by Gene Mahoney

This Is My Rag and Welcome To It...

Hey there, everybody! I hope everyone out there is having a great summer. Or at least a lot better than the one I’m having. Actually, considering my whole life has been a blur for the last four years since I started the San Francisco Herald, I never know what day of the week it is, or even what season it is. I just realized it was summer a few minutes ago.

All I do is work. That’s it! I mean it. It would be one thing if I worked my ass off and got stinking rich doing it, but the way the economy is going, just staying afloat is a fantasy of mine. Probably yours, too.

I’d like to welcome some new readers in Berkeley and Marin County. This month marks the debut issues of the Berkely Herald and the Marin Herald. They were originally set to be titled the Berkely Journal and the Marin Voice, as I had started the Silicon Valley Review four months ago and the San Mateo Sentinel four weeks ago.

The other day I realized that if I kept starting papers in different cities, eventually I would run out of names (Observer, Gazette, Post, Examiner, Chronicle, Tribune, Times, etc.) So, just as George Foreman named all his sons George, I’m naming all my rags The Herald.

I hope you enjoy the new newspapers. But please, don’t think of them as exact replicas of the San Francisco Herald with just different ads thrown in. Even though they are. Hey, start advertising with me and maybe I can actually cover the news in Berkely and Marin. And San Mateo and Silicon Valley.

Granted, it doesn’t seem likely as I’ve been putting out the San Francisco Herald for four years now and my entire staff just writes about themselves. But you never know. Miracles can happen.

Hey, I just realized this “Welcome to this issue” column is at the very end of the paper. Oh well, better late than never....

News and Notes, This and That...

Dateline: Fairfax in Marin County:

See? I’m covering news in the North Bay already!

Go visit the Shady Porch Cafe & Coffeehouse (85 Bolinas Road, across from the park, in the back).

Why?

“Because people come from all over the world just to see Maria, the owner, and experience her paellas!” says Dona, the resident Tarot card reader there. Dona is also known as La Tigresa, the world famous environmental activist and poet. Maybe you’ve seen or read about her in the news. Recently, High Times magazine wrote an article about her, the BBC interviewed her, Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey have denounced her. Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien mentioned her in their monologues.
What did she do?

“I went into the forests in Mendocino and Humboldt where the ancient redwoods are being clearcut. I went right up to where the men were cutting the trees. I went as the emodiment of Mother Earth -- barebreasted, wearing only flowers in my hair and a tiger-striped sarong around my hips. I recited my Earth Godess poetry and, in every case, they stopped logging. They put down their chain saws and listened respectfully.”

Mother Earth continues: “I have halted logging operations for days at a time. What this does is buy us time. Trees are still standing that would not be standing now had I not done my part. If you want the real scoop; the forests are being destroyed by corporations like the Pices Corporation, owned by the Fischer family of San Francisco who also own Banana Republic, Old Navy, and The Gap. They own the Mendocino Redwood Company and their logging practices are far from the sustainable logging practices that we need to ensure a healthy ecology and a healthy economy. That’s why it’s better to go naked than to shop at The Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy.”

For more information about La Tigresa and her politics and poetry, log on to www.treesit.org. There you’ll find an eight minute film documentary about her called “Striptease to Save the Trees”. Get her CD of spoken word and music at jazzphilosophy.com (or .org, she can’t remember the suffix and I’m too lazy to look it up)....

The San Francisco Black and White Gallery has opened a new, larger location at 619 Post (@ Taylor) not far from Union Square. It’s always worth a visit....

If you want a pleasant Sunday, do what I do. See the Redwood Symphony perform at Canada College just off 280, then have dinner at Buck’s of Woodside or some other cute Silicon Valley eatery.

Performances are inexpensive, too, and Eric Kujawsky, the conductor, is top notch. For schedules of shows and other info: redwoodsymphony.org....

Menlo Park police officer Ron Safarzo and his wife Maryann have released a CD titled “America Our Country... America Our Home”, which has received praise from some former U.S. presidents, along with other people. Danny Hull, the former Doobie Brother, plays harp on it! For more info log on to www.americaourhome.net....

Hey, it’s not often that I get emotional talking about temporary employment agencies, but that Sue Kramer broad over at Career Resources is really something. It’s amazing how I’m kissing her ass right now, considering the awful, vitriolic thoughts I had about her just recently. It all stemmed from when I had a low-paying job in the classified advertising department of a local paper over ten years ago. Sue called to place an ad, and she said I was so nice on the phone that she invited me to come in for a job interview!

I had given my word to the classifed ad manager that I would stay on the job for at least a year, but considering how all three workers in the department treated me like shit, I decided to show up for the interview.

When I get there, Sue and these two assholes she works with start the interview, and proceed to treat me like shit! Sue told me stuff like, “You are nice on the phone sometimes, but sometimes you sound like SHIT!”

Why if she was a guy... mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble.

I thought, why do I need to work here? I can get treated like shit by three assholes with the job I’m at now! Being the trooper (or sucker) that I am, I kept my cool and finished the interview. I sensed they weren’t too interested. I knew I definitely wasn’t interested. So this was the real world, I thought to myself. I should have stayed in college!

(Actually, I still think that today).

So, to make a short story long, I never called them back, and they never called me back.

A decade passes. One day a few months ago I’m at Caffe Borrone (Borone? I forget how to spell it. That trendy Eurotrash cafe on El Camino in Menlo Park).

I have a couple of glasses of the house red and decide to take a walk. I walk past Career Resources (805 El Camino Real in Menlo Park, 650-328-6687) and decide that I can’t keep it in any longer. I’m going to go into that place and give that Sue Kramer woman APIECE OF MY MIND!

So I walk in with an Elvis-type snarl and swagger and tell her:

“Hi. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I interviewed for a job here ten years ago. I came in today just to thank you.”

“For what?”

“Well, you and your co-workers treated me so badly, like shit actually, that when I left the interview I swore that I would never work for anyone else except myself -- ever again! I now publish a newspaper. I’m my own boss. And I would have never done it without you and your obnoxious co-workers.”

The two co-workers I encountered a decade earlier weren’t there. A young woman sitting behind a desk (who turned out to be Sue’s daughter) started to look very nervous. I thought she might call a cop (maybe even Officer Ron Safarzo. See above.)

Now at this point Sue could have freaked out and started screaming at me to get out (which is what I wanted to happen) but she didn’t. Instead she engaged in a form of mental jujitsu. Before I could finish the last words, she nodded and said something like:

“Well, that’s great! I’m happy for you. I’m sorry if we were rude to you. Times were kind of rough then and I didn’t always handle things as well as I should have. Luckily things are better now. But hey, that’s great about you owning your own newspaper!”

So I sat down, she gave me a Diet Coke, she signed up for an ad (which she is still running) and I emailed my web designer to put a link to www.career-resources.com on my web site. Then I called my then-unemployed friend and handed the phone to Sue. She talked to him and got the guy a computer job that pays $1,000 a week in no time!

So this is what you have to do. If you’re unemployed and want a good job (and you’re willing to work hard at it, don’t call if you’re a screw-up) call Sue today at (650) 328-6687. Even if you’re in Marin or Berkeley, give her a call!

Okay, y’all. It’s about time this little doggie rode off into the sunset. So until next time...

Happy trails!

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Gene can be emailed here