Herb Caen

It’s true.

We’re totally moving there.

Partially because we’re totally burned out on Palm Springs.

But also because we love that city. I’ve lived there before – years ago – and coffeesister has visited enough over the years to know that she wants to spend the next few years of her life there, if not the rest of it.

It’s vibrant, colorful and alive, teeming with an energy that pulsates and dances to a unique rhythm I’ve never felt in any other city.

I’ve lived in San Diego..

Los Angeles.. Hollywood.. Sacramento..

I’ve visited Seattle.. Portland..

Many other places.

There’s nothing quite like the City by the Bay.

Tony Bennett not only left his heart there, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen used to call it, “Baghdad by the Bay,” back when Baghdad was seen as a jewel of the desert and comparing a city in the United States to it wasn’t insane.

Herb Caen was the guy who came up with the term “Beatniks” to describe the bongo-bonging beat poets who frequented the North Beach coffee houses of the nineteen sixties. He also popularized the term “Hippie” to describe, well.. Hippies.. during the heyday of the counter-culture movement, which was born in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district.

I used to read his stuff almost daily. Before the Internet I’d pick-up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle at one of those newstands in San Diego, Los Angeles and Sacramento that carried papers from other cities, and I’d head straight for Uncle Herb’s column.

When the Chronicle went online in the nineties I was there.. one of the first subscribers, gleefully devouring Uncle Herb’s column every day right there on my computer.

I even got mentioned in it once.

Right when email was becoming popular and they’d just given him an email address, which he didn’t use but an assistant did, I sent in a punny quip with the hope that it would get printed out for him and he’d think it funny enough to run.

He did – in the very next column. He gave me name credit for the punny quip too. I think this was about-ish 1995 or so, and I was thrilled. Let’s see if memory serves, and I can get it verbatim..

“We certainly hope so!” quips David Rhodes of Ashland Oregon, after spying his local paper’s headline, “Pipe bombs may be tied to Montana Freemen.”

Coffeesister and I lived in Ashland at the time, and that headline was on the front page of “The Daily Tidings.” The Montana Freemen were big in the news, having blown-up something to raise awareness of whatever brand of insanity they had festering in their twisted souls. They were not very well liked at the time and I think Herb and his readers enjoyed the thought of tying pipe bombs to them.

Uncle Herb died in 1997, but the City by the Bay lives on in all of its passionate, pulsating energy.

We had one of those epiphany moments the other night, as the two of us sat here in our little Palm Springs studio. I’ve been out of work for ages, and we’ve been without a car for even longer. It’s hard to get around in this area and there’s not much to do anyway.

So we looked at each other and said, “Why in the hell are we still here?”

Our arrival in Palm Springs several years ago is a long, boring story that I have no desire to drag out and beat the dust from, but suffice it to say it wasn’t our idea to come here.

But it’s our idea to leave.

We’re not sure how we’re going to do it – I’m already job-hunting there as opposed to here thanks to broadband Internet, and she’s looking for rentals right in the city that mirror our current digs in price and amenities (4 walls, a bathroom and kitchen.)

All I can say is thank God for Craigslist and Google Maps.. they’re truly miraculous!

I’m also working online, but I can do that from anywhere. So, I’d prefer to do it from there, where I’d dearly treasure the memory of Palm Springs and try not to miss it too much as I sit and sip a cappuccino at one of a thousand sidewalk cafes to choose from in Baghdad by the Bay.

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