If i ever found myself living in that scruffy north-coast community i’d be sure to actually produce such a blog, but as it happens we were too focused on being tourists to pursue photographing the unusual cast of characters populating the area. My fav was the guy in the ancient Datsun(!) pickup truck, rummaging through the garbage cans along the bay wall collecting bottles and cans, then, suddenly, setting up a fairly new-looking nylon tent right on the walking path. He took it down after admiring it for a few minutes.

I can’t imagine what the unemployment rate is throughout the north coast. If there ever was a time to buy real estate in that area, that time is now.

On Saturday we visited Arcata and Eureka and actually spent some time walking around. It was move-in day at Humboldt State, so Arcata was swamped with an incoming tide of students. Upon arriving in town the massive farmers’ market was in full swing… with a seemingly endless cornucopia of photographic quality vegetables all priced well below (well below) the prices at the Ashland market. Nearly a week later we’re still eating the heirloom tomatoes Annette bought.

The town of Arcata personifies the somewhat pejorative term “crunchy” and, after slowly cruising the Humboldt State campus, Annette practically chanted “i’m so glad you didn’t get that job here.” I was not quite as certain as she, but i could totally understand her point. We would be in the older demographic were we to move to Arcata. In Ashland, retirement mecca of Oregon, we’re youngins. Plus, aside from working in one of the dozen or so vegetarian restaurants, there’s nothing for her to do.

But what i took away from this most recent coastal jaunt is a re-engergized conviction that i really do want to live on the Pacific coast. The desire is there, now all i need is the “how.”

I’m also hopeful the opener sets the stage for a season devoted to the actual work of a creative agency. It would be a welcome change to spend some time with these characters while they struggle with the business of starting up and running a brand new agency.

Now all i need is for Breaking Bad to return along with my guilty pleasure – Caprica, and my iTunes season passes will be complete.

So i’ll put the moral of this story right up front: unless you are typing on an Olympia SG-1 or equivalent, stop hitting two spaces after a period or other terminal punctuation.

How did this all start? As the featured graphic demonstrates, in the early days of typesetting and typewriters letter shapes (glyphs) all occupied the same (or nearly the same) horizontal space. Thus the problem of how to delineate sentence breaks arose and consumed the minds of designers for generations. The “solution” that took over the world remains a classic example of buck-passing. “Just hit two spaces after a full stop… why complicate matters?”

But this really should come as no surprise, after all the ludicrous “QWERTY” keyboard we all take for granted was developed specifically to slow typists down in order for the hammers to clear the gate. Yes, thank the industrial engineers of yore for this pathetic tool still in widespread use and the cause of numerous wrist and forearm injuries.

So, you can see why i tend to get pissy when faced with intransigent users who insist “two spaces was what i was taught!” and expect me to accept that rationale as holy writ.

Typewriter:

Computer (even a nasty windoze computer):

But when it comes to actual life there can be little doubt that my Irish heritage and with it the curse/blessing of Irish luck rules the day.

“Irish Luck” is, of course, a statement dripping with irony. The Irish are about as unlucky an ethnic group as you could find. However growing up my mother often referred to having Irish Luck when oddly bad or annoying things happened. For people within earshot who looked confused at the term she explained it thusly: “One balmy summer’s day an Irishman is strolling down the street when he happens to step in pile of manure. Looking down at his shoe he exclaims,’ah! bless me and my luck, i coulda been wearin’ my good shoes.’”

So you can understand perfectly how i felt this past Saturday when our Range Rover began spewing oil on the road from Burns to Bend…. but i then learned Bend is the home of Bend Rovers. Ah! bless my luck, we coulda been stranded in Wagontire.

So after some sad debate, we opted to park the rover, with kayak on roof, in the parking lot of the rover place and leave a couple of what i hoped would be humorous voice mails on the phone. We stashed the rover’s key in the yellow watering can/planter by the door, transferred much of what the rover was carrying to the pickup and continued on our way to Ashland.

After the long weekend passed I called Bend Rovers and spoke to Francis the owner. He was nonplussed by finding a green rover with a sea kayak on its roof in their parking lot. “We got one car ‘head of ya, but we’ll have news for you tomorrow for sure.” Behold and lo the next day he actually called me back. Amazing! Turns out the oil leak, which blew more than two quarts in about 200 miles, was simply a cracked oil pressure sending unit. Cheap part, easy installation. But… that was just the beginning: front brakes were down to about 1mm of pad, rear were about the same, but the killer was the right front axel seal was leaking and there was virtually no grease left. Yeah, another of those $600 jobs to replace an $80 part. So there’s another four-figure repair bill. But it can’t be helped, the car is from 1993 and quite possibly had the original brake pads… so they were due. The axel seal… i’m a bit pissed that Gregg of Gregg’s Autohaus didn’t catch that while he was rooting around the front end replacing ignition parts by the bucket full, but i’ve come to learn he wasn’t much of a mechanic,  he was more a “pill doc” who only cared about treating-and-streeting.

But the larger lesson here is the one Tom and Ray of Car Talk try to teach us every day: cars suck. Cars are simply terrible things on nearly every level when examined rationally. That you can’t fully participate in life in this country (with a couple notable exceptions) without a car is a travesty bested only by our pathetic healthcare system. But that’s why i choose to own a Range Rover… and to drive it as little as possible. People, especially in this crunchy little town, will no doubt find such a car wasteful and extravagant, but i wager i burn less gasoline in a week than any average Prius owner… and even with two four-figure repair bills plus the cost of buying the car, i’m still way ahead money-wise.

In 1993 i was working in the graphics department for the Chase Manhattan Bank. My office was on the 28th floor of “2 Chase Manhattan Plaza” (aka 20 Pine Street). I had a pretty crappy view as my office looked north directly at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza so looking out the window, especially at night, gave the impression of a Blade Runner-esque purely-urban landscape. The New York Times had recently run a billboard campaign promoting the paper’s classified ads with my favorite being “I never thought I’d pull a bank job.” I thought about that line nearly every day i showed up for work having landed the job via The Time’s job listings.

One day in February i was on the phone speaking to one of my “clients,” a young, attractive recent business school grad who, my memory tells me, actually worked over in one of the WTC buildings. Not the towers, one of the low buildings, maybe WTC 6 or some place like that. She was a corporate climber, i was the film lab flunky she had to deal with on rare occasions when somebody in her department needed slides for a presentation. But i remember we always had fun, flirty conversations. Then suddenly i heard through the phone, and simultaneously felt, a low, powerful, “THUD.”

“What the hell was that?” i asked, “you drop something over there?”

“I have no idea… but the whole place just shook.”

Before we could finish our conversation, i heard the sirens. “Get out of the building” i said and hung up. I picked up the camera we used for grip ‘n grin shots, took the elevator to the street and hustled over toward where the sirens seemed to be headed. All I got to see was the smoke and then, several yards from the parking garage door, a piece of twisted metal blown out from the door. It would be later, after the cops established a perimeter, that the people with the now famous soot marks on their faces would begin pouring out onto the street. Looking down at that piece of metal i realized it had to have been a bomb.