A view of the coast range from the deck of my friend Karen Ward’s weekend home at Sea Ranch. In yet another reflection of the recession, Karen has reluctantly put the home up for sale.

Last weekend I enjoyed a clear day as a houseguest at Sea Ranch two hours north of here. When I went to take a shower, however, things became foggy. I found the shower stall stocked with skin-conditioning soap etc. but nothing I recognized as meant for shampooing hair.

I called through the door to Karen, asking if I could borrow some shampoo to wash my hair, and she directed me to a bottle of Neutrogena. The label on the bottle, however, said it contained a “body enhancing shampoo,” which sounded like a body wash that builds pecs and tightens abs. If it doesn’t contain steroids, I wondered, why don’t more men use it?

But then I remembered a New England Journal of Medicine report that washing with lavender soap may cause boys to develop breasts. What if this “body enhancing shampoo” was for women and likewise mimicked hormones? I never did learn the answer, and I still don’t know why Karen sounded exasperated when I asked if it had been safe for me to wash my hair with her Neutrogena?

The view of the Pacific from Karen’s living room and deck. Her home is near Sea Ranch’s Shell Beach (there must be a dozen strands around here called Shell Beach), and at night I could hear seals barking outside my window.

Karen’s three-bedroom, two-bath home has been listed for $799,000 by Coldwell Banker agent Lynda O’Brien, 707 884-3591. I’m telling you this as a favor to Karen, but because I’ve been promised another stay at the home sometime in the future, I’m less interested than she is in seeing it sell.

“So many daily newspapers are losing money that a bunch of them are planning another round of newsroom layoffs this year,” my friend Dave LaFontaine told me over the holidays. “That’s no bullsh-t.”

“Why is that noble sh-t?” I demanded. Dave, who’s an Internet media consultant from Los Angeles, calmly replied that several big papers are resigned to sacrificing quality in order to survive. “Do you really think their planning to sacrifice quality is noble?” I asked. Dave said he personally believed it was no bull, and we changed subjects.

I later suggested to Dave that some metropolitan papers’ financial troubles can be blamed on their too eagerly buying up other newspapers during the past 20 years. “The chains thought the good times would never end,” I said, “so they became spendthrifts.”

Having said that, I immediately wondered why we call people who recklessly spend money “spendthrifts.” You’d think we’d call them “extravagant spenders.” When I looked up the origin of the word, however, I discovered that “thrift” is being used in an obsolete sense which meant “accumulated wealth.” The word “spendthrift,” it would therefore appear, reveals something about the way the English-speaking world views wealth. For instance, we’re not much into potlatches.

We can, in fact, learn a considerable amount about different cultures from their vocabulary. For example, in Pashto, Afghanistan’s most-common language, the word for “cousin” is the same as the word for “enemy.” Doesn’t that tell us something about the turmoil there?

Similarly revealing is the German word “Scham,” for depending on the context, it can mean either “vulva” or “shame.” This may suggest it was more than coincidental that Freud grew up speaking German. And God with us, my friends, the correct response to “Gott mit uns” is not, “Yes, we’ve got mittens.”

For the most part, however, German is Greek to me. Or as they say in German, “Ich verstehe nur Bahnof,” which literally means, “I understand only train station.”

As long as we’re on the subject of words, Amy Tsaykel of The West Marin Review has asked me to mention a fundraiser in Point Reyes Station for the journal. From 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, in a private home, she writes, an “‘elder statesman of the Beat Generation,’ novelist, and prolific writer Herb Gold will read from his latest work, a memoir entitled Still Alive: A Temporary Condition.

“In the words of the man himself, the book is about ‘love and memory, why both are blessings and sorrows and a form of immortality.’ Our special guest welcomes questions and conversation following his reading. Wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served.”

One of the original Beats, Gold (born in 1924) was attending college in New York when he first met two other luminaries of the Beat Generation, novelist Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac unfortunately was anti-Semitic, and Gold later said, “I crossed the street to avoid him.” Gold and Ginsberg, however, became fast friends.

Following a divorce that left Gold a single parent with two daughters to support, he became what he called “a writing factory,” often contributing to Playboy and other men’s magazines.

Playboy — where young men of my generation were most likely to first encounter Gold — paid handsomely. “With a feature inside the magazine,” he now notes, “you could buy a VW, and with a lead feature you could buy a VW convertible.”

Tickets for the afternoon with Gold cost $30 for individuals, $50 per couple. One VIP ticket is available at $250, including: event admission, dinner for two at Café Reyes, one night’s stay at Olema Cottages, Point Reyes Vineyard wine, an autographed copy of Still Alive, and the West Marin Review Vol. 2 when it is published. Tickets are available online at West Marin Review and Point Reyes Books.