The old Laucks Bakery in the Tower District, picture from France Is Hexagonal
I don’t mean to age myself too much here, but I am old enough to remember having the peanut butter cookies from Laucks Bakery in the Tower District. It is one of my first food memories. And they were so good.
No peanut butter cookie has measured up to it. My Mom’s are the closest and are delicious. But the Laucks used to really hit.
I am seeking comfort lately, and a peanut butter cookie that tastes like a Laucks cookie would really fill a hole right now.
So who has the recipe? What’s the fucking secret?
Nobody wants to post the recipe (at least I can’t find where), as if this needs to be kept secret anymore.
This has also put me on a quest to find the best peanut butter cookie in Fresno. Maybe the smallest quest ever, but it’s still a quest. If you have some thoughts on this, tell me where to go.
Editor’s note: I will be doing more personal log style posts here on The Fresnan with expansions of some of the Fresno!Fresno! content. Hope you enjoy and check my website more often as a result.
I was one of 3 old dudes at Goldstein’s last night. I don’t know to think if this is pathetic or something to be proud of.
Probably a bit of both.
Pathetic: Why are you out in The Tower alone as a 50 something dude? Go home and pull weeds or do dishes or some shit.
Proud: Nobody else in my age group out here checking out local bands and enjoying a beer, walking miles home.
I got that video just as the Goldstein’s crowd gave up trying to start a little pit. That band was not playing pit appropriate music but, dammit, folks wanted to pit.
For the younger Fresno crowd, this has been a staple of every Fresno generation; Fresnans love even the tiniest excuse to start a pit. Bless our little hearts. Do we need to grow up? Maybe. But it makes us kind of adorable too.
I decided to check in on Livingstone’s (It has been a while for me) and have a General Sherman IPA from our own Tioga.
The bar had just enough people to give me a sense of enough going on that I wanted to stay. But soon enough, a large amount of people came in and it was too much for this guy, so I headed back over to Gold’s and caught some more Fresno talent:
As I wandered the streets home, contemplating life, I am pretty sure I saw Fresno Jesus wink at me as I walked by:
This new bike lane on Van Ness (You know, the Van Ness you never think about because it is not Old, Extended or Downtown) has everyone all messed up.
Admittedly it is some weird looking shit. It requires processing. And processing we are.
Maybe the best thread I saw about it came from a local musician’s on Facebook. We will call him T.
I always feel a little queasy pulling Facebook threads out here into the open part of the Internet so I won’t use any real names of people in these quotes but they are real and sum up the bike lane drama:
The fact that they took so many parking spaces away in front of people’s homes makes no sense at all. Besides passengers aren’t normally looking for bicyclist on their side if the car when they get out so there’s that hazard. I don’t even want to know how much of our money they spent researching this lovely idea.
L
It’s a drunken stagger zone. For City liability insurance. Only intoxicated Fresnans work or travel through this area. It is known.
K
From what I’ve observed, almost no one is using this properly–almost everyone just parks their car against the gutter as they always did, totally blocking the new bike path. I wonder if they sent out a notice or anything.
N
Doesn’t make sense to me. I would rather not ride in a bike lane sharing the road with cars without any concrete divider. I do not trust drivers. I ride my bicycle on the sidewalk as long as there’s no pedestrians around.
D
It’s nuts! I wouldn’t park in those spaces! You might a well put a target on the back of your car! 2am catastrophe
F
Yes, this was a total fail. Half the parking is gone, and now the bike lane is useless because people are using it for parking. Here’s my proposal. Go back to curbside parking, and turn all that new parking weirdness into a big fat bike lane.
L
This is the lane in question:
When you go a little further up the road next to FCC, those college educated kids are having problems too:
Parking in the designated parking area inevitably puts cyclists at risk as most will go around the truck into the street instead of in between the vehicles.
Why isn’t there clear parking instruction signage to keep people from parking in the bike lane? pic.twitter.com/u9lipZpofs
I ride that route fairly regularly. It is an adjustment, but the idea is to separate bikes from moving traffic. And it reduces the chance that you ride into a quickly-opening door.
T
Ha ha! Tell me about it. Complete Streets are something that the org I work for espouses, but I don’t like them when I’m driving, huge hypocrite that I am. It makes sense to stop designing our transportation systems solely around making it easier for cars. Perhaps making the world safer for bikes will encourage more people to ride?
C
I don’t known that my opinion is valid since I only drive on there occasionally and can’t remember the last time I rode a bike through there.
But, I will still say, it feels like we are scared of this new thing. It will be confusing at first but we will get it. Some street has to be the street we learn on, might as well be regular old Van Ness.
I believe protected bike lanes are a build-it-and-they-will-come sorta thing, not a “Look at all these damn bikers, they need more lanes!!” kinda thing.
And one day it could be as pleasant as this (found on mmwpro63’s feed):
When we're looking at improving cycling, so much focus is given to big cities.
Yet often, it's small cities—especially college towns like Eugene—that make the greatest gains in the least time; refining best practices, sharing with others, and acting as incubators for good ideas. pic.twitter.com/jQjPFvbA8M
I have always said that Fresno is a great basecamp for visiting the Sierras, most notably our three nearby National Parks: Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Sequoia. But I had never really known of someone that actually did it – someone not from here anyway.
A dude named Nick Pisano is spending a year traveling (sounds like a sweet gig if you can get it) with his partner and recently spent a couple weeks using Fresno as a basecamp.
This long blog post by Nick documents his use of Fresno as a base for visiting our nearby parks and … Bakersfield ?♀️ -that is actually a cool part to me, but anyway.
It is a overall good blog post illustrating how a tourist can use Fresno as a basecamp, I want to make that clear.
Buuuuut.
He gave us several shots throughout the post. He tried to be nice about it, but definitely didn’t pass up on chance to deal in digs:
“Not a lot going on here”
“I’ve gone out in search of Fresno, as it were, multiple times here and come up relatively empty each time.”
“relatively sleepy”
“The key to enjoying this city is lowering your expectations”
“a kinda bad city next to some very good things”
“I say this with the utmost respect, but there’s just not a terrible lot going on here. In some ways, it’s the least-happening place we’ve been.”
Woah. Pretty rough.
I will give him credit for going to a Fresno Grizzlies game, the Tower District, and bonus points for visiting the Underground Gardens. He seemed to enjoy those, as he should.
He certainly didn’t do all the things though.
In fact, one major mistake: He did not seem to have much (if any) Mexican food – most notably no mention of tacos:
Next time I’ll show you the stuff the tourist guides won’t
Yep, you KNOW Mike Oz is taking that dude on the taco tour of his life next time.
Speaking of food, going out to eat is a feature for Fresnans. Part of our culture is eating out. When someone visits us, we plan on eating places. It is a “thing to do”.
You can make fun of that if you like but I think it’s cool. It’s a Fresno feature that is underrated.
Also, this guy seemed to not be familiar with the concept of a small city. A working class city. A city for living a life.
Not every town is built to give a shit about tourists. Fresno is one of them.
We don’t have a beach. We don’t have Disneyland. There are no longer any cable cars. A Hollywood sign doesn’t loom over the town. We don’t have a Vegas Strip. We have no plan for someone hanging out for two weeks.
What our “sleepy town” has is people working their ass off and living a life.
For the sake of this post, I will put aside the debate about if it is safe enough to go to a packed bar in the final (we hope) throws of a pandemic.
That said…
Tonight is Thanksgiving Eve. Traditionally a big night in the Tower District, where Fresno Natives (now living out-of-town) come back and mix with current Fresnans.
Those current ones have to listen to old friends pump up their post-Fresno lives, like they’re trying to sell us on bitcoin.
Livingstone’s traditionally has been the epicenter for these meetups. At this point, I am afraid to go.
Not because I am worried I’ll run into some weird person from my past. It’s because I likely would not run into anybody.
Like, not one person I know.
Been away from the Tower scene too long. And any old friends I might see hardly go out anymore either.
I might be too old for Livingstone’s. (ouch that stings)
Enjoy yourselves, younger Tower people. Enjoy Livingstone’s and Strummers and Goldstein’s and Vini’s and Fresbrew and Spokeasy’s and whatever.
