Writing is Like...

My space to work out some of my most complicated, nagging thoughts, not to mention a meditative opportunity to reflect on and examine some of my assertions, beliefs, assumptions, sentiments, feelings, plans, thoughts and relationships in a way that I might appreciate new, novel and perhaps helpful and informative perspectives. There is never any promise with this activity that I will come to any epiphanic conclusion; but conclusions are never good substitutions for trails of thoughts, pathways of reflection, alleyways of contemplation. Finding the ideal conditions for expressing and articulating thoughts is what is writing is about, limiting the form to a medium of a certain kind, much like painting. And, in my arrogance, I want to say that it is a preferred form: that, unlike painting or music, it provides us - its presumed users - with a level of precision, detail and pointedness (that is, in the most skilled and diligent of its users) hardly found elsewhere. But this, I think, is an unjustified conceit: it is merely another way to represent 'reality' or to muse on the features and aspects of the world, which many have long purported it to reflect and mirror cleanly: a whole issue on its own.

For now, all I care about is that writing is like prayer for me: my genuflection to a god that, in our creation, could be.

(Self) Transported

While walking in Oakdale, you might cross one person, someone you've likely never met before that likely lives just a block or two down from where you wake and sleep. Your interaction will undoubtedly be awkward, them dressed in sweat pants and being dragged along by a dog they can't seem to let go and you witnessing this in full force and view. As you pass an unnecessarily large illuminated marquee proclaiming the divine existence and authority of THE DIVINE BEING (hereafter TDB), wondering all the while why such a divine being needs that kind of publicity if he/she/zhe were all that divine anyways.

But that's aside from the point, and if you look too closely anyways, you must just be struck by a marauding truck, some monstrous beast of a vehicle that exists nowhere else on the planet except for warzones and this city, and while it careens on by, defying every extant cost-efficient, friction-reducing design and engineering recommendation, one can't help but sympathize - if just for a moment - with how cool it might be. But for every moment, there are ten others that stink of environmental degradation, general noisiness, obnoxiousness and unbridled masculinity. So this is what people think of you.

As dusk wears on, fewer people stroll the sidewalks, and more white and red lights dominate the streets. This is when one must be hyperviligant, observant on all sides of lurking beasts: you never know when one might pounce.

...

For a moment after passing the bike-topic mini-mountain hastily constructed outside of a 7-eleven in anxious anticipation of a slurpee, you recognize something that had been there all along but that from which all of the other sights and sounds had been distracting you: the profound stillness in the air, a cold coming on slowly but not forcibly or meanly, greeting you on your walk home from school or work (or both), casually talking up your flank as you tiredly shoulder the increasingly burdensome bag that you can't seem to empty too quickly of books. But that is your lot, you know, and you accept it, even welcome it. To cafes, to bars, to places where it really isn't socially acceptable to sit and read; even propriety doesn't stand in your way, old friend, you bookish one you.

This is how you end your days, sometimes how you begin your days, and you look forward to its anchoring function in your life, the time when you can think, reflect and ponder, make sense of and order your life, like you order your days with calendars and clocks; if only existential desires might fit the same kind of form. And you try to do that very thing, with varying levels of success. Let's see how it works this time.

Oh how common is such a world.

Art Blog Introduction Statement: Oakdale Project (aka Reflections On A City Without a Place)

What is in a Place anyways?

It's hard to say what any place is really about, so I'm not even going to try to do that here. I'm just going to leave some of my impressions of a place that I've gotten to know just a little bit too well, and I want to document some of my history with it.

The traces left here are little testament to all that I've experienced and done while living here and really only an introduction to a way of life, in some ways similar to ways of life elsewhere and in some ways distinct and remarkable. I do not purport to say or accomplish much with these transient, experiential ramblings, but I do hope something is 'gotten' or 'learned' or 'appreciated,' if all this means is that you liked the pretty pictures or how I used a verb in a certain way.

Otherwise, I do not have much more to say, aside from: Thanks for Stopping By and...

Welcome to Oakdale

(and please do feel free to leave traces of your thoughts, too: those are really what I care about)

The Art of Summer Survival; The Pools of Oakdale

Summers

 Oakdale summers are hot summers; we are not talking eighty to ninety degree warms days punctuating otherwise pleasant, breezy, coastal weather. These are triple-digit summers, the kind we're later proud-to-brag-we-endured summers. Talking about the heat and cautioning others about it- and how we might avoid it - comes to replace 'take care' or 'have a good day.' Instead, we're left with: "stay outta the heat."

These are typically dry times, too, which is supposed to make the climate more bearable. All the same, the offending, imposing heat incinerates any possibility of real interaction with the outside environment. Taking walks involves covering every exposed part of skin, swiftly moving from dark shade-patch to light tree-cover and carrying gallons of water for fear of dehydration.

But it is not as though we actually have to face these treacherous conditions. One can, if they have the privilege of not working in the environment (which so many people do not), just stay inside. And, once done, the rest will too.


Pools

But we like to be outside. To cope, we've institutionalized pool-ing here. Pools serve as an oasis, a recreational opportunity to brave the warm weather, with a relatively certain promise of a cool outlet for these desires.

Pools come in an assortment of shapes, depths, colors, designs, layouts and yard-situations. They are, in a way, the symbol of upper-middle-class success. "We've made it, so let's get a pool."

There are 'doughboys', impermanent pools that sometimes pre-purchasedly inhabit the monstrously immense warehouses of Costco. Doughboys are smaller but a nice compromise, still providing a much needed sanctuary from an otherwise untimely heat-induced fate.

Inset pools have a longer life, and can often reach a greater depth, emanating a sort of religious permanence and a kind of human defiance of the local environmental conditions; it is, as well, a way of bringing and safeguarding water, what is absent, to the home, not even to be consumed but to be leisured in.

Spas and Jacuzzis are mainly nighttime affairs. They play on our bodies ecstatic and comfort-seeking obsession associated with being warmed to a certain temperature. The relax, calming effect of the Jacuzzi simulates that of the Sauna and doesn't require the same level of investment. It is also, status-wise, how one moves from solely having pool; that is, having the ability both to cool on warm days and to warm on cool nights.

Insulating its parishioners from the actual state of the local climate is as much part of enjoying pools as is any recreational activity facilitated by their presence, and the presence of water. It also seems to remind us of a primordial relationship with the stuff that we will never be able to escape, as much property values and urban flight encourage it.


Rivers and Reservoirs

In addition to constructed pools, there are numerous rivers, creeks, reservoirs, and 'naturally'-occurring bodies of flowing or still water. They are to be found both in town and outside of it, and if you move further away, you might even find a dam or two.

These might weave in and around roads or border long expanses of fields and orchards. Often, they are drawn from for irrigation purposes.

It is also widely known that Oakdale survives and thrives largely on the presence of an underground reservoir of clean, flowing water, without which, we might be be in the same situation in which unknowingly citizens of LA or San Francisco find themselves: up a creek (but really, just dependent on more hinter-landing batteries of thirst-quenching water).

Note: I've included a few photos here, but more will follow

Rain, Rain (Please don't) Go Away: Come Again Another Day

Rain in Oakdale brings a new and different kind of reassuring, if unanticipated calm, and especially now. For some time, California has been experiencing routine and persistent droughts, as if someone on high is holding out on us.

This issue, while an inconvenience to many, is felt all the more acutely in places like Oakdale, where industry is primarily agricultural, and our very subsistence, not to mention general economic improvement largely rests on a key variable over which we have no control.

If there is no rain, there is no Oakdale: the grass would permanently yellow, crops would wilt and perish, and animals would thirst.

Many who live in town are nevertheless often caught unprepared and the normal sartorial precautions one might expect to witness elsewhere are not even given a second thought (as if it were an affront to our sense of personal survivability to actually outfit ourselves in appropriate ways).

Nevertheless, we press on, while the rainclouds pour and the streets fill, patently surprised at the presence of a thing that they are incapable of swallowing: somehow we make it through.

Many are annoyed, but those of us who are doomed to be kids at heart no matter what our age still take pleasure in pushing headlong in pooled bodies of parking-lot street water, lamenting its inevitable dissipation by the unfun gods of City Park and Rec.

Letter to the Editor on "The Park People"

Dear Oakdale,

Having returned recently from a scholarly stint in the bay, I was dismayed to find uprooted public benches, probing Leader articles, impassioned public debate, and a regrettable disdain for the “park people.” To my chagrin, I felt this personally while walking to Cafe Bliss, when I was curtly accosted by nearby store owner who interrogated meanly: “Are you one of those park people?”

I worry that the recent ordinance that diagnoses the issue as alcoholism is only the most recent contribution to the city-wide discourse about the ‘park people’ that has yielded unhealthy discussions about ‘who they are’, these members of our community. It also ignores many of the contributing factors to the development of such a habit, including but not limited to poverty, which is not an individual but a shared, social issue. This ordinance that endeavors to address the issue simplifies the atmosphere of causes and effects and generates a solution that addresses only a small part.

I want us to come to an effective solution like the rest of you. But labeling a complex and multifaceted issue of poverty, social stigmatization, and the rapid disappearance of the public space as one of ‘public drunkenness’ is misleadingly simplistic and infused with failed, outdated prohibitionist values. While treating a loose group of park-goers as “those people” does little more than create unnecessary fissures in our own community. The issue is far from resolved, so let us focus on creating inventive, inclusive solutions, such as shelters, or simply those that treat these ‘people’ as human beings in order to actually be that loving, inclusive Oakdale we purport to be.

(In my search for city council minutes, I also found it quite challenging to obtain a copy, anything after 2012,, which signals a possible but remediable barrier to public knowledge.)

Risk Aversion?

A risk is a risk because it is a risk and not because it is not a risk. This is the way of the world.

All actions are risks because they project us from what is and has been to what is not and what might be; in any case, some actions and engagements are more risky than others, project ourselves further into conditions about which me may know little.

We have an intuitive sense of this risk, to some degree, as attending to our bodies and what they tell us about our performance and our environment's proffered resources, not to mention our ability to confront likely challenges, is a way to read our own aptitude for facing uncertainty.

It is not foolproof, but it is essential, and we can inform and develop this intuitive sense through research, conversation, reflection and writing. Without it, however, we are dead in the rough, incapable of interpreting even our basic abilities to cope with and adapt to our environment.