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Blog One: Is This Thing On?

Throughout my long life, I’ve dwelt in the American West. Sixteen years into my decidedly non-average childhood in San Diego, I flew the family coop and headed to Canada with a draft-age boy. For some reason, we thought if we showed up at the border, the RCMP would let us right in and help us homestead. Turns out, that’s not how it works.

Eventually, I migrated solo to the San Francisco Bay Area. More specifically, to Berkeley in the mid-1970s. I didn’t stay forever, though. For 35 years, I resided and worked in Hawaii, Nevada, and Colorado. In 2012, my old grey cat and I rented a 24′ truck and towed a used Bimmer over the Rockies, landing atop Mount Veeder between Napa and Sonoma Counties. Leroy and I lived (mostly) happily in a cabin in the redwoods until the whole shebang burned to smithereens.

In October 2017, a PG&E-sparked wildfire burned my whole world down

Just before a big tree fell and took out all power and communication, my luthier friend in the Napa flatlands texted an offer of sanctuary and a couch to me and my cat, if and when we needed it. The winds were roaring, but the visible fire was on the other side of the valley, across Hwy 29. I cuddled Leroy and played solitaire by lantern light. I did not sleep.

The next day, I fiddled with the car radio and walked around the property in a vain search for a phone signal. I napped. I chose two of my many guitars –an electric and a 12-string acoustic– and put them in the back seat along with a blanket and a pillow. Leroy’s medium-size dog crate took up the entire passenger seat.

A sheriff whose name I wish I could recall knocked on my door and told me that a worried facebook friend asked for a wellness check. I said to let her know I was staying alert and asked if I had to evacuate. The deputy said no, and assured me he’d be back if evac became necessary.

I slept.

The day after that, my nearest neighbor came by to make sure my unreliable old car would start, just in case we had to haul ass. We checked, and it was dead as a duck. Young nabe gave me a jumpstart and said there might still be a WiFi signal at the laundromat halfway down the mountain. I drove five miles to Brown’s Valley, found no signal, and puttered back up the serpentine road to my cabin.

That’s when I saw the orange sky. In a panic, I snagged a handful of bedside books and my laptop. I put Leroy in his crate in the still-running car. Before I had a chance to dash back inside, a man I’d never seen before appeared on the road and said there was no more time. I dived into my dodgy Beetle and hit the gas. Leroy and I barely escaped the fast-moving conflagration in the rear-view mirror.

Wildfire wasn’t the worst thing to happen to me that day

What I didn’t know was that when I fled those frightening flames, I ran toward something far more devastating. Minutes after accepting sanctuary, I almost met Miss America.

My cabin and pre-Beetle vehicle in the enchanted redwood forest a few years before the fire
Once the embers cooled enough to visit the wreckage
Me and Leroy after landing in the Napa flatlands

Virginia Woolf: Google Doodle Honors Feminist Author On Her 136th Birthday

Personal favorites from the wayback machine

By Kaanii Powell Cleaver
Originally published by Inquisitr News: 12:15 PST, Jan 25, 2018

Internet surfers who used Google on Thursday may wonder about the dark-haired woman whose illustrated image adorned the top of the search engine page. Her name was Virginia Woolf, and the fact that she is remembered more than seven decades after her suicide is testament to her talent.

Woolf penned thoughtful prose in a loose and readable stream-of-consciousness style. Introspective characters who experience mundane events in extraordinary and non-linear ways are a recurring theme in novels such as Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, Jacob’s Room, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. Woolf’s nonfiction works, including Three Guineas and her extended essay A Room of One’s Own, explore the perils and pitfalls of writing while female in a world where men held overwhelming economic and legal power.

An LGBT-friendly feminist ahead of her time

Despite the fact that Virginia’s father forbade her from attending college, Woolf delivered impassioned and informative speeches to female undergraduates at Cambridge, Girton College, and the Newnham College Arts Society. Notes for her 1928 speeches were collected and published as A Room of One’s Own the following year. The feminist essay wonders what would have happened if Shakespeare had a sister and proposes that for a female to succeed as a writer, she must have money and a room to call her own.

A thinly veiled lesbian theme runs through A Room of One’s Own, especially in the section wherein Woolf outlines the writing of a character named Mary Carmichael.

“Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

Apparently, Virginia Woolf liked women very much. According to scholars at the University of Illinois at Springfield, Woolf participated in a number of “erotically charged and sometimes sexual relationships” with women over the course of her lifetime. The most notable of these lesbian affairs involved well-bred aristocrat Vita Sackville-West who became the inspiration for Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando.

Vita Sackville-West inspired Virginia Woolf’s LGBT-friendly novel, Orlando

Literary career cut short by sadness

Virginia’s novels and essays were well received during her lifetime, but depression and despair prevailed in the end. In 1940, German fighter pilots bombed Woolf’s house to smithereens during the Blitz of World War II, and the author never quite got over it.

On March 28, 1941, Virginia composed a loving suicide note and donned an overcoat. After filling the pockets with heavy stones, Virginia Woolf walked into a river and drowned. She was 59 years old.

Update Nov 2024: Read A Room of One’s Own at Gutenberg Canada.

Meeting Miss America, Almost

I met the would-be pageant princess for the very first time as my home in the redwoods was burning down. Uninvited, she showed up less than an hour after I and my cat arrived to my luthier’s open arms and assurance of sanctuary. I’d only been inside his guitar shop before, never inside the mostly-empty house he’d recently retrieved in a divorce agreement. Let’s call him RJ.

RJ seemed surprised to see the obviously agitated woman who arrived with no warning; at first glance, I figured she was his mom. I got the feeling she hated me right away, though.

Once introduced as ‘someone who lives in the neighborhood’, she didn’t stay long. She didn’t stay away for long, either.

Before the NFD allowed me to visit the ashes of my disenchanted forest home, the icky-vibe neighbor came back to wreak a bit of havoc. And that’s how I came to be physically assaulted in the street by a drunk old woman who once aspired to be Miss America. Seriously. Miss Fkkn America.

When she signed herself up to compete in the 1963 Miss Napa County pageant, her picture made the local newspaper several times. As pretty as any of the other girls, she was barred before the preliminary competition. Those reasons don’t seem to have been published. Let’s call her CBR.

Flash forward 54 years, CBR showed up for a second surprise visit while RJ and I were having dinner. Sloppy drunk, she barged through the unlocked front door and into the dining room. The decidedly not-miss-congeniality got in my face and demanded I “step outside for a talk.”

I asked if CBR if she was threatening me. In response, she snatched a goblet of red wine from the table and tossed the contents against a white wall. RJ stood up and escorted the fuming trespasser to the door. She continued her drunken tirade, and I stepped outside to make sure RJ was not in danger.

That’s when Not-Miss-America lunged for my throat and tore off my necklace, cutting her finger on its silver crescent moon pendant in the process. With theatrical flourish and no lack of epithet, CBR wiped her blood on my host’s shirt, staggered to her car, drove herself the few blocks back to her house, and called the Napa police. She said she was the victim.

When an officer arrived at her house, CBR proved her identity with a drivers license and assured him that she had done all her drinking after returning home for the night. The cop took a written report in which she stated that we had assaulted *her.* She showed him a bruise the officer described as ‘old’ in his report.

Cop came back to talk to us. After interviewing me and RJ in separate rooms, the officer returned to Not Miss America’s house and said he didn’t believe her story. She screamed an obscenity or three, and slammed the door in his face. The officer came back and asked if I wanted to file charges. He said CBR could be arrested for battery. Wine Country first responders were busy with bigger issues that night, RJ swore she’d sober up and leave us alone, so I declined to press charges against the woman who thought she had what it takes to be Miss America.

If I’d known then what RJ –and the Napa police– knew about her, I would have pressed those charges hard.

* * *

By the way, Janice Kerr prevailed at the 1963 Miss Napa County pageant.

Unlike the disqualified contestant, Kerr did not go on to be arrested numerous times in Napa.

The felony case circled above refers to the second time the wannabe beauty queen went for my throat and connected. The crime itself occurred in 2017.

The other criminal cases occurred long before I knew of her existence. Those cases were still active in the court system in 2017. Those charges include hit-and-run w injury, assault w a deadly weapon, and filing a false police report.

After her “service dog” shat in Trader Joe’s on Xmas Eve 2022 and she became belligerent with customers, she collected new criminal charges, but that case is now “masked” in public records due a relatively new law. In 2023, she is being sued in civil court for non-payment of bills.

Here she is. Your ideal.

This decades-old publicity image is from one of Not Miss America’s two failed bids for Napa city council. Both times, she came in last.

And that’s all I’m gonna say for now about this crass and reprehensible human.