OB Rag

The Shingle Chronicles – Part Two

This is the second in a series about my recent run-in with a most unpleasant malady, Shingles. I hope it will encourage those who have not had the vaccination to set aside all your acrimony and distrust toward “Big Pharm,” and get vaccinated. It is also a lesson learned and an acquisition of empathy for all those who suffer from disabilities and illness we cannot “see.” Here’s Part One.

Descent into Shingles Hell

After a night of vivid dreams which rivaled Alice’s trip through the Looking Glass, I awoke to sunny May morning. Normally this would have been the start of good day. I was on leave from University and as I recall, there was nice little bump in the surf and Our Mother Ocean was starting warm up. Light, off shore winds marked the end of Winter’s chill and an approach of balmy Summer days. There would, however, be no surfin’ for a while and the previous night’s medications were beginning to wear off. I found myself a bit out of sorts and “scratchy.” Surprisingly, the pain was not yet particularly bad. So I just took the anti-inflammatory, with a sort of wait-and-see attitude toward the pain medications. It was now a full week from the initial symptoms showing up. Only eight more to go….

OB Rag readers – please go check out our brand new offspring online publication for all of San Diego: the San Diego Free Press.

The City of San Diego is finally moving forward on its plans to wrap Mission Bay in surveillance cameras, including the camera the City has been threatening for two years to install at the end of the Ocean Beach Pier.

The OB Pier camera is part of a 14-camera security system funded by the Department of Homeland Security that are being placed around Mission Bay on city light poles, atop lifeguard structures and on boat ramps.

The OB Rag has been covering the City’s plans for a while now:

• ‘We’re Watching You’ – Surveillance Cameras to Be Installed On OB Pier and Around Mission Bay, by Dave Rice, March 22, 2010

• Creeping Big Brother in OB and Beyond, by Frank Gormlie, April 7, 2010

By Mel Freilicher / Special to the OB Rag

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life
By Vivian Gornick
Yale University Press, 2011; 151 pages; $25

Rather than write a political history of Emma Goldman’s very full life (which is already documented in great detail, including in her own hefty, 2 volume autobiography, Living My Life), Vivian Gornick has chosen to “concentrate on the force of her extraordinary rebelliousness and try to understand it in light of the existential drive behind radical politics.”

To illuminate what she believes to be at the heart of many dedicated radicals’ commitment, Gornick delivers a provocative portrait of Goldman’s soul, really: embodied in what’s famously paraphrased as, “If I can’t come to your dance, I’m not coming to your revolution.”

This is the first in a series about my recent run-in with a most unpleasant malady, Shingles. I hope it will encourage those who have not had the vaccination to set aside all your acrimony and distrust toward “Big Pharm,” and get vaccinated. It is also a lesson learned and an acquisition of empathy for all those who suffer from disabilities and illness we cannot “see.”

Part One: Tripping into the Shingles Abyss

Reading any contemporary literature, there appears to be what I would call “module writing.” This seems to hold true for most cinema, as well. For example, the First Module gives us the setting (Tropic Island, South Central LA, Oxford), the characters who are acceptable for the particular setting (Island girl, middle-aged black man, ruddy faced ginger cook) in a particular genre (lost and abandoned, coming of age, off-beat romance).

Join us tonight – Primary Night – here at 8:00 pm when the OB Rag joins other local online media and doing a live blog of the Primary’s mysterious being unfolded over the course of the evening. San Diego CityBeat and San Diego Rostra will be represented as well. Andy Cohen will be downtown blogging at Election Central, and Doug Porter, Frank Gormlie and Annie Lane – and perhaps more – will be live blogging from home.

Here is the agenda for the OB Planning Board’s regular, monthly meeting, for June 6th. The Board meets sharply at 6 pm at the OB Rec Center,4726 Santa Monica Avenue. (The agenda does have a second page, but it just includes “adjournment”.

The main item on the agenda is a request to construct a 288 square foot addendum to an existing structure at 5072 Niagara Avenue.

From San Diego Free Press / June 4, 2012

In Under the Perfect Sun, Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew and I observe that San Diego is a city that “many conservatives extol as a utopia of patriotism and free enterprise.” Indeed it was Nixon’s “lucky city” but, as we note, “San Diego has too frequently been a town wide open to greed but closed to social justice.

Like its Sunbelt siblings—Orange County, Phoenix, and Dallas—it has a long history of weak and venal city halls dominated by powerful groups of capitalist insiders. ‘Private Government’ has long overshadowed public politics.”

My daughter, her husband, and son came to visit me today. They live in Orange County and because of her working hours it has been difficult for them to visit for more than a day at a time. Lynn is my middle daughter who checks on me daily to make sure I am ok.

Because it has been more than 6 months since they have been here, I asked both of my other daughters and their families to join us. My oldest daughter was baby-sitting her grandchildren and could not make it. My youngest came with her family, and the two students I have living with me joined us as well, totaling twelve as we sat down for dinner. It was a fun evening, and we began talking about what we would do the following day.

Balboa Park Conservancy Board of Director members Judy Swink and Vicki Granowitz recently issued a joint press release in which they announced their resignations from the board. Both of their resignations were precipitated by the board’s June 1 majority endorsement of politically powerful San Diego philanthropist Irwin Jacobs’ controversial Plaza de Panama plan. According to the press release, prior to June 1 the Balboa Park Conservancy had maintained a neutral role with no direct involvement in the creation or implementation of this plan. It now not only supports the plan, it will actively lobby for it.

Beginning Monday, June 4th, the OB Rag is birthing a new online publication for all of San Diego. It’s called the San Diego Free Press – and is named after San Diego’s very first alternative newspaper – which was published from 1968 to 1969.

The San Diego Free Press will bring to the rest of San Diego what the OB Rag has been bringing to the community of Ocean Beach these last four and half years – an online source of news, issues, and progressive views by citizen journalists, plus the providing of a platform for the discussion of issues relevant to the village of OB.

The San Diego Free Press – in the planning stages for over a year and half – will be a source for neighborhood news from all the ignored and forgotten communities of our area, and it will provide a source and platform for progressive views for and by San Diegans.

“Thai Time Bistro Thai Food”
1830 Sunset Cliffs Blvd.

After cooking dinner for 12 people last night, I decided to take one of my students and go out to dinner tonight. We found our way to a restaurant I have been to many times, and knew that my student liked Thai food so it was a natural.

We arrived about 6:50pm on a Saturday night and although the restaurant was not full there was a lot of action taking place. We were “sort of” greeted by the manager and left standing as he sat another patron. After seating them he came back to us and showed us our table. We sat for a few minutes, and one of the female’s that help serve the food brought us water (with lemon slices.) For the first time since I have been dining at Thai Time there was also a small bowl of warm fava beans served as an appetizer.