Saturday, July 24, 2004

Got Me on My Mi-yiyiyi-yiyiyind….

Could it only have been a year ago that it had already been a year ago?  Time having spiraled me forward to the here and now, I find myself celebrating a second blogiversary.  Many of those who read this site these days were reading it back then too; some others of you, valued all the more for your recent arrival, may not have had a chance to read all the 363 masterwanks I’ve ejected over the past year.  It’s barely 50 percent of my output from my first year, and works out to fewer than one a day.  But on the other hand, I’ve been a lot more longwinded, so I don’t know if I actually wrote any less. 

What I do know for sure is that I’ve enjoyed it tremendously.  I’ve met wonderful people and had a great time roaming around blogsylvania.  By the same token, I’ve really enjoyed writing all this chazzerai, incorporating creativity into my daily life and having our little attenuated conversations about whatever I wound up thinking worth posting at that time.  I have a world of respect for anybody who reads this site, but the ones of you I’ve been privileged to get to know personally or via a web-based persona, have been uniformly good people who’ve made my life better and more interesting.

Last year I selected my 40 favorite posts from the prior year and re-linked to them.  And, that’s right you guessed it, I’m doing it again.  I’m just that boring.  I actually have scads of stuff stocked up for posting later but the time is ripe for me to look back at what I’ve already written.  I found the exercise to be illuminating and entertaining – a cross between reading my own diary and a short subjects film festival.  Some months seemed pretty thin to me, and some were just jampaqued full of stuff I enjoyed re-reading.  And in the end that was my main criterion in making these selections – that I enjoyed re-reading it. 

Some of these essays have strong personal connections for me.  Some of the others I left out are even more meaningful to me but they didn’t make the cut because I didn’t enjoy re-reading them as much.  We’ve got a healthy cross-section of hut genres, but a common thread of me liking it.  If your favorite post, oh god as if you would even have one, but if a post you remember in particular thinking didn’t specifically suck out loud, if such a post as that is not on this list and you wonder why, well, there’s no reason at all, it’s arbitrary my good people, like genetics and network programming.  But I’d love to hear which ones you might think are missing.  Not like it’ll do you any good, but, you know, for kicks. 

Speaking of kicks, I’m out of here.  I will be spending something more than the next two weeks secluded in a monastery high in the azure Caucasian mountains, cultivating daikon and mastering my inner dragon. I will, furthermore, be without computer, but I will be plugged in to the great eternal motherboard in your heart.  If you need me, I am already there for you.  Just don’t ask me to do much, because I’m pretty much useless.  Showing up really took it out of me.  Now pace yourself with the following list – don’t take on too much at once.  Lift from the knees.  No, your own knees.  Oh suit yourself.  See you when I’m back.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

The Crepe Cycle

Apparently calling things the new black is the new black.  Memepool has said as much and I’m sure as hell not going to argue with them.  But I’d written in my little notebook a few weeks ago another “new black” that doesn’t appear on the lists - crepes.  There is suddenly a crepe glut in this francophilic city, with deflated pancakes popping up everywhere stuffed with everything from salmon roe to ratatouille to nurtella.  There are cool funky french places in the mission and hi-teq futuristic places in stylish retail zones and even on my very own Clement Street there is a japanese grocery/crepatorium.  We recently dined at a lovely middle-eastern crepe place.  If you can eat it, it seems someone wants you to cram it in a crepe first these days.  And that’s okay with me. 

With proliferation comes decay, and naturally some of these new creptastic refectories were going to fold - but I didn’t want Cafe de la Terrasse to be one of them.  It was thus with an overcast heart that I saw the series of signs on their storefront on my little stretch of Geary. 

The first is hard to read, but I know it says “Natraj,” the name of a strange little Indian restaurant that mouldered there, underutilized, for many years.  Their dark walls, sticky carpet, and ungainly tables and chairs discouraged diners, but somehow they hung on for a decade or so.  But after they went the way of all flesh their sign remained in place, partly spraypainted a rusty brown, defaced but still bearing witness to the street. 

The shop was empty for some time, but then reopened as a bizarre grafting of computer gaming arcade and creperie.  Overbright and post-industrial, bare of decorations and furnished with uncovered tubular steel tables and chairs, they offered fresh sweet-n-savory crepes to whomever could stand to be in the room, which echoed with simulated gunshots and explosions and tire-squeals from a rank of about 20 computer terminals in a connecting room up a few short steps and through a wide passageway in the back.  There was nothing anywhere to baffle the pounding noise.  We stopped there once and had an entirely serviceable crepe or two, but the environment was garrish, the lighting was ghastly, the noise jarring and the furniture uncomfortable.  We let them go their own way. 

Within a year or so the CyberCrepe Cafe had put butcher paper up over its windows and scaffolding over the storefront.  When these masks were eventually removed, the CyberCrepe had been sent back in time.  The outside was a rich deep crimson-maroon, a color that bespoke confidence and heritage.  The signage (not the Natraj marquee, which still hung dusty and ignored) was painted in discrete Latinate capitals, gold in color, generously proportioned: CAFE DE LA TERRASSE.  Sidewalk Cafe.  When I peeked indoors I saw they’d made a huge change there as well: they’d plastered the walls thickly and painted them to look like stone with medieval doorways and eaves, murals had been painted on side walls to replicate a scene in an old and charming city.  The place suddenly looked as if it had been there for centuries, wedged between ancient buildings that had never actually existed on Geary Boulevard before.  The tables were wooden, appropriately solid and cozy, with comfortable wooden chairs on a weathered hardwood floor.  They’d also gotten rid of the computer grotto in the back and turned it into a dining room, all faux stone and bogus beam but still a comfortable and inviting environment.  Definitely, a lot better than it had been before. 

We visited and had a nice crepe (really you have to screw up pretty badly for me to rate your crepe as crap), listened to relaxing world-beat music, conversed quietly and easily as the street rolled past outside the windows.  This place had potential.  And soon they sought to maximize it by advertising on their front window that they they were also glatt kosher, the highest level of kashrut, guaranteed by rabbinical inspection.  In my ‘hood, that’s appropriate niche marketing for all the orthodox jews we see walking to shul on a saturday. 

The sabbath, in fact, was their achilles heel, commercially - La Terrasse closed early on friday, didn’t open again till late saturday afternoon.  Kel was wondering why they didn’t just hire a crepe-goy but that’s not really the way it’s supposed to be done, and so that’s not they way they did it.  The key weekend hours, prime time for them to grow their business, were cut in half.  Maybe it hurt them commercially. 

Soon they put up another big sign: “Organic/Vegetarian.” That preserved their kosher aspect but made a bigger play for us typical San Fran softheaded one-worlder types.  “What does a person have to do,” Kelly asked in amazement, “to sell a crepe in this town?”

Whatever it is, Cafe de la Terrasse didn’t do it.  They went from dingy to sterile to old-european, from Indian food to crepes to kosher crepes to tree-hugger crepes.  And now there’s a new sign on the window: For Lease, Blatteis Realty. The shop itself is empty, the kitchen dusty and stripped, the plaster-stone walls abandoned and dusty.  I usually don’t care when one of the neighborhood shops folds, but I really wanted this one to survive.  They tried so hard to make it work.  I guess with so many new outlets now, the crepe market is just a little too flat.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Tamburger pt III: Fried

A look down the mountain showed my trail rollicking a long long way into vague and unknown territory.  I could just see, far up the hill behind me, where the trail slipped back into the tulgey woods from which I’d emerged some time previously.  I decided to go back up rather than forward and down, preferring the devil I knew and thinking my car was closer that way. I started walking the bike back up the trail.  It was hard work but I had all day.  Turns out I needed it.

Once I got back to the woods whence I’d ridden out prior to my velocipejection, I followed the trail to a fork that was poorly marked.  Then there was another, and another.  Ever the intrepid outdoorsman, I got myself lost - and I mean good and lost.  There are a lot of trails up there and I couldn’t find my way back to the right one.  I just kept walking among them trying to make consistent choices.  Instead I got loster and loster as the afternoon ripened.  I had fallen at 2.  It was now past 4 and things were not getting any better.

Then, right on cue, I saw a good sign, sort of. “Muir Woods.” Well that would get me somewhere populated, someplace I knew how to get out of.  It was also miles off my anticipated route, but that was better than camping out in my shorts and muddy t-shirt with no food, shelter or fire.  I took the Muir Woods trail and hoped for the best. 

I’d been to Muir loads of times, but not to this part of it.  The part I knew was the valley floor, a flat paved trail lined with redwoods and laurel with a crystal stream meandering at the bottom.  It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited, and so wonderfully accessible that Kelly takes her blind students there on field trips where the smooth blacktop path wraps around five-hundred year old arboreal giants.  But where I was, it didn’t look like that.  It was just a series of drops and switchbacks down a steep hillside of manzanita scrub.  The bike had long since grown quite heavy and my contusions and lacerations were starting to make me want to stop moving but there was nowhere to lie down and rest and anyway it was getting chilly fast as the fog started funnelling through the narrow ravine on a fresh Japan breeze.  I was goosepimply and thirsty and tired; it had been three hours since I fell and I could easily imagine darkness coming before I got to a safe haven. 

The path eventually bottomed out onto asphalt - the very furthest reach of the valley floor trail with which I was familiar.  I was finally back in civilization.  The end wasn’t in sight but I was definitely in the right area code.  I rolled the old Nishiki beside me, leaning and limping.  My right side was a long dripping smear of dirt and blood and sweat, and the rest of me must not have looked much better because people on the trail, as I now began to encounter them, got the hell out of my way.  Families with kids, groups of seniors, vibrant young outdoors types - they all took one look at me and got to the far side of the path.  I definitely needed the middle and they did not want to risk brushing against me accidentally.  Whatever was wrong with me, some of it might rub off on them. 

My strategy was to get to the gift shop near the front entrance to the park and ask to use their phone to call Kel to drive over and get me to the other car I’d left at Richardson Bay, which was still a good 15 mountanous miles away around the base of Mt. Tamalpais.  At the shop, a cashier immediatly called for a ranger who took me into a back room to check me out. Seems I was rather pale and clammy, and they didn’t like the look of my numerous cuts and bruises. I somehow explained to their satisfaction what had happened and where, and then convinced them that I was capable of driving myself home if they would get me to my car. So a mellow park ranger with a big hat and a big gun loaded my bike into his back seat and me in his front seat and he took me to my car, watched me secure the bike to the rack and drive off safely. 

Some details here are not too clear for me.  At some point I called Kel; was I supposed to have picked her up from work?  We spoke briefly; I told her the bike was broken but nothing more, not wanting to worry her, so she was significantly surprised once I got home to see I’d been turned into Tamburger.  I asked her to help me get into bed; then she called Dr. Andy who came over from up the street.  He cleaned me up a little, told me he’d have stitched my knee if there had been any skin left to work with.  There was nothing to do but provide palliative treatment - pain pills and anti-inflammatories.  My bruise eventually covered the entire area from my right calf to my left elbow - I was basically a big purple welt with legs.  And I am proud to say, I was in court the next morning for a hearing, wearing a suit with pants I couldn’t zip because my body was so swollen - a hearing that went well for my client, no less. 

Then I took two days off, but suffered no lasting injuries.  I’d somehow endured my worst fall ever, gotten all tore up and terribly lost for hours, and was ultimately none the worse for wear.  Even the bike needed only the most minor of repairs.  Maybe I shouldn’t have taken a lesson from that, but I did anyway: I never took a ride even remotely like that alone again.  Years later I went with my friends back to the scene of my disaster and showed them exactly what had happened, and where.  Brian then promptly fell from his bike at the same spot.  However, his bruise had nothing on mine.