On an MSNBC interview today, some Republican fossil jovially proclaimed that birth control is a simple matter: all “gals” need to do is put an aspirin between their knees and hold it there. Boy, does that take me on a trip down memory lane! The line dates back to my pre-teen years, before abortion had been legalized and when birth control pills were newly on the market. I’ll venture a guess that it’s unlikely to be widely popular, circa 2012, in a country where individuals tend to pride themselves on their rights to personal freedom. News flash: Women are people too! Even Republican women!

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured quietude.

Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep
Where only body’s laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind;
Yet he who treads in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!

 While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth’s consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

It can be taken as an article of faith that if there’s a dumb idea with any chance of making money, sooner or later someone will try to exploit it. I was at Target buying sundry things the other day, when I came across a display of items designed to look like “Apps” for various minor ailments. Sort of like a cross between generics and plastic junk:

Somehow, I doubt this will turn into the Next Big Thing. Help® — I just took a razor and slashed up my inner arms!

There’s something exhilarating about the start of a new year. It must be the psychological construct of a blank slate, but the effect is no less tangible for stemming from an abstract idea. Here’s to new beginnings! It’s a presidential election year, which means we should be in for an entertaining ride. This year, in particular, American culture is due for a major league reckoning. Things could get interesting, quite quickly.

Item:

“Orinda has some of the Bay Area’s worst roads, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, but how to repair them—and the storm drains beneath—has proved elusive.

“The city has spent $15.5 million on roads since 2000, enough to repave arterial and collector streets but not residential roads. Bond measures in 2006 and 2007, for $59.1 million and $58.6 million, respectively, fell short of voter approval…

“…Roads are rated from 0 to 100 on what is known as the “pavement condition index,” or PCI. A rating above 80 qualifies a street as “excellent.” Less than 50 is “at risk.” Less than 30 is “failed.”

“Orinda’s overall PCI is 49.”

– West County Times, 10/25/11

Having grown up in Orinda, this doesn’t surprise me at all. Orinda’s residential roads snake for miles over and around so many hills and through such a tumble of enchanted glades that the greater surprise would be if civilization had indeed succeeded in taming them all. Two roads on the route from the Village up to the Tilden Park stables, which I became acquainted with during my first few years of driving, fell to nature years ago. One connects El Toyonal, the main thoroughfare, to Wildcat Canyon Road, and is probably fenced off for safety reasons to reduce wear and tear. From outward appearance it’s not in too bad shape, and I expect it could be opened in case emergency exit routes from the densely packed neighborhood were needed.

The other road, last time I was up there, looked straight out of a Disney cartoon, the sort of setting where dark branches loom overhead, spooky eyes wink open and shut from the shadows, and a motley assortment of signs warns TURN BACK! or DANGER! or BRIDGE OUT—ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! It used to be an innocuous little arc of a shortcut that shaved about five minutes’ driving time off El Toyonal’s sinuous loops, but somewhere along the way the Orindans failed to maintain it, and the elements took over. Now both ends are blocked off with ROAD OUT notices posted, and tree roots creep around broken chunks of what used to be pavement.

Back during the housing boom in the 1960s, some developer got the idea to build a bypass route from Highway 24 out to Moraga, in the open space between the Caldecott Tunnel and the Orinda exit that backs up to Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in the Oakland hills. The theory was that an alternate route would ease the commute bottleneck on Moraga Road’s two lanes, but the tradeoff was that yet another housing development would sprawl over the rolling hills through which the new road would run. The project was to be a “gateway” out to the Moraga/Rheem area, and, amidst much fanfare, freeway on-ramps and off-ramps for the proposed “Gateway Boulevard” through what was to be “Gateway Valley” were constructed. Then the development plans hit a snag, and the Gateway Boulevard exits sat for decades as roads to nowhere—except for the use of the exit in one direction as a quick detour around freeway traffic. If cars were backed up going west on Highway 24 after the Orinda exit, those in the know would exit at Gateway Blvd., take a left at the stop sign, and then merge right back into the traffic just before the tunnel entrance, thereby avoiding about a ten-minute delay (a practice that continues to this day).

Things began to pick up after Orinda incorporated in the mid 1980s. A few years later, Berkeley Shakespeare Festival pulled up its roots from John Hinkel Park, renamed itself the California Shakespeare Festival, and built a new outdoor theater in the valley across the freeway from Gateway Valley. The formerly unnamed location was dubbed “Siesta Valley,” and the Gateway Blvd. signs on that side of the freeway were renamed “Shakespeare Theater Way.”

In 2004, after years of litigation hard-fought by a group of longtime Orindans led by a feisty, 70-something environmentalist, development in Gateway Valley finally started up again. Under a settlement agreement that the Golden Gate Audubon Society and the Sierra Club signed onto, 80% of the lavish proposed designs, which included a golf course and conference center, were ditched in favor of a scaled-back development that would cede the majority of the open space to the East Bay Regional Parks District and East Bay MUD in perpetuity. It was the best arrangement that could be hoped for, under the circumstances.

Now, amidst the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, as mass protests about economic injustice sweep the land, homes are being pitched to young professionals with prices starting at a baseline of $1.5 million. A polished marketing campaign promotes the idea that the right price will unlock a gateway to having it all—a safe, old-fashioned, small town community, country club amenities nearby, close access to unspoiled nature AND the freeway, and state-of-the art luxury homes. In the sort of cosmic joke that makes it difficult for honest, hard-working satirists to earn a living, the development has been named “Wilder.” The former Gateway Blvd. signs have been upgraded to read “Wilder Road.”

I suppose there’s a poetic justice, of sorts, in the idea that at least some of the proportionally higher property taxes the people buying into the “Wilder” brand will pay will go towards subsidizing repair of some wilder areas of old Orinda. At the end of a long, winding, cracked and pothole-strewn road into some interior canyon, under an oak canopy where California laurel scents the air and the locals know to tread lightly, I imagine the dryads and other folk of the woodland realm are enjoying a good laugh.

I’ve been thinking about my observation the other day that forty-something women wearing fashions popular among the twenty-something crowd look foolish. Since my rigorous, scientific study to date includes exactly two Hollywood celebrities, it’s a rather small statistical sampling for drawing broad conclusions. However, I note that neither Laura Linney nor Jennifer Aniston has children. Even in this “anything goes” age, perhaps a trace of social stigma still lingers in the idea of women competing with their daughters (or daughters-in-law) in the age-old meat market.

Scratch the surface, and the picture begins to clarify. The mini-skirt message appears to be “I’m still as sexy as ever,” which is Hollywood’s primary preoccupation, after all. But it’s part and parcel of the terminally adolescent “mine’s bigger than yours” mentality that has a pathological lock on too much of our cultural functioning. Laura Linney is a fine, intelligent actress, and it would be nice to think she didn’t feel the need to broadcast the idea that her sexuality is the most interesting thing about her. I’m less familiar with Jennifer Aniston’s work; from my vantage point she seems primarily known for playing Debbie Reynolds to Angelina Jolie’s Elizabeth Taylor. Which lends a slightly pathetic note to the scantily clad, stiletto heeled look post the 4-0 mark.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think women in their forties who wear mini-skirts look ridiculous. Jennifer Aniston is the one who usually comes to mind, but at last night’s Emmy awards Laura Linney was up there flashing her mid-thighs for all the world to see. Ewwww. Admittedly, I came of age during the hippie era, which introduced a huge set of its own baggage to ideas of female imagery. But I’m struck by how thoroughly the “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” backlash to the women’s liberation movement of yesteryear has permeated our perennially adolescent culture. This has nothing to do with prudishness, and everything to do with finding maturity sexy. Style is cool. People over forty trying to look like they’re twenty-somethings isn’t.

“When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.”

I usually either flat-out disagree with conservative columnist David Brooks or find his analyses naive and short-sighted. But he’s an intelligent, well-meaning person, which is more than I can say about most Republicans in the public eye at this point. And he’s spot-on in this recent column about the broader social implications of the lack of clear moral values amongst “the younger generation.” As happens on a cyclical basis in American culture, the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.

I heard the news of terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC on the clock radio as I was waking up the morning of September 11, 2001. I lay in bed for a few minutes trying to take it in, and then got up to check the Internet. I couldn’t get a connection, so I went into my teenaged son’s bedroom and turned on the television. He woke up to the image of the burning towers and my jumbled explanation of what had happened. A few minutes later, we watched the first tower crumple to the ground.

“There were people in that building,” I said. There wasn’t much else to do but go fix breakfast and try to gain some sense of normalcy to the day.

It has been an extraordinarily busy ten years for me ever since, and I honestly haven’t spent much time reflecting on the events of what is now known as 9/11. But major anniversaries are a good time for reflection. George W. Bush, whose presidency was floundering, found his calling that day, and his puppet-masters behind the scenes found the cover they needed to go on offense with half-baked, ideological dreams of grandeur. Seven horrendously destructive years later, the country radically shifted gears and elected the first African-American president, a long-held liberal dream. I like Obama a lot and believe he has done an extraordinary job under impossibly stressful circumstances these past three years, but his relative inexperience wielding power has caused problems that perhaps weren’t inevitable. Still, he’s a smart, honorable man, and the best leader we’ve got to help us muddle through the current mess.

Ten years on from 9/11, old systems and institutions around the globe are in a state of turbulence, and life sometimes seems more chaotic than ever. But I’m continually struck by how much strength, resilience and good will there is down on the ground in ordinary life. I have faith that we will get through this and emerge stronger than ever. There are times, though, when I wish it was easier to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

I didn’t watch the Republican debate last night because I have a low threshold of tolerance for watching wack jobs be treated as if they were rational, functional members of society. I’m glad to see that the race appears to be quickly narrowing down to a contest between Mitt Romney, representing the party’s sane adult wing, and Rick Perry, representing the whoop-de-do crowd (and proud of it). I would like to believe a majority of the country’s voters wouldn’t be so dumb as to get fooled again by another loudmouthed, swaggering Texan with a sketchy relationship to fact and reason, but, as H. L. Mencken once said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Sigh… This would be more enjoyable to watch if I had more faith that the better angels of our nature would ultimately prevail.