We were sitting on amplifier cases in Winterland after a sound check, when everyone else had gone out for dinner before the show.  The Sons of Champlin, the band I was the roadie for, were opening for the Dead.  There were only three people in the building, me, Jerry, and the Sons drummer, who also played in one of Jerry's spinoff bands.  What are ya gonna do, sit in opposite corners and smoke by yourselves?

No, you all sit together, and the guy with the best weed shows it off.

I worked on lots of Dead shows in the '60s and early '70s, because the Sons and Dead often appeared together.  This Rick Griffin poster for a Dead/Sons show became the cover of a Dead Album, Aoxomoxoa, and is one of the most collectible rock posters.

Jerry has a walk-on part in my book, the chapter is excerpted here.

I'm Not Gonna Miss You

I'm still here, but yet I'm gone
I don't play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you 'til the end

"Kamala Harris doesn't have a Bernie Sanders problem. The so-called 'Sanders Left' has a black-woman problem. In fact, the entire left has a black-woman problem. On May 25, a group of black women wrote an open letter to DNC Chairman Tom Perez requesting that he meet with black women politicians and policy makers. The letter noted that the 115th Congress has '20 Black women -- the largest number in history' and reminded Perez that in 2008 and 2012, black women were the party's most loyal voting bloc. The DNC refused to even give black women an official response to the letter. I say this, because I want to be clear that the DNC is no friend to black women. However, if 2016 is any indicator, the vast majority of black women rejected the Sanders solution as a model for the kind of left politics that meets their needs.

"Sanders's voters think that black women who care about establishment politics lack vision. They don't get the psychology of black women's party loyalty. Black feminist theorists beginning with Professor Stanlie James have long talked about what they call the 'visionary pragmatism' of black women. They point to the fact that black women typically believe in a brighter future but that they also believe in keeping the lights on and in maintaining a solid foundation upon which to build the future they want to see. You can have a left political vision and a pragmatic approach in the voting booth. Unfortunately demagogues on the left insist that this is a lack of vision.

"The DNC is engaging in the kind of moral dishonesty that is rooted in a devaluing of black women's clear and consistent contributions to the stability and health of the party, but then so is this alleged 'Sanders Left.' If everybody's lying, then it becomes a case of the devil you know (the DNC) versus the devil you don't (far-left Sanders adherents). And though I'm loathe to relitigate 2016, postmortems can be useful, particularly in untangling the political dishonesty of this moment.

"The biggest lie that members of the so-called 'Sanders Left' told during the 2016 elections is that there was no appreciable difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. After six months of having Donald J. Trump lead the country, it's quite clear that the left should have listened to 94 percent of black women voters. We know a disaster when we see one."

[...]

"Ryan Cooper tries and fails to preempt arguments about his response to Kamala Harris, saying that critics might argue that, 'The left just doesn't like minority or female candidates because they are racist and sexist.' He characterizes these arguments as trying to 'win dirty.' White men on both the right and the left always like to remind us, when they are disagreeing with black candidates, that everything is not about racism. They can disagree with people's policy positions on the merits. That is, of course, true.

"But a dirty win is actually one predicated on blaming black women and black politicians more generally for failing to save America from itself once again, and then claiming that race and gender have nothing to do with the targets of your ire. Sanders Democrats are mad that black women didn't think a critique of capitalism absolved the radical left of needing to deal forthrightly with racism and sexism."

(Emphasis is mine.)

Here's the thing: Trump keeps pushing the voter fraud thing because he's desperate to somehow prove that he won the popular vote.  I am less inclined to believe that Trump's ultimate goal is postponing the next presidential election than I am to believe the only thing he cares about is proving that he won the popular vote - or at least successfully brainwashing people into believing he did.

If there's one thing we should know about Trump, it's that everything he says and everything he does is based on what is best for him - it's ALL about Trump, always.  His vision is so narrow that he doesn't see how damaging it is to the system for him to continue to push this highly false alternative fact.  But even if he did see it, he wouldn't care unless it could harm him somehow, otherwise, he would just leverage it to his own benefit.

The real problem is the millions of voters who believe him, who believe Trump when he says the Russia investigation is just an effort to cheat those who voted for him out of getting what they voted for.

If he told them he had built his precious wall, they would believe him.  I truly believe he could tell them anything and they'd believe it.

In response to Putin's reaction to the new American sanctions that cut/kick out of Russia 750  US diplomatic staff, our strong leader, President/InnKeeper Trump,  said:

"I want to thank him (Putin) because we're trying to cut down our payroll and as far as I'm concerned, I am very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll.  There's no real reason for them to go back.  I greatly appreciate the fact that we've been able to cut payroll in the US.  We're going to save a lot of money."

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.

This isn't a case of being politically incorrect, it's a case of perpetuating gender stereotypes, of not allowing for the possibility that women only seem to fit those gender stereotypes because certain fields/disciplines and workplace cultures have been resistant to fostering an environment that accepts that women are every bit as capable and talented as men.  

I'm willing to believe that like a lot of companies, Google's commitment to workplace diversity may be more superficial than they want people to believe; by speaking his mind, Damore may have committed the unforgivable sin of exposing the superficiality.  I mean, just because a company has more women, more people of color, more LGBTQ employees, doesn't mean there is company-wide acceptance of employees who represent diversity.

Also, it's important to keep in mind that any company looking to do work for the government - or even some private-sector companies- often has to demonstrate its diversity when bidding on work.

I don't pretend to know why he did it, I just hope he has a Plan B when it turns out the courts aren't going to cooperate in his efforts to have his antediluvian opinions justified.  

Yesterday, after reading the news, my daughter asked me a question. "Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?"

That question, whether it's been asked outright, whispered quietly, or simply lingered in the back of someone's mind, has weighed heavily on me throughout my career in technology. Though I've been lucky to work at a company where I've received a lot of support--from leaders like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg to mentors like Bill Campbell--my experience in the tech industry has shown me just how pervasive that question is.

Time and again, I've faced the slights that come with that question. I've had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I've been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I've had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt.

So when I saw the memo that circulated last week, I once again felt that pain, and empathized with the pain it must have caused others. I thought about the women at Google who are now facing a very public discussion about their abilities, sparked by one of their own co-workers. I thought about the women throughout the tech field who are already dealing with the implicit biases that haunt our industry (which I've written about before), now confronting them explicitly. I thought about how the gender gap persists in tech despite declining in other STEM fields, how hard we've been working as an industry to reverse that trend, and how this was yet another discouraging signal to young women who aspire to study computer science. And as my child asked me the question I'd long sought to overcome in my own life, I thought about how tragic it was that this unfounded bias was now being exposed to a new generation.

Some of those responding to the memo are trying to defend its authorship as an issue of free speech. As a company that has long supported free expression, Google obviously stands by the right that employees have to voice, publish or tweet their opinions. But while people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender. Every day, companies take action against employees who make unlawful statements about co-workers, or create hostile work environments.

For instance, what if we replaced the word "women" in the memo with another group? What if the memo said that biological differences amongst Black, Hispanic, or LGBTQ employees explained their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles? Would some people still be discussing the merit of the memo's arguments or would there be a universal call for swift action against its author? I don't ask this to compare one group to another, but rather to point out that the language of discrimination can take many different forms and none are acceptable or productive.

I thought about all of this, looked at my daughter and answered simply.

"No, it's not true."

I don't know if Damore's complaint will go anywhere but I do know he put his employment in jeopardy by saying something politically incorrect.  Perhaps he wanted the attention so he could change careers and write a book or something?

I'll let someone else find the actual statistics, but, if we want anecdotes, my mother was an engineer with Bell Labs. She was born in 1933.

I tend to agree with this Damore quote...

Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

Like I said, Peloton shows the chest monitor readings as I'm riding and saves them for every bike ride, including in graph form, so I can compare them and show my doctor next time I see her. I don't have any other apps for the chest monitor, to see what it reads when I'm not on the Peloton, but I haven't looked for one. I have noticed the heart readings are down somewhat from when I began.

I also found a second class with Rolling Stones music. I also really like seeing the funny monikers people use, it reminds me of when blogging first started 15 years ago and the choice of names was a big deal.

So many injuries this year, and more than a few new names, I'm like you: no idea what this is going to look like.

If they can just get out of the preseason without more season-ending injuries, that will be something.