Digital Fruit

I took a short weekend visit to Fresno this weekend to a wedding anniversary celebration. My observations during this trip, among other observations, highlight the diminishing returns of technology.

Perhaps it's just me. Perhaps it only happens to me due to my subdued personality, my inability to engage people in different social contexts such as breakfast at Perko's, dinner at a banquet hall, lunch at Thai Basil -- I find that I am ignored by virtually everyone around me while in these situations as they dwaddle with their cellularized telephones, blackberries, treos, MP3 players, and other "wonders of the digital age."

I ate breakfast at Perko's on Saturday and while at the table, my mother-in-law jawed on the phone for fifteen minutes, my sister-in-law spent 20 minutes deleting texts or something while the cursed thing kept beeping at the table, my son's iPod was loud enough to be heard, and my wife received two texts and was compelled to respond then and there.

I hadn't seen my friend Mark in almost a year and a half. I met him for lunch a month ago and it took him a full 20 minutes to stop e-mailing via Treo. Lunch was nearly over before he finally put that damn thing down.

Some time ago, when my sister-in-law was ready to drive home to San Diego, she spent 20 minutes off the I-5 exit entering her destination into her new OnStar. She's been driving home for thirty seven years -- why did she now need to have some talking machine on her dash to tell her how to get home?

I ate lunch with my friend Joe just last week. We discussed our upcoming hunting trip and he spends a half hour on his Blackberry trying to load in the Cabela's catalog web page for goose decoys.

What is it with all this?

It's not a generational thing -- everyone from nine to ninety is attached to the hip to these things, and it's only going to get worse. I can only imagine what it must be like for a shy boy at a school dance trying to ask a girl to dance as she intentionally ignores everyone while fuckering about with her phone all night long. Ignoring made easier through the magic of technology. Texting while driving is all but impossible to enforce. Dying made easier through the magic of technology.

One thing I've thought about has been the gradual elimination of a number of human jobs that used to route phone calls for business. Instead of hiring a human with their bothersome salary, vacation, and health care needs, we've gone down the "press #" route where the customer is now shouldering the responsibility to route his/her own inquiry -- and over half the time you press a series of digits to talk to a live person anyway. Wasting time made easier through the magic of technology.

All of this is maddening to me. Maddening. I don't think I'm going to survive the new age. My sister gave thanks last week to digital fruit -- her new Blackberry. She's a bona-fide convert and is hopeful she won't develop this crack-like addiction that has affected the rest of our culture. Perhaps I am only delaying the inevitable by postponing my own entry. Perhaps someday I will be forced into it, I'll get addicted, and I'll be blogging from hotel rooms, beach fronts, funerals, church, my dad's cabin, casino halls, thrash metal concerts, weddings, and everywhere I possibly can while ignoring every other live human around me.

I'm waiting for the Boysenberry to arrive before I take the plunge.

Zhu Zhu

I wonder if there was any consideration, any at all, for Russel Hornsby and his small company, Cepia LLC of St. Louis, to manufacture his Zhu Zhu Pets in the U.S.

I'd bet the decision to manufacture elsewheres took less than a picosecond.

For a host of strategic reasons, the manufacturing was offshored because of the financial realities of taxes, financial incentives, and cheap wage labor. But I'd bet also that today he would have an inability to borrow to expand production of these little robotic hamsters.

Imagine trying to go to a major bank to proposition them to finance a manufacturing facility in St. Louis. Horrors! Imagine trying to secure capital from private investors to fund the ramping up of domestic production. No way.

Even if Missouri provided some sort of tax break or other financial incentives, it would likely take eighteen months to obtain all the environmental, health, and safety permits to build the facility. By then the Zhu Zhu craze might have waned. Imagine the costs associated with employee health and vacation benefits, unemployment insurance, payroll taxes, and compare that with $2.00 an hour Han Chinese immigrants in Hangzhou. Imagine next Christmas, when employee health benefits will cost 7% more than today.

Imagine having to build a supplier network here in the U.S. from scratch, to get all the raw fuzzy material, stuffing, electronic and plastic components necessary to build the hamsters. If all these suppliers are only overseas to begin with, why do the end manufacturing here anyway?

Imagine the host of complaints and ensuing litigation that neighbors would raise if St. Louis adopted this new manufacturing facility anywhere near residential housal units. Imagine smokestacks near your housal unit! Nope, can't have that, so the residents will demand the location be put way out on the margin, with no hope of any sorts of alternative transportation to it other than solo occupant motoring, enslaving the workers to thirteen years of life working to buy and keep their cars.

Can you imagine any resurgence in American manufacturing? I didn't think so.

H1N1

Whatever you might think about an electrical power engineer put near the top of a very short list to receive the hog flu vaccine because my work is considered "important to national security," let me tell you -- the shot was painless compared to the seasonal flu shot.

I asked the nurse if I could see the vial. He said OK. I just wanted to see where it was made.

Liverpool, England.

Sigh...we don't produce anything here in the U.S. anymore.

The Decade Of Aggression

I wrote extensively last year about our total apathy and complete disregard toward our two wars, that what most Americans are doing is the least they could do. Truthfully, we aren't really at war. Congress has never declared it. Nonetheless, a trillion dollars and a few hundred thousand lives later we are on the edge of a paradigm shift and we'll finally abort our mission(s) overseas and get back to whipping our consumerist economy in shape.

Ha.

I doubt it. We are so entrenched that Obama will be mired in these two campaigns well into the end of his first term and if the economy stays flat, well, he'll be mired until the end of his one-term presidency. This is American warfare of the 21st century: bomb, attack and surge, then get bogged down in perpetual insurgency until some arbitrary and capricious date when we declare victory and pull out.

Question is, when is that arbitrary and capricious date?

Friday?
Next week?
December?
2010?
2013?
2031?

I could care less about our wars. In lieu of giving a shit, I was instructed to go buy a car, which I admittedly didn't do. I didn't follow the instructions. Perhaps I failed America by not doing so. Did I fail America?

Do I fail America by not caring a whit about Afghanistan and Iraq? Do I fail America by thankfully realizing the amazing luck that 1) I contracted diabetes and got out of the service before our decade of aggression, 2) my oldest son was just old enough to land a steady job before the economic slowdown/perpetual wars and 3) my youngest son is just young enough to likely escape all this when he comes of age?

Perhaps I fail America. Perhaps that old "Love it or Leave it" slogan should be hung around my neck while I'm pilloried on the public square for being so anti-American. Wait...there aren't any public squares here in Elk Grove...thank God for that!

I will likely refuse to accept any rationalization for our continued presence in either nation and, as Obama will likely announce at West Point this Tuesday, another thirty thousand troops to be sent to Afghanistan. I think I am entitled to an opinion, and this opinion -- particularly when I have made [recent] efforts to live a life not predicated on continued private solo motorization, the importation of cheap Chinese consumables, and the gross volumes of imported energy required to keep it all running. I firmly believe that our way of life is at the heart of a great many problems -- supposed climate change, a wholesale lack of meaningful places to live, a finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) economy not based on building anything anymore, exurban sprawl, poor social interactions, cheap consumerism, lack of places worthy of our visiting, the increasing importation of energy from foreign sources, $12,000,000,000,000 in debt and counting, and money-for-nothing expectations from the lowest class (entitlements) to the middle class (housal unit flipping and NASDAQ) to the upper class (CDOs & default swaps), from the youngest ($8,000 housal unit credit) to the oldest (cash for clunkers).

I am not a fan of this way of life. I am not a fan of the exportation of this way of life at the cost of a trillion dollars and more to the point, the wasted national effort in lives, resources, and energy. We are about to engage Thanksgiving and I will be thankful for the fact that my sons aren't overseas. These wars aren't about national defense -- they are about the continuation of a lifestyle (see above) that is wholly unsustainable. If you think that the defense of this way of life is indeed worthy of such wars, well, I suppose we will never agree.

Franklin Crossing

By the time my career is over, by the time I'll be sipping pounding Mai Tai's on some foreign beach somewhere, I will reflect back on my life and silently cringe, knowing that I took part in the complete destruction of a small town on Franklin Blvd. -- the town of Franklin.

I've been reviewing the land acquisition for the future SMUD Franklin bulk substation, to be located just south of the town of Franklin on my Franklin Blvd. I also received a map of the future Franklin Crossing subdivision, a wholly wasteful, grossly proportioned, and energy intensive piece of shit that will surround the substation, and indeed, represents one of hundreds of other subdivisions scheduled to be constructed once our economy gets "back on track." Our economy -- you know, the one that is solely comprised of the building and accessorizing of low density suburban sprawl, the creation of retail and myriad service jobs necessary to support it, the re-assignment of manufacturing to Asia, while we financially engineer the whole thing from San Francisco, Charlotte, Seattle and New York.

Franklin Crossing. This is almost a correct name. It really should be called the Franklin Burial Grounds, because I will bet my house that someday that entire town will be razed to the ground and paved over for a corner strip mall/shopping complex (call it the Franklin Crossroads or Franklin Marketplace) to service the sixty thousand thru commuters from all those eastern subdivisions...all those commuters heading towards I-5 to get to their Bay Area or Sacramento jobs.

What a waste. A total waste. Someday I will set the protection on the transmission lines and the bulk transformer in the Franklin substation and instead of feeling a sense of worldly accomplishment I will sit on that beach and think about how I was one small cog in the gigantic wheel of progress that rolled over and obliterated that small town out of existence. This Franklin Crossing -- a perfect example of a living pattern wholly devoid of the notion of a community, the notion of connectedness, nowhere near jobs or natural resources, and will in fact destroy what value the land had for agriculture or open space or wetland habitat.

Franklin Crossing -- a living pattern that owes its whole existence to the acquisition and timely, consistent delivery of cheap gasoline. I am going to write future chapters in my Franklin Monologues devoted to what $3 dollar gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing; what $4 gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing; what $5, $6, and $7 gasoline would mean to Franklin Crossing. It's development is predicated on the continuing cheapness of gasoline so you might understand my wholehearted desire for oil to climb in price so rapidly and so consistently such that we rethink our plans for this stupid development and rethink our plans for continued exurban sprawling madness. I cannot think of anything else other than energy depletion that would crimp this eighty year experiment of national waste, because cheap energy underwrites all of it. All of it. When I mentally envision a future of energy scarcity (or at a minimum, energy at a premium), I see a future worth living in, because we will finally build worthy urban arrangements.

Kilo, Mega, Tera

I do believe we are about to get yet another foreclosure here on my street in Elk Grove.

A couple bought a housal unit here on Moonlight Way in about 2003, yet moved out of town in 2007 (to a better, more exclusive place no doubt). They opted not to sell...how could they in 2007? So the rental began. After a year and a half of renting the tenants packed up and moved on, leaving the couple today with a second mortgage payment.

I last saw them a few weeks ago, helping the guy strap down a chest freezer he was hauling to their newest home in another county. Their tone of voice said it all: "We don't know...(long pause)...we might just sell it or rent it out again..."

Codespeak for "The keys are already in the mail."

I am aware of several people around me who were dumb enough to buy in 2003-2006 but smart enough to have purchased a second house in late 2007/early 2008 after the asset bubble had burst, only to abandon their first home and its underwater mortgage. This is clearly the most desirable economic thing to do. I fully admit, had I also fell into the speculative frenzy of housal unit flipping, reaching for a drink from that chalice of easy-money -- leveraged real estate -- or fell into the bigger debt trap of a better, newer housal unit (with its larger mortgage), I absolutely would have been one to do the same thing. Absolutely.

Imagine what more would come if credit was still as easy to get as it was five years ago. Alas, but it almost is! Perhaps you weren't aware that the recently extended $8,000 federal credit to spur "new" owners to buy a housal unit can be used as a down payment. That is, keep allowing people with no skin in the game to keep playing the game. That the statistics say that the 2001-2006 no-down-payment 'programs' resulted in higher default rates apparently doesn't register with current policymakers. That the remote possibility of further housal unit value declines and the remote possibility of further unemployment might spur these late entrants to also say fuck it and walk away also hasn't registered with current policymakers.

I don't really care much about all this...the results, that is. I highly enjoy thinking about the possibility of financial implosion if only because I think I'm much, much better positioned to survive any financial calamity. As an electrical power engineer I often think in large numbers (kilo, mega, tera) but I no longer even know how many zeros are in a trillion anymore. If forty is the new thirty, a trillion is the new billion.

I can't say I don't really care much about all the foreclosures around me, though. I do care. It's not that my own housal unit value might decline -- I could really care less about that; what bothers me is that the endless cycle of people in/people out cannot possibly lead to any real sense of community (not that low density suburbia has any hope of that to begin with). I cannot live in a vacuum regardless of how financially stable I might personally be. I am better off than most, I believe, through lifelong prudent fiscal responsibility, but that doesn't mean I could live correctly without a stable community for reciprocal support.

This isn't something anyone else thinks about. I believe it prudent to consider the remote possibility that things aren't going to immediately get better. We are all beginning to believe that this is was just some sort of V-shaped recession, now with a 50% return of the stock market and 3.5% GDP growth. Give it another eight months, following that logic, and we will be at 100%, having not lost any nominal stock value with growth at 7% with all our former problems passed away.

The Housal ATM

Whenever I go to a restaurant these days, I'm paying cash. I take the effort to get cash ahead of time to try to eliminate the 3% loss the restaurateur would take if I paid with a debit card. For me, it's not about some faceless corporation stealing money from a small business -- banks do need to charge to allow for this service -- but I figure that the 3% that stays and circulates in the local economy is much better for both me and the small business owners, so I take some efforts to work mostly in cash.

Amid the endless suburban shitscape of the Sacramento region, I am unbelievably privileged to be able to work in a building within 400 feet of a light rail station and within a quarter mile of a bank, pharmacy, independent grocery, a hardware store and twelve restaurants. It takes zero effort to hit the ATM first before patronizing everything else.

If I do use a card, I always ask which is cheaper for them, debit or credit. The pricing structure that processors charge is so convoluted and opaque that it's often impossible for them to even know beforehand, but I ask anyway. It might be only a matter of a few nickels. I don't care. I do it anyway.

Quite recently, three three! co-workers have received letters in the mail from their credit card companies indicating their rates are going to be jacked up. I believe this to be a preemptive strike against the coming 2009 credit card act which will limit their ability to change rates. Two of them have said fuck it, they're closing their account. One asked me yesterday if it would hurt her credit score, and while I am one to hardly know, I believe it will -- closing a long standing account in good standing would not likely improve one's creditworthiness, you think?

Easy credit is what fueled our pre-2007 boom, which ultimately led to our current mild economic slowdown. Personally, I hope that going forward credit becomes much harder to get. Bear in mind that we homeowners pulled out $5,000,000,000,000 from our housal ATMs over the last decade to buy shit we didn't need with money we didn't have. To buy shit we didn't need with money we didn't have. I am extremely hard pressed to figure out how a 70% consumer spending economy such as ours is going to dig out any time soon if consumers aren't consuming more consumables on credit.

Larger Than Themselves

I am stuck in my ways. I prefer riding my bicycle the same way to work and back every day, along the exact same roads, the same exact paths. I am one to think that if I rode the same way every day for the next twenty five years I will always find some degree of pleasure in the routine. I will never bore of my commute.

This afternoon I detoured off Franklin Blvd. to my ophthalmologist's office on Florin Rd. to retrieve my new pair of glasses. It was lunacy navigating a bicycle alongside the wretched surburban madness of Florin Road in South Sacramento. But I did it anyway.

I guess I did it to prove I could. I did it to show that it's possible -- to make a statement. I understand why people do the risky things they do. I understand why the old black lady at Martin Luther King and 22nd Avenue risks her life every morning as a crossing guard. I understand why every weekday morning the retired black guy rises and dresses and volunteers as a crossing guard at Franklin Blvd. and G Parkway -- they are making a statement that pedestrians count, that they are worthy of guarding against the two hundred thousand asshole drivers in our city.

I am hardly comparing my bicycling to the noble deeds done each morning by these two. But I think I better understand why they do it, why the subject themselves to the elements, to inattentive hurried drivers, to getting trash thrown at them and insults hurled at them (it happens all the time). They do it for reasons that are larger than themselves.

I started bicycling primarily to keep my diabetes in check, but over time I've come to realize how marginally better my living environment is because of it, and I like to think about what Elk Grove could have been had more of our decision makers also had type I diabetes, and also discovered the benefits of exercise, and also discovered what a hostile city they've created for people without cars.

But they aren't diabetic. They don't walk anywhere anymore. They require campaign funding from pro-sprawl sources to remain decision makers. And while I claim that I don't care how all this plays out, under the assumption that I've got no power to spur change, and how I immensely enjoy blogging about our wretchedness, I look to those two crossing guards and I see that they are making a substantial contribution to a better environment.

The FIRE Economy

I maintain I hold one of the few, rapidly disappearing manufacturing jobs in the U.S. I manufacture electricity. A stretch? Yes, perhaps. But as I bike up and down Franklin Blvd., and as I offer the following south to north listing of all the strip businesses I pass everyday, tell me we actually produce anything in this nation anymore:

SF Market
Cash 1 Check Cashing
Walgreen's
Raley's Supermarket
Hollywood Video
B&S Oriental Market
Q The Style
Gas Station
US Post Office
Prince of Peace Church
Security Public Storage
Hair Plus Beauty Supply
Fiji Indian Food Market
Maharaja Indian Restaurant
Goodwill
Rite Aid
FoodMaxx
Carl's Jr.
Pizza Hut
Suzie's Adult Superstore
Goeman's Bar
Hanson Realty
Sacramento Japanese Methodist Church
Southgate Glass
Southgate Veterinary Hospital
Japanese Motor Shop
United Carburetor and Auto
Unlimited Smog Stop
Exotic Aquarium
Extra Space Storage
Public Storage
Overhead Door Company
Pedro Auto Sales
Atlas Muffler Shop

Look, I understand that listing all the strip retail on a particular boulevard in Anytown, USA and then claiming we don't manufacture anything is fraught with inaccuracy. Most manufacturing isn't done on a collector road in suburbia -- it's done in factories on the margins, in heavily mechanized and automated facilities. We don't allow manufacturing sites anywhere near "clean" suburbia; instead we offer "clean industries" such as Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE), in their own single use office parks and towers only a short easy drive from suburbia. Keep them separated, damn it. Can't imagine the property value hit a residential subdivision would take if it fell withing walking distance of an office park. Horrors!

Along Franklin Blvd. not a damn thing is built -- it's all about servicing the vehicles necessary to live here, about offering fried food to all those drivers in drive-thru's, about storing myriad consumer consumables in storage pods, and about praying to various Gods for salvation with manicured hands and nice hairdos.

We don't build anything here, and I am at odds with trying to understand how our economy will grow when during the boom years of 2001-2006 we grew largely on the hallucinated wealth of financial gaming, speculation, and leveraging...we grew on the burning of a FIRE economy. With all of that now up in smoke, where exactly is our future growth going to come from?

He With The Most Lug Nuts Wins

Another Furlough Friday down Franklin Blvd. this afternoon, a day that couldn't have been better for bike riding. I made a mental note of the average gasoline price today ($2.87) and then thought about all that effort to ride back and forth to work...and it only saved me one gallon of gasoline. I saved three fucking dollars.

Less than three bucks a day...against a $50/hour salary...No wonder all my co-workers are driving Sequoias and Yukons...it's dirt cheap to operate them and you don't have to break a sweat. You are also supposedly safer -- he with the most lug nuts wins in an accident. My bicycle has no lug nuts....I won't ever win.

Nonetheless, today I rode by the newest self storage facility on Franklin Blvd., Extra Space Storage, and for the last two weeks they've had a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man outside in its newest advertising campaign. If your eye catches it just right you can see the sign the wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man is holding -- 'first month rent is free.'

FREE?

Wa-hey!

"Honey, let's once and for all clean up the garage and off load some of that stuff into an off-site storage locker. Our skiing gear? We can load it up in the spring, and spring it out in the fall. Your late mother's hideously ugly beautiful electric mixing bowl collection? I know you don't want to get rid of all sixty seven of them, so how about we preserve those precious memories of her by storing them properly? My bum knee will someday get better, so I'll store my tennis racket in there, too. How about that extra computer printer we know we'll someday need when the current printer fritzes out? Yes, into the locker it goes. All our camping gear, the table saw I never seem to have time for using anymore, Aunt Martha's lamp...oh, and Aunt Martha's ashes..., my Foosball table, your old breast pump, my AMC Gremlin that I can't decide to restore or part out..."

And the wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man will be our silent sentinel, providing 24/7 security for our precious stuff.

Option None

I was, up until August, totally bomb proofed during this mild recession. August brought cuts to my Elk Grovian e-Tran bus service, reducing my options to get to work without the use of my private automobile. The recession hit home for the first time.

The second recessionary hit occurred yesterday, when news that Russ has abandoned my old house that I sold him in 2006. He will foreclose. I am still carrying paper on it.

When I moved to Elk Grove in 1997, Russ wanted to rent my old Sacramento house, and while I wanted to sell it, he started renting the day I moved out and he rented it until 2006 when I sold it to him. Back in 1997 he couldn't afford to buy it, so renting was a good option for him until he was ready to buy. He was finally ready to buy in 2006. He made a colossal mistake by buying at the peak of the market.

Russ had no business entering into a mortgage he could barely afford; his broker had no business charging him such fees to arrange the sale; the bank, Option One, had no business offering such a loan. I tried, in all sincerity, to convince him not to do it. I tried, in all sincerity, to tell him to use another broker because I saw what he was going to get charged...but he did it anyway...along with one million, nine hundred thousand other Americans who also thought that if they didn't buy then they'd never be able to afford later, because everyone thought the good times were going to last forever...

I made out like a fucking bandit. I sold at the exact peak; I sold the same year I started at SMUD during the only year I've ever had a depressed salary -- so I paid zero AMT. Instead of buying his and hers SUVs like most other sellers, or a 1031 like-exchange that everyone suggested I do, I instead plowed the proceeds into reducing my own mortgage. Everyone, from my investment advisor, to Russ's broker, to the title insurance lady, to the escrow officer -- everyone told me I was an idiot for paying the capital gains and not buying a like property to continue the 20% ad infinitum returns...because the good times were going to go on forever, they said.

Option One paid me a shitload of money and later lost out. They have ceased to exist; they are no longer...they are Option None. As for my second -- Russ will continue to pay me, although truthfully, it's like paying on a car with four flat tires. To me this second has always been funny money, and some of us are still laughing, because the good times are going to go on forever...

More Alive Than Ever

I spent the better part of this morning in the town of Franklin, down south on my beloved Franklin Blvd., out at the Stone Lakes Wildlife Refuge. Two Canadian geese came into range this morning and were killed by me. I was really duck hunting, but if geese come into range, well, they will be the target of my passive shots...much like these sentences...quite passive.

Two geese! In four years of hunting I have only ever taken a single shot at a goose -- I had never killed one, and today I bagged two in separate passings. I felt more ALIVE than EVER.

So I will breast them out tonight and will follow a recipe from my goose-hunting co-worker, and hope like hell I like goose. I am afraid, really, that I won't like goosemeat, because I will not kill them going forward if I won't eat them.

I am afraid, really, that as our hallowed economy rebounds and Elk Grove expands ever southward, there won't be any birds left around here. It was absolutely fantastic to observe about fifteen mating pairs of Sandhill Cranes fly overhead this morning, with two landing just outside my spread. It was equally fantastic to watch about 65-80 American white pelicans circle around my blind.

Pelicans. Twenty minutes from home.

I am afraid, really, that as Elk Grove commandeers more land to its south to site all those supposed 55,000 average median income (AMI) jobs the city says it needs, then that will simply allow for thousands more people to escape the confines of the city proper and build themselves starter mansions on 2-3 acres on former farmland or former open space, creating more long range commuters, more roads and expansion of the rural roads already in existence. While Stone Lakes itself might be spared, when we destroy all the surrounding areas to build theaters, strip malls, auto repair shops, Asian foot massage parlors, jiffy lubes, cell phone shops, big box retail and dozens of square miles of low density car-dependent suburban slums, this will all lead to waterfowl declines.

We will have no open space left -- and it will all go unnoticed by the thrum of suburban living -- housewives driving minivans to get their morning latte, to attend yoga at the gym; househusbands driving Yukons to drop the little ones off at practice; residents yawning at 3:45 AM preparing to slog out their daily commute to Walnut Creek; Elk Grovians driving, driving, driving.

The bane of Elk Grovia -- open space.

To Kill A Bufflehead

I spent a fantastic Wednesday morning by my lonesome out at the Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. A beautiful bluebird morning out in the marshes.

I was trying to kill birds.

As a waterfowl hunter I fully respect what wilderness we have left around Elk Grove. I am keen on what I'm doing, I do so responsibly, I eat what I kill. Truthfully, contrast that with eating at Cape Cod fish and chips or Mikuni's -- and tell me that the netting of cod in the Atlantic ocean and transporting them 3,400 miles, or farming Octopus in Japan and sending it 6,200 miles is more environmentally friendly, then tell me again how disgusted you are that I'm out killing innocent birds for pleasure.

As a hunter I believe I have a greater respect for where our food comes from than virtually every other Elk Grovian, all of whom drive to the supermarket for cottage cheese without a shred of knowledge where it's processed, how much energy is used to manage feedlot diary cows, how much energy is used to transport their cottage cheese, 1,500 miles on average, to them. I am far more willing and able to minimize how much energy is used to feed me, having a far greater impact on oil use, climate, and traffic congestion than virtually all these other "green" things we supposedly should do.

A significant portion of my hunting license fees go towards the preservation of land, to support waterfowl habitat. Open space is something we will lose forever the moment we bulldoze it over for a suburban housal unit or office park...but that's what we are doing. Stone Lakes is abutted by an Elk Grovian subdivision of the same name, Stone Lakes. It will only be a matter of time, if we fail to respect and preserve our open spaces, before we say fuck it, we dam up the creeks that feed the refuge, we bottle the water for sale at the supermarket, and we pave over the refuge for a new interchange to the freeway.

Los Angeles Without The Freeways

So....3.5% growth last quarter...we are ready to resume our suburban slum blowout here in Elk Grove from the Sacramento City border to our north to Galt to our south. Elk Grove is Los Angeles...without the freeways.

I sat at the dentist's office off Elk Grove Blvd. and Bruceville last Wednesday, on the edge of a massive corner strip mall called Elk Grove Commons (the dentist, Kohls, GameStop, Pete's Coffee, etc), overlooking the weed filled "developments" of Laguna Ridge and Poppy Ridge Estates.

First of all, these so-called Commons are privately held, owned and operated. You are only allowed onto the commons as a consumer, and upon commencement of your consumptive activities you are invited to hurry on out, to make room for another vehicular enabled consumer. Hardly a public realm. Hardly a common good. But, that's all we got, and such an apt name for a strip mall -- the only place an Elk Grovian can go to meet other commoners. Even the stores themselves within the Commons are too far separated to walk to. You exit the Trader Joes and you'll have to drive to the other side of the commons to get your hair cut at the Vietnamese QT Nails.

Nonetheless, this is the essence of 3.5% growth. Commons that aren't common, weed-filled empty tracts of leveled dirt just waiting for a housal rebound, waiting to build out another subdivision full of auto-dependent people -- each one fighting each other for the use of the only truly common thing we have in Elk Grove...the roadway. You can remain on the roadway for 24 hours if you'd like. But try hanging out in the Commons or in Elk Grove Park after sundown. You'll be shackled and booked.

3.5% growth means just more suburban slums in Elk Grove. When a new subdivision pops up near you, is your first thought "Look, Honey, new neighbors are moving in!" or "Awww, fuck, more congestion!"

Bring on the growth.

The Stimulati

So having vacuumed up all those loose stimulatory nickels in Washington, SMUD is primed to spend north of one hundred and twenty million dollars to install new metering and other more smarter stuff, forming the floor for our upcoming smarter grid.

And while those in control are saying that this stimulati has created or saved 640,000 jobs, SMUD is ready to eliminate a fair number of meter readers once wireless metering is installed. Loss of jobs, of course, is [in part] how our smart grid is projected to save money in the long run.

I'm guessing that when we stack all those saved nickels, when we devise long term budgeting for the smart grid, we happily include the savings from these eliminated metering positions to make a stronger business case for smart gridding, but I warn that we will totally fail to account for myriad other jobs that will need to be created and filled to manage the fourfold complexity of this technology. We will underestimate this by a long shot...a long shot.

I'll say it again -- look to the California ISO, then tell me that duplicate energy monitoring and control functions along with the creation of extremely complex marketing arrangements has decreased the cost of electricity in California...has made energy and capacity trading less expensive for utilities. There are whole divisions in PG&E, whole business divisions, that now exist to trade energy through the ISO, to detail outage requests, to process the tractor-trailers full of market settlements, to manage marketing risks, to lawyer lawsuits and subpoenas and summons and testimony before FERC and...all that didn't exist before.

Then tell me that our smart grid's gonna do the same, it's gonna shave costs. Please identify one instance in human history, just one, where the use of additional technology has led to a overall reduction in total energy use.

I dare say there isn't one. Smart grid, in my opinion, isn't at all about saving the world or using less power or any of that horseshit -- it's about expanding the role electric service providers have in providing that electric service, expanding the role of nine hundred thousand new vendors providing new meters, new home area networks, new smart enabled products, gadgets, appliances and services, under the rubric of "increased reliability and decreased costs." That technology will pave the way towards hassle-free billing, metering, and delivery of electricity.

Uh-huh...

The Wait

On a Halloween night that couldn't have been nicer, with zero wind and 63 degrees, there were absolutely no kids out this year. The worst showing in the thirteen years I've lived here in Elk Grove.

Why? I will ask that question to myself here on my blog over the course of the next year, and wonder if somehow we are changing for the worst. The Great Recession? Pig Flu? Game 3 of the World Series? Were these the causes of such a poor turnout?

I remember when I first moved here with my two eight-year old and 18-month old boys, I remember taking them out on our first Halloween and thinking how utterly dead my new "community" was, how no one bothered to open up their houses to trick or treaters. My very first thought, being a white guy growing up in the white suburbs of Carmichael where Halloween was always very well played out, was that maybe all my new neighbors just didn't give a damn about Halloween because maybe it wasn't in their Asian/Black/Mexican American vernacular. I noted how very diverse my neighbors were -- Filipino's next door, a Chinese man and a Korean woman next to them, a Black man and a white woman across from them, a Mexican couple next to them, Punjabi's next to them, and so on. Was Halloween a white-only event? I kid you not, that was my reaction. I thought Halloween was a whites only affair.

I spent most of this beautiful Sunday morning retiring my Halloween props to the attic for another year-long wait, and all morning long I lamented what our Elk Grovian kids won't ever have that I had...good Halloweens with hundreds of kids and pillowcases full of candy and dozens of scary neighborhood displays and a full night of walking and... Elk Grove has always had a shitty Halloween turnout, but this year was exceptionally bad. I now don't attribute it to any cultural differences due to a highly diverse population...I attribute it to the poor respect Elk Grovians have towards their Elk Grovian neighbors, and I will attribute that to our car dependent, low density, private-only, public-be-damned urban design.

When you build communities that are from the start lifeless, that are chopped in half with brutal NASCAR styled collector roads, that are not fit for walking, that have no respect for the public realm -- then you don't ever get children out on Halloween and you don't ever get parents who will even let their children go out on because of the one-in-three pedophiles among us, because of the razor blades in the gummy bears, because of all those speeding assholes. They button themselves up inside their private realms, turn off all the lights, and vegetate while watching Dancing With The Stars...

I should also offer that perhaps my little community, now some 19-years old, is at the stage in the lifecycle of suburbia where kids are simply non-existent -- perhaps we just don't have as many kids because young parents with children want their own new housal unit which means all the children are now a few miles farther out in the newest fifth-tiered suburban ring of Sacramento. This is an idea I should explore further.