Sorry, but real life continues to interfere with time in front of the computer; yesterday Tenacious G (my SO) managed her re-entry motorcycle ride into the Santa Monica mountains, where we met and breakfasted with friends. She hasn’t ridden in the mountain roads since her two accidents last year, and to be blunt, I haven’t exactly encouraged her.
She did great, a good time was had by all, and I will slowly learn to give up trying to ride her motorcycle and mine at the same time. It’s not easy to live in anxiety about someone you care for, but in order to care for them you have to respect their choices…even the ones that make you anxious.
This somehow plays into today’s Steve Lopez column in the LA Times (signin ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’), in which he tells the story of a young man who ultimately succeeded in committing suicide, despite the efforts of his mother to protect him. He ultimately shot himself with his handgun – which had been taken away by the LAPD when he had been picked up and taken in for evaluation, and then given back by the LAPD when he was not admitted.
We have a terrible mental health system here in California, where care for ill people takes a back seat to ‘respect’ for their rights, and a desire not to spend any money on them. The results can be seen daily on Main and Los Angeles streets downtown, where the homeless congregate. And can be seen in this small tragedy.
And above all the policy issues, we want to make things better and to keep our children safe.
So again, in today’s Times, an article about a high school here in Southern California which is being used as a testbed for surveillance technology, in part because

” Schools are among the first to embrace new technology, often because companies view campuses as perfect testing grounds before rolling products out to corporate America.
For instance, one of the companies behind West Hills’ system, PacketVideo Corp., predicts that demand for products like SkyWitness will grow, as people are tracked at factories, office parks, stadiums–even places such as the Third Street Promenade shopping district in Santa Monica.
Companies like the fact that students enjoy fewer constitutional protections than adults and have lower expectations of privacy than their parents.”

The desire to keep our kids safe places them in Bentham’s Panopticon, the perfect prison where visibility would ensure behavior. This is ass-backwards; I’ll try and get into why it doesn’t work later, but for now, simply want to say that, hard as it is to say and do, we cannot provide total safety to those we love. I don’t know enough facts about the case Lopez talks about, but I do know the feeling I get when someone I love straddles her motorcycle and rides away. And despite those feelings, I know that I simply have to put my head down, ride my own motorcycle, and let her ride her own.
Anyway, a great dinner with friends last night, too much Big House Red, lunch and a movie today with my brother (who still owes me for this), and another dinner with friends tonight.
It’s a rough life, isn’t it?
But I’m working on a review of Embattled Dreams and some other stuff…so please come back tomorrow!