It was called the "Club Chico" motel on the Esplanade at East Ave and the manager was a skateboard rat. I was glad to live alone after having roommate problems in San Jose. I was drinking heavily at that time and one night I fell asleep while smoking a cigarette and caught the mattress on fire. The manager woke me up and hauled the mattress out into the parking lot. He replaced the mattress with a spare and I stayed there for a couple more weeks. I was expecting that he would be upset about the fire but he just shrugged it off... That motel was often visited by the police... So, just a fire was no big deal to him.
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| One Mile Pool - Looking Upstream - Photo taken while wading |
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| One Mile Pool - Looking Downstream - Photo taken while wading |
I sold my stock in Radio Shack (about $6,000 worth) before I left San Jose but the Investment company was very slow to pay. I ran out of money before I got paid. Without money I couldn't pay the rent and so I went camping in Bidwell Park at Picnic Area 37 - The Grove of Redwood Trees. I called the investment company every day and yelled at the man who answered the phone. I believe it was a standard company policy to delay payments a couple of months in order to increase profits. They hired college students to answer the phone and make up excuses...
I showered at the One Mile swimming pool and ate at the Jesus Center. I also ate at "Food not Bombs" in Train Depot Park and on Sunday I ate at the Salvation Army... with organ music. It was "Chico on Zero Dollars a Day"... I picked up cigarette butts from ashtrays...
I started going to AA meetings every day and stopped drinking. One big influence was New Years Eve 2000. I was in my motel room, alone, drinking and watching the VH1-Behind the Music show. Every band's biography had drug and alcohol abuse problems and then they either stopped using or died. I did a little introspection and saw that I too had a drug and alcohol abuse problem... As a matter of fact, AA has some excellent parties for New Years Eve, Halloween and Christmas.
I remember that there were terrible forest fires in the mountains behind Chico. The air was filled with smoke and the Summer heat was over 100 degrees... I spent every afternoon inside the library playing with the computers. They had the internet for free if there were no students that wanted to use the terminal. Since it was Summer, there were very few students... I also went swimming in Chico Creek a lot. I had to take some defensive action (like swimming) due to the smoke and heat.
In the Fall it started to rain and I moved into a cheap motel. Then I rented a room from some gay women for a few weeks... then I moved in with Victoria... I bought her $300.00 worth of propane and so she had heat in the winter. It gets really cold in Chico in the winter... maybe 30 degrees... cold enough that without propane, you could die... We lived on Highway 99 north of town a few miles in a "granny shack" in the middle of a corral with horses. And Almond Orchards... I got a Job at WREX Plastics as a machine operator...
One night Byron ( another pal from AA) and I went out into the orchards to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower.
Read more of my autobiography at:
http://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/03/growing-up-in-los-gatos-california-in.html
https://gvan42.blogspot.com/2018/08/lets-build-solar-powered-desalinization.html
Solar Powered Desalinization Factory converts Seawater into drinking water... Good for making Ice Cubes for a Scotch on the Rocks or for Showering, watering plants and livestock...
My Webstore on Zazzle...
https://www.zazzle.com/gregvan
Free Winplot Art for use in your own creations. Pirate at will, Matey It's Fun!
https://gvan42.blogspot.com/p/go-ahead-and-pirate-any-of-these-images.html
Read More on My Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/GregoryVanderlaan
Numbers have cultural meanings... For Example 5150 meaning is Danger to self and others.
1,4,9 is the shape of the TMA in the movie 2001... The Big Black Box.
This is my list of every number I can think of and what they mean...
https://gvan42.blogspot.com/p/for-example-and-its-one-two-three-what.html
0: number invented by Indian Mathematicians. Brought to the middle east and then Europe by an Arabian named Al Khwarizmi. (Algebra). Handy for expressing BIG numbers like, 1 followed by a hundred zeros – a googol. A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros. Spelled differently than google.
007: James Bond, a secret agent for her Majesty in England. A Character played in the movies by Sean Connery... and a gazillion other wanna-bees.
half pipe: a skateboard word referring to a part of the skate park made out of a concrete pipe sawed in half... a big concave area remains.
¾ waltz time… 4/4 rock music and folk… 5/4 Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”
1: The traditional beginning number used when counting. For Example: One for the Money, Two for the show, Three to get ready, now GO CAT GO! But don’t you, step on my Blue Suede Shoes. also: And it's 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for? Country Joe and the Fish.
1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34… Fibonacci sequence… add together any two consecutive numbers to calculate the next term.
1/20/09 date Obama moved into the White House.
1.44 - Size in Megabytes of a Floppy Disk. According to Larry Niven - Science Fiction Author it's the minimum size needed for a Neutron Star. 1.44 times as large as the Sun. "The Chandrasekhar limit ." The currently accepted value of the limit is about 1.39...
1.618 Phi the golden ratio - found often in art and nature
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.jpg "Who WAS Ram Dass? In the Sixties, He was a Psychedelics Researcher and Promoter at Harvard with Dr. Timothy Leary. (LSD, Magic Mushrooms and Peyote)")
.jpg "Peace Sign Pie Chart")
.jpg "Military Death Chart USA")