Monday, July 14, 2008
A Recap So Substantial it’s a Re-HAT
I come before you this Monday with a craw full of weekend still seeping through the semi-permeable membrane that is my mind. From Friday night through Sunday I kept myself occupied and productive. How do I feel about this now? Distinctly divided. I wish I’d gotten more done but I’m glad to see the progress that’s been made. I didn’t get out to enjoy myself nearly enough, except that my forays into social intercourse were in fact delightful and fulfilling. I didn’t achieve nirvana - AGAIN (nor even stone temple pilotdom) - but I did accomplish some decent shopping. But ultimately my experiences - for better and worse - rank this weekend not just in the “positive” column but the “meaningfully memorable” column. It’s not even a column, actually. This distinction is so unusual that it’s usually an asterisk’d footnote. But let’s take things in their proper order so you can stop asking yourself what the hell I’m talking about and why you’re still reading this. If in fact you are. Which I’m not. Let’s go on. (In the extended entry below, I mean. Go on, click through. Whassa matta, you chicken?)
FRIDAY NIGHT was Burger-Of-The-Month night. I went to the shop to pick up the ol’ Soob, navigated the mean streets of central frisco back home, met up with dear friends M and C and E, and we all strolled 12 blocks out to Bill’s Place on outer Clement. They’ve been around for fifty years, and I’ve been there once or twice in that time. But I’m in this club now, where we go out to enburger ourselves once each month, and this time they were coming to my neighborhood to visit Bill’s so it was time for a revisitation. We took over the back patio, which has all the necessities of a burger patio - wicker and wire chairs, round tables, umbrellas, and of course an active koi pond with waterfall and tiny-but-dangerously-steep footbridge. (Because what’s a burger without multicolored carp cavorting in a pool of their own excrement!) We were a crowd of at least 20, and I counted among them many close friends. I enjoyed my meal but I can’t say it will draw me back again anytime soon. My chili cheese burger was massive but not particular distinctive; the chili was runny and the burger was actually overcooked. My curly fries were excellent and my root beer float was pretty good too, but in the end the burger was the load-bearing stud of the whole meal and it didn’t really carry its weight. Others expressed similar opinions about their burgers as well. We had a great time and Zach was beside himself with excitement to be out at 10 pm partying with his little buddy Eli but that was just not enough for me. We may be going to Joe’s Cable Car in the Outer Mish next time, and I’m willing to give that a try despite the warnings that it’s got enough flashing lights to trigger epilepsy in those who previously didn’t even have narcolepsy, poor wakeful fools. No regrets about going to Bill’s, though. Burger Club was fine. And for the record, the first rule of Burger Club is, do not talk about Fight Club. O what a giveaway.
(Additional sidelight on Bill’s: the section of their menu for “Celebrity Burgers” begins with a burger called “Mexican.” Most of their celebrities are pretty uncelebrated, even in San Francisco ((Bernie Ward? Jazzbeaux? Really?)), but calling “Mexican” a “celebrity” just tells me that they’ve run out of celebrities. I suggest they consider the George Lopez, the Jennifer Lopez, or the Ante Lopez. Anything with a name. When Mexico gets its own sitcom we can revisit this. For the nonce, Mexi Can’t.)
Saturday is the new Monday, in that I used to have monday mornings off to play with Z but now that’s been shifted to Saturday. Kel wants us out of the house so she can work on her overthruster and bake elaborate desserts which she consumes before our return. Instead the boy and I went to - wait for it - Mervyn’s (a discount dept store) for to look for shoes for the little man. His existing stock of footwear had turned the corner, as it were, from “disreputable” to “CPS on autodial” so I thought I’d try to gussy up his peds before his preschool teacher took me aside for the “hygiene talk.” Zach immediately found some cheap white sneaks with spiderman all over the sides, spider-shaped treads on the bottom, and red lights in the soles that illuminate when you stamp really hard on the downstairs neighbors’ ceiling. They are already wearing out, a testament to the staying power of comix-based cobblery, but I cannot regret the purchase. Mostly because the other option was Hulk sandals that turn into giant green construction boots when you step in dog crap, and I couldn’t have those mutating in the boy’s closet. That’s my job.
Additionally at Mervyn’s I found and purchased the cheapest little “computer” toy I’ve ever seen, I think. For my $10 investment Zach now has a “computer” he can carry around that plays 20 different “games” involving spelling, numbers, “music” (euphemistically described) and reading basic words. The screen is about 2x2 inches, monochrome black-on-grey (no backlight), and makes 8-bit graphics look sophisticated. The audio is equivalently crude, sounding like an angry quizkid ("Wrong! Try Again!") or a particularly cheap harmonica. Still, it’s got a QWERTY keyboard and a carrying handle, and it has proven more popular than suppertime, bedtime, or many of our in-house video options. It’s loud (and has no volume control) and some of the programming is counter-intuitive, but I’m okay with that. Zach is learning from it every day. Mostly that his dad is a freaking tightwad, but also that computers control freemasonry. That’s in the advanced modules but I’m pushing him to exceed his limitations. The boy is three years old. It’s time he knew that the Knights Templar were really just Linux prototypes.
Important household developments are in process, as well: the big cheerful blue-and-yellow “study” is in a transformative phase on its way to becoming Jesse’s room. Part of that task was accomplished last weekend when I broke down the big honking desk (my bigness no longer honks, which actually is not such a bad thing if traffic is light), but additional furnishing-related evolutions are in the works - the big dining table that had been lying disassembled in a corner has to be moved to the garage, and the good ol’ crib had to be re-acquired from friends who were storing it for us across the bay and reassembled so that we could put el nino nuevo safely to sleep in our own area code. Success rating on these efforts is “moderate but cognizable” - we got the crib back but have not yet reassembled it, but the hard part was cramming it in our little car and hauling it back upstairs, and those preliminary obstacles are now achieved. Plus, I wrapped the old dining table (the top of it anyway) with heavy plastic tarps, and taped it lovingly with three-quarters of a roll of cheap shoddy masking tape, so I can - eventually - drag it downstairs and hide it behind the stack of dusty, lonely bicycles I fully intend to start riding again two years ago. There is a lesson to be learned here but I am too lazy to figure out what it is. The point is, broken-down furniture now crams the once-efficient “study” but it’s all a work in progress, which is better than when it was a sterile and efficient place in which very little happened. Plus I get to move and build furniture soon! Wait, that’s going to suck. Forget it, I’m moving out.
Let me now address a few issues of particular significance, because so far this has been much nothing about a dude. I’ll go from novelties to decrepitudes to sublimities, because that’s how life works bucko and you’d better get used to it.
Novelties: New establishments I need to visit in my neighborhood include the Hard Knox Cafe (local outpost of an apparent southern home-style favorite in the Dogpatch district ), Cafe Cabana (replacing a moribund old coffeehouse that made caffeine sad and lonely), Cup & Cake cafe (replacing a long-departed liquor store I’ve mourned here in the past), and the Royal Market (which Kel tells me has a nice cheese counter, a good charcuterie counter, nice looking produce, and a wide variety of other decencies available; they’ve been on the verge of opening for months now and it’s nice to have a real grocery so close by again). We’ll see if I actually get to any of these places, but I must say that I like the urbane renewal. More coffee and sausage in walking distance? No complaints from Mr. Jitters McCasingstuffer here....
Decrepitudes: For as new life burgeons, it sucks the vitality from what had theretofore been working okay. This is the glorious cycle of phailure, and I am riding its shaggy crest as follows: The soob, which, as I mentioned, was in the shop last friday, was not repaired because the wrong parts were delivered by the genius repair brains at What’sThisThingCalled Incorporated. However, the part I actually needed costs half what the wrong item they actually got was going to cost, so that’s in the plus column. Feeling threatened, the minus column has rallied the troops and now includes the following items needing repair: Air Mass Meter (like a choke, controls the air-fuel mixture), Fuel Sender (tells the gas gauge how much gas is in the car), struts, and undetermined (due to lack of time when every other goddamn thing in the world seemed to be wrong) repairs to the air conditioner which now does not blow cold air - it just blows. Lucky for me I really, really trust my mechanic, and I got a cool photo of the floor of his shop. I’ll post photos later. I’m still dwelling on decrepitude. Don’t rush me; good decrepitude demands to be savored.
As to which: my crappy cheap-ass cell phone, six months old and finally updated with all relevant phone numbers, has started to develop a big orange scab-like mess at the top of the display screen. It’s growing a few pixels bigger every day and is just starting to eclipse the part of the screen where actual information shows up. Much more of this and I’ll need to replace it again, or stop worrying about who I’m calling. That might be easier, actually. It’s not like I care that much as it is right now.
But the most significant problem I’ve had to deal with lately was discovered on Saturday night, when Kel went to peek at some recorded television and was greeted with an unusual grey screen - “Powering up, please wait.” She waited, but the screen never changed. When she told me TiVo was acting up I leapt into manful action: I unplugged TiVo, waited a while, and replugged it back in. Success! - that is, I successfully replugged it, but it was still giving us the same sorry message. Kel checked on-line support and they suggested “unplug, then replug.” My relief at having been confirmed in my cybertronic genius was mitigated by my aggravation that we still had problems, so I got on the telemaphone to see if their live support staff was any more lively and supportive. Turns out, they were not. “You’ve got a hard drive failure,” the humorless woman advised me, humorlessly. “You need a new TiVo box.” So I went and got one. It’s not like I’ve got cash for this stuff lying around but we rely on that sucker on a daily basis - for Zach as much as ourselves. Between giving him a few minutes of selected cartoons before his bathtime, and my slavish fascination with Kat Deely’s hairstyles on “Oh You Fancy DancyPants ShmancyPants,” we were not going to go another 24 broadcast hours without DVR capacity. And we didn’t. The new box has twice the memory, came with a $150 rebate, and was a lot easier to set up now that I’ve done all the heavy lifting setting up the old busted model. It was four years old when it went to the great recycling center in the sky. I guess I should consider myself lucky. Instead, I consider myself poorer, but DVR-enabled. And enablement is what I’m all about, as you surely can see by now.
Which brings me to the final chapter in this voluminous screed: the sublimity of strolling on a summer evening. We were out on Saturday on our “crib retrieval” mission, up in the Berkeley hills. We’d had a delicious supper and some big fruity wine (sometimes it pays to be big and fruity) and the sun was still hovering over the horizon; the weather was balmy and the kids were energetic so we decided to take a walk. Kim led us up toward the small main drag of her neighborhood and delivered us to the foot of a plum tree growing next to the curb in front of someone’s house. The tree was heavy with dark purple plums that hid among the purple leaves till, like one of those “hidden picture” images, I could refocus my eyes just right and suddenly see loads of fruit for the plucking. And pluck we did - all of us were eating fresh, tree-ripe plums right there on the sidewalk, spitting pits into the street. The fruit was warm from the sun, and bursting with sugary nectar. They were smaller than store-bought plums but so much sweeter and more fulfilling, and we ate them nigh to satiety. On our way back down the hill to our starting point, more plum trees kept appearing before us, each of them laden with comestible delights. Some were big purple trees, some were thick green shrubs; some were spindly shafts of a trunk and some were enormous sheltering fruit factories. We must have found seven or eight of them on our way home, till we were so surfieted with heretofore untouched plumfruit that we couldn’t try any more from the new trees we kept discovering.
On our way we also encountered two apple trees (apples were very small but not bad), a pear tree (fun little pears that looked better than they tasted), an apricot tree (strangely, these were pretty much inedible even though many had already fallen, overripe, to the pavement), and some blackberries (mostly still green but I got a few that were at the height of ripeness and absolutely amazing). While I’d usually have compunctions about making so free with the fruits of other people’s labors, we always plucked fruit at the apex of readiness, and had we passed it by it would surely have gone to waste; our path meandered through minefields of fallen fruit and denuded plum pits that testified to the time-sensitivity of our mission. By the time we got back to our hosts’ house, the sun had set, huge and red in the smoke-tinged air, but the evening was warm enough for shirtsleeves and my mouth was scintillating with the flavors of a farmer’s market’s worth of fresh fruit. My only regret: fig season was not yet upon us. I guess I’ll have to go back in a few weeks. Anyway, the blackberries will be worth it all by themselves.
