A lot of stuff has changed in Santa Clara County since I started writing Byebye and Shlort in 2015. At that time the big break for downtown’s homeless former foster youth was still Martha’s Kitchen. Now there are the shower trucks, and other stuff I’m probably no longer hip to.
Now Dave Cortese is announcing that Santa Clara County former foster youth will receive new financial support for a year, branded ever so trendily as “universal basic income” or “UBI,” as they age out of the foster system. What hasn’t changed is people’s callousness toward and judgment of former foster youth, which is like having a felony or something. Statistics, video, etc. on foster youth’s ending up homeless is widely and easily available on the internet.
The catch is that individuals must make it all the way to 24 before eligibility for the $1000/month support for one year. There’s enough for 72 individuals so far. The article linked above is worth reading in its entirety. I would embed a video on the subject but it’s only on Facebook, so.
Tag Archives: history
Consumer Consensus 2020: Education Unimportant Before Ego
The self-esteem police have decreed consensus!
A person’s routine, comfort and reality tunnel must not be disturbed by any world-historic struggle or growth, including the education systems required for such to work, lest the self-esteem suffer! This hits a variety of issues, such as cop lynching, whether to wear a mask outside amid an epidemic and how to face our own history (in our case, not at all!! Ha ha!!!), for just a few examples.
LIFE HACK: Put another statue next to the non-white-fragility one, which serves exclusively to explain the other one! Have you been anywhere outside the US??? We need more monuments, not less!!
Oscar from downtown
This morning I ran into Oscar. He looked about 65. Asked me how far I’d gone on my bike and I said only about 13 miles, just down to a plant spot and back. He said he once rode his bike to Reno, a two and a quarter day ride, and arrived in time to turn 21. He said he got super drunk in Reno.
I asked him if he could ride on 80 back then and his response wasn’t clear as he was changing the subject but I think he said yes. He said he’d been in the army as a youth, stationed in Germany, as a mechanic. He put seven years in at Sunsweet Prunes running the pitter machines, and they didn’t want to see him go when he left because he knew how everything ran. He was unclear whether this was before or after the army.
He said he’d gone to catechism right here downtown. Then he said that he’d been caring for his parents here downtown until they died, one at 83 and the other at 85.
When they died about a year ago (2019), he said that the city took the house and he didn’t know why. But they lived right on 87 and the city had taken all the rest down so they wanted his parents’. He didn’t get it because they owned the home outright. I speculate there could be a few reasons for this that Oscar didn’t know. He said that now he sleeps in the park.
He asked me for some help because he’d been drinking nothing but water all day. I told him good, he should drink water, and then gave him 3 bucks plus half the nectarines I’d just plundered down the street. Our neighborhood produces apricots, peaches, plums, pomegranates and avocados that put everything you ever bought in the store or from a CSA box to shame, in the purely super-organic nature of neglect and good weather.
Oscar said he’d pay me back and I said just tell me more stories next time. He had presumably everything he has on a walker, and walked slowly with a hunch to his neck. His clothes and stuff were in order and only the top of his hair was thinning, handsome, probably Italian, beard and mustache getting long.
UPDATE 9.11.20
Ran into Oscar again tonight at the park, about 50 degrees F and getting down to 38 tonight. Didn’t recognize him at first all bundled up, and I guess I forgot his voice already.
He was a little less coherent than I remember from last time, more repetition, but that could just be the pace of his day. He was on the bench and started the conversation asking me to pick up a trashed Modelo so it wouldn’t get smashed and hurt kids in the playset, because he could barely bend down with his walker and all. Said the VA set him up to the walker.
Before I realized who he was, Oscar told me that he was staying the park, didn’t want to go to the VA to sleep because he didn’t want to get in fights, and there were prejudiced people there. Didn’t want to walk down to the fairgrounds for the quarantine housing, doesn’t like the bus because you have to fight for a place to sit. So he was bundled up to stay on the bench.
He repeatedly kept the talk going by saying that he was drafted in ’72, was born here on Prevost, went to Gardner, went to Woodrow (Wilson), then to Lincoln High, graduated in 1969 and drafted in ’72. He said he was in the army in Berlin until 1979 and divorced his wife meanwhile for cheating on him, so he has two daughters right down off Lincoln whom he has little seen, and said he lost the address since I’d begun by asking if he couldn’t go stay with one of them to warm up. He said one is thirty and one is twenty-six. The whole timeline is fuzzy due to his use of the present tense a lots of junctions in the story, so I’m not going to argue.
Just before I found out that we’d already met, I asked about his loss of his dad’s house after he died, thinking that he was someone else and trying to test if there were some pattern in San José for people losing their parents’ houses at death. This time Oscar said that his dad had sold the place to the city for the land before he died. Oscar had used his army money to help his dad buy the place whenever that was, and had the house landscaped, et cetera.
Then came the theme of bad legs. Oscar has tendonitis, “and you know that travels,” and says they’ve wanted to cut his legs since he was in his twenties. He said before that that his dad had been a carpenter and had injured his legs to the point where doctors had wanted to amputate his legs for gangrene. Oscar said that his dad had survived the gangrene, or else was out of sequence with my question, and at 85 he had “had enough” and Oscar took took him to the doctor essentially to have him put down. Again, I’m just writing what he said.
I told him how I’d been involved with German beer and he asked if I still drink. I know he was trying to be polite to ask for a hand with some beer. I gave my usual lament that my system can’t handle anything anymore from total stress and lack of exercise, so it has to be “expensive” (ie., Sierra or German) or else I don’t enjoy the trip that much. He said he was drinking (lately? earlier?) 8.1, I have no idea what that is but it doesn’t sound goo. Later on he asked for beer money, but I didn’t have my wallet so I didn’t give him any. He had a few cans in a bag to recycle, and a dead lotto ticket. I’m glad he has VA benefits but sure wish he’d use them.
David Mejia’s Before and After Thanksgiving
Finally, finally made it to the fourth floor of my beloved King Library, after a bitter monthlong absence, to be shit last in seeing San José old hand David Mejia’s exhibition Before and After Thanksgiving. It’s a painting (watercolor, right?) exercise and a modest history lesson. Mejia has been pushing his stuff for years. One of my favorites is the profane and puerile Ballman. It’s excellent that he’s getting some love at the library. Go see the paintings before November 30! I’ll let the paintings speak for themselves:
Low-res, off-center photos posted for collegiality and appreciation only. I really dig the playful but purposeful use of color and the comic book-style planning in general. It gives an emotional directness needed by the subject, just as an improvised shamanic performance would in a more advanced culture than our own.
I also like how he mentioned using fish as fertilizer in poor soils, because it reminded me of the many years of my life I spent wondering why the fuck, as it said in some school textbook of mine, they “planted fish.”
David Mejia
Elephant Hanged Twice in 2016 For Resisting
Originally posted on Alafair: A hundred years ago, an elephant named Mary was strung up by a crane and publicly hanged to death in a Tennessee town after she struck back at a circus employee who hit her with a sharp tool called a bullhook. It took two attempts to kill Mary. The first chain…
Días de la selva por Mario Payeras
Acabo de leer este relato en peligro de olvido sobre los esfuerzos de Payeras y su diminuta guerrilla para enseñar letras, organizar y retribuir tierras en las aisladas regiones indígenas del noroeste de Guatemala comenzando en 1972. Me llamó la atención desde una pila de libros en la venta bibliotecaria, y supe de inmediato que el libro me iba a fascinar.
Se trata de la guerrilla que tras años terminaría con nombre de Ejército general de los pobres (EGP) que espantó tanto al puñado de ricos de origen española y estadunidense que controlaban vastas tierras, enriqueciéndose con el labor de indígenas analfabetos, como usted el lector capitalista se engorda con las fresas pizcadas a espaldas rotas aquí en Santa María, Salinas y Guatsón.
Para mí la cumbre del relato fue cuando matan al dueño explotador de una finca sin tocar un centavo de la paga que interrumpieron. El libro incluye cuando posible a vocablos indígenas para cosas comunes de la selva. Me gustó mucho su medida distancia con la que dibuja los personajes y acontecimientos, que deja sitio para ironía, cariño, espanto y la todoimportante autocrítica marxista. Me asombraron también las descripciones de esos personajes ocultos en las aldeas de la selva, a cuyos tiques y característicos personales Payeras describió con tanta atención y humor.
Realmente nada más se necesita decir del libro en 2017 aparte de ésto: imagínense que ahora casi nada se ha mejorado en Guatemala pese a los esfuerzos relatados en el libro, y que hoy en día gringos pendejos de Berkeley de California hacen su eco- y café-turismito en esa misma región guatemalteca en busca del café perfecto para sus fair-trade non-profits de mierda…
Recomiendo el libro a todo quien tiene ganas de aprender más de la historia de resistencia indígena, o sea de revolución, y a quien luchara con la Mockingjay, con el ejército de Dumbledore, etc etc etc.
Sense Magazine 1971
So old man Tommy upstairs finally died a few months ago and, as he had no family left except an equally ancient and doubtlessly equally arthritic brother in Japan, my dick landlord hired a company to clean out his apartment. His whole life went into a dumpster. I could write a whole essay cycle on just that, but I won’t now. Anyhow I got to go in his thoroughly pre-internet, archival apartment and tried to get whatever I could that caught my eye.
He had a voluminous shelf of Chinese and Japanese cookbooks, tons of 1980s-1990s TIME-type jingoistic/uncritical photographic folios that we all pored over as kids looking for answers that weren’t there, ring binders full of local history and newspaper clippings (a post on that coming soon), city and county pamphlets on health and aging and disaster preparedness and shit, and sundry stuff such as what you see below.
Above is the cover of Sense Magazine. This wasn’t the metrosexual men’s Cosmopolitan of the current decade, but “the portable marriage counselor,” a “sociological” publication by Academy Press of San Diego, volume 1 issue 2, from January 1971. I’m not sure how much WordPress cares about nudity and stuff so I might not scan in pages. In any case, it’s basically a hardcore full-penetration etc. skinmag BUT with clinical explanations for everything –you can practically hear the voice of Art Gilmore reading it –adjacent to the photos, and you had to really want it, because in 1971 it cost $5 when for that you could see Zeppelin and remain to learn firsthand about fellatio, cunnilingus, fetishes, orgasm, lesbianism and male homosexuality.
Without scanning photos, we can say that the fun part is not the repetition of sex photos but the weird Marin County tone of self-whatever and openness (the woman’s biting her nipple with a fucking fake skull and what’s more that NEVER gets explained) that pervades the magazine. It swings between matter-of-fact, which is good, and a certain uncomfortable distance; you know, that avuncular voice from the mid-20th century of a middle-aged guy hired to sound smart about this shit who privately wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
There is ample mention of totally hipster-level trends of the time such as “What is the ampallang?” and “Are these really adequate substitutes for the male penis?” It quotes experts as much as possible, such as obviously Kinsey as well as Sexual Actions and Reactions by Burch Robbins.
What’s more, a certain photo of two women using a vibrator shows a huge battery pack on the back of the thing obscuring the one woman’s privates, like you’d see today on an orbital sander, and the metal label is hard to read but I thought it said Sylvania or Swingline. What logo is that??? At least I found out in the research for this little blog post that there is a vintage vibrator museum on Polk in SF that I’ve shamefully never visited. I’ll get my life in order in 2017 yet!
The only really heavy part is the series of fuck photos dedicated to incest, which are of course staged, accompanying the straight-faced explanation of that phenomenon. However there are awesome payoffs, such as the headings “Isn’t the Bible full of incest?” and “And what about incest among the Borgias?” If this is a question that anyone on the street would’ve asked on the topic of incest in 1971, that is proof that our current education system is catastrophically off-track.
Oddly enough, we can’t find a dang thing about this magazine on the internet. It appears to have disappeared off the face of the earth, not that this is surprising. All we can hope is that couples looked at the pictures to get in the mood to do it, and that the shameless swingers who must’ve started this silly magazine helped prevent some people from getting divorced or whatever, though it’s more likely that they used it to attract people who were into throwing power-orgies of epic proportion.
If anyone wants this magazine, please comment and I’ll gladly mail it as I’ve already read it for its historical import and am over it. If you want it and you are Thomas Pynchon, you can count on my discretion.
Reproduction Cycle of Unicellular Life Forms Under the Rocks of Mars
This is one of the early films by Ivan Stang, preacher of the Church of the Subgenius. Just going to leave it here so yall pinks can learn something. Give yourself some slack and watch the video!
Eugenio Negro Comics 