[sic]

I usually am not one to count my clicks before they pass, but as it stands this morning I’ve pedaled 625 miles during a record-breakingly hot October, and with three bike commuting days left until the end of the month I not only can look forward to topping my record of 684 miles traversed across June, but of also eclipsing the long-elusive 700 mark.

Here’s approximately 16 of them, from my ride home Monday night:

There’s a relatively new blog in my environs — a good, informative and readable one that’s been around a few months. Based out of Echo Park its creator Jesus Sanchez opted to call it The Eastsider LA. I wasn’t so much perturbed by that at first, but I am now. And though I know there are a lot more important things worth being perturbed about at this moment, this trivial thing bothers me because I’ve finally realized why I can’t stand it when my area of the city — Silver Lake, Echo Park, Angelino Heights — is referred to as the “eastside.”

Never mind that the argument ender is simply the historical and geographical fact that the true eastside of the city is comprised of those richly entrenched neighborhoods and communities east of the L.A. River beginning with the likes of Boyle Heights. Lincoln Heights. Then there’s East Los Angeles to consider.

But none of that matters in the slightest to those intent on such flippant misrepresentation.

In fairness, Sanchez does not fall into that category and his coverage radius extends well to the east. He even recognizes that area’s claim to the term in an historical context. Having been born in Boyle Heights and having grown up in East LA Sanchez sees his long-standing residence of Echo Park as an extension or expansion of where he grew up. Hence the name.

But then he trips himself up in closing a defense last month to critics of the naming decision with: “But I have no interest in setting up an Eastside Boundary Task Force to decide who can or can’t call themselves an Eastsider, who does and does not belong, who is in or out. That’s so westside.”

That may be “so westside” Jesuz, but what’s even more westside is to call where you and I live eastside, and that’s where my resentment lies. It just doesn’t get more blithely elitist westside-centric than that.

See, where I live in a house built on a plot of land not long after it was first deeded 102 years ago — that was the westside. And long before that In the late 1800s, Angelino Heights was one of the first residential sections of the city established west of downtown. And Western Avenue wasn’t arbitrarily named. It marked the city’s western boundary. On the other side of it was not much more than swamp and tar that would have to wait a whole bunch of years before some westsider would look disinterestedly inland and imagine everything  on the other side of Western proprietarily as the eastside.

Ultimately it’s a winless argument — and a tired one, too. But no one will ever convince me it’s one without meaning. Especially since people are always going to hold the city’s true cultural history with such little regard, respect or consideration..

And that’s so very L.A.

UPDATE (10.29): Call it kismet. The morning after posting this I found LA Observed’s YouTube vid reporting on the 3rd Annual L.A. Archives Bazaar, which featured discussions on that topic not only in regards to East Los Angeles but also the denizens of Central Avenue who in that street’s heyday called themselves “The Eastsiders.”

As seen from my window on the 10th floor of the office building I’m in at the Howard Hughes Center yesterday morning (around 9:30) looking in the general direction of LAX. Looks like someone left the defrost on outside. I punched through the wall of soup while on the creek path approaching Sepulveda Boulevard. MOIST.

Saturday was the first Tour de Ballona ride along the creek. It drew about 60 riders, including me and Susan, and of course I timelapsed it (below) with my handlebar cam and also took snaps along the way with another.

Up until a few moments before this picture was taken on Santa Cruz Island in 2004, if you’d said I’d ever get this close to a Jerusalem cricket aka potato bug without having to be physically restrained and sedated, I would’ve punched you in the arm and said you were nutso.

But there I am. Letting one crawl upon my hand (albeit begloved) that we found near the site of one of the island fox captive breeding pens we were invited to the island to build (see previous post).

After the jump is a reprint from the archives about the childhood backstory to the phobia and this fateful encounter that to me is indicative of my present respect and consideration for all critters — especially the ones prone to illicit irrational revulsion. Except maybe camel spiders — I’m still working on accepting them into the big circle of life.

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An L.A. Times article today on the excellent success of the island fox captive breeding program on Santa Rosa Island reminded me that in a few days it will be the fourth anniversary of my trip to Santa Rosa’s neighbor Santa Cruz Island with a team of fellow Los Angeles Zoo docents.

Invited by The Nature Conservancy to help build pens there for the expansion of its captive breeding program, we spent the better part of four days in the island’s interior (normally off-limits to outsiders) working on the slopes of a small valley near the historic and ridiculously picturesque Stanton Ranch erecting four 600-square-foot pens where the remaining housecat-sized wild foxes would be caught up and installed to better ensure their safety, increase their drastically low numbers, and ultimately enable their survival.

Historical nutshell time! The foxes lived perfectly on the Channel Islands with bald eagles and mice and blue jays and bugs and native human inhabitants for as much as 16,000 years, but that all began to change when between 1947 and 1971 some 1,800 tons of DDT and an unknown amount of PCBs were dumped in Torrance, making its way through sewer lines into the bay near Palos Verdes where it spread. Bald eagles on the islands eventually ate fish tainted with the pesticide and died off, and in their place came opportunistic golden eagles from the mainland, with a far greater taste for flesh than fish. With no baldies to harrass them, the golden eagle couldn’t help but thrive by exploiting unchecked a virtually endless food supply in the expanding populations of feral pigs–  an ecologically disastrous byproduct of the farming and ranching that took place on Santa Cruz for more than 150 years. The golden eagle wasn’t picky and would gladly eat island foxes, too. And as if the eagles weren’t enough of a threat, the pigs contributed by basically rooting up much of the native vegetation, thereby both reducing the food available to the fox and also leaving them few places to hide and escape the eagles. Seriously, by 1994 when the animal was listed as an endangered spicies there were populations of foxes on some islands that barely numbered in the double digits. In the course of the recovery effort that began in the late 1990s, the golden eagles have been trapped and relocated, bald eagles have been successfully reintroduced, and the pigs — some 5,000 of them — have been killed off.

With my departure from the zoo a year after my visit to Santa Cruz Island, I confess I haven’t been keeping as abreast of the island fox recovery efforts these past few years. So it came as a surprise to learn that the captive breeding program has been so successful that the pens we built have actually been closed since last year - and for good reason: they’re just no longer needed.

In 2004,  there were less than 60 foxes on Santa Cruz island. Now it’s estimated that there are more than 400 — and growing. Populations on Santa Rosa, San Miguel and other islands in the Channel chain are also on the rise.

Though the part that I didn’t hesitate to play in that complex and successful process was infinitesimally small, the amount of pride I take in it is huge.

A photobook I made of images from the excursion can be viewed here on Shutterfly.  Or the full photo album can be seen here.

Way back in October 2001, the boss of where I worked at that time implemented a program wherein during the regularly scheduled monthly meetings he wanted his employees to give presentations. The topics could be about pretty much anything, so I was one of the few to actually volunteer for a time slot and then got to work putting my thoughts down in a paper I titled “Bicycling For Fun & Profit,” the first — and incomplete — draft of the narrative which I just accidentally stumbled on whilst diving around the archives on my back-up hardrive..

Some of it seems so quaint now: Gas at $1.50 a gallon. Me resolving to bike 1,001 miles in 2001. Pretty much the total lack of any so-called bike culture (at least in its current and evolving form) worth mentioning.

I remember boiling a lot of the info down into a bulleted, Powerpoint-style presentation and probably have that file somewhere, but anyway… if it’s your bag or interest, a glimpse of me prepping to preach the power of the pedal from the wayback is on the other side of the jump (replete with a photo of my old Raleigh mountain bike — still sporting a number from what looks to be an LA Marathon ride –  at rest on the L.A. River Bikeway around Atwater Village).

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Agh. I waited too long. For the past however many days I’ve been snickering ever time I biked by a monster billboard north of Venice Boulevard at National, and of course I knew better to get a snap of it while I could, but I didn’t and this morning, it’s gone. Bah.

The billboard up until yesterday was part of a mega ad campaign promoting the DVD release of a 50th-anniversary edition of  Walt Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty,” and most prominently featured the above classic moment when Prince Charming is about to bestow the kiss that will awaken her from her comatose state.

I’d seen several variations on the promo featuring different scenes accompanied by the headline of “See More Than Ever Before,” but whoever created and approved the pairing of that headline with the above image of Charming positioned atop the pronated babe either is really really numbskulled or — more likely, gawd bless ‘em –  knew exactly what the hell they were double entendre-ing.

“Sleeping Booty,” anyone?

Here in the city of anglez, membership has its privileges on all sorts of levels — one of them being preferred access to the variety of municipal pay tennis facilities (8) and golf courses (10). It doesn’t come free, of course. There’s an annual fee attached to each; $15 for swatters of the fuzzy ball and $25 for whackers of the dimpled one.

Nor does possession of the respective pieces of plastic grant you free passage onto those fields of play. It’s $8 an hour for tennis and a varying fee depending on what set of holes you want to play on. Basically all the cards do is allow the city to collect some personal information on you in exchange for being provided a member number with which to navigate through moderately clunky automated systems to schedule a court or a tee time, depending on availability.

Certainly walk-ups are welcome but without a reservation the risk of standing around and waiting is always a possibility.

Anyway, I had previously possessed both of these cards, but let my tennis one lapse when I decided to confine my on-court antics to the downtown YMCA’s rooftop courts. I failed to renew my golf one when I entered into that two-year period of not picking up my clubs (except to move them to the basement).

But after my round at Roosevelt last month with my friend Joseph Mailander, wherein I learned he’s also a player of tennis, I figured it was time to re-up to better enable and speed any future play dates. And now both have arrived, though sadly only after having to print out applications and employ stamps and envelopes and checks and photocopies of proof of residency like it’s 1995, not with the online ease one might otherwise expect to be the standard today.

PS. Speaking of archaic, someone with big enough golfballs in the Golf Division of the L.A Dept. of Recreation & Parks needs to march up to their boss who needs to march up to their boss and teach them two words: graphic artist. If there’s ever a card that needs some visual stimulation, it’s that one. And can somebody help that poor hunchbacked guy zip up his fly, dammit?

PSS. Yeah, you’re funny, but no the “D” on the golf card is not indicative — at least not intentionally — of the level of my game. It’s one of four rotating priority designations allowing early tee-time access on specific weekends throughout the year.

In learning about another cyclist getting attacked on the Ballona Creek (via Damien Newton on Streetsblog LA), I first “chewed with my mouth closed.” In other words I seethed in silence, digesting the angrifying news without posting a hyperbolic comment in response.

Then yesterday after reading the comment of a fellow bike commuter whose response to the incident was to stop riding the path in the afternoon rather than risk getting mugged, I chimed in that my resolve to ride the creek had not been weakened, and that I was disgusted that witnesses to the victim’s state reportedly ignored his need for assistance:

In the comment immediately following mine a reader whose screename is “Paulobak” felt the need to butcher my bravado: