THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Reader April 1, 2015)

Dr. Ken Anderson, the affable owner of Pacific Beach’s Anderson Medical Clinic, has his hands sagely folded, fingers interlaced, on his desk. He’s remembering the date, September 26, 2010. That day, the temperature over 100 degrees in Del Cerro, the humidity an untypical 78, he and his wife were playing another couple at the Lake Murray Tennis Club. The two pair were the only players at the club. In the middle of the third set, Anderson tells me, he went down: “I wasn’t breathing and I wasn’t moving.” His heart had stopped. Neither his wife nor their friends had any medical training, though his friend’s wife did notice an automated external defibrillator (AED) near the front desk. She ran for the device, put it beside Anderson’s motionless body, and unzipped the canvas top. The machine started speaking. It told them to apply the panels to his chest. Then, in robot voice, “Shock advised. Stand clear. Press the orange button. Shock delivered. Start CPR.” As a doctor, Anderson reminds me, he knows how perilous the moment was. “Had the AED not been there I would not have made it.” For cardiac arrest, which was his diagnosis, the heart needs to get back to its normal rhythm in five minutes—before the brain loses oxygen.

(San Diego Reader January 28, 2015)

Because I’m a writer, I have always thought that among humankind’s most lofty inventions is the printer—the machine, not the person. Be it text or image, how would we know anything about the community we call home without copies of weekly magazines that feature glossy ads for breast enlargement and trend-chasing cover stories? For centuries, print technology has copied text and image onto paper, stone, wood, plastic, or any surface that will receive it. Of course, the copy is flat, sitting on, not rising up from, the surface. But what if we wanted to print something in three dimensions?

(San Diego Reader November 19, 2014)

Beach Trash

Beginning our tour of San Diego’s most befouled spots (air, land, water, sea), we stop first for three summer holidays—Memorial Day, July Fourth, Labor Day—when local beaches turn from sun havens into trash dumps. When party-hardy masses overrun Mission Beach, west of Belmont Park, they leave behind swaths of crap. There, at dawn, Cathy Ives, in her sandals and sun visor, surveys the carnage. She’s a citizen trash-trawler, her and her little red wagon, holiday or not, scouring the beach for the non-biodegradable: Styrofoam and booze bottles (though both are banned); plastic water bottles; torn Mylar balloons; boogie boards that crumble into foam beads, becoming bird or fish “food”; fast-food wrappers for sandwiches; cardboard boxes for pizza; and those little packets of hot sauce. (Predacious gulls pick through the piles or hungrily eye human junk haulers.)

(San Diego Reader August 20, 2014)

For Gary Strawn, one prime indicator of the menacing intensity of the 2014 drought—and the health of San Diego county’s dozens of streams—is the presence of rainbow trout in the upper reaches of Boulder Creek.

On a mid-morning in June, I, Strawn, and Doug Taylor, the former a riparian volunteer and fly fisherman, the latter, ambassador with the San Diego River Park Foundation, are stepping gingerly through dead or dying underbrush on our way to one of two known trout pools. Strawn and Taylor have been here, in the last couple years, restoring a River Park-owned creekside parcel with native plants and fishes. We are five miles east of Cuyamaca Peak, the site of this stream’s headwaters at Cuyamaca Dam in the Cleveland National Forest.

(San Diego Reader February 5, 2014)

I want to believe that when we talk about drones —also known as unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned aerial systems —whose bodies vary from pterodactyl-big to mosquito-small (the Robobee, a robotic insect, weighs less than 1/300th of an ounce), and any one of which will soon be taking off, in ungovernable numbers, in our coming (2015) deregulated airspace, we are not talking about General Atomics’ “Predators and their Hellfire missiles bombing daycare centers in Afghanistan.”

But the drone has already earned its inalterable reputation. Much to the chagrin of the man who uttered the sardonic quote above: the resourceful, loquacious, fingers-in-many-pies Lucien Miller, CEO of Innov8tive Designs, in Vista. Miller is behind his desk in a small office, next to an adjoining warehouse, one of hundreds of manufacturing warrens in the Palomar Business Park. Dressed in a light blue knit shirt, faded jeans, and comfortable loafers, Miller is a-flurry with info and PR on unmanned aerial vehicles and their possibility. Which is why he’s adamant that the word “drone” is a great misnomer.

(San Diego Reader December 31, 2013) My 50th Reader Cover

I’m listening to attorney Eleanor Adams who’s been practicing immigration law locally for 25 years. By phone, she’s outlining, breathlessly, our labyrinthine federal system of percentage quotas, monthly resets, and Congressional reform proposals for the two big categories of immigrants—family-sponsored (relatives) and employment-based (workers). Immigrants are foreign-born people the majority of whom are here to work. As of 2009, they comprise 12.5 percent of the population—38 million. A little less than half of those are naturalized; the rest reside here legally or illegally.

I dare not interrupt Adams: such a seminar is like a first-semester course at Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

Seventeen minutes into her monologue, I’m muzzy-brained, listening to her legalese: status, exemptions, chargeability tumble together like Cirque Soleil. Finally I find a space to enter: maybe, I say, we can take a step back and define legal and illegal. It’s the first moment of silence between us, which may be just that or a simmer, on her part, for my barging in.

(San Diego Reader August 14, 2013)

Student Loan Basics

At TED talks, the most viewed video—now surpassing 14 million hits—is "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" by England's Sir Ken Robinson. Not long into the 18-minute lecture, Robinson answers his query: yes, schools do kill creativity. "I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it." And, says the consultant, who helps European and American educators reform their entrenched systems (in 2003 he was knighted for "his service to the arts"), such a tendency "is profoundly mistaken" these days with "the whole world engulfed in a [digital] revolution." His advocacy has sparked debate over the purpose and applicability of education, ever the same bored kids and boring teachers.

You would think America's schools would cave under all the criticism they receive. What's distressful is that the critique is withering from both ends. Take job and career prep. Robinson tells his audience, "You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid—things you liked—on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: 'Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician.'" At least, not a money-making one. The reality is, however, there's hardly any way into the arts that doesn't involve waiting tables. What's more, not everyone is artistic. Kids need training, especially the talent-less. Where else will they get it but in school?