And the beautiful weekend continued...

As if Friday weren't gleeful enough, Saturday the very lovely whipartist, whom I hadn't seen in ages, stopped by the house and we all trooped out to the local Thai place for lunch. She brought, as she put it, a member of her harem with her, a lovely man who chatted amiably about being out of work and looking for a new job and all the stresses that go with it and gave me more good ideas for where to look. It was glorious seeing her again; I had found the "admission bracelet" from a party we'd attended, lo, 15 years ago, and good grief, other than the pink hair she hasn't changed much at all.

Seattle Tilth '07 Edible Plants Sale

After that, Omaha, Kouryou-chan, Lisakit and I all headed up to Seattle Tilth, where we arrived with only ten minutes to spare. Ten minutes was all we needed, however, to get all the basil plants and stupice tomato plants we wanted. We carted them home, and worked on cleaning out the garden to get more space.

I don't think we're going about the gardening correctly. We really ought to go with a kind of square-foot gardening ideal, where we start with soil more or less guaranteed to be weed-free, but we don't have that luxury with the retaining wall o' doom as our container.

A most at-risk job.

One of the other chaperons I met at the Musuem of Flight outing I took yesterday with Yamaraashi-chan has the most at-risk job I could think of: she was the recruitment desk for classified ads at a major city newspaper. Her job was to round up "Help Wanted" ads with which to bulk up the classifieds pages. She said that they were making a lot of outbounds, begging employers who used to post every week to give them something, anything, but most employers just didn't have any openings worth paying money to put a classified ad up.

I confessed that I used both her newspaper and Craigslist in my search. "No, don't use Craigslist! They just post the same job ads over and over. You'll never get anywhere with them!"

She confessed that she wondered every day if her job would be there tomorrow. I understood her clearly. I wondered that too.

The View From Your Recession: The local independent pharmacy goes under

Omaha and I got a surprise letter this weekend, announcing that our local, independent pharmacy, Manhattan Drugs, was going out of business. The letter was from the corporate grocer chain Safeway, informing us that the Safeway, 3 miles north of us, would be taking over their pharmacy records unless we elected to have them sent elsewhere. Safeway would, of course, be happy to have our business, and here's three $25 coupons for our next three drug purchases from their pharmacy.

I went over to Manhattan and talked to some of the women behind the counter. The landlord who owns the property has been raising the rates on everyone. It's pretty well acknowledge that he raised rates deliberately to drive the Dairy Queen out of business. The video store probably closed of its own accord. The florist shop closed up, too, when the corporate chain grocery store QFC (that I use all the time) started selling flowers "good enough" for most occasions. The teriyaki place is holding on by its fingernails.

The pharmacist, a nice older gentleman, had apparently negotiated with Safeway to make the move when he decided to close the business, and then sprang it on everyone last Monday. The pharmacy goes, the extra staff is, like myself, now without work.

There's been a sign up for years announcing that the strip here is going to be demolished and gentrified, with QFC and the new chain daycare center as anchors. I guess this is another step in that process. I wonder what the Starbucks will do.

This frustrates Omaha and I. It used to be that when we needed medicines, we could walk. Now, like everything else, our neighborhood's walkability has plummeted, trashed until a replacement comes in, because one of the major draws in this neighborhood, an independent local pharmacist, is gone.

Life, Inc.

The recent announcement from my neighborhood pharmacist that he would close at the end of this week coincides with the publication of Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back, and in particular the chapter in which Rushkoff tries to talk about that unpriced externality: neighborhood liveability. It's one of those things that we're notoriously bad about pricing, because it takes a long time to see the damage we do to our neighborhoods when we reduce the diversity of merchants and merchandise, because we're plains apes not well adapted to thinking in those terms, and because our environment of evolutionary adaptation was one where the only long-term strategizing we did was about reproductive options and assumed a stable, indeed unchangeable (except by catastrophe) environment.

Rushkoff gives an anecdotal example:

Jennifer has lived in the same town in central Minnesota her whole life. This year, diagnosed with a form of lupus, she began purchasing medication through Wal-Mart instead of through Marcus, her local druggist--who also happens to be her neighbor. Prescription drugs aren't on her health plan, and this is just an economic necessity.

Why can't the druggist cut his neighbor a break? He's trying, but he's selling at a mere hair above cost as it is. He just took out a loan against the business to make expenses and his increased rent. The downtown area he's located in has been slated for redevelopment, and only corporate chain stores appear to have deep enough pockets to pay for storefront leases. It sounded like a good idea when Marcus supported it at the public hearing--but the description in the pamphlet prepared by the real estate developer (complete with a section on how to compete more effectively with "big box" stores like Wal- Mart) hasn't conformed to reality.

Marcus's landlord doesn't really have any choice in the matter. He underwent costly renovations to conform to the new downtown building code, and needs to pass those on to the businesses renting from him. He took out a mortgage, too, which is slated to reset in just a couple of months. If he doesn't collect higher rents, he won't make payments.

Jennifer stopped going to PTA meetings because she's embarrassed to look Marcus in the face. As their friendship declines, so does her guilt about helping put him out of business.

This is an anecdote, of course, but like all anecdotes it has a certain amount of power, because it has an amount of truth. We are all of us, all the time, making these decisions that are to our short-term benefit, but that in the end reduce our neighborhoods to faceless, uninterested corporate entities. We reduce our lives to monocultures, in which box stores have a much bigger collection of stuff, but the diversity of stuff is restrained to what's in the box stores. Tom Slee put it this way: "The customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop." Slee's talking about the diversity of what can be found at Amazon.com or via Google, but his point is about monocultures versus diversity, and we get that with one grocery store and its fifteen different varieties of coffee, all more or less tasting the same, and none of them tasting at all like what fresh Guatemalan beans smell like right out of my home tower roaster.

I know that the phrase "unpriced externality," especially when applied to something as touchy-feely as "neighborhood livability," tends to make my libertarian friends see red, but clean air, clean water, and, yes, neighborhood livability are things that we all share in, that cannot be priced reasonably. Yet libertarians often seem to forget that value itself is illusory: money has as an unpriced cost its lack of intrinsic depreciation as a function of its holding value. Only inflation causes depreciation, and that is simply the "cost" of having a fiat national currency. There are other ways to do money, after all.

And there are better ways of living. I wouldn't want the power of the gun, the government, telling me how to live, but it does that already by buying into the corporatized model of commerce and the all-money-is-debt economic models. There are other models of commerce and even of capitalism, suprisingly enough, and where they vary in efficiency, they also vary in reliability and, maybe, even humanity.

We know now that the libertarian ideal of homo economicus is as much a figment of our imaginations as the New Soviet Man was for communists. I can't tell you what we really need, yet, nor what kinds of market distortions our goverment should or should not be using. I just know that the current model isn't working, and it isn't creating neighborhoods.