My Bedroom Renovation

Sneedy & Bunny,

As you two are the only folks from the Girlfriend E-mail Club who have been intrepid enough to have actually  slept in my bedroom, I'm addressing this e-mail to you.  Each of you had fairly firm opinions when you first entered.  Nicole's reaction was to grab two large plastic garbage bags and start heaving in clothes from my closet.
  

Me:  Wait!  Not that!  Dave gave me that suit.  I made out with two women on New Year's Eve at the Claremont hotel in that suit!

Sneedy:  I see that it's a 42L with a waist of 34 inches.  You're never going to wear this thing again.

Me:  Not that suit!  We had one of our first dates with me in that fine three piece charcoal pin stripe suit.  Remember?  We met at the Compass Rose Bar in the St. Francis Hotel.  I was resplendent in my pin stripe three piece and you were strikingly beautiful in  your navy blazer with the gold buttons.  After our date we descended to the Union Square garage to fetch our cars.  I had decided that it was way past time for our first kiss.  I grabbed you and drew you to my bosom and laid one on you.  I could feel your heart start to beat so rapidly I thought you were going to faint.  Later, on the way home, I thought to myself.  Hmm I bet that means something...  You want to throw that suit out?

Sneedy:  You're a dirt farmer now.  Our courting days are over and you're not going to wear this thing again.

So I lay there on my bed and watched, dumbfounded, while Nicole, without a shred of sympathy or sentiment, proceeded to empty most of my closet into the garbage bags.  Anything with a 34 inch waist was history.  Most of my collection of dress shirts were also eighty-sixed...  I managed to save my lovely colorful Hawaiian Aloha shirts from the wrecking ball but not much else.  Bunny's first reaction upon entering my sanctum sanctorum was to remark:  "Hmm, smells kind of Hamsterish...".  But out of loyalty to our relationship she stuck it out in that bedroom for about a year.  Then one morning, after we'd got engaged, she woke up, looked at me and decided I was spectacularly unsuitable as husband material.  She moved out soon thereafter...

       So, without benefit of the feminine touch, my bedroom slowly, over the years, turned into the cold, dark and moldy man cave I've been sleeping in.  Sometime ago my brother warned me that he could smell a lot of mold and mildew in there and perhaps it was time to renovate.  Since the Colonel owed me a bunch of money and he is our resident maintenance man, I put him to the task.  He has been simultaneously working on the wall outside of my bedroom and the bedroom itself.  When we (by which I mean several day laborers ...) had dug a trench, exposing the lower part of the outside wall and the underlying foundation, we found exposed siding and rotting foundation timbers.  Apparently the big stone chimney, sitting on a concrete pad, had been the stoic sentinel that had been holding up that side of the house for all these years (it was homesteaded as a dairy farm in 1935).  After that part of the outside wall had been revealed I noticed that I could see outside through the floor in the corner of my bedroom; and also from my closet.  Eventually the opening was large enough for smallish wild varmints to crawl through, if they had a mind to.
  

When I brought this to John's attention he started to work on the inside.  "Colonel, I want to completely renovate my bedroom.  We've (you) gotta wash down the walls and ceiling with a chlorine bleach solution.  We'll repaint with anti-fungal paint.  We need to re-floor the northwest corner and replace the crumbling panels of sheet rock.  There are numerous cracks in the rest of the sheet rock that have opened up as the house continues its downhill slide into oblivion...  We need to mud and tape those cracks again.   I suspect that this old rug that has been in here for thirty three years has absorbed its share of mold etc. and needs to be cut into pieces and removed.  When we're down to bare floor we (you) can thoroughly wash it with bleach and reseal it with some kind of anti-fungal floor sealer.  I'm gonna just go with a nice area rug between the bed and the bedroom door."

The finished product.  Yes, I live simply so that others may simply live.  Notice the Indian themed wall hanging.  I believe I'm supporting a single mother, dwelling in the Mumbai slums.

A framed picture I've my dear mother;  Georgia O'Keefe and an antique dresser; note new rug with geometric pattern.

 

The Colonel rose nobly to the challenge in front of him.  My dear friend and compatriot John Troutman lives in part of the out buildings adjacent to the garden.  He has cobbled together a humble (and I do mean humble) abode that we refer to as The Hacienda.  I won't describe it here for fear of offending the ladies...  I call John The Colonel because his last name is Troutman.  In the Rambo movies Colonel Troutman is Rambo's boss, apologist and advocate.  "John, if you'll just do this one last mission, I promise you'll be released from breaking up this rock pile and be returned to civilian life."  "Colonel Troutman, you're the only man I trust"  That happened to be the longest bit of dialogue Rambo uttered in the movie.  Since I like to give those close to me nicknames, my John became "The Colonel".  The Colonel waded into the challenge of my bedroom remake with gusto and fortitude.
  

Over the years, my bedroom had become a repository of all kinds of flotsam.  This had to be removed so John could attack the walls and the ceiling.  Some stuff has been moved outside of the house and the rest has been moved around in the bedroom.  Currently, the bed is in the middle of the room with stuff piled high on the portion I don't sleep on.  My file cabinet has been moved to the closet, rendering it temporarily inaccessible.  There is paint and old paint chips along with myriad construction debris littering the rug everywhere.  I have a nice navy blue long sleeve tee shirt that was lying on top of a pile of clothes on the bed.  I put it on the other day and noticed what looked like rust spots on it.  I finally figured out that some of the bleach used to clean the walls had splashed onto the shirt and also on my SF Giants World Series Champs black hoodie. tsk tsk...
  

Now when I go to bed, I carefully pick my way through the debris and gingerly lie down, making sure the pillows don't fall off the bed since it is no longer pushed up against the wall.  Reclining in bed with my nighttime sleepy bye book propped on my tummy, I can't see the floor.  I can, however, gaze on my beautiful new cleaned, spackled and painted bare walls.  It should be informative in the next year to watch the cracks in the walls and ceilings come back as this old house continues its slow, inevitable, downhill slide.  Like a man clinging to a tree in a flood, I rely on the chimney to keep me from floating away.  When all the eggs have been broken and the soufflé is finally served, maybe I will have a limited viewing for those of you who were so intrepid as to spend time in my bedroom, all those years ago.

Love and kisses, Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres   

Beautiful Indian Summer Day

October 9th, 2013

      The soft fall sunlight is beginning but it's still warm and sunny.  Occasionally it's off shore and Matt the Cat is able to enjoy some jiggy waves at Ocean Beach.  Now that he has a steady income he can afford to drive into the City instead of having make do with the local dreck.  With my heart beating normally I'm continuing to feel wonderful.  After all the troubles earlier this year and trying to resign myself to a life of atrial fibrillation where only half my heart beats, I sometimes feel like I'm in a dream.  Things can't possibly stay this wonderful.  Maybe this is a dream and I'll wake up to find out I'm actually a seamstress in a sweat shop in Saipan...  But then I wake up to the sound of Matt fumbling around in the bathroom.  The early sunlight is softly lighting up the outIine of my curtains and I realize that, oh joy!, I get to steal another lovely day as the Mayor of Happy Acres.  

I'll be going back to the gym today to exercise like normal people do.  I'm having fun working out on the various cardiovascular machines.  You'd be surprised how tricky the treadmill is.  I decided to check it out.  I stepped on the "tread" and hit 'Quick Start'.  The tread started moving slowly backward and I started walking slowly forward.  I realized that, in order to get some actual aerobic exercise out of this machine, I had to push some buttons on the computer screen ahead of me.  There was an "^" button for faster so I punched that a few times until my MPH registered 3.  Then I pushed the button that raises the machine to a higher level of incline to simulate walking uphill.  I thought I'd start with a 1 degree slant and see how that felt.  The tread starting moving faster, I started walking faster and the tread mill raised up by a small amount.  "Hey!  I'm walking slightly uphill at 3 MPH!"  I still had my hands firmly on the side rails while I looked down at my feet to make sure I didn't accidentally wander off the tread since, as a novice, I didn't feel comfortable letting go and looking up.  It's kind of like riding a bike.  I don't mind riding with one hand on the handle bars briefly if you need to scratch your nose, but the idea of riding with both hands free is preposterous to me.  I assume the bike would instantly veer sharply to one side and I'd find myself crashing to the the pavement covered in road rash.
  

I looked over at the guy next to me.  He was going 4 MPH and he was swinging his arms vigorously, looking straight ahead.  I thought to myself: "This is ridiculous.  I'm just walking in a straight line, for Christ's sake, just look up, let go of the rails, and walk like a normal human being."  Well, easier said than done.  I was good for a couple of seconds then I found myself wandering slightly or falling behind a bit and my sneakers started making this high pitched squealing noise because I had faded backward onto the drum roller that powers the tread.  I quickly increased my pace, grabbed the rails and looked down at my feet.  I tried letting go and looking up a few more times but soon started wandering off course again with sneakers squeaking their warning about my pace.  I didn't want the other treadmillers to hear that sound since it was kind of the equivalent of farting...

      As a former champion stud volleyball player I feel humiliated that I can't walk freely on a treadmill.  Lesson two will commence this afternoon.  Wish me luck...

I've commenced a delightful e-mail correspondence with our old friend Joanie.  I sent her a copy of one of my first typing therapy 101 e-mails.  I think the title was "Weasels Ripped My Flesh".  She was kind enough to say that I was a "wonderful writer".  That was a nice little thrill as it was coming from a published novelist but then, Joan, God love her, tends to be encouraging about anybody's attempt at pretty much anything.  I don't care.  I'm sticking with the image of "wonderful writer" which does not bode well for all of you as it means I'll probably continue to bombard you with this "verbosity" as Nicole puts it.
  
        Back when Nicole and I were in the romantic phase of our relationship we were occasionally invited to various social gatherings, where I would often find myself wandering into 'extrovert mode' with some silly story, I would feel this pressure on my foot.  I'd look down and find Nicole's shoe stepping on mine.  That was her signal to me saying:  "Sneedy;  shut up and let these other nice people get a word in edgewise..."  With that in mind, I see that I've already written four paragraphs which Nicole said should be my limit so I will stop here.  I thank you all for letting me exercise my new fully functioning fingers in typing therapy 101.

 Best wishes to all, Mickey da Mayor

Do not stray into the lair of dragons for you are crunchy and go well with ketchup

I saw a disturbing documentary on captive killer whales the other night, but before we get into that I present you with a bit of country western doggerel that will turn that frown upside down... 

Family reunions is no place to find a wife

           Cuz you and she'll be giving birth to incestuary life

            You gals think us boys from Alabama are just hicks

            Cuz all we really wanna do is check you chicks for ticks   (then the oboe solo...)

The documentary was called Killerfish and was created by a former trainer at Sea World in Orlando, Florida.  (Killerfish is what the local native americans called killer whales.)  Sometime back in the early seventies, I believe, some enterprising fellows came up with the idea that a trained captive killer whale would make a swell and profitable attraction for paying audiences.  They netted off a small portion of puget sound in the Vancouver, B.C. area.  They put up a small grandstand overlooking the pool which was about half the size of an olympic swimming pool.  Next to the pool they had erected a  roofed steel holding tank, 20 feet by 30 feet, to keep their killer whale safe from vandalism when the 'park' was closed.

The consortium dragooned a small regatta of fishing trawlers with the idea of chasing down the local killer whale pod and isolating one of the babies and trapping it in a net.  It would then be transferred via a sling and crane to a flat bed truck and dumped into the pool.  I imagine they reasoned that if classical conditioning and shaped behaviors could be used to train pigeons to do simple tricks, imagine what the same process could do for an animal as smart as a killer whale.  As the trawler regatta chased down the pod, the males separated from the females and the youngsters, and led the boats in one direction while the females and young ones veered off into a side channel.  The trawler captains eventually realized they had been duped by the males and managed to find the other whales and blockaded them into a small bay.  They separated one young killer whale from the others and triumphantly hauled it up via ropes and slings onto the deck.  The rest of the pod stayed as close to that boat as they could.  For several hours the pod and the captured baby exchanged frantic vocalizations till the boat with its prize motored up to the pool and deposited its prize catch.  In the process of the capture three other young killer whales died.
  

A trainer managed to teach the young killer whale several tricks and the park now named Sealand of the Pacific was a moderate success.  As the whale grew in size, the time spent in the small metal holding tank began to affect its behavior and performances declined as the whale showed signs of frustration and aggression.  Audiences declined, the park was closed and the owners were forced to sell their prized catch to Sea World of Orlando Florida, a group with a larger pool, more professional trainers and, hopefully, better overall conditions.  Thus was the phenonemon of performing killer whales born.

Fast forward to 1981.  The catching of killer whales in Puget Sound was outlawed as the public learned of the aforementioned events.  Killer whale catching now migrated to the coast of iceland.  Another young killer whale was captured and eventually ended up at Sea World in Orlando.  He was named Tilikum and became a featured performer at the park where he was known to the public as Shamu a name shared by many captive performing killer whales. Tilikum as an adult is 12.5 feet long and weighs 12,000 pounds.  His pectoral fins are seven feet long and his dorsal tale fin measures 6.5 feet high.  It's hard to imagine the majesty of that dorsal fin as it has flopped over to one side.  In the wild this is seen as the symptom of a sick or depressed whale perhaps one banished from the pod for some transgression.  The former trainers that were interviewed for this movie stated that the animals were mistreated away from the public eye.  They were often deprived of food to make them more desperate to perform their various routines up to expectations.

Here's one of the trainers and his near death experience

In 1991  a popular and very accomplished female trainer was pulled into the pool by her arm and dragged to the bottom where she drowned.  Tilikum would eventually kill two others.  One was a drifter who somehow snuck into the park after hours and decided to take a swim in the whale pool.  They found his body the next morning being towed around on Tilikum's back.  He had been severely mauled and his scotum had been bitten off.                                                                        

     The third death also involved a trainer.  Dawn Brancheau was the perfect ideal of a Sea World trainer.  Blond, beautiful and charismatic, she was considered one of the top killer whale trainers.  She too was pulled into the water by Tilikum.  He pulled her under until she drowned.  He then swam around the pool dragging her lifeless body by the arm.  This incident took place in front of a full house.  The staff was eventually able to recover the body minus the arm which Tilikum had eaten.  She had also been completely scalped of her long blond hair.  Management made up a bogus story to tell the public and confiscated all video that had been taken of the event.  They blamed the trainer for the 'accident' so that the authorities wouldn't put the animal to death since a trained adult killer whale was worth millions.  Tilikum is still performing at Sea World.  To date, he has sired 21 offspring all of which are performing in various aquatic amusement parks around the country.

     An autopsy of an adult killer whale revealed that their brains are every bit as complex as ours with an extended frontal lobe where emotions and compassion reside.  Their capacity for reasoning and planning is evident in their group strategies for surrounding and catching schools of fish.  Whale researchers have also reported that their communication abilities, both audible and sub-audible sonar, are extremely complex.

  

I'm reminded that back in the late nineteenth century South African Brits captured a bushman of the Kalahari.  At the time they were called Hottentots and were hunted for sport.  Because of their strange appearance they were not considered human.  This captured 'Hottentot' was put in a cage and carted around England for the amusement of paying audiences.  I posit that if you do something potentially dangerous, such as swimming and performing with a 12,000 pound killer whale, chaos theory says that eventually the odds will catch up with you.  I wonder what the people at Sea World think now that this video, which was shown in prime time on CNN, has been broadcast.  Maybe it's time to free Willy.  

     Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres, Killer Whale Free 

Spongiform Encephalopathy

        I couldn't find an 'alarm' clock with the soothing maternal voice chip I mentioned in a prior e-mail, but I did purchase a nice small, quiet, clock radio which I installed bedside.  When I tried to set the time (the current time was roughly 6:06 PM) there were no buttons evident that would allow me to perform that simple task.  Before getting angry and hurling my new possession against a wall, I decided to do the adult thing.  I went and got the instructions.  It seems that there is a battery inside the clock.  The time is set at the factory and is already accurate.  All I have to do is reset the time zone to Pacific Standard Time.  By this time Matt, a housemate and friend, had gotten involved and was actually handling the time zone button pushing.  "Just keep hitting the time zone button till we get a six in the hour slot", I reasoned.  He did and the clock read 6:08 PM (two minutes had elapsed figuring out the time zone button deal).  How the people in China, where I assume this clock was made, knew exactly when I would plug this clock in so the time matched is a bunch of high tech digital alchemy that is beyond the reasoning capacity of my pea brain.  I now have, for the first time in years, a fully functioning (I hope) clockular device which is quiet and tells fairly accurate time.  Instead of the scary red glow of my former clock, this one broadcasts a soothing green glow into my little bedroom giving one a sense of being in a fern grotto which I find very soothing and conducive to sleeping.  I even got up at a reasonable hour (6:06 AM) this morning instead of 4:30 AM like yesterday.

When the power goes out again, as it always does here---cloth wrapped electric wires from the thirties when this land was first homesteaded as a dairy farm and the main house was built, I guess the digital clock masters of China will send a signal to my new clock/radio to resume operating with the correct time when we flip the tripped breaker and power is restored.  With powers like that, it's no wonder that China holds America's pink slip...

I was reading the 'political world overview' section of my latest Economist magazine.  I think it's way cool that the two largest countries in South America both have ladies as their leaders.  It seems that Christina Fernandez of Argentina has some kind of cranial malady and the doctors have to remove some blood from her brain.  Considering the kind of economic and political shanagins that seem to habitually afflict Argentina, Madame President Christina is going to need all the blood her brain can hold...  Speaking of brains, I saw an intriguing Frontline (PBS investigative show like 60 Minutes) episode about football and concussions.  By now it's common knowledge (unless you work for the NFL) that there is a big and apparently growing problem with football (and, indeed, any contact sport---thank God I played volleyball) and its cumulative effect on the brain.

       Like most chicken little stories, initial reports of deteriorated brain tissue among  deceased former NFL players, were greeted with disdain and disbelief---especially among NFL and NCAA executives, who are behaving exactly like the tobacco execs when it was posited that there just might be a connection between smoking and lung cancer.  They are not only in severe denial mode the're about to be in deep doo-doo mode as more and more people become incensed with this situation (like the parents of young boys who want to go out for the school football team to prove their manhood---especially to hottie classmates whom they dream of boinking behind the grandstands...).   As the scientific evidence mounted, as with climate change, more and more people began to see the danger in contact sports---especially football.  Even cumulative 'sub-concussive' events had the same effect as real concussions.  In cartoons, a concussion is illustrated, as you'll no doubt recall, by a couple of birds slowly spiralling upwards over the head of the concussed victim.  In real life concussions, especially repeated concussions or 'cumulative sub-concussive' events lead, mostly in later life, to a deterioration in the brain known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (try saying that 3 times fast...).  This condition manifests itself in dementia style behavior along with forgetfulness, feelings of rage and suicidal thoughts.

        A slide of a brain with spongiform encephalopathy

Junior Seau, former fearsome middle linebacker for                                              the San Diego Chargers                                                           

Junior Seau, the famous former middle linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, had the condition and he knew it.  When he killed himself, he did it with a bullet to the heart so his brain would be preserved and used to provide further evidence of CTE.  Players' wives and, increasingly, former wives, have provided the most poignant testimony.  The retired players couldn't remember the names of their own kids, much less what day it was.  They acted just like Alzheimer's patients.  When examined under a microscope, the brain tissue of these folks looked just like the brain tissue produced by mad cow disease, more properly known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.  It turns out that there are these rogue proteins called prions that are pretty much indestructable and that somehow got into certain bovine herds.            
The cannibals of Borneo or New Guinea--I forget which--used to eat the brains of their vanguished foes some of which had these evil rogue prions.  I believe the rogue prion syndrome started there.  How this condition migrated from cannibals in the highlands to the  world's beef population is a fact only known by the same guy who knows who let the dogs out and who really killed JFK...
  
         You may recall that some years back a mad cow disease epidemic broke out in "Jolly Ould England".  The cattle producers had the pleasant practise of mixing dead cow parts, including brain material, into the feed of live cows, thereby transferring the prions to pretty much the entire English herd.  Everybody freaked out because eating said cows would transfer these evil prions to the consumer where they would eventually migrate up into the brain causing zombie-like behavior.  In order to avoid an outbreak of zombies looking for more brains to eat, the 'authorities' decided that, since every country in the world, including poor Bangladesh, had stopped importing English beef, the entire collection of British bovines needed to be incinerated.  I don't know how many cows were barbecued but I know one personage who was thrilled.  That's right, Jews and Christians, I'm talking about God/Yahweh.  I doubt if anybody has sacrificed a bullock, an ox, a swine or a sheep to the almighty in quite some time.  Imagine how thrilled God must have been when the sweet smell of burning cow reached his almighty nostrils.

"From now on, the Brits are my chosen people!"  God, probably thought to himself.  Considering how things worked out for the former chosen people of God, the British people might want to tighten their seat belts as they may be in for a bumpy ride.  Hijinks might even ensue.  I'm just sayin'...

In other nooz...due to a lack of foresight, hindsight and oversight I somehow let my checking account become overdrawn to the tune of $1k and change.  Imagine my alarm and humiliation when a debit card purchase of prescribed meds (2$) was rejected by the computer at my local Walgreens pharmacy.  The same thing happened later after my workout (I'm letting go of the treadmill side rails for longer and longer periods of time now-sometimes even minutes at a time---Thanks Timmy---I know you're so proud...) when I went to the local sporting goods store to purchase some sweat absorbing workout headbands and a proper gym bag.  The bag I've been using has two side pockets where I keep my essential shower toiletries (through hard work and unceasing dedication I've managed to work my way up to four showers a week!...).  Unfortunately the zippers on both side pockets malfunctioned, leaving said side pockets only zipped under the fly itself.  I feared that my precious toiletries, especially 'product' (hair gel-- to tame those 12 angry hairs atop my head.  If that doesn't work, I'm thinking maybe sheep-dip might do the trick...), would topple out onto the locker room floor to the general derision of 'the fellas'.

      "Hey look, Gunther, this loser not only uses hair gel when he doesn't even have any hair, he has dandruff too cuz he shampoos with Selsun Blue!"  So I went to the counter to pay for my new gym bag, only to find my debit card rejected yet again.  Since I had sensibly chosen the cheapest bag in the joint I had enough cash to cover the purchase.  Upon returning home I immediately went to my Wells Fargo checking account web site.  Yep, $1k and change, negative, in the balance forward column.  Three checks had been returned NSF.  Luckily not the rent check.  The returned checks were small items written to three of my 22 medical creditors.  I think I'll wait till they call me...  So back in the car and down the hill to my other bank where I have a money market account and a CD (21 months...1% per annum!!!).  I got a cashier's check for $5k and put it in my regular bank's checking account.  That should put out the fire.  JP Morgan, also known as the mayor of Happy Acres, once again saves the day.  Kudos all around.
 
      Love and kisses from the mostly omniscient and omnipotent Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres

Weasels Ripped My Flesh

         I just finished shaving with my jiggy new Norelco floating head electric shaver.  My old shaver developed a hole in the screen (unbeknownst to me).  My last shave with it felt kind of rough.  When I looked in the mirror I was shocked to see the results.  It looked like I had shaved with a live weasel.  (Weasels Ripped my Flesh, Frank Zappa circa mid sixties-great cover...).  So yesterday I received in the mail a little packet from my new supplemental insurance company (Blue Shield).  "Congratulations!  As a newly insured patron, you qualify for the coveted SILVER SNEAKERS CREW!!!  I thought yeah, sure, this card probably qualifies me to buy a pack of Depends adult diapers for half off.  But no!  It qualified me for a free membership in my local 24 Hr. Fitness Club.  So I called the place in Larkspur Landing (lousy parking-who knew so many people with coupons shop at Bed, Bath and Beyond.) and the friendly sales rep said, "Yes Mike, with your knew silver sneakers card you have full use of our wonderful, very large and sweaty, gym!"  I loaded up a gym bag with workout clothes and headed to Larkspur.  Now, this is where Nicole would chide me.
  
        Whenever embarking on a new endeavor your supposed to go shopping for new outfits.  When she and her Thelma-and-Louise buddy Pammy started going to an aerobics gym they first headed to the workout store and bought what they knew to be the proper "aerobic outfits".  This consisted of new white cross trainer gym shoes with turquoise laces, leg warmers and head bands in hot pink.  And finally, a leotard in spangly Phoenician royal purple.  "You've got to look good to feel good especially in a co-ed workout session..." stated Nicole.  I have enough sweat pants and sweat shirts for now.  Maybe if I start getting "cut" I'll treat myself to spandex bike shorts and a wife-beater tank top.  My favorite tank top was one I saw on a guy who was called for jury duty.  As he walked forward to talk to the judge everyone in the court house started to titter.  His tank top had a message on the back that said: "IF YOU CAN READ THIS THEN THE BITCH FELL OFF"  I think he was a member of a coed motorcycle gang.  The judge dismissed him.

Anyway, so I went in and signed up; did some stationary biking (didn't quite get up to my proper aerobic heart rate; but I will eventually) and did some weight machines.  Since I have a recovering torn rotator cuff I couldn't do overhead presses, but I could do the bench presses.  I also found a jiggy little machine that is a hand and arm crank.  Like those guys on the racing yachts you see wildly cranking away to tighten the sheets or whatever.  As I cranked away, I imagined I was on Larry Ellison's Oracle hydro-foil catamaran crew, flying across the water at 50 knots.  "Stevens!  Look lively on that hand crank are you a sailor or a land lubber!"  I go back today for my official orientation.  My workout counselor is a middle aged chinese lady named "Doha" or something.  She probably knows Yubi Waza and Kung Fu--great...  I think I'll crank some more today before the lactic acid build up takes over and turns my body into a stiff rictus of pain.  I can feel it starting now.  The last time I went to a gym, after the first session I lay on my sofa for three days, despite haranguing from my housemates.  One of the nice things about this gym is they have great locker rooms with private shower stalls with dispensers of lemon/lime scented body wash.  I may be showering four or five times a week now.

Basking in my after-workout endorphin glow, I decided to continue my transformation to a metro-sexual.  I  bought big fluffy new towels in mauve and ecru and I also bought some "product".  I've got about a dozen or so hairs still clinging to the top of my head but they insist on standing up and it makes me look like a wanna-be member of Spanky and Our Gang.  I got my hair cut at the two-vietnamese ladies-hair cut, body waxing (the men's special is called "back,sack and crack")... and nail care place.  I had "Linda" put some gel on my head after my hair cut and those twelve angry hairs finally laid flat, for awhile anyway.  Now lately it has been harder and harder for me to give myself a proper toenail cutting.  With my unruly toenails and my foot neuropathy I'm afraid I'll clip into my flesh while trying to cut my toe nails.  I got out of the barber chair and looked over in the corner.  There sat a lovely barca lounger with a foot bath in front of it.  I looked at the sign and it said "Full pedicure treatment for $25."  I thought to myself, it's time to let a professional deal with my feet.  I'm going for it.  "Linda, I want you to give me a pedicure".  She didn't object and since I had just had a shower with scented body wash my feet at least wouldn't smell.
  
         I plopped into the chair (very comfy) and put my naked feet into the pedi-bath.  Aaaahhhh, now were feeling good.  "Would you like me to turn on the back massager?"  "Oh yeah, I want the full treatment that my $25 buys.  She pressed a button, smiled, and walked away leaving me to soak for a few minutes. Immediately I was mildly pummeled  by the back of my chair.  First the kneading then the vibrator.  After a few minutes "Linda" came back and started to work on my feet.  You can't beat Vietnamese ladies for no nonsense, professional foot care.  After about a half hour of cutting, buffing, sanding and scraping she had my toes subdued and looking like fat little sticks of pink bubble gum.  Then she pulled out the lotion and massaged my feet and lower legs while I sat there getting back massaged.  Are we having big fun yet?  "Toe nail painting comes with the price.  How about I paint your nails in black and orange for Halloween?", said my pedicurist with a mischievous smile.
  
        Still on my back massage and endorphin high, I told her to go for it.  This will be a great chance to bond with my feminine side.  She went to work.  First came some clear liquid which I assume was a bonding agent of some kind.  Then out came the orange and black polish bottles.  She smiled impishly as she painted.  "Oh, Mike, you gonna look so good for Halloween!"  When she finished I had to sit there for fifteen minutes with the little puffs of foam rubber between my toes.  I looked down and marveled at my beautiful new feet.  I was sorry I wasn't limber enough to bend down and suck on my lovely orange and black toes.  Maybe I can get Nicole to do it for me...  I'm wearing flip flops around the house now so I can continue to admire my jiggy new toes.  I once had a girl friend who was very tall with big hands and feet and my feet look just like hers used to.  Lynn Cordell, I'm thinking about you, my old beauty.  And I'm sorry that the bartender at Minerva's cafe with the dim lighting called you buddy.
 
I came home and cooked up a mighty pot of spaghetti swill.  I used my coffee grinder to chop up some oregano and fennel seeds.  I also had half a bag of lightly seasoned roasted garlic cloves.  I threw them in the grinder and pressed the button.  The result was akin to library paste and I had to use my forefinger to dig the stuff out and smear it into the spaghetti.  I can't wait to see how it tastes tonight after everything has had a chance to mingle.    
I keep looking down to admire my naked feet.  That's it.  I'm now a certified "pedi-file".  ...


     Love &Kisses, Mickey da Mayor


P.S.  Aren't these babies kissable?

Memories of Happy Acres

Memories of Happy Acres by Mike Stevens

     When I first moved into happy acres (a 3.1 acre homestead off Highway 1 in Mill Valley, CA) it was the spring of 1974.  My landlord was the son of the man who had homesteaded it in 1935.  He had just run off the last tenants when he found out they had broken into the basement and sold a bunch of stuff that belonged to his late father.  The old homestead had been the only thing between Highway 1 and the Diaz, ranch that ran from the dirt road outside the house to Muir beach, where the Green Gulch Zen center is now.  It had no sewer hook-up, no water line and no electricity.  
     

     Tony Quadros  made do with a rain catch cistern made from a wine barrel from Sonoma that was about 12 feet high and 20 feet across.  The sewer was a 50-gallon drum buried about 2 feet underground with no discernable leach lines.  A huge blackberry bush (actually a whole cluster of them) about fifty feet in diameter and twelve feet high, had grown up around the septic tank, concealing it from view.  Even during the drought years of the seventies, when Marin County’s reservoirs were dry, this blackberry bush kept growing like wildfire. I hired a Vietnam vet who was down on his luck to help me hack the monster blackberry hedge down with machetes.  I wanted to clear the land so I could board horses there for a little extra money.  

     When we finally, with our trusty machetes,hacked our way to the heart of the beast, I found out why this thing had flourished for so long through thick and thin.  The septic tank was rusted through and all the ‘effluent’ from the house had been oozing across the ground feeding this bush.  We also found a cherry tomato plant growing right over the tank.  The tomatoes were quite delicious despite their questionable fertilizer.  It also gave me an idea that this place would be a pretty good place for a vegetable garden.  More on this later.  Electricity was provided by a donkey engine that turned a leather strap that turned an electric generator.  It could also be switched over to a flywheel made from an old train wheel that turned an Alaskan chain saw that was used to mill the wood that built the house and surrounding outbuildings.
  

Tony had milk cows, ducks, geese, chickens and goats.  Later when he was old and sort of the neighborhood curmudgeon he kept huge pigs.  When local kids would cut across his property he would come out on the back stairway landing with his shotgun, which was loaded with rock salt, and shoot above the kids' heads to chase them away.  One of them told me years later that his parents used to tell him if he wasn’t good they’d take him up to old man Quadros’ place and feed him to the pigs.

Tony, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Mussolini, was a big barrel chested immigrant from the Azore Islands off the coast of Portugal.  He was the police chief in Sausalito in the thirties and considered himself a tough guy.  He used to strut around his homestead all year in just an Italian undershirt and some old faded overalls.  He buried three wives while living on the property.  One shot herself while sitting in a pickup truck in front of the house.  He had feuded with his brothers in S.F. in the last years of his life to the point where they didn’t even know of his death till years later.  His son knew it was time to make other arrangements for the old man when he came by one day to check on him.  One of the side frames on his glasses had broken and Tony had dealt with the problem by attaching a piece of string to the front piece and tying a nail to the other end which he hung behind his ear.

Tony could never get old man Diaz, the neighboring ranch owner, to impregnate his cows with Diaz’s prize stud bull, so every year or so, Tony would break down the fence  between the two properties while his cow was in heat and the bull would come over and service the cow, whereupon, Tony would call up Diaz and blame his bull for breaking down the fence.
  

In his old age Tony got a little dotty and took to some strange ways.  He would go around the neighborhood with his old beat up pickup truck and collect any kind of junk that people wanted to get rid of:  cement wash basins, rusted out appliances like ringer washers, freezers, ice boxes and piles and piles of wood that sat there slowly rotting for years.  The cow/horse pasture resembled what lawyers call an attractive nuisance.  Wandering through the pasture checking out these old appliances, I half expected to find a little human skeleton locked into one of the old freezer units.  When I decided to clean up the place to use as a horse pasture it took me eight large grange boxes to haul all the stuff away.

When my girlfriend and I moved in we were just renting the house (monthly rent was $ 125/mo).  The pasture was occupied by the last remnants of a former ranch up in Oregon, a cow, a bull and two quarter horses.  One morning in the spring of ’74 I looked out the living room window to see the cow lying dead on the ground with a piece of plywood on top of it and the bull standing on the plywood looking down at the cow as if to say “Hey wake up!  What are you doing sleeping on the job!?”  Eventually the tallow truck showed up and the driver paid out about  300 feet of cable from the winch in front of the truck and hooked it up to some chain with which they had bound up the cow’s hooves.  As the winch started dragging that cow up the hill the bull went nuts and started running around and bellowing.  This caused the quarter horses to swing into action and they took turns shooing the bull away from the cow.  He would run around to the other side of the barn and then the other quarter horse would shoo him away.  I dare say these were the last cattle in Mill Valley.  I knew I had found a home.

The house itself was in pretty bad shape.  There was no insulation in it and the pine paneled walls let the breeze in between the planks.  The windows in the living room over looking the pasture were consumed with dry rot and you could stick your hand out through the rotted sill.  The wooden house frame sat on a set of small square stones that had sunk into the ground giving the house a bit of a lean.  Several of the floor joists were broken through and resting on the ground.  Of the four hippies who had been sharing it, one was living in the dining room with a small herd of puppies. They had been relieving themselves on the old threadbare Persian rug in the dining room and the upstairs reeked of puppy urine.  The guy living there had decided the air was too dry and had several open pans of water sitting on the heater to increase the humidity.  In one of the downstairs rooms I found several bags hanging in the closet which were filled with dehumidifying rocks.  So we had the upstairs humidifier versus the downstairs dehumidifier.  I later years when asked to describe where I lived, I would tell people to imagine an Appalachian moonshiner's cabin--but a nice one...

The local fauna would occasionally take up residence in the basement, which was now open to us tenants.  I once found the jawbone of a possum in there.  Occasionally you could hear the sound of fur brushing against the walls and if you put your ear to the dining room floor you could sometimes hear breathing below you.  Several times baby raccoons took up residence under the stairs on the side of the house and would wake us up with strange mewing noises in the morning, calling for their mother who had gone off to forage for food.  Once I pulled up the stairs to find 3 blind baby raccoons all clumped together crying for their mama.  I put them in a box and that night she came and got them and took them away.
  

Speaking of raccoons, once I went out to check the horses’ water trough only to find a drowned raccoon floating in the water.  I had to drag the carcass, dripping wet, weighing about 40 pounds, over to the side of Hwy 1 so the Cal Trans road kill crew could dispose of it.  The raccoons showed up again a few years later when I had eight chickens living in the old dairy barn.  I got up one morning and was heading down to the garden to feed the chickens when I saw about 20 big black turkey vultures roosting on the roof of their shed.  I had a sinking feeling in my stomach and sure enough when I got down there, there were my chickens ripped to pieces with their parts strewn all over the garden.  At least with the gray fox he was smart enough to take the eggs and leave the egg layers alone, as I found out one day as I saw him crossing the road, leaving behind a trail of broken chicken eggs.

I had been employed in the world of finance and accounting for years, with each job getting shorter than the last.  In 1991 I finally saw the handwriting on the wall and gracefully accepted an offer of disemployment from the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco and set about to make myself self sufficient on my little Happy Acres homestead.  Helped by my beloved brother who was bivouacking here at the time, we built a 24 x 36 ft. rental unit on the property, artfully situated so that no one else could see it.

     Armed with the rent from that unit and from the house, studio and horse pasture I was independent of the corporate world.  This allowed me to expand my vegetable garden.  A friend of mine (who lived on the property in a felt yurt kit he had purchased and cobbled together) and I had started a small garden in 1980 or so.  I decided to expand on that original garden and fenced off roughly 20,000 square feet on a fairly flat and sunny portion of the horse pasture overlooking highway 1.

     For the next year I threw myself into expanding on the original garden.  I put in a small fruit orchard and a thousand square foot greenhouse.  In the main garden area I laid out a series of raised beds about seventy feet long and five feet wide.  I spent the winter of 1991/92 digging out the rocks and double digging all the beds laying in tons of compost most of which I obtained from the four horses I had boarded on the property.  The rest I got from the Muir beach stables.  Every year for as long as I had the horses I would collect all the manure by flat shovel and garden cart and deposit it in a large pile directly below the garden.  It averaged, when finished for the year, 80 feet long, 15 feet wide and 3 feet high.

     After the initial plume of decomposition had died down I would go out in the Winter with my hoe and a hose and turn the whole thing over and the second plume of decomposition would commence.  As I worked my way, six inches at a time, through this pile I would be enveloped in a cloud of steam from the heat of the pile.  By Spring I had all the composted horse manure the garden needed.  I would layer each bed with a thick dressing of the stuff and spade it over by hand before roto-tilling each bed.  I ended up having so much produce I used to sell it to the neighbors.  I had about twenty local families in the neighborhood that I would deliver a bag of groceries to once a week.  At its peak, the garden had over a hundred different varieties of fruits, herbs and vegetables growing.  When I had my serum cholesterol tested my doctor said I had the highest levels of HDL’s (the good kind) of anyone he’d ever heard of.  The employees at my local grocery store couldn’t believe how I survived all those years, as all I bought from them was booze, meat and tobacco.
    

Deer have also been prime occupants of the land.  Late one night in '74 we were awakened by the sound of sirens.  The house below the pasture, which was owned by Vince Guaraldi the jazz pianist, had caught fire and it and the surrounding Eucalyptus trees were going up like Roman candles.  Meanwhile a whole herd of deer came running across the highway onto the horse pasture right past us.  Over the years the deer have had moderate success getting into the garden.  One of them got his head caught in the garden fence and I had to pick him up and unhook his head from the fence.  He showed his appreciation by pooping all over my pants.  I had to carry him out of the garden with him bleating plaintively the whole time.

Then there was the time the two dogs living on the property chased a deer across the pasture down to the highway where it leaped out onto the road and was struck by a passing car.  I got down there just in time to see it expire on the neighbor’s driveway.  One morning I saw the motion sensing garden light come on which I knew meant some intruder was in there.  Sure enough about five deer had snuck in and were chowing down on my strawberries.  As I went to chase them out, as they ran by me one of them stepped on my ankle with his pointed little hoof.  I still have the scar.  Earlier this year coming back from a friend’s house, I found a baby deer standing in the middle of the road.  Its mother was nowhere to be found so I picked it up and took it home.  I got a baby bottle and fed it some formula.  Not knowing what else to do with it at that hour of the night I took it to bed with me.  Early the next morning it started crying plaintively, convulsed a few times and died in my arms.  I don’t recommend this approach to saving baby deer as it is very sad and there are the fleas they leave behind in your bed.

     Some years back, in the fall, I heard a strange sound coming from the pasture like the sound of giant knitting needles.  When I went out back I discovered two adult male deer jousting.  The females ran up out of the pasture, past me in the back yard and disappeared into the forest.  One of the males locked his legs and the other pushed him back, skidding about three feet.  After the loser ran off below into the woods, the victor put his head down and followed his nose up the scent trail of the retreating does.  As I stood stock still he kept coming, following the scent, and trotted right past me, his eight point antlers missing my thigh by about two inches.  For awhile I fed them rolled oats out in the back yard like we used to feed the horses.  They got so tame that if I sat very still next to the feeding trays they would actually come up and sniff my shoes.

Then there was the time I heard a knock on the door one morning.  It was a woman who said she was driving up from Muir beach and found the four horses that were boarding here grazing on Hwy 1 near the beach.  Being a horse owner herself she didn’t panic.  Instead she herded them back up here in her car.  One of the owners, it turned out, had accidentally left the horse gate open the night before and the horses had gotten out and sauntered the five or six miles down to Muir beach.  Another time someone left the gate open and one of the horses got out and started cantering down highway 1.;  a very lonely and distressing sound for me to hear.  Luckily the horse realized, eventually, that there was no place like home.

The Eucalyptus trees on the property have furnished a certain amount of entertainment also as several have, over the years, come crashing to the ground or had huge limbs come down.  A couple moved in across the street in the late seventies and the wife was very concerned that a huge tree limb that hung over the road and part of her yard was going to blow down in one of our Winter wind storms and wipe out her new fence and her prized rose bushes.  She kept badgering and threatening my landlord until finally we decided to have the limb cut down to get her off our backs.  I hired a friend of mine who sidelined in tree trimming.  He climbed about 80 feet up the offending tree and attached a long rope to the limb.  Five of us stood in the next door driveway pulling on the rope while my friend cut down the limb.  Which promptly fell on her new fence, wiping out her prized rose bushes.

 One limb almost hit a fellow who was driving a backhoe on the property at the time.  It came so close to him it sheered off the hydraulic hoses that powered the backhoe’s digging arm six inches from his head.   After I had to get rid of the horses for insurance purposes a huge limb came crashing down right where their feeding troughs had been.   I and/ or the horses would have bought the farm if the timing was right as I was the guy who fed the horses.  It took all day with a chain saw and a log splitter to render that tree limb into firewood.  I’m still burning the wood today two years later.  The dead fall from the trees surrounding this place have provided me with firewood for over thirty years.  For over twenty years the big hand-built fireplace in the living room was its only source of heat and I’ve never had to buy a stick of firewood.

After I had finished playing music for a living, to keep my hand in the business, two friends and I started a recording studio in the garage.  The landlord was accommodating but a bit overwhelmed at what to do with all the stuff his dad had accumulated over the years as a homesteader.  Throwing open the garage door was like opening a Pandora’s box from the past.  Trays of copper locksets and latches, horsehair stuffed sofas and chairs, huge circular saw blades, rusted piles of chain and barbed wire etc.

     My landlord and his long-suffering wife were overwhelmed at the task of separating this stuff and deciding what to do with it.  Eager to get to work on our new studio, I suggested that we separate everything into three piles.  A keep pile (furniture and such) a throw away pile (rusty barbed wire) and a pile to decide what to do with later (everything else).  Norm was still overwhelmed at the prospect of going through his departed dad’s stuff.  I decided to start things off to prime the pump, as it were, and I grabbed the funkiest dirty rusted out pile of chain I could find and told Norm, “It’s just a matter of starting with the worst and working our way through it.  Here’s a prime candidate for the throw away pile”, and I put the pile of rusty chain down outside.  Norm said, “I might want to keep that…”.

     We eventually got the job done and my partners  and I got to work on building our little recording studio.   We had a lot of fun recording ourselves and others including Michael Bloomfield, Commander Cody and his lost planet airmen and a mother daughter combo that wanted to be back-up singers.  They went on to become Naomi and Wynona Judd, the popular country duo.  I was the mom's boyfriend for about a year and even made it into her autobiography.  The sheriffs used to show up some nights when things would get a little loud and rowdy.  Eventually the neighbors across the street complained to the county and we were forced to vacate the premises.  Later I turned the place into an in-law unit and rented it out to a series of musicians.  Beautiful music is still being made there today only now it’s recorded on a computer.

In addition to the duplex rental unit I had built, I had decided to expand my little legally dubious empire by putting up a yurt and some out buildings down in the garden.   Unfortunately the County Planning Commission took notice and wrote me up for multiple zoning code violations.  (The memo said I was guilty of operating an illegal dumpsite, among other sins…)  I had to evict everybody and remove several kitchens and bathrooms and worst of all, my beautiful yurt, which was all fixed up but no one ever had a chance to live in.  A month later the insurance company said there was a liability exposure for the landlord if the horses were to hurt somebody and, sadly I had to evict them too.

That, at the time (2001), was pretty much the end of Happy Acres as it had become.  It was as if there had been a death in the family.  When I told my brother, a journalist, about it, he wrote a little memorial story (the first entry in this blog) about the place so many of us had come to know and love. (I've had over 50 tenants in my 36 years here).  It was a beautiful elegy for an old homestead that had become an anachronism in modern Mill Valley.  Fortunately the coda to this story is a happy one.  After several years the county lost interest in my ‘rehabilitation’ and I was eventually able to resurrect my rental units.  Now all that is missing is the sound of my beloved horses, gently nickering in the afternoon breeze.