The age of prophets never ends. There are always prophets. When times are good, they haunt bookstores and coffee houses and publish small-press books that no one’s ready to read. Because when times are good, nobody’s looking for fresh answers. They think they’ve got life all figured out.

But in bad times people do want new answers, and prophets heat up. Their small-press books get good reviews in the thoughtful magazines — in the back pages, but nevertheless. They make short appearances on public television, after 10 pm. The Utne Reader reprints one or two of their essays. Videotapes of their lectures show up on YouTube.

And they make speaking tours. Which is why Rhumba and I were listening to a slender, intense man talk about the union of cosmic consciousness, love, and economic reform.

And he made it work. Money separates us, we were told, because it makes interactions distant and impersonal and even abusive. How much better to have a community of people who you serve, and who serve you. Not for personal gain, but because it’s what’s right. And what we’re built for.

The sound system, sadly, wasn’t built well at all. Rhumba’s hearing lacks clarity; she couldn’t understand the prophet. “I’m going to go buy some shoes,” she whispered. Her completely recyclable dress sandals had, sadly, begun to biodegrade. We were downtown; five shoes stores lay in a two-block radius. This town just loves shoes.

We smacked lips, and off she went. From his seat on the floor, a dreadlocked neo-hippie in a basket hat asked with his eyes, “Is that seat free?” I motioned him into it.

The place was packed. Santa Cruz is a college town, and politically aware. Its citizens believe, many of them, that the current economy rewards and celebrates the worst instincts in mankind – and that civilization suffers for it.

Up on stage, the prophet gathered steam. Our economy should be an endless giving of gifts to one another,he said. We all feel that something is missing in society, and that is the idea that community, and a just economy, are one. Our wealth should not be what we own, but in the talents and resources of the community of which we are a part.

“But it’s a difficult leap to make, isn’t it?” he asked. “To give up the idea of absolute ownership and cast your fate into the hands of others?” He knew his audience: mostly over-50, educated, economically comfortable. A few old and young hippies could be seen, but in the main there were grizzled academics, tanned matrons wearing organic cottons, and alert seniors with snowy hair. Call it “1969” – with the original cast.

Keeping with his own credo, the prophet had charged no admission, taken no fee. But donations were welcome to offset the expense of bringing him from the East Coast. At the door, a basket literally overflowed with twenty-dollar bills, and higher.

I wanted to hear the prophet’s specific prescriptions for a new economy, but it was not to be. Instead, local speakers mounted the stage to describe their own programs to promote community-building and resource-sharing.

There would be a full panel discussion at the end, but we were two hours in; and I have a short attention span. I became restless.

And I did have a complaint, one i have of many well-meaning college-town movements; the community-building efforts all sought to build communities among well-educated, well-heeled white people. I know they don’t intend to stop there, among their own; but so often, it seems like they do.

Rhumba reappeared. The neo-hippieDownt gave up his seat without a word.

“Didn’t you get new sandals?’ I whispered.

“I’m wearing them,” she said. They looked about like her old sandals; but then, sandals generally do.

“What happened to the old ones?”

“I told the manager I didn’t want them,” she said in my ear. “I asked if he’d recycle them. But he said that when people leave their old shoes, he just puts them outside the front door at closing time. They’re always gone the next morning. People need them. So that’s what’ll happen.”

We stayed a little longer, then I motioned to Rhumba that I’d had enough. “Wanna go?” I asked softly? She nodded.

We silently made our way out the door. And I did wonder and hope, as we left, that a utopian world of tight-knit gift-giving communities will have enough heart to give gifts to strangers.

If you’ve read any pulp science fiction and fantasy — and I have, though not for decades — you know all about the Dark Empire.

The Dark Empire is that distant but mighty star empire which swoops down on the peaceful settlers of the planet Zipperdork 3 and suborns them to its plans for galaxy-wide conquest.

Or, in heroic fantasies, the Dark Empire inhabits the chaotic land of Dystopia from which it dispatches hordes of spell-flinging calvary to overrun the peaceful kingdom of Dragonsbane and enslave the heir to the throne inside a tower well secured by charms, demons, and bureaucrats.

The variations are endless. What’s inevitable, though it may take several thousand pages, is that a few plucky starship captains will discover the lost super weapons of the ancient Vleen race and char-broil the empire’s neutronium-plated space fleet.

Or, a ragged slave boy will find the magic sword Phallusia in the lost city of Oxnard and fulfill an ancient prophecy by slicing the Dark Empire’s calvary into flank steaks. And acquire  the throne of Dragonsbane in the meantime, plus an interesting scar.

Whatever. If you’ve seen a Star Wars movie, or a Lord of the Rings flick, you’ve pretty much got it.

The thing is, the thing that really bothers me, is that nobody ever fills in the back-story for the Dark Empire.

Sure, the Dark Empire can field fleets of star destroyers and hordes of well-equipped warriors. But who builds the starships? Who joins the army? Where did these people go to school? Who raises the food? You can’t conquer the galaxy, or even the trackless wastes of Dragsonbane, without a complete civilization to support you.

So, somewhere there must be a Dark Empire homeland. And no doubt you will find there the Dark Empire Missiles and Space Corporation, the First Bank of the Dark Empire, the Dark Empire Unified School District, Dark Empire Mall, and the Dark Empire Parks and Recreation Ministry. There are festivals and patriotic holidays, a Dark Empire Football League, and certified public accountants.

And millions of people who lead normal lives, go to work every day, raise children, and wave the flag. It doesn’t take much to keep them in line; the Dark Emperor just need to use the right words:

The emperor doesn’t “invade,” he “defends the Dark Empire’s strategic interests.” He doesn’t “blackmail” the tiny Kingdom of Twee into giving him their gold and treasure, he “welcomes them into the galactic economy.” It goes without saying that the Dark Empire troops never rape, torture, or pillage. But if someone does say it, the Dark Emperor talks solemnly about “human rights violations,” and finds a low-ranking scapegoat.

And so the Dark Empire’s citizens are reassured and go back to sleep, and to their jobs making Nova Bombs or poisoned daggers for the Dark Empire’s fighting men.

And that’s why, from now on, I will refer to the United States’ armed Predator and Reaper drones as “flying robot assassins.” Which is, up till now, a term used only in the Middle East.

And that’s understandable. The news from Yemen this past week was all about a dozen or more U.S. drone attacks; each one sought out and killed specific people who were terrorist suspects. Plus a fair number of innocent bystanders, but only a few independent Yemeni news sources mention that.

So what’s the different between a drone and a flying robot assassin? Not much; they’re both robots, they both fly, and they both seek out and kill particular people who may or may not be engaged in combat. Which is the definition of assassination.

Just, the word drone is neutral, safe, unexciting. If President Obama talks casually about the need for flying robot assassins to protect U.S. interests abroad — questions will be asked. Those words are dangerous. People might begin to wonder why the world’s leading democracy, its beacon of freedom, needs an ever-growing force of flying robot assassins.

The famous cynic George Orwell wrote that a nation’s gone completely corrupt when nobody dares call anything by its real name. Bribes become “campaign contributions.” Domestic spying is called “anti-terrorist activity.” And flying robot assassins are just, you know, unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones.

Inside the Armed Services, of course, they don’t mince words. The armed drones have model names like “Predator” and “Reaper,” and the military glories in the bloody imagery. Here’s a t-shirt that the Air Force gives to a particular flight of recruits upon passing basic training (321st Training Squadron, Flight 532,”The Predators,” out of Lackland AFB in San Antonio):

For those of you who don’t know me well: I collect t-shirts of significance that show up in local thrift shops. Whatever America does in the world, wherever, it leaves behind a trail of t-shirts. Here is a tee that is all about flying robot assassins, even if it’s not so obvious.

The Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa is the future of anti-terrorism in the Middle East. In large part, it’s also a grim base and airfield called Camp Lemonnier in the baking-hot desert nation of Djibouti, on the Gulf of Aden. Djibouti’s natural resources consist of dirt, rock, trash, lizards, camels, and a free trade zone. It is perhaps the poorest nation you’ve never heard of. Desperately poor.

And thus Djibouti was happy to let the U.S. do anything it wanted with Camp Lemonnier, a derelict French Foreign Legion base. Conveniently located near Yemen, Somalia and the underbelly of the Middle East.

Camp Lemonnier is a pit: hot, dry, dusty, drab, desolate. Mind you, it’s a pit with a giant weight room and fitness center. And the Bob Hope Chow Hall where, on Thanksgiving, low-paid Filipino contract workers dress up as Indians and Pilgrims to serve turkey, steak, and crab to beefy men and women in green uniforms.

There’s even a Thanksgiving parade, though I don’t think the real Mayflower ever flew the skull and crossbones.

And the Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) office does what it can, like arranging for traveling rock bands from Northern Iowa (“The Blue Island Tribe”) to play a Christmas Eve gig on the big stage, or putting on volleyball tournaments with free t-shirts – one of which ended up in Santa Cruz.  I wonder whether Camp Lemonnier has on-base silk-screen capability or had to have the tees flown in. And there’s a coffee house, the Green Bean, with two locations and WiFi.

Camp Lemonnier is also home to 400 to 800 Navy Seals, Army Delta Force special ops troops, and intelligence agents; five F-15 fighter-bombers; several spy planes; and a goodly flock of flying robot assassins. I can find very few pictures of all that, though MWR let the Blue Island Tribe play with grenade launchers and hang out in the spy planes.

So when anyone judged to be a terrorist or sympathizer dies in Yemen or Somalia or anywhere nearby, their cause of death likely flew in from Camp Lemmonier. From a flying robot assassin, or from real live assassins working beyond the bounds of law and constitution as we know it. But who believe, or at least are told, that they’re defending their country from terrorism. And they’re going to keep doing it for years to come; Washington is spending over a billion to make Camp Lemonnier a permanent base. The war on terrorism will never end.

And there’s the ghost of George Orwell in the back of the room, waving a finger in the air: if we can’t call things by their real name anymore, what’s the real name of terrorism?

I hate to tell you: it’s “resistance.” Resistance by people who aren’t really awfully wonderful in any way, shape or form. Resistance led, often, by fanatical, hateful religious zealots. But zealots with one valid point: that U.S. and the West have been trampling the region’s sovereignty for the last 70 years in the name of oil and big corporate interests. (Name one other reason we’d care so much about the Middle East.) And they’d like us to leave.

They’ve chosen terror as their weapon, because it’s what you can use when the other guy has all the guns and bombs and planes and body armor. And when your anger and hatred, perhaps, has grown past the edge of madness. So you try to break the will of the enemy nation, because you can’t break their troops. Ramming airliners into the World Trade Center is one way to do that. Especially when some people interpret “World Trade” as a code name for the Dark Empire.

The wiggly thing about a Dark Empire is that it never looks dark from the inside. It can’t, or its own people would begin to disavow it. So the gentle control words are used: “defense against terrorism,” “support our troops,” “spreading democracy.”

And since it’s actually doing none of those things in recent years, from the outside our Dark Empire just seems darker and darker. As it fights not the War on Terror, but the War on Resistance: resistance to a world-girdling oligarchy of power, money, and greed that is based right here in America.

Might be a hell of a pulp novel in it, eventually. Though maybe not one you’d want to be a character in.

As if you had a choice.

The time is 7:05 am. It is a weekday. And from the big table by the front door, we watch the West Side of Santa Cruz drive up for its coffee and bagels.

Outside, an old pickup on giant tires parks jerks to a halt. A weather-beaten, thirtyish man emerges: in hoodie, board shorts and work boots. Back in the cab, the Customary Dog sits erect on the bench seat.

The hoodie man charges into the coffee house and draws an extra-large house brew from the spigot by the register. The word CONTRACTOR is not written across his chest in 100-point type. But it ought to be.

This coffee house is an odd duck, at least at 7 in the morning. Latte orders, cappuccinos: they’re few and far between. It’s a workingman’s joint here and now, and most everybody heads for the giant thermos of pre-brewed coffee. Or, if they’re fancy, to the brew bar where the barista has set up a drip filter and cup for them. She knows her regulars, and preps their brews-of-choice as soon as she sees their cars pull up.

A fat university cop sits at the front table, speaking in low tones to lean, dried-out men with the look of retirees. In the background a worn young woman hovers near the ATM machine. Her tight jeans and low-cut blouse show too much — joylessly, with the feel of someone whose night furnished not enough rest and whose day is an ordeal stretching ahead.

A hulking civil servant stalks past with hollow eyes, shirt half-out of his slacks. We know each other, but for him it’s too early for more conversation than the flick of one eye. I know what his job is like, and his health. I understand.

At two tables near the back, indifferently-dressed women peer at old laptops – apparently here to use the free WiFi on their way to whatever job keeps body and soul together. There is little conversation of any kind; not face-to-face or even on a cell. The mechanical sounds of fans, blowers, steamers and compressors dominate the room. They fracture and neutralize the light jazz drizzling from wall speakers.

More trucks pull up, some with more dogs. More men emerge, in hoodies and boots. Hoodie men have come to our house lately, to fit it for new siding and trim the trees, and paint. I groan when I write the checks, but their hourly pay is little enough for physically demanding work where injury’s a risk and health insurance isn’t so common. The man who trimmed our trees walked with a limp; earlier this year, a chain saw caught him across one thigh.

And yet “the market” – our new god – tells us that these people are less valuable and more dispensable than, say, an advertising executive.  For no reason that would make sense in a sane world.

It is not just coffee that draws the crowds here, but the bagels as well. Bagels of a dozen flavors, split and toasted, fresh from the bakery: with cream cheese, with hummus, with eggs, with bacon, with tomato and onion, or any combination thereof. Carbs, a little fat and protein, a vitamin or two, and a big jolt of caffeine with milk and sugar: it’s the low-priced fuel that launches devalued people into another day in the salt mines.

The coffee house staff works like a machine: serious young women in constant motion. Orders in, orders out, one after another, with rarely a bobble or wasted movement. The cashier passes the coffee order to the barista at her left hand, who probably has already started it. The bagel order, written on a yellow-sticky note, she slaps on the bagel prep station behind her.

The bagel cook endlessly slices, toasts, spreads, fries, and assembles, stopping only to slide the finished sandwiches across the counter in flat black baskets and call out the orders in a steely voice: garlic bagel with easy cream cheese; onion bagel with egg; whole-wheat bagel with hummus and tomato. On and on. If we are each of us in this place the hero of our own comic book, facing villains with names like PsychoBoss or Captain Overwork or Doctor Poverty, then these bagels are the Breakfasts of Champions. And they will suffice for another morning.

And then they are eaten: some at the few tables, in silence. Others, God knows where: their owners will take them “to go” and run out the door with a wrapped bagel in one hand and a paper coffee cup in the other. Will they eat it one-handed, behind the wheel? Devour it at their desk, at the job site, or in the teacher’s lounge in the minute or two before the work day begins? The answer to these questions, you and I will never know. But we can surmise.

An hour or two later, this coffee house will be a different place: fewer customers, none of them in much of a hurry to be anywhere. “The market” looks more kindly upon them – or perhaps upon their parents. They’ll order more coffee drinks and sweet pastry. They’ll come with friends, and chat. Some will establish themselves at a table and spend two or three hours attempting the Great American novel, or at least the Great American Term Paper. Laptops will stream YouTube videos; young men in horn-rimmed glasses and funny hats will laugh over-loudly. This is what we expect of coffee houses.

But this is not all that they are. Nor everyone who uses them.

So ends another dispatch from the West Side of Santa Cruz, where some people live the good life all day long. And a whole lot of others are just getting by.

Almost everywhere in the world, the locals make beer. They may not drink much beer, but they make it.

They make it for your sake: you, the visitor: a nice, cold bottle of hops-and-barley lager beer, just like the beer you drink at home. They’ll even sell you a t-shirt with the beer’s name on it. Everywhere.

Because when European civilization left home to see the world, it traveled with a bottle of beer in its hand: Usually a lager, a light beer; the new lands were warmer than Northern Europe. Most places are.

Grant you, most peoples of the world invented beer on their own. Be you Asian or African or European: you put whatever spare carbs you have in a pot, add water, and wait. When the waiting’s over, you all get drunk and discuss the world’s problems. Welcome to civilization.

But the Euros turned up their noses at beer made from corn, or potatoes, or rice or bananas. Real beer, to them, came from barley and hops. So wherever they settled, or conquered, or at least stopped for awhile to make money, they planted barley and built breweries.

Or they got a German to build one for them. And if no Germans could be found, Dutchmen would do in a pinch. Mexico, Central America, Africa, the U.S., Asia, everywhere. All beer in Japan traces back to one beer hall built there by Dutch traders in 17th century – a rest stop for the sailors on Dutch cargo ships.

A couple of centuries later, the Thais founded their first brewery because their many foreign visitors drank it, and the upper classes had also adopted it. So why not make their own beer instead of importing it from Japan? There were, of course, Germans on hand to help set things up. They just can’t restrain themselves.

Years ago I visited Thailand and had my first encounter with “locals” beer abroad. The beer of choice is Singha: decent, but not great.

But I do remember drinking Singha on the “rapid train” out of Bangkok one hot summer night; speed is relative, and the “rapid train” made all of about 30 miles per hour. And that was fine, because it meant we could slide the big coach windows wide open to let in the evening breeze. Stewards in white shirts and black ties walked the aisle with buckets of iced Singha for your pleasure. We swigged beer luxuriantly and watched the sun go down over the rice paddies as the farmers did some damned with water buffaloes. There may have been an elephant. I traded toasts with German tourists – of course. Good times.

And yet many Thais didn’t drink Singha. Beer is expensive there; barley and hops aren’t widely grown. But rice is, and sugar. For the price of one bottle of Singha, you could buy enough local rice whiskey to put two or three people on the ground. This whiskey was called Mekong: I remember it well, even though i don’t want to. Mixing Mekong and Pepsi is the act of desperate men, and in the end, it doesn’t even help.

And yet Mekong was the low-price leader in liquor, and thus popular. More popular than Singha, which in the eyes of many Thais was largely drunk by fat European sex tourists and therefore, the logic went, must be what made them fat.

Years later I went to Costa Rica, another tropic vacation spot for first-world tourists. Costa Rica has no indigenous beer. But European settlers eventually built breweries there. A guy named Juan Traute – German descent, you think? – founded one a century ago that changed hands a few times and eventually developed Imperial, Costa Rica’s premier brew. There’s a hell of a t-shirt, too: the Vaterland practically oozes from Imperial’s eagle logo. Which was designed by a Costa Rican advertising man named – Hangen. I wear this shirt around town, and often.

The average Costa Rican does drink beer, but there are cheaper options that they drink more often. Like Cacique – a sugar-cane-based hard liquor that buzzes your brain at minimum cost. It has almost the strength of vodka, and yet the supermarkets offer it in four-packs. Cacique (Ka-SHE-Kay) doesn’t taste like much of anything, so you can mix it with everything. And people do.

Cacique, not beer, is the Costa Rican national drink: officially, at that. The government makes it at the National Liquor Factory. And they seem to do a good job. If the U.S. had a National Liquor Factory, it would no doubt be run by defense contractors, and the product would spontaneously combust in your liquor cabinet if not stored at precisely 64 degrees fahrenheit.

Thus recurs a pattern that repeats in Thailand, Costa Rica, China, and elsewhere: first come the European settlers and traders, and then comes the European-style beer. But the beer is expensive, so only prosperous locals and foreign visitors drink it often. Everybody else drinks whatever can be made cheaply from local crops: rice wine, rice whiskey, guaro, mescal, pulque, banana beer.

They don’t grow a lot of barley in the Carribean, either. And yet all those island-colonies-turned-nations have breweries; some founded by European colonists, others founded later by businessmen, for the tourist trade. With t-shirts for the tourists who drink the beer. I’ve yet to see a t-shirt for Cacique, or Mekong.

In an odd way, a brewery is a second-world country’s admission ticket to the global economy. For good or ill, the governments are hungry for foreign investment and foreign tourists. The yankees who visit — or farangs, or laowai, or gaijin, or gringos, or Europeans — want their beer, and so you’re either going to import it for them at great cost or start making your own. And don’t forget the t-shirt.

There’s always a German standing by if you need help. And as long as Western Civilization runs on barley beer, you’d better ask him for some.

———————————————–

Before I go, a note about one of those wandering German brewmasters. His name and face adorn a t-shirt that I found at the thrift store :”Master Brewer Karl Strauss,” it says on one side. On the other: “Born in a Brewery.” Both statements are true.

Strauss was born in 1911 at his father’s brewery in Minden, Germany. His family raised him in the trade, and he attended university for all the scientific knowledge of brewing that could be taught. With a master brewer’s certificate in hand, he sought a career at one of Germany’s many world-class breweries.

Unfortunately, it was the 1930s. And it was Germany. And Strauss was Jewish. Under the Nazis, Jews were persecuted, later killed. He couldn’t get work. But he did had relatives in San Francisco, and they sponsored him into the U.S. He came over in ’39; most of his family died later in the concentration camps.

Strauss never made it to San Francisco; he stopped in Milwaukee, America’s capital of beer brewing, and got a job on the bottle-washing line at Pabst Brewing. In twenty years he worked his way up to vice president of production, responsible for every bottle of Pabst sold everywhere. Strauss built breweries and ran them; he reformulated all Pabst’s beers for modern tastes. If you lift a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon today, you’re tasting Karl Strauss’s work.

Karl Strauss was the brew master’s brew master: he won every award that could be won. And when he left Pabst in the ’80s after 24 years at the top, he consulted with the new micro-brewers and brewpubs that were springing up everywhere. He helped them to formulate new beers, and more importantly taught them how to brew with precision — so that every bottle of a particular beer was of consistent taste and quality. He made micro brewing professional.

He was apparently a wonderful guy, too: an enthusiastic, helpful, laughing man with a thick German accent and a ready smile. When a distant cousin in San Diego wrote for advice on setting up the city’s first brewpub, Karl was on his doorstep in no time. And that’s why everybody in San Diego knows Karl Strauss: he did so much to get the company going that his cousin put Karl’s name on the label and made him the brewpub’s official spokesman. I’ve drunk his beer; it’s damned good.

Strauss died at the ripe old age of 94, still brewmaster of the chain of brewpubs that bore his name. About brewing, he told an interviewer, “It’s the only thing I know how to do. But I like doing it.” That’s a recipe for a long, happy life if ever I heard one. Wonder if you can bottle it.

So if you live in the states and enjoy a good micro-brew, lift a glass of the good stuff to the memory of Karl Strauss. He may well have made that glass possible: another wandering German brewmaster, spreading the lifeblood of civilization one stein at a time.

 “When the tree fell in the woods and the lumberjack didn’t hear about it…. whatever.”

 (My manager, making a fine point about project tracking near the end of a long meeting in a hot, poorly-ventilated conference room. )

I’m still here; just taking a break from posting.  I should have said something; the silence worried my friend Forrest enough to call the house.  He and I lost a mutual Internet friend once; and the Internet doesn’t send out death notices. You’re just left to wonder, with rising alarm, why your friend stopped answering email.

Anyway, I told Forrest what had distracted me: a video project.  Video can be tedious and a lot of fun at the same time.  At any rate, it eats afternoons in the blink of an eye.

I had considered studying TV production in college; probably would have made a living at it. But knowing me I’d have spent the 35 years that followed with my eyes glued to an editing console, occasionally wondering why I had no social life.

Word of my video activities pleased Forrest, who was happy to find me “puttering” on an intriguing project. But the “p” word didn’t go down well with me.

No, I told myself, you’re way too young to be “puttering.”    But I looked in the mirror, and it disagreed.

So I have decided that puttering is not an age-based activity, and that the mirror lies.  Such is the intellectual flexibility of twenty-first century man — or at least, this one.

Other operations are ongoing.  After years of procrastination, we hired a contractor to put new siding on our home., and new windows  The house is twenty-two years old. It has withstood time and the elements with some competence; but the original siding was little more than paper mache with attitude. Water had penetrated to the interior plyboard in spots; parts of the trim were rotting. And all the windows on the south wall were in bad shape.

None of the established contractors I called seemed to want the job. So I found an unestablished contractor: Dave.

Dave works so far beneath the radar that he lacks a web page, email or even a land line. But he is legit, and he built a house for my wife’s friend LaVa, who doesn’t suffer fools – or anything else – gladly.  LaVa recommended Dave highly.

And Dave’s been great.  He’s fine with my naive questions and is happy to explain things twice, or even three times. He told me how he would handle the job, answered my concerns, and is doing everything that we agreed on.  Frankly, Dave is happy to do just about anything, whether we agreed on it or not; he’s on time-and-materials, not a fixed bid. Build a pyramid out back? Sure, why not?

I expected to hire a contractor, then sit back and let him do all the running-around. But it was not to be.  You see, Dave is low-overhead. He doesn’t  front the money for the materials and labor.  He didn’t want to spend time pushing the building permit through the much-feared Santa Cruz Planning Department, which he’d never worked with.

So it’s my job to do all that.  I set up an account at the lumber yard, which Dave can draw on for materials.  I dealt with the planning department and got the permits.  I arranged the inspections. And I handle payday: every Friday at noon I drive home, receive time cards from this week’s crew, including Dave, and write out the paychecks on the dining room table. And every day I come home and see how the work has progressed, and I sometimes have questions.

At least I know how much money I’m spending, and how much is left to spend.  Dave promised a good deal, and the numbers say that he’s going to deliver it.  Meanwhile my yard is home to a small, temporary industrial facility of scaffolds, power cords, workbenches, and lumber piles.  There’s even a porta-john.

So I’ve had things on my mind lately.  And, as my boss might say, the tree fell in the woods and you lumberjacks never heard it about so…

Anyway, more stuff in the near future.  Take care, and thanks for checking back.

I have acquired a new look. This “new look” derives from a pair of massive amber wrap-around sunglasses more suited to a dealer in some exotic, high-priced drug made in Pakistan by renegade pharmaceutical laboratories.

And all because we went to the optometrist this weekend.

Once upon a time my eyes, though in need of correction, saw clearly. Examinations were predictable: periodic checkpoints on the gentle, gradual decline of my vision.

But last year my heretofore trustworthy eyes threw a wild party: odd flashes of light, posterior vitreous detachments, sprays of blood bubbles across my field of view like tiny UFOs, floaters as thick as schools of whales. And yes, cataracts are beginning to come on. It was a party all right – the kind that requires a new carpet afterwards, and repair of the holes in the wallboard.

Things have quieted since then. The blood bubbles dissipated; the problem retina calmed down. Occasionally I must clear the whales out of my eyes. But Doctor Young, my Generation-Y optometrist, let me off easy this year: no new developments, no imminent disasters. I’ll need more extensive tests – but next year.

Doctor Young had one other point to make while he had me in the chair: yes, you’re developing caratacts, and someday you’ll need surgery. But why hurry things along? Wear sunglasses outside at all times; protect your eyes from UV; put off the day of reckoning.

I’ve avoided sunglasses: I already have two pair of prescription glasses, and I didn’t want a third. Contact lenses have never been for me. So when the sun is bright, I just squint.

But what the doctor suggests, my wife Rhumba enforces. I had a pair of sunglasses by the end of the day: bulky, non-prescription plastic jobs called fit-overs that “fit over” the prescription glasses that I wear constantly. They’re cheap and easy; amber in color, UV-proof, and polarized.

I now inhabit another planet: a planet with a red sun where colors gleam rich and ruddy and the shadows are black as night, and where every object stands out clearly from every other. It’s like watching a film strip of the “Wonders of Yellowstone” on an old View-Master 3-D viewer. The “real world,” in comparison, seems mushy, washed-out, boring.

So this weekend has been like an exotic vacation in my own town. And wonder of wonders, after a day of wearing the fit-overs outside, the muscles around my eyes began to tingle and relax. I’d been squinting constantly for decades, and hadn’t even realized it.

Moreover, my depth perception improved. I’d lived in a relatively flat world; now it has depth. Each object exists in a plane of its own at a unique distance from my eye.

It’s all about perception. We judge the world as we perceive it. Change the perception: change the world.

While Doctor Young shined lights in my eyes, Rhumba shared the waiting room with a three-year old who’d come to pick up his first pair of eyeglasses

The boy’s father and the optometrist’s technician hovered over him as eyeglasses slid onto his nose for the very first time.

The little boy blinked. Then he looked around the room. Very slowly. He looked at everything. Twice. He left with his father, head swiveling back and forth as if he’d never seen a street or buildings or cars before.

Because he hadn’t. His world of fuzzy shapes and colors had been replace by a crisp, injection-molded universe of incredible detail and complexity.

It had been there all along. All that had changed was his ability to perceive.

We all know of the differences between perception and reality. Every day, salesmen and politicians try to change the way we perceive the world. Unlike the optometrist, they don’t seek to help us find clarity: they merely want us to perceive the world in a way that’s of benefit to them and their friends.

The most arrogant of them boast of their ability to “create realities” on demand, and to convince the rest of us to accept them. They want us to live in a foggy, hazy, near-sighted world of indefinite shapes and colors which they will interpret for us. All can seem well in such a world – until you’re hit by a truck that you didn’t see coming.

I’d love to tell you that the bad optometrists who think they rule us will eventually be overthrown; that justice will be done; that society will become kind; and that we’ll all march off to a better tomorrow. But in the time before all that takes place, if it does, who’s to say that you won’t be hit by an invisible truck?

No eyeglasses can help you. But I hope that you can keep an open and unsettled mind – unsettled in the best sense, as in a willingness to reconsider your assumptions without abandoning your humanity.

And whatever the television tells you is or is not happening – listen for the sound of trucks.

Now available on the other side.

It had been a long Saturday afternoon, a week or two before Christmas at St. Bob the Informal’s Presbymethertarian Church. In a moment of madness, Rhumba had volunteered to help with the annual Christmas pageant, and this was the appointed time for the dress rehearsal.

I will spare you the gory details, but here is a sort of impressionistic word mural of the proceedings:

Half-a-dozen six-year-olds in sheep suits careening up and down the aisle; a sullen, buxom 13-year-old Mary glowering at her diminuitive, eight-year-old Joseph; two giggling Wise Girls who consistently ignore their cues; an overworked choir master who hasn’t read the script yet; little-girl angels twirling in place to the music until they get dizzy and fall over; and St. Bob’s bluesy praise band, The Damascus Road Ramblers, rocking out to “Felice Navidad.”

There. That’s almost as good as being there, isn’t it? Trust me.

It had been a forced march to get everyone to the rehearsal; Presbymethertarians and their kids are as over-scheduled as anybody these days. But the sweetener for the deal had been an offer of free pizza after the work was done, courtesy of the Sunday School budget.

The average seven-year-old will wade through molten lava for a slice of pizza. And the average seven-year-old’s mom will make that extra effort to get him to Sunday School functions if it means she doesn’t have to cook him dinner. And can maybe take care of her own dinner in the bargain. Believe this: It’s food that holds a church together, whatever religion. There’s good reason why the core religious ritual of Christianity is a meal.

So, after running through the program twice, the kids piled into the wardrobe room, handed over their costumes and streamed straight to the social hall where a stack of eight pizza boxes stood ready.

I had been moping around in the hallway while the kids changed clothing. As somebody’s husband, I’d had plenty of gofer jobs to do, but no real responsibility. Which was fine. But as the kids hurtled past, I realized that no adult had yet made it to the social hall. And that 20-plus young children plus eight stacked, boxed, unattended pizzas is an equation for disaster.

I’m slow on the uptake in many ways, but this time my legs made for the social hall at a dead run before my brain even sent the order. I got there just as the first six-year-old started to open the first box.

“I”LL SERVE!” I shouted. “WHO WANTS CHEESE?”

“ME! ME! ME!” There was a forest of hands. Kids are genetically programmed to eat only plain cheese pizza until the age of seven. After which point they might broaden out so far as to eat a slice with pepperoni. Maybe.

I got a couple of boxes open and hurled slices of cheese pizza onto plates for the waiting munchkins. Strangely, the more they ate, the more there seemed to be; the mothers had ordered enough. It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, courtesy of Tony and Alba’s Pizza. Everything was under control.

Then a high little voice piped: “Can I have the table?”

And a sharp-faced little girl asked, “Can I have it?”

“No!” I snapped. And snatched them up. “Who wants pepperoni?”

No, the kids weren’t asking for furniture. The “tables” are white, molded plastic triangles on three legs, perhaps two inches tall. After a cook slides a pizza into a “to go” box, he throws one or two of these things on top of the pie before closing the lid. They prevent the box lid from collapsing on top of the pizza and sticking to the cheese.

And for some reason, if you get a group of kids together for pizza, they’ll compete for the table. If you give it to one, the others will bitch and moan about it being “not fair” ’til the end of the meal. The lucky one will monopolize the table and maybe even tease the rest of them about it. If he’s not the biggest one in the room, somebody will try to take it from him. It’s a mess.

And all for a little piece of plastic that’s not even a real toy. I mean, these kids have toys galore at home, game consoles, light-up sneakers, anything you can think of. But right here, right now, a dinky little plastic table is the center of their desire. Because everybody else wants it, but only one of them can have it. Having it makes them special. And special is superior. Special gets attention. And to kids, attention is power.

The only way around the table dilemma is to give them to everyone, or give them to no one. We had eight pizzas and eight or ten tables, but 25 kids — not good enough. So I kept snatching up the tables and sticking them in my pocket. A no-nonsense Sunday School Mom materialized beside me and began serving from the other boxes. She picked up the tables, too. She knew.

Which is how I ended up with a greasy pocketful of triangular plastic tables. For some weeks they found a home on top of my dresser; the cats liked to push them over the edge and watch them drop. The thrills never stop with these things.

It’s easy to dismiss this whole table-lust phenomenon as childish behavior. But as an observant man once wrote, the thoughts of children are the thoughts of men written in crude, heavy letters. Children don’t have the subtlety of adults, but adults and children all share the same impulses. We all have desires, and, like children, some adults give into theirs recklessly.

A certain number of adults want more than their share of things, just because they want it. Because having it makes them special, superior. And if they can’t get what they want — and if no one’s there to prevent them — they cheat until they do get it. And pretty soon, everybody cheats because there are no rules anymore and they feel they have to cheat just to get anything for themselves at all. It’s as if I’d had 25 tables, one for each kid, but stood by passively while three kids grabbed them all.

It’s all simple schoolyard behavior — when the yard duty isn’t around to keep things straight. The way I see it, the yard duty on our national playground stepped out for a smoke 25 or 30 years ago, and hasn’t been seen since.

Wall Street is corrupt and irresponsible, yet can always depend on the politicians to bail it out. Why not? They bribe them well. Corporations are corrupt, even to their own stockholders. The health care industry kills and cheat people at the same time. Titular control of the country is split between far-right radicals and so-called reasonable men whose cautious little reforms are flawed and weak and change little. Because they bow to the bankers, too.

Oh, mama. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has left the building.

But it can’t go on forever. If I hadn’t beat the kids to the social hall — if I’d slouched out to the parking lot for some peace and quiet and missed the whole thing — it is conceivable that they would have spilled most of the pizza onto the floor while jostling to get their pieces first, and further, ground the fallen pieces into the new, expensive church carpet with their little feet. It is also possible that one or two alpha kids could have hogged all the tables and started their own table-based empire complete with haves, have-nots, and a squad of subservient beta bullies to keep order.

But in reality, before it had gotten that bad — as soon as enough of the kids realized that the stronger kids were getting first crack at the pizza and the tables — a delegation of less able predators would have run down the hall to find the adults. Who would have come at a run, dressed down the troublemakers, confiscated the tables, made the kids clean up their mess themselves, and send the worst offenders home with no dinner. Then there would be a long lecture about how the rest of them were only getting two pieces each because the others had been dumped on the floor, all because everybody forgot how to share. And no, they weren’t allowed to eat the ones that fell on the floor.

There would be more wailing. And grumbling. And sulking. But in the end nearly every child (except the bullies who had been winning) would have accepted it. Because deep down, even the jiggliest, most rambunctious child likes order and security. Wants food, a warm bed, an order to his life that he can depend on. And of course hugs from Mommy and Daddy.

Grown-ups like the same things. Oh, we can fall under the spell of people who tell us that speculation — in real estate, in stocks, in commodities — is a sure path to riches, so why invest in society and take care of each other. Or we can accept the reasonable sounding argument of “shared sacrifice” and slash vital government programs while keeping taxes low on the ultra-rich.

But when the real estate markets begin to collapse and the financial instruments that we were told were so strong turn out to be based on fraud, and “balancing the budget” means eternal unemployment for the least of us, and the smooth salesmen who sold us on all these things are nowhere to be found…. well, an oversized house and a couple of expensive cars and an Acapulco condo and fancy electronic toys become unimportant. What does become important is a regular income, reliable health care, old age security, opportunities for the kids. In other words, order and security.

So at some point, a lot of us will start screaming for the adults to come and fix things and punish the bullies and make them share. Who yet knows who these adults are? Maybe we’ll invent them.

Maybe — and here’s a hope — we’ll become them.

Is a picture worth a thousand words?

See the picture and caption below.

As a word guy, I favor words. But words and pictures together can make a powerful team.

Count out the caption’s syllables; it’s a standard 5-7-5 haiku.   I write haiku based on crime stories from the newspapers: seventeen-syllable short stories about human folly and error.  You can check them out right now, if you wish, at http://www.policeblotterhaiku.com.

I’m even self-publishing a police blotter haiku book. But as it turns out, page after grey page of haiku looks pretty boring. I needed some illustrations; and some help.

Enter GIMP.  GIMP is an image editing program, similar to Adobe Photoshop; it does all sorts of things to photos . It can even make them look like drawings, which is what I wanted.

Photoshop costs hundreds of dollars.  GIMP is nearly as powerful as Photoshop – and free.

I like to say that I come from the True Internet.  The enthusiast’s Internet.  Where people shared and gave away knowledge and information and skills for the satisfaction, and money wasn’t the major point of it all.  Back in the 90s, the True Internet dominated.  Because nobody had yet figured out how to make money online.

In those days, I was all over the Internet. I maintained a frequently-asked-questions page for Santa Cruz; I answered questions from people who wanted to move here, go to university here, even find missing relatives.

During the dot-com boom, I ran another site that showed people where to look online for work in Santa Cruz; people emailed to thank me for the jobs they’d gotten.

When the boom collapsed, I published  rumors that people sent me about which local dotcoms would crash next.  The Santa Cruz newspaper published stories based on my stories.

Because I like murals, I published a website compendium of Santa Cruz’ many public murals, with information about the artists and mural-making. After awhile, cities and hospitals contacted me for advice on planning mural projects.  I gave mural tours to university students from Liverpool.  For several years.  More of them kept coming.

People did great things for me on the True Internet.  I had an old Japanese flag that my father had brought back from his never-clearly-described adventures in World War II; it was covered with hand-written Japanese ideographs.  I took pictures of the flag, put them on a website, and posted the hyperlink on Japanese-American discussion boards; Japanese-speakers translated the flag for me; it had been given to a Japanese naval fighter pilot on his way out to war.  The inscriptions were farewell messages from students and staff at a teacher’s college north of Tokyo. A Japanese-American neurosurgeon in Tokyo tracked down the school for me.  And told me that flags like this were given to friends who are going away — and will probably not be seen again.

There were millions like me on the Internet.  Still are. Anybody who writes a blog for fun is part of the True Internet.  Another word for the True Internet is geekdom.  And anybody who makes something for love and gives it away on the internet – a story, an app, knowledge, advice, or instructions — is a geek, a member of the True Internet. Anybody who goes online or puts up a website to share what they love with others: they’re part of it.  Anyone who contributes thoughtful input to discussion boards: they’re part of it, too. They’re geeks; and they should be proud.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia built by the people themselves, is pure True Internet.  As are Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, Instructables, Ravelry, Daily Kos, even Reddit or craigslist or Facebook or Twitter: all platforms that are (or can be) filled with useful content posted by just plain folks who want to help.

And YouTube: you may troll YouTube to watch old TV shows and dancing-baby videos, but other people go there to post videos that show how to play guitar, patch a bicycle tire, cut up a chicken, knit socks, draw, drill holes in metal, publish a website, bake pita bread, and on and on.  Some do it for money or the hope of money; but for most, it’s – just because.

A lot of crap lives the Internet these days, and danger as well. But the True Internet survives and thrives: the land of geeks and makers, of people who get excited about interesting things and want others to know about them.  People who share with others because, money aside, that’s what people do.

And yet the New Internet gets all the attention these days: that creature of e-commerce and Amazon and advertising and subscription-only websites and stock offerings and cookies and harvesting your personal information to sell to others.  The New Internet is where you make money; where you sell instead of share.

I’m not against people making a buck or two on the Internet, but when the money becomes more important than the love, the party’s over.  In fact, the drinks are probably spiked. Disillusioned Facebook members are not so hard to find these days.

And yet again, there’s GIMP. It’s open-source software, built up over fifteen years by volunteer programmers working together over the Internet.  GIMP’s a powerful tool; a bit rough around the edges, but it certainly serves all my photo-editing needs.  And they give it away.  Because they think that software should be free, and everyone should have it.  So that other people can follow their dreams with or without money.

Working for love… who’d have thought it? Don’t they know you can’t get rich that way?

I’m illustrating Police Blotter Haiku: The Book with photographs that I and others will take; I will run the photos through GIMP filters to make them look like black-and-white drawings.

At present, I’m mainly swiping pictures off the Internet to experiment with. Yet I also have pictures that I will use in the final draft, because they were taken for me by people who found me on the Internet and volunteered to help.  Volunteered; there’s that word again.

Take a look at one of my favorite GIMP-ized photos do date, a deserted parking lot after the rain.  A volunteer took the original photo, so I’ll be using it in the book. You can go over to www.policeblotterhaiku.com and see more, if you like.

I will charge money for Police Blotter Haiku, the book  But not a lot. Money’s not really the point.  What I want is the achievement, the validation, that comes from selling 1,000 copies of something I wrote.

So I can then say, yeah, I’m a real author. Or even, a published poet who actually sold 1,000 copies of his work.  There aren’t so many of those, believe me.

This goal is doable, I judge; newspaper people think that my haiku are pretty funny, and I can use that.

But even if I undershoot the goal, there’s so much to learn: new software, Internet marketing tools, social networking strategies, and more.  And I might meet some interesting people along the way: always the unwritten goal in any decent enterprise. In truth I’ve already met some.

The New Internet is all about money; the True Internet is all about love.  And if and when the money dries up – as it may – it’s love that will help us all survive.

See you on the True Internet – as always.

His name was Daniel Sheets Dye. And he was obsessed.

In 1909, the 25-year-old college grad signed on with a Baptist missionary society to help establish a medical college in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, western China. Sichuan in those days was literally beyond the edge of our world; civilized, but alien. Western influence hadn’t made the slightest dent.

I can’t tell you what made Daniel Dye, a square-jawed Ohio farm boy, make a long-term commitment to teach science in Chengdu, a 2000-year-old city he’d probably never heard of.

But as he packed his bags, Dye’s old professors urged him to get a hobby — something to stave off homesickness and culture shock ten thousand miles from home in a land that probably never heard of Cleveland or Columbus, either.

And after Dye settled in, he got his hobby.

One day he was touring a shrine to a famous poet when he saw some Chinese lattice windows of unusual design. In traditional Chinese architecture, windows are made of a decorative wooden lattice with a sheet of rice paper glued to the inside to block the draft. Lattice windows let in the light, if not the sights; glass windows hadn’t made it to Sichuan yet.

Dye had noticed simple lattice windows before — grids and so forth — but these were special. He immediately copied down 20 designs and took them back to the university. Something about the intricate lattices — perhaps the underlying maths and geometries that informed their design — zapped Dye’s systematic Baptist brain. He took his copies home and set out to research the history of Chinese lattice windows.

But there wasn’t any. Lattice windows weren’t considered art; they were simply something that carpenters created using folk designs that were passed down through the generations. Dye found just one book on the subject, 300 years old and “with a limited commentary.”

But now he noticed lattice windows everywhere he went; he saw similar designs and motifs from place to place, and others that were wildly different than anything else.

But even as he began to study the lattice, it began to go away.

The Manchu Dynasty was collapsing, China sank into turmoil. Everywhere, old buildings burned down or blew up in insurrections, riots, clashes between rival warlords. Lattice windows began to disappear; in the new buildings, glass windows replaced them.

So Dye decided that he would be the scholar of Chinese lattice wherever he found it — in windows, on the side of buildings, carved into wooden boxes. Before it vanished forever.

He made hundreds, maybe thousands of drawings and rubbings and measurements in the street and on the road, where he traveled by sedan chair in convoys with other notables. Dye said that you could always tell which sedan chair he was in because it was likely to pull over unexpectedly so he could jump out to sketch an interesting window. And of course curious locals would invariably crowd around the odd-looking foreigner. It wasn’t always easy to get those drawings made.

Dye even taught one of his Chinese assisting teachers to use a mechanical drawing set and transcribe Dye’s rough sketches into permanent, precise drawings in his spare time. (It’s unclear precisely how “spare” that time was to the Chinese gentleman, though Dye kept him at it for 20 years.)

Where certain lattice designs had Chinese names, Dye identified and recorded them; where there were no names, he made his own. He devised a complete classification system for Chinese lattice design based on the basic motifs he identified, and placed each and every one of his designs in it, along with the precise location of the original and what he could find out of its age and background.

Dye figured out the principles behind each type of lattice design in his classification scheme and developed procedures for replicating every single one of them. And he never stopped trying to figure out What it All Meant. Some of the designs had themes he could figure out from Chinese cultural references, but the rest — Where did they come from? How old were they? Who invented them?

All the swastikas that recurred over and over — religious, or just a folk motif? And then he started looking at patterns woven into the belts of Tibetan herdsmen and saw many of the same patterns he saw in his windows. And he went to Japan, and Korea and even back to the states and saw lattice everywhere and noticed similarities everywhere. What came from what? Who influenced who?

Daniel Sheets Dye never did figure “it” all out. Maybe there was nothing there, or maybe too much. His lattice designs could have come from a hundred places, and moved on to a hundred places and mutated along the way; folk art is like that, especially in a cultural crossroads like western China.

But after he’d spent 25 years in China — where did the time go — Dye took his mass of material and published an awkwardly-written book with an extensive collection of drawings arranged according to his new classification system. And thus appeared the first treatise on Chinese lattice design in 300 years. There have been no others, since. There may never be. Who else would care that much? And even if they did, how many lattice windows are left?

Dye stayed in China until the Communists rolled into Chengdu in ’49, and then went home to the States — though I suspect it wasn’t “home” anymore. The medical school he taught at is still operating, by the way.

Daniel Sheets Dye lived on for many years and never gave up on lattices — and never achieved the “Big Picture” synthesis he’d been hoping for, either. Before he died, though, he apparently sold the rights to his works to Dover Publications, that eccentric reissuer of obscure and forgotten reference books and literature. And Dover has kept it in print ever since.

After Dye died, Dover even published additional lattice patterns from Dye’s papers as an artists’ design book.

Which is why both books were here for me to find — at a ridiculously low price — on the “New Arrivals” cart at Logos used bookstore in Santa Cruz some time back. I marveled at the odd patterns and strange geometries, unlike any I’d seen. I found them curiously satisfying on some visceral, non-intellectual level. Perhaps I felt what Dye had felt as he hopped from his sedan chair on a bustling street in Sichuan, pencil and paper and measuring tape in hand, at the sight of a mesmerizing lattice window. I bought them both; I see at least a couple of good stained glass projects in Dye’s collection.

Yes, Dye was obsessed. But obsession, though not always the most pleasant of personality traits, often leaves something behind for the rest of us to enjoy. And if you troll the Internet you will find artists and craftspeople and even mathematicians and programmers whose work, they will gladly confess, was influenced by a Baptist science teacher’s book on Chinese lattice designs. Designs which might never have made it out of China — or survived at all — if Dye had decided to take up cooking instead.

All hail to the obsessed! And thank you, Mr. Dye.