Benicia, California — Final Lush Years pg150

Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic

You Are Here 2015

So here I was a seagull squawk away from where Jack London got boozy and wrote ‘Tales of the Fish Patrol’ a century earlier. I initially tried an entrepreneurial venture involving potpourri. A good-looking friend had the skills and charm to get people to buy stuff. He also had a connection for dried plant products with an importer. I had a commercial space and graphic design skills.

We quickly hatched a plan where I would create a pretty package, we would both stuff the cello bags and he would sell ’em. This is before I learned that any product idea takes a year of concentrated effort and $10,000 — just to get it ready for the marketplace and investors. We surprisingly got off to a pretty good start when he landed an account at Nordstrom, but it was his other connection with an importer of South American plant products that became problematic. Turns out my biz partner was crackhead, so our scheme went up in white smoke in a quick six months. — From Chapter 8

This quote is about the first failed biz I tried after moving to Benicia. I don’t want to talk about it, so let’s look at the image instead.

The painting pictured above isn’t an abstract. It’s a fairly exact topographic map looking down on…