Which seems to be dedicated headlong for more Making America Garbage Again to our friends’ dismay and the delight of our enemies while all the while I in Benicia was busily hoping this workaround would hold up…seems for the moment we’re good, so:

Cormorant.

Benicia the benign, the beneficent

wherein in the initial week of December

a Major Milestone is reached; from now on we’ll be loading up on Large Breed DOG Food

instead of Large Breed Puppy Food while down at the harbor the hopefuls fly their Trumpflags

high.  After all, if a minority “won” the last round it’s only fair that they win this one too, right? As Michael “Pardon-me” Flynn so aptly put it to the mob in front of the Supreme Court “WE get to decide the outcome”* and with sixty million plus [those are just the ones who voted!] getting their news straight from the unimpeachable [see, you suckahs?] @the realDJT…but enough! We merely have different belief systems**.  Were I younger, less encumbered and more sprightly

I’d surely, like my brother, be looking into that Canadian citizenship about now as ‘merkin citizenship is looking increasingly iffy. Even more so after a trip to Safeway where the paper

goods were as absent as they were back in April.  Jeez, you’d think someone would have predicted the dread second wave might lead to supply chain issues similar to the unexpected first one’s and take preemptive corrective measures, right? Unh-unh and uh-oh.  I wasn’t in the

market for toilet paper anyway but a trip on California’s ill-maintained freeways overlaid with surveillance cameras and toll lanes to the potholed garbage-strewn streets San Francisco

with THEIR multiple indecipherable specialized lane restrictions and designations for bicycles, parking, pedestrians…everything but the unimpeded flow, maybe, of traffic, was no more

reassuring. Symptomatic, but not inspiring confidence; deferred maintenance with an overlayment of regulations designed to distract from it. After all these years a stunning

achievement for Critical Mess, a clusterfuck for everyone else.   The homelessness, or ‘street-style living”, continues grandly conspicuous as does the attendant detritus everywhere we

went, which was only as far as Utah on the edge of Portrero to drop off work, see Leo Valledor’s 

stunning show at Brian Gross***and Linda’s works, with a side order of Bob Arneson.

Midday return, the sparse lockdown traffic allowing navigation despite the aforementioned un-maintained streets and abundance of regulatory confusement, was fairly effortless.

Between the homeless, the carless [even if not homeless the carless are shunted onto a failing public transport system to their considerable disadvantage] and the Fortunate [that’s us, for the moment] the contrasts are stark and bode ill for the unevenly distributed futures ahead.

But so to lunch, garden, and

benign Benicia.

Friday morning started off looking a little more December-ish along the water

as well as out eastbound 80, but that weather was soon outrun,

if only temporarily.  As shall be seen.

*Which is to say not the electorate, not the Electoral College, not the Supreme Court nor the Constitution but “We” because We, in contempt of all that, can. Would they’d Shut the Trump Up.  If only…

**”They” [the “We”] seem to favor a feedback loop of Trumpian tweets, the formally loyalist Fox pontificators, Q-anon and other unimpeachable sources while I reactionarily rely on the ever starry-eyed New Yorker, Steve Stern’s blog, “First Dog on the Moon” and articles sent me by friends and family.  All of which I, as do they theirs, trust semi-implicitly.  With complicity.

***Leo’s show open by appointment until 9 January 2021