CUL-DE-SAC

A week ago I put on a dress shirt and a tie and I drove to City Heights to talk about building a skatepark there. It was a community meeting in a tiny gathering hall that was sponsored by my employer and Speak City Heights.

City Heights is a low-income part of San Diego that’s full of immigrants. It’s the kind of place where you need to check whether it’s Ramadan before you invite the locals to a lunch.

But the main thing about City Heights is there’s no place to fuckin’ skate!

I can relate. Since I moved to California I have not joined a new-age cult but I did learn to skateboard. I can ride but I can’t do jumps. I can’t balance my board on a steel stair railing and ride it to the bottom.

I’m too old for that shit, which reminds me I went skating one night with my son (who rode his bike) as we tooled down a neighborhood hill that I’d ridden many times. But it had just seen some street maintenance and I hit a crack that didn’t used to be there and was thrown off my board. I managed to do a decent shoulder roll as my ten-year-old shouted, “Daddy! Are you okay!!”

But the pain in my shoulder took literally months to go away. That’s what happens when you’re in your 50s and land on cement.

But back to the lack of a skatepark in City Heights. About two dozen folks turned out for the discussion, and most of them stuck around until the end, since we told them we’d raffle four Kindle Fires. Skateboarder Nick Ferracone was there to tell us why City Heights should have a place to skate. But he also said something interesting and contradictory.

Skaters are brilliant at using the “built environment.” You know… roads, sidewalks, ramps. So why do they need a skatepark?

I can’t remember what Nick said to that, but I know that skaters aren’t usually supposed to be where they are. Bikes have carved out a niche but nobody seems to want skateboarders on streets or sidewalks. Park engineers fasten metal tabs to hardscape to keep them away. Businesses put up signs that say, “No skateboarding.”

The cool thing about this is it preserves the rebellious nature of the sport. I was thinking about channeling that energy into the setting of a skatepark as I loosened my tie and walked to where I parked my car in City Heights… when I saw something beautiful.

It was a kid with a mop of black hair riding his skateboard across a four-lane road. He hit a break in the traffic just right, sped over two lanes, hopped up onto the median and down onto the opposite lanes before he disappeared into some side street, negotiating every road hazard with quickening grace.

City Heights is a nasty, beat-up built environment, and that kid on a skateboard had taken it over.

Mt. Laguna is 6,000 feet and a little over an hour drive from the Pacific Ocean. Compared to urban, coastal California you are in a different world even though you are so close.

By the pile of rocks in the meadow.

You can see the stars at night. The Milky Way looks like dust or clouds though it’s actually a stellar blanket seen in the dark night sky. Is that why they call it the Milky Way? I grew up with a dark night sky but now it’s a brilliant oddity.

The birds in the mountains are different. Red-winged blackbirds sing their colorful songs and stellar jays look like black hipsters wearing flat tops and a blue suit.

A meadow in the middle of the pine forest has a pile of rocks, and my kids like to go there to jump from one to another. It’s been raining here, and there are thousands of tiny frogs they capture and release.

In a tent with three kids I lie, waiting for sleep to come as others in the campground continue their parties, talking, laughing and listening to music. Slowly the sound turns to nothing but the shrill cry of bugs in the trees.

I have spent my whole life cheering for losing teams. I grew up in Iowa and I never saw the Hawkeyes win the Rose Bowl. I lived 17 years in Minnesota, where the Vikings could get to the Super Bowl but always got thrashed once they arrived.

Now I live in San Diego, a city that’s  never been home of a powerhouse team, collegiate or professional. So what am I to think of the fact that the O’Malley family is about to take over the San Diego Padres?

The son and the grandsons of Walter O’Malley are part of a group that is buying the Padres for $800 million. Walter was the man who owned the Brooklyn Dodgers and made baseball history by moving them to LA.

A joke once told in Brooklyn: You’re in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley. What do you do when you’ve got a gun with only two bullets? You shoot O’Malley twice to make sure he’s dead.

I don’t remember my father ever saying he hated Walter O’Malley. But he did grow up a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers because he grew up in upstate New York in a town that was home to a Brooklyn farm team. He worked at a golf club in Elmira as a teenager and once caddied for a group of Dodger players that included the great shortstop Pee Wee Reese.

When the Dodgers left Brooklyn, my dad stopped being a Dodger fan.

In Dodger history, Walter O’Malley was a better villain than a hero. He not only abandoned Brooklyn, he drummed out of the Dodger organization the sainted Branch Rickey, who desegregated major league baseball by signing Jackie Robinson.

Now it looks like Walter’s heirs will be running the San Diego Padres, and they are paying Padres’ owner John Moores a king’s ransom. The sale price is ten times the amount Moores paid for the club in 1994.

Baseball history and my family history make me like the connection to the Dodgers, even though my Dad never cheered for LA. Maybe it was because they were too successful. It was easier, somehow, to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers who typically lost the big game. Maybe backing losers runs in my family.

And maybe the Padres will keep being losers. It might serve the O’Malley family right. But now that they’re in San Diego, they’re on my side. So I’m stuck with wishing them well.

Being a parent of school-age kids means you have to curb your desire to force them to only do things that are “good” for them. You know what I mean. You don’t want your kids to A)Watch lots of TV B)Use foul language C) Play violent video games D)Eat unhealthy food E)And so on.

But my whole notion of what’s good for my kids has been turned upsidedown by my son’s introduction to the video game Minecraft.

Minecraft is not a violent video game, even though people do get killed and kill others. Apparantly, there’s a game mode called “survival” in which you are placed in danger and… well, get killed a lot, though there must be some ressurection mode since it never seems to cause Nicholas to stop playing.

Over the course of 2-3 months, his devotion to the game has approached obsession. He’s been a very good reader since he was able to read at all, but Nicholas hasn’t read a book in two months. He likes to play Minecraft on my work computer, which is why he meets me at the door when I return home from work. It’s my computer that gets the warm welcome.

He goes outside less. He gets less exercise and seems to spend each free minute in the a room with a computer. Maybe I should be alarmed. But here’s where it gets complicated.

Minecraft is a game of building things. You create a world for yourself with a home, mountains, rivers and farms. In fact, depending on the number of servers you use, you can create multiple realities. To build things you need to gather materials, and there’s a trick to that, of course. It’s not exactly engineering school, but you can imagine the creativity and learning that comes with this thing.

Minecraft has taught my son more about using a computer than I ever thought he’d know by now. Customizing the game requires installation of certain mods, or modifications. We recently saw him investigating and learning ways to add mods by downloading instructional videos from Youtube… again, something he’d never done.

Above all, this has, in a strange way, made my son more social.

A few years ago, a diagnosis landed Nicholas on the autism spectrum. He’s on the upper end. But he’s socially awkward and has few friends.

Minecraft has given him a common language he can use with his peers. It’s something that he can talk about excitedly. Like lots of video games, Minecraft can be a shared experience that people can play on a computer network. He sees his friends online. They help him build stuff and they admire each-other’s creations.

Maybe I would feel better if he and his friends were building stuff out of junk in the backyard. They’d get some sun and exercise. But how can I complain about a computer game that’s brought him out socially, and put him together with other kids like nothing else has done before.

So there he sits at the computer, sometimes for hours. I eventually tell him he’s got to get out and ride his bike or play in the canyon, even though I know that will soon be over and he’ll be back to turn on the computer and re-enter the world of Minecraft.

A summer with computer games is a reality I never knew as a kid. As a parent, I’ve made a negotiated settlement with it. And I’ll assume my son’s next obsession is one I’m more familiar with.

Sorry. Spoke too soon.

IKEA actually has replaced the Swedish rye bread I used to buy, so I can’t be pissed off anymore. And I have to take back all I said about IKEA not caring about providing whole-grain black bread (See previous post).

Their brand product is seen in the photo provided. I don’t yet know how Brödmix Flerkorn tastes, so it may still be inferior to the old stuff. But at least I’ve got hope.

By the way… black bread tastes great with mayo and vine-ripe tomatoes, so this is a good season to try it.

More later.

I have been writing this blog for going on three years, and no blog post I’ve written has gotten more attention among readers than my denunciation of IKEA for no longer selling their black bread mix. I once made special trips to the Swedish retailer to buy a carton of dry makings for Finax Swedish Rye Bread.

You used to be able to buy this stuff.

Just add water, let it rise and then bake for an hour and you have fresh, whole-grain rye bread just like I ate as a teenage exchange student in Hamburg, Germany.

I guess it occurred to me to wonder about this again, since I just returned from a trip to Europe in which I visited Hamburg and was able to taste that rich and wonderful food. I also recall IKEA employees having told me the Finax product was being discontinued because they wanted all their food to be IKEA products.

This came with the suggestion they would replace it with something much the same and just as good, only difference is it would carry the IKEA brand.

But my recent trip to the IKEA on Friars Road in San Diego showed me there was no black bread mix. It had not been replaced.

I will complain to management, though I expect it will do no more good than the last time I raised the subject with them. The very least they could do is tell me where else I can buy it.

This product was a gem among the stacks of cheap furniture they sell at the place. It was something you couldn’t find anywhere else. Maybe it still is, which means they probably won’t tell me another place I can buy it.