Closing the file

Wow, looks like it’s been kind of quiet around here. Lots going on, and where have I been? Oh, around, here and there, dealing with life and watching as our once-vaunted economy slides into a morass of depression that no amount of Prozac is going to fix. You’d think I’d be chomping at the bit to get my thoughts down.

You’d think that, and you’d be wrong. For whatever reason, I just haven’t felt like writing much in the last month or so. Maybe it’s post-holiday letdown, or maybe it’s just that I feel like it’s time to slow down and decompress. We had a hard-fought election campaign, and now that our new President is in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue I feel no small sense of relief. The world isn’t any kinder, and our economy isn’t any sounder, and maybe I’m just being naïve, but I’m confident in our new President. He’s a bright man, and I hope he succeeds. For the sake of all of us, he needs to.

We’ve seen lots of changes happen in the last few months, as anyone with a 401(k) can tell you. I’ve survived layoffs at work, a tanking retirement plan, and I’m watching as the unemployment rate begins to skyrocket. There’s talk that deflation may be happening, and I’m enough of a history buff that I read the newspapers, magazines and blogs and think hard about the 1930s. I’m grateful that my monthly gasoline bill is down below $300 for the first time in ages, but I’m nervous about what might happen with our monthly income. There are no guarantees, and like everyone else, I’m starting to wonder what the future holds. When I was a kid, I remember what it was like to climb to the top of the slide at Conejo Community Park and look down that long expanse of metal. Now, at 43, I’m looking down a long slide of a different kind, and I can’t see the bottom, which is scary. I just hope I don’t have to ride it all the way down. Or at all.

But change happens, and all you can do is roll with it. This is a long-winded way of coming around to my main point, which is this: I’m shutting down the blog. More precisely, I’m renaming it, refocusing it, and moving it to new quarters. “The Lazarus File” was an echo of an online re-branding that was perhaps less well thought-out than it should have been, and it’s become fairly obvious that it’s time for change here as well. I’ve already moved my homepage and reassumed my old Twitter and Jaiku handles, and this blog was the last thing left on my list. It’s time to go.

So come over and take a look at my new blog, which you’ll find at http://larand.wordpress.com (see update below!). I’m not yet sure what the title of the blog will be; nothing quite as good as “The Lazarus File” has come to mind. But I’ll think of something, and I’m open to ideas if you have any.

And now, The Lazarus File is hereby closed.

Update (2009-02-24): My blog, called The Larry Channel, can now be found at http://blog.larryanderson.org.

2nd Update (2010-03-23): The Larry Channel has also been retired. It resides (for now) at http://larryanderson.org, and has given way to a network of sites–larandNET. The  larandNET index page, with links to all content, is at http://larand.net.

Post office follies

There are many things I love about the city where I live, but my local post office isn’t one of them.  It’s no stretch to say that I’ve never had such indifferent terrible service from a post office as I have since moving here.  It wasn’t always like this; when I lived here in the 1990s, I never had a problem. Something must have happened in the interim.

My first inkling that something was amiss was in 2003, when I graduated from UCSB.  The university mailed my diploma, and it arrived on a rainy afternoon looking as if it had been dropped in a puddle and dragged through the mud, this despite the fact that my front porch is well-shielded from the elements on the 2nd floor.  When I went to the post office to complain, I got the most thorough stonewalling I’ve ever encountered from a government employee, and came to the conclusion that whatever happened, the local staff would simply cover for each other and nothing would happen to change that.

Then there was the time I was home from work, and waiting for a package to arrive.  Late in the afternoon, I went to the mailbox to find a note that my package had been left at the office because it had to be signed for and there was no answer at the delivery address. Small problem: I was home all day, and my doorbell never rang.  Another time packages for multiple addresses were left in a box by the office door, in clear view of a rather busy street. Anyone could have helped themselves.  Perhaps you are beginning to understand why I’m less than thrilled with this particular post office?

So I started taking steps to ensure that as little of my business as possible would be sent through the U.S. Postal Service. My bills now are largely electronic, and when I have to ship something, it goes UPS or FedEx.  It isn’t much, but it’s all I can do, and it makes me feel a little better.

Lately, they’ve come up with a new trick.  Bulk mail is being left bundled on the ground underneath our mailboxes.  This has happened several times now, and I recently decided to start documenting it on the theory that if I ever again have a problem worth complaining about, I’ll have photographic evidence that the local P.O. is slacking off on the job. It’s not that I love having my mailbox stuffed with junk mail, but it does make me wonder about how my other mail is being handled.  I’m sure that it must be a violation of some kind of postal regulation, since bulk mail is still mail that is supposed to be delivered.

Anyway, here’s what I saw today (the first two photos are reversed, because they were taken through my side view mirror):

The USPS delivering mail to my apartment complex. Notice the bundles under the mailboxes.

The intrepid postal carrier finishing up before driving away. Notice the bundles are still under the mailboxes.

Bulk mail bundles left under the mailboxes after the carrier has driven away. I wonder what the advertiser (our local paper) would think about how its mail is being handled?

I’d say he was in a hurry, but he seemed to have time to set up and take down his iPod speakers (not visible in the photos). As I said, this isn’t the first time it’s happened.  It’s happened on several other occasions; the last time I documented it was back in November, and you can see those photos here.

This, however, is not the end of the story. Five months ago, my wife and I mailed a package from upstate New York containing various vacation souvenirs.  It never arrived.  I had foolishly failed to ask for a tracking number, so it could not be tracked and I assumed it was lost. Today, a little more than five months to the day since mailing it, it showed up at my brother’s place in New York (I used his address as the return address). It was stamped “Unable to be delivered.” This despite the fact that it was, you guessed it, correctly addressed. I can only surmise that our postal carrier (see above photos) couldn’t be bothered to actually, you know, deliver it to my doorstep.  It must have been easier to return it to New York, which I assume was done via pack mule since it took five bloody months to show up.

The upshot of all this, if there is one, is this: our local post office sucks out loud, and I’m sick of it. I’m tired of accepting substandard service from poorly supervised government employees who know that, for all practical purposes, they can’t be fired. If there was a way I could remove the Ventura post office from my life entirely, I’d do so in a heartbeat. I’d gladly pay more for better service, but unfortunately our government has not yet seen fit to privatize the post office and open it up to competition.  So I will continue to avoid doing business with the USPS wherever possible, and I’ll continue to document its shortcomings right here.

And if you work for the Ventura post office–East Ventura, Wake Forest Avenue–be sure to smile for the camera.  I’m watching.

Ten years on

Today is the last day of the year, and there are, have been, and will be no shortage of posts in the blogosphere looking back at 2008.  This is logical, I suppose, but I find myself less inclined to look back at the year gone by than I am to look back at the last ten or twelve years—the last decade, as it were.

Decade, you say? Indeed…

On this day in 1998, I had recently completed my first semester back in school after a 15-year hiatus.  I had quit my job, given up my apartment, and moved back to my childhood home in order to pursue the degree I should have pursued in 1983. It would prove to be the beginning of a period in my life that saw me experience religious conversion—twice, no less, whatever that says about me—meet the woman whom I was obviously supposed to marry, move three times, and generally transform my life.

All of this was the continuation of a process that began in earnest two years earlier, in 1996.  Back then, I was single, working in a restaurant, and living in a cookie-cutter apartment in a plastic suburb planned community, and was becoming pretty desperately unhappy.  I moved to Ventura, ostensibly for cheaper rent, but in reality I was searching for the life that I knew had to be out there somewhere.  Before long, I was immersed in the life of a musical community whose center was a coffeehouse known as the Cafe Voltaire.

It was magical, and quite unlike anything I had experienced before, or would encounter later. People from all walks of life came together and formed a congenial unit.  Imagine, if you will, a wisecracking Jewish coffeehouse owner, a stilt-walking hippie doorman, a retired fishing boat captain and his wife (who did beautiful leather work), a cigar-smoking Xerox technician (who was and is a serious amateur photographer), a tattooed ex-punk kid (hi, Zack), a middle-aged eleven-toed songwriter and guitar picker who came to California from Texas, running from the law, his wife, a down-home Kentucky girl, who had lived in Iran before the revolution and spoke fluent Persian, and me, a crew-cut (at the time) fast-food management dork.  And those were just some of the regulars.  Somehow, we all got along famously.

All of this was highly transformative, and it is safe to say that by the time I graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2003, I was not the same person who moved to Ventura seven years earlier. In coming to know and understand others of wildly varying backgrounds, I had come to understand myself in a way that I could not have conceived of in my Simi Valley apartment in 1996.  Because of all of that, I am a better, more well-rounded, and more well-adjusted person today.

All of this was on my mind as I drove home from work today, so just for the hell of it, since I don’t get down there much anymore, I thought I’d take the long way home and drive through downtown Ventura. What I saw left me with decidedly mixed emotions, because while I feel I have come to understand myself better in the last ten years, it seems my adopted hometown is suffering from an identity crisis.

The Cafe Voltaire itself is long gone, of course. It went the way of the dodo in 1999 when Todd, the owner, lost his lease and tried moving it to another location, after which it was never the same. He ultimately tried buying a dingy country bar and transforming it, but the clientele didn’t follow, and in 2001, after becoming a tribute-band venue, it closed ignominiously without notice and Todd left town. The courtyard where the cafe had been has in the last ten years been transformed from the bohemian, slightly funky ex-bus barn that it was into a yuppie heaven.  A pricey Montecito restaurant has relocated into the space the cafe once occupied; the children’s art center (Kids’ Arts) across the courtyard is now a trendy Bikram yoga studio, and the tiny and eclectic jewelry shop appears to have become an equally tiny hair salon.

The rest of downtown has undergone similar change.  There has been an obvious attempt to mimic Santa Barbara, which to some extent has succeeded in upgrading the ambience, but sadly there has been an equally transparent attempt to upgrade the clientele as well. It’s unlikely that anything like my eclectic Cafe Voltaire experience could take place today, because the overwhelming majority of the new businesses seem to be catering to tourists with money and the wealthier locals in preference to average residents who might not spend so much in one shot but whom are likelier to be regular patrons.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; businesses have to make money to stay in business, and if catering to the tourist trade and dislocated Santa Barbarans is what they have to do, then so be it. There was a time when downtown Ventura consisted largely of independent locally-owned businesses, and to be certain it was not always healthy. When I first came to town, people thought of the downtown area as being primarily made up of thrift stores, used book stores, dive bars and homeless people, and there was a reason for that.

But something important and unique is being lost, which I mourn. With the possible exception of the local Hells Angels chapter, I don’t think too many people miss the rowdy Rendezvous Room being turned into a nice bistro, but it’s unfortunate that the locally-owned Daily Grind coffeehouse is now a Starbucks, and that the Bank of Books has become an American Apparel store.  There has to be more than just fitness studios, yoga studios, and trendy bistros, or else it’ll just be a big outdoor mall.  We already have a Santa Barbara and an Ojai. We don’t need another one.

And here’s where the identity crisis comes in: under the surface, Ventura is not either of those, nor will it ever be.  For better or for worse, it’s always been a working-class town, a wallflower compared to its wealthier sister, Santa Barbara.  Surprisingly, we still have working oil fields in Ventura, the same ones that brought the first President Bush here briefly after World War II when he was in the oil business. Make no mistake, it’s a wonderful city, but its beauty is sometimes lost on outsiders until they live here a while. Thanks to Caltrans’ ham-fisted freeway design and construction, for most Angelenos, downtown Ventura is a concrete canyon they drive through on their way to Santa Barbara, which suits many of us here just fine.

Ultimately, of course, change is inevitable. Ten years on, this city is still amazingly like the town I adopted as my hometown. But thirty miles to the north, two-bedroom homes sell for over a million dollars, and we’re only fifty miles north of the sprawling disaster that is Los Angeles. On a summer’s day, when L.A. is 100 degrees and smoggy, here you can still feel the ocean breezes and smell the citrus blossoms.  Short of blowing up the Santa Clara River bridge, dynamiting the Rincon, and erecting the Great Wall of Saticoy, I don’t see any way to prevent the gradual overrunning of our little corner of paradise, and I have no illusions that the gentrification and yuppification of downtown Ventura will cease or even slow.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it, and it doesn’t mean I can’t look back with fondness on a time now past when things were different.  I was fortunate to have been here at a very special moment in time, when  all the conditions were perfect to create something magical.  I am who I am today in large part because of the people I met during that time, many of whom have moved on to other places and other pursuits. I owe them a debt I can never repay.

Thanks to all of you for having been a part of my life. The last ten years have been spectacular. I can’t wait to see what the next ten years will bring.

Happy New Year, everyone!