SQUIDFRY 08.03.17: Frittering Away

FRITTERING AWAY… Squid is a big Silicon Valley fan, having watched the HBO series since its inception. The first season included a running gag about every tech company insipidly promising to “make the world a better place.” Now it appears that techie billionaires are getting ready to make their own better world in miniature, right here in Monterey County, with an exclusive enclave calledWalden Monterey.

Trading on Henry David Thoreau’s classic work, Walden or Life in the Woods, a company called Signature Group Investments is touting a 609-acre oak woodland south of Highway 68 near Laguna Seca Golf Ranch as a place for techies to find the simple life – at the bargain price of $5 million per lot. That doesn’t include the multi-million sustainable-zero-carbon-footprint-so-you-can-feel-good-about-yourself homes to be built there.

One website connected to Walden Monterey has a video showing tony-types walking bucolic hillsides, enjoying glasses of wine, or gathered around a communal table straight out of a magazine. In one brochure, Signature’s Nick Jekogian says it’s being developed in “connection with nature for enlightenment and well-being.”

Squid thinks Thoreau would be horrified. In Walden, he called chasing money and material things “a fool’s life.”

He goes on: “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” Or acreage and homes worth millions of dollars.

There’s even a warning for all the work it takes to earn those greenbacks: “Men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.”

SICK JOKE… Just the other day, as Squid typed away in Squid’s office in Seaside, Squid heard what sounded like a gunshot. But, Squid presumed, it likely fireworks leftover from the Fourth of July.

The sound reminded Squid of a July 6 Seaside City Council meeting, just two days after the biggest fireworks display Squid’s ever seen in the city. Squid’s lair, at the time, felt like a bomb shelter.

And sure enough, residents spoke up during public comment in droves, urging the City Council to do something about a situation, they said, that made the city feel like a war zone with some fireworks sounding like gunshots.

Former Seaside councilmember Darryl Choates agreed, saying, “I’m going to tell you this funny thing. Over by my housing I heard four of ’em go off, and I said, ‘Man, he finally got her,’” he said, presumably joking about a man shooting a woman. As he chuckled – and as Squid vomited shrimp popcorn into Squid’s mouth, finding nothing funny in this version of gunshot v. firework – Choates added, “I mean, it was a joke to me, but it was like, I thought they were bullet shots too. I’m like, ‘Wow!’”