Tuesday, August 26, 2008

God’s Half-Tube and the Little Green Guy: In Lieu of Actual Writing

Freaking ridiculous, or as the ancients put it, freakus ridiculousus.  August is turning out to be as intense and demanding as I could ever have expected, and my expectations were high.  Dad came for a visit, as I’ve mentioned; last weekend, it was mom, and next weekend, Delia and her parents (one of whom shares more of my genetic material than any other person on the planet).  I’ve built furniture, laundered a mountain of vaguely musty linens, installed and repaired (with expert assistance) a wireless network, and am now waiting for a new laptop and neighborhoodie.  There’s a bat mitzvah (with associated pre-event shindig), a newly-adopted child’s first birthday party, a dear old friend’s locally-famous pigmeats party, and we’re busily pulling together final paperwork in anticipation of getting the call to fly off and pick up Jesse in Seoul.  Another friend, with whom we lost touch years ago, just called yesterday to suggest that I might do some voice-over narration for him.  And still - STILL - I yearn to blog. 

Well, maybe that’s an overstatement.  I sort of want to blog, though.  I’ve got a transit tale and a poem percolating in the works, but I’ve lost one of my prime writing-times with the change in my morning commute, and even so I spent that ride today sketching out a conference I’m planning for January.  But I’m not going to share the Partnership Grants conference plans with you.  I have more respect for you than that.  Plus, I don’t want to give anything away in case any of you out there happen to be Partnership Grant recipients.  Instead, I’ll just share a brief anecdote from this past weekend.  I’m sure you’ll find it profound and uplifting.  It’s either that or upfound and prolifting, and I think I need a special truss for that. 

So ANYWAY, Congregation Beth Sholom has finally finished its new synagogue, and for what it’s worth (not much) I think it’s a knockout.  The previous incarnation of this structure was a traditional 1920’s edifice with doric columns and stained glass, a staid and unimaginative place to daven.  Or so I have it on good authority and unfettered imagination; I never went there myself though I live but two blocks away.  I tried once but got shut out (high holidays do attract quite the crowd).  In the 70s it was rehabbed with the addition of a big bulky assembly hall on one side, and a clumsy portico with curved bay windows tacked tackily to the front of the sanctuary.  It aged ungracefully and finally the congregation had enough and tore it down, replacing it with a cool new structure that roused my curiousity.

Thus it was that on Saturday - THE LORD’S day, you know - Kel and Zach and Mom and I took a little stroll to check the place out.  It was 2 in the afternoon and we had it to ourselves, which was nice - no irritating tribal-types to distract from the clean lines and austere colors.  The front doors admitted us to an open-air plaza with broad steps leading up to a wide patio fronting the sanctuary.  The sanctuary itself is shaped like the hull of a large boat, with rows of seats rising on either side of a central aisle and the bima, or pulpit, in the middle.  The ceiling is far overhead (as well it should be), coffered in a modern style and rich purple in color, with plentiful hidden skylights.  Even if the place wasn’t brand new it would inspire the soaring of the soul that is the hallmark of spiritual practice. 

Zach hasn’t been to many synagogues - I will admit that his spiritual practice has been honored mostly in the breach.  It’s not that he doesn’t have the sensitivity for it - quite the opposite.  We just have not made opportunities available for him.  But here, we explained that this was a special place to be quiet and let goodness fill you up, and he seemed to understand.  Kel had taken a seat halfway up one of the sides, and Z took a break from assiduously testing out all the chairs to come and sit down next to her.  “This is a place,” he explained to her, “where I think about Yoda.” After a brief pause, he continued: “He’s little… and green.” A numinous light filled his eyes and his face was serene.  Indeed, the force is strong with this one.

(We have not yet shown him Star Wars but he’s seen some video of Yoda breakdancing.  I’m not sure how this will affect his theological development, but I think it must all be for the best.  His cousin is all about Vader since she saw him at Disneyland, and I’m thinking they’ll play well off each other in that regard.)

We will be checking out a new congregation for high holidays, a renewal jew-bu hippie-dippie deal that meets at the arboretum in the park, still within easy walking distance of home.  Beth Sholom is closer, yes, but I think the scene there might be a bit constrained for me, if not for Z, so far as my Rosh Hashona vibe is concerned.  But now I feel confident that Zach will be up for the davening.  Focus your kavanah on the little green guy within you, my man, and the path to righteousness will reveal itself. 

Up next: me going to sleep.  Stay tuned for nothing. 

Thursday, August 21, 2008

The New Ride: The Spleenvent Continues

Yesterday I waxed unenthusiastic about my new commute to work.  My vitriol was unexpended by that rant, so I continue unabated:

The route, too, seems to weave through town so as to minimize our possible exposure to life’s magnificent pungency: Once we leave the park it’s a long shot along Lombard, perhaps the city’s most picturesque street with its sinuous masonry curves - but we don’t visit that part, rolling instead along the vapid breadth of its western reaches lined with innumerable motels and desultory breakfast joints, an architecture drained of poetry and spirit.  At Van Ness we hang a ricky and head south on the city’s broadest boulevard, past bucktoothed condos and shabby dive bars, the occasional remaining stately manse superwhelmed by the surrounding stucco stultification.  A left at Broadway rolls us past a few uninspired blocks of apartments and playgrounds, into a three-block-long tunnel under Russian Hill and out again at Chinatown.

This is not, however, the funky kitchy chinatown so famous as postcard fodder.  Rather, we cruise a wide, gritty boulevard of shuttered liquor stores and cut-rate herbologists, scary-looking pet stores and questionable cafes.  We then barrel through three or four blocks of North Beach’s tawdriest reaches, strip clubs vying with megataverns for the sweat-wet dollarbills of tourists now sleeping off well-drink buzzes.  We speed right past tiny cross-lanes named for people I’ve never heard of - Turk Murphy Lane, someone with the surname Peter whose last name starts with M but whose memorial alley we pass too quicky for me ever to make out the name in full - mere capillaries of asphalt that lead nowhere special, too insignificant to merit inclusion on any map I can find. 

Then, with a suddenness so swift as almost to escape notice, the tone shifts and we’re surrounded by big blocky warehouses and light industrial sites and an INS field office, all substantial in scope and megalithic in their lack of architectural inspiration.  A right on Battery brings us finally into the Embarcadero bussiness district, with tall shiny multiuse towers and a streetscape that has grown inviting and interesting by the time the bus doors open at California and Front street and most of us disembark.  There’s one more stop a few blocks futher down that’s actually closer to my office, but which would leave me to walk beneath a really foul highway overpass I’d just as soon avoid so I hit the sidewalks at my first opportunity.  I walk one block east amid caffeine dispensaries from which sleepy office hotties trundle with their cardboard cups of joe, reach Market Street at the shoeshine plaza and cable car turnaround, cross eight lanes of blacktop and trolleytracks to the Federal Reserve and then head down two blocks as part of a true urban blend of pedestrians to the yeast-rich air of the midblock bakery where my paseo cuts through between tall blocky buildings to the midrise where I’ll huddle in a fifth-floor cube all the rest of the day.  It’s a short walk, not quite four blocks, but that’s where I get my fix of humanity for the morning - and frankly, I cherish it. 

A few Mondays ago I was late enough and unlucky enough to miss my chance for a seat on my boring new bus.  A tall, pencil-slim woman with straight blonde hair, a tailored suit and cold blue eyes had boarded just before me; we walked the short aisle, took our places standing at the rear of the bus, and begain mutually untangling our respective earbud cords.  More commuters kept piling on and I soon found myself cozily wedged between the icy blonde and a beefy pale guy in jeans and a business shirt, his florid necknape peeking at me from under short salt-and-pepper hair.  More people boarded; the aisle was filling up. I fumbled further with my ‘pod, seeking escape.  Yet more travelers were climbing on; my personal space was fast shrivelling. 

I could smell my neighbors - though they were sufficiently clean and inoffensively fragrant, I resented the imposition.  The big guy ahead of me called forward to the driver, “Send them back, there’s still room.” The woman behind me hissed at him over my shoulder, “What are you talking about?  We’re at capacity!” “Don’t be selfish, these people need to get to work just as badly as you do.” “Don’t tell me my business, jerk.” It was the first free-standing conversation I’d heard on this bus, it wasn’t starting off well, and I was in the middle of it.  Great.  “I don’t need to start my Monday like this,” I announced, turning up the volume of the music in my ears and trying to ignore his big wet lips and her pale dessicated ones as the sniping then began in earnest. 

The doors closed and the bus started rolling.  My fellow travelers raised their voices to continue their castigations.  My earbuds, sensing my critical need of them, shorted out.  There was to be no escape.

“Why are you being such a jerk about this?”

“Do NOT curse at me!  There’s no reason to use that language!  Your problem is that you have no respect for other people!”

“I am NOT cursing at you, jerk!  Why are you even being like this?  The bus is full, goddamn it!  There was no room!  Why did you say that there was?”

“People have to get to work!  There is plenty of room on this bus if people aren’t selfish about it!  Why were YOU being so selfish?”

“Okay, forget it.  Forget it.  It’s all gravy.  There’s nothing to talk about.  Jesus.”

The burly guy turned to face the front of the bus; his shoulders sighhove visibly.  The skinny woman behind me wrestled a phone from the bottom of her designer bag and started texting furiously.  The bus lumbered out past the massive Letterman Digital Complex and the antique Spanish cannon guarding the Lyon Street gates, their long barrels beaded with chilly morning dew and gaping mutely in the fog. The manicured lawns and designer groves gave way to dreary streets that subtended blandly outside our tinted windows like the upturned bellies of so many insensate grey snakes. 

If that’s what passes for human interaction on the new bus, I guess I’ll take boredom. 

(Taken yesterday morning at the main post on my way down to the transit center with my new cellphone camera.  Oo lookit me I’m so new-millenium!)

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The New Ride

Time for transit!  Here’s part 1.  Give me a freaking break.  I’m a busy man. 

The new bus is a new experience, an exercise in veneer.  I’m writing this on the old bus [note: “wrote"], on which I’m riding home after a rare night of camaraderie and carousing; getting on at its second stop I’m already surrounded by plenty of curious characters about whom I could write an essay each.  But my point isn’t the old bus, it’s the new one.  The new bus is a weird little ride, and not in the way that inspires too many essays.  I’d better make the most of this one while I can.

In my pre-fatherhood incarnation I’d take the 38 from the corner by my house, clear on downtown. That’s a bus with plenty of what we might call “personality.” Then, when Z started with the daycare, I’d drop him off a mile or so from home, cross the street, and board the 1BX.  That bus is a commuters’ special, populated mostly with wan grimaces and crackberries, a quick ride without much to distract me.  Good writing time, but not too inspirational despite still being a public conveyance.  It felt like I’d given something up.

Now Z’s in full-on preschool and we drop him off in the Presidio, a national park of over 1000 acres.  His school is about half a mile away from a shuttle stop, straight across parade grounds two centuries old.  I sign him in, give him a hug, say so long to his teachers and the sweetheart who runs the lunch room; I stroll past stately old barracks to one side and patina-green cannon to the other - weapons dating back to Spanish days, their plugged maws gaping as they stand impotent sentry over quiet lawns and parking lots.  There are plenty of cannon and mortar and field artillery pieces scattered about on concrete pads going slowly green in the bayside fog, their placidity eclipsing their bellicose origins just as a garden gnome bears no relation to its frightful pagan forebears.  It is almost unimaginable that those emplacements once belched fire and spat those carefully-stacked cannonballs in death-dealing fusillades.  Today they are nothing more than sculpture. 

At the end of my walk I’m at the Presido Transit Center, and if I’ve timed things right my bus is waiting.  But no longer is it big sloppy articulated public transportation - it’s a private mini-coach with restricted access, lowered, tinted, upholstered and sanitized.  Instead of graffito’d ads for health clinics and trade schools, the upper walls are lined with calming photos of intra-park stops - gorgeous forests and colonial structures and breathtaking overlooks. It’s all perfectly nice.  That is to say, after a few weeks it’s boring as hell. 

Similarly, my fellow riders offer scant distraction and less companionship.  They’re Presidio residents, which now means not soldiers but young professionals reeking of entitlement and privilege.  No more riding with winos and grannies, respectively clad in sopping blankets or mothball-reeking housecoats - it’s all suits with impeccably modern tailoring or slick bizcaz or stylish jackets over smirkingly ironic Ts.  They board glumly, sharing among them a single stale scowl - but not my selective old “sit thou not next to me, ye skungy creepster” scowl from my rides on the 38, the scowl that I drop the instant it’s not needed anymore.  Rather, this is a scowl that has settled in for the duration, upon lips that seem to have had their smiles surgically removed.  It may be that some of these people are perfectly nice in their own little worlds but that’s sort of my point - I’ve ridden that intimate conveyance with them for more than a month now and every day I’m struck by how their disdain for the rider and for each otehr permeates the humid air we all exhale upon each other.  Smiles can be counted on the fingers of one hand; interesting characters, on those of one foot. 

Up next: the route, and the “incident.” But a parenthetical note: as I wrote this one night some weeks back the bus filled with all kinds of folk.  I could hear over my earbuds the two college girls next to me debating seriously whether one’s “two-drink minimum” rule was in conflict at that particular moment with the other’s “three-drink maximum” rule.  The center aisle of the bus was crowded.  A man boarded and was unable to get a seat; I couldn’t see him clearly through the crowd but he seemed to be shortish, stocky, reasonably well-maintained in proletarian garb and a brushy little moustache.  He was accompanied by a dog - perhaps a cocker mix?  I was distracted, tipsy, not particularly interested… till I noticed that the dog had worked its way through the crowd to near where I sat and that its long blue leash had been carefully inscribed with tidy writing in white paint: “One of us has no balls.” I laughed, pointed it out to the girls near to me; they laughed too, loudly and lustily.  Now that’s a situation that just doesn’t come up on the new ride.