Satan's armpit 

Hot enough for you? In the Laguna Lake area, not only has it been hotter than a stolen tamale, but 2,300 Pacific Gas & Electric customers had to contend with power outages on Sept. 4, 5, and 6 in the afternoon at the heat's peak. There's a terrible stillness when fans stop turning and your wee dog looks at you with widening, teary eyes and begins panting uncontrollably.

click to enlarge

PG&E, the monopoly everyone loves to hate, thoughtfully sends out text messages to affected customers: "PG&E Outage Alert: Address starting 1234 may be experiencing an unplanned outage affecting 2,312 customers."

Well no shit, Sherlock. My sweat is sweating. Then 20 minutes later they send a text about a crew on the way, then on-site, and a while later you get a text saying power has been restored just in case you haven't noticed your fans are turning. Then repeat.

PG&E engineers have been flummoxed. A safety system automatically shuts off power if a tree limb or other object touches a powerline. Knowing PG&E's sparkling history of keeping powerlines free of potential hazards (Yes, that's sarcasm), is it any wonder why the power goes off?

Of course, it could be worse than sweating in a hot house. For instance, have you asked yourself how your unhoused neighbors are doing? Where are they supposed to go? How "safe" is the Oklahoma Avenue Safe Parking Village when RVs don't have water or power hookups and can't run generators if they can't afford gas?

Homeless advocate Becky Jorgeson has been pleading with officials to do something: "While we are very grateful for a place for homeless people living in their vehicles to legally be, I write because we're very concerned about the people living out there," she wrote to SLO County's Public Health Director Penny Borenstein, Sheriff Ian Parkinson, County Counsel Rita Neal, and Board of Supervisors among others. "There are health and safety concerns along with code violations that have not been addressed in a year. A refrigeration unit was finally delivered a few weeks ago but is still not powered up. No way to keep food cold. So food sits and rots in the sun. After a year."

Handing out "cooling towels" and bottled water is better than nothing, and offering rides to cooling stations like the 40 Prado Homeless Center sounds good, but homeless people are often afraid to leave their possessions behind, and some have been suspended from Prado for bad behavior, according to CAPSLO Director of Homeless Services Jack Lahey.

Thanks to global climate change, these problems aren't going away. They require permanent solutions, not moist towels.

On another note, anybody know how the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights' investigation into the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District's charges of discrimination against Latinx and Spanish-speaking members of the community is going? (Phew! Somebody call an English teacher! That's a lot of possessive apostrophes!)

I only ask because Geoffrey Land, a Paso Robles High School social studies teacher and advocate for LGBTQ and minority students, was recently awarded District Teacher of the Year and then SLO County Teacher of the Year, and now he's up for State Teacher of the Year. Land's the dude behind events such as A Night for DACA Dreamers, the Coming Out Against Hate Forum, and the first Paso Robles High School Baile (That's "Dance" in Español, amigos)—events designed to give a voice to the marginalized.

If I was a member of the Paso school board, I'd be doing everything I could to deflect the notion that the district doesn't treat LGBTQ and Latino people the same as cisgender Caucasian people. Maybe having a guy who advocates for those folks as Teacher of the Year offers someone to point to and say, "See? We're not homophobic racists. We voted this liberal muckraker Teacher of the Year! Get off our backs, Office of Civil Rights! (Also, yes, he's a white man so it's not that radical.)"

"I don't think that the school board right now, as it currently exists, is sensitive to issues of bullying against LGBTQ students or racism that exists on campus or the many forms of bullying and bigotry that take place directed at students of color and English language learners and undocumented students," Land told New Times. "I think the school board right now is much more interested in fighting imaginary culture wars than in actually strengthening the educational programs and resources at the high school and throughout the district. The school board right now needs to listen to students and take the time to educate themselves about the very real legal obligations they have toward all of their students."

Snap! But it's true. When you focus all your attention on keeping the nonissue boogeyman critical race theory from being taught, it's hard for the board to focus on stuff like a stolen Pride flag being shit on and flushed down a toilet by vandals who posted the act on TikTok, or more importantly, coming up with a better response than simply banning all flags bigger than 2-feet-squared. Don't want to clog that plumbing with a big flag, amirite? Let's not even bring up the Paso High "Fuck Biden" flag incident. Or Paso's ill treatment of Spanish-speaking parents at meetings. Δ

The Shredder is hot around the collar. Commiserate at [email protected].