Behind the Orange Curtain

Where cars and Costco rule the day

I transitioned from small-town America to a flat endless horizon of surging traffic, a snarled madhouse of giant shopping centers, one residential neighborhood after another, intertwined with high-end condo retirement complexes the size of most towns. Photo Stacey Warde 

By Dell Franklin

I took the Amtrak train from San Luis Obiso south to visit old friends who live in Orange County and it’s taken me almost one week to digest the horror of it. I was too dazed to be overwhelmed at first as I transitioned from small-town America to a flat endless horizon of surging traffic, a snarled madhouse of giant shopping centers, one residential neighborhood after another, intertwined with high-end condo retirement complexes the size of most towns. 

And strip malls. 

I felt so small and insignificant, like an invasive germ.

My friend Angus picked me up at the Anaheim train station adjacent to the stadium where the California Angels call home. Angus lives in a Huntington beach grid among many grids of homes that have no front porches and are walled in so that the only time people see each other and have little visits with dogs and so on is when they are out and about, which is seldom. There are no lawns. The streets are idle and inert. Like a ghost town.

Angus and his wife Dot have lived here for 47 years. They are retired school teachers. Angus also coached baseball and football and was once an All League athlete. They have a pleasant home with modern fixtures and appliances and furniture and a swimming pool and jacuzzi that neither use. 

They know when I make one of my generational visits that it can be an ordeal absorbing my comments and picking on Angus, whom I consider a person 100 times more virtuous and valuable than I am; which is why I make it a point to pick on him constantly.

He took me to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He drove me to Huntington Beach’s main drag that was studded with Miami Beach-like luxury hotels that go for a grand a night and are always booked full. Where does the money come from? We parked and walked. I splurged and bought my first T-shirt not from a thrift store in possibly 40 years just for the hell of it—50 percent off and beachy.

Later, Angus, who is 82 and has two knee replacements, two shoulder replacements, one hip replacement, and spent a year of chemo fighting off cancer, forced me to go to Costco with him to purchase some medicine for Dot and for a few odds and ends. It was hot out, and we had to park a long way away. He commandeered a shopping cart and began pushing it around.

“Why do you need a cart for a few items?” I asked.

“Be quiet.”

“I’ve never been in a place this big with so many people buying a bunch of shit,” I said.

“Stop it.”

“It’s obscene.”

He refused to react. I made fun of his painful, shuffling walk. He ignored me. He needed help in the cavernous immensity of this particular Costco, and a little cheerful Asian lady pointed him in the right direction. More than half the people pushing carts appeared to be Vietnamese American women. They pushed their big carts with grim, get-out-of-my-way determination. I took over Angus’s cart in a move I felt would relieve his being miffed at my condemning Costco and making fun of his walk. I suddenly became pleased as I picked up the pace and played chicken with aggressive and tiny Vietnamese grandmas. I know how to adapt.

I did not see one even slightly portly Asian but a lot of overstuffed white people stacking their carts to the brim as they waddled about.

Angus was looking for plain white T-shirts like the ones we wore in the 1960s but they didn’t have those, although Costco is supposed to have everything. The T-shirts they had were not white and were too small. 

Angus needed raspberries, and as we passed the salmon he bragged about how delicious and easy it was to prepare. He does a lot of cooking since Dot would rather read. When we came to the vodka, I urged him to buy a half gallon of Gray Goose since he could not spend all the money he had, but he did not like Gray Goose and preferred Absolut. I told him that although I was poor I insisted on luxury vodka and he should too since, like me, he was a lifetime boozer. 

I informed him that he was institutionalized to inferior vodka due to growing up poor, and needed to break out. He stuck with the Absolut.

We came to the wine section. I asked him what he knew about wine and he said not much and that most wines tasted the same and he and Dot liked a certain white which I pooh-poohed. I explained I did know a little about wine because my brother-in-law and nephew spent hours on their computers studying wine and various vineyards and were experts, and when they visited me up in Cayucos they spent whole days wine tasting in Paso Robles and bought crates of top-shelf wine. 

When I spotted a Dou Chardonnay from Paso Robles that my nephew bragged about, I informed Angus this was an excellent wine for the price and to buy it, and insisted that Dot would like it, and though I could see he was as usual leery of my opinions and exclamations, he gave in and accepted two bottles I dropped in the cart.

After that I felt rejuvenated and became more aggressive with the cart, feeling like a teenager in a bumper car at a county fair. When we finished finding raspberries and other crap, I sprinted my cart to an open checkout station and cut off a Vietnamese woman with a packed cart. She sped to another check out station without reaction, cutting off another woman.

Later, the three of us sat out in the coolness of Angus and Dot’s little sheltered patio after I shoved the chard in the freezer. Angus opened it. Poured out three glasses. He and Dot sat across from each other and sipped. Dot nodded. “This is really good, Angus,” she said.

Angus took a sip, nodded. “It is good,” he agreed.

“Is it better than what you usually get at Costco?” I asked Dot.

“Yes. Definitely.”

I turned to Angus.“What’d I tell you, huh? Aren’t you glad I made you buy two bottles?” 

“I said it’s good.”

“For the price, it’s better than good.”

He wasn’t biting.

“You should stock up on it. That’s what people do at Costco, right? Stock up. Because there’s never enough of everything and anything in Orange County. They all gotta have it all or there’s no life.”

His phone rang. It was Stacey Warde. My old partner with the Rogue Voice literary journal I once published in SLO County. Stacey once wrote for the local Tribune and was managing editor of New Times, where we first met. He now lives in Tustin and was to show up at Angus’s around 4:30 p.m. Another friend from around Mission Viejo named Sean was also to join us and then we’d retreat to a bar.

After Angus hung up, he said Stacey was on his way. Tustin was only half-an-hour away.

“You don’t know Stacey,” I said. “We ran that paper together for four years, and my guess is he won’t get here for at least two hours. He’ll get lost—even in his own backyard. He’ll call again. You’ll have to talk him here. Trust me.”

It took him two-and-a-half hours, although he grew up in the OC. He called several times for directions and stayed on the line. He dealt with horrendous road rage. When he finally arrived one could see how the OC takes its toll. 

(To be continued…).

Dell Franklin writes from his home in the lovely quiet beach town of Cayucos, Calif. This column first appeared on Cal Coast News, an online publication. He’s the author of The Ballplayer’s Son, a memoir about his father’s years as a pro when baseball was still a working man’s game.

Quality of life in Orange County

It’s not the same for everyone

Outside of promises of the good life, such as they are in Orange County, there is no life. 

Story and photo by Stacey Warde

I miss the conversations about watersheds and droughts and trees. Or how many pigs came down out of the hills last night to wreak havoc on the orchards and irrigation lines in search of food and water, or where the coyotes keep their dens. Or how many chickens were killed by the bobcat that lives down in the hollow underneath the old abandoned school bus.

More often, the conversations I hear today in Orange County revolve around sports or fitness and cars and jobs and burnout and crime rates and the occasional coyote roaming down suburban streets taking out neighborhood dogs and cats.

Outside of promises of the good life, such as they are in Orange County, there is no life. That’s the sense I get from this place after moving here nearly one year ago from Mendocino County, where there are more trees than people. Prior to that, I lived in San Luis Obispo County for almost 40 years, much of that time on a ranch in a tiny house of 300 square feet, not in a multi-million dollar monstrosity of thousands of square feet in the middle of endless suburbia. This modern El Dorado I live in now, Orange County, is the golden mean for quality of life, if you listen closely to those who love living here.

“I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” I’ve heard people say while others nod in agreement.

For some reason, my brain wants to imagine Orange County the way it was 40 years ago when I first fled the area for greener pastures, which thankfully I found in Cayucos, California, a beach haven not unlike the Laguna Beach I knew as a child.

The OC, as they call it now, resembles nothing close to what it was when I was growing up here, or what I still imagine it to be with  ranches and orchards and open fields. I recently discovered to my dismay that those features have long since disappeared while taking two hours to find a friend’s home only 20 minutes away in Huntington Beach.

The entire drive, which should have been easy, felt like a test flight for a fighter pilot. While trying to figure out where I was, looking in every direction for a familiar sign, an impatient driver behind me started madly honking his horn and waving his arms in great distress. If looks could kill, his scowling and fretful face would do the trick, and I would be dead.

I know the feeling, buddy, I thought, waving your arms isn’t going to help you. Believe me, I know, you look like an idiot flapping your gums and waving your hands in anger while driving solo in heavy traffic. Been there, done that. He pulled out from behind me in a sudden bolt and showed me his middle finger as he drove by and aggressively cut me off with a sharp, dangerous turn into my lane. Road rage runs rampant.

I kept my cool, which isn’t like me. Ordinarily, I would have shown the same foolish disdain by offering him my middle finger and flapping my gums as a greeting. But I’m trying to get away from that type of bad behavior, which I see everywhere on the roads. I’ve seen lots of that around here, as often on the roads and freeways as among the many homeless who wander the streets in search of refuge. This is quality of life? Now, he’s one car length ahead of me, no longer waving his arms or flapping his gums. All that wasted angry energy to get his one useless car length advantage. That’s Orange County: Crowded freeways, entitled angry murderous drivers, overworked populace, expensive, unaffordable homes, the appearance of wealth and success, tons of debt and graft.

Then, my Google GPS told me to turn onto the Santa Ana River Trail made for bicycles only. I turned off the GPS after two hours of driving and said: “Fuck!” 

Thankfully, I wasn’t far from my destination. I pulled into a crowded Costco parking lot, where most if not all of Orange County does its shopping, a favorite pastime here. I made the call and got directions to my desired location only blocks away. The traffic. OMG! I gave up herds of cattle blocking the road home for this?

No doubt, the ornamental trees in Orange County show the wonders of a fine climate, which so far is the only real attraction I can rightfully attach to the place. The citrus orchards that gave the county its name have all but disappeared. I see cars and row after row of houses. More cars. More houses. Little slices of “paradise,” at home in the best climate in the world. And a lot of frustrated angry people (in paradise?). Am I missing something? Perhaps I haven’t given it enough time? Where are the orchards and fields and farmworkers? Why do they call this Orange County?

I once got into a conversation regarding the wisdom and shame of removing an old oak tree, probably hundreds of years old, because its deep roots were sucking dry the well we depended upon for drinking water and showers and gardening, water designated for domestic use. Water for livestock and orchards were seldom at risk. Our home water use depended mostly on necessity rather than convenience. We showered, for example, not every day as they do here but only when essential, when the stink of chickens got so bad we had no choice. We treated our water and trees and livestock as precious resources. We were connected to nature. It was essential for our survival.

We studied the watershed that fed the creek and the wells and reservoirs. We knew when we were in trouble and when there was plenty. Our water wasn’t assured, there was no water company to secure and process this precious resource; it was clean and drawn from the pristine, environmentally sound, hills above and around us. We welcomed the rain. The runoff served us well, without an influx of bacteria threatening major health hazards and closing popular beaches.

Here, I get the feeling, precious resources, trees, water, wildlife, even beaches, come as an afterthought, after another grueling day at work, after the baby is fed and put to bed, after beating traffic to get home, after the dishes are put away. After another unsuccessful turn of putting off a lover’s sexual advances. After exhaustion sets in. After suicidal thoughts have been momentarily banished.

In El Dorado, water is water. Gold is what you need and want. But if you prefer water, all you have to do is turn on the faucet and see! — Water! Spend time in nature? Escape the rat race? Boy, wouldn’t that be nice, but there’s gold around here somewhere.

OC is a shower-every-day kind of place. With sun, beaches, parties and posturing, and a sometimes semi-arid climate, sports to play and gyms to visit, you don’t go to the clubs later without getting showered and dressed and looking fine, which is an important part of life here. Netflix and chill is more of a country thing, I think, but one would hope there’s plenty of that too in Orange County.

Meanwhile, a hawk slices through the air to enter the protective cover of an enormous ancient pine tree across the street to rustle smaller birds and mammals (tree squirrels). The commotion and squealing of the tree’s inhabitants is a familiar sound. I hope the hawk wins. I don’t think squirrels are cute. They’re a nuisance for farmers and they make good food for coyotes and bobcats, prey for raptors, which still make their rounds here. I’ve watched the squirrels jump from the street wires onto our lone avocado tree, another ancient survivor of Orange County, to search for food. In the wild, I’d shoot it because that’s what you do if you want to eat.

I know that change is the only constant in life; nothing stays the same. I know this yet I’m shocked at how much has changed since leaving here so many decades ago. I also know there were cruel exiles in ancient Rome and Greece meant to punish and diminish a person, which is kind of how I feel now in my own particular self-imposed exile from the beauty I knew in Cayucos, but who nonetheless came out ok in the end. Exiles who showed character, Musonius Rufus, for example, found purpose wherever they landed, however they were treated. I hope to find a similar purpose here, made from character and virtue rather than entitlement, and make the right connections, before my dying day or before being overtaken by another driver on the rampage.

In the end, the survivors and people who prospered in exile were the ones whose character brought them to safety and a sense of well being. Here, in El Dorado, gangsters and Disney and grimy politicians seem to prosper most. Here, people are judged more often by the cars they drive, titles they hold, and houses they own rather than by the strength of their character. Thug culture, I call it.

Those who live here seem to love it and I have yet to understand why, not when you compare it to life in the wild where one is truly free though more likely to run into bears or a herd of cattle than countless cars speeding down the freeway with angry drivers threatening murder and mayhem. In the wild, as elsewhere one would hope, conversations have meaning and purpose, and quality of life starts with how one chooses to live.

Stacey Warde is adapting to thug culture while searching for integrity and honesty.

A pox on pickleball

Pests, aka pickleball pukes, invade tennis courts & take over

Like officious twits inculcated into the deep bureaucracy, both these people, a man and a woman, repeated regulations obviously culled straight from the recreation department charters and ignored me as I scalded them for taking over “our” tennis courts. Photo by Frankie Lopez on Unsplash

by Dell Franklin

The four newly built pickleball courts at Del Mar park are evidently not enough for local pickleballers, as on a recent Saturday morning at 8:45 – the time my tennis partner, Ethan, and I play – one of two courts at Monte Young park in Morro Bay was open and a 30ish-40ish dandified couple not only took it over while I waited for Ethan, but, against the supposed rules created by the Morro Bay Recreation Department, they knelt on their hands and knees with chalk and sullied up the court to pickleball specifications.

By this time, I was on the court as a couple of tennis players volleyed on Court 1, and told the pickleballers that these courts were not marked out for pickleball, and were for tennis players only.

Like officious twits inculcated into the deep bureaucracy, both these people, a man and a woman, repeated regulations obviously culled straight from the recreation department charters and ignored me as I scalded them for taking over “our” tennis courts.

But I soon realized a cult as fanatical as pickleballers was impossible to reckon with, as they are prepared interlopers unabashed about planting themselves in foreign territory and, like an invasive species resistant to all manner of chemicals or poisonous toxins, they grow and grow and take over more and more territory, and the more they grow and take over territory the more entitled and arrogant and self-righteous and odious they become, until we tennis players can only resort to visiting intimidated officialdom at the local rec department and watch them shrug, shrivel up helplessly, shake their heads sadly and tell us there’s nothing they can do. 

Soon the intruding pickleball pukes begin batting the ball around and filling the neighborhood with obnoxious pongs, PONGS, PONGS!

Photo by Brendan Sapp on Unsplash

The two tennis players on Court 1, both of whom are friends I’ve hit with, seemed embarrassed and said nothing as I continued jawing at the enemy. To this attack the pickleballers scrabbled about as if preparing for the Olympics — perhaps the next goal of this noxious effluvium.

“Why don’t you go to the rec department if you wanna play ping pong?” I sneered.

“Why don’t you go to the high school if you want to play tennis,” said the man, snottily.

“Yeh!” said the woman.

“Because the high school courts are occupied on Saturdays,” I yelled. “A tennis group plays there! Maybe you can get the city to turn those courts into pickleball courts.”

I was growing faint with a rapid adrenaline-spun heart beat. I am 80, and cannot allow myself to even engage in verbal combat anymore. Rage no longer suits me.

Ethan showed up and, a man 18 years younger and much less scabrous and confrontational than I, walked right on court and began abusing the pickleballers with a concise vehemence I found shocking, yet envied.

“Look,” the guy finally said, holding his paddle. “The courts at Del Mar were full and we didn’t want to wait, and we need to practice, so we’ll only be here thirty minutes.” 

“Why can’t you wait at Del Mar?” I asked. “I thought waiting around was a big love fest with your cult. You can talk about how pickleball is saving American slugs.”

Again, they stopped and went through a list of rules and regulations that allowed them to use our tennis courts as “open to the public.”

Ethan continued berating them. I was thankful to have eloquent back-up. We double-teamed them, agreeing that if we made their thirty minutes a living hell, they would return to their cult grounds and warn everybody about the vicious psychos at the only playable tennis courts remaining in Morro Bay.

During a brief pause from our abuse, Ethan said to me, “You know, the local cult paid for those courts at Del Mar. I think it cost them around forty-grand. Pickleballers have money. Their cult has big money. They’re like a corporation. It’s like they have lobbyists fighting for them day and night, because they realize they’re despised, that they’re an invasive species, but they’re rich enough to pay for lawyers and lobbyists, because cults, once they get going, collect money like these evangelical religious leaders.”

“They drive luxury cars.” I retorted.

“And I hate to say it, but I think the majority are liberals—Lexus libs.”

“The kind of liberals that give us a bad name—snooty, corporate, wine-sipping, money-grubbing hypocrites who never have enough.”

“There’s no stopping them.”

We went back to abusing the pickleballers, but grew weary and sat down and waited, glowering at them as the wife or partner returned little lobs here and there and her hero dashed back and forth, back and forth, lathering himself up.

“Tennis used to be the snob sport,” I told Ethan. “Now we’re the outcasts – the bums. We have no backing. Nobody cares about our rights. That fucking cult is massive, and they’ve gained the upper hand. They’re winning. It’s like a pandemic, and we have no immunity.”

“What about the ones we used to play tennis with and were kind of friends?” Ethan asked.

“The converts are by far the worst. The born-agains are the most fanatical proselytizers. They’re unbearable.”

Ethan nodded. When the pickleball pukes finally finished, they strolled past us, heads held high in a manner of smug ownership, left the courts and headed for their vehicle.

“They know they’re winning,” Ethan commented glumly.

“That’s the worst part.

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos. His books, The Ballplayer’s Son, and Life on the Mississippi, are available on Amazon.

Praise for the Salty

Wanna nip? Just add water

He would observe the occasional wandering snake or feral cat passing along the dirt floor from one side of his shack to the other, past the row of bottles of booze he’d stored on some old wooden shelves

Photos and Story by Stacey Warde

I’ve known rascals, and loved some, too, those guys who thumb their noses at culture and the corporate value system that degrades humans (like a bad drug, or too much alcohol) and turns them into humanoid shells of greed and hubris.

Tam helped me to see what salt of the earth really means: Basically, people who have struggled, and sometimes thrive, on the fringes, along the margins and outskirts of fashion, and of what’s trendy like cold baths and avocado toast. He grew up beyond the reach of formal training and education, studying instead in books and magazines of his choosing, also in the hollows of wild pig dens and in the wide-open spaces of the Pacific ocean and fertile California farmland. His life trajectory spun him far and away from the familiar refrains of “how to get ahead” and “make it big” and “make a name for yourself,” which he already had in some circles, 86’d from more than one bar in his lifetime, no easy task. He scorned the chosen, acceptable path or standard, what is popularly sought after in our American culture of bozos and boosterism — notoriety, fame, money, security — and set his own course with his own rules. Some observers might interpret his indifference and way of life as low-brow, mean, and limited, a man with not much ambition. Just the opposite.

His mode of living might have appeared as if he didn’t love life; he did love life, on his terms. In fact, he was life, full of hardscrabble, grit, and grace. He lived closer to the cattle trails and cow pies of his chosen lifestyle than he did trying to be somebody who might be ok with recruiters and corporate hacks. His arc of life choices, for good or ill, stretched beyond the lies and false promises of a “good life” (who’s to say what that is?) in the US. He’d made it, as far as he was concerned.

“I wouldn’t trade this for all the money in the world,“ he’d say of his apparently rough circumstances, waving his arm across the open wild that was his front yard.

Salty people like Tam know how bad or good things can actually get, living close to the ground, and they appreciate how lucky they are, even though they’ve taken punches and blows, suffered setbacks, without worrying about “optics,” market share, bottom lines, or how much money they earn.

Their views and values haven’t been warped by a predatory corporate culture — owned and operated by vultures and wolves, we both agreed, of a sort more dangerous and cutthroat than one might find in the wild — people with major personality disorders, squeezing out the bitter juice of envy, greed, and corruption that makes America “great.” Salties have instead been shaped by real living, where sun and earth get under one’s skin and fingernails, and the juice tastes pretty good. There’s nothing like cutting into a ripe avocado to eat and fresh water to drink during a rest break under the shade of a forest of trees on a ranch in the middle of a hot California afternoon where the breeze feels fine and snakes slither off into the coolness of dried leaves. I doubt you can beat that on a New York holiday.

Tam was the salt that keeps life interesting and real, I knew it from the start, a modern-day Diogenes, far from time-wasting office politics and petty grievances that pepper and ruin the workplace; he was the Cayucos version of the Greek Dog from Athens, barking at distracted city fellows from his refuge in a wine jug to stop and breathe and enjoy life. He lived out loud from the moment I met him, unashamed of himself, often on the verge of drunkenness, and unconcerned about how to fit in; he lived the way he wanted to live, like Diogenes the Dog. Better to trek rattlesnake infested weeds than the halls of business filled with vipers and psychopaths. Most people who get ahead in America, he’d observe, are not well balanced. They don’t know how to live.

Neither, perhaps, do the salty ones, like Tam, with whom I am most familiar and most comfortable.

Flat out, with no sense of shame or embarrassment, when we first met, Tam told me he’s an alcoholic, didn’t mind being one, and in fact had learned not only how to be a functional drunk but had also acquired the expert knowledge to make his own booze, a master distiller, a skill he learned from his late father, a Morro Bay fisherman, and decided that living is fine, more than fine if you had the guts for it, but living without a batch of your own homemade whisky is no way to live at all.

He took great pride in his Scottish heritage, organizing and participating in rough-and-tumble Scottish games as a young man, self-reliant, fiercely independent, scornful of anyone who tried blowing smoke up his ass with promises of a better life, a “safe” and “easy” life of which he knew there was none. A man has to make his own way. That’s how it’s always been, he’d say, a lesson his father taught him raising a family as a commercial fisherman.

A Scotsman as devilish and feisty and short as a leprechaun, Tam lived in a dirt-floor shack that he loved and maintained just the way he wanted with its solar panels up top to power his lone analog tv and video player and some selected lights in a yard filled with scavenged treasures, tools, saws, tires, wood, a beater Honda that he rescued and drove with pride. “Forty miles to the gallon!” he boasted. “What the fuck do I need a new car for?”

He would observe the occasional wandering snake or feral cat passing along the dirt floor from one side of his shack to the other, past the row of bottles of booze he’d stored on some old wooden shelves, and he welcomed the fresh running spring water that fed his still; he was a modern day homesteader/hermit tucked into the quiet of an enormous open landscape filled with coastal oaks, willow, native scrub, invasive weeds, and running creeks, bothering no one, living his own life with no one to bother him. A world of his own where work and play were all the same.

We were employed by the same ranch outfit, a sprawling enterprise for cows and produce: He worked the cattle side, I worked in the orchards, mostly solo in our respective roles, and we got stuff done.

Tam plowed the nearby adjacent fields of the thousand-acre ranch and made sure we had plenty of feed to get us through the dry season, which was almost year-round in that parched part of coastal California.

I irrigated, pruned, and cut down trees, made burn piles in the enclosure where the bulls were kept until breeding time. The bulls, all nine of them, would surround me, nudging me out of their way, looking for green grub among the leavings, as I unloaded the trailer with my cuttings and piled them into the center of the field where I would burn them in the fall after they dried out.

Tam plowed the nearby adjacent fields of the thousand-acre ranch and made sure we had plenty of feed to get us through the dry season, which was almost year-round in that parched part of coastal California. Tam later taught me how to drive the fearsome Kubota tractor so I could mow the orchards in spring and help prep the fields for planting grasses for the cattle, which Tam managed in his own gleeful ranch hand way with a smile, a wave, and a bottle of homemade whisky. He repaired the ancient tractors and harvesters on site, and he loved every one of them, almost as if they were his own family, or old lovers.

“I’ve been inside and out of that tractor more than I’ve had pussy, and I’ve had plenty of that,” he’d say, pointing to the lone menacing machine standing stuck in the middle of the field — again. Damn thing nearly killed him once when it rolled over him, he said, bruising his insides and breaking nothing. “The doc said I got lucky on that one,” he said, “coulda killed me if it had rolled over my chest and rib cage. Just bruised my intestines is all.” During the off hours, we sat at an old picnic table in his big open yard by the creek, or on old ‘50s-style Formica table type of kitchen chairs with fat degraded padding, facing each other, telling stories blown way out of proportion, laughing like fools, refilling our glasses, rolling in the dirt, loving life.

Each time I got up for another pour, he’d say, “Make sure you add a bit of water. Whisky tastes better that way.”

We sat on the far opposite ends of the political spectrum too — he thought liberals were hypocritical bloodsuckers — yet we enjoyed good conversation. He would never go on disability or ask the government for anything. No handouts. Ever.

Able-bodied people had no business asking for handouts. The government can’t be trusted either, he’d add. So long as he could get out of bed after a night of eating out barflies and waking up to grapple with the tractors and feed the herd, and get paid, why do anything else? You’d be a fool and a loser to go on food stamps. Tam lived large, as an unapologetic conservative with no interest in the buttoned-down universe of Madmen.

“The oceans aren’t rising,” he argued in our sloshed conversations about climate change. He knew the oceans better than I, I figured, because as a youngster he’d worked as a fisherman up and down the West Coast from Alaska to Mexico. “If you take a glass and fill it with ice and water and watch the ice melt,” he’d say, “the glass won’t overflow. It’s the same with the oceans. If the polar caps melt, there won’t be any overflow. It’s basic science.”

The point being, he’d explain, that environmentalists were mostly a bunch of cry babies who don’t know how to have fun, don’t know what they’re talking about half the time, have little science or knowledge to back their claims, offer no reasonable/doable solutions, and only know how to make life difficult for those who are serious about earning a living, actually doing stuff instead of looking for an easy way out. I loved Tam.

Women, as salty and crusty as he was, with voices rough like sandpaper, and generally not my type, came often to visit, glad to have landed at Tam’s hideaway refuge on the ranch, away from the mean streets of Morro Bay or San Luis Obispo (which a friend and writer famously christened the “Golden Ghetto” after a series of unsolved murders of three women, including Kristin Smart) away from state highways crowded with tourists, happy to be a part of his inner circle, generous with hugs and kisses, drinking Tam’s home-spun whisky, with a place to spend the night, if necessary, where the floor was made of dirt and the bed always made for love.

Tam, ever the gracious and sometimes unpredictable host, loved a good talk and welcomed evenings watching a movie on his solar-powered VCR and rolling in the arms of a wanton woman. He fancied himself a lover. Once, during a drunken fit, he tried to molest my girlfriend, who nearly punched him in the face.

Often, during work hours, I’d see Tam driving the ancient murderous red tractor through the fields adjacent to the avocado and orange orchards where I worked making sure the irrigation lines were intact, not chewed down or leak-sprung by coyotes or jerked out of alignment by wild pigs, which ran everywhere, tearing up the ground beneath the trees and making an unholy mess of things, fouling the low-hanging fruit with mud and dirt.

“I had pigs all over my place one season,” a neighboring farmer once told me, “just tearing the place up. So, I went out one night and shot 30 of the bastards, thought I’d cleaned the place out. Next night, they were back at it again, I could hear them, and I went out and bagged 18 more pigs. You can’t win. They’re everywhere.”

Occasionally, on an outside turn in the field, Tam would drive the tractor over my direction to say hello, not far from the section of dirt road where I found what I thought at first, in my limited imagination, were the hideous footprints of an old hag and which turned out instead to belong to a bear. The ancient tractor, pulling an equally ancient seeder loaded up with new seed, made its chugga-chug-chugga-chug lurch through the freshly ripped clay soil as he approached. Then, Tam stopped the machine not far from where I stood. The thing coughed a final blow from its smoke stack to rest sputtering from farm work. He was seeding about seven acres, which would produce much-desired grass for the cows. “Wanna nip?” he shouted, his own voice raspy with age, as he reached into his back pocket to pull out a plain bottle half-full with his home brew of golden-blond whisky.

“Sure,” I said, taking the bottle. “Damn! That’s good.” The smell of freshly plowed earth, alcohol, red diesel, and last year’s hay passed between us as I handed back his stash. The tractor continued to cough and sputter.

“Have another nip!” he offered, leaning in my direction from his perch on the tractor, hand outstretched. “OK,” I said, taking the bottle once more.

“What’re you planting?” I asked.

“Sudan grass. It’ll survive any drought, made for dry climates, the desert, North Africa, and we get lots of feed from it. If we’re lucky, we might even get two harvests from this planting.”

I handed back his bottle. “That’s awesome. Thanks for the nip! You do good work, Tam. I’m pretty sure the cows love you for it. Maybe more than your lady friends.”

“Never!” he said. “Come on by later!” he added, “I just made a new batch.” He was proud of his craft. He fired up the tractor, saluted me with a wave of his arm and hand, as if he was riding a horse, and began to chugga-chug around the field again spreading Sudan grass seed.

My after-hours visits with Tam were always a good plan. I dropped back into the cool shadows of trees to finish pruning, anticipating another evening whisky chat with Tam, who schooled me on the value of being a man and a rascal and the good life as he saw it.

Stacey Warde is retired from his labors as a farmhand and remembers his work there with fondness.

Train stories

Love for theater, literature forms bond between ‘old fossil’ & student

I was going to a huge gala wedding shindig for a close nephew in a swank venue in downtown LA on Amtrak’s Surfliner. Photo by Stacey Warde

By Dell Franklin

We pulled out of the San Luis Obispo Train Station promptly at 6:11 in the morning, and for a couple of hours, at least, I had a seat with a view of the California coast and nobody beside me, until we stopped in Isla Vista, a UC Santa Barbara enclave for college students, who began piling onto the train, like a mini-stampede of young people heading home for the beginning of the Veteran’s Day weekend.

In my bag were the rolled up remnants of the only semi-respectable attire left in my closet. I wore shorts, a hoodie and sneakers. I had been taking notes as I always do on trains as I studied students seeming so young as to look like children.

It seems young college students are not only disinterested in conversing with old fossils, but have grown so inept socially they wouldn’t know how.

Then a young person stashed a bag above me and, without even glancing at me, sat down and turned partially away from me, withdrew a book (Salem’s Lot) by Stephen King from a smaller bag and began reading.

I continued taking notes. I was not affronted. It seems young college students are not only disinterested in conversing with old fossils, but have grown so inept socially they wouldn’t know how. I was at first unsure whether this was a small boy or girl by the attire—baggy cargo pants, hoodie, black leather shoes, dark hair cut fairly short, large rimless glasses.

But I noticed the hands were small and white and delicate, a girl’s hands.

I continued taking notes and, since she was turned away, the notes were mostly my conjecture about her. Then I put my notebook away and we stopped in Santa Barbara where more students piled on until there was standing room only, which meant for the rest of the trip to LA, people would be standing and awaiting vacancies at the next stops to grab seats.

Somewhere between Santa Barbara and Ventura, the gal beside me put the book back in her bag and withdrew writing material and began jotting notes.

“Are you a student?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said in a soft voice, turning to me. She was pretty, her expression pleasant, but presented no sexual edge whatsoever.

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“Theater arts,” she said.

I asked her if she acted in plays and also if she was a movie buff. She said she was. I asked her if she liked Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Edward Albee, and she said she did and that she had been in a play by Tennessee Williams in school but that lately she had been captivated by the Beat Generation writers, and especially Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. I asked: Did she like “Howl” by Ginsburg? Yes!  She loved it. The Beat poets were her favorites. Had she read Gary Snyder? Not yet.

I said I’d noticed her jotting notes and asked if she wrote, too, and she said that writing plays and stories and poetry was what she really wanted to do – and was doing. She then mentioned that she noticed that I was jotting notes and asked if I was a writer. I told her I was, and mentioned writing for a local online news and opinion outlet, and having a couple books out. 

Somehow, we began discussing just about everything literary. Our conversation transitioned from cautious to curious to comfortable to trusting.

She had originally gone to a small prestigious theater arts college in New York City that she loved, but then the pandemic hit and she was inside for days and weeks at a time and she has ADHD. She said ADHD made her think and do crazy things. She melted down in NYC and came home broken and desperate, saw a shrink, who put her on Prozac.

“That stuff’s horrible!” I expressed.

“I was on it two months and went crazy. I actually thought I could jump off tall buildings!”

“So what happened?”

“I went off it. My mother doesn’t believe in any drugs anyway. I went to junior college in Santa Monica, where I grew up. And lived with my mother. I did two years. I got back into the theater. They have a great program at Santa Monica JC. And now I’m at UCSB.”

“How do you like Santa Barbara?”

“I love it. It’s beautiful. I love where I live. I’ve made a lot of good friends.”

A lot was divulged, all on her part, about her mother, who is a divorcee and frustrated ex-hippie artist and lifelong CPA. Her father? Very little. In about an hour, I heard her life story—so far. She was a thoughtful, sweet, sensitive young person, probably around 21, who had nevertheless struggled, but was doing better; yet I wondered about her future, as I know nothing of ADHD and what it does to people in the world in which we currently dwell.

All this trauma kind of stuff is new to me. Did not exist in my youth as a teenager or college student or young soldier in the Army, before there was PTSD. Looking back, it seemed all of us were somewhat “fucked up” one way or the other, but we just plowed ahead, did a lot of boozing, survived as best we could.

When we arrived at the magnificent Union Station in LA, we said our goodbyes and finally asked each other’s name.

“I’m Shel,” she said.

“Oh, like Shelly…?”

A shake of the head, and a firm, “No, Sheldon.”

I was not surprised. I don’t understand much of what’s taking place these days, but one couldn’t find a more pleasant and stimulating encounter on a train than this young person–whoever you are.

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif. The Surfliner leaves for San Diego from the San Luis Obispo Train Station, just minutes away, first thing in the morning every day 

Living too small?

I’m finally beginning to understand

Diogenes the Cynic could rock the boogie, once telling Alexander the Great to “please step aside; you’re blocking my sun.”

By Stacey Warde

Since arriving here two months ago to take refuge at mom’s I realize how small I’ve lived: Feeling watched, under a microscope, careful not to err. Forming unclear, fluid boundaries. Staying small to avoid upsetting others. It’s all coming clear. Is this where it all started?

Finally, at 65, I’ve realized, “Wow! I gave up a lot, mostly my own soul, power and dynamism, to please people who were never going to be happy with me, no matter how hard I tried.” Early on, I adopted the “good Christian” approach to life, which made sense, given the culture in which I grew up: Sacrifice. Sacrifice. Sacrifice. Give until you lose yourself. Which, I’ve learned, is bad, really bad. The flip side of that equation, of course, is not giving enough. Which is also bad.

And what did I accomplish with that approach? Not much. Lots of lost time, toxic heartbreak. Redundancies, not the most favorable kind, mistakes, mostly. Some luck. Yes, a lot of the good in my life came solely from luck, and a little bit from making healthy choices. Also, from pursuing what I love, even when material rewards were limited.

I’ve heard it said that the way to success comes by welcoming failure not by actively pursuing success; “fail as often as you can,” the saying goes, “until you get it right.” If nothing else, I say, be persistent and learn from your mistakes, which is really the same thing. So what if you’ve little to show for it? The important thing is effort, and endurance (in today’s vernacular, “resilience”). That’s how one lives large — by enduring, putting in the effort, no matter how seemingly impossible the task, and keeping one’s wits, not falling into the trap of emotional attachments to “success” as defined by others.

My ideal life at this late stage would be to become a sage, though by most measures that’s impossible. Diogenes the Cynic is my primary model of the day, but I would not live entirely as he did, taking shelter in a massive wine jug that was popular some 2,500 years ago, parked in a public place, defecating and masturbating there with little care for or acknowledgement of community standards; however, I do embrace calling out, as he did, all the posers who think they are something when they are not, and seeking out honest people, those who live according to nature, and who don’t subscribe to the false coinage or customs of the time but according to their own deeper thought-out purpose.

Apparently, Diogenes, a sage by any standard and who held up his own character, virtue, and self-sufficiency against any and all who might challenge him, could rock the boogie, once telling Alexander the Great to “please step aside; you’re blocking my sun.” Alex, a protector of the Greek city of Corinth where Diogenes held court, had heard of the wise curmudgeon’s exploits and wanted to see the man for himself. As he stood there, likely expecting to be worshiped as a god, Alexander asked the old man, “Hey, you know me, conqueror of the known world. Is there anything I can do for you, bro?”

“Yes! Absolutely! Please step aside!”

How does one “get it right” in a world changing as rapidly as this one, when more and more of what we know to be true gets tossed aside for the latest fad in technology or social media? When all the world seems riveted by celebrity, wealth, and fame?

I’m still adjusting, reinventing myself with what little time I have left, stepping aside whenever necessary to let the warming light shine through, focusing on what is most essential and real rather than getting lost in the detail of false narratives and the conjured morality and supposed superiority of con artists and “influencers” who do not contribute to the overall well-being of those they influence.

I’m still failing in these attempts at living well and being free. And, I hope, I’m learning. I’m lately discovering the deep dark world, as we’ve been informed by the experts, of things like AI and other promising yet untested new technologies. Lessons can be painful. As I imagine it was for Alexander when he learned that he stood in the “great” man’s way. Alexander, we are told, when his soldiers laughed at the foolish old man living in a wine jug, supposedly hushed his men and said, “If I were not Alexander, I would rather be Diogenes.” Me too.

And, as some other wiser folk have said, what good comes of boasting, especially when boasting of things that were not earned, things like good looks, old money, health, and other inheritances that came merely as an accident of birth? And, even if you worked your ass off and acquired by your wit and luck more wealth, celebrity, or fame than you could ever possibly use, what good does boasting prove? It accomplishes little, and shows that one has not yet really “arrived,” or become a sage — which we all need in our lives — or found any lasting freedom. Yet, boasting and “influencers,” people on the make, trying to be “successful,” are everywhere we look.

I watched a YouTube video of a half-naked “influencer” dressed in a skimpy cheerleader’s outfit attempting to justify her slutty presence on a high school campus by pulling the old “do you know who I am” trick? The people shooting the video didn’t know and didn’t care, and instead tried to persuade her that she was in the wrong place (in view of the high school football team) to broadcast her sexy influencer status. I would not put her in the class of iconoclasts like Diogenes, protesting false coinage or tired old maxims, but would question the value, as does commentator Joey B., of her contribution to the betterment of the world.

I want to boast too, but can’t find a place for it, not in my past or even so-called accomplishments, which will soon enough be forgotten. What are they, exactly? Just stuff. I have stuff. I’ve done stuff. SO. WHAT. The devil’s in the details, and there’s plenty of detail in me that doesn’t amount to much, certainly not for boasting. I excel and often go overboard while attempting to please others. I guess I can boast about that; the devil, however, appears most often when I lose my sense of self in the effort to “be” somebody, and liked by others.

I’m codependent, meaning I have acquired and mostly lived a toxic approach to life, depending on others for status, connecting with them by doing more than is necessary to get their attention and approval. I have little to boast of because I haven’t been very good at setting clear boundaries to keep the meddlers and naysayers (the most annoying creatures I’ve ever met) at bay, holding them at a distance, creating a safe space for myself, to do what I love unmolested by those who think I should be doing something else.

I spent most of my years growing up seeking approval instead of persisting in my own particular and/or peculiar interests and curiosities, which weren’t always in alignment with my parents’ 1950s outlook on life. For the most part, I did not share my parents’ traditional values or interests like cleaning the car every weekend. Another example, when granola became a popular food item in the 1970s my parents thought it was weird and gross, and I loved the stuff, even if most people associated it with “dirty” hippies and annoying whiny tree huggers. I found my way, slowly, laboriously, learning to love what others decried as deficient or “weird.”

Traditions and values come and go. Granola is everywhere now. So, I guess, are half-naked “influencers” who claim to make a living, and the world a better place, by taunting perverts.

Growing up and during my years as an adult, not aspiring “influencer” status, I hid myself, the part of me that dreams and wonders, the part that wants to scream and shout and play music and dance and fuck and act silly. I hid because I needed to be practical in this “practical” world and, as dad would say, use good common sense to navigate its often treacherous obstacles. (By “good” I think he meant not criminal. By “common” he’d say, “It’s not so common.”)

I’ve been busy since relocating to this concrete jungle, from which I fled almost 40 years ago, working in mom’s yard, attempting to garner some appreciation and love from mom, who’s in her 80s and appears generally happy, though she seems to “putter” less in the yard and reads more books on the porch these days.

I set out each day to do what I love, starting with meditation and gardening, sometimes yoga, and recovering from the culture shock of moving here after nearly three decades of a quiet rural life.

Yes, I’ve returned out of necessity to what is referred to in the neighborhood as the “Concrete Jungle’’ (Orange County, Calif., where my family first settled more than 150 years ago, and agriculture ruled. My great-grandfather, Joseph Smith Thurston — was there ever a more Mormon name than that? — grew and sold the popular “Thurston” watermelons at Laguna’s Main Beach on hot summer days, long before the automobile became the predominant OC archetype).

I try not to be a “people pleaser” any more, hard as that is to avoid, and hope instead that what I’m doing now, limited as it seems, is ok. I have yet to fully reacclimate to an Orange County that feels like a foreign country with its endless freeways and rush to go nowhere in the most expensive cars money can buy.

Mom’s garden is tired from the neglect that comes with age. I’m happy to give it a new life. It makes her happy too.

Stacey Warde has returned to the Concrete Jungle, where he was born and raised. This essay appeared first on Medium.

Unfair wages hurt the newsroom

By Stacey Warde

As a young journalist starting out, I’d been warned: “There’s no money in it.”

I shrugged.

What’s that to me? I’m not trying to corner any market. I’m a journalist, a truth seeker. Ever know anyone who made money ferreting out truth, bringing the light of day into the shadowy world of politics? This was in the early 1980s, not long after I’d graduated from the School of Communications at Cal State Fullerton.

I was an idealist, smitten with the idea of the power of the pen. Who needs money when you have a sword at your fingertips? What’s the old saying? “He may have all the gold, but I’ve got all the lead,” meaning gold won’t be of much use against someone better equipped with the right weapons.

And that’s what I did with my training and experience, putting money-grubbing, corrupt lawyers and politicians on notice that the power of the press was a force to be reckoned with. They may have had all the gold, but I had all the lead.

Indeed, the power of the pen was a force to be reckoned with. I saw more than one supposed community stalwart, the presumed “movers and shakers,” exemplars of local virtue, even one of our biggest advertisers, go down in flames for lying and stealing other people’s money in spite of the appearance they gave of being good citizens. We nailed their misleading, false claims to wealth and virtue with basic journalistic instincts, fundamental digging, verification, truth, accuracy, and the power of the pen.

However, I also began to notice later in my career the inequities present in the business of journalism itself.

As managing editor, I observed one morning coming into work that the finest cars in the newspaper parking lot belonged to the advertising staff; the junkiest heaps, including mine, belonged to the editorial staff. Why?

All the perks and financial rewards, mostly given in sales commissions, went to those who sold the most ads. Meanwhile, my staff, which worked just as hard to create content that attracted readers and advertisers in the first place, took the leftover crumbs.

I argued for more equitable standards with the publisher, who agreed with me that there wouldn’t be much for the ad reps to sell without compelling content created by the editorial staff. “It’s all about the readership,” he’d say, nodding and affirming my concerns.

Meanwhile, he suggested, I could draw from the pool of money given in trade by some of the paper’s advertisers, primarily restaurants and those in the food business, to reward my people for their hard work. So, presumably, I could cut a check for dinner for two on occasion as a way to inspire and motivate my hardworking reporters. We still drove the junkiest cars in the lot. Virtually nothing changed with respect to the balance of power that comes with a healthy paycheck.

Soon after my conversation with the publisher, I checked the pool and discovered at least $3,000 in restaurant trade available to draw from; satisfied, I went back upstairs to my office and planned to reward several of my staff with a night out on the town. Several days later I went to cut a check for some of my people and discovered the account had been drained, leaving a zero balance, taken up by the ad staff who had apparently treated themselves to endless free lunches on the company dime.

So, not only were they earning more in commissions for their efforts but had long been in the habit of treating themselves to free lunches from the company coffers. How convenient.

This, however, is the way it has always been in my experience; this is why labor in several industries is on strike, protesting the unfairness of management and corporate executives living off the backs of those who do the heaviest lifting, executives who, without much remorse and plenty of self-righteous justification, take in the lion’s share of profit, earning millions while labor gets what little is left over.

Ford Motor Co. CEO, Jim Farley, for example, earned close to $21 million last year, which is roughly $54,000 a day, or about $12,000 a day less than what the average auto worker earns in one year.

The advice offered early in my career proved to be correct, there wasn’t much money in journalism, unless you were an owner or principal in the business. The big dollars were reserved for others, mostly salespeople and executives whose business acumen apparently was more deserving than the hard-working reporters pounding the streets to get the best, most relevant, and latest news affecting the entire community.

This notion, that wealth can be obtained by any means necessary, but mostly by limiting the income of labor, enabling executives to enrich themselves off of the backs of others, — those lesser individuals who were not smart or lucky enough to attend the best schools and land the best jobs — permeates our culture and is one reason why we see more of our brothers and sisters marching the streets and demanding fair wages.

Stacey Warde edited and published The Rogue Voice, a literary print magazine with an edge, from 2004–2008. Previously, he was managing editor of New Times, San Luis Obispo. He also has been a member of the Teamsters Union and the National Writers Union.