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Livin' In a College Town
Aug. 30th, 2015 10:25 pmKimberly and I got back from a great bike ride today, and discovered that one of the two trees that we had planted about three years ago — that I hand-watered for a year and half and that I've checked regularly during our drought — had been badly damaged. A couple of feet of bark was stripped off of about 30% of the trunk's diameter and the smoother wood under was somewhat damaged too. Our best guess (and it's a very likely scenario) is that a drunk college kid smashed his high-school-graduation-present Prius into the tree while backing out. Unfortunately, it looks like it happened at least a few days ago, as the damaged bark that was crumpled up and hanging from the tree had already gotten hard and rigid. It can't be reattached.
We duct-taped the remaining damaged bark that was still mostly attached to the tree, and I gave the poor tree extra water. Some time later this week, I'll try and get it some fertilizer, and I've got watering it back on my schedule as it could now use all the help it could get.
Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that happens, living' in a college town. Or rather it's the sort of thing that happens, livin' in a college town, in a society that idolizes underage drinkin' and partyin'. No, I'm not just an old fogey; I've hated it since I was a college-age kid here.
Also, I'm an old fogey.
K. and I actually talked about the topic of college a few days ago, before we discovered the hit-and-run on our tree. We each settled in (or near) a college because colleges create cool communities.
Or, at least they did.
When we moved to Berkeley, it was full of great bookstores, great comic stores, and great movie theaters showing wacky movies. There were fun, casual restaurants, and there was an interesting culture that was intelligent, counter-culture, and political.
And year by year that's all faded away, and some of the benefits have even become deficits.
The bookstores and comic stores are greatly decreased in number. Only the mainstream theaters are left. I admit, we're part of that problem. We shop online and we rent DVDs and streams from Netflix. But, there's cause and effect and effect and cause there. I shopped at Cody's less and less as they stocked less and less backstock. I shopped at Shakespeare's less and less as they got stingier with their buying and so had less interesting stock on their shelves, as they turned it over more slowly as a result. Perhaps those bits of stinginess were the result of lower revenues due to people buying online, but they lowered revenue by forcing people to buy online.
And DVDs, that's the classic case of the local stores just not offering the benefits they need to, in order to compete against online stores.
So, it's not exactly that I miss the book, comic, and movie stores, at least not as they existed shortly before their demise. It's that their absence — or the lack of need for them — means that Berkeley is no longer offering one of the benefits, one of the balances that it once did.
Meanwhile, the restaurants continue to go upscale and trendy. Oscar's? It's going to be replaced by vegan fast food.
That's a fine example of how the counter-culture has become the privileged-culture. North Berkeley and the hills have long ago become enclaves of over-privileged people who expect everyone to jump when they say so. I occasionally run into such a specimen, and I tend to blithely refuse their over-demands ... and they're flummoxed. They don't understand how a world could exist where people don't do what they say.
Perhaps the last remnant of the counter-culture is the homeless-apologia of the city. Homeless numbers increase as the rest of the west coast shuts them out, and though I have tolerance for the genuinely homeless, I can't say the same for the "travelers", the wandering kids who popped up in the '90s, journeying up and down the west coast like modern-day hobos. They're aggressive and angry. They're frequently fighting, occasionally chasing down tourists who snap their photos. Between drought and laws in other cities, we have an entire west-coast of them now, all-year round.
Meanwhile, the college kids remain. And they certainly have plenty of problems of their own. We aren't kept awake as often by loud parties since we've had an increasing numbers of our windows redone, but they're there. And, man does this town get crowded every year when the students came back, as they did a week or so ago. And sadly some percentage of them are just as thoughtless as you'd expect young 20-year-olds to be. It shows up in the rubbish filling the streets every semester-end, in the smashed bottles left fragmented on our sidewalk ... in the tortured trees.
So loud parties, drunken kids, and angry travelin' youths are now balanced by ... a lot less than they used to be.
I'm not feeling particularly bad about Berkeley or anything today. I'm not feeling particularly unhappy about where I live. But I'm aware that it's become a different place from the one I chose half a lifetime ago. I'm aware that a balance has shifted and continues to shift, because the world is a different place, and because Berkeley is.
And I wrote about it primarily because I'm pissed about the assault-and-battery on my tree.
We duct-taped the remaining damaged bark that was still mostly attached to the tree, and I gave the poor tree extra water. Some time later this week, I'll try and get it some fertilizer, and I've got watering it back on my schedule as it could now use all the help it could get.
Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that happens, living' in a college town. Or rather it's the sort of thing that happens, livin' in a college town, in a society that idolizes underage drinkin' and partyin'. No, I'm not just an old fogey; I've hated it since I was a college-age kid here.
Also, I'm an old fogey.
K. and I actually talked about the topic of college a few days ago, before we discovered the hit-and-run on our tree. We each settled in (or near) a college because colleges create cool communities.
Or, at least they did.
When we moved to Berkeley, it was full of great bookstores, great comic stores, and great movie theaters showing wacky movies. There were fun, casual restaurants, and there was an interesting culture that was intelligent, counter-culture, and political.
And year by year that's all faded away, and some of the benefits have even become deficits.
The bookstores and comic stores are greatly decreased in number. Only the mainstream theaters are left. I admit, we're part of that problem. We shop online and we rent DVDs and streams from Netflix. But, there's cause and effect and effect and cause there. I shopped at Cody's less and less as they stocked less and less backstock. I shopped at Shakespeare's less and less as they got stingier with their buying and so had less interesting stock on their shelves, as they turned it over more slowly as a result. Perhaps those bits of stinginess were the result of lower revenues due to people buying online, but they lowered revenue by forcing people to buy online.
And DVDs, that's the classic case of the local stores just not offering the benefits they need to, in order to compete against online stores.
So, it's not exactly that I miss the book, comic, and movie stores, at least not as they existed shortly before their demise. It's that their absence — or the lack of need for them — means that Berkeley is no longer offering one of the benefits, one of the balances that it once did.
Meanwhile, the restaurants continue to go upscale and trendy. Oscar's? It's going to be replaced by vegan fast food.
That's a fine example of how the counter-culture has become the privileged-culture. North Berkeley and the hills have long ago become enclaves of over-privileged people who expect everyone to jump when they say so. I occasionally run into such a specimen, and I tend to blithely refuse their over-demands ... and they're flummoxed. They don't understand how a world could exist where people don't do what they say.
Perhaps the last remnant of the counter-culture is the homeless-apologia of the city. Homeless numbers increase as the rest of the west coast shuts them out, and though I have tolerance for the genuinely homeless, I can't say the same for the "travelers", the wandering kids who popped up in the '90s, journeying up and down the west coast like modern-day hobos. They're aggressive and angry. They're frequently fighting, occasionally chasing down tourists who snap their photos. Between drought and laws in other cities, we have an entire west-coast of them now, all-year round.
Meanwhile, the college kids remain. And they certainly have plenty of problems of their own. We aren't kept awake as often by loud parties since we've had an increasing numbers of our windows redone, but they're there. And, man does this town get crowded every year when the students came back, as they did a week or so ago. And sadly some percentage of them are just as thoughtless as you'd expect young 20-year-olds to be. It shows up in the rubbish filling the streets every semester-end, in the smashed bottles left fragmented on our sidewalk ... in the tortured trees.
So loud parties, drunken kids, and angry travelin' youths are now balanced by ... a lot less than they used to be.
I'm not feeling particularly bad about Berkeley or anything today. I'm not feeling particularly unhappy about where I live. But I'm aware that it's become a different place from the one I chose half a lifetime ago. I'm aware that a balance has shifted and continues to shift, because the world is a different place, and because Berkeley is.
And I wrote about it primarily because I'm pissed about the assault-and-battery on my tree.