Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Reader’s Vacation: A Weekend in Reality

wow, Wednesday, huh?  This week has gotten right away from me, and it’s not just that Monday was Soldier Appreciation Day - I’ve had a fistful of busy jammed down my craw from sunup till gloamdown and more on the way, so I’d best take advantage of a moment or three this evening to catch you up with the general doings and goings-on and suchlike.  Let’s recap:

First, a note of general authorial orientation: I’m writing less lately, though I’ve got plenty of notes for essays and such in my little mini-moleskine.  The problem is Jamie.  He’s this dude who is at the center of a blasted skellitch of a series of novels that, with no great pride on my part, I cannot stop reading.  I’m on volume five of six - this one is 1400 pages long, but I’m sucking it down like, oh, I guess Jamie would say, like cold porter on a hot July morn.  It’s just your basic Scottish time-travel action adventure romance medical-historical mystery hogwash, and if you want to know more, drop me a line.  Otherwise, suffice it to say, I’ll be writing again soon, once that damned kiltie has been laid to rest in my bookshelf where he belongs. 

So, with that out of the way:

Saturday was a day of frolics and delights.  Z and I spent some quality time at Rossi Playground in the morning, where I hoped to tire him out in advance of a trip to the museum in the park with Shariar.  It was a good time at the playground and a good time at the museum too - we visited some galleries we don’t often frequent, lingering over the mesoamerican doodads and some of the modernist freakouts like this:

There was also a great exhibit of art by kids ranging from very tender years up through high school, much of which was really museum-worthy.  I took lots of photos but they don’t capture what I saw, so I won’t bother you with them.  Suffice it to say, they were good and Zach in particular seemed charged up by them.  Once Zach’s energy level exceeded my ability to manage him inside a museum, we went out to the gardens to let him romp.  We started in the sculpture garden, which is actually a little barren I think, but it does have that awesome skyspace area where Zach frolicked and squealed with a delight we all shared but were too restrained to express.  Here’s how he looked just before leaping up with an echoing shout:

We next wandered over to the east garden, which I really like; for a small space, it’s got great landscaping with lots of “features.” One of Zach’s favorites is the lawn that’s watered, not with sprinklers, but with misters.  NO, not like “Mr.s” - I mean like this:

Sha returned to our home with us to await Helena.  Before she arrived, or shortly thereafter (things got fuzzy after a while), the Paiges also showed up to share some giggles and agitate our boy, thusly:

Helena had brought in an enormous feast from one of our longstanding favorite but too-long-neglected east African restaurants, whereof we supped, once the Paiges had left for their own supper, far beyond our reasonable capacities.  (That’s the thing about Ethiopian food; you eat it with bread that’s very spongelike and once you’ve finished eating it keeps on swelling and expanding inside of you, taking you from “comfortably full” to “grotesquely stuffed” without the necessity of taking any additional sustenance.) The remainder of that evening was a dead loss.

Sunday was a day of housework, a run in the park, a buttload of more housework, and a stroll back in the park during misty hours that lent themselves to some more pastoral photography.  Here’s a selection of my favorites:

A twig, hanging down from a tree, cloaked in spikes of moss:

A log, with moss swirling in its whorls:

A sculpture we stumbled across in a service yard - broken and bizarre (is that a face I see on that young woman’s head?  If so, why is she so disturbingly deformed?): 

Sunday concluded quietly, with Zach bright-eyed in anticipation of a picnic the next day.  And he was fain disappointed, because (as intimated in an earlier post, for those of you paying attention) we spent much of Memorial Monday waaaay out the other side of the bay up in Tilden Park with the Paiges and the Penns and a bunch of other families with young kids whom we did not know but liked from the outset.  Kel and I ate delectable sandwiches from our favorite gourmet deli, and drank excellent beer, and ate much pineapple and strawberry, and generally lounged and relaxed.  But there was more: active gaming, also, took place!  I’m not the first guy you might think of when it comes to ball-and-bat games or football tossing or that sort of thing, but I had at it with gusto and it was an absolute blast.  Even though I was in the presence of someone who was a) a stranger, who was b) much larger and in better shape than I was, and c) really really knew what he was doing with a bat or a football, I had a great time.  It even sort of loosened up my tense, aching back.  (pause for pity (("pitypause"))).  We hung out till 4 pm, by which time the cold breeze and overcast skies had cleared to warmth and sunlight, and then we rounded off our day with a pit stop at the Paige’s nearby lair.  Supper was consumed back at our home, including my now famous squash fritters (see below).  I got Zach to sleep at 8:30 and went directly to sleep myself thereafter.  I got 10 straight hours of sleep that night and it was fan-freaking-tastic. 

This brought me to Tuesday, a day of “to’s”: I went TO Z’s preschool with him TO drop him off, then TO my office TO do my work for a few hours - then I left TO take BART TO the east bay for my annual physical.  I am, by the way, fine - a healthy weight for my height and still too young for a prostate exam, which my delightful friend Dr Andy tells me is no longer an effective diagnostic tool anyway so I have that not to look forward to anymore.  After an amusing chat with Andy I re-applied my pantaloons and wandered a few blocks down Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue ("where the shat is uckky") to a cool brewpub and cafe where I met an old friend from High School.  We’d gotten back in touch with each other as a result of that cover story in Newsweek about my graduating class (actually, I’m not kidding), and finally arranged to share a table and some beverages and see about catching up a little.  It was a provocative, entertaining, sobering and amusing conversation, and I hope to have more of them with her.  But by then it was time to catch my train back to the city, and my bus back home, and to make my fried tofu with green beans, and to call it a goddamn night.  Which, by then, it was, and more power to ya. 

Oh yeah, the fritters: check the extended entry if’n ya want the recipe.  They’re damned tasty.  But if you’re done by now, I can hardly blame ya.  Wish me luck with the stupid goddamn novels, and I’ll have something of literary value for you someday soon, I hope.  Till then, dinna fash, sasquach - the good stuff is just around the corner. 

Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Alien Next Door

I’m torn - I can’t decide between stories of Zakular cuteness, a recipe for tasty fritters linked up with the story of my fabulous (FABulus) weekend, or if I should just just spit out a story about extraterrestrial visitations.  But the first one is not challenging and will ultimately bore the three or four of you still poking under this dank flat rock in the forgotten sideyard of the internet; the second one would be premature as I’ve still got a picanik to attend tomorrow; and that leaves you with my old friend Bashar.  Hope you guys get along real good. 

THE ALIEN NEXT DOOR

It didn’t feel like the beginning of anything - much less, an era.  Maybe “era” is putting it too strongly, though.  Maybe “phase” is more like it.  Still, it didn’t feel much like the beginning of a phase, either.

It basically felt like a living room in Studio City, though now I suppose it’s called “Valley Village.” I drove through the area again not too long ago and all they changed was the name - unchanged were the ranks of residential streets with their regular geometry, four long blocks up and eight narrow ones across, separated by four-lane arteries and filled with tidy houses all possessed of their own modest universality, a breastpocket comprehensiveness to every hearth that rendered each one an archetype of what had once truly been an era, the midcentury boom that exploded the SF valley and similar infra-urbs throughout America - infill tracts, stucco-studded and driveway-cleft, each home a prepackaged dream come true and consequently a delight for drivers cruising the boulevards but a little spooky sometimes for a solitary pedestrian like myself as a kid.... In those streets, among those houses, I was never confident that I had any idea what my neighbors were up to - or, rather, I was absolutely sure each one of them hid a terrible secret that I’d be better off never knowing.  Everything looked too neat for them not to be hiding something.

It was in this world I grew up, and in it that my friend and fellow sentient Tanja gave me a call one night when I was home from college to see if I was open to checking out Bashar - she had two invites for a local event and thought it might be up my alley.

I asked the same question you’re probably asking now - Bashar?  Apparently there was a nebbishy guy who was getting a lot of attention as a channel, an entity through which another entity could perceive and communicate.  In this guy’s case it was a very distant alien being called “Bashar." He had a message or a perspective or a frequency or something that was said to be new and powerful.  He had a following.  These invites of Tanja’s had not been easy to come by. 

The event would be local; the cost, “reasonable.” How much?  Twenty.  Okay, I’m in.  And let me tell you something - back in the early ‘80s, a $20 was really worth something.  But I was committed - to the experience if nothing else.  Tanja came over that night in her little Civic and off we went to scope out the oracle. 

I can’t tell you a thing about what he said that night - some gobbledook, some Robert Heinlein, some Deepak Chopra - but the message was not what really stuck with me.  Neither was it the thin reedy voice nor the spasmodic facial tics that wracked the human intermediary’s face as he channeled.  Rather, it was the almost tangible feeling that reverberated in the room itself. 

Once again, this was the early ‘80s - Shirley McClaine was still mostly known for acting and dancing.  Crystals were for bedazzling, not for aura clarification.  Astral projection happened at planetariums.  Guys like Bashar were pretty few and far between, but they were rapidly getting a lot more popular.  The Bodhi Tree was coming into blossom and truly it was the dawning of a New Age - one might even say, the New Age.  When we walked into that unprepossessing living room, that typically inert ceremonial space built into every home in my dreamtract neighborhood, which is to say, just a regular living room in Studio City - when we opened that front door we found dozens of people sitting on a thicket of folding chairs and all the remaining floor space, somewhat subdued in dress and manner but chattering breathlessly, waiting, an undercurrent of anticipation crackling in the air.  Something was happening here, hidden amid the stultifying regularity of my immediate world. Or, it had been hidden, but I had stumbled into it. 

But that just begged the question - if I had uncovered this one secret, of disembodied space aliens preaching the doctrine of cosmic harmony, in one erstwhile unremarkable living room - what about the secrets that remained concealed?  After aliens, what next? 

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Word on the Street

It’s not like I make a regular practice of handing out change, but when I do, this guy is a likely beneficiary.  He’s out there more often than not, putting in some serious hours selling the Street Sheet - and that is difficult work, though he seems to bear up under it impressively well.  He’s slightly built, his hair thin and lank but still barely more black than grey, deep wrinkles in his weatherworn face surely exaggerating his age. He wears jeans and a plain twill worker’s shirt with a shapeless, slightly-too-small sweater.  But his pedestrian wardrobe is not what you notice.  What you notice is how he stands.

His posture is swayed, his legs rising to the side instead of up, his hips rotated away.  His spine wrenches up to compensate, so he peers at you as if he were rolling over upon waking up in a bed not his own.  His face, too, seems twisted, his mismatched remaining teeth giving a slant to his grin that accentuates the hip-twisted sideways direction from which his gaze originates.  He’s got a complicated physiognomy, but a guileless, steady smile and a self-deprecating approach that’s somehow a retreat, backing away along with you with gracious wishes for you to have a good day.

And if he gets you ear for half a second, craftsman that he is, he’ll have you hip-deep in conversation, getting you talking about the weather or the Giants or the new building they’re putting up down the road… the conversations are not oppressive, and he never exceeds the bounds of propriety in what he says or how long he says it for.  I never hear him complain about things.  His hands, when I occasionally gave him some help, are delicately constructed and very soft.  He has a soft touch all around and helping him out never feels like enabling him.  Nice as he is, this dude needs some help sometimes. 

Earlier today I encountered him in the mid-afternoon, which is to say, I saw him swaying his earnest gig at the corner and just walked on up to accept his cheerful greeting.  I could have avoided him but I didn’t, and in that I felt generous already.  He asked me how it was going, and I told him that I was doing pretty well, and returned the inquiry.  I was suddenly struck by a fear that this had been an insensitive thing to ask when I noticed a faraway look come into his eyes, and he said something like this:

“Well I’m all right, you take the good with the bad and I can’t complain, I woke up this morning and thought, that’s a good start. You know I was in the hospital, I got stabbed - well really it started out and I was up in the marina, of all places, three-four months back, and I see this scuffle on the street, but I just stay away from all that and it sort of breaks up, but then this one fella sees me and he just flips out and comes at me, that’s all I remember and I wake up seventeen days later with my spleen took out, he’d gone and stabbed me for no reason at all, they’d had to put a hole in my throat so I could breathe and no food or water for all that time, I woke up and my family was there, they was crying, and I ask’em, why you crying?  And they tol’me: ‘cause you woke up, and I says, it’s only been a day, and they says, no, it’s been seventeen.  And my mouth and my throat, they was all full of blood.  But the whole thing only cost me forty-eight dollars, since I’m a veteran and all.  I lost fifty pounds in seventeen days, and then I went out and visited my brother in West Virginia and he runs a Dairy Queen, and I put on a pound a day, a pound a day.

“And people ask me,” he paused, looking contemplatively at a new building they’re putting up down the road, “they ask me what I’d do if they found the guy who did it, ‘cause you know the police never did find him at all, but if I found him would I come to him with forgiveness or out of revenge, and you know, I just don’t know which one I’d pick, but I hope it never comes to that, because each day, you know, now it’s a gift to me, it’s an absolute gift when you wake up after seventeen days in a coma, and I’m not going to let that guy who stabbed me get in the way of that.”

At this point a well-built man in his 20s or 30s stepped up to us.  He was simply but very neatly dressed, and presented himself with polite diffidence.  “Excuse me sirs,” he began, “I am sorry to bother you but I must return to Mexico and I have no money to do so.  Can you help me?” The Street Sheet guy almost scoffed but restrained himself, saying only, “I’m selling the Street Sheet to get by here, I got nothin’ for ya – but maybe if you came back in an hour or two, I might be able to help a little....” I reached into my pocket and pulled out seventy cents in change, dropped it in the putative Mexican’s palm.  He nodded gravely and walked away. 

It was time for me to go back to work, so I took my leave of Street Sheet guy and walked back up the murky arcade toward my building.  I felt as if there were something more that I ought to be doing, but I couldn’t think of what.  I was out of change already, I’d bought a Street Sheet earlier in the week, and I was still using my spleen.  I settled for picking up my son from day care.  You may not see the connection, but I do.