Rhubarb Pie

Back at you, lady.

I keep wanting to do a grand unified essay about all these, but I haven't pulled it together yet.  My thoughts have been grimmer than yours.  I keeping thinking about becoming poor.  This terrifying essay sets the microscale, what it is like for a person to become poor.  Here is a story about a town being poor.  And a county, when one of their resources goes away.  The thing I keep noticing is that cutting back early is the key to lasting.  These people have what looks like a path forward.  But it worries me that the bloggers I read are all using a growth economy as the standard, rather than a steady-state economy or a descent-based economy.

So I'm thinking about that.  I was sorry to read about the tragic shooting in your neighborhood.  When you brought food to the relatives of the deceased, how did you find them?

I totally love this song by High Places.

You know what I would love to link to, but can't? All the resources for people who are interested in co-parenting.  I'd love to show you the forums I'm reading and the matching services for people who want to co-parent.  I'd totally link to the blogs where people write about their experiences.  Except, you know, I CAN'T.  I don't think they're out there.  There're a few in Britain, but that's all I can find.  I've called around and gotten confirmation.  There is no infrastructure for finding someone else who might want to have and raise a kid with you, not in Northern California.  Wouldn't you think it would be in California as much as it would be anywhere?  Yeah, there isn't any.

This is so frustrating for me.  I'm sure of my decision to have kids, starting soon, but seriously daunted by the prospect of doing it alone.  I'm willing, but I've seen what that's like.  My friends are awesome and generous about offering help and I'm sure that when I'm in it, I'll make the arrangements I need.  But it looks hard.  It also looks like the first thing to go is my workout.  I'll make that trade if it is necessary.  But I don't want to.  If finding another involved parent is possible, I'm interested. 

But I can't even get to the point of negotiating the difficulties of that, because so far as I can tell, there isn't a locus for potential co-parents.  Everyone I've asked confirms, yeah, it is all ad hoc.  That's ridiculous.  There are so many people who could be served by this.  Some gays and lesbians, of course.  But I think of the women I know who wanted kids but aged out waiting for a romantic partner.  Some might have been better off with a co-parent, even if that isn't the ideal of a romantic partner.  This gives men who want kids another option too.  So I don't get why this niche is nearly entirely unserved.

A pattern!

Or maybe you see a pattern in my recent reading:

Human system responses to disaster : an inventory of sociological findings / Thomas E. Drabek

Strategies for coordinating disaster responses / Thomas E. Drabek.

Facing hazards and disasters : understanding human dimensions / Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences: Future Challenges and Opportunities, National Research Council

I have to admit that I don't curl up with this stuff quite as readily as I do something with swords and horses, but I've been indignant recently that my department doesn't give the human sides of disaster response the same attention it does the physical system.  I decided that at least someone in the department should know how humans evacuate and what makes them build in the path of disaster and whether they will always go back.  So I poked around and it turns out that way smart people already know this!  I do not have to make up answers from scratch (although I totally would).   

Seems like Dr. Drabek is the Grand Old Man in the field. I tracked him back to the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center, where I signed up for their newsletter and want to go to the conference SO MUCH.  Anyway, I will read his books and find out if there is any hope of getting people out of the way of floods.  Then I will go to Boulder in early summer and maybe see some of you there.

Also, two pheasants, one deer and a VERY large cat.

The train this morning had a bike car, which is great.  We've needed one for a while.  The trend I see on the train echoes the news stories I hear from all over.  The train is steadily filling.  Ridership is up.

The other thing I see from the train?  New homeless camps.  Two more than Friday, in fact.  There's the one woman on the edge of a marsh, between the sand beach and the refinery.  Her camp has paths and rooms and stuff; she's been there since before I started taking the train a year ago.  On Friday nights, I've started seeing groups of men around small fires. That might be recreational.  But this morning I saw two new homesteads, tarps, tents, collections of items.  I can't believe people are choosing the train right-of-way for recreational camping.

Last year I read Jack London's memories of time as a hobo.  It was grim, and some of the worst of it was the battle between railroad companies and hoboes.  I think times are about to get bad, and I rehearse the same mental stories that you do.  What would I do if we contract to a near-barter economy?  What useful skills do I have?  I get the same outcome you do.  I'll fall back on my network, my ties to people. 

What I worry about as much as I worry about anything is that people will turn mean.  Or even meaner.  We're already so harsh and unforgiving, looking for fault in the victim, letting people die on cold sidewalks for being sick or addicted or mentally ill.  We've been mean for long time, but I keep hoping that we aren't yet the kind of mean that Jack London sees in his travels.  I worry that when people are scared for a long time, insecure in food and shelter, the fear poisons them.  It makes them cruel, feel justified in selfishness.  At the least, the last Depression left my grandparents with a crippling frugality, the inability to enjoy anything that cost money.  That lasted long after they were secure and cost them pleasure for decades. 

I have two hopes against that worry.  The first is that we may again be led by someone who is genuinely decent and humane.  People do get inspired, and they will follow a good example.  Sometimes, being shown the way is enough to get people moving in that direction.  Second, I run my little storylines about how I'd survive a Depression, and the thing that transforms them from fear and survival is to introduce a different frame.  Instead of, "how would I hole up?", I try to tell the story "how many people could we help?".  Running through that story feels different.  Well, there is organizing to do and resources to arrange.  The whole feel is different, more energizing, offering choices.  Well, there's this option and that option and it would be easier to reach this group and that person would know how to do this part so we'll have to drag her in.  It is not a fear-based scenario at all, largely because the focus is moved into the communal.  It isn't like I'm a saint who actually does anything so productive.  But thinking like that is a good way to move out of fear.   If things get bad, we're going to need to stave off fear.

Not much of a campaign slogan.

The other thing I've been thinking about is how to prioritize the work of the next administration.  If the nation gets extremely poor, like I expect, the administration will have to prioritize.  If they are triaging, they should choose to keep the programs that speak directly to things that people fear.  There are two components to poverty, austerity and fear.  Of those, the real problem is fear.

Austerity means you don't have stuff, even stuff you want.  But austerity itself doesn't invoke a given reaction.  People experience austerity in all sorts of ways, depending largely on their expectations and the company they keep.  Austerity, by itself, is independent of happiness.  There are euphoric monks, who chose to own nothing.  There are people who live in ostentatious wealth and misery.  Once the need for basic food and shelter is met, austerity and happiness have a very loose relationship.

Fear, though.  Fear is just terrible.  It shapes people, eats their goodness away, makes them permanently smaller, meaner, selfish, violent.  And what are people scared of?  They're scared for their kids and scared for their health.  They're scared of hunger and loss of shelter.  I think those are the things that the next president will have to secure.  Those things.  He should make those things safe and assured for us, and tell us so.  The rest can be dealt with, slowly rebuilt, our society contracted and re-knit.  We can live within our means or create things until we catch up to the money we spent in the last decade.  But it will be a thousand times easier if people are not scared for the very basics, if they believe they will not fall all the way down, if they don't turn on each other.

The experience of a Depression with fear and austerity is very different from one with only austerity.  I bitterly resent that we are forced to make choices like this, but the priority for the next administration is very clear.  Austerity without fear, '08.

Glad you're feeling better. I can fix that.

I have a stack of non-fiction waiting for me.  I just finished and liked the Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why.  I've got Something for Nothing, The Winner-Take-All Society and See You in Court queued.  I'm still trying to figure out America, I guess.  I do like non-fiction, but I have to say sometimes I look over at my bedstand and wonder why it is full of self-imposed homework.  I have to admit that I finish super excellent stories about dragons a lot faster.

I have all sorts of stuff to say about economic collapse, and how I'm kinda bummed it is happening at the same time as climate change, and then a thin ray of hope.  But it isn't done yet, and maybe I don't want to overwhelm the front page with massive essays.  But I'll put that up here somewhere, sometime soon.

 

I suppose I could wear gloves.

Oh god.  I was clearing out the weeds from the walkway at the community garden as it was getting dark, taking big rough handfuls of things and ripping them out.  Did this Sunday night, too, and had my second run-in with a huge green praying mantis in a month.  Both times I found out about the praying mantis by getting a big ol' handful of him.  Both times he scratched me.  Not deep or anything, but enough to shriek and fling it away and then come back to look at the eight foot long praying mantis with slavering jaws and eyes that shoot laser beams.  Tonight it wasn't a praying mantis.  Tonight I caught a glimpse of the long waving black legs in time to snatch my hand back from three huge black widows.  Three of them.  Big.  Moving and stuff.  I'm rocking back and forth as I type this. 

Right now, and probably until the feeling that anything that touches me is a spider goes away, everything is to blame.  I don't love big stripey spiders in pretty webs.  I hate them and all spiders, and I hate no-pesticide gardening with my own hands.  I love huge conventional agriculture, stripped down to dirt and clean lines of crops as far as the eye can see.  I'll buy my vegetables from Safeway, thank you very much.  I also hate community gardens, with their stupid pathways where things grow.  I love concrete pathways.  I hate nature.  Wolves are not wise and beautiful totems for lesbians.  They're varmints to be shot from planes.  Coyotes are not tawny agents of the trickster.  Varmints.  They're all varmints!  I hate fall, stupid dusk coming earlier and making nocturnal spiders brave.  Stupid earth tilting away from the sun.  I hate that too.

Right now the only two things I don't hate are my bicycle, which carried me away from the garden too fast for the black widows to give chase, and the burrito I'm about to go eat.  A burrito will make this all better, right?  Burritos contain, like, ninety percent of the restorative magic in the world.  I don't understand how you live in a place where a burrito isn't the default, the standard, the way, the cure.  Perhaps after a burrito I'll be able to see beauty in nature again.

It isn't fair.

Oh man.  My heart goes out to the lecturer who came to see you.  Academia can be a terribly brutal process.  People go into it with such high hopes and lots of them get absolutely torn up and mangled.  We compound that with our vicious American belief in self-reliance and work ethic and concept that we’re in a meritocracy that rewards work.  There’s the  sneaky underlying concept that if you don’t succeed, the failure is a personal failing. But I watch my friends get caught up in systems that are just plain out impossible, and blame themselves.

I thought that Freakonomics was fun, maybe a little facile.  But I’ll always be grateful that it introduced me to the difference between careers and tournaments.  A career has gradations that everyone has access to, training and paths for most to advance.  A tournament is a winnowing process, in which many compete, largely on their own, for a very few highly-rewarded slots at the top.  In Freakonomics, drug dealing is shown to be a tournament.  In my world, my friends compete in the academic tournament.  Most people will fail in the tournament for professorships.  That’s the set-up and the only reasonable expected outcome. Maybe it isn’t inherently wrong that academia is set up that way, although it wastes the talents of some of the most brilliant among us and takes a painful toll on their lives.  But it really is cruel that people don’t understand that they are entering a tournament and not a career.  If people want to gamble that they are especially brilliant and lucky outliers, that’s fine.  But they should know that they’re gambling against high odds, not beginning a process that is designed for their progress and success.

The other system I see eating my friends alive is the nuclear family, couple parents, couple young kids.  Couple jobs and a house.  The thing I always want them to remember is that the conventional picture of that, two parents working, house clean, everyone fed and time left over for cuddling the baby and having a romantic relationship, IS NOT POSSIBLE.  This is impossible for middle class America or lower.  My friends drive themselves so incredibly hard and blame themselves for failing.  It is so cruel to feel that you are failing at something that was never possible, and to think that there is something wrong with you if your house isn’t clean and your partnership whole and your fridge stocked and baby nurtured constantly.  But that isn’t a possible thing for two adults alone.  Or it is, but the cost is a strangling burden of work.

When I see people doing that and looking sane, I don’t believe it.  They have help I don’t see.  They pay for housecleaning.  There is a gift of money in the background.  Grandparents step in reliably.  Or, something has yielded.  The adult relationship is neglected.  They aren’t cooking for themselves.  They’re falling behind on money.  I see this in different ways in different couples, but the thing I hate to see the most is when they feel like failures and blame themselves.  It is a terrible thing we’ve done, letting people believe those early parenting years in the middle or lower class nuclear lifestyle is possible for only two adults.   There are solutions, going back to living in extended families or having extended parental leave or keeping small houses.  I think we should do those as soon as we can, but if that takes a while, I’d at least like people to take those impossible expectations off themselves.  At the least they should know when the whole system, including the American beliefs of self-reliance and work, is rigged against them.

Precarious.

Sherry, I don't think I'm pulling this off.  You know I moved out of my house last year, in a two-month spate of drive and work that spent me for months after.  The intention was to move to Oakland, to live with my sister and try to date in the Bay Area.  But I never finished the move, because I got offered neat stuff to do at my work.  These days I work in Sac during the week, staying in a room in a little house very like my own, and go to Oakland every weekend.

Sometimes I think this works great.  I like having no responsibilities here during the week.  I work out a lot and go to my garden and see Margie everyday at lunch.  I love the train ride.  I like spending weekends with my sister and her beautiful boys, who sometimes run into my arms to be thrown up over my head.  I was chokingly sad to leave my house, but within weeks I realized how much house upkeep (or guilt for not doing house upkeep) had been weighing me down. 

Sometimes I think this is a ridiculous halfway situation, neither here nor there.   I'm here in Sacramento, but not even in my own sweet house?  I'm not establishing a new social life in Oakland because I'm not in the same places consistently enough to be a regular.  (I am starting to know the folks on the train, however.)  I go on Craigslist dates in Oakland; those are much better than CL dates in Sacramento, but haven't led anywhere either.  I'm away from my cat most of the time, which isn't right for either of us.  There's no reason to think my job is so great I couldn't be matched in the Bay Area, except that I haven't looked for a job there and sorta dread the process of applying for jobs.

Anyway, this morning my housemate surprised me.  She's been unhappy about some living-together stuff that wasn't even on my radar.  (Not, truth told, stuff that I feel particularly bad about, although, since I don't care about it, I'm happy to do it the way she wants.)  I'm wondering how long this living situation is going to last.  I've thought for months that I'm living balanced on a fulcrum, not stable but not tipping either.  When people ask me what I'm going to do, I say I'm waiting for something external to give my life a push.  Maybe this is it.  I was hoping for a brown-haired man who sings in the car, but maybe instead I get an upset housemate.

So if this is going to change, what do I do?  Do I move back into my house?  I miss it, you know.  I could be back in my house in time to eat my own persimmons.  I could hold Pumpkin Carving Party like normal.  That'd be weird.  That'd be like I went to all that huge trouble for essentially nothing.  Like I did all that to break free of the ruts I carved and then, you know, couldn't get farther.  Now that I see the nephews weekly, I miss them when I don't.  I've liked doing stuff with my sister.

Do I finish the move to Oakland?  Commute on the train back to Sac everyday?  Oh no.  Find a job there?  What job?  I'm not all that imaginative about career and job stuff.  I'm mostly content in an underemployed routine.  The original plan was to date in Oakland, but Oakland isn't putting out either.  If neither city is going to give up the good men, shouldn't I be moving back into my house and prepping a nursery for me to have a baby by myself?  It is getting near that time.

I don't know Sherry.  Between has been fine, but it can't last.  It may be ending sooner rather than later, but I'm as undecided as ever.

It matters to us when they miss.

I didn’t tell you the other part about the weekend, the part that is not so nice as pies.

Saturday night, about midnight, I was watching Jay Smooth’s videos on connectedness and rejecting the thug aspects of commercial hip-hop when the shots started. Two bursts of several shots, loud and very close, then a car screeching off. I turned off my lights, crouched for a couple seconds, ran to the front of the house to find my sister. Found her crouched in her room in the front, calling 911. We waited a couple more minutes, until we heard a man calling for help and saw a neighbor come out. We went out to see what happened.

More of our neighbors were out on the corner, forty feet from our house, looking at the car crashed into the parked cars. They’d been driving and a car came up fast behind them, shooting into the car until it crashed, screeching off ahead. Two men were shot. One walked to the ambulance. One was wheeled on a stretcher. We don’t know if he’s OK. There were a bunch of casings in the gutter at our feet. Oh.

The rest of the night was a little surreal. You know, for a decidedly not-street person, I feel like sitting on my porch as police work through the night is getting too familiar. I’ve done it four or five times now. The nephews woke, so we sat on the steps, the littles on laps tucked into our sweaters. They were somber too, and we quietly discussed the police cars, the flashing lights, that everyone was sad because some people hurt some other people, what the yellow tape was for.

Telling Anand about it today, he worried that we must have been so scared. So here’s the part that I don’t like. No. I wasn’t so scared, not once the shots were done and we knew that the shootings were a drive-by intentionally directed at someone. Once I knew it was related to the Section 8 housing down the street, I wasn’t scared anymore. Because things that happen in those lives aren’t things that happen to me. So I was detached enough to think abstractly when I saw two women screaming and crying and rushing the cops, asking to please please tell them if that was her husband. I thought, ‘oh, women’s grief, to be afraid it was yours that got killed.’ I thought, ‘you know, considering how much this is adding to the commotion at the scene, you’d think the cops could include information gathering and dispersion in their procedures.’ I thought, ‘they’re not helping, with the frantic crying and shouting and trying to push past the cops. I bet they’d get a lot farther if they approached the cops with composed requests.’ But I didn’t think, ‘oh no oh no, which of my neighbors got shot tonight?’ I didn’t think ‘oh god, what if it were one of us?’ Because really? It isn’t going to be one of us.

That’s what makes me sad. The apartment complex with the Section 8 housing is half a block away and we live parallel, non-intersecting lives. The white gentrifying hipsters all came out the next morning to gawk at the smashed cars, introduce ourselves and point to our houses. We talked about hearing the shots and lost sleep. I’m sure we will talk to the people we met again. I have no idea how the apartment complex reacted to the injuries of two of theirs. Even when gun battles break out on the street in front of us, even when our neighbors are shrieking with grief, that is for them. We watch until we get cold, then tuck the babies back into bed.

Because those lives seemed so separate, it took me half a day to remember the fundamentals of community. Oh yeah. When your neighbors are hurt, you take them food. My sister was ahead of me; that afternoon she baked and brought them banana bread. But people from those apartments haven’t been community. They’ve only been neighbors in the sense of geography.

One other neighbor came out that night, equally disconnected from everyone human. A brazen raccoon walked calmly past the police line, went partially up the stoop across from us, then stopped when he saw our neighbors out. He crossed the street in the changing yellow and blue shadows, approached our steps and stared at us. He left again, equidistant from tragedy and watchers, unconcerned about either. I don’t feel any need to befriend the raccoons. But I should do better about connecting to people who live right next to us.