Quibbles & Bits: On Empty Buildings, Penmanship and Friending Myself

A late-April potpourri for your perusal

By Ed Goldman

GET BACK!—If I remember it correctly, Harvey Korman’s character of Hedley Lamar in Mel Brooks’s western satire “Blazing Saddles” laments that people he was hoping to drive out of town were “staying in droves.”

This is what employers who want their workers coming back to their high-rent offices, especially in urban downtowns, are feeling: Employees are staying home in droves.

I haven’t researched how this is unfolding in other cities but in Sacramento it’s a huge challenge. While this is largely a government town, its being the state capital and all, thousands of feet of office space are lying as fallow as those farms whose owners are paid by the government to not grow crops. (We pause here to acknowledge that if you’re an extraterrestrial trying to figure out our planet, and you don’t mind my paraphrasing the alien Borg nation on “Star Trek,” coherence is futile.)

Everyone from commercial real estate mavens to members of the vaunted Urban Land Institute—many of whose Sacramento members live in gated communities outside the city limits, which are about as urban as four-car garages—are coming up with ideas on how to get people to return to their cities’ downtowns.

Some (including me) are suggesting that unoccupied buildings be used to house, treat and rehabilitate homeless people who didn’t ask for their plights. Others have put forth the notion that downtowns have to depend less on public- and private/sector occupants than on the so-called destination economy: in short, build a soccer stadium, axe-throwing venue and free parking at all times and they will come.

This is a defeatist approach. It proposes turning the capital of one of this country’s great states into an amusement park. (Well, we already have carneys under that dome, don’t we?)

I INK; THEREFORE I SMEAR—As a young man, I strove to have beautiful handwriting. Today, it resembles an EKG printed out during a tsunami.

Penmanship is usually judged by your cursive writing, though designer friends of mine in my general age barrel can print words swiftly and magically, often with nothing more than #2 pencils. (For younger readers: This might be a good time to go play Warcraft in your parents’ basement, since words like “penmanship,” “cursive” and “pencils” are sure to cause you needless angst. For future reference, they’re components of the English language. Now go do a #2 for mommy.)

I never like it when authors say they “pen” their books unless they really are hand-writing hundreds of pages, possibly with a feathered quill at their Louis XIV desks. And since even used replicas of these can set you back more than $200,000, it’s likely that the only writers sitting at those are insurance under-writers—or backstage thieves at PBS-TV’s Antiques Road Show.

I was encouraged to write legibly as a kid, both by my parents and by movies that showed Great Men of History drafting by hand the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and “J’Accuse” (the Emile Zola letter to the president of France about the Dreyfus Affair—not the #Metoo movement’s manifesto, which of course would have been written by a woman). I thought that if I wrote in long strokes while smoking a pipe it’d help the appearance of, if neither the content nor mechanics of my writing.

I also was typewriter-phobic as a teen. A number of my friends begrudgingly took typing class and I resisted. Who’d have thought back then that even though typewriters would become obsolete, typing skills would still serve one well on computer keyboards?

Eventually I taught myself the one- then two-fingered typing skill often debased as the “hunt-and-peck” system. It’s the one I use to this day. Especially when my quill is at the cleaner’s.

FRIEND-IAN SLIP—In an 18-hour period, the tech geniuses at Facebook dumped my account and then, when I checked in via Facebook.com, suggested two new Facebook Friends for me. One was Bob Rakela, a wonderful graphic designer and fond acquaintance who, unfortunately, died last August (until recently, artist Gary Pruner, who passed away six years ago, was seen endorsing some sort of doggie door on the site). 

And the other recommendation was (drumroll)… me.