Last week, I was walking through a neighborhood of modest houses built in the 1950s by Hignell & Strange. They probably cost about $12,000 to $13,000 when they were new.

I walked by a house with a "for sale" sign in front of it. Next to it was a drop box with fliers in it giving particulars about the house (1,200 square feet, three bedrooms, a 7,500-square-foot lot) and how it could be financed.

I have a middle-class household income. I figure my wife and I could somehow scrape together $25,000 for a downpayment and then pay $1,200 a month for loan principal, interest, property taxes and mortgage insurance. We have never paid that much for housing, but I think we could manage.

But to buy the completely unassuming house I've come across, we’d have to pay $1,350 a month after plunking down $47,800 for a downpayment. Or we could put down my scraped-together $25,000, add $3,000 to that and then pay $1,632 a month.

Two years into a down market, and we’re still not even close to being able to get into a house. I’m sure there are better deals in Chico, but I have my standards. Like I said, I like to think of myself as middle-class, so I don’t want to live in a shack. But paying $1,600 a month to live in a house is for affluent people, not those of us of ordinary means.

If the economic news remains gloomy, the housing slump is likely to get worse. But if things get too bad, jobs will start to disappear. Affordable houses coupled with unemployment is a far worse situation than a tolerable job market with unaffordable houses.

But either way, if you are a house-hunter, you can’t win.

As the word implies, limbo can last a long time. Buildings can be emptied, boarded up and left unused for years, hovering between life and death.

Hotel Diamond in downtown Chico was in limbo when I came here 10 years ago, but developer Wayne Cook finally brought it back to life for another turn as a hotel, restaurant and bar.

Another notable downtown building that has been in limbo for a long time is the Old City Hall on Main Street. It has been around since 1911, but hasn't been used since the mid-1990s, when the city moved its offices to new adjacent buildings. It's now being brought back to life. The city again needs the space for offices.

In the South Campus neighborhood, wedged between an imposing Italianate Victorian and a handsome prairie-style building, is a modest bungalow that has been boarded up for more than a decade. Chico State University owns all three of the buildings, but hasn't found a use for the middle one for a long time. It was once the home of Anna Barney, dean of men and women at Chico State.

A block to the south of these buildings, the site of the now-defunct Chi Tau fraternity has been boarded up for about three years. This is where Matthew Carrington died of water intoxication while pledging the fraternity. A century ago, this colonial revival was one of the neighborhood's grand corner houses. Today, it sits empty, surrounded by a chain link fence, waiting for a buyer.

For most of a year, the craftsman bungalow on the southeast corner of Woodland Avenue and Cypress Street was in limbo. Its doors and windows were boarded up and the grass in the front yard grew tall. But in the last three months, the house, which once marked the eastern edge of Chico, has come back to life. The house was built in 1912 for William Guynn. As the owner of the Park Garage, Guynn was one of Chico's first auto dealers.

Right now the house on Third Street between Orient and Olive streets and an adjacent guest house over a garage are shuttered, but won't stay that way. A new owner plans to subdivide the large lot into four lots, two of which will be next to Annie's Glen. The existing structures will be retained.

So far, I haven't been able to find out much about this house's history. I'd appreciate it if anyone with information about it would let me know.

The house on the southwest corner of 14th and Mulberry streets went into limbo within the last year. In the time I've been in Chico, many of the houses along Mulberry have been renovated, which makes this one look especially forlorn.

I envy people whose great-great grandparents settled in Chico. What an easy way to trace ancestors.

Alas, my family is peripatetic. In other words, we are wanderers. When my grandparents came to Chico 80 years ago, they barely stayed long enough for my dad to be born. Then they moved on, in search of greener pastures.

Some families are settler types. Others, like mine, are itinerant. That’s OK with me. It doesn’t trouble me if my ancestors, having arrived in California, felt like pulling up stakes and moving every few years. All I wanted was for them to have come here when California was young.

When I was growing up, my grandfather told me stories that suggested we were from an old San Francisco family. But he was deliberately vague. He was always trying to distance himself from what he felt was a chaotic and strife-torn upbringing. He wasn’t that comfortable with his family’s profession, either. They were stage actors. He was a furniture salesman.

I felt just the opposite. With so many solid citizens in our family — farmers, businessmen, teachers — I wanted to know about some potentially wild and crazy ancestors. But my grandfather remained tight-lipped about them as long as he lived.

It was my grandmother who told me a story that was way over the top, even for my grandfather’s family. It was about his grandparents. As newlyweds, with a baby on the way, they went on a world tour with a theater group. Shortly after their baby girl was born in Natal, a country in South Africa, my great-great grandfather allegedly found his wife in the arms — so to speak — of another man and shot her to death. According to my grandmother’s story, it was considered justifiable homicide in that country.

My great-great grandfather and his little girl eventually returned to San Francisco. He continued his stage career and she followed in his footsteps. My great-grandmother died when I was 14, but I saw her only a few times when I was a kid. I never had a conversation with her. My grandfather probably would have squelched my attempts to get to know her better.

What a sensational story. Did my great-great grandfather really kill his wife and get away with it? It sounded like something out of a melodrama rather than a real-life event. How could I find out the truth?

I at least knew these ancestors’ names. My aunt still has a program announcing their performance in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” in 1881 in Singapore. My great-great grandparents are identified as John Fulton and “Miss Sallie De Angelis.” Also listed is Sallie’s brother, Jeff De Angelis.

About a month ago, while doing my usual thumbing through the California history shelves at the Chico library, I ran across a book about the San Francisco stage in the 19th century. I flipped to the index, not really thinking I might find my ancestors there.

If I were the sort of person who says “Lo and behold,” this would be the place I’d insert it. Suffice it to say, I found some references to Jeff De Angelis. He was born in San Francisco in 1859. Lotta Crabtree tried to coax him into making his stage debut at the age 4. He started performing when he was 10. He became a singer, actor, acrobat and juggler. He performed in minstrel shows. In his prime, he appeared on the stage with Lillian Russell. He even had a few movie roles at the end of his life.

My great-great grand uncle was nothing less than one of the pop stars of his day.

Better yet, he wrote about his life. My research turned up a ghost-written autobiography called “A Vagabound Trouper.” Thanks to the marvels of the Internet and my wife’s skills in navigating it, we found a copy, ordered it and had it sent to our house. It took just a few days to arrive.

I’ve already finished the book. I got my wish about my ancestors. Jeff’s father, Johnny, came to San Francisco as a youth in 1848, just after the Gold Rush. He and his uncle came from Philadelphia, sailing around Cape Horn. After he arrived in California, Johnny tried his hand at prospecting, worked in the mining camps and rode the Pony Express. But then he fell into acting and never looked back. The same was true of my family — until my grandfather came along.

In reading the book, I found out what really happened to my great-great grandmother. She did die of a gunshot wound in South Africa, but it was an accident. A pistol fell off a bureau she was dusting in a hotel room. When it hit the floor, it discharged and the bullet entered her body, mortally wounding her. She died 12 hours later.

A juicy family story I’ve heard all my life has been put to rest. But that’s all right. I’ve now made the acquaintance of Uncle Jeff and learned about his life as a globe-trotting adventurer.

Thanks again to the marvels of the Internet and my wife’s navigational skills, we located Uncle Jeff’s 99-year-old step granddaughter. I called her on the phone about a week ago, and we chatted for an hour. She still has vivid memories of “Joup,” which is what she called him because she couldn’t say “Jeff.”

How many other little girls had grandfathers who rolled down the stairs in their house in order to stay in shape for their stage acrobatics?

In just a few short weeks, Uncle Jeff and his family have become my longed-for wild and crazy early California ancestors.

The illustration at the top of this blog shows Jefferson De Angelis on the cover of sheet music. The photo is of him in the stage production “The Wedding Day” with Della Fox and Lillian Russell.

Only a society that has successfully insulated itself from the natural world for several generations would think of it as a benign force.

We talk about living in harmony with it. Some of us like to think of it as a nurturing mother. We castigate ourselves for being mean to it. We worry that we may be destroying it.

We can’t. Nature’s in charge, and if we aren’t careful, it will crush us.

For most of us, it’s been a century or two since our ancestors were farmers. It’s been a few hundred to a few thousand years since they were hunter-gatherers. Our comfortable, citified lives have allowed us to cultivate a romantic view toward nature.

The Bidwells were pioneers of this movement. John started out his life as a ruthless, rugged guy. As a youth of 22, he and his immigrant party figured out a way to cross the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Bidwell went on to become rich by exploiting California’s gold. Then he tried to maintain his wealth by exploiting the state’s rich soil.

Once he was ensconced in his luxurious house at the foot of The Esplanade, Bidwell started to develop a soft spot for nature. He wasn’t quite so keen on just exploiting it.

Annie needed no lifestyle change to become fond of nature. Her privileged upbringing in Washington, D.C., followed by her marriage and move to Chico, where she enjoyed even more of the perks of being rich, allowed her to appreciate nature from a distance. Her friendship with John Muir helped hone her interest.

In the last century, as our lives have grown as comfortable as the Bidwells, we’ve adopted many of their values. We like nature for its own sake. Just as we are separate from it, we want large swaths of it to be separate from us, free to work its wonders.

It’s a touching thought, yet completely unnecessary. Almost nothing can stop nature.

It may take a decade or two more to get over our foolishness, but we’ll come to see that New Orleans should never have grown beyond its original French Quarter boundaries. People shouldn’t live in the Mississippi River lowlands.

In a hundred years, even more lowlands are likely to become uninhabitable. As the world’s store of ice melts, many of our coastal cities will be sitting in several feet of water.

Two hundred years from now, we’ll acknowledge that the early 21st century was the high-water mark of human domination of the Earth. With our once-stabilized population now in freefall and the wildlands closing in on us, we’ll once again appreciate nature’s unquestionable, overwhelming presence.

In about 10,000 years, when the next age ice returns, we Americans will have to move what remains of our civilization far to the south of its present location to get out of the way of glaciers advancing into the continent.

Then the real fun begins. Sooner or later, the Earth will be hit by a large asteroid, giving us humans the challenge of a million lifetimes to survive.

In about a billion years, the sun will start to exhaust its supply of hydrogen and start expanding. The Earth will get so hot that the oceans will boil and evaporate. We’d better have found another planet by then.

In several billion years, our galaxy will run into the Andromeda galaxy. The planets our species have chosen to colonize could be knocked out of their orbits. How do we survive that?

In about a trillion years, the universe, long after having run out of energy to give birth to stars, will flicker out.

Nature wins, and then snuffs out everything.

This is the force we want to revere? I don’t think so.

We’re too hard on ourselves about what we’ve done to this planet. As far as we know, we are the only thinking, caring creatures that nature has devised. When you think about it, it’s a miracle.

Right now we’re muscling out the other species on Earth, but we alone are able to make things better. Nature is mindless and has all the time in the world to wreak havoc. Why do we want to live in harmony with that?

If anything, we need to figure out a way to outwit nature to keep the universe from dying.

My latest find is “Larry’s Party,” a novel by Carol Shields, a Canadian writer. According to the cover of the paperback edition, the book was a national bestseller when it came out 11 years ago. Obviously, is not some obscure title, just one of thousands I overlooked.

My only excuse is that I wasn’t reading much fiction 11 years ago.

What I like about the book is that it is about mazes. The main character, Larry Weller, goes to England on his honeymoon and walks through the hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace. It changes his life.

It breaks up his marriage. His wife becomes so upset at his maze-obsession that she tries to bulldoze a maze he planted in his yard.

Larry, who’s a mild-mannered florist at the beginning of his book, decides to branch out and become a maze designer. He becomes world-famous.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Larry’s life is a maze he’s trying to figure out, but the book is mercifully light-handed in its use of metaphor.

The part of Larry’s experience of mazes that strikes a chord with me is that he enters them in order to get lost. He knows there’s a way out, but he’s not that anxious to figure it out. He’s more interested in becoming temporarily disoriented.

That’s how I approach mazes. I have a strong sense of direction, but I like to find ways to subvert that skill.
I want a little chaos in the midst of a physical world I can largely figure out.

When I was in my 20s, I traveled to London a couple of times. I was constantly getting lost there, even when I was holding a map in my hand. The entire city was a maze. That was more chaos than I needed.

I got lost once in Chico, where the main grid of the city intersects with Chapmantown. For about a half-minute, I completely lost my sense of direction. I immediately realized my mistake, but it was a thrill to have been momentarily hoodwinked. For the most part, Chico’s layout is too straightforward to leave me dumbfounded.

Unlike Larry Weller, I’m not obsessed with mazes. In fact, I was in my 40s before I realized they were one of my special interests. And when I did, I realized there wasn’t much I could do with this interest. There aren’t that many of them to explore.

I loved it when I’d take my son to get lost in a corn maze just before Halloween. He’s too old for that now, and I would feel sheepish about visiting one without a child in tow.

A labyrinth has been proposed to be built in Chico, but that’s not the same as a maze. When you walk a labyrinth, you can see the entire tortuous route. There are no walls or hedges to hide it. The idea of walking a labyrinth is to foster a meditative state. But I don’t need a labyrinth for that. My default state tends to be dreamy and contemplative.

I just want to get lost.

I wish there were a real-life Larry Weller. Then we could commission him to come to Chico and build us a hedge maze.

The Los Angeles City Council took land-use planning in a new direction by placing a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in an impoverished section of the city. The council apparently thinks poor people have no self-control. Put a fast-food restaurant in their neighborhood and they are destined to get fat. The rest of us , I suppose, become obese by choice — or perhaps it’s just assumed that how much we weigh is our own business. I guess that's one of the privileges of being middle-class.

This is an example of regulation at its most extreme. I bring it up because I think most people agree that the city council went too far, not just in attempting to regulate behavior, but in using a land-use tool to bring it about. I’m using this fairly obvious example of bad judgment as a jumping off point for this discussion.

I'm all for regulating behavior. I think murderers and rapists should be severely punished. I like how smokers in California have been banned from lighting up indoors in public places and people aren’t allowed to hold cell phones while driving. I'm in favor of fining companies that pollute the environment. I admire a society that seeks to protect and make life more pleasant for its members. But let’s not make a mockery of this concern.

I'm all for zoning, too. I don't want to have factories in residential neighborhoods, do you? Such a threat gave rise to a case called Euclid. vs. Ohio. Clear back in 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the village of Euclid had a right to keep humongous Cleveland's smoke-spewing industries from crossing into its territory.

The decision paved the way for cities to insist on segregated land uses. In fact, the practice is called Euclidean zoning. I never hear city planners call it by that name, but I'm sure they learned it in school.

New urbanism advocates think cities have gone too far in segregating land uses. They want people to be able to live, work and shop within a space that can be easily walked. But I doubt they would welcome a factory into even the most tightly woven urban fabric.

Houston has a reputation for having no zoning. Actually, the city has regulations that result in the same kind of segregated uses that are found everywhere else.

I also applaud zoning that creates and preserves historical districts.

Downtown Nevada City has strict building standards. This makes perfect sense. This Gold Rush town in the Sierra foothills has gorgeous, historically significant buildings. For decades, when the town was a backwater, preservation efforts were unnecessary. But in the 1970s, the town woke up from its slumber. It has now become an outer suburb of Sacramento. When a freeway project took a bite out of downtown, the city got serious about saving what was left.

What makes less sense is Nevada City’s recent efforts to ban chains and franchises from downtown. A story in the Sacramento Bee describes residents' strong opposition to a proposal for Beach Hut Deli to set up shop there. The owners, in getting their space ready, have reportedly followed all the required architectural and design guidelines. But many residents prefer that only "mom and pop" businesses locate there.

If the name Beach Hut Deli sounds familiar to you, it's because one of its 20 locations is in downtown Chico. Our city has a reputation for being picky about its downtown businesses, but if I recall correctly Beach Hut Deli came in without raising any ruckus. Chicoans seem to have accepted the notion that downtown will always be a mix of locally-owned businesses, and chains and franchises.

The biggest problem with Nevada City's fussiness is that in the end no amount of regulation may be able to keep chains and franchises away. Downtown commercial property has become extremely pricey. As rents go up, the mom and pops are bound to feel pressure to move elsewhere. In time, only chains and franchises may be able to afford to do business there.

What makes the two communities so different? Temperament, mainly, if places can be said to have a temperament. San Francisco is showy and brash. It has always wanted people to come and marvel at it. It has been aggressive about creating opportunities for them to do that.

In its short life, San Francisco has hosted two world's fairs, both of them self-contained cities that offered enticing glimpses of imagined futures.

San Francisco has world-class restaurants and hotels.

Two of its gateways are spectacular bridges that achieved the seemingly impossible feat of spanning deep and turbulent waters.

Modern Chinatown was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake primarily to attract tourists. Its plain brick buildings were replaced with structures with pagoda-shaped cornices so that visitors would think of the place has quaint and authentic. The rows of gimcrack gift stores along Grant Avenue followed soon after.

Visitors marvel at Golden Gate Park's wooded vistas, but the effect is an illusion. It was once a sandy wasteland, with not a tree in sight.

Only San Francisco could make a small fleet of crab fishing vessels the centerpiece of one of the nation's most popular eating, shopping and entertainment destinations.

Only San Francisco could cover the bay shoreline with fill, impose a rectangular grid of streets on its steep hills, pave over 95 percent of its land area, lose two-thirds of its Victorian houses and turn its financial district into a replica of Manhattan and call the result beautiful.

Chico's glory comes from its habit of not calling attention to itself. It's a community of everyday pleasures. At one time, it was just another small town among many. But most small towns have either shriveled up and died or been absorbed by nowheresville suburbs. Because Chico's smalltown charm is still intact, it has become a special place. But — shh! — don't tell anyone and don't let anyone turn Chico into a tourist attraction. Only big cities like San Francisco area capable of surviving such a stampede.

Happily, Chico has never been brash enough to make a play for crowd-pleasers. It has no monumental landmarks, high-profile cultural festivals, theme parks or dolled-up historical districts. It's not even next to a major freeway. Even its staid and modest Victorian houses stand in marked contrast to San Francisco's over-the-top painted ladies. It's all because of temperament.

I have faith that Chicoans will continue to be wary of the temptation to turn the city into a venue designed to amuse and titillate travelers. It needs to be a place that permanent residents find appealing.

For me, hearing such a nickname is an invitation to check it out. A city that is said to live in the past is my kind of place. But that’s not what Red Bluff’s really like. This is California and no city that’s bisected by an interstate highway is going to escape the ravages of progress.

Red Bluff’s expanding periphery is a visual non-entity. But its core is another matter. Back in the mid-20th century, Red Bluff residents somehow failed to heed the message that it was time to bulldoze its 19th and early 20th century downtown and residential blocks and replace them with ugly modern buildings — and be quick about it. They largely ignored this exhortation and left things alone.

Perhaps the biggest loss was a fire in the 1980s that destroyed the Cone-Kimball building on Main Street. It was topped by a tall tower and cupola. A replica of the top now stands in a small downtown park.

Red Bluff was a 19th century distribution center. Goods were sent by steamboat up the Sacramento River from San Francisco and Sacramento, where they were transfered to wagons bound for more remote regions, including the gold mines. Red Bluff was built at the northern boundary of the navigable stretch of the river. The coming of the railroads eventually brought an end to river commerce at this end of the Sacramento Valley.

Red Bluff’s historical core is much smaller than Chico’s. That’s a plus for visitors. You can see everything on foot in a three- by 10-block grid of streets in a couple of hours, have a leisurely lunch and then visit the Italianate-style Kelly-Griggs House, which is now a museum. It’s open for tours from 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

Over one of the fireplaces in the house is a gilt-edged mirror that was once in the Bidwell Mansion. A Red Bluff resident acquired it shortly after Annie Bidwell died and later donated it to the museum.

The city’s IOOF building also has Italianate touches and retains its original covered walkway.

Across the street from it is the classically-inspired Tehama County Courthouse. Even its restrooms are elegant. A much more modern addition is attached to the south side of the old courthouse.

Many of the houses on the streets north and south of downtown have plaques on them that give the year they were built. A lot of them date from the 1880s. Some of them have been converted to businesses. Just about all of them are well-maintained. There are representations of Italianate, stick and Queen Anne style architecture. These houses are to die for and lust after.

Set among these houses on the north side of downtown is the Herbert Kraft Free Library, now the home of a business. Built in 1910, it looks like the Carnegie libraries of that era, but it was built by a local resident.

Red Bluff also has several architecturally appealing churches, including Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Its steeples make it one of the city’s more prominent landmarks.

That’s me sitting on the front steps of the church in the photo at the top of this blog entry.

I think of blogs as essays that are trying to adapt to a new medium.

The new medium isn't moderated. There’s no middle man. There’s no editor or teacher to tell you that what you’ve written doesn’t cut it.

Blogging offers a tremendous opportunity for all of us to give their take on the world. But to be effective, we need to cultivate the art of good essay writing. And without teachers and editors, we must master the art on our own.

One of the pitfalls is dealing with our overactive egos. Legendary essayist E.B. White noted, at the end of a long career, that the writer of these works “is sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

“I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader.

“There is some justice in the complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egotistical.”

White may have been that way by nature, but his essays show considerable self-restraint. He writes about places, objects, other people and ideas. He is firmly in control of his ego. It’s one of the reasons he’s such a good read.

Aldous Huxley, who is probably best known as a novelist, was a also prolific essay writer. At the end of a career that was as long as White’s, he wrote that the most “richly satisfying” essay writers are able to move in the “three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist. Freely, effortlessly, thought and feeling move in these consummate works of art, hither and thither between the essay’s three poles — from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience.”

For Huxley, inner experience and abstract thinking matter, but facts and concrete description are also important. My commitment to writing about Chico tethers me to the concrete world, where facts aren’t open to interpretation and must be correct.

Phillip Lopate, a novelist, creative writing teacher, poet, film critic and essayist, has compiled an anthology called “The Art of the Personal Essay.” In the introduction, he writes that essayists have to wrestle with “what might be called the stench of ego. A person can write about himself from angles that are charmed, fond, delightfully nervy; alter the lens a little and he crosses into gloating, pettiness, defensiveness, score-settling or whining about his victimization.”

An essayist can also fall into the habit of being crude and offensive. In fact, writers will often deliberately take this tone in an effort to attract readers. I notice that even the best bloggers will throw in a strong cussword every now and then, hoping it will have a good effect. Contemporary literature is riddled with profanity. This may make you more popular, but as a writer you sacrifices your potential for subtlety and complexity.

Lopate makes a good case that essayists should be contrarians, motivated by the fear of staleness. “To assert that all men are brothers, that prejudice and racism are bad, and that nature should not be despoiled may win a writer points in heaven, but it is doubtful that these pronouncements will quicken the reader’s pulse. The novice essayist often errs by taking a strong moralistic stand and running it into the ground, with nowhere to go after two paragraphs.”

This is a big challenge for bloggers, who don’t have to contend with space limitations. They can run out of things to say in two paragraphs, but there is nothing to stop them from cranking out 100 more of them.

White had a tendency to drone on about the United Nations in essays he wrote in the 1940s.

Blogs about “sustainability” can make me cringe. The idea boils down to “conservation — good, wastefulness — bad.” If you also throw in the idea that we are all wasteful despite our best intentions — most of us would not do well as Luddites — you’ve pretty much said it all. You don’t need to turn it into an essay.

But I like Jeremy Miller’s “Chico, Sustainable,” one of the NorCal Blogs. His essays are full of specific recommendations, and he doesn’t do guilt trips.

Lopate describes several characteristics of good essay writers. I’m delighted by his observation that essayists “frequently represent themselves as loafers or retirees, inactive and tangential to the marketplaces. The shiftless marginality of the essayist’s persona is underscored by some of the most famous essay series: “The Idler, The Rambler, The Spectator, the Tatler.”

This is very much in keeping with my persona as a flaneur — a sentient ambler through urban space.

My observations as a flaneur aren’t exactly tangential to the marketplace, as I often recount visits to coffeehouses. I think of myself as a promoter of a selective slice of the marketplace. I don’t frequent major coffeehouse chains and I write negative things about them.

I steer away from blogs that exalt the marketplace. I would like the blogosphere to not be so immersed in consumer culture. But Lopate warns that self-righteousness is the enemy of the essayist, so I try not to be too opinionated about appropriate blog topics — you dupes of capitalism.

I’m a big fan essays, so I ought to be a big fan of blogs. But the idea of slogging through hundreds of them just to find the handful that quicken my pulse is daunting. I guess that’s why the library, rather than cyberspace, remains my happy hunting ground for essays.

One of my own rules about blogs is that they be short and to the point, so it's ironic that this blog critique is my longest post ever. But Lopate wants essayists to cultivate irony, so I guess I've done the right thing.

There have been times when I’ve wanted to quit my column and focus all of my efforts on this blog. There are no space limitations here, and I can post as often as I want. I can use photos and other illustrations. I’ve felt less constrained about staying on my topic — the life and times of Chico — and have adopted a more personal tone. There’s more “me” in the blog than there is in the column, though I’m hesitant about engaging in a lot of navel-gazing. I’m introspective, but I tend to confine that kind of writing to my private journals.

Cyberspace is touted as the future home of newspapers. In some ways, the future is now. In its online edition, the E-R can cover breaking news stories hour by hour — and minute by minute, if necessary — instead of day by day. I’m not usually one to blow my own horn, but I’ve been blown away by the timeliness of the E-R’s coverage of the recent tragic wildfires. This is exactly the right medium for this kind of reporting.

In other ways, the future may never arrive. Take the blogosphere. Its egalitarian intentions are laudible, but it its results leave much to be desired. It reminds me of the California Gold Rush. The multitudes have staked their claim, but only a few will strike it rich and become the cyberspace equivalent of John Bidwell. You need just the right blend of clear, engaging and accurate writing, expertise in your chosen topic, original thinking and a scrappy attitude to attract a large and loyal following. Reading most blogs makes my eyes glaze over.

And it’s not enough to be good once. You have to be good day after day, year after year.

Lon Glazner is the creator of the highly successful “Commission Impossible” blog, part of the NorCal Blogs group the E-R sponsors. In his last post, almost two months ago, he wrote that he thinks his time would be better spent with his 1-year-old daughter than doing his blog every day.

I think so, too. He has a great blog, but I was amazed he had the energy to update almost every day during his daughter’s first year of life. He needs to take it easy on the blogging front. After my son Todd was born, it was two or three years before I was able to do anything on a sustained basis besides look after him and go to work.

Todd was already grown up when I started this blog. It had been a long time since he had required a lot of my attention. And yet after a few months of posting three times a week, I lost the will to go on. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I manage once a week. So I thought quitting my column might give me more time to blog.

But I hesitate to go in that direction. I’m afraid I’d lose readers. I’m almost certain most of my “But This is Chico” fans are baby boomer and older — with the emphasis on older. This is the demographic that still reads newspapers. It may be hard for me to lure them into the blogosphere.

Who, exactly, would join in me cyberspace if I let go of my column? For that matter, who is with me in cyberspace right now? Whoever it is, there’s not that many of you. For those who are here: thank you, thank you, thank you. Tell your friends to read me.

Whenever I ask these questions, the future becomes a little scary. I’m not sure younger readers are ever going to acquire the requisite community consciousness — whether the focus is on Chico or the world — that supports traditional newspapers. Younger people are more self-focused and could easily stay that way the rest of their lives. If the 1970s was the “me” decade, then the people who are coming of age in the first decade of the 21st century belong to the “me, me, me” generation.

It doesn’t matter if the newspaper of the future continues to be printed or goes entirely online. To survive, it will have to change so that it reflects the navel-gazing outlook of younger readers.

But sometimes I want to browse. It’s a form of ambling that’s not quite shopping. I might buy something, though I have nothing in mind beforehand.

So where do I go? I’ve written before about Melody Records. It’s now the only place in downtown Chico that sells records, tapes and CDs. It’s a perfect place for vintage vinyl browsers. On my last visit, I bought a copy of a Weaver’s record we had when I was growing up. It’s in better shape than the one my parents’ owned. Now I can listen to one of my favorite songs, “Lonesome Traveler,” without having to hear Lee Hayes sing “I’ve been a travelin’ travelin’ travelin’ travelin’ travelin’ ...” My copy doesn’t skip.

Downtown Chico ought to be home to several used book stores. This is a college town, right? But all we have are The Bookstore and a section of Lyon Books. A prized recent find from The Bookstore is a copy of “Here Today: San Francisco Architectural Treasures.” I collect Chico, Bay Area and California books.

But I have to say my favorite browsing venues are antiques and collectibles stores. There are a good number of these downtown.

You can see a theme is emerging. I find old things consoling. I guess that’s why I write about old neighborhoods and old buildings.

Add old furniture and household items to that list. Typewriters are exempt. I don’t understand why people continue to use them. I’ll take a computer any day.

I’m charmed by the craftsmanship of everyday objects from the past: wooden boxes that hold postage stamps, mother of pearl fountain pen holders, porcelain soft-boiled egg coddlers. These objects were made at a time when artisans earned low wages. That was why anyone could afford them.

In a way, we value nice things more than we did in the past because we have accepted the idea that artisans should be well-paid. But because handmade things are so expensive, we turn to cheap mass-produced goods, which aren’t nice and don’t last.

In a world of disposable objects, transitory relationships and ever-changing life circumstances, collectibles and antiques are consoling. I’m happy to spend hours in the stores that sell them, surrounded by stuff that’s older than me.

A letter to the editor by Paul Ratzlaff of Orland appeared recently in the Enterprise-Record in response to a “But This is Chico” column I wrote about gay marriage.

In the letter, he notes that I cited Chico for being a model of tolerance. He claimed the word “tolerance” is often misused.

I think the problem is that the word has several meanings. Lots of words are like that. This leads to endless debates over semantics. My wife and I get into these kinds of discussions all the time. It drives me crazy.

Ratzlaff writes that “parents sometimes speak of ‘tolerating’ their teenagers’ music. The implication is that they dislike said music or else they would simply say they ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ it.”

That’s not what I meant. Disliking gay people, yet choosing to be “gracious or indulgent” toward them anyway, as Ratzlaff writes, doesn’t meet my definition of tolerance.

On the other hand, a “Come on people, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now” approach goes above and beyond my definition.

I’m more comfortable with a definition that implies indifference or neutrality: “He’s gay, she’s a lesbian; who cares?” I predict that by the end of the 21st century a person’s sexual orientation won’t be a big deal. The dragon of homophobia will have been slain.

I recently re-read “The Man,” a novel the late Irving Wallace wrote more than 40 years ago about a black man who becomes president after the sitting president, vice president and Speaker of the House die within a few weeks of each other.

The book deals forthrightly with the ugly racial prejudices of the time. One of the liberal white characters, a Jewish lawyer named Nat Abrahams, muses about the meaning of tolerance: “The word tolerance bore, in itself, a flick of prejudice — one was nice to certain people, treated them equally, accepted them, but being tolerant to them thus, one implied that they were different. To Abrahams, all men were together, and some were stupid and some were intelligent, some more boring and some more fascinating, some more bad than good, others more good than bad.”

That comes close to my definition. Tolerance means you see no differences that are based on people’s race, ethnic background, religion gender or sexual orientation.

As a journalist, I’ve been writing about gay rights for more than 30 years. Most of the people who have taken issue with me are Christians, who say their views about homosexuality are based on religious teachings, not homophobia.

I’m not a Christian, so it’s not for me to say whether anti-gay Christian teachings have their roots in homophobia. I’m always surprised Christians try to draw me into their arguments without knowing whether I share their beliefs.

I prefer to approach sexual orientation issues from a secular point of view, while recognizing that science and other “rational” disciplines can also promote intolerance.

For example, I don’t care if biologists figure out whether homosexuality is inborn or a “choice.” If it comes to be regarded as a genetic or prenatal glitch, it will just open the door for some people to say “poor things; they can’t help it.” Whatever causes homosexuality, it’s not pathological. One day, we’ll realize that we once made a big fuss over nothing.

My parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and all who came before me, stretching back to Adam (or Lucy, if you prefer), are gone now.

This new status doesn’t make me feel like an orphan. My stepmother, who has been my mother for 47 years, comes from hardy stock and may outlive me. And I have an aunt who’s only a half-generation older than me who will be around for a long time to come.

And it's not as if facing the prospect of becoming part of the oldest generation has made me feel elderly — yet. I’m only 56. But the significance of my dad's death is already making me look at the past differently.

I’ve always been the unofficial memory-keeper in my family. But even I, the supposed expert and stickler for details, know little about our roots.

When I was born, nine of my forebears were still alive. But while they were here, I didn’t spend enough time talking to them about their pasts. Now it’s too late. Few of them bothered to write down even a brief autobiography and nobody kept a journal.

Somehow, there are all kinds of impediments to passing down family history and lore. You'd think it would be such a simple task and that there would be plenty of time in everyone's life to do it.

When I moved to Chico, I was curious about what it was like for my dad’s family to have lived here for a few months in the late 1920s.

My dad was born in Chico. He was the first member of his family to have been born in California. But, of course, he couldn’t tell me anything. He was still a baby when he, his parents and five brothers and sisters left Chico. My dad’s oldest brother was 10 when the family came here. But he’s no help because he’s not interested in thinking about the past. A lot of people are like that.

My dad and I tried to find a landmark that would attest to our family’s stay in Chico. My dad’s birth certificate gave a home address. We found the spot, not far from First Avenue and The Esplanade, but the house looked too new to have been around in 1927. The Polk Directory showed no occupant by the name of Brown living at that address in either 1927 or 1928.

My dad was the only one of his siblings to have been born in a hospital. So I showed him the building on Flume Street that once housed Enloe Hospital, not knowing if there were other hospitals in Chico at the time. Just six weeks later the old hospital building burned down. So much for landmarks.

I often think about what it would have been like if my dad and his family had stayed in Chico. I’d be able to claim old-timer status.

But we’re not that kind of family. We don’t stay in one place. I’ve been in Chico 10 years, and that seems like a long time. When Chico didn’t work out for my dad’s family, they moved to the Bay Area. When I was growing up, most of my relatives lived there. But in the last 40 years just about all of us have migrated to more rural parts of the state.

We are a rootless family, and we leave few behind traces of our existence. What is known about our lives rarely outlives us. The family narrative is too fragmented to offer any clues about how our background might have shaped us. And every time a person dies without having said much about what they did and why they did it, we become even more cut off from our past.

Car traffic is light, but a suprising number of people pass by on foot and on bicycles. It’s a part of Chico where the pace of life seems slower than the city as a whole. Yet the coffeehouse attracts a steady stream of customers.

Has Beans itself is tiny. It has just two inside tables. But customers can sit at two umbrella-covered tables facing the street and watch the world amble by or they can sit in a shaded patio to the side of the building.

I wish more of Chico’s neighborhoods had their own coffeehouse. Higher Ground in Longfellow Terrace and Cafe Paolo at Fifth and Ivy streets come closest to what Has Beans Creekside offers.

It appears that coffeehouses downtown and along major thoroughfares are struggling. I noticed that the Hideaway Cafe in the Phoenix Building is no more. I was there just a few days before it closed.

As a flaneur in good standing, I seldom drive to Has Beens Creekside Cafe. I leave my car at Bidwell Park and then walk a loop that includes a stop at Has Beans. You can see some of Chico’s most sumptuous and most modest houses along this route.

If you go to Has Beans Creekside on the weekends, you can listen to live music on the patio. I’ve already heard a folk, rock, jazz group called Wounded Pick-up and a Latin and classic jazz group called Indoor Barbecue perform.
If you like laid-back leisure time, nothing can be better than sipping an iced latte on the patio on a Sunday morning, tapping your feet to the music and trying to remember the words to “The Girl from Ipanema.”

I decided that I would eventually drive every road between Sacramento and Redding. It’s turning out to be more of an adventure than I thought. The valley has lots of roads that start out paved and then suddenly become gravel or dirt. I do my best to keep going, provided that the road doesn’t peter out.

I have my favorite country roads: the Midway between Chico and Durham, of course; Chico River Road west of Chico; Highway 45 between Ord Bend and Colusa, which is the route I take whenever I travel to the Bay Area.

But I also have out-of-the-way favorites — roads taken only for the pleasure of driving them. I’ve seen all of Highway 99, and the stretch between Los Molinos and Red Bluff is the most scenic. It’s filled with roadside stands that sell produce and other items.

I also like the roads west of Highway 99 between Gridley and Yuba City. If you take Larkin Road, you’ll see an Islamic center and a Skikh temple within just a few miles of each other. They’re so unexpected in this land of prune orchards that they almost seem like a mirage.

Bear River Road, between East Nicolaus and Wheatland, is one of the most surprising of the scenic byways. I don’t like this part of the valley. For one thing, it’s too wide and monotonous. For another thing, it’s becoming littered with commuter suburbs. But this twsty road through walnut orchards seems far removed from all that. The housing bust and the gas price surge may conspire for a while to keep this area safe from the bulldozer.

With gas prices approaching $4.50 a gallon, Sacramento Valley country roads become all the more appealing. It’s getting too expensive to travel much farther than that.