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.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Tamburger Pt. II: The Pounding

Coming out of woods dark and primordial, the scent of bayleaf sticking to my sweaty gritty face, I saw open trail ahead of me - all downhill.  So much for my slow and steady days - I knew how to handle this kind of road.  I didn’t even pause to enjoy the view of the mountain face dropping 2000 feet to the impassive grey pacific - I just nosed out, stood on the pedals, sent my weight back and the bike forward.

I was rolling fast, feeling the machinery click and clatter under me, and I had a revellation: I was all alone; this beautiful wild country was, for the moment, all mine and no one else’s.  “Damn,” I thought to myself, “I am really completely by myself.  There is not a soul around for miles.  Just me, my bike and my mountain.  This feels absolutely right.”

It was at that moment that the trail on which I rode suddenly plunged, transformed into a twisting roughened ravine instead of a flat reliable roadbed.  Things happened fast.  I pushed my butt further back off the seat, tried to aim for some traction, a patch of dirt I thought I could trust; I tightened up on the brakes - gently at first and then more aggresively as the bike failed to slow down at all as I pitched down into the steep gulch.  I no longer felt like I was in control.  I could see how this might end up badly if I weren’t careful.  Carefully, then, I took a fraction of a second to evaluate my options.  I was heading into a deep rocky rut, one likely to deprive me of both steering and brakes.  My tires churned forward in a direction no longer of my choosing.  I was heading for the lip of the rut and If I couldn’t stop pretty much immediately, I’d go airborne.  Experience taught me that always hurt, so I pulled back hard on the brakes while I still had brakes to pull.

Something moved, and I moved with it.  My momentum lifted me over the bike’s handlebars, which I released as they twisted away under me.  I knew that the only option now was to try to land intelligently.  Luckily, I didn’t have too long to think about it.  Extricating myself somehow from the toeclips I tucked, rolled, landed on my right ass cheek, tumbled and slid down the hillside for a while.

I lay where I landed for as long as I needed to.  My breath eventually came back, and then the feeling in my extremities.  One bit at a time I tested my body for traumatic injury: nothing was broken.  Everything worked.  I was filthy - dirt was ground deep into my entire right side and dust lay thickly on the rest of me; my right knee was bleeding freely from a big deep serving of road rash, and my left elbow and arm were scraped up pretty good and starting to seep red too - but nothing was broken.  That meant everything was fine.  I slowly stretched myself back into vertical orientation and considered my circumstances. 

I then made two discoveries: I really was all alone out there on the side of the mountain; and the bike was now unrideable.  I had flown over the handlebars because they’d suddenly twisted 90 degrees in the headset and were now parallel with my front tire.  It was all messed up and I wasn’t prepared to fix it.  My helmet was cracked, too - I must have hit my head at some point.  I didn’t remember that.  That didn’t seem like a good sign.  However, my head felt fine.  On the other hand, my knee was bleeding pretty steadily, my whole body was astonishingly filthy, blood was starting to trickle down my left arm and my right butt cheek was profoundly sore.  An ache was settling into my joints and muscles.  The sun was now hidden by fog and my sweat was cold on my skin. 

Well what do you know?  This darn story still ain’t told.  Come tomorrow I ought to be able to wrap it up.  See ya then, I hope.  Today I have an out-of-office appointment.  Should be a real good one.  Wish me luck, past and future!

Monday, July 19, 2004

Tamburger - Preparing the Meat

So I’ve never told y’all the story of my bad fall from the bicycle? Not the little fall when I broke myself so very badly, but the great big fall that gave me the amazing enormous bruise?  Well, what the hell kind of a host am I?  You’d think I had a concussion or some damn thing.  Let me fix you up right away then: get out of the saddle, unstrap your cleats and helmets, enjoy a nice long burst of stale water from a warm plastic sports bottle and see if you can’t imagine:

Me, with my trail bike.  Not the shiny new well-tuned GT hardtail, but the old one.  The turkey rider.  A Nishiki Colorado, blue, early 90s vintage, from which I’d removed all identifying decals from the right side and all but five decal letters on the left that read “rad” across the top bar and “HI” down the main tube.  The cro-mag cromo.  21 gears, no shocks, already by this time (’95 or so) extremely well-used maybe even abused a little.  I’d dropped it a few times, and myself in the bargain, but I knew it intimately - geometry and response; I trusted it implictly and explicitly.  I knew it would never get me into more trouble than I could get out of.  Of course, I knew a lot of other bogus crap too.  I just never figured it would let me rack myself up too badly. 

I had been given a book of trail rides sometime previously and I’d barely cracked the spine on it.  I was feeling one night like I ought to stretch my skills and test my capacities as a velocepidist, so I browsed through the book till I found a cool ride: a long challenging loop through some really beautiful country, some of which I’d already gotten to know - up one side of Mt. Tamalpaias, over the top and down the other side, and back to the start around the perimeter.  It would be an all-day trek but I was invincible - if only in my own mind. 

I called a few biking buddies to find someone to come along with me but when the search proved fruitless I went on on my own.  Yes, “They” say you shouldn’t do that, but “They” say a lot of bogus crap.  Who knew that, this time, they knew whereof they spoke?

So, reasonably early one morning, I drove me and the bike out to the Richardson Bay overpass and parked the car.  The first part of the ride took me along flat bayside trails north into Mill Valley, where I rode up Blythedale to the Railroad grade firetrail - all the way to the top of the mountain’s easternmost and highest peak.  Once I’d summitted that 2,300 foot mountain from sea level I knew I was unstoppable.  I might not be fast but I was damn strong and in total control. 

I took the ridge road from the peak out to Potrero Meadows and through Laurel Dell, splashing through streams and scaring the deer, feeling more empowered with every turn of the chaincrank.  The route sent me past the Pantoll Ranger Station and over into the wild western flank of the mountain - a mountain I was beginning to think of as my very own. 

Hmmm.  This story goes on for a while.  I’m going to take a little breather and finish it off tomorrow.  Unless it finishes me first, of course.  Have a productive Monday, if you dare!

Friday, July 16, 2004

Tasting the Night

If I were to be honest about where I stood, socially, when I was graduated from high school, I’d have to admit that I was well-liked in a fraternal sort of way.  I’d not “gone out” with anyone from my school; the few girls I’d seen socially were strangers, cyphers to me, moreso after our anxious little dates than before.  Among my classmates I was recognized as smart enough to be a source of test answers in various classes, sucker enough to be in a lot of school plays, and driven enough to engage in various extracurriculars that only looked cool on my college app - morning announcements, debating club, political action society.... but as far as I knew I was not seen as someone romantically interesting.  I was a friend to a lot of girls, but not a boyfriend to any of them. 

As a result of these traits and activities I got invited to the “right” graduation parties, ones with actual invitations that some people didn’t receive.  However, I bore the shame of going to them all alone. 

To back up a little, second semester of senior year I’d had a brief period of studliness.  At one point I was juggling promising relationships with two girls from other schools and felt the confidence in myself that is, in the final analysis, the most powerful kind of aphrodesiac.  For a few brief weeks, I’d had charisma.  During that time I got over my fear of osculation.  I can’t say I learned to kiss, but I learned how not to not kiss, and that was a big step in the right direction for me. 

But I did not learn how to manage myself or my relationships with my new curious friends, and by the end of the year I’d squandered all the libidinous capital I’d so painstakingly acquired over the entire preceding lifetime.  Which really wasn’t much anyway, but lord how I missed it.... And these were the ideas that floated through my head at one particularly riotous party I attended to celebrate the turning of the era of schoolbound youth to that of unleashed young adulthood right around the time the Grant High class of ‘86 was moving out into the world.

This party had everybody: jocks and brains and socies and hotties and people whose names I knew but whose role in the scene I hadn’t quite divined, and vice versa.  One of these was a girl whose name I don’t recall, though I’m sure I knew it at the time.  She was beautiful in a cold, forbidding way.  Her body was a luscious dessert on which I’d feasted my eyes in all the several classes we’d had together.  We had different racial backgrounds, different circles of friends, different interests; we were completely different from each other.  I didn’t recall ever speaking with her one-on-one before.  She scared me and excited me.  I was pretty sure, after this party, I’d never see her again. 

I discovered her standing alone in a side yard, drinking a cup of punch.  I approached, stood before her.  “Can I have a taste of that?” She handed me her cup and I drank from it, tasting only her eyes as I stared into them, dark and limpid in the night. 

“Thanks,” I said, handing her back the bright red plastic cup full of bright red plastic beverage.  She looked down to take it from me, then back up to my face.  For some reason I suddenly just knew that I could get away with it, so I leaned forward and my mouth closed over hers.  Her head tilted toward me and my hand encircled the small of her back; our lips flattened softly and parted as we tasted each other. 

I pulled back before I overstayed my welcome, broke contact, let the cool night air brace me like aftershave.  I stood before her, breathing deeply but not hard, moderately aroused, quietly relaxed. I saw, for the first time that night or perhaps ever, the whites of her eyes as she asked me, “Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to know if I could.  I wanted to know what it was like,” I answered with a controlled low voice.  “It was nice,” I added as a polite afterthought.

“Please don’t tell anyone about it,” she requested, a familiar coldness returning to her warm moist lips.

“I won’t,” I assured her,and then added, superfluously, “Don’t you, either.” I turned and went back into the party, kissed no one else that night or the rest of the summer.  It wasn’t till I met Kel three years later that I actually had a date with a girl.  That date, for the record, is ongoing.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Take Notes

Growing up, religion was a very rational prospect.  Dad saw to it that I understood the basics of religious observation: sabbath prayers, havdala, festivals, monthly services and weekly sunday school at the synagogue; I knew obscure bible facts, the relationship between Mishna and halacha, the actual number of positive commandments in the pentatuch.  While some of the explications and epistomologies were ultimately grounded in concepts that did not readily admit to logical conceptualization, I was satisfied both that it would all make sense in time, and that the real point was in the theological facts and observational protocols I either knew or knew that I would eventually know.

But the essence, as it so often does with children, escaped me.  I truly thought that religion was about knowing answers, a game of holy trivial pursuit.  But every so often I tasted a different experience, one that seemed to contradict the formalism of the indoctrination I’d received.  On Saturday nights when we’d gather in a dark room for havdalah, I knew the prayers by heart and how to hold my hand to see the sabbath spirit take her leave of me, but my pride in these shreds of knowledge was consistently eclipsed by the sheer emotional power of the extinguishment of our only light, a braided three-wick candle, in a dish of sacramental wine.  To see that flame sputter and die in the carmine nectar, with the smell of alcohol and sugar and carbon all together in the sudden blackness of the room, filled my heart with something that had no logical explanation for me, that was not amenable to rational analysis.  I felt a response of the spirit, mine and more than mine, and while it felt true and right, it felt different than the rest.

Mostly, anyway.  Some of the rest also felt big inside - numinous, as I would later learn.  Just before Pesach when dad would pull out a special book - bigger, richly illuminated - from which he would conduct the ceremony of destruction of leaven, burning in our fireplace the crusts of bread we’d found hidden around the house during a candlelight search - that was moving, that was powerful; unknown to me, Dad intentionally conducted the rites incorrectly so as to heighten the impact of the experience on my sister and myself.  Those nights affected me in a way unrelated to my knowing a particular answer or a particular prayer.  That fireplace became a door between whose jambs one might pass into a different realm altogether.

There was one place I knew I could always get a good taste of the big feeling: from Cantor Brown.  I will admit, here and now in this public forum, that I grew up listening to crappy music.  When a 10-year-old boy doesn’t know any of the top ten favorite songs of his classmates but memorizes the score to Brigadoon, that 10-year-old boy is going to get beaten up - and he will deserve it.  But whenever I went out for services at ol’ Temple Beth Hillel, a place I generally associated with the minutae of legend and observance, Sam Brown reminded me of the other side of music and, through it, reality and what lay beyond it.  He would chant… well, anything, really; he could chant the phone book; but much more typically it would be an ancient prayer or blessing or invocation; he’d lean back with his eyes closed, a tall bald man with a silver goatee under the broad white shallow synagogue dome, and the passion would fill him: you could see it happen, and from deep in the earth beneath his feet a voice would arc upwards, passing through his flesh and lifting into his chest, his throat; the hollow of his mouth became a conduit for it and the sound poured out of him and filled the sanctuary with vibrations and heartwrenching tones, tropes thousands of years old echoing through all our bodies, filling up the ether with music and spirit, unifying creation in a richly textured tapestry… we’d mumble along with him, the mysterious words familiar, the antedeluvian tune instinctual; but the music - that came from him.  It was where I first learned to distinguish spirituality from religion.  It took me a long time to begin to learn to inculcate it in my own soul - but at least I knew it existed, that it was out there, and that I could get a solid shot of it once a month if I felt dry. 

Cantor Brown retired to New York shortly after I left high school and by now I’d expect him to be well on in years, if still among us at all.  But on the off chance that you encounter these words, Sam, or this sentiment: Thanks for feeling what you so obviously felt, and for sharing it with us.  Some of those notes you sang are carrying still.

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Damage Assessment

* Are you mad at me?

* What do you think?

* I think that sounded like you’re mad at me.

* I just wish you hadn’t said those things to them.  To them, especially.

* What? (.....) You wish I hadn’t said what?

* You really don’t know.

* Are you playing some kind of game here?  No, I really don’t know.  What did I say that you’re so mad about?

* It was hours ago, Peter.  Six goddamn hours ago.  And you didn’t even notice.  Not till now.

* What do you mean?  Of course I noticed.  I love you, honey.

* No.  Fuck that.  Don’t get started with that.  I’ve been sitting next to you on the verge of tears ever since 5:30 - that’s six fucking hours - and you didn’t even notice.  You have no idea whatsoever what’s going on.  You didn’t even know anything was going on. 

* Well, if you’d share these things with me instead of bottling it up for hours and hours and then playing hide-the-ball with your emotions --

* We were sitting with your clients, you shithead!  I wasn’t about to cut my own throat to spite yours!  I couldn’t say or do a fucking thing but sit there with my teeth gritted hoping I’d get through dinner without crying!  I had to bury it tonight - but goddammit, we’ve had this conversation a thousand times.  I can’t believe you’d try to tell me I don’t talk about these things - I talk till I’m blue in the fucking face and you tell me you love me and you don’t want it ever to happen again but do you even hear a fucking word I say?  It’s sure not sticking in there, you’re just making the same mistake over and over and over again and… you know what?  Now I see why.  You just don’t pay attention.  You look like you do but you don’t.  It’s the only way you could fail to notice how badly I’ve been hurting tonight.  And if I can be in this kind of pain sitting right next to you for that long and you don’t even notice, I just can’t feel safe with you.  And I can’t live where I’m not safe.

* Wait a minute.  What are you telling me?

* Goddamn it, Peter.  Why couldn’t you have opened your eyes for fifteen fucking second for once in your life?

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

CD Playa

How did I get to be the baddest cat in the cubefarm?  Why are all the ladies so hot for me?  Where did I learn to be such a high-caliber funkofied muthah? Well it all must be because this just showed up at my desk.  Curtis Mayfield and Quincy Jones and Bobby Womack and me are going to grab some hats with wide brims and some big-ass guns and some women who show a lot of leg, and we’re going to party like it’s illegal.  Luckily, I already have the leather vest-pants ensemble.

Choice Cut

The hardest part is not knowing.  I can make tough decisions if I have all the information.  I’ve endured pain; I’ve caused it, too.  I can live in complex, compromised twilight worlds, balancing devils on the edge of a sword.  If I know what is really going on, I can make an appropriate choice under the circumstances and I can live with it.  It may take all my strength and will, but if I can be confident in my decision, I can withstand hell itself to carry it out. 

But when I don’t know enough to choose, that’s when things break down for me.  I keep reviewing what I know, hoping it will lead me to some conclusion, hoping that, with sufficient analysis, I’ll be able to see my way through the thicket.  I repeat partial propositions and hanging halves of incomplete syllogisms.  I think myself stupid.  Then I try to choose a course of action that minimizes the downside potential - without really feeling sure what, or where, that potential is. 

Sometimes I can put off making a decision till things resolve a little.  Sometimes I have to decide anyway, even while dithering over half-facts and unknown consequences.  Merely making the choice in such situations is wrenching.  Having the confidence to live with it takes a kind of strength that beggars that required for merely enduring the consequences.  It’s the difference between total committment to a known end, and resigning myself to a proposal that I hope will do less harm than good.  It requires faith, not in logic and facts, but in myself.  That turns out to be a lot more challenging, in the end.

Monday, July 12, 2004

Cat Nap

Dogs may be creatures of habit, but cats are habits in living form.  They eat habitual food at habitual times in habitual ways; they habitually like certain things, habitually demonstrate certain responses.  Even their fabled curiousity is a habit - “ooh look, haven’t seen that before - ah well, guess I’d better check the manual… hm, ‘thing, new:’ - oh yes, now I remember: time to puncture it with my razor-sharp teeth - and, failing that, I’ll just knock it over....”

Our cat Rufus (a girl cat, despite the name) is much beloved, by me in particular.  I feed her and pet her, jab her twice-daily with insulin-laden syringes; I brush her out, sanitize her litterbox and trim her nails and occasionally I even bathe her.  She’s always been a sweet little sugarlump, nobody’s enemy and a friend to anything upholstered and stationary.  Keep that in mind, please, as I also mention that she’s a simple-minded, clumsy and not very clean animal.  And that’s okay - we didn’t take her home from the SPCA so she could vacuum and mop for us or repair our motherboard or any of that.  We just wanted a warm fuzzball to purr when petted.  (I mean, other than myself.) And since that’s pretty much all that Rufus does, it’s been a harmonious relationship lo these 14 years. 

Except for this one habit Rufus has: she likes to join me for my last little bit of sleep of an early morning.  She does this pretty much exactly the same way just before every dawn, and I can honestly say it’s driving me up a frigging tree.  I’m ready to put her in masking tape restraints with the way she cozies up to me in the wee hours.

Friday, July 09, 2004

Dickhead

California’s Secretary of Education is leading by misdirection, it seems.  At a recent event in Santa Barbara to promote a book club he’s wielding this summer, a schoolgirl in the audience mentioned to him that her name was the same as that of an Egyptian goddess.  That’s good, right?  Impressionable youth meeting paternal figure from the state government, taking pride in herself and in her ancestry, embracing literacy, and maybe even polity?  What could go wrong?

Apparently, the thing that went wrong was that the Secretary misunderstood the girl’s comment.  In fact, he misunderstood her so grievously that he responded by telling her that her name means “stupid, dirty girl." The girl seems to have dealt with the incident with more equanimity than I would have, calmly correcting him and letting the stupid, cruel geezer off the hook.  But I gotta tell you, Mr. Secretary, you should not be making fun of anybody’s name.  Not just because you’re the Secretary of Education and you should know better, should be setting an example of probity and propriety for the children under your jurisdiction, whose lives you shape by your words as well as your deeds.  No, there’s a simpler reason.  You should not be making fun of people’s names, Mr. Secretary, because your name is Dick Reardon.  Dude, we don’t even have to say it wrong to be making fun of you!

Hot Shirt on a Silver Platter

He pulled on his new shirt with the childlike enthusiasm he once felt when he’d get a new notebook at the beginning of the school year.  It was riotously colorful, a petrol puddle in polyester, draping his slight frame like a sack on a fencepost.  Though he was generally disinclined towards self-examination, especially in the physical sense, he evaluated his new look in two different mirrors as he savored the feeling of the slick fabric on his bare skin, smoothing it unnecessarily with his hands.  “This,” he thought to himself, “is a nice shirt.  I look good in this shirt.”

He gathered together a basket of dirty laundry and carried it out toward the front of the apartment, where she was resting on the couch reading a thick magazine.  She put it down with a gasp and a snort of laughter.  “What is that?,” she inquired with mock horror. 

“My new shirt,” he responded self-assuredly. 

“Where’d it come from?”

“I got it from a street vendor.  And before you say anyting else about it, I really like this shirt.  It’s comfortable, I look hot in it, and it makes me happy.”

“So you’re happy? Good, then.  Be happy.  If that’s what it takes, then you should enjoy.”

“I will then.”

“Good.” And with that she returned to her reading and he stepped outside, went down to the laundry room with the basket of towels under his arm.  At the entry to the laundry room he paused to hold the door open for great-auntie.  She wasn’t anyone’s great auntie in particular; she was just the old woman of the building, an energetic, opinionated, benign matron of advanced maturity and questionable judgment.  She stopped as she went past him, a small sack of warm dishcloths in her scrawny wattled arms. 

“Oh Michael, thank you!,” she effused.  “You’re well?”

“I’m great, Mrs. M.  Just doing some laundry.”

“Well you go ahead, young man, you just go right ahead.” The buzzing overhead tubes shone their unnatural light down on them and he couldn’t help but notice the even less natural color of her hair with its wispsy grey roots over a crusted seborrheic scalp.  Her moles cast shadows over the pits of her large-pored skin.  Her makeup was thick; he idly wondered if it could be peeled back like old paint to reveal geologic strata of expired cosmetics.  “Oh my,” she continued enthusiastically, casting an appraising and approving glance over his torso, “what a marvelous shirt!  It’s like a party!  I could wear a shirt like that myself!  We would be twins - wouldn’t that be cute?  Where did you get it?  Was it expensive?”

“Umm.... it was a gift,” he mumbled, looking down toward his navel, trying to submerge himself in the colors.  “I gotta get this stuff in.” He walked past her into the laundry room and loaded the machine, letting the door slam shut behind him unceremoniously.

When he got back to his apartment he went directly into the bedroom and pulled the shirt off, tossing it in the corner behind his nightstand and pulling on a maroon fleece sweatshirt.  He picked up a chunky novel and walked up to the living room.  “Give me some couch,” he asked.

She shifted her legs a little and he slid into the cushions opposite her.  He thumbed through his book as she peered at him over her magazine.  “Your fancy shirt?,” she asked.

“I’m getting rid of it,” he replied without looking up.  “I don’t think it quite fit.”

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Meeting the Neighbors

One of my many wonderful birthday gifts this year (months past, you totally missed it, TYVM) was a gift certificate to a dive shop.  I’ve been treating my visit there to redeem it as, effectively, part of my upcoming vacation in tropical paradise.  Kel and I went last weekend and I got a high-tech snorkle and some flippers and an underwater flashlight, because in three weeks we’ll be living next door to the sea with fish, dolphins and giant turtles filing a lagoon around which we will revel for a week. 

Anticipating this little shopping trip in anticipation of the big vacation, I was reminded of Negril, where Kel and I vacationed after getting married (to each other).  Our resort was a series of thatched huts perched on cliffs at the island’s western tip.  There were some things about the place that weren’t perfect, but location wasn’t one of them.  Our front door opened onto a small concrete patio that fronted the edge of the seacliff.  As soon as we arrived we dumped our bags on the bed, got into our natation costumes, and hauled booty down steps carved into the stone cliff to a protected bathing lagoon.  The water was clear and very blue, the sort of color that ony looks real in person and must, for purposes of emotional reconciliation, be considered impossible at all other times.  Sunlight glinted off its purled surface with a perpendicularity that felt both natural and bizarre.

Iraq Scissors Paper

I’ve had it up to here with most everything today.  Good thing that Memepool turned me on to this link.  Defy the tyrant at your peril!  RAWRR!  NYERMMMM!

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

Bad Meeting

I could smell the acrid stench of desparation wafting from their four armpits before I even opened the conference room door.  “Here’s your ice water,” I told her.  She smiled widely and reached up across her colleague for it.  My nostrils tried to crawl up my nose.

In Town for the Convention?

Maybe it’s only funny to me, but when we had the big biotech convention in town recently, I kept misreading it as “biotch.” So there would be all these articles in the newspaper about the police getting ready for the “biotch convention” and I’m thinking, man, these must be some righteous biotches.  The ordinary ones we usually have freak me out bad enough.

Late Again: Bloomsday Greetings

In keeping with a one-day pattern of tardy commemorations, I wrote this back on June 16:

Monday, July 05, 2004

Four-Minute-Mile of July

I sat wondering what to post for July 4, the day we celebrate the signing in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence, and it occurred to me that I’d written something about another date I wanted to commemorate two months past but I never got around to posting it.  Well then, in recognition of the grand tradition of Declaratory Independence, I’m going to spurn all mention of patriotic matters from here on out and talk only about an incident that happened fifty years ago in the mother country, that I heard about again two months ago, then thought about it for a month before I wrote anything about it, and then took another month to post.  Hey, being fast isn’t the only thing that matters, right?  And so:

The short-term anniversaries should certainly be observed on the proper date, but once you get up to 50 years of history, exactitude becomes less critical.  It is in this spirit that I, untimely, take this occasion to honor Roger Bannister, who broke the 4 minute mile.

Friday, July 02, 2004

Happy Foist of July

Instead of dumping another of my patented “sopor-tastic” essays, I’ll just hurl a bunch of tidbits into the ‘sphere here and hope something among them amuses you.  I’m making no promises here.  You may want to start drinking now and get in the right mood.