We went down to Alki Sunday as the weather was nice and the phones were dead.  My wife, Tina, chowing down on some onion rings at the Pepperdock. Good burgers there, friendly staff, reasonably priced.

     Am I angry?  Yes I am.  I moved here three decades ago to get away from the crap that was happening in Seattle.  It was unincorporated King County here and a decent place to live.  Now it’s just Seattle Jr.  It’s been ruined by land developers.

     Shoreline has become a city where people mostly want to come to die.  The City Council wants some younger people who are still working and not retired to come here to be exploited (pay the taxes to finance their land redevelopment to make the land city council members own more valuable) but for the most part it’s not happening.

     They ask why but when they’re told they don’t like the answer they get.

     Younger people aren’t retired, most are working, they need services at night, they need entertainment at night.  If they want a tax base, they’re going to have to make some concessions to make this city liveable for those who aren’t yet over eighty and retired.  The Casino’s don’t count.  We need parks that are open so those of us who enjoy night photography or just want to watch the night sky can do so.  We need some good musical venues like the old Parker’s Road House back when it was a road house and not a sports bar or casino.  We need a police force that doesn’t harass everyone under 25, my son was stopped just for walking at night.

     As long as these things don’t happen, youth are going to avoid this city like the plague it is.

     I’ve been annoyed by the way things close down here at night, it didn’t in my youth, and I just found out there is a city ordinance that forces everything, with the exception of Casino’s and 7-11, which is grandfathered in, to close at 1PM.   As a resident, I find this more than a little annoying.  My wife works nights, I often have to do work at night, and there are times when I need something or I’m hungry, and I have to drive to Seattle or Everett because of this stupid ordinance.

     When we voted to form a city, the idea was it was just going to be a minimalist government to accommodate the state requirement that we provide police and fire services.  But we made the unfortunate mistake of not drawing up a charter.  And now it’s turned into the City government from Hell, a bunch of land developers mostly bent on getting money from citizens into their pockets.

   This can be especially difficult when you work from home as I do.  You don’t leave the office often even when you’re not working.  The point remains the same, it is necessary to achieve a reasonable balance.  It’s hard not to admire the work ethic of someone like Elon Musk, and all that he has accomplished with his hard work but you have to wonder what the long term toll will be.

     I was coming back from a bank run when I was stopped waiting for a red light to change.  The light changed to green but immediately a motorcycle cop stopped in the middle of the intersection and stopped us from going with the green light.  Followed was a hearse and a procession of vehicles.

     I wondered why do dead people get the right of way?  What hurry are they to get anywhere.  The living, we only have so much time on this planet, we sometimes have reasons to hurry, but the dead, their dash is over, they have no reason to be in a hurry.

     When I was in prison there were people in their for murder, and people in there for sex offences and more often than not those with sex offences had the longer sentences.  I think it’s an interesting commentary on society that an act that actually takes a life can have a less severe punishment than an act that has a potential to create a life.  I think this says something very fundamental about the value of life, and more specifically, human life, in today’s society.

     We allow violence and murder on prime time television, but we don’t allow sex or nudity.  In fact, by the time the average person reaches age 18, they have witnessed 200,000 acts of violence and 40,000 acts of murder on prime time television.  Why is it we train our children on the ways of taking life but we go out of our way to protect them from learning how to make life?

     I’m still trying to figure out what to do with what’s left of my dash.  I am having a hard time being comfortable in a society that has so much reverence for and glorifies death.  I can’t help but wonder if this has something to do with our numbers?  Given that they’re seven billion of us on this rock, perhaps that’s just too many for human life to have value.

     I like listening to Mexican and Latin American music at times, and I think what I enjoy about it is that it is so full of life.  Most popular American music is dark, violent, or sad and grief filled.  I would rather be part of a society that celebrates life than death but I’m here and stuck with what it is.

     I am awake but just barely, was seriously considering going back to bed, and this is what My Daily Bread had for me today:

Someone mentioned It’s A Beautiful World by Louis Armstrong and it reminded me of another of his song that I think is just totally beautiful even though it was used in a somewhat shallow movie, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which did not do justice to Ian Fleming’s book at all, too many details were left out of the movie to make sense of it without first having read the book.  Anyway, the misuse in the film aside, it’s a great song.  Ignore the movie and enjoy the music.