple of weeks ago.  It’s sappy teen lust at its finest.

The t-shirt’s from a 2002 little-theater production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” a Broadway musical from the sixties.  Community theaters put on a lot of feel-good musicals; anymore, they’re the only sure money-makers.

The shirt told me was that it was from a  2002 little-theater production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” a Broadway musical of the early sixties. The shirt also said that the play was staged in Marin County, a woodsy shire just north of San Francisco where big money, privilege and cultural patronage go way back.

But the shirt raises questions.   What is “The Mountain Play?” A play on a mountain? What mountain? What is this theater company that has the cash for expensive t-shirts?

Yes, there’s a story.  It goes back 102 years.

The shirt also said that the play was staged in Marin County, a woodsy shire just north of San Francisco where big money, privilege and cultural patronage go way back. And there is the name, “The Mountain Play.”

But… what is the “Mountain Play?” A play on a mountain? What mountain? What is this theater company that has the cash for expensive t-shirts? Some of them can’t even sell bottled water in the lobby.

Yes, there’s a story.  It begins 103 years ago.

It’s 1912, and Mount Tamalpais in Marin County is the most popular hiking spot in the Bay Area.  It’s a 4,000-foot mountain that’s only five miles by ferry and local rail from San Francisco, and the scenic vistas and natural beauty are supreme.  The name, Tamalpais, is taken from an ancient Miwok Indian legend about a princess who becomes the mountain. The mountain has that kind of profile if you stare at it hard: from far away.

Victorians liked a good hike in the woods. They romanticized nature’s beauty as an antidote to industrial-age urban ugliness. And, in any era, some of them just liked going on group outings and boozing it up. Whatever the motivation, hiking Mount Tam alone or in groups was a big deal.

That year, three hikers discovered a natural amphitheater with insane views  2000 feet up Mt. Tam and declared it an idyllic place to stage edifying plays in the great outdoors. Mind you, there were no real roads: just trails, and a scenic railway. But one of the hikers was chairman of the UC Berkeley drama department, and he put together a production, and the money, the next year.  It was a medieval mystery play: about what you’d expect from hiking academics in 1913, if the archive photo is any clue:

 

And there was another play the next year, and then yearly after that for 100 years.  And they call it The Mountain Play.

nd there was another play the next year, and then yearly after that for 100 years: work by local writers, Shakespeare, whatever.  And they call it The Mountain Play.

To go to the Mountain Play, you had to — well, climb the mountain. Okay, you could take the train, but a great many of those steel-calved Victorians did hike in: eight miles and two thousand feet up the mountain.  They’d hike up in the morning and see the play in the afternoon. Then they’d hike eight miles back down the mountain and take the ferry back to San Francisco to make money.

It’s 100 years later, and truth and beauty are on the back burner.  The area is a state park now. The annual Mountain Play is now a Broadway musical, not hokey old local plays and Shakespeare; to be very fair, the Mountain Play was on its last legs when management made the switch.  Now, attendance can run to several thousand per performance.

Of course no one hikes up to the amphitheater anymore; there are shuttle buses now, and a few parking lots for the quick or the privileged.  A competition has evolved amongst playgoers to see who can pack the most insanely elaborate gourmet picnic lunch for the several-hour affair.  This is, after all, Marin County.

 

The view is still supreme, but the sets are much more elaborate. Why not,  when you have all the room there is and the directors can even drive cars across the “stage”  if they feel like it?

And that’s the story of this t-shirt: a long-running theatrical series halfway up Mt. Tamalpais, and a mountain named for the legend of a sleeping Indian princess.

And it’s complete nonsense.  “Tamalpais” means something like “West Hill” in Miwok.  The Miwok tribe never had a legend about Tamalpais.  The mountain meant nothing to them.

But around 1921, several years into the Mountain Play series, the producers commissioned a local playwright to write a play about the Indians who’d lived on top of Mt. Tamalpais.  In short order, the writer’s research told him that no tribe had ever lived on Mt. Tam.

“Make something up,” the producers commanded, and the playwright did.

It was a piece of Victorian noble-savage hokum called “Tamalpa,” about a Miwok princess who dies of a broken heart and becomes one with the mountain.   But it was popular.  The Mountain Play staged “Tamalpa” seven times, right up through 1970.  Here’s a cast photo from ’23.

And somewhere along the line, Tamalpais the “sleeping princess mountain” became a “real Miwok myth.”  Back in the ‘60s, every third-grader around that end of the San Francisco Bay was told about the sleeping princess of Tamalpais.  Hundreds of thousands of them.  And I believed it for 50 years, until I researched this t-shirt.

This sort of thing happens all the time.  It’s scary easy to make fiction into fact that “everybody knows.” The other day I found out that Richard Nixon has grown four inches taller.  Even though he’s dead.

In an on-line discussion about GOP presidential candidates, somebody opined Marco Rubio will never get the nomination because he’s short (5 foot 8 or thereabouts).  The common wisdom is that only tall men become president.

Wait a second, I thought.  Richard Nixon was 5 foot 7.  What is this BS?

I went out on the Internet.  It told me that Nixon was 5 foot 11 and a half, nearly everywhere including Wikipedia.  Here and there, 5 foot 10.

Now, I really had a hate on for Nixon back in the day: his desperate self-importance, his slimy eagerness to claim all power for himself.  For the ‘72 GOP convention he had a special adjustable podium created that would ensure that no politician appeared taller than he in front of the crowd.  The podium’s “default” position was for a man five foot seven inches tall: Nixon’s height.

The story typified everything I hated about Nixon.  It engraved itself on my brain stem.  I could never, ever forget Nixon’s height.  But it was no secret to anyone back then that Nixon wasn’t especially tall.

My wife caught me muttering to my laptop about it. “What’s bothering you?”

“The Internet thinks Richard Nixon was 5 feet 11.”

“He was 5 feet 7,” she said immediately.  “I don’t know how I know that.  I just do.”

I trust my wife.  I trust me.  But all of you younger types who trust the Internet for everything now “know” for a fact that Nixon was 5 foot 11.   W, as they say, TF.

Anyway, it’s fact now for anybody who doesn’t want to crack an actual book by a reputable scholar.  Which is most of us. Some partisan cared enough to add four inches to Richard Nixon, and every other reference source just went with it.  The Internet is hungry for facts; doesn’t matter if they’re not true, as long as enough other people are wrong, too.  Or you just don’t care.

Just for fun, let’s list other “facts” that we’re told that “everybody knows:”

• America is the land of opportunity.  If you don’t succeed here, it’s your own fault.
• All Americans have a level playing field in life.
• If we have a robust social safety net, people won’t want to work.
• Too much government regulation is the cause of all our problems.
• Cutting taxes on the rich will make us all better off.  (Bill Gates wouldn’t have worked nearly as hard if he’d only made ten billion instead of sixty.)
• Unlimited campaign giving by corporations and billionaires is good for democracy.
• A national health system for all is too expensive and bankrupts the countries who adopt it.

And they’re believed. Personally, I’d like to see  references on all of then.  I’d probably get a big laugh. Got any “facts” of your own to add?

 

I’m not a joiner.  More of a misanthrope.  I like people who are a little off-trail, a little different. People who don’t fit in.  People with unique points of view. They inspire me.

It follows, then, that I’d support Bernie Sanders for president.  Sanders is different. His views weren’t unique among politicians in, say, 1967.  But they are now. I’ve got to like a guy who goes against the flow of modern “liberal” operators. You know, the ones who support gay marriage and save a forest or two while giving the big money practically anything it wants.

And when I went to my first Bernie Sanders meet — a live address by Sanders via streaming video — the crowd was full of the “different” people.  Teenagers trying to figure out the world. Arty ladies in tattered dresses and tarnished African jewelry.  Tall old men in big hats, with weathered skin and whispery voices.  One of them had a pocket full of chocolate bars.  He broke them up and passed them to the crowd.

And there were “normal” people, of all shapes and sizes.   People you’d see at the supermarket, buying the weekly staples and looking a little tired.

Everyone was white; it’s a college town, and an expensive one. We have Latinos, a lot of them;  but they’re invisible in civic affairs.  That’s changing; but not today.

Still, I felt comfortable. They all had interesting things to say, or they were seeking. They listened to each other.

Now, in the BernieVerse, anyone can organize an event and invite locals who registered in the big database of Bernie supporters.  And at first, a variety of people in these parts put on events independently.  But after a while, as people will, most of the local Sanders activists coalesced around one ubergroup.  It called a meeting to rally volunteers to work for the campaign.

So Rhumba and I showed up for the meet and walked into a room full of  elderly, well-kept, retired academics and college-town political nerds. I call them The Usual Suspects. They dominate cultural and political life around here because they’re educated, politically aware, and have plenty of spare time (and money).

They look like people from the same village. They all wear the same organic-cotton casual clothing. They all have the same well-kept white hair.  The same educated accents.  And often, the same tidy retirement income and paid-off three-bedroom house near the coast bought cheap in 1982.

A wiry MC faced the crowd and said, “Let’s all start out by each standing up and saying ONE WORD that expresses our feelings about Bernie!”  “Inspiring!” cried a lean, wrinkled woman with perfect teeth. “Integrity!” rumbled a bulky old man with a professor’s beard.  “FINALLY!” shouted an elderly athlete with silver hair.

And on it went.  Then we were all instructed to “tell our neighbor” what brought us to be here today.

Rhumba and I looked at one another.  I used activities like this when I student-taught second grade.

By the time the MC started talking about our pre-programmed tasks, the two of us were out of there.

I’m not putting anybody down.  Well, yes, I am.  But I’m a misanthrope, and a creative one. So is Rhumba.  I know how political campaigns work; that’s why I stay away from them.  Rhumba and I like to think about things deeply and kick around ideas. There was nothing here for us here in this true-believer seniors citizens’ pep rally.

Moreover, I’m suspicious of people who support reform yet are heartily successful with things as they are.  What can I say? I hung out with wealthy Episcopalians for too many years.  I’ve met too many well-educated, sheltered, privileged people who know just how to create justice and equality for a world full of people who aren’t like them at all.  I’ve seen such folks become confused or even actively hostile when the poor and underprivileged refuse to behave in an orderly manner.

So Rhumba and I went our own way, and the local Bernie organization carried on without us. And they are doing some valuable work.  The national organization is using them now to phone-bank to voters in some of the early-primary states.

I reluctantly suspect that I should get involved; but e-mail notices for events like “Wine and Cheese and Phone-Banking for Bernie!” make me want to stick the proverbial finger down my throat. Especially when it’s assumed that you’ll bring your own cell and tablet (or laptop).  Of course you have one.

But at least these people have good taste in candidates. Don’t think that their unthinking elitism puts me off Sanders, at all.

I’ve done the reading.  As a politician, Sanders is seriously pragmatic — more than willing to engage with anybody and everybody on their own terms, and to piss off “supporters” and ally with “enemies”  if it gets the job done.  He’s much more strategically flexible than most politicians today — just less morally flexible.

I suspect that if Sanders does make the presidency — knock on wood — the wine-and-cheese revolutionaries will find reason to be disappointed.  He’ll love guns too much, or not spend enough time on gay rights or the environment.  Or he’ll compromise.

He may even cause damage to their stock portfolios. Heh.

But I’ll say one thing: they actually found a job for me that I’m willing to do.  Several times a month I get scans, by email, of hand-written sign-up sheets that would-be volunteers fill out at various Bernie campaign events. It’s my job to transcribe the information — name, email, phone, etc. — in a spreadsheet and send it back to the organization.

It’d be simple — if most people didn’t have terrible handwriting.  Deciphering the names and contact info takes a combination of graphic manipulation, Internet detective work, and inductive reasoning that would probably get me a job at the NSA.  I actually enjoy it.  And I don’t have to shout slogans or wave flags.

It’s a perfect gig — for a misanthrope.

This is my birthday.  Today, I am 60 years old.  You may congratulate me for making it this far.

I kicked off the day’s festivities by cleaning up cat feces.  We’d locked a cat in the kitchen last night by accident, and she showed us, as they will, why that was a foolish thing to do.

Later in the morning I swabbed down the bathroom and the kitchen with a vile peroxide cleaner. Rhumba and I came down with noro virus — “the stomach flu” — last week, and I wanted to decon the house so that  our visitors don’t get it. Not that we have a lot of visitors, but noro can stay live on hard surfaces for months.

All this work took place in slow motion because, although noro leaves quickly, it takes all your energy with it.

But, y’know, that’s life.  After 60 years, I should know what life looks like, what it does.  It shows up for you every day.  You deal.  Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s not.  Find the right people to be with, and you don’t mind so much when it’s not fun.  I found one of those, and she found me.  Thank God.

Have I achieved great things with my 60 years? Written best-selling novels, traveled the world, graced the covers of national magazines, made millions in the stock market? Not so you’d notice.  And it has bugged me more than a little bit, because somewhere I picked up the idea that I should achieve some fame-worthy thing, or life is worth nothing.

Ideas like that keep you from being happy.  Took me awhile to figure that out, but hey: I’ve had sixty years. I still strive at my personal projects; it’s the striving that’s valuable, that makes you grow.  As it turns out, I’m actually rather averse to fame.

After I battled noro with spray bottle and paper towels, a still-ailing Rhumba and I went out to visit a friend briefly. We then spent the rest of the afternoon in a deserted coffee house over Assam tea, discussing life and politics and particle physics and Donald Trump (who crosses all three topics) as the sun’s rays sleeted through the windows and lit every individual item in high relief.  Even the napkins.  Have you ever examined a paper napkin in very bright light? It’s like looking down from orbit at a metropolis designed by cubists.

We went from there to my birthday dinner at a modest Italian restaurant where the food is inexpensive, simple, and of exquisite flavor. Italian is spoken on the premises.  It’s a wonder of the world, or at least of mine.  Rhumba and I clinked glasses  and grasped each other’s pinkies, which is our way of saying “I love you” without actually speaking.

And now I’m writing this at 10:30 at night in my environmentally-friendly chiropractor-approved leather easy chair. Time to feed the cats, go to bed, and get ready for a day in the office earning more money for cat food.

That’s my day.  That’s life.  There are pros and cons but: all in all, a good thing to have had sixty years of.  I’ve told the universe that I plan on having more years, thank you.  It dare not disobey.

And life goes on.  Good.

I learned to walk long before I learned to drive, but driving taught me how to move with the herd: When to go. When to yield. How to signal your intent.  How to pass another car. And above all, the importance of Keeping Right.

Forty-odd years of this, and now I walk like a car.  Others don’t. But I seem to have internalized the rules.

I proceed in a straight line.  I stop for cross traffic. I keep right.  I move out smoothly and silently on rubber-soled shoes. In an office building, at the intersection of two corridors, you won’t heard me coming.  If you turn left and cut the corner close — if you don’t keep right — you’ll come face to face with six feet of swarthy Iberian, moving at speed.  People have screamed.

Screams get my attention.  Otherwise, I’m not present.  My mind’s off in la-la land somewhere while my body shifts for itself with the rules from the DMV handbook.  It’s that, or walk into walls.

The conscious mind, I’ve learned, is the self-important CEO who thinks that he runs the company single-handedly.  He doesn’t. It’s the flunkies in the back office who write the budget, upgrade the servers, book the AR and even choose new carpet colors.  All that the conscious mind does is sign off.

I do so many things without thinking.  I walk into a room with an envelope in my hand; my wife asks my assistance. I go to her, ready for a task that requires both hands. The conscious mind is already thinking of Wife, so the eye and hand and a bundle of rogue neurons back beyond my music center work together collaborate to put the envelope down on some safe surface.

Later, I will wonder where I left the envelope. And I will have no clue.  Because “I” didn’t leave the envelope anywhere.  The back office took care of it without me.  The back office thinks on its own.

I call it the back office, but frankly, I’m not quite sure who or what’s  in here with me.  All I know is, one or more semi-independent operators handle a lot of the little actions and decisions, and none of them are “me.” Whatever “me” is.  But they’re helpful: I even trained the back office to count reps for me while I’m on the rowing machine.  It’s way more accurate than I am.

All in all, I’m grateful. The back office does the little things for me, and I get to stride along and think great thoughts.  Or, think no thoughts at all.

And walk like a car.

Step into this cafe and think: “Mediterranean:” bright colors and tropical plants greet you.  Ceiling fans revolve briskly.  Almost-impressive paintings of flowers and women and tile-roofed cities hang on the walls.

Now listen to the music, and think, “Old.” Because it’s jazz.

In these parts, restaurants whose patrons trend older and affluent will play jazz on the sound system.  It’s relaxing; it’s inoffensive.  It’s hip,  or it was in 1965.  If you’re over 70, you remember jazz clubs and intense young people listening to multi-ethnic combos in hip clubs in North Beach, the Village, Chicago, LA.

Maybe you were one of those kids. And jazz is still hip, to you. In pop culture, though, jazz died a long time ago. Rock displaced it in the hearts of the young, and only dedicated aficionados and musicians and academics keep it going.  Anymore, the best jazz station online is out of Switzerland.

And you walk to your table past all sorts of people who are there to chatter over eggs or ponder the ultimate and the New York Times with a Belgian waffle and a cup of Smooth French.  All sorts, but trending old, because the olders are retired and free and can afford it.  This town ain’t poor.

And the jazz plays and soothes the patrons with Old Cool while the waiters criss-cross the floor.  This day our waiter is a slender young man of expressive smiles and graceful hand movements.  As always, he treats Rhumba and me like fragile grandparents needing care and guidance; and as always, we are amused.  He tries too hard. We like him for that.

“I saw you on the street over the weekend,” he called chattily.  “I almost waved, but you were so far away and I was with my” — quarter-second pause — “friend.”  He named a street.

“Yes, we were on our way to have some hot chocolate over at Maison Peut-Etre,” Rhumba said.

“Oh, my girlfriend and I were on our way to the movies. Sorry we had to be in a hurry.” And he bustled off with our orders.

I looked at Rhumba.  “He doesn’t have a girlfriend, does he?”

“Nope.”

Rhumba and I lived in San Francisco in the ’70s and ’80s. If gay-dar was a physical device, ours came from Raytheon. False negatives? On occasion.  But never a false positive.

Gays have made so much progress toward equal rights; you’d think the cause was won.  But is it won in every heart, even in this West Coast college town? So many of our waiter’s customers are older; and 50 years ago, before the university came here, this was John Birch territory.  Those people didn’t leave.  And they eat breakfast, too.

He’s a waiter.  He lives and dies on tips, and so he must not offend.  Not anyone. Especially in this most expensive town where, I know, he lives in a tiny, airless room whose only window opens onto an air shaft. It’s all that he can afford.

Sadly, jazz isn’t the only remnant kept alive by older folks, and some young ones as well.  I’m sure that most of his customers wouldn’t care if he was completely himself, but his livelihood rides on everyone liking him.

The war has been won, but the battles go on.  It’s not supposed to be that way, but it too often is.  Especially when you are paid at the customer’s whim.  God, I hate tipping.  Just offer everyone a fair wage for a job well done.  Please.

In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find a tasteful gay-friendly lapel button to wear for our waiter’s benefit.  If he needs to be sure who his friends are, what can a friend do but tell him that he can afford to be himself?

It looks like mud.  No child would ever drink it. It takes off the top of your head. And I think I’m love.

This year a gourmet hot chocolate shop opened in a hip but ramshackle space a couple of blocks from our house, and Rhumba and I have been in there every two or three days ever since.  I might as well just sign over a paycheck every so often.

The staff prepares chocolate in all imaginable liquid forms: “regular” hot chocolate, if you call varieties like “Himalayan Pink Salt” and “Venezuelan Cumboto” regular.  There is “brewed chocolate,” brewed from roasted, ground cacao beans in a French press.  It’s like tea, yet unlike any other tea.  They make smoothies from the sweet pulp of the cacao pod that surrounds the cacao beans themselves.

And as you climb the step-pyramid of chocolate preparations, it just gets weirder.  Above lies no happy, friendly American-style chocolate.  Above lies the fiercer sort, resembling the xocholatl that the Mayans invented and the Aztecs prized.  Men in feathered headdresses peer down from on high.

Next come the Euro-style sipping chocolates, 70 percent pure, very thick, and served in an earthenware cup.  The taste can be intense; especially when made with water, not milk: the Mesoamerican way.  If the guys behind the counter like you, they’ll make it even thicker than usual so that a spoon, if stood vertically in the mixture, remains erect when you remove your hand.  The sight has drawn gasps from women of mature years.

It’s rich. It’s strong. It’s somewhat sweet, but the bitter edge of pure chocolate shines through.

And it’s psychoactive.  One cup messes with your head, but just slightly.  You’re alert, relaxed, a slight bit happy.

Drink more than a cup, however, and the priests in feathers begin chanting prayers to Quetzalcoatl.  You will feel FINE. Emphatically FINE.  Your mind will race.  You’ll feel creative. You’ll stay up until one in the morning on a school night, doing productive things.  You will sleep soundly and dream of dead relatives or imaginary countries. I think they’re imaginary.

You will wake up at 5:30 in the morning, feeling FINE.  You’ll work a full day, productively, until you start to fade around six in the evening.  At which point you may decide to have another cup of sipping chocolate.  And once again, you’ll feel FINE.
The cacao tree’s scientific designation is theobroma cacao: literally, food of the gods.  Chocolate is divine, and always has been. Historians say that the Aztec emperor Monteczuma II drank 50 cups of xocholatl a day.  I wonder if his feet even touched the ground.

And that’s why Rhumba and I don’t get sipping chocolate every day.  It could easily become of our basic food groups… and lead us down odd paths.

Because beyond sipping chocolate lies one more flight of stone steps. It leads to the very top of the pyramid where the priests dance and remonstrate with the heavens:  the 100-percent pure Venezuelan Cumboto.  The 100-percent contains no sweetener of any kind; they grind it with stones for 50 hours to reduce the bitterness.

Then it is mixed, caked, baked and ground until thick as mud and red as blood, for clean-cut young men to serve to you in a special black cup.  The very finest chocolate is red.

The hundred-percent is strong and bitter, without the faintest hint of sweet. Many wouldn’t care it.  But one cup of the hundred percent takes you far, far beyond FINE.  It will make you drunk everywhere save your head.  Your muscles loosen; the skin crawls on the top of your skull. You have the energy for anything that you want to do, and the will to do it. I’ll be sixty in a couple of months; the 100 percent makes me feel like a somewhat creaky 25-year-old.

I had a cup one Saturday after breakfast.  I slogged through six hours worth of household chores and business without eating, then went to the gym and pushed twice as much iron as usual. I walked out the door feeling strong and energetic, went home and had dinner.  Lay down for a moment, and the next thing I knew it was three hours later.  I got on the computer and wrote until one in the morning.  The next day was almost as good.

It’s little-known, but the Aztecs gave their warriors xocholatl before battle so that they could fight all day without even stopping for food. The hundred percent would do the job. Believe me. I could get to like this stuff too much.  I limit myself to one a week.

And who are these people who brought Mesoamerican war beverages to a seaside college town?  A couple of youngish brothers with some ideas and serious chocolate mojo, but no money.  Creative guys, trying to make a start before too much of their youth slips away. And there was a Kickstarter campaign and they carved a little space out of a shadowy old restaurant called Maison Peut-etre and started serving hot chocolate and bottling their mixes for the gift shop trade.

It’s a dream.  Maison Peut-etre overflows with them.  The Maison is a pop-up venue: open several nights a week but with a different chef and staff and menu each night.  All the chefs dream running restaurants but don’t have the money —  just dreams.  At Maison Peut-etre, everybody dreams: and works their butts off for the glory and word of mouth that can make dreams real.  It’s a hard world to make a start in with nothing but sweat, ideas and a few friends who work cheap.

The chocolate shop staff is of this sort: no sullen teenagers here, no college town slackers.  Instead, energetic, handsome, post-college young men from the liberal arts, working two or three part-time jobs to make ends meet in a world that does not value their educations.  They’re friendly and forthright, and several cups of war chocolate a day no doubt helps with that.  They pick up extra jobs and gigs wherever they can, at the pop-up operations and beyond.

And while the young men maintain headway in life, there’s no good course ahead. No dreams have yet come true in Maison Peut-etre.

We spotted one of the guys walking to work juggling full-sized Indian clubs.  “You’re a man of many talents,” I called.  “No, I’m a man with a lot of free time.” One of his seasonal gigs was coming to an end.

They leave for months-long road trips in elderly cars, go back east to visit relatives, or just disappear for a while.  But the young men always come back, and serve us chocolate.  They have no better place to be. Maybe they’ll go back to college, they tell me. Maybe not.

Underneath the smiles and self-assurance, sometimes, cynicism and sadness breaks through.  “All my friends are depressed,” one of them told me. As was he, behind his big, white smile. His eyes radiated stress, and yet he was considering a degree in counseling to, he said, help others.  I told him to take care of his own emotional needs first and foremost, or he’d have nothing to offer anyone else.  Now he treats me like some kind of sage.

Except for the brothers who own the chocolate shop, who are a decade older, the young men are as apolitical as can be.  They know little or nothing.  Sometimes I wear my “Bernie 2016” shirt  when I stop in, and they say that they want to ask about Sander’s positions sometimes. It hasn’t happened yet.

It’s like watching water go stagnant behind a dam.  It wants to move, it wants to do. But immutable economic and political forces block the way ahead.  Seemingly immutable. But always political.

An entire generation, except for the well-funded or fortunate, has been told that it’s  unnecessary except in its ability to consume.  Struggle as they might — and I see them — I wonder if they’re beginning to believe it.  As the young opt out, past generations and ancient oligarchies maintain their grip on America. Don’t tell me that’s not by design.

Yet I see these bright young men — and women — and can’t but think that they will prevail.  They’re so capable. America will need them someday; heck, it needs them now.  It just doesn’t want to pay for them.  I’m an old guy who gets jazzed on chocolate and feels young for a few hours.  But they really do have the power of youth and the power to do.  I don’t like seeing it fizz away serving me Aztec chocolate drinks.

The Aztecs, in fact, had a world-view that was pertinent to all this.  They believed that cosmic disaster was eternally imminent, to be kept at bay only by rigor, devotion, and sacrifice.  The Aztecs had the bravery and guts to drive Cortez the invader and his guns and horses and steel out the gates of Tenochtitlan.  And yet later were brought low in large part by the smallpox that the Spanish had brought.  So perhaps the Aztecs had a point about the nature of the universe.

And, from the grave, they may still have one.  We face a dozen potential Cortezes — runaway climate change, drought, famine, war, plague, mass migrations, and ignorance.  Always ignorance. Shall we throw away the generation that will fight them for us, and collapse as a failed civilization?  Or feed them spiritual chocolate — which is nothing more or less than the food of the gods — and unleash  them to drive off the dangers that we ourselves have let inside the gates?

The choice is ours.  I wonder if, right now, the Aztecs would think us mad

July 3 was a national holiday, and a Friday. We’re a tourist town here, and a college town as well.  So a lot of people were out and about that night.  Not that Friday night is ever dull here.

Rhumba and I don’t travel much, but life in Santa Cruz provides experiences that some people go to Bali for.  We always pack cameras to record what we see. Rhumba’s quite the quick hand with a pocket cam. She takes photos to draw from, and also for the hell of it.  I’m also  big on the hell of it.

That night, Rhumba and I went down to the city museum. On the first Friday of every month, the museum functions as a large, semi-educational (and free) nightclub.

Well-aged surf rockers performed in the twilight for a more-or-less elderly crowd of groupies and surfers and local culturati outside the museum. You’re never too old to relive your youth. In fact, it gets easier.  Down in front!

The concert celebrated the museum’s new exhibit: the very first two surfboards built and surfed upon in America — in fact, in Santa Cruz by visiting Hawaiian princes in 1885.  It’s a distinction of some sort, if your town is full of surfers.  The surfboards were ceremonially ferried to town by a convoy of vintage surf woodies.

Rhumba’s camera snapped away at the geriatrically gyrating crowd, but I was drawn down the street by the thump of drums and the jangle of bells.  It sounded like.. Krishnas.

It was indeed Krishnas, dancing and drumming and singing and either having a fine time or simulating one very well.  They have a temple up in the hills.

And in no time at all, they were engaged by an inquisitive squad of sub-16 beach babes. The babes immediately got into the spirit of the thing.  Or as far in, at least, as they could without spilling their softie ice cream.

And the sub-16 beach babes and the Krishnas and the surrounding crowd fell to dancing together.

Before long they were joined by a hairy six-foot unicorn in a tartan kilt and his friend the pagan goat god (not shown).  The sub-sixteen beach babes dropped everything: time for a selfie!

It’s not every day that you get a selfie with a unicorn, much less one with a light-up horn. Here’s one of those questions: can only virgins take unicorn selfies?

And then the giant furry animals and the sub-18 beach babes and the Krishnas and anyone else who wandered by, danced and drummed far into the night.  Or at least until I lost the light and rejoined Rhumba at at the seasoned citizens’ surf party.

So: how are things in your town?

I have decided to back Bernie Sanders for president. I got my Bernie 2016 t-shirt in the mail a week or two back. It took long enough.  But it’s a lovely shirt: well-cut, union-made, and all.

It seemed too good not to share.

I’ve seen no visible sign of an Elect Bernie movement here in Santa Cruz — not even a bumper sticker. So  last weekend I put on the shirt and hiked back and forth through downtown.

This is a well-to-do, progressive college town,  hardwired into national Democratic politics. The local heavyweights all schmoozed with the Clintons and seem committed to them. Hilary Clinton is electable, the common wisdom goes.  She’s the smart choice. Progressives and leftists, fall in line with the safe establishment candidate and be happy for what you get.  You’ll get something. It may even be meaningful.  I say, “may.”

But there are people around here who, like me, appreciate Sanders and his energetic, activist, no-generalities approach to America’s problems.  Yet they’ve been quiet. They don’t have a voice of their own.  Perhaps they’re unsure whether many others feel as they do. We talk of individualism, Americans, do.  But human beings run in packs, in tribes.

So I decided to fly the flag. I put on the shirt and, for an afternoon, became the flag. And I walked myself up and down Pacific Avenue.

I said nothing, didn’t engage. But people engaged with me.

“Bernie!” said the retail clerk trundling goods onto the sidewalk. He threw a thumbs-up.

“Bernie!” barked the fat man in Bermuda shorts.

“Berrrrr-neeeee,” a woman sang out as we passed on the sideway.

“I like your shirt,” a young woman called from her car.

“I like your shirt,” a father said as he straightened the clothing on his disheveled tot.

“I like your shirt,” said the cost-conscious fashionista in the thrift store.

“I like your shirt,” said the hipster fledgling businessman from the counter of his new shop. “Do you think they have key chains, too?”

“Bernie, phhhtt!” spat a street musician. We know each other: a committed Republican and a Portuguese-American like me. If a Portuguese doesn’t get in your face, it means he doesn’t like you.

Most people said nothing, but I saw the eyes of oncomers shift down to my shirt, felt  eyetracks zip across my chest . Calculations were taking place behind blank faces: “perhaps,” the neurons whispered to one another, “Bernie’s not just a media construct…”

I’d say there are a lot of people out there who’d like to see the flag flown, and even more who need to see the flag flown.  And a t-shirt flies higher than a bumper sticker. If you are a Bernie supporter, and you’re comfortable with the idea, put on the t-shirt. Fly the flag. Become the message.

And the people you pass will see it with their own eyes, and begin to believe that it’s real. It’s a place to start, before the real campaigning begins.