I owe you an explanation for my silence lately. It’s not because of the cancer. I remain mainly healthy. The fatigue can be pretty heavy, but if I wanted to, I could still crank out this blog. The problem is, I don’t want to.
Turning 80 in June was a big deal. Turning 80 and having an incurable, fatal disease like cancer is something else. I never thought I’d reach 80. Now, here I am, staring into the abyss. Do I have much time left? Who knows? What would I like to do with whatever time remains? That is the question.
When I began the Coalition for a Better Oakland, six years ago, all I wanted was to have a voice. There was something dreadfully wrong in the city: the anti-police hatred, fanned by the City Council and Oakland’s horrendous anti-cop mentality, demanded that someone speak out against it. Who was I to do it? Just another cranky old guy, a keyboard warrior convinced I had to do something to turn things around. I had nothing going for me, except a certain facility with words, and this magical blog. So I started writing.
Blogging has been a big part of my life for close to 20 years. I began steveheimoff.com as a wine blog, in 2008. I was at the height of my career success as a wine critic and writer. Blogging itself was a rather new thing that anyone could do, and I decided to see what I could come up with. It turned out to be a singular success, at least in the relatively small field of wine writing. There was, it turned out, an appetite among the public for this kind of writing, and I was good at it. My little blog—riding the coattails of my fame in the industry—soared to the top. I was able, for the first time in my professional life, to write exactly as I wanted, without the permission of a publisher. For a writer, to have unlimited control over what you write, and the ability to publish it, is a rare blessing. I took to it like a fish to water.
Eight years later, I retired from wine writing, so it no longer made sense to continue a wine blog. I made the difficult decision to change the blog’s direction. I’d go from wine writing to politics, and specifically, toward skewering Donald Trump. This was around the time he rode that stupid escalator down to the Trump Tower lobby and announced his candidacy for President. I knew all about Trump; most New Yorkers understood that he was a con man, a serial liar, narcissistic, greedy and mean. But I had a conscience and he did not. He was and is a sociopath, and I decided to use all my powers against him.
So that was in 2016. It was fun. I published 5 days a week and was never short of content. Meanwhile, the situation in Oakland was deteriorating. By 2019 homeless encampments had spread throughout the city. The streets were dangerous and filthy. Crime was exploding. Our politicians—Libby Schaaf, Sheng Thao, Carroll Fife—were certifiably nuts, hell-bent on making Oakland the racial-grievance capital of California, and determined to jack up their defund-the-police ideology. I started the Coalition with one or two other like-minded colleagues, notably the late Rich DiLeo, whom I ardently miss to this day. Rest in peace, Rich.
Eventually, of course, the blog evolved again, into the Oakland-centric medium it is today. I wrote some months ago that it was increasingly hard for me to turn out a blog every day because there just weren’t enough news events to fuel that undertaking. Also, other online publications were doing a far better job than I ever could in following news and events. There was no way for me to compete with them, which was okay: my blog was not a breaking-news place, it was a place to express my views. Although its readership never was huge, it was loyal, and influential: this blog is read in high places. I was one of the few Oakland writers who consistently defended the police and railed against encampments. Readers appreciated that, and they also liked the more personal tone of this blog.
In close to four decades of being a published journalist, I’ve formed a deep, abiding relationship with my readers. That is something I take very seriously. Believe it or not, every single one of you who reads me is singularly important to me. When I consider that against the backdrop of my fatal disease, it becomes a super-motivating force: to keep that relationship going forward gave me purpose.
Which brings me to today. Something is pushing me into a new, possibly final chapter that does not include this blog. I don’t yet know what it is: that’s the exciting thing about change. I know that the future of Oakland is still vitally important to me, but I also recognize that trying to influence it may no longer be the best use of whatever time remains to me. I’ve done my best. It’s now for others to pick up the baton.
I will always love this city, even though so many aspects of it drive me to tears. I hate the obsession with race, which is such a perfidious infection—like cancer itself. I hate the corruption that infects City Hall, especially the role of the employee unions like SEIU, which run our town with mafia-style thuggishness. I loathe the race-baiters, the no-talent maggots who constantly keep racial tensions stirred up for their own personal profit. I want Oakland to be a normal city, not an outlier where decent people no longer feel welcome. At a hopeful moment in our history, when OPD seems finally about to escape the clutches of the evil Negotiated Settlement Agreement, when I read that certain elements in Oakland wish to extend the NSA indefinitely into the future, I want to round those racist creeps up and ship them off someplace where they can no longer hurt us. I want to crush every so-called “police watchdog” group in this town, from the Police Commission on down.
But it can’t be my job anymore to bang my head against the wall while the cancer clock is ticking. There are more peaceful ways of finishing out my life. Eating a perfect jamon empanada at Javi’s on Broadway. Enjoying an Americano at Mazar, on Lakeshore. Browsing the newspapers at the Lakeview branch of the Library. Shopping at KP Asian market on Telegraph. Hanging out with the waterbirds at the Lake Merritt Waterfowl Refuge. (“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.” — Walt Whitman). Walking down to Chinatown for ChiuChan at Ming’s Tasty, or shu mai at Tao Yuen, then some sweet baklava at Sana’a Cafe. Or just taking a guilty-pleasure afternoon nap in my own cozy bed—is there anything better?
The title of today’s column comes from two entertainers of my long-ago childhood, the cowboy duo Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
Happy trails to you,
Until we meet again.
Happy trails to you,
Keep smiling until then.
They represented a simpler time in America, a time I miss. A time of optimism and hope. A time before the Great Anger that now fills the land. When people wished each other good will. A time when Oakland actually worked because its voters had common sense. That chapter has now closed, but only temporarily. We’ll bounce back. I may not be here to witness it, but I know it’s coming. And if I played a small role in Oakland’s resurrection, well, that will have made the whole effort worthwhile.
Thank you to everyone who’s helped me all these years. You know who you are. Special props to Sgt. Barry Donelan and Sgt. Huy Nguyen, the former and current president of the Oakland Police Officers Association. Being an Oakland cop is the hardest job in the world. God bless those men and women. God bless you and yours. And God bless Oakland!
Until we meet again.
Steve Heimoff