Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport

November 20, 2016 JG 2 Comments

I’ve started losing things. Little things that mean a lot, and I’m having trouble letting go.

In the past ten days, I’ve lost a leather bound book in which I’ve tracked almost two decades of road trip expenses (likely on the ground of an Oregon rest stop, having fallen out the car door pocket); a drawstring bag with a couple favorite pair of earrings (mysteriously disappeared between Washington and LA, not a trace to be found); and all hope for the future of the USA.

This last one fled sometime around 7 pm PDT on Tuesday, November 8^th, and I’m genuinely not sure where it went or how to get it back.

I woke up Wednesday disheartened, and fearful; in a state of disbelief but not wonder. I couldn’t listen to the news. I made one facebook post and haven’t looked since. After all, what spewed forth was predictable: finger pointing, intellectualist blame-naming, mostly directed at the nameless “them” in the middle of the country. It’s where we go (“we,” the liberal, intellectual-elite, coastal inhabitants) when we want to call out what is broken and whose fault it is, whose responsibility to fix it. How were the polls wrong? How did we miss this?

We missed it the way “we” always do: by ignoring an ugliness we aren’t sure how to handle. Democracy is not about the “I.” It is – more than almost any other thing we have – it is about the, “we.” WE the people. We all bear responsibility for what happened this year, in some shape or form.

So please don’t turn to a fellow who voted for a third party candidate and say, “this is your fault.” It isn’t. That person did precisely what that person is meant to do: voted for the candidate that best spoke to his or her needs or ideals, who made him feel heard and represented in a political system that makes most of us feel ignored.

Please don’t ask, “where did these hateful people come from,” as if they have been on another planet and just landed on earth in time to register and vote. If you do not know where this faction of voters comes from, you have been surrounding yourself only by those who agree with you, and ignoring all uncomfortable hard evidence that this hatred has been brewing for decades.

After all, this is America. We had institutionalized slavery until 150 years ago. We’ve yet to hit a century of women having the legal right to vote. It’s not been 50 years since we sprayed our citizens with fire hoses and beat them with clubs for nothing other than the color of their skin, an epidemic of violence “we” justified with fake science and mislead religious order. We still seem to shoot a similar cohort regularly, with no cause, and hold no one accountable.

We all bear responsibility. When you have ignored those who feel dispossessed, excommunicated, robbed of a power they were raised to believe was their right, they will find a way to take it back. When you ask how this hasn’t happened to our many communities of color, the answer is: because they haven’t had that power yet, here. The fight for power in the first place is a different fight than the one tinged with revenge – the fight to get back what you feel has been ‘taken’ from you.

I am not validating the behavior. I am not accommodating the revenge. Not aligning with the bigotry and selfishness that characterize the candidate who has become our president-elect, or the small minded hatred of those who brought him to office. I am merely saying this: please don’t move to Canada. We need you to help us fix this.

Please don’t move to Canada. Move closer to your neighbor. Find someone to hug if that helps. When the news dies down, find a cause, and dig in. This is OUR country. Democracy, as they say, is not a spectator sport. When you are ready to join in, let us stand together, roll up our sleeves, and do the important work of rebuilding this democracy so that the dispossessed we left out in the first place are empowered. Let us rebuild ourselves more graceful, more welcoming than we were before, and let us do it together in the face of this adversity. When someone looks in your direction and says, “love it or leave it,” smile and say, “I love it, so I fix it.”

Los Angeles, Uncategorized

The Sounds of Silence

November 7, 2016 JG 2 Comments

There is no picture to go with this post, and for that, I apologize. But you can make one for yourself. Go ahead. I will help.

Close your eyes. Go on – close them. Close your eyes, and take a breath – slow, long, and deep. I’ll tell you what the breath smells like: clean, a little sweet with the scent of fecundity. Fall sun, the whisper of winter, a slight afternote of salt floating in. Now let out that breath and take another. And while you take it in, listen, and I will tell you what you hear: nothing.

You hear nothing, and that nothing is everything. It is the space that is made for a pair of mergansers to fly across a field and alight on the pond near you. It is the space that is made for a sudden wind to blow – strong enough that you can see it coming across the still surface of the water and listen as it shakes down the alders and birch and begins the winter process of stripping them bare. On its way, it bats the apples from the trees by the beach to the ground with a heavy, abusive thud that leaves sugar spots on their skin and calls the deer to feed, their slow chew a silence of its own, until they sense your presence and stop, perking up their heads in a frozen stance and then prancing away – a hop almost like a rabbit – the pattern of it smashing grass beneath their feet with the quiet underbeat of a drum.

Let out your breath and take another. Keep your eye closed. Here come the geese, the heaviness of their wings sweeping by you like a brush across a snare drum – sleepy, slow, the shushing of mother nature putting the earth down for a nap. The beat of fall. If you whistle for the dog, he will come, too, soft and silent across the grass and then faster, his own background beat, louder as he comes to your feet and stops suddenly and it is silent, except for his heavy pant of breath, backed up by a faint lap of waves sipping from the rocky shore and swallowing shells back down to sea with the tinkling of a wind chime.

This is what silence looks like. This is the picture to send with this post – of stillness and breath, of a life that happens around you like a quiet background beat of a drum to steady the earth’s breathing, and your own.

Now, open your eyes. Take a deep breath and try to hold on to that picture while the sounds of the city replace it with the cacophony of urban-ness, an aural affront that wakes your brain to alertness. It is endless, unpatterned: the unpredictable whine of a siren down La Brea. The inevitable, irrational hum of a helicopter over Hollywood, or the highway, or on a trip to the beach – the Uber of the rich driving through your backyard – louder, louder, closer, too close, too loud, receding, gone. Replaced in irregular waves of sound and motion. The neighbors are having the same discussion about their relationship across the alley over the one constant: the whir of air conditioning units pushing too hard at work, broken at irregular intervals by plumbing from the floor beneath you, so loud it may be in your own kitchen or bath.

These are the sounds of the city, and they create a picture of their own. The backdrop is an uncontrollable foreground that we don’t breathe in. We don’t move to them so much as follow them along, dodging their beat, letting go of our own, occasionally in step, or stepping aside. Welcome back to LA. Welcome back to the wake up.

On the Road, United States

Dragging vs Hauling

October 30, 2016 JG 4 Comments

My sweet little hiking companion has done his fair share of dragging a$$ on our hikes this month. How could he not be gleeful and as full of energy as I am, up in these amazing, pine-carpeted trails?

The truth is, he is just like me: a little out of shape, occasionally short of breath, interested in taking his time, and taking it all in. Most hikes, he lags behind me while I whistle for him. And then, just when I wonder if I need to go back and look for him, his sweet little face appears from behind a trunk or around a curve. And usually, once or twice, he comes tearing. Top speed. Brace yourself: if he takes a curve too fast his back legs go sliding out from under him and he will slide right into you.

Today, though, was different. Today he must have known it may be our last hike for a while. He didn’t drag – he hauled. And as a consequence, I spent 6 miles looking at his fluffy tail wagging around, as if it were waving for me to hurry and catch up.

Los Angeles, Uncategorized

Hollywood Forever

February 29, 2016 JG 2 Comments

People keep asking me how I like LA. Or how I came to be here. Or if I think I’m staying.

I, myself, barely remember that I am here lately. This is the first weekend in 7 weeks that I’ve slept in my own zip code, and between those weekends, I’ve been working a good number of 11- and 12-hour days at the office. In weeks like that, does it matter where one lives?

And yet it does. Because where else but LA could you take four pieces of art that have been sitting in your apartment, patiently awaiting frames for a year, to finally get the love they deserve, and end up taking the dog for a walk in that ultimate commitment to never leaving LA: Hollywood Forever Cemetery?

Tucked between the Paramount lot and Santa Monica Blvd, with a clear view of the infamous Hollywood sign on most days, Hollywood Forever Cemetery has a little of something to love from every corner of this city. There are Russian Orthodox here, and Russian Jews, and German Jews, and just plain Jewish Jews. I would imagine there are some just plain Russians and Germans and Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese and Italians and maybe some Brits and people of other sorts, but I didn’t happen upon their individual ‘neighborhoods.’ There’s a Jewish mausoleum and a Catholic mausoleum and a giant empty space of mausoleum waiting to be filled with anyone ready to commit to whatever Hollywood brings on.

On a sunny Saturday that threatened to heat up, numerous palm trees and other deciduous arboreal delights provided ample shade and some wandering space for the dog. Like the rest of LA, the cemetery is absurdly dog-friendly. Of course it is – it’s the eternal home of Toto.

The grass is pleasingly unkempt; the cemetery (unlike LA) is not overly-coiffed. Its natural irregularity is inviting, and I was tempted to wander through the crowded rows of tombstones on a plush offroad journey. But I was informed by a friendly but firm security guard that dogs must stay off the grass. The reason, he pointed out from his seat on an official golf cart, is because the graves and some of their stones ride right up against the curb in a significant portion of the park.

The stones are worthy of their own rolling credits. It’s not the people who lie within or beneath them – though there is a Golden Age of Hollywood Who’s Who list buried here – it’s the pure variety of the stones themselves. They are stones the size of ledger paper. There are stones flush to the ground. There are stones the size of coffins, and stones that are sarcophagi; stones engraved with the symbols of Masons and Oddfellows, Stars of David and Coptic crosses, and things I’ve never seen before. There are family plots that are monuments themselves; there are crypts and obelisks and something that looks like a cross between a real pyramid and a pyramid you’d find on the Vegas Strip, but of course, this is Hollywood, and what is Vegas but a variation on that theme?

There are homages here. To mothers, and sons, to brothers and daughters and great grandparents ‘united in eternity’ side by side, their portraits etched in granite above them.

There are artists and actors and singers and writers and producers and directors and normal Joe’s. There are granddaughters now walking with canes and aided by great granddaughters carrying picnics to visit family members on a sunny afternoon. There are mourners gathered, and empty chairs set up awaiting more. And there are tourists – foreign and domestic, and local, like myself, wandering through a local past and wondering about the future. It’s a village of passed souls breathing a little life to those of us still walking above them, looking up at the palm trees and blue sky, and wondering how we got to this incredible place.

Los Angeles

I Left My Heart in San Francisco

October 5, 2015 JG Leave a comment

When people ask where I am from, I tell them, “San Francisco.” It’s a spiritual truth as much as a literal one. When I left the Bay Area at age nine, I truly left my heart behind, and when I graduated from college just over a decade later, the first thing I did was flee westward to the San Francisco of my dreams.

In the intervening years, San Francisco had grown some, but it was still, fundamentally, itself. It was a place where all possibilities were possible – from miner 49ers to flower children and beyond. It was a city filled with active neighborhoods and the activists who loved them; of spicy eucalyptus pods dropped along the park; a place of historical hangouts and the leftover hippies who still hung out in them, as fervent in the 90s as they’d been three decades before. A place of ocean and fog, of salt that floats out each morning and in each evening on a sweet wet wind, burned off and on by a bright but not-too-hot sun. It was the Golden Gate, the Bay-to-Breakers, Alcatraz and Angel Island and Marin in the distance. It was, of course, a city of hills – hills navigated slowly by original Beetles and VW vans with bumper stickers of dancing bears and, ‘CoExist,’ and ‘dog is my copilot,’ and the Darwin fish. It’s where garage doors rolled up on a Saturday, revealing one sale after another; where you could start a fight on the Muni by insisting your burrito place is best; where grown men rode skateboards, not scooters; and everyone was a politician of some sort because we were all devoted to our systems of belief.

01565b931e5962c9bb3194a22aa4505dd054230306

Like dancing bears, only San Francisco-ized.

It is by no means surprising that this city of free love and the Diggers and Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead and acid-dropping and Black Panthers (I’m appropriating Oakland here) and City Lights and Spec’s and Fillmore posters and the thriving Fillmore district replaced by the yuppie Fillmore street and motorcycles not bicycles outside Toronado and the TransAmerica building and hip-hatted Willie and Jerry Brown and Harvey Milk and Margo St. James and free speech and SDS not LDS – it is by no means surprising that this is the place where tech went boom. It was as inevitable as the fire of 1906. Only a place of such possibility would yield a creative mushroom cloud of such impact as to bust the city it dropped on.

Last month, I was home in San Francisco for a wedding. It had been a while since my city and I had reunited for more than a night or two, and it filled me with conflict, and an overwhelming nostalgia. San Francisco was, and remains, my one true urban love affair. I love its grungy streets and random murals, the sound of electric busses passing and the streetcar on a track. I love the beach in the fog and a grungy coffee house in the spring. I love those Eucalyptus trees, and triplexes of railroad flats. But San Francisco, my San Francisco, is gone.

San Francisco still has a funky attitude – one funky people can’t afford.

It’s hard to be a dreamer in San Francisco anymore. Dreams there are incredibly expensive. In the mid-90’s, I shared a three bedroom flat in the mission with two other women and we paid $1350 combined. We were two blocks off Dolores Park and surrounded by stores of used stuff, semi-functional laundromats, a couple sketchy-marts, and the 500 Club.

In that same neighborhood now, a one-bedroom costs upwards of $3000 per month, and our combined rent couldn’t even get you a studio (I’m not exaggerating). The sketchy-marts are now smoothie bars and hi-end independent organic grocers and farm-to-table restaurants with lines out the door. The 500 Club is still there, but I doubt the same is true of its Addams Family pinball machine, or the regulars who camped out on the same bar stools, night after nigh,t with a bartender who resembled Pinhead. Friends who grew up in the city by the bay, who are married with solid double-incomes have been priced out, and in their places have come a new generation of dot-com and start-up youth who think it’s normal for a martini to cost $15 and will never know the inside of a true dive bar.

The “go west, young man,” dream is in our national psyche, for better or worse. We leverage it to create a new beginning when the going has gotten too tough or the odds are never in our favor. But where do we go to start over when the start-over west goes bust?

When I was looking for a place to settle, I was frequently asked, “why don’t you go back to San Francisco? You love it there!” I struggled with an appropriate answer because what my heart was shouting was, “because my San Francisco is dead.” Meanwhile the Los Angeles of my memory was calling.

Since all of my fun Los Angeles memories take place on vacations, I figured I should come down from my temporary encampment in Washington State and check it out. I intentionally went to dinner during rush hour traffic, to see how bad it was (not fun, not horrendous). And then, while having lunch with a friend I’ve known since the sixth grade, the lightbulb turned on.

“LA is great,” he said. “I love it here because you can decide to do anything you want, and people will help you make it happen. Want to start a line of vegan baby clothes? Great, how can I help? I know a dude who went to Harvard and decided he really wanted to be a dog walker. Done. You just put it out there and work on it, and people are on your side.”

Now, granted these are ridiculously Californian examples, but the lightbulb went on: a place where all possibilities are possible. Not everyone’s dream will come true. But in LA, your dreams aren’t over before you find a place to lay your head.

My heart is still in San Francisco. It always will be. It remains the city that launched a thousand dreams – my own alone. It will always have its funk, its fog, its coffee and its political vibe. I will always want to be there, when the lights go down in the city and the sun shines on the bay (or when Journey is playing a concert). But I’m creating a life in the new San Francisco, a city with a vibrant history of its own, where museums are popping up amidst the bright lights of movie premiers and the dark corners that yield a crisis-launching number of homeless. We lack funding, and water, but we have enough palm trees and dreams for everyone. Come join us – we’ll help you make your dreams come true.

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling