I attended the court hearing this morning of Shon Davis, one of my fellow jail inmates over the weekend. He’s been in jail for two weeks on a parole violation involving a previous drug possession conviction. Shon said a state cop arrested him while he was getting off work at the Wacky Tobacconist, one of two such stores he manages in Gold Beach and Brookings. He has already lost his job over the arrest.

Shon said the parole violation involved his alleged “association with a known drug user” that the state cop said he observed earlier in the day. “How was I supposed to know the guy was using drugs,” Shon told me. “It took me two years to get to where I am today, and they just took it all away from me.”

I don’t know how old Shon is, but I’d guess in his late 20s. He said he wouldn’t even have still been on probation had he finished paying his fines earlier in the year and been released from probation on the scheduled date, but the judge extended his probation for a year so he could finish making payments.

At today’s hearing the prosecutor said Shon had also failed a drug urine test and he had some other add-on crime I couldn’t quite hear. The court scheduled his trial for Dec. 1 and Shon is to remain locked up in that sunless, cramped dungeon of a jail until then. I talked to Jim Gardner, Shon’s lawyer, afterwards and asked why there was no talk of him being released. He said the D.A.’s case has big problems (read that as not very strong) but they won’t let Shon out “even if you had a million dollars.”

I left the court rather depressed about the whole thing and walked the mile back to my office. In jail Shon told me he helped build the greens at Salmon Run, the golf course where I used to be a member and still often play. We knew several people in common at the course, including Felix Calderon, the major figure in the Calderon Group which built the course. I told Shon I’d try to get him a job helping to build the Crook Point Golf Course, the new course proposed for Pistol River near my home.

By the way, I was in jail for duii (driving under the influence of intoxicants). It’s a phony rap as far as I’m concerned. I had two glasses of wine last Feb. 12 with John Silveira while we were working on the magazine at the office, then left and got caught in a speed trap at the edge of town. Speed traps are ubiquitous around here. They are a major revenue-producer for the bureaucratic machine. After six months, $10,000, and a joke of a trial, I was convicted and sentenced to two days in jail, loss of my license for a year, and a couple of thousand dollars more in fines. They also pulled my concealed carry permit.

A few hours after Shon’s court appearance, I went down to the bank and took $400 out of my social security account and put a $100 each into the jail accounts of Shon and three other of my former jail mates. I know some of them have no money so this will help them buy something when they have commissary privileges twice a week. It’ll be an escape from the drab crap they serve to the inmates at lunchtime.

More on this dismal business later. I suppose it will be outrageously funny and absurd years from now, after we rescue this country from the police state it is turning into. Right now it’s just damn sad. Not for me so much, but for those inmates still in jail — all nonviolent offenders and most on parole violations for booze and marijuana. They’re “caught” in the Government System, paying everyone’s salaries with their incarceration. The government can’t aford to let too many of them out. Think of all the guards and bureacratic paper-pushers they’d have to lay off.

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I was in jail for the last two days. Not a lot of fun, but very revealing about how the criminal justice system works. I had eight cell mates in a tiny county jail pod in Gold Beach. All were nonviolent offenders and friendly. I interviewed everyone, which is a natural for me because I am a former reporter for daily newspapers in my life prior to founding BHM.

I had an epiphany. For years, Silveira and I have written about why the United States has the highest incarceration rate of its citizens of any country in the world. Now I got to experience that high incarceration rate. We are f—-d up as a country if this is what we got. It was dehumanizing. All the inmates appeared better candidates as friends than any of the guards.

I’ll write about it in detail in future blog posts. Right now I got out of jail just in time to help Annie and Lenie with deadline for the new issue. Looks excellent. Annie is getting very close to doing this magazine alone. She is so good with honchoing it that she reminds me of me when I was her age. Except it still took me another 20 years to launch the magazine. The difference is she got a head start. I’m so grateful I can leave BHM in the hands of someone competent and loyal to the cause of freedom.

This is my first night home. My back is beat up from the concrete floors, the steel cots with their 2-inch mattresses, and the boredom of being locked away for 48 hours without sunlight or anything to do. Most of the guys just slept. I wrote, in tiny script, on the two pieces of paper they issued me.

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Here’s a video of Paul King singing at our local 1950s Malt Shop, called Sheriff John’s Happy Days Malt Shop. He’s a pretty good talent to be appearing in a small town like Gold Beach. My little camera does not do his great voice justice, but I thought you might enjoy it.

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We went out of Gold Beach today where the big fish are! Had to make our way out through a sea of tourists in river guide boats going after salmon in the lower Rogue.

Robby caught a big black right away.

We fished the Gold Beach Reef, a pregnant area because it is not fished often, being frequently hazardous to get to it when crossing the Gold Beach Bar, a small patch of water (200 yards long) that can yield freaky waves and currents that claims about two unsuspecting fishermen a year. (Shhh! It’s one of GB’s best kept secrets that we have a bar that kills two people a year.)

We were careful, and the Bar was calm.  Lenie insisted we call her before we crossed the Bar, after we got across, when we caught a big fish, then when we were about to recross the Bar coming back, and after we had successfully crossed it. We spent a lot of time on the phone.

I’ll go out here more often. Lots of current and it’s too deep to anchor, but it was fun! Robby is a totally independent fisherman. He understands his gear, the art of experimentation, and he never asks me what he should do next because he’s already figured it out. I have three very smart sons, but Robby is brilliant and it comes out especially when he is fishing. He understands the primordial battle of man versus fish.

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Quosatana Creek Campground 15 miles up the Rogue River is a relaxing and serene place to camp. No internet or cell phone service, which is just fine. For five days, we swam, fished, bicycled, and relaxed by the fire.

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Being a publisher, I have to keep up with new technology to determine if it may serve the magazine well. So the other week I bought myself a Droid X and a new laptop computer. The Droid and similar devices such as the iPhone are probably the future for magazines and newspapers. The laptop contains Windows 7 as the operating system, so I needed to see what BHM will be converting to once Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP, which we use at the office.

I’m not a computer geek so I must assimilate new technology bit by bit, with geeks holding my hand every step of the way. The Droid was no problem, as I bought Annie and my three sons Droids so they could quickly learn it and teach me. The laptop I had to learn on my own, and it took me only a few days before I decided I did not want to learn Windows 7 with all its unnecessary changes. So I gave the laptop to John Silveira, since he had an older-than-dirt one, so he could learn Windows 7 and teach us in a year or so when I convert the company to it.

I’m typing this blog post on my two-year-old Toshiba running the Windows XP I’ve grown so very comfortable with. At my side is the Droid X playing oldies on the Pandora radio station that is one of the many free downloads for it. It plugs into my old Bose radio so plays concert-quality sound. I really like this Droid X, and my sons are there to solve any problems I have learning its nuances.

I’ve already downloaded the free Google Sky Map so I can observe the planets and stars above my head or below my feet. It’s also got a calendar, note pad, camera, video recorder, and a bunch of other useful things. It also serves as a “hot spot” for internet access for my laptop with a two-gigabyte limit which is plenty for my needs. Internet use is unlimited if I’m using just the Droid to browse, send email, text, talk, etc. The quality is superb. The BHM website shows up well, as does everything else. Quite a remarkable tool, and I’m certain it will give me new ideas to make BHM more accessible to more people.

Now I’ll use the Droid X as a “hotspot” to upload this post to my blog. Technology is marvelous, as long as I learn it a little at a time.

By the way, here’s the tooth I got yanked a few hours ago. I took it with the Droid:

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I’m going to get a tooth pulled (extracted) tomorrow morning. I’ve been taking antibiotics for an infection that set in to its root for nine days. It’s one of those old-guy things — the tooth simply wore out, got filled a long time ago, and is now dead.

It’s not like getting heart bypass surgery, but I’m a weenie. I hate pain! It’s the needle I’m afraid of.

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A couple of days ago my family went up Pistol River to swim at Deep Creek, a local spot where the river bunches up so you can swim without freezing to death or drowning. I like a certain small sandy beach at Deep Creek, but you have to wade across the river to get to it. Unfortunately I forgot to take my BlackBerry cell phone out of my dungaree cutoffs, and I was in the middle of the river when I remembered it. When I got to the other side, the BlackBerry was flickering like it was gasping for air. I shut it off immediately and hoped it would dry out by itself.

But it didn’t. By the time we returned home a few hours later, the glass display had fogged up. Youngest son Sam came to the rescue and told me, “Put it in rice overnight, Dad. The rice will draw out the water.” I did, and by morning it worked! Thank you, thank you, thank you 15-year-old son Sam. I had a lot of data besides phone numbers on that BlackBerry.

I’ve since backed up my BlackBerry data to a hard disk storage device, then did the same for my laptop, which it turns out hadn’t been backed up for about a year. You need a data scary moment like this now and then to make you remember how much grief it can cause you to lose a lot of computer data.

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Tomorrow night, Thursday, July 8, could decide the future of the Crook Point Golf Course proposed to be located in Pistol River about 10 miles south of my town of Gold Beach as the Curry County Planning Commission holds a meeting and will listen to public comments. The meeting is at 7 pm at the Curry County Fairgrounds in Gold Beach.

At stake are several hundred new jobs for this hard-pressed area and more than $8 million a year being injected into the local economy. All local businesses and their employees stand to benefit from the new economic activity. I plan to attend and lend my support. I expect there will be some opposition, mainly from hard-core fringe environmental groups who don’t want to see anything built anywhere.

The proposed golf course will be an especially important revenue producer for our local school districts, fire, and police departments, generating $400,000 in new taxes each year, which is 40 times what the property proposed for the golf course now generates.

If you are from this area, you should attend this meeting and voice your support. Too many valuable proposed projects in the past have been killed at this type of meeting because the naysayers outnumbered the supporters.

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