JOURNAL 2016: Sports, Hip Surgery, Trump, Trump, Trump

Description

Journal 2016 (15,000 words) is the 17th yearly journal by San Francisco author Joseph Sutton.  At the age of 76 in 2016, Sutton wrote down his thoughts about writing, his memories of growing up in 1940s and ’50s Hollywood, his love of sports, his terminating two longtime friendships, his recovery from hip surgery, and his opinion of Donald Trump.

 

Saturday, January 2, 2016 – Momentum and Confidence

I’m sitting here in my living room watching the 2016 Alamo Bowl football game between Oregon and TCU.

I, of course, want Oregon to win, not only because I went there and played football for them in the early 1960s, but because I’m for any West Coast team when it comes to them playing in a Bowl game.  Oregon is leading in the first quarter 14-0.  They seem swifter, more creative, more determined.  They just scored again and you can hear the band play the fight song:  “Oregon, our alma mater, We will guard thee on and on.  Fellows gather ’round and cheer her.  Chant her glory, Oregon!”

It’s 28-0 early in the second quarter.  Oregon can do no wrong.  They’re hot.  I know that feeling when everything’s going your way, you’re so confident.

I played college football at a time when each team’s quarterback called the plays in the huddle, when there were no end zone celebrations after touchdowns, and when there was only one TV game on Saturday.  Now there are at least 25 games on TV every Saturday.  Football = Commercials = Money.

Oregon just lost their quarterback, Vernon Adams, due to a concussion.  He’s so valuable.  It’s 28-0 with three minutes left in the first half.

On TV I just saw the campus of Oregon.  I saw the quadrangle and the path to the University Library.  Memories come of the time I spent in that library that has since been refurbished.  I found a place to study in the little-traveled book stacks.  I needed to concentrate, to get serious about my studies in a quiet atmosphere.  Outside of football season, I was always at the library until closing time at 11 p.m.

There’s seven and a half minutes left to play and Oregon is leading 31-20.  TCU is getting closer than I want them to be.

TCU is now the hot team.  It’s 31-28 with three minutes left to play.  Oregon’s second string quarterback is not half the quarterback that Vernon Adams was.  I have a feeling TCU, with all the momentum going its way, is going to win.  This game is an example of how powerful the forces of momentum and confidence are.

With one minute left to play, TCU is on Oregon’s 13-yard line.  It’s fourth and one-yard to go for a first down and TCU chooses to kick a field goal.  And they do it.  31-31.

Overtime now.  TCU gets the ball first on Oregon’s 25-yard line.  They score a touchdown.  Now it’s Oregon’s ball.  They score and make the extra point.  38-38.

At the end of the second overtime it’s 41-41.

Third overtime.  TCU scores a touchdown. Oregon has a chance to tie the game but falls short.  TCU wins the game 47-41.  This game is now known as the greatest comeback in college Bowl history.

 

Saturday, January 16, 2016 – Melville’s Billy Budd and the NFL Division Championship Game

I sat down today, after revising a story I’m still not finished with, but at least I got some work done on “The Death of a Friendship,” about my longtime friendship with Nate Wirt and calling an end to it.  Why would I call and end to such a long friendship?  Because for the last several years Nate, a born-again Christian, was constantly harping on my going to hell because I didn’t believe Christ was God or the Son of God.

I watched a pro football game today and one of the great films of all time, Billy Budd.  The movie was adapted to the screen by Peter Ustinov of Melville’s story about Good vs. Evil, Law vs. Justice.  It’s about people who logically know something’s right but can’t get around it because of the Law of the Land.  Goodness and Innocence is Billy Budd who accidentally commits a crime in anger.  The captain and his three lieutenants knew in their hearts and minds that this innocent youth, Billy Budd, was forced to do what he did, which was to strike Master-at-Arms John Claggart because Claggart falsely accused Billy of leading a mutiny.  Between the captain and his three lieutenants, none of them could figure out how to refute the law, that killing another man, according to British law in 1799, a person must be hung for the crime.  And so the captain and his three lieutenants, along with the whole ship’s crew, knew that John Claggart (played perfectly by Robert Ryan in 1962) deserved what he got because of his evil and sinister ways of sticking to the letter of the law.

I kept switching back and forth from Billy Budd to the Division Championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the Arizona Cardinals.  On the last play, as the gun sounded to end the game, the Packers’ Aaron Rodgers threw a 50-yard Hail Mary pass that ended up in one of his receiver’s hands in the Cardinals’ end zone.  That play tied the game and it went into overtime.  The very first play the Cardinals had the ball, a pass was thrown to Larry Fitzgerald, who did a sensational job of catching the ball, eluding a whole slew of Green Bay defenders, and was finally tackled on Green Bay’s 5-yard line.  Two plays later, Carson Palmer threw a short underhand pass to Fitzgerald that he carried in for a touchdown.  Game over.

Two fantastic, out of this world touchdowns, one right after the other.  It’ll go down as one of the great games of this year’s NFL season.  Nothing will beat the memory I have of Aaron Rodgers’ arm and Larry Fitzgerald’s catch and run.  Both were spectacular.  It’s a game where the losers, the Packers, can hold their heads up high.  There was no true winner, but the winner wins if he has more points at the end of the game.  It’s just like the law in Billy Budd.  You can’t bend the law, even though justice isn’t served.  It wasn’t a just act to hang Billy Budd, who was the epitome of innocence and goodness.  But the devil, John Claggart, won out.  Why was he the devil incarnate, always trying to destroy the will of those under his command?  He was a control freak who abused his position.  If someone went against the law of the ship in the slightest manner, then that person would be flogged.

Melville showed the conflict of good vs. evil, law vs. justice.  Peter Ustinov produced and directed the film and played the captain of the ship that was called Indomitable.  The movie was perfection, just like Billy Budd (played superbly by Terence Stamp) was perfection in honesty, a positive demeanor, and innocence.

 

Saturday, January 23, 2016 – Death of a Friendship

I finished the story about my longtime friend’s religious zealotry that caused me to end our friendship.  The name of it is “The Death of a Friendship.”  It took me a few weeks to complete.  I’ve written three pieces in the last few months:  “The Death of a Friendship,” a story about Neal Shapiro and me and our high school football experience that I’ve called “The Burden of Guilt,” and lastly, my view on climate change.

 

Sunday, January 31, 2016 – Sunday in the Park

It’s a sunny, windy Sunday in San Francisco.  Today, instead of going for a walk by the ocean, I walked around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park because it’s less windy there.  I’ve walked in the wind near the ocean and it’s almost impossible to enjoy the exercise.  So today I got smart and walked where the wind didn’t knock me off my feet.  While walking along the Lake, I wrote down some of my impressions.

 

Sunday in the Park

Passing by young lovers talking about their hopes for the future.  Little do they know the peaks and valleys that lie ahead of them.

Young children under five strolling with their parents.  Those little minds of theirs are like sponges.  They’re so young, yet they’ve already soaked in how to comprehend words and sentences.

Old couples pass by me conversing about their grandkids.

There’s a mighty wind today.  Still, a young man rows a rented boat with his beloved facing him, and just behind their boat, a father rows with his young son in the sun.

A young man in a black tux and his betrothed in a flowing white wedding gown, along with four bridesmaids dressed in long, sleek purple dresses, posing for pictures with the Lake as a backdrop.

 

Yesterday I worked in the front garden where there are only plants and bushes.  One of the bushes had branches and stems that have been dead for the past year, due to the four-year drought we’ve had (thank goodness El Nino has brought rain in January for the first time in four years).  I spent four or five hours out there pruning the large bush and cleaning up afterwards.  It took every bit of my energy to finish the project.  My 75-year-old body was sore and I could barely move after finishing the job.  Before I went to bed, I took a couple of ibuprofens to relieve the soreness in my body.  I woke up early this morning and wasn’t as sore as I thought I would be.  Thank goodness my body is in fairly decent shape.  All the years I’ve been doing water aerobics have made it so I can work out hard one day and not feel sore the next.

The day before yesterday I went for a long walk with my friend Lou Berman near Half Moon Bay.  It was cold, windy, and overcast, but the air was as fresh and invigorating as air can be.  We talked about Lou’s son and daughter and how well they’re doing in their professions connected to the Internet.  We talked about the exciting, first place Golden State Warriors and the upcoming Super Bowl that’s going to pit the Denver Broncos against the Carolina Panthers.  I predict, like most people in the country, that the Panthers are going to win the game going away.  Why?  Their quarterback, Cam Newton, is probably the most talented quarterback in the National Football League today (he can run with power, he can throw pin-point passes, and he’s got a head on his shoulders).  The quarterback for the Broncos is Peyton Manning, old, weak-armed, but probably the smartest player to ever play the game.  Denver has a great defense, but the Panthers are solid on both offense and defense.  I have a feeling that Carolina is going to overpower Denver, unless Denver can pull off a miracle.  That’s my prediction for the game that will take place on my son Ray’s birthday, February 7.  [Note:  I predicted wrong.  Denver and Peyton Manning won the 50th Super Bowl game 24-10.]

Ray will be 35 next week.  He and his girlfriend Ashley are going to move into what was once Jim Bransten’s condo.  Jim was my wife Joan’s brother who died last summer.  It’s a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom condo in the heart of North Beach.  Ray and Ashley have a dog, Babu, a nice, quiet, gentle dog who will be stuck in the condo all day while Ray and Ashley are at work.  I assume they’re going to have to hire a dog walker.

 

Thursday, February 4, 2016 – Hemingway

Before turning the light out to go to sleep, I’ve been reading The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway.  The title story has to do with a man, Francis Macomber, who’s on a safari in Africa with his wife.  Everyone in the safari sees that Macomber is frightened, even his wife, of facing a lion and killing it, and that Macomber relies heavily on the safari guide, Robert Wilson, for his safety.  Because Macomber is frightened, his wife, right in front of him, goes for Wilson, and although it’s not mentioned but implied, Macomber’s wife has sex with Wilson.  Macomber knows of this and doesn’t do anything about it.  Macomber somehow overcomes his fear while hunting water buffalo.  This is his short happy life because while stalking a wounded water buffalo, he is killed by a gunshot from his wife.  We don’t know whether she shot him by mistake or not.  That was Macomber’s short happy life, his overcoming a fear where he defies his wife and shows his manhood.

Hemingway, in the next story, “The Capital of the World,” again tries to show how a waiter, in proving his manhood to be a bullfighter, practices his technique with another waiter in the restaurant.  The other waiter binds two sharp knives to a chair to make it seem like it’s the bull’s horns and rushes this would-be bullfighter.  One of the knives goes into the body of the would-be bullfighter and he dies.

Hemingway’s life involved danger and manhood, which is passé nowadays.  Hemingway was constantly trying to show his manhood in his writings by drinking, hunting, fishing.  He was truly a man’s man of his time.  He eventually committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth in Ketchum, Idaho, just before his 62nd birthday.

It was Hemingway who said, “Write drunk, edit sober.”  Maybe it wasn’t him, because he once wrote that that was a saying amongst writers.  Hemingway is also known to have said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”  Sportswriter Red Smith is known to have written something similar:  “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”

Enough of writing quotes.  What the hell would I like to write about right now?  Well, that’s easy, I’ll just keep writing what comes to mind, for that is one of my keys to writing if one doesn’t know what to write.  In other words, writing swiftly without stopping, or writing drunk, loosens the subconscious so it will rise to the top.  If a writer does that, he can either break out of a writer’s block or generate a new idea to write about.

Me, I write almost 95% from my life experience and embellish on that.  For instance, in my story “The Burden of Guilt,” instead of making our high school team playing our crosstown rival, I make it so that the game is the semi-final game to get into the Los Angeles high school championship game.  I upped the ante, so to speak.  It’s a true story about my last high school game against Hollywood High, that we, Fairfax High, won in the waning seconds of the game.  So what I did was make us play in the semi-final game, but I couldn’t play in the championship game of the 1957 football season because my ego got in the way.  How did it get in the way?  In the huddle, after throwing a beautiful 45-yard pass, I called my own running play by saying, “I brought us down here (near the goal line); I’m taking it in.”  Well, I got injured on that running play and had to hand the ball off to our running back on the next play who scored the winning touchdown just before time ran out.  That injury kept me out of my last football game at Fairfax High.

 

Monday, February 15, 2016 – Alan and Nate

Alan Blum comes to mind.  I have in my computer a story titled “Alan’s Financial Story.”  It sheds a bad light on Alan.  He lost so much money over the years gambling the lottery.  No one knew about his gambling addiction until recently.  So far I’ve actually GIVEN Alan close to $10,000.  Given!  God, how could I have been so blind?  One reason is that he was my “friend.”  He really took me for a ride.  Never again, even if he’s starving at my front door, will I give him one more cent.  He’s taken for saps not only me but others in his life.  I believe he’s used me more than anyone else.  Now, because he has a very bad case of Parkinson’s, Ralph and Teresa Yanello have said they are going to take care of his finances.  Ralph is Alan’s oldest friend from when they both lived in Florida.  Alan now has a place to stay, paying $700 in rent.  He has a little over $2000 coming in from Social Security.  With Ralph and Teresa taking care of his finances, that should be the end of his ALWAYS being broke.

I never figured out why he was always broke when he was making good money as a mechanical engineer.  We all know now.  I was the biggest sap of them all.  I’ve always known Shakespeare’s famous line, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  What a schmuck I’ve been.  I’m one of the biggest saps in the world.

I’ve got to get off this negative thinking of Alan.  I have already shed a longtime friend from my life, Nate Wirt, who was constantly telling me that I was going to hell if I didn’t take Christ into my life.  I had had enough of his proselytizing over the years, and finally a couple of months ago I called it quits between us.  No more a longtime friend in my life, although we grew up together since we were 12 years old.  Money is known as the root of all evil.  I would add religion to that list of evils.

 

Thursday, February 18, 2016 – Hay Fever

I finally had a good sleep last night.  My sleep has been very poor due to hay fever.  I first got hay fever way back in 1953 when I was thirteen years old while hiking in the Hollywood hills.

What can I write about hay fever?  Well, the story can be about a boy, in his 13th year on earth.  It’s spring vacation in L.A.  The boy lives on Fairfax Avenue, three houses below Hollywood Boulevard.  Four blocks north of his house are the Hollywood hills, where he sometimes goes hiking.  Up past the houses he soon reaches dirt trails and brush.  He looks down on the city he grew up in and what does he see?  A brown layer of smog covering all of Los Angeles.

So he starts hiking in the hills above his house.  He’s been up there before, either with a couple of friends or his brothers or cousins.  He’s walking along a dirt trail when all of a sudden he starts sneezing and his nose won’t stop running.  He has to keep spitting the congestion the whole time he’s in the hills.  What’s going on? he asks himself.

That was the first time hay fever had come upon the boy and he would suffer through it every springtime for many decades into the future.  For three months at a time he would suffer from hay fever—that is, until his wife heard him sneezing one day and asked him, “What did you just eat?”  His answer was, “A handful of raisins.”

“That’s it,” she said to him.  “That’s what’s causing your hay fever.  Raisins contain mold.  Anything moldy during your weak months of spring will make you sneeze and your nose run.”

And that was the cure, up until this year, when it rained hard in December and January and then the sun came out in February, and he didn’t eat or drink anything that had mold in it, and he still got hay fever.

Let’s hope this doesn’t keep going.  We’re in the middle of February now, a weak month for him.  After April, he can eat or drink anything he wants without being bothered by hay fever.

 

Monday, February 22, 2016 – Revere the Unconscious

Mike Nichols, the great artist and director, once said, “Revere the unconscious.”  Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to get at in my journal entries, the unconscious.  To write full-speed ahead without stopping so I can get into my unconscious.

The unconscious is not coming to the fore yet.  I’m thinking of what to write instead of just letting my fingers hit the keys to see what comes up.  And what comes up are thoughts of my good friend Charles Lewman.  Charles is a man I communicate with on Mondays at 5:00 p.m.  He lives in the Laguna Beach area.  Our conversations are about everything under the sun.  Today we talked about the Republicans and Democrats running for the presidency.  We both agreed that not one Republican was of presidential material.  The leader in the Republican primaries is Donald Trump.  The man is grotesque.  He’s a self-absorbed bully.  He’s a man who says the most stupid-ass things and still gets away with them.  Some people actually believe he can solve all the problems in America by building a wall to keep the Mexicans from crossing the border.  They believe he can make China and Japan and every country we trade with pay higher tariffs.  They believe he can keep the Muslims from coming into the country.  He arouses hatred of Mexicans and Muslims.  What Muslim or Latin person from Mexico or Central America will be able to walk the streets in peace if that man is ever elected?

Oh, I must get off of Trump and mention what else Charles and I talked about.  I wrote down three words that he mentioned tonight that would make anyone healthy:  Nutrition, Exercise, Rest.  Those three words, if followed correctly, can make anyone healthy.  Me, I often eat too much which makes it hard for me to lose weight.  As for exercise, I try to do something physical every day, such as going to my water aerobics class, going for a walk, or working in the garden.  Rest.  That’s what I need more of.  Today I was so tired from my water class that I laid down on my bed and closed my eyes for an hour and just rested while listening to NPR.  A man needs rest, especially at my age.  Just a half hour or hour during the day.

And another thing that will make me healthy is writing every day.  I’ve waited until 10:45 p.m. to start writing today.  I should do it much earlier in the day.  But tonight I watched an hour documentary on Mike Nichols and his work.  He said he depended considerably on his unconscious.  That’s how he got started in show business, by doing improvisational skits with Elaine May.  Nichols died in 2014 at the age of 83.  “Revere the unconscious,” he said.  He was having a two-day conversation with the interviewer, one night in front of an audience and another night just the two of them.  Nichols directed his first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, that won four Academy Awards.  He didn’t win it for directing, though.  Quite a beginning for a young director.  He went on to direct The Graduate, which won the best picture and best director for him.  He also directed Catch 22.  I remember reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 while serving in the Coast Guard.  What a time to read about the military while IN the military and all the bullshit that goes on.

But I really haven’t reached my unconscious tonight.  I’ve been Googling too much, to find out when Nichols died and about his first movie that was written by Edward Albee and Elaine May.  I’ve stopped and sputtered and here I am, almost finished and I really didn’t get what I set out to do, which was to get into my subconscious.  I hesitated too much.  I looked up things, which I could have done after I finished, but no, I had to find out the facts before finishing this entry.  That’s life, I guess.  Sometimes it goes your way and sometimes it doesn’t.  I really wish I could have had more reverence for my subconscious.

 

Sunday, February 28, 2016 – Steph Curry

Last night I watched the Golden State Warriors dig deep into their souls to pull out a victory against the Oklahoma City Thunder in a classic basketball game (the Warriors led only once in the game and that was in the last minute of overtime).  The sports channels on TV last night couldn’t stop talking about the game that was won in the last second in overtime by a Steph Curry 37-foot prayer that swished through the basket.  Curry was talked about last night, and the conversation continues on radio today.  We are witnessing a revolution in basketball by a 6′ 3″ point guard who can, 90% of the time, separate himself from a defender to shoot 3-point shots accurately.  This Curry fellow is changing the game of basketball right in front of our eyes.  He’s out of this world, he’s sublime, he’s the best shooter the game has ever produced.  The Warriors have 53 wins and only 5 losses.  No team has ever had a better record at the 58-game mark.  They have 24 more games to play before the regular season ends.  And then the playoffs, which will end sometime in June.  And here we are, almost at the beginning of March.  Will the Warriors go down in history as the greatest team ever?  I believe they should be in the mix.  Every player on the team is a valuable cog.  Steph Curry is really the most valuable player in the league this year, just like he was last year.

 

Thursday, March 3, 2016 – Getting My Giants Book into Bookstores

Yesterday I drove down to Burlingame, near SFO, to meet with Earle Peterson at Books Inc.  He wanted nine copies of my third Giants book.  Great.  Last year he ordered five books and sold four of them.  So with one leftover from last year, he’s going to add nine more to the shelf.  My book still lives.  I have only 40 copies left of San Francisco Giants:  A Fan’s Journal 2010, 2012, 2014 out of the 300 that were printed last year.  Earle Peterson has given my hopes a big boost with his order.

I’m going to spend the next day or so going to all the bookstores in San Francisco to get my book out into the world.

It’s the beginning of the baseball season and the Giants seem like they’ll be pretty good if there are no major injuries.  Injuries are killers.  Last year we lost Hunter Pence and Joe Panik for most of the season.  The Giants have acquired two very good pitchers in Jeff Samardzija and Johnny Cueto.  They should be one of the top contenders in the National League, that is, if they stay healthy.

 

Wednesday, March 9, 2016 – Nothing Tastes as Good as Being Thin Feels

“Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”  That was said by Elizabeth Berg, a woman who’s written about losing weight.

That quote has been on my mind for at least a week.  The thing is, I still eat when I really don’t have to.  When I learn the real truth of Berg’s saying, that’s when I’ll start losing weight.  Like last night, I went for a second helping of rice and mixed vegetables, even when I said to myself, “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”  I try.  But I guess trying is not enough.  One can’t try, one has to actually follow one’s own words.  Food is what puts weight on us, but at the same time it’s what we need to survive.

So my question is, “Why do I eat too much?”  I know that being thin is good for my health, but almost every day I eat a little too much for my own good.  Could that be a symbol of my not loving myself?  Why am I punishing my body?  I’m being very hard on myself right now by asking these questions, for I want to dig as deep as possible so I can cure myself of this problem.

For instance, right now, I’m thinking of eating either a fruit, vegetable, or cracker to ease a supposed hunger pang.  Do I need the food?  No, I don’t.  I just need to tell myself that I’ve already had enough to eat and really don’t need more.  I’m full as it is, but somehow I have a craving to put something in my mouth.  How about a mint?  Yes, I can have three mints dissolve in my mouth, one at a time, for only 10 calories and that might be a cure for my hunger pang.

I’m somewhat satisfied with the mints.  But that’s not a cure.  The cure would be to say I’ve had enough to eat for lunch and I’ll wait for dinnertime to eat the last meal of the day.  I’ve got to think that way or else I’ll be going back to my old ways of picking, picking, picking.

 

Monday, April 4, 2016 – Pro and College Basketball

The Golden State Warriors are on the verge of becoming the greatest professional basketball team of all time.  Their record is 69-8.  The best record is held by the Chicago Bulls of the Michael Jordan era at 72-10.  All the Warriors have to do is win four more games and they’ll own the record.  The team is led by Steph Curry, with a fabulous supporting cast of Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Andrew Bogut, and Harrison Barnes.  That’s just the starting five.  The bench players are just as important.  Andre Iguodala, Sean Livingston, Mo Speights, Leandro Barbosa, Festus Ezeli and several more players.  They will go down in history as the greatest team ever.  They won the NBA championship last year and are on their way for a repeat.  The only block in front of them is the second place San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference.  If the Warriors get by the Spurs, they’ll probably meet the Eastern Conference champions, most likely the Cleveland Cavaliers with LeBron James.

The Warriors are an exciting team.  I’ve watched most of their games on TV.  Oracle Arena is always packed and is the best show in the NBA.  The Warriors are unlike other teams in that they shoot 3-pointers better than any other team.  Steph Curry is the leader in that department, which makes him so valuable.  Klay Thompson is right behind him in the 3-point category.  The Warriors would not be where they are today if it wasn’t for those two.  And then there’s the heart and soul of the team, Draymond Green.  Although he’s only 6-foot-6, he plays like he’s a combined 7-footer and 6-footer, meaning he covers men taller than him and smaller than him.  He’s the workhorse of the team.  I hope they break the Bulls’ record so they will go down in history as one of the great teams, if not the greatest, of all time.

 

Tonight I watched a most exciting NCAA Championship game between the North Carolina Tarheels and the Villanova Wildcats.  It went down to the last tenth of a second when this kid from Villanova, Kris Jenkins, made a long 3-point shot to win the game and the college title for his team.  Before Jenkins’ shot, a North Carolina player made a fantastic 3-point shot to tie the game at 74-74.  So with 4.7 seconds left, Villanova’s guard brought it quickly down the court and passed behind him to Jenkins who bucketed his shot from well past the 3-point line.  Game over.  Villanova wins.  A most exciting ending to the college basketball season.

 

Tuesday, April 5, 2016 – The Meaning of Life

While talking to Charles Lewman on the phone yesterday, he brought up something he was thinking of, and that something he asked himself was, “What is the meaning of life?”  And the answer he came up with was, “The meaning of life is to experience life.”

I told him I once asked several people that question and wrote down their answers.  Here are a few of them:  “To be able to pursue your interests,” said my friend in Portland, Steve Carey.  “To give your best effort,” said my wife Joan.  “The meaning of life is always changing with me,” said my friend Stan Lipkin, who lives in Thailand with his Thai wife Tuee.  “Right now there’s no meaning of life for me.”

What is the meaning of life for me?  “To choose well from all the choices we have in life.”

 

Thursday, April 7, 2016 – On Second Thought

I once imagined becoming a successful writer.  I’ve given up on that thought.  Now I only want to be a great writer.

Being a great writer is different than being a successful writer.  Being great is being true to yourself and doing the best you can.  That’s why I consider myself a great writer.  I’m true to myself and I’m always trying to do my best.

On second thought, successful and great mean the same thing.  Being successful or great doesn’t mean that a writer has to earn a large sum of money or become famous.  Being a successful or great writer should be what a writer thinks of himself.

 

Saturday, April 30, 2016 – Our Trip to L.A.

Joan and I are in L.A. at my cousin Vic’s house.  We’ve been here since Wednesday.  Thursday we went with Vic to the Walt Disney Concert Hall Center that Frank Gehry designed in downtown L.A. to watch the L.A. Symphony Orchestra in rehearsal.  They rehearsed only one piece, Janacek’s Taras Bulba.  A great piece of music, but there were too many starts and stops throughout the first hour and a half of rehearsal, and only one stop when the orchestra leader, Jakub Hrusa, let them play the whole piece.

Yesterday, Friday, Joan and I visited the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades.  It was a great experience to see the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan sculptures throughout the museum.  Since Joan is a Classicist, she loved it.  On our way back, though, along Sunset Boulevard, it took us almost three hours to get home in the late afternoon traffic.  It was hell, but Joan read a couple of long articles to me from her cellphone that settled my nerves a bit.

 

Wednesday, May 4, 2016 – The Warriors Win Without Steph Curry

Last night I watched an exciting game between the Warriors and the Portland Trailblazers in the second round of the NBA playoffs.  The Blazers were ahead for three quarters, but then the Warriors stormed back in the fourth quarter to take the lead and won going away by 10 points.  Festus Ezeli was the spark for the Warriors, along with Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and Harrison Barnes.  I wonder why Steve Kerr hasn’t played Festus much.  The guy is a force under the basket.  I hope Kerr has learned his lesson to give him more playing time.

This was another game where the Warriors won without the great Steph Curry.  The poor guy has had to sit on the bench and cheer the team on.  The question is, should Kerr play Steph in the next game four days from now?  I say rest him for the game six days from now, just like I thought he got into the game against the Houston Rockets one game too early and hurt his knee badly.  First it was Steph’s foot in the Houston series and now it’s his knee.  He’s played very few minutes in two games against Houston and has zero playing time against the Trailblazers.  I say rest his foot and knee for as long as possible.  But Steph is a hard man to hold down.  I’m sure he’ll want to play in the next game, and he probably will.  He’ll be rusty, as everyone predicts, but he needs playing time to keep in basketball shape as they go further into the playoffs.

Joan is going to Chicago at the end of this month.  It’ll be her second trip in less than three months.  She can’t stay away from our little grandson Olby, who will turn four in June.

 

Friday, May 6, 2016 – The Past

Two weeks ago I spoke to a group of young people about writing and publishing.  A girl asked me, “Why did you become a writer?”

I thought for a few seconds before saying, “I want to record my experiences on Earth.”

Good question.  Good answer.

Yes, I want to write down my experiences of a man who was born a little before halfway through the 20th century and is still going strong in the first quarter of the 21st century.  Of course there are other reasons why I write, but I think my answer to the girl was the main reason.

I’m sure other writers would have given other reasons why they became writers, but I think they, too, want to record their thoughts and experiences here on Earth like I do, and, like many of them, I do it by writing down my experiences that are most of the time fictionalized.

I’ve written about my second week on Earth to the present day—from grammar school, junior high, high school, college, teaching, traveling, writing, marriage, and fatherhood.  I’ve done some stupid and unethical things, mainly as a kid and into my early 20s, but overall I’ve been an honest, moral, and upstanding man.

Grammar school thoughts come to mind:  kindergarten in 1945, I remember a nice teacher who let us take naps on the cots the school provided; I remember playing Cowboys and Indians with my male classmates; I remember looking for my brothers Bob and Maurice on the playing field of Selma Avenue School from behind a fence; I remember playing in the sandbox in the second or third grade; I remember winning a running race against all my third grade classmates; I remember getting into a one-blow fight (I was on the receiving end) in the boys’ bathroom at Selma; I remember my third grade teacher, Miss Seenor, putting me down for not saying the correct time to her when I came back from the main office to tell her the time because the clock in our classroom wasn’t working.  I said, “It’s 2:50,” and she criticized me by saying, “You don’t say it that way, you say ten minutes to three.”  I remember my fourth grade teacher, Miss Snyder, an angel, who complimented my cursive writing in front of the whole class.

And then we moved from Homewood Avenue to Fairfax Avenue and I entered Gardner Street School.  But before I left Selma, I became a member of the Hollywood YMCA in the third grade at 8-years-old.  I learned to swim right off the bat at the Y.  The first swim meet I entered, in Brentwood, West Los Angeles, I won the race and cried because I was surprised at how well I did, and in the second swim meet I entered when I took second amongst 40 or so other swimmers as we swam the width of an Olympic-size pool in Glendale.  Yes, the third grade was a major experience in my life, and I’ve written about Miss Seenor and those two swim meets as an 8-year-old.

Gardner Street School.  Riding my bike to school.  Having a good friend in John Cavett in the 5th and 6th grades.  Being the best athlete in my grade in the 4th, 5th and 6th grades.  Competing against my classmate Steve Richmond in those three years.  I’ve written about my competition with him and why we never spoke to each other.  He didn’t speak to me because one day, in anger, I called him a monkey because he looked very much like a monkey to me.  I didn’t speak to him for telling a lie to the principal.  The principal kept me after school in her office for a whole week because he told her that I went off campus while school was in session.  I did no such thing.  I remember my fourth grade teacher, Miss Gehling, getting mad at me and another boy for burping in class and she hitting us on top of our heads with her black whistle.  I remember my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Kelly, taking us to Security Bank, about four blocks from school on Sunset and Stanley, where we all started our own individual savings accounts.  I remember my other fifth grade teacher, Miss Mozart, a redhead, who I stole a small, round, thin plastic piece from the cloak room.  She said she needed it badly and wouldn’t hold it against anyone who took it.  I’m so sorry, Miss Mozart, that I never returned it.

And then, in the sixth grade I remember Miss Sullivan got sick and was replaced by Carlo Sparti, who at the time was my hero because he was the first male teacher I ever had.  Mr. Sparti was a truly nice, gentle man who played his violin on Fridays for the class.  I can still hear those soothing sounds emanating from his violin.

 

Wednesday, May 11, 2016 – The Exemplar

I watched one of Steph Curry’s and the Warriors’ great games the other night that took place in Portland.  They were behind most of the game, that is until Mr. Curry took command in the fourth quarter and led the team to a tie at the end of regulation play.  He missed his first 10 3-point shots, but that didn’t deter him because in the fourth quarter he started hitting everything he threw up at the basket.  The game went into overtime and he scored all 17 of the Warriors’ overtime points to win the game for them and to go up in the series 3 games to 1.  What a performance!  The guy was out for two weeks with injuries and he comes back to lead the team to victory in overtime.  The man is truly the MVP of the NBA.  And the next day, this humble but confident basketball player, praised his teammates, family, coaches, and the Warrior’s front office for all his success.  Truly a remarkable man, which makes him the exemplar of what an athlete should be.

 

Friday, June 3, 2016 – Freedom and Donald Trump

I’m a very lucky man.  I can do anything I want.  I can walk to the market to buy a bottle of bourbon, I can write in my journal, I can read around in Saroyan’s Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon, I can write about my day with Lou Berman as we walked along the bluff overlooking Miramar Beach in Half Moon Bay, I can go to the refrigerator to eat part of what I bought at Whole Foods on my way home, or I can work on my latest book, This Writing Life.

I can do any of the above.  It reminds me of a poem I wrote in Eugene, Oregon, in September 1972 called “Freedom.”

I finally sit.

WRITE

But what?

A novel, short story, essay, letter, journal entry, poem??????

Inches away is a friend’s unpublished manuscript

Read?

On the record player is John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Listen?  Dance?

The floor in the kitchen needs sweeping.

Fiddle?

Outside is a beautiful Autumn day.

Walk?  Talk?

The mailman is late.

Wait?

 

It’s not a bad poem.  It was one of the first of many poems I’ve written over the years.  When I wrote “Freedom” I had been a writer for only three years.  I had finished a novel and was sending it out, which gave me time to think of my existence as a writer.  I thought of the freedom I had.  “Of all the choices I have, what shall I do now?” I asked myself.  Well, a poem came out of my indecision.

In Eugene I lived with Sharon Murphy.  I was 32, she was 24.  I had quit teaching high school social studies in Los Angeles in 1969, moved to El Cerrito (next door to Berkeley), and started writing A Class of Leaders on my 29th birthday, August 20, 1969, of my teaching experience.  In the midst of writing that novel, I met Sharon in the El Cerrito Library where she worked.  We lived together for a while in Berkeley before we moved to Eugene in 1971, where I finished A Class of Leaders.

That’s the story of my “Freedom” poem.

Lou Berman and I went for a walk today in Half Moon Bay.  We mainly talked about his theory of Donald Trump dropping out of the presidential race because of Trump’s psychological makeup.  Lou calls Trump a sociopath, a person who is never wrong, who blames others for his ineptitude.  Lou believes, like I do, that Trump is a bully, liar, and cheat.  He really believes Trump will drop out because Trump hates to lose and he’ll find out as he running for the presidency that he isn’t going to do well on election day, which will make him quit the race.

I totally disagree with Lou.  I think Trump will stay in the race and do anything to get elected.  He’s a real sleaze and he’ll try to make his Republican opponents the scum of the earth.  He’ll go to any extreme to win.  That’s what I think of that sociopath.  There are people who love the man for speaking off the top of his head, and there are those who believe he’s the complete opposite of what a presidential candidate should be.

 

Thursday, June 16, 2016 – Joan’s Sleeping Problem and My Upcoming Surgery

Joan is having trouble sleeping.  She depended so much on marijuana cookies that put her to sleep at night, but thought that was the cause of her losing weight at an extremely fast rate.  So today she had a barium test and it showed nothing was wrong with her stomach.  And then, when she went to get a sleeping pill prescription from the pharmacy at Kaiser, the pharmacist told her that marijuana cookies would be better to take than sleeping pills.  The poor woman is a nervous wreck, all because of losing weight so fast and not sleeping well.  She might go back to marijuana cookies again.

I’m going to have a revision on my right hip in the middle of August.  It’s going to take time to heal, but I’m willing to do it.  My hip was originally replaced 14 years ago.

The Warriors are playing game 6 of the NBA finals tonight against the Cleveland Cavaliers.  They’re up 3 games to 2.  Draymond Green didn’t play in the last game because he was suspended for hitting LeBron James in the groin.  He’s back tonight.  But Andrew Bogut, the Warriors huge center, is out with a very bad bone bruise.  Will Cleveland make history and force a game 7 after being down 3 games to 1?  Let’s hope not.

 

Tuesday, June 21, 2016 – The Train vs. the Cat

The Cleveland Cavaliers vs. the Golden State Warriors.  LeBron James vs. Steph Curry.  The Train vs. the Cat?  Which team would you choose to win a 7-game series—the unstoppable Train of LeBron James or the Cat-like instincts of Steph Curry?  It went down to the seventh and final game of the NBA Finals.  With less than a minute to play, both teams tied 89-89, the Train was on a mission.  The Cat was making mistakes and missing shots.  Catman Curry was defending against Kyrie Irving when Kyrie made the game-winning 3-point shot with 53 seconds showing on the clock.  The Warriors had a chance to tie, and the only question was, Should they try to tie it with a 3-point shot or should they go for two and foul right away?

The Warriors chose Curry to take a three, and he missed with 23 seconds left to play.

Curry had to stop Kyrie and he didn’t do it.  Then when he had a chance to tie the game, he missed.  The Train barely edged out the Cat.  LeBron was a little bit stronger than Steph at the end of Game 7.  That was the difference.  Strength.  It could have gone either way but by the slightest margin LeBron and the Cavaliers came out on top.  It was competition at its height.  I can see a documentary made of the 2016 NBA Finals, or even the last game that led up to Curry doing his best without fouling Kyrie.  It was a valiant effort by both teams.  But then Curry had a chance to redeem himself.  Curry had the ball and he was dribbling, trying to get some space between himself and defender Kevin Love for a 3-point shot.  He shot and missed.  The Train won out over the Cat.

 

Wednesday, June 22, 2016 – Trump, Trump, Trump

Lou Berman and I went for a walk on a beautiful, clean air day.  It was a different walk.  Lou and I were used to dirt trails and not the soft sand we walked on today.  Hey, I thought, walking on dry sand is just as good an exercise as an hour walk on a dirt trail.  “Lou,” I said, “we have to do this more often.  Next time I’m going to take off my shoes.”

Lou knows the sociopathic personality of a person like Donald Trump.  He grew up with one—his sister.  He knows how that type of mind works, that Trump refuses to ever admit a wrong and if something he does fails, it’s always someone else’s fault.  Two days ago he fired his campaign manager.  That’s his modus-operandi, to fire anyone who makes him look bad.  Is that how he intends to run our government?  If you don’t perform, YOU’RE FIRED.  What will happen if he becomes president?  Will he be able to do things in a democratic, slow-moving, checks-and-balances way, or will he try to take complete control of the reins of government and become an authoritarian figure?  I believe it’s his intent to take control of the government.  Trump, as I said, is never wrong, and if that wrong is a lie and doesn’t work, he’ll go on to another lie.  Hitler chose the lie of the Jews to be the villains of Germany; Trump has chosen the Muslims and Mexicans as America’s villains.  He now has irrational Americans hating those two groups of people.  That’s hitting the lowest common denominator as a leader, to preach hatred to his followers.

The definition of a sociopath, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, is “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.”

What are Donald Trump’s extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior?  His preaching of racism and his bullying.

What shows Donald Trump’s lack of conscience?  He lies incessantly.  He won’t ever admit he’s wrong.  For instance, he still refuses to admit that President Obama was born in the United States.

 

Tuesday, July 19, 2016 – I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy.  Carnage in Nice, France, Black Lives Matter, Republican National Convention, build a wall, Make America Safe Again, plagiarism in Melania’s speech, Benghazi, prison for Hillary, NRA, assault weapons, tension in Korea, nuclear arsenal, jail riot, Zica virus, coup in Turkey, Taliban, ISIS, ax attack in Germany, Brexit, fracking, child porn, pollution, homelessness, domestic abuse.  I Read the News Today, Oh Boy.

I’m sickened by what I read in the Chronicle every day.  It’s so depressing.  It’s always negativity that makes the headlines.  What can I do about this depressing news?  Write, write, write is what I can do.  I can only take care of my own little world instead of the world at large.  In my little world I can write down my thoughts, my feelings, my fears, my sorrows, my triumphs, my failures.

 

Friday, July 22, 2016 – Trump Again

Donald Trump gave his acceptance speech last night at the Republican National Convention that turned out to be four days of what I call a Hate-Fest against Hillary Clinton.  Mr. Trump said he’d fix every problem in the U.S. after being inaugurated president.  He’ll stop crime, he’ll build a wall along the Mexican border, he’ll lower taxes for everyone in the U.S., he’ll build up the military, he’ll stop all Muslims from entering the country, he’ll make China pay for stealing jobs from America, he’ll punish American corporations for manufacturing outside of the U.S., he’ll put all Americans to work, he’ll put an end to Obamacare, he’ll do everything he says he’ll do so we can all live happily ever after.

Bernie Sanders said on Twitter that he thought America was a democracy with three branches of government and not a dictatorship.  Yes, Donald J. Trump is a demagogue, a political leader who gains power by appealing to the passions, prejudices, and ignorance of people, and it’s his intention to undermine democratic procedures and the rule of law.

Just like my friend Lou Berman says Trump is a sociopath, Trump’s ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, has come out and said the same thing.  We’re starting to find out that truer words were never spoken.  Trump, if elected, will be a disaster, and to think that almost half the country doesn’t see what this man truly is:  a liar, cheat, bully.  The man thrives on attention and is surely getting it now that he’s going to run against Hillary Clinton for the most powerful office in the world.  His ghostwriter says if there were an Emperor of the World, Trump would try to be it.

 

Tuesday, August 2, 2016 – Big Little Joe and Little Big Joe

My poor wife Joan is having so much trouble with her stomach.  She can’t eat.  She has a constant nauseous feeling.  Every day is an excruciating, frustrating experience for her.  She feels like there’s a brick in her stomach and it just won’t go away.  She recently found out that she has acid reflux.  The medicine the doctor has prescribed for her doesn’t work.  She’s so thin.  She’s losing weight at an alarming rate.  She’s lost 35-40 pounds in the last four months.  She’s set a date with her throat doctor for August 23 to operate on a pouch next to her esophagus that could be causing the acid reflux, but the doctor isn’t sure if it will cure her problem.  What to do?

My cousin Joe sent me an e-mail and a 14-page manuscript about three major operations he had within a three-month period last year:  open heart surgery and two hips replaced.  I can’t think of my cousin’s wants right now because of my upcoming operation on my hip that Kaiser calls “revision hip surgery.”  From what I know, I’ll be able to put weight on my leg soon after the operation, but I’ll probably need crutches, because Doctor Kiest will have to cut through the same area of muscles that he did 14 years ago to replace the cracked plastic over the titanium ball.  The surgery is set for August 18.  And then Joan’s surgery is scheduled for August 23.  And then my stepson Sol and his family are arriving from Chicago on August 19.

Only within our two families, my cousin Joe and I are called Big Little Joe and Little Big Joe.  I’m Little Big Joe and my cousin is Big Little Joe.  You see, Joe is older than me, which makes him Big Joe, but the thing is, I’m physically bigger than him, which makes me Little Big Joe and him Big Little Joe.  Big Joe is the one who taught me how to juke a defender off his feet in football.  He taught me how to not take any crap from any bullies who might pick on me when I first entered Bancroft Junior High.  Joe and his brother Chuck (who is no longer with us) were my cheerleaders who advised me before I went off to play football for Oregon.  Both of them said I surely had the talent and to show it off to the coaches.  I tried to do that at Oregon, I really did, but it was the first day of summer practice that we had to run a mile.  After finishing a full practice on a hot, humid day, we had to run a mile in our sweaty uniforms.  For two years, I was usually among a group to finish last, which showed the coaches that I wasn’t in the best of shape.  Yes, that was probably one of the reasons why I only played sporadically at Oregon, but it all started in my second week of my first spring practice when I wrenched my knee so badly that I had to be helped off the field.  Two days later, the team’s first scrimmage was scheduled for Saturday at 8:00 a.m.  I woke up late that day and hobbled into the training room to find that everyone was already out on the field.  No was available to tape my knee.  I didn’t know what to do:  to go out to the scrimmage in my street clothes or suit up?  I suited up.  Soon after I got on the field, backfield coach Max Coley called my name to get in on offense.  I just stood there and shook my head, for I foresaw the future:  a permanently damaged right knee.  Because I defied Coach Coley, he approached me and yelled for the whole team to hear, “Sutton, you’re never going to play football as long as I’m coaching here.”  That was the main reason why I sat on the bench on Saturday afternoons in the two years I played for Oregon.

 

Friday, August 5, 2016 – Don Ellis, My Friend/Advisor/Editor/Book Shepherd

Tomorrow at the Gilman Grill in Berkeley at 10 a.m., a surprise party for Don Ellis is going to take place.  His daughter Rosie is the ringleader of the event.  I wanted to write a short poem to Don for his 75th birthday.  I dawdled all day until this very minute and so what can I write to him that will make an impression on him?

Here’s what I would like to say:  Don, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be where I am today.  My self-esteem is high because I’ve listened to your ideas over the years and they’ve helped me become the writer, man, husband, and father that I am today.  You have always said to me, “What are we here on Earth for?  To keep creating, to give this life all that’s in you, to be strong, to persevere, to be yourself, to be honest, to never say die, to stand tall.”  Oh, my dear friend/advisor/editor/book shepherd, I can’t thank you enough for what you have done for me.

 

Wednesday, August 17, 2016 – Hip Surgery

How do I feel before my hip surgery tomorrow?  A little nervous, but confident that Dr. Curtis Kiest of Kaiser San Francisco will do a good job.  He’s going to have to cut through the buttocks muscles like he did in 2002.  He also replaced my left hip three years later in 2005.

Boy, I hope I won’t need revision on my left hip.  Surgeries are tough.  They’re painful.  You can’t sleep on one side for weeks at a time.  You have to do physical therapy.  It’s learning how to walk all over again.  Dr. Kiest said I’d be able to put pressure on my leg the first day, unlike 14 years ago when I could only put 20 pounds of pressure on my right leg for 11 weeks.  Yes, that’s how long I was on a walker or crutches:  11 weeks.  Thank God I don’t have to do that again.  But that was almost 14 years ago when I was 61.  I was young back then.

After my first hip surgery, I called the advice nurse and told her my right calf was really swollen for a few days and it hadn’t gone down like I expected.  The nurse told me to rush, and I mean RUSH, to the Emergency Room, where they found a blood clot in my groin.  If I hadn’t gone, they said the clot would have reached my heart and maybe killed me in a day or two.  Close call.

So how do I feel?  I feel fine.  I looked at myself in the mirror tonight and I’m overweight.  I’m about 15 pounds over what I would like to be.  I keep eating big portions and can’t lose any part of the 15 that I want to lose.  I’m down on myself for that.  Maybe I wouldn’t need surgery tomorrow if I had stayed at 190.

Here’s what I eat in the morning:  a cup of oatmeal, a banana, an apple, and a slice of cantaloupe.  Add to that a couple of dollops of non-fat Greek yogurt.  That’s just breakfast.  Lunch varies, but most of the time it’s 3-5 cut-up veggies mixed into a bowl of miso soup with cut up pieces of chicken included.  Dinner consists of chicken, brown rice, and a cooked vegetable like broccoli or cauliflower.  I might pick on a fruit or two during the day.  Oh, and lately I’ve been drinking a couple of shots of bourbon before dinnertime.  I say to myself that I’m not going to buy bourbon anymore, but then, after a couple of weeks of going without it, I break down and buy a big bottle that lasts maybe 3-4 weeks.

 

Monday, September 5, 2016 – Post Operation

It’s been 18 days since my hip surgery.  There’s no pain.  But when they cut through your buttocks, it takes a while to recover.  I haven’t written in my journal since the operation because it hurts to sit down for any length of time.

I’ve been doing my strengthening exercises every day.  Sitting, standing, and lying down exercises.  I believe I left the hospital too early after the operation.  I should have stayed two nights instead of one, because my first night at home I had to get out of bed three times to go to the bathroom, and it was hell getting out of bed each time.  It took the life out of me.  I believe it led to a week’s setback.  My wound was bleeding too much after that night.  It wasn’t good.  I should have stayed at Kaiser, but as they say, “It’s best to leave the hospital as soon as possible after an operation because one can catch a staph infection.”  I wish with all my heart that I won’t need revision on my left hip.  I hope it will last till the day I pass away, because surgery, especially this type of surgery, has taken its toll on me.  I get to bed around 9:00 o’clock every night.  That’s how tired I am after 18 days.  It hurts to sit for a long time.  I sleep on and off every night.  Sometimes I wake up sweating.

The Giants have been struggling since the All-Star break.  They had the best record in baseball before the break, now, after the break, they have the worst record in baseball.  They lost three out of four to the Cubs in Chicago, who presently have the best record in baseball.  One run decided every one of those four games.  They needed a win yesterday.  They almost had it because they were leading by one run when Chicago came to bat in the bottom of the ninth.  But Santiago Casilla couldn’t shut them down, and so the game went into extra innings, and many relief pitchers later the Giants lost in the bottom of the 13th inning.

Joan is up and down psychologically and physically after her throat operation on August 23.  Sometimes her stomach bothers her and sometimes it doesn’t.  When it bothers her she’s very depressed.  She doesn’t complain much, but her face shows what’s going on in her mind and body.  She gets out much more than I do.  She’s gone shopping a few times.  Yesterday I moved my car from one side of the street to the other and it wasn’t easy to do.  I couldn’t extend my right leg.  It was uncomfortable.  I wonder when that feeling will subside so I can get on with a normal life of driving to the YMCA for my water aerobics class or going for a walk.  I can’t rush this leg.  I can at least put pressure on my leg as I walk in the house or outside with one crutch.  For two weeks I used a walker.  I graduated to one crutch a few days ago.

I have a nurse, Colleen Chien, coming to the house three days a week to check my blood pressure and get a blood sample.  She’s been a lifesaver for me.  I’m taking a blood thinner called warfarin, which prevents blood clots.  So let’s hope things go smoothly from here on out.

This past Thursday, Ralph Yanello invited the poker group (that he once belonged to before he dropped out several years ago) to a dinner at Postino in the East Bay town of Lafayette.  It took Steve Dessy an hour and a half to get there in the heavy traffic that night.  And because I was sitting for so long in the car my leg started bothering me.  Thank goodness, when I got out of Steve’s car, everything was all right.  Ralph invited the poker group, past and present, to celebrate his retirement from Lawroom.com that he sold for $40 million a few months ago.  Ralph and his wife Teresa are now multi-millionaires.  They put in 22 years of working 12 to 13 hours a day seven days a week to become millionaires.  I commend them for such diligence.  They surely gave every ounce of energy to their business and were duly rewarded for their effort.  Now they can retire and live wherever they please and do anything they want.  I wish them the best.

 

Sunday, September 11, 2016 – My Hip and Donald Trump

Ever since my hip surgery almost four weeks ago, I’ve had little interest in writing and reading.  I’ve got This Writing Life on hold.  I haven’t put an ounce of energy into it since surgery.  I have books and magazines to read and do very little of that.  The only time I read is in the morning when I read the Chronicle while eating breakfast.  Occasionally I’ll open a book or magazine.  What I mainly do is listen to the Giants games on radio or watch them on TV.

I’m walking with a cane now.  Yesterday, my physical therapist said I could start going up stairs with both legs instead of just one leg at a time.

My sleep is fair.  I can only sleep on the good-leg side.  I can’t sleep on my back or on my bad-leg side.  It gets kind of boring sleeping on only one side.

So what do I do during the day?  I do my leg-strengthening exercises.  I do little chores around the house, such as washing the dishes and keeping the kitchen clean after Joan cooks.  I’ve gotten out a few times on my own.  Although I’ve been told not to drive, I drive.  The only thing wrong is, my leg hurts when I’m driving, especially when my foot is on the gas pedal.  When I put my right foot on the brake, my leg is fine.

Boy, the world is in a mess.  The irrationals don’t understand that the seas are rising, that the world’s climate is getting hotter, that the coastlines will be inundated (which is happening in the U.S. right now on the East Coast), and that droughts and hurricanes and wildfires will be more powerful and prevalent.

We have a man, Donald Trump, running for president who feeds the irrationals that we need more oil and gas to fill the air instead of cutting down on those two substances.  He feeds these people by saying, “We need more jobs in this country.”  No matter to him that oil and gas are poisoning and ruining the atmosphere by making the climate get hotter and hotter.  It’s sad that this clown is running for the most powerful office on Earth and that people actually believe him about more jobs, about a border wall, and about supporting judges who are against abortion.  The man is dividing us rather than bringing us together.  And to think, almost half the country is for this vindictive man who has attention deficit disorder and whose supporters are proud to say, “He speaks the truth.”

Who are these people who believe in such nonsense?  It’s the uneducated, the racists, the intolerant, the bigots.  Trump is bringing out the worst in this country.  He wants to build walls instead of bridges.  Is this man, who appeals to a little less than half of the country’s electorate, really crazy?  Yes, I believe he is.  He actually belongs in a psychiatric ward.  He’s a habitual liar, cheat, bully, and a predator of women.  Oh, man, we are in for some rough times if he’s elected.

 

Monday, September 12, 2016 – Alan Khedari

It’s been four weeks since I had hip surgery.  Today I went outside in the gloom of a typical San Francisco summer day (gray skies).  The gray is so depressing, but my heart and mind are sunny.  Yes, I got outside, and I walked three blocks with a cane to get my blood flowing.

Thursday I’m going to drive over to the East Bay to talk to Don Ellis about This Writing Life.  I haven’t looked at it since my surgery.

The other day I thought of Alan Khedari.  He kind of took me under his wing when I was a kid.  He took me bowling one day when I was around 10.  He took me to see my brother Bob play a football game for Hollywood High against Fairfax High when I was in the 7th grade and he was a 9th grader.  Alan was the first person to hire me outside of my father’s store.  He had the main corner, the northwest corner of Sunset and La Brea, selling newspapers.  He gave me the southwest corner.  He was always using his brain.  He sold ten times more papers than I did because he had the corner of a famous Hollywood drive-in called Tiny Naylor’s where customers could park and have women on roller skates serve them at their cars.  It was a very popular place from the late 1940s into the ’80s.  Alan eventually became a dentist and the last I heard he became a principal officer of a bank.  He was the son of Jimmy Khedari, the great singing voice of the Syrian Jews on the Jewish holidays.  I remember going to Alan’s wedding in my early twenties.  Sad news came about a year after the wedding.  He and his wife drove down to Tijuana to get an abortion and she died on the operating table.  Poor Alan.  I wonder if he ever got married again or had kids.  He was such a kind soul.

 

Saturday, September 17, 2016 – Growing Up in Hollywood

In This Writing Life I mention perspective and give an example of sitting in a streetcar facing one way and other people facing the other way, plus some people standing.  Everyone was viewing something different that was going on in front of them.  In other words everyone had a different perspective, which means that my perspective is just as important as other writers like Twain, Whitman, Thoreau, Philip Roth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Saroyan.  That’s my special thought of the day.

I see my leg is getting stronger as each day passes.  I feel so blessed that I’m able, after one month, to get back on my feet again.  No more walker, no more crutches, no more cane.

Think of a baby and how many times he or she stands up and tries to walk.  Over and over we see a baby stand, stumble, and fall…to get right back up and try again.  Babies are thinking creatures.  “I want to walk like Mom and Dad (brother or sister) and I’m going to keep at it until I can do what they’re doing.”

Me, I was three or four when we lived on a dead-end street named Leland Way in the heart of Hollywood.  I remember riding my tricycle down a slight downward slope and turning left or right onto the sidewalk.  That’s the first and only memory I have of Leland Way.  Then we moved a few blocks to Homewood Avenue and Wilcox.  In our backyard I can see Dad building a barbecue of bricks.  I can see the only heater we had in the house in the bathroom.  I can picture the layout of the three-bedroom house that Dad bought for $5000 in 1944.  The house was behind the Hollywood Police Station and Emergency Hospital.  My mom used to pay the jailed prisoners (probably in for drunkenness) to wash her car.  One block east of us was the Department of Motor Vehicles.  I remember seeing long lines of people sitting in their cars ready to take the driving test.  I actually grew up in the Civic Center of Hollywood.  Along with the police station and emergency hospital, there was the Hollywood Fire Station around the corner and up the block.  I remember Mom taking me into the fire station one day and the firemen letting me sit in the driver’s seat of the long, red fire engine.  I remember a very thick, squat palm tree around the corner from us and seeing Harley-Davidson motorcycles lined up in a row where the policemen parked them.  Billy Baxter lived across the street from the DMV.  I remember playing with him and my brothers Bob and Maurice on his front lawn all the time.  We all used to sit comfortably in a tree facing the DMV that was on Billy’s front lawn.  I remember boxing Billy, four years older than me, with thick boxing gloves and getting hit by him.  I didn’t like it.  I never boxed again.  No wrestling, either.

When I was nine in 1949, my mother, father, five brothers, and I moved to Fairfax Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, a two-story house that had four bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs.  Downstairs had a large kitchen, breakfast room, dining room, a large living room, and in the back on the main floor was a bathroom and a small room we called “the den” where the television was located.  We moved from a lower middle-class house to and an upper middle-class house in the  blink of an eye.  The city bought our house for $25,000, which was the price of our new house.  The city used the property they bought to tear down the house and make a parking lot for the policemen’s cars.

After Selma Avenue School, I transferred to Gardner Street School and entered Miss Gehling’s fourth grade class in November 1949.  Oh, Miss Snyder, I had you as a teacher for only two months at Selma, and to this day, almost 70 years later, I consider you one of the best teachers I ever had.  Miss Gehling was an OK teacher except one day she got mad at me and Barry Russell.  Barry was teaching me how to burp, when all of a sudden a large burp erupted from my mouth.  Barry, too, accidentally burped.  Miss Gehling stood over us fuming and hit us on top of our heads with her black whistle.

 

Saturday, October 1, 2016 – Dog Bites

Last Saturday I went for a walk with short pants in 90-degree weather.  I was on my way home when this little white poodle came running toward me.  I didn’t know what to do.  Would it just bark at me or would it bite.  It bit me.  My hip surgery leg wasn’t the strongest.  If it were strong, I would have booted that fucking dog down the street like a field goal kicker would.  But since I was on only one good leg, I couldn’t do it.  The dog’s owner was right there.  I was mad as hell at him for not teaching his dog to be a good dog around strangers.  Yesterday I went to Kaiser to have a doctor look at the bite.  She said it was OK, but she warned me that if the redness around the wound got bigger, to pick up an antibiotic prescription that would be ready for me if I needed it.

It was the second time in my life that I’ve been bitten by a dog.  The first time was when I was 10 while riding my bike home from my friend’s house.  A German shepherd came running at me from its front yard and bit into my left thigh.  I’ve written a short story about that incident—”The Dog Bite.”  I bicycled home with tears flowing down my cheeks.  I told my mom about it.  We got in her car and started driving to where the dog bit me.  My poor mom, she kept driving around and around the area for an hour.  The bite so traumatized me that I couldn’t remember the street or the house where it took place.  My whole family that night was worried about my contracting rabies.  Thank goodness I didn’t get it.

 

Friday, October 14, 2016 – Mr. Trump and the End of the Baseball Season for the Giants

It’s election season and Donald Trump is taking all the oxygen out of everything else that’s going on in our country and around the world.  He consumes the headlines every day.  Even if he loses the election next month he’ll still keep making headlines.  He’ll blame the election process or blame someone or something for losing the race.  He says he wants to “Make America Great Again,” but he’s actually making us weaker by fomenting hatred and racism.  He’s stirring all the negatives one can make to gain what he wants most of all:  POWER.  He’s probably the most aggressive human being alive today.  He’ll stoop to any means to acquire that power.  Even if he loses the election, he’ll continue to hit the basest of human instincts to appeal to his unthinking, irrational base.

I don’t know if I’ve ever written my theory of the human race, .  Here it is:  There are rational people and irrational people in this world.  For instance, there are people who refuse to believe President Obama is an American citizen.  There are people who don’t believe climate change is taking place.  Those who hold those beliefs and other garbage thoughts are what I call the irrationals of the world.  And so it is my belief that there will ALWAYS be irrational people living on Earth.  Always!!!!!!!  It is incumbent upon the rational people of the world to follow what Thomas Jefferson once said, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  We have to debunk the irrationals at every turn, otherwise, as the late cartoonist Walt Kelly has his cartoon character Pogo say, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

It rained for the first time in seven months today.  And the meteorologists say it’s going to rain more over the weekend.  Great.  We need all the rain we can get.

The Giants know they need a closer next year if they want to get into the playoffs.  Bruce Bochy had to use five men from the bullpen in the Giants’ last game of the season against the Chicago Cubs.  The Giants were leading 5-2 going into the top of the ninth.  All they needed was three outs and they’d tie the Division Series at 2-2.  Five relievers couldn’t get the job done and this led to the Cubs coming out on top 6-5.  My son Ray and I couldn’t believe how the world caved in on them.

 

Wednesday, October 19, 2016 – The Presidential Race and Our Son Ray Proposes

Tonight is the third and final debate between Hillary Clinton and the narcissist, sociopath, divider, cheat, liar, the man who says the election is rigged before it even takes place two weeks from now.  The man is rousing his irrational base to make trouble on election day and the days following the election if he loses.  The man is an out-and-out traitor.  He’s a Manchurian Candidate.

That’s my rant against the most underhanded person to ever run for the Presidency of the United States.  Hillary Clinton is not all milk and honey herself, but there’s no doubt she is much more competent than Trump.  I see her compromising with the Republicans and getting things done, unlike President Obama who I believe has been treated like scum by the Republican-led Congress.  The way the Republicans have treated Obama reminds me of how Jackie Robinson was treated when he broke into the majors in 1947.

Our whole family will be in Chicago during Thanksgiving.  That’s where Ray is going to propose to Ashley Walton.  Joan gave Ray her mother’s wedding ring to give to Ashley on the day he proposes.  Ray is old-fashioned.  He went to Ashley’s parents to ask their permission to marry their daughter.  He wants to have a fairly big wedding, too, unlike Joan’s and my wedding, where only eight people were present:  my mother, Joan’s mother and father, Sol, Judy Levy, George and Doris Krevsky, and my cousin Vic.  All of us gathered in Rabbi Martin Weiner’s office at Temple Sherith Israel for the marriage.  And then we all met at Sinbad’s on the Embarcadero for lunch.  That was it for Joan and me.  Ray and Ashley want something altogether different.

 

Wednesday, November 2, 2016 – The World Series

The Chicago Cubs have won the World Series for the first time since 1908.  They won the seventh game against the Cleveland Indians by the score of 8-7.  They had to win three games in a row and they did it, just like the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Golden State Warriors in June by coming back from a 3-1 deficit in the NBA finals.  It is my contention that whoever wins the important sixth game of a 7-game series, the winner will turn out to be the champion.  That’s what happened to the Giants when they squandered a 5-run lead in the sixth game of the 2002 World Series and lost to the Anaheim Angels.  The Angels went on to win the seventh game 4-1.

 

Friday, November 4, 2016 – Dawdling and the Warriors

I was about to start writing in this journal way back at 3 or 4 p.m.  You know what time it is now?  11 p.m.  That’s what is called dawdling.

You see, I went with a walk with Lou Berman in Half Moon Bay.  And every time we go for a walk, we take a few tokes of Lou’s highly potent pot as we’re starting out.  And then we have lunch.  And then I come home and pick on more food because pot gives me the munchies.  And then I drink bourbon.  And then it’s dinnertime.  And then I clean up in the kitchen.  And then I watch the Warriors game.  And then Joan and I watch Real Time With Bill Maher.  Tonight Maher interviewed President Obama.  It showed Obama at his best.  He plays it right down the middle, Obama does.  He’s so presidential, so democratic, so much for all the people.  The man has a great mind.  Maher is worried, though.  He’s worried that this Trump fellow might win the election.  His belief is similar to what I believe, that Trump’s main goal is to be an autocrat.  There are just four days left of the longest goddamn presidential race ever.  It’s unfair to the public that presidential candidates start their campaigns two years before election time.

Last night the Warriors blew out the Oklahoma City Thunder, but tonight they got skunked by a young L.A. Lakers team.  Why they’ve been blown out of two out of six games in this very young basketball season is very disturbing.  The first blowout was against the San Antonio Spurs.  Tonight it was the young Lakers team that won by 20 points.  So we really don’t know how this team will fare by the end the season.  They just don’t have the bulk of Andrew Bogut or Festus Ezeli playing center.  Andre Iguodala and Klay Thompson couldn’t hit a shot tonight.  Maybe it was wrong to have signed Kevin Durant.  Maybe they shouldn’t have traded away Andrew Bogut, Harrison Barnes, and Festus Ezeli.  They had chemistry going with those guys.  Now it’s going to be rough on the Warriors to win a game because their big man, Zaza Pachulia, isn’t the force that Bogut was.  It was a bad move by the Warriors to sign a great ballplayer in Kevin Durant, but it’s the rim ballplayers, like Bogut and Ezeli, that will be missed.  [Note:  The Warriors won the NBA championship against the Cleveland Cavaliers in five games in June 2017.]

 

Wednesday, November 9, 2016 – The Jerry Springer Show

Donald Trump won the election.  Is he going to actually build a wall along the border?  Is he actually going to authorize the deportation of 11 million Latin immigrants?  Will he keep Muslims from entering the country?  Will he actually Make America Great Again by going backward instead of forward?  What’s going to happen with climate change that he and his followers believe is a hoax?  Will he pursue to make abortion illegal again like it was before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973?  Will greed, racism, and bullying become commonplace in our country?  What will the reaction of our foes like China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia be like?  What will the reaction of our allies like Canada, Japan, France, England, and Germany be like?  Will the Latin and Muslim people in this country feel fear as they walk down the street in conservative or reactionary neighborhoods?  What will an already conservative Supreme Court be like when Trump chooses Anthony Scalia’s replacement and the replacement of a very sick Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

It doesn’t matter that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes, the thing that matters is that Trump won the electoral vote.  Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, was quoted in the Chronicle regarding Trump’s election:  “I thought we were better than this.  I thought The ‘Jerry Springer Show’ was ‘The Jerry Springer Show.'”  Yes, the irrationals won.  What a sad state of affairs for America that many of those who voted for Trump want to go back to “the good old days” of the 1950s when racism and misogyny were widespread.  Sad, sad, sad.

 

Tuesday, November 22, 2016 – Chicago and Plato and Aristotle

Joan and I are in Chicago at Sol and Jang’s condo.  She got here five days ago and I arrived yesterday.  Today we went to the Art Institute of Chicago.  We took a bus there and back.  It’s cold, in the low 40s.  At the museum we went through one wing and mainly viewed the Impressionists.  It’s always a pleasure for me to view the Impressionists.  They painted with such rich, vibrant colors.  My favorites are Renoir and Pissarro.

The plane flight from San Francisco was pretty bumpy and at times frightening.  I hate it when a packed plane of people drops from out of nowhere for a second or two and then battles the winds to stay on course.  Scary.

I didn’t sleep well last night after an exhausting day of waking up at 4:30 a.m., flying to Chicago, taking the Blue Line train into downtown and transferring over to the 22 bus.  It was a long day for this man of 76 who is starting to feel his age.  I have an arthritic shoulder, an arthritic knee, I just had a tooth extracted last week (my second in the last two years), I had revised surgery on my right hip, I wear hearing aids, I’m bald on top, I have a pot belly, and I don’t think of sex much except when I see a beautiful woman.

 

I’m reading a book about the influence that Plato and Aristotle had on Western Civilization.  Both were extremely influential.  It’s called The Cave and the Light.  The book states that for the past 2500 years Western Civilization has been going back and forth as to which philosopher has wielded the most influence.

Plato believed in universal forms, Aristotle in scientific observation.  Aristotle was more of a natural philosopher, more of a democrat; Plato believed in a hierarchical society.  The Christian and Catholic churches were influenced mainly by Plato’s thinking.  Aristotle influenced agnostics and atheists.

I lean much more toward Aristotle’s philosophy, although he is much harder to read than Plato.

 

Tuesday, December 20, 2016 – My Life in a Nutshell

I’m giving myself 10 or 15 more years to live and that’ll be the end of Joe Sutton, born in Brooklyn in 1940, moved to L.A. with his family in 1941, grew up in Hollywood, attended Selma Avenue School and Gardner Street School, Bancroft Junior High, and graduated from Fairfax High in 1958.  I then went to Los Angeles Valley Junior College and played two years of football there.  The University of Oregon noticed my talent and offered me a football scholarship.  I played very little at Oregon.  Probably the best education I received was leaving L.A. and going away to college.  I was let out of the cage, so to speak.  And then I graduated from Oregon and entered the Coast Guard reserve for six months active duty and attended meetings every month for five years.  I skipped one year of meetings because I traveled to all the major cities in Europe after my first year of teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

I taught in L.A. for five years and quit in 1969 because I wanted to be a writer.  My first writing project was based on my last semester of teaching at Fremont High School in South-Central L.A.  In that semester, I dropped the conventional teaching methods of giving assignments and testing my students.  I let my students “teach” instead.  They mainly led the class in discussing the main issues of the day.  I couldn’t grade them, so I gave them all a grade of A.  I thought my book would go over big with the public, but that wasn’t to be.  It took me 40 years to get A Class of Leaders published, and guess who published it?  Me.  It’s now one of 13 books I’ve published:  three through regular publishers and 10 of them that I’ve self-published.

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