"LA LA LAND"

“La –La” Land

Jackson Blair

When I was much younger I flew from the east to the west often. It was a pleasurable trip. You entered a plane, they served you coffee or a drink almost immediately. They pushed a nice cart down the aisle and carved you a slice of meat, scooped out some potatoes and other vegetables, poured you a glass of wine, and said nice things about your selecting their airline. I should mention, in those days, a small pack of three cigarettes was served with every meal.

The fare was about $250.

The airline made money and the passenger was comfortable and felt special.

Yesterday I took a trip from the east coast to the west coast.
Every seat in my plane was taken. We were informed on take-off that no food was available, except for purchase. The choices were cheese and crackers for $4 or a chicken sandwich with potato chips for $10. Nobody mentioned “seconds”. If you wanted something more than water or coffee, you could buy one of those very small bottles of booze for $6.

The fare for this trip was over $500.

The airline didn’t make any money and passengers were very uncomfortable.

If you want to buy airline stock, now is the time to do it. They are very unprofitable but since some have announced they plan to charge for the use of the toilet on the plane, I think you will see profits go up. Judging from the line of people waiting to use the two toilets, I would say the airlines should be able to turn a profit now.

I did arrive on the west coast at roughly the time they said I would. This, friends, was the best part of the trip, if you don’t count not crashing.


I am writing you from “La La Land”, the extreme LEFT COAST, the home of “Hippies” and “Drug Addled Winos”. You get the picture.

Specifically, I am in San Francisco and environs.

The recent news that Congressman Gary Condit did not actually kill Chandra Levy was such a relief that I thought about driving down to his trailer to say hello. After losing his congressional seat and being shunned by his family and constituents for almost ten years, I can only imagine how pleased he must be that they finally found someone else to blame. It took a long time. But the authorities, after painstaking exploration and work, identified a man already in jail for doing exactly the same thing to two other young women within months of doing it to Ms. Levy. Wow. What detective work.

Each time I am out here I wonder why all those explorers spent so much time trying to get here. Think of it, all those covered wagons, months of deprivation on the trail, Indians making movement pretty difficult at times, while providing haircuts at no charge, no easy path through the mountains; it had to be arduous and dangerous. Not to mention the total lack of Port-O-Potties on the trail.

It is then that I realize why the west coast is as it is. Only nut cases and folks fleeing the law would have ever embarked on such a journey. Voila! (That is French and it is meant to impress the reader). They are the genetic ancestors of these people who are out here now. When you look at it this way, sort of anthropologically, it all makes sense. Well, actually, not much makes sense out here. These people are in the business of defying description. Well, all of them except my son, his wife and my only granddaughter. I know they are being held hostage and are not permitted to get an exit visa back to the normal world. They are not allowed to talk about it so we just ignore the topic when I am here. When I am here I always comfort myself with the knowledge that I am just “passing through”.


That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you always hear people in the east make the statement regarding the west coast: a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.

People like to go to the Side Show at the Circus, but they don’t necessarily want to dine regularly with the Hairy Woman, the two-headed Aboriginal, or the fire-eating twins.

So visit I must, but stay: absolutely no chance.

By the way, did you ever eat tofu?

Out here the vistas are incredible. You can see from the window of your hotel room to the windows of so many other hotel rooms. You can walk outside, especially in San Francisco, and just inhale. Immediate high! Whatever they are all smoking here is just simply floating around on the air. This must be what Bill Clinton meant when he said “but I didn’t inhale.”

Another thing about the west coast, no one is ever arrested for smoking marijuana. In fact, there is some suspicion that people who are not smoking it are put away for a couple of weeks so they can think about the error of their ways.

And you thought the weird way the Governor here speaks had something to do with his birth country! Everybody out here fully understands what he is saying.

By the way, did you ever eat wheat grass?

You can run outside and into the street here and jump on a trolley, but only if you are out of your mind. Do you have any idea how old these trolleys are? Think about it. Ever since the Big One, the earthquake that destroyed San Francisco, the natives have been riding these trolleys. Not a one of them has probably been serviced since then.

The tracks are the same ones put down in the beginning of trolley service. Governor Schwarzenegger is giving people IOU’s for their tax refunds so what reasonable person would be thinking he is setting aside money for trolley repair?

Have you ever seen the streets of San Francisco. I do not refer to the TV show with Karl Malden but to the actual streets. In any other part of the world they would be called mountains. Nobody can actually walk up one of these streets.

I am pretty sure the steep streets are the reason our early ancestors started walking upright. So they could catch the trolley.

So look at the equation. Really old trolleys. Climbing up really steep streets. Anything fails, like brakes, and you get to ride the trolley back down the hill at about 100mph right into the Bay.
If you survive the trip down the mountain and into the Bay, you then face the plight of the good folks who used to try to escape from Alcatraz by swimming: waters with serious undercurrents and undefined people eating fishlike things.


This is a sport beloved of all visitors. Frankly, I don’t know what the big deal is here. For years in New York City I had to run out in the street and try to flag down a cabdriver who was making so much money on welfare and disability he wasn’t inclined to pick up any fares. At least, if you are in a cab riding on completely flat Manhattan streets, you don’t have to worry about brakes. The worst that can happen is that you cruise into the car in front of you. But since NYC cabs only go about 2mph there isn’t a chance you can actually claim whiplash when you go to court.

And should it happen to be raining the day you need a taxi, the cabbie usually gave you the one finger salute as he splashed you from head to toe with his wide tires, moving through the puddles.

By the way, you have a much better chance catching a cab in NYC than a trolley in San Francisco. This should be a question on Jeopardy. Somebody tell Alex Trebek.

By the way, did you ever stay in a house with incense burning all day? Eye, Ear and Nose doctors prefer to work on the west coast. There are no dummies in that profession.

Also, out here in San Francisco they are famous for those little movements in the pavement and the swinging of their buildings.

You can be seated having a perfectly wonderful cup of coffee only to find it in your lap after a minor earthquake. That must be why some people think of this as such a moving place.

If those people back east that sued McDonalds for spilling hot coffee on them would vacation out here they could get a really good lawsuit going against the San Francisco supervisors.

I went down to Fisherman’s wharf for some good seafood. I decided on a big restaurant sitting on the side of a hill with a panoramic view of, yes, Alcatraz prison. I should mention here that everything in San Francisco sits on the side of some hill.
I reflected on what would motivate anyone to build a restaurant that overlooked a prison.

Since I had absolutely no reason to look out the floor to ceiling windows as the prison is closed and there was clearly no chance of seeing someone swimming in an escape effort, followed in hot pursuit by guards in rubber rafts, I ordered the fish of the day.

No wonder it was called the Fish of the Day. At $37 a plate, it should have been the Fish of the Century. I asked my waiter why it cost so much. Since he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Illegal Alien, he searched out the one or two American waiters in the place.

It was explained to me this way: it cost a lot because of the “middle man”. Aha, the infamous “middle man”.

I reminded the waiter that we were in a restaurant that was located on a coastal area of the continent. He and I together could actually spit in the ocean from where we were standing, although I feel certain they would frown on that.

I simplified it: fish in the water; hungry diner at a table a short distance away; trip from water to table via kitchen at best a couple of hundred yards! And for this they needed a “middle man”.

The waiter went to get the manager. Undoubtedly, the waiter told the manager that another uppity easterner was making trouble. The manager spoke a short form of English. I could understand about 10% of what he was saying. There was a lot of hand and arm waving. I was patient.

I was advised that there were union rules out here. Fish could not just be brought from the water to the table. Only certain highly trained people were permitted fishing licenses for commercial establishment needs. This is the gist of what he was saying. I reached that understanding after roughly 15 minutes of my saying “what” and his repeating an unintelligible gibberish. Finally, we agreed to a truce. He called one of the native born Americans over to translate for me. I think that is what they mean by “extra attentive service”.

The English speaking fellow told me that other, presumably advanced degree holders, were required to actually clean the fish. Then government inspectors would arrive,( federal, state, local and mob affiliated) late of course, to determine if the fish had been properly cleaned. In the old days one assumed a fish swimming around in good old salt water for years was pretty clean already. But in these new days, once the clean fish gets to land, a lot of dirty hands work with it and it gets dragged from the wharf to the docks to the fish houses to the refrigerator trucks. These people need one fish tank filled with Purell. That would do the trick.

After that, another government man would appear to determine if the fish had any rights that might have been violated in the process.

Assuming everything was as it should be, the fish was then loaded on an approved mode of transportation (long way of saying a refrigerator truck) and brought to the restaurant. However, since refrigerator trucks are only permitted on certain San Francisco streets, the trip of a couple of hundred yards becomes a trip of twenty miles. And then there is the matter of paying the fee for “protection” that keeps your truck from becoming unrefrigerated due to bullet holes in the paneling.

When the fish arrives, and that can only be on Wednesday or Friday due to city regulations on delivery options, it must again be inspected to determine if it enjoyed the trip and arrived refreshed, I mean fresh. It is known to most humans that anything that has been dead for a couple of days should never be referred to as “fresh”. This is also the story behind the commonly used phrase: “fish breath”.

By this time numerous mafia leaders have collected their piece of the action, the Association of Longshoremen have been paid off, the members of the Refrigeration and Freezing cartel got their piece, and the fish was now about to encounter the Hotel and Restaurateurs Association guidelines.

There was the Chef, the Pastry Chef, the Sous Chef, and numerous other chefs that were required to actually touch the fish. And each of them had to wear large puffy big hats and that cost money, too.

Did you ever wonder what was under those big puffy white hats? I can finally share the news with you: two sharp knives, a crumb brusher, one small flute, the original score to Damn Yankees, and a slightly balding head).

Then officials of the Waiters Union got in the act and determined the size of the plate permitted, the timing of the pick-up in the kitchen and the delivery to my table, an estimated time for me to consume the fish, a timetable for the removal of the plate, and I love this part, a whole person hired just to come to my table and brush off a few crumbs so things would be tidy for dessert. Somebody should offer a PhD in this.

Let me tell you, I had no more questions. That damn fish had traveled more miles from the water below to my table, and taken more time doing it, than it took me to get from the airport to the restaurant. They talk all the time about meat being aged, wine being aged, somebody should begin referring to fish being aged.

I happily forked over my $37 (along with the required 20% gratuity which, in light of all the folks involved in producing my dinner, I thought was quite minimal)

This is a story of stimulus.

In supporting President Obama’s request that I spend a little money and get things moving, I am personally responsible for a productive and profitable day being had by fishermen, refrigerator truck drivers, inspectors from various agencies, fish cleaners, fish inspectors, fish cookers, fish servers , a couple of mafia chieftains , a crumb remover and, lastly, a fish eater.

Only in America friends!