For all of you who have sent good thoughts toward our very good dog Cosmo, over the past week or the past year or ever:
Thanks.
He’s finally off-leash and uncollared, and he’s chasing squirrels like he always wanted to. His legs don’t hurt him anymore. I just wish we still had him around.
part iii of “stuff that smells.” The first two parts are immediately below. It’s only a total of five items, anyway, it’s not like this is some big list. I just can’t stop yammering about stuff. Except, of course, that now I’m on hiatus for a couple of weeks. See you May 9.
Mothballs: this is an invasive smell. It takes over, kicks other smell’s asses. Nothing else can be smelled when mothballs are on the scene. Unlike some smells I’m used to noticing, these don’t just smell poisonous – they are actually poison, designed to offend living things, to drive them away. Why should these nuggets of deterrent hold any kind of special place for me? Blame Zerline.
My maternal grandmother kept a very clean house, and I got to visit her there every so often as I was growing up. She lived someplace exotic and unusual – Lima, Ohio. For a kid who grew up in LA, Lima was a pretty big change, and an excellent place to do the grandparent thing – high humidity, lightning bugs, vast back lawns that blended together without the benefit of fences… Under my grandparent’s custody I got to play lawndarts late into the creeping evenings, and explored Hog Crick and the whole subdivision, and met girls, and ate sugared cereal each morning in their antiseptic kitchen. And just next to that blindingly clean kitchen was the laundry room, with a door to the backyard which I frequently used. And every time I used that laundry-room door, or walked from the dark, perfectly organized, roll-door garage through the laundry room into the main house, or even if I just stood in the part of the kitchen nearest to the laundry room, I could smell the laundry supplies.
That is to say, I could smell the mothballs, because all other odors cowered and bowed before those fragrant crystals. Northwest Ohio is an area prone to moths in the warmer months, and there was no way that Zucky was going to allow them to take advantage of her hospitality with their filthy multiple legs and germ-ridden hairy thoraxes. So, she mothballed stuff. You could notice it all throughout the house, but in the laundry room it was particularly intense.
The smell of mothballs cleared my head; it felt cool in the summer heat, almost refreshing. When I smelled it, I was reassured of some very important things: that there was shelter and safety, even from a welcome and welcoming heat; that order prevailed in the world; that I could not go far astray before being brought back to a place where my welfare – and that of my clothes – was paramount. And even now, catching the occasional whiff of camphor in a supermarket or hiding in the bottom of a long-neglected drawer in an unfamiliar house, I am called back to Lima and a place where synthetic death turned out to be a decent analogue for the best things in life.
I still use my big honkin’ nose as a key exploratory tool, drinking in scents and smells and even stinks, learning where I am and what’s here with me in an intense, multifaceted way. Smell is actually a tactile sensation – the molecules that carry the scent lodge physically in the sinuses and send signals upstairs about what has been thus acquired. But that’s an oversimplification. Odor, scent, olfaction – the way this sensation touches me is worlds beyond anything my skin can take in. I’m not saying I don’t care to feel things on the surface; feeling things on the surface is great, as far as it goes. But to touch me the way it really counts, for me to feel sensations deep below my skin and into my soul, give me a little something to sniff. Lodge the scent in my mind, and you’ll have my undivided attention, Potentially, for the rest of my life.
smells that touch my memory: part I was yesterday. part III is tomorrow. then I get a short hiatus. oh yes I can. don’t take that tone of voice with me. do you want me to turn this blog around and go back home right now?
Electric motor: there’s a peculiar tang in the air that I associate with a certain class of household-grade electric motors. It’s almost sour, almost sweet – an intensely artificial smell, but somehow comforting to me. Perhaps it’s the smell of a household robot. In my home growing up, it was the smell of mom’s Sunbeam electric hand mixer, a smell that meant she was doing something good: cookies, probably, or maybe a cake. This meant I would most likely soon enjoy not only a tasty dessert, but also a more immediate harvest of rich mixing bowl gleanings. I’d stand by the kitchen counter, sunlight streaming into the room, the ingredients gleaming as one by one they were incorporated into some bliss-inducing synthesis, and beneath and around it all, that curious electrical scent. When I encountered similar kinds of motors emitting similar odors in non-kitchen environments, such as power drills or some plug-in children’s toys, my mouth has literally watered when that smell of warm insulation and whirring dynamos reached my nostrils. It seems technology has left me behind on this one, though; newer motors don’t seem to make the same yummy smell. Sometimes, though, I still run into an old vacuum or sander that smells like the promise of cookie dough when I turn it on. In such cases, the turn-on is mutual.
Creosote: it’s that bitter-smelling black stuff on phone poles and pier pilings, a hydrochemical smell, distilled from tar and impervious to the elements. Yet when it gets in the air around me, I’m sent back to a time when, though some things were not as I’d have wanted them, I was too naive to think ill of my circumstances. I was six, in England, effectively friendless and culturally adrift. Yet sometimes the kids in my block of flats (as the brits so charmingly called it) got together to cavort and carouse as best we could in that quiet time with the limited means at our disposal. We ran around and kicked stuff in the street, threw horse chestnuts at each other, antagonized insects and generally experienced a bit of life free from adult supervision. These breaks in the generally overcast tedium of my life were precious and I knew it. And as a general rule, they tended to be accompanied by the smell of creosote, which seemed to be in liberal use everywhere all over the city – in streets and on roofs and on anything made of wood and by the barrelful in the brownfields… wherever I seemed to go, the odor of wood mummified in this stygian goop had preceded me there and overtaken the environment. I always arrived to the scent of creosote; it seemed to signal my right to let my guard down and enjoy myself. To me this was never the smell of poison and preservatives. It was the smell of freedom. And sometimes if the whiff hits me right, it still is.
Sycamore and sage: growing up, I spent several of my early summers at a camp up in the Malibu hills. A private road ran inland from the sea up a narrow canyon where they’d built cabins along a few miles of creekbed; my dad had a regular chaplaincy gig there, so I got to know the place pretty well at an early age. The camp was rustic, minimally transforming the wild land on which it stood. A canopy of sycamores shaded much of the area. These are large trees that have bark that peels off in flat chunks, big leaves covered with stiff fuzz, and spherical seedpods that fall apart into hundreds of little pollen darts. The groundcover was mainly poison oak and wild sage, both of which I learned quickly to recognize for opposite reasons – one, because it was beautiful and dangerous; the other, because it was plain but fragrant. The sage and the sycamore together wove a dusty perfume that filled the canyon – and my mind. I sense Malibu mountains in the summer heat whenever this particular combination of sage and sycamore reaches my nostrils – which is reasonably frequently, what with my coastside lifestyle and all. The evocation is much more than mere place and time – it’s an evocation of a state of mind, a time when summer lasted half my life and I never had to worry about money or food. It’s the smell of unlimited potential and a sheltered place from which to grow. I cherish it.
This’ll be part one of a three-parter. It’ll wrap up on Friday, and then I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. I’ve almost filled up my essay book and I need to come up with some “content,” as they say in the biz; also, monday’s my birthday and my present to me is taking it easy for a week. The following week I go to Austin for a conference, and doubt that I’ll have access to a computer there. So read slowly, my friends - this’ll have to last into the second week of May.
It’s one thing to believe instinctually that smells have an especially powerful emotional pull, that they can revive memories more effectively than any other sense; it’s another thing altogether for your psych 101 professor (the good one, the one who wrote the textbook) to attest to as much as a clinical fact. The sense of smell has been scientifically linked to somatic memories, recollections in which the whole body participates. Properly stimulated by scent, you can actually sense that old air on your skin again, or that pavement beneath your feet; you can recall the layout of a room that hasn’t existed for years or the way things looked thought a window deep in your past. Dr. Gleitman said that one whiff of the local bay air and he suddenly, instantly, reacquired his old mental map of Berkeley from 20 years prior. And now, 20 years after I heard that story, I know that the smell of a hot dog cart will always remind me of Philly - in particular, the corner of 36th and Walnut.
I tend to be olfactocentric - I’m particularly inclined to notice smells, sample them, pick them out and think about them. I try to learn what I can from smell in any situation, even though all too often that particular spectrum of sensation really isn’t in play. But sometimes my nose tells me a great deal about what’s going on; then again, sometimes it sends me right back to a distant time and place that touches my very core in a way that nothing in the present can come close to reaching. As these moments, my sense of smell is a veritable portal to my past and to a larger, richer world, one that seems to exist at different spots in the space-time continuum at once. My elevated sensitivity to smells enhances the impact of these fugue experiences for me, and even today, some things - ordinary normal things that most people smell and don’t think about once, much less twice - some things that I smell send me right into a nostalgic reverie. Here’s a few of my favorites:
Blue Tip Matches: We lit candles on Friday and Saturday nights when I was growing up. The occasions were regular but that somehow enhanced, rather than diminished, their significance. Even when I might not have had the patience for the whole Friday sunset ceremony, the candlelighting at the start was always nice. And it was always linked to that delicious smell of sulphur and wood, a whiff of fulminant scouring a rough edge on the vision of a splendid table set with bright linen and gleaming candlesticks in the golden evening air. Or, on havdalah Saturdays, when we lit the candle with three wicks and then, after the short ceremony, extinguished it in the pool of wine: the bluetip smoke still hanging in the air, blending with the sudden carbonization of cotton wicking and the vaporization of wine, an odor that permeated my mind as we sat in sudden darkness, singing psalms. Whenever someone lights a bluetip now, be it for a birthday cake, pilot light or cohibo, some part of me still anticipates a numinous, if not sacred, event.
come back tomorrow for the next 60% of my “smell this” stories. or don’t. jeez. I’m not the boss of you.
He came back, and I had to revise my assessment. The guy who was breaking down the fallen boughs returned to finish the job. He wore the same clothes, but didn’t seem to have washed them or himself since he last took on the manual destruction of a dusty pile of dead limbs. His hair, once disheveled, was now positively alarming, a halo of grey neglect. His clothes, once just barely unpresentable, were by now a filthy map of sartorial misconduct. And his eyes, once merely shifty, were now goggling in their sockets, outbulged and restless. This was no well-meaning hippie. This was a man who had lost touch with a reality that had long since lost touch with him.
He’d taken a day or so earlier in the week to break down the wind-tumbled tree limbs that had fallen onto and blocked “my” path, across the street from my house. I’d appreciated his many hours of hard, dirty, manual work, unassisted by any tools but the ones with which his maker had endowed him. The evidence of his handiwork lay undisturbed in the disreputable ivybeds - a bier of twigs and branches, each individually broken off and broken down to manageable size. All that had been left were the three large boughs that had supported it all, and that had fallen and taken each other down in the first place. These were each between ten and twenty feet long, as large at the big end as a big man’s thigh, twisted and bifurcated into sinister tines. These lay on the small patch of lawn near the corner, beyond the ability of any rational man to break them down further without the use of some kind of hardware.
Rationality was not a relevant consideration to this particular civic-minded maniac. It seems he’d grown tired of being mocked by those big old limbs lying in state on the grass, so when I came home from work last Friday, I found him working to break those down too. He was surrounded by a cloud of dust and dirt, and his movements and posture revealed his increasing levels of exhaustion and frustration. He’d obviously already tried all the easy ways to bust these branches into smaller bits, so now he was taking extreme measures. He’d hoisted one bough up against the side of a heavy concrete trash can so it’s smaller end towered high up in the air, and was using a smaller branch about five feet long and six or seven inches in diameter as a club, smashing it down first on the side of the big limb; after several vigorous but unproductive axe-swinger’s strikes, he moved up to the lofty upraised tip and attacked it with overhead blows. With each attack, the bough shuddered and shifted on its precarious perch at the edge of the active sidewalk, but it did not succumb to the assault. It just released, each time, another cloud of dessicated dust, and emitted a low “thump” that bespoke more of futility than achievement.
I was walking past him with a small clutch of fellow muni riders, and we exchanged glances with each other as we circumnavigated his workspace, giving him and his wild wideswinging club as much room as they could want. Some of the people there with me looked amused, taking some entertainment from the spectacle. But I felt it differently. He would never break down those limbs - they’d just exhaust him, soil him, infuriate him and then leave him feeling impotent. After a day of work that had produced obvious results, now it didn’t matter how hard he tried - he would fail, and fail publicly and on a large scale. The more inevitable his defeat became, the more desparately he seemed to attack the deadwood. After a particularly viscious blow, his club shattered in his hands. The limb was unaffected.
Eventually he gave up. The next morning I saw his handiwork where he’d left it, where I’d seen it the prior evening - a jumble of large boughs on the grass, barely affected by his long arduous efforts. A few subsidiary limbs had been separated from the whole, but mostly it was big, battered branches, as unchanging as the sea, mocking the new day’s sunlight. The man, of course, was long gone.
When Friday ended I had just about run out of energy; I got home with my mind full of broken pieces of my week endlessly re-collating themselves into different imaginary crises. Kel didn’t have much of the ol’ vital force left in her either, so she recommended we create a nice clean break with the week just concluded by going out to the Riptide to have a beer. The Riptide is a rustic biker bar out at the ocean end of Taraval, way off in the deepest depths of the avenues. The bar was accomodating, if not actually enrapturing, with plenty of cold Anchor on tap and plenty of cold thrasher metal on the jukebox. People around us seemed to be having real conversations and we were very comfortable draining our pint glasses as the afternoon matured.
By the time we were done and walked out it was nearly sunset; the change from sitting on a warm sheltered barstool to walking into the chilly pacific wind elicited in me a strong desire to relieve myself of some superfluous fluids. Luckily, the “Taraval Comfort Station” was right there waiting for me - a sturdy old WPA edifice with fresh paint, fresh flowers (and a nice variety too), ornamental detailwork on the doors, red tile roof and black-and-white tile floors… I was shocked to find such a truly comfortable “comfort station” way out where the surfers and sharks congregate. Joining me there was a man of middle years, carefully washing himself, his torso and head covered with handsoap suds, painstakingly rinsing off in the tired pedestal sink.... The old pipes rattled like a jackhammerwhen he ran his rinse water, jarring and disruptive in the surprisingly serene setting of the public bathroom, and his ablutions seemed enervating from where I stood. Which was way over on the other side by a wall-mounted fixture, for no longer than was absolutely necessary.
Once I had achieved re-equalization of my internal hydrostatic pressures, Kel and I walked up to the top of a small bluff to watch the sun drop behind the horizon. Once again, there was no green flash, but it was a gorgeous sunset anyway. The dunes were peppered with couples, mostly heterosexual, standing in transfixed embraces as the disk of the sun got redder and redder… as the ocean grew purple in its reflection… as the final thread of sunlight squeezed itself dark against the inexorable horizon.... there was a moment of hushed silence. Then occurred a prompt and remarkably consistent movement among, it seemed, all the women, independently, who each wrapped an arm through the arm of the man she was with, and walked him firmly and swiftly off the bluff, out of the wind and back to the comfort of their cars. These women hauling their men off the dunes, all at once, with the identical determined chilly-nippled stride - it would have been funny if I’d had a chance to stand there and watch it, but Kel was cold so we got the hell out of there.
Friday night we finally watched Donny Darko. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to people who are okay with the ideas of time travel, 80’s nostalgia (same thing, really), the willing suspension of disbelief, and malevolent ghoul rabbits. Also, the phrase “I begin to doubt your committment to Sparkle Motion” is currently one of my personal mantras, though I’m not sure what it’s there to teach me. I’m starting with it as a sort of koan and seeing where it takes me.
Saturday I shopped and cleaned and rested, and attended an interesting citizens’ advisory meeting about public transit on the major boulevard at the end of my block. I’m on those busses daily so I felt as if I might as well find out what fresh tribulations they might have in store for me. Vibrating massage chairs? Special seating for the hygiene-impaired? Monkeys to roam through the passenger section, checking for tickets and raining monkey-spit and feces down on fare-cheats? As far as I was concerned, anything was possible. I expected the meeting to be a rinky-dink affair, poorly attended and without much information to impart, but I was completely wrong - they had brought traffic engineers and urban planners to make a thorough presentation about the whole corridor being studied, and then talked specifically about some plans that have been effective in other cities to make high-volume corridor transit with busses more effective. In small-group breakouts, I then got a chance to bat a few gripes and ideas around with some fellow riders, some of whom I recognized from the bus and would be psyched to talk to again. I actually came up with one fairly radical plan that I think has a lot of promise, but I don’t want to jinx things - especially with the price of plutonium in such flux these days, and the pandas under such tight contractual limitations. Let’s just say, if my plan gets implemented, rapid transit will never look the same again. Those lead vests can be very slimming.
Sunday morning we had Mitch and Catharine come over with baby Eli for a brunchy sort of thing. I threw together a nice blintz soufflee, together with a couple rashers of bacon and a bunch of fried yuca. I also got a pineapple, a papaya, and some blueberries, diced the big fruits, and stewed them up into a compote that went very well with the soufflee. Overall it was a successful gorging. The thing that shocked me, though, was that neither M nor C knew much about cooking yuca. They’re sophisticated worldly-types; they eat in good restaurants and built themselves a real gourmet kitchen because they can use it to proper advantage. They freely admit to going out to eat yuca. Yet the notion of home-cooked yuca startled and excited them. This was, in fact, the second time in a row this humble root turned out to be a culinary exotic for our table guests. So I figured, as a reward for putting up with this rambling substitute for therapy that I’m calling today’s post, I’ll tell you how to cook yer yuca:
Melissa Kaplan says: “People in Hispanic countries use cassavas (also called manioc, mandioca, yucca, yuca, yucca root, yuca root, Brazilian arrowroot) much like those of us in the U.S. use potatoes. Some of the tubers are sweet even when eaten raw; others are bitter. In the case of the Agavaceae, most times the bitterness seems to be in the skin, so peeling the tuber before using or cooking should greatly reduce the bitterness (which is due to its prussic acid content). Fresh tubers can be hard to peel; nuking it for a minute or so may make it easier, just as it does with winter squash. The fresh tubers don’t have a long shelf life, so use within a couple of days of purchase. The flowers, especially the young ones of must Yucca species are tender and sweet when eaten raw. You can even stuff them with a savory vegetable/bread crumb stuffing and steam or bake them.”
So there you have it, right? I’ve never seen the flowers, but I see the roots in many of the better asian and latino produce markets in my neighborhood (which, I’m glad to report, are so numerous that I get to comparison shop). This is what they look like in the store; you’ll often find them heavily waxed, I guess to keep them fresh - they do tend to go bad quickly. But, supposing you can even find them - what do you do with them?
Well, they’re long thick tubers that come to a blunt point at the end - you figure it out. But for cooking purposes, I like to cut them into manageable cross-sections, and then pare them by cutting off 1/4” all around the edges - removing both the skin, and the lighter-colored clear sheath underneath the skin. Cut the trimmed sections into quarters and steam them for about 10 minutes, till a fork penetrates easily. Let them cool, then cut them into bite-sized (or slightly larger) chunks. As you do this, watch for the thick fibers that tend to run up the middle of some roots, or even out from the middle to the side; you can just cut these out with a knife. Finally, heat about an inch of cooking oil in a large saucepan to a nice high heat; dump in the yuca and let it fry up for a while - give it about five minutes at a sizzling fry before you turn it with a spatula, so it can develop a nice golden-brown color. When it’s sufficiently fried, drain it on newspaper or in a collander as you would with fried potatoes, and then serve it tossed with spices like white pepper, paprika and kosher salt. It looks and acts like potatoes, but it has a fun, nutty flavor and a lighter texture. Plus, it can also be used as a weapon. Really, those things are like the baseball bats of the vegetable kingdom. Yuca is considered not so much the silent killer as the unflavored injurer, but still represents the bane of a tragically underreported epidemic of kitchen violence. Do your part: eat one today. The bumpeded head you save may be your own. Or, more importantly, mine.
After brunch, I slept the sleep of obsessive overeaters for 90 delightful minutes, and then I worked on some new material for the upcoming passover seder. I’ve got a lot of good stuff to try out this year, and any festival 3,000 years old demands a bit of an up-do when you dust it off for another year’s service. I worked on it till the evening was upon me, and by the time I was done with it and with preparing this post while I was still fired with the thrill of living these very events I have described for you here today, it was my bedtime. Out of respect for the natural order of things, I honored that bedtime and stopped writing, so that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll just conclude by wishing you all a very gentle monday, and a week that treats you with the respect you deserve. How much respect that winds up being, I’m not in a good position to say. But some of you had probably better watch out.
Big doings today. Here’s a quick scraping of my frontal lobes. Chew thoroughly, you don’t want this stuff coming back up again:
*****
What kind of seed is it that makes things seedy?
*****
·Gugk. This is hideous. I don’t even think they should be allowed to call it “syrup.”
·Well, it is a syrup.
·It’s nothing like maple syrup.
·That’s because maple syrup is made out of maples. And robitussin syrup is made out of robuts.
*****
Here’s a little lesson I learned, so you don’t have to: guys, if you’re shaving, and you accidentally cut your ear a little, you can expect it to keep bleeding for about as long as it takes your bus to get you to your office. And gals, if you’re shaving and you accidentally cut your ear, I think we should talk about finding you an endocrinologist.
*****
Sign waved to me by mostly-toothless, grinning, filthy man at Bush and Market this morning, who was holding out a big cup for contributions with his other hand: Contribute to the United Negro Pizza Fund.
*****
Clearing the Path
I don’t know who he was; I didn’t recognize him but there’s a lot of people in this neighborhood and I don’t recognize plenty of them. I think I first saw him in the morning when I took the dog out two days ago. He was over by the top of the path across the street, the path that cuts through the greenbelt under all those big old eukes and acacias and junipers. Those trees are a century old now and they’re starting to lose a little of that good vibrant tree energy that helps them stay big and strong like those heroic trees you may have read about in arboreal legends.*
But anyway, a big juniper up near the end of the block had dropped a long-dead bough, a big one, desiccated and dry, that took down two other good-sized branches on its way down. This was a lot of wood, enough to block the path completely with an impassible jumble of branches and twigs.
For a week or more I’d had to walk through the questionable ivy bed to get around it. It was an ugly mess, and it was in my way. Of equal significance, the dog didn’t like it either.
Then two days ago I saw this guy out there. His clothes seemed a little baggy but new enough and well-maintained; his hair seemed wild and unkempt but sufficiently clean. I figured him for a hippy do-gooder, rather than a homeless freak. He was standing at the pile of windfall deadwood, methodically, glovelessly, stripping the largest branches he could off the main boughs. Some snapped right off in his hand, and some he had to work for a while, twisting them, yanking on them, pushing with his feet for leverage… Once he pulled off a branch, he’d carefully remove from it every subordinate twig, and break these down to the smallest natural division of kindling. He’d toss these scraps aside onto a good-sized pile growing in the ivy, and then he’d pick up the next branch and start in again from the beginning.
He’d obviously been there a while when I encountered him that morning with the dog, based on how much scrap he’d already produced. I noticed as we walked around him that he’d started, very logically, at the far end of the bough, and was working his way to the part that had originally been nearest to the tree. He still had a long way to go; the pile remaining before him to be broken down still dwarfed all three of us as we passed him on our way to that elusive canine relief we were seeking. He seemed full of anxious energy, mumbling to himself and squinting up into the remaining branches of the canopy overhead. The dog, who can be suspicious, paid the man no attention at all – so I figured he was okay.
When I got home from work that evening, he was still at it.
Then, yesterday morning, I got up and took the dog out again, to find that my singletrack path had been restored to me; beside it, a huge pile of twigs, sticks, and branches hunkered in the ivy, and three big heavy boughs, stripped of all branches, had been dragged out to the lawn near the corner. It didn’t appear that anybody’d taken away any significant amount of the branches and twigs. I didn’t want any of it either, but I appreciated that weird guy’s efforts to clean up the mess that had been bringing me down for so many days. I just wonder what compelled him to do it like that. I guess some guys can’t keep their hands off the wood.
*Like, for example, The Legend of King Arbor.
ya know what? I’m just tired. I’ve got a lot of plates in the air and I’m just going to watch them teeter for a while this morning instead of typing up another chunky opus about what things smell like or some old drunk guy. So here’s what I’m gonna do for ya: here’s a few photos I took yesterday. My fetish with fireplugs continues unabated, and the proof is these two photos of the fireplug at the corner of my block. Plus, the edge of fun (I thought it was bigger, too). Don’t say I never gave ya anything. Don’t you remember that hepatitis B?
but first, a bit of fun: a friend shared a very lovely essay with me yesterday about the analogy of personality (and inhibition) as a suit of clothes. It bumbled around in my head for a few minutes and then this came out:
I am a suit
in search of a body
that can read my dimensions
and carry me out
without dragging on doorstoops
or dangling calfward
my waistband unstrained
yet aligned to the waist
and some shoulders that fill
the deep emptyness sheltered
beneath my lapels
where my heart should be found
I require some arms
that extend to the my wristholes
(agape in defiance
of nothing at all)
that can muscle their way
up within me and out
into part of the world
where I might yet belong
I am a suit
and I’m needing a body
but all I can find
is a hanger.
I think that’s all I’ve got for now. All I’ve got for public consumption, anyway. Isn’t that excitement enough for one day?
That last post mentioned a big birthday party. I’ll probably never get a better chance than this, then, to post this photo of a beloved family friend at that party, helping with the drinks and the block of ice. Yes, I wore the hat. Yes, there were grass skirts too. No, I won’t show you those photos. But thanks for asking anyway.
No way, dude. You’re telling me I never told you the story about the Silver Thunder? Well that’s just not proper. Let’s attend to that right now.
Summer is hot up in the Poconos, and evenings glide with slow grace into night. Wilkes-Barre (it rhymes with silks-scary) luxuriates in these languid evenings between the mountain ridges that define the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. It was to here that we had all travelled to celebrate a big birthday party, and it was here that I and a few of my extended inlaw family found ourselves with a powerful craving for pizza.
On this particualr pizza-craving evening we decided as a group to do something about it. So Big Frank called in an order and then he loaded up a car with Burma and me and he took us on a little trip down the hill, out next to the projects, where Ricci’s Pizza stood.
(One clarificatory note: contrary to what one might think, NEPA has some rightly widely-renowned pizza. My personal fave is Victory Pig, but there’s a lot of the flat stuff around for the discerning gourmand. Crusts are square and semi-thick; cheeses are subtle and the tomato sauce is sweet - a pizza that reminds me of the best qualities of my old grade-school cafeteria pizza lunches. They’re worth the trip to the old country all by themselves, and they’re so local that none of the really good ones even have websites that I can find.)
Ricci’s, as I mentioned, stood near the projects and under the span of the south street bridge, in an old house that, like so many others up and down the street, had had its ground floor converted into a rude commercial establishment. Groceries, taverns, furniture stores and funeral parlors predominated, but there were other shops tossed in among them and Ricci’s was one of these, with a tired old sign in front and creaking steps and hinges as you entered; its white paint had long since gone stained and worn, like most everything else around it. We piled out of the car and filed into the weakly-lit windowless shop.
Four or five exhausted tables with moribund chairs were set up against the side walls, that seemed to pose a standing dare to anyone who’d want a seat; a counter slept across the back of the room, simple and scarred. Behind the counter were a few of the staff, keeping company with an ancient cash register. The shop seemed to be decorated entirely with outdated beer posters, with one good-sized slide-open cooler against the wall with soda on one side and beer on the other.
Big Frank stepped to the fore and announced our readiness to pick up our order. The counter staff took the news with equanimity… and then time sort of… slowed down....
I don’t know how much later it was that I started biding the while over by the cooler. Other patrons floated in and floated out, with a slice or a calzone or such, making little impression on me. I was hungry and that place smelled good. The array of malt beverages under the paltry lighting of the icebox was barely a distraction, but I had nothing else going on.
St Ides. Colt 45. King Cobra. So many kinds of malt liquor, all standing proud in 40 oz bottles like besotted bishops waiting to play beer chess. I’d never heard of most of them. One in particular attracted my attention: Silver Thunder. “Silver Thunder?,” I asked rhetorically. “What kind of a name is that?”
“That’s some good stuff, there.” He was at my shoulder but I hadn’t noticed him. A little taller than me, and a little slimmer, he wore regulation street youth garb with natural ease. With his smooth skin and casual attitude I figured him for his early 20s - barely a man, with the boy in him still faintly visible. His hair was short, cupping his head in a thin blanket of tight tiny curls; his clear dark eyes were fixed on the bottles in front of us, examining them as he spoke softly to me.
“That so? What can you tell me about it?,” I asked as Burma and Big Frank turned to watch the conversation from the nearby counter.
“What I can tell you is, it’s cheap, man. That Silver Thunder, it’s only like a buck-fifty for a 40. That’s a good deal. If you can’t get it together for an Ides, you can still get the Thunder for six quarters.”
He turned to me with this information, inclining his head knowingly.
“How’s it taste?,” I asked, briefly meeting his gaze and then looking back discreetly at the cooler.
“As good as any of them,” he admitted.
“My thing is, that name. ‘Silver Thunder.’ Now, silver lightning I could understand - you can see lightning. But thunder is a sound. Sounds don’t have color. So, calling this ‘silver thunder’ - it’s like calling something ‘pink music.’ It just doesn’t track.”
“Huh. Never even thought of it like that. But it’s not bad malt liquor, for the money.”
“I hear that.”
“Hey Dan.” Big Frank was calling to me; our five pies were being stacked on the counter for us. “Pizza’s up. Grab-n-go. People are waiting.”
“Yeah aright. Later, dude.”
“Yeah, later.”
I hoisted the fragrant cardboard pallets and walked out with Burma and Frank. As soon as the door closed they both busted up laughing. I didn’t get it.
“I don’t get it. What’s so funny?”
“You can go anywhere and just start up a conversation with anybody. It’s just amazing.”
I got into the car, pursed my lips and stared at my lap full of pizza boxes as we pulled out into the narrow street and back up the hill to the family compound. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “He started talking to me.” This only made them giggle more. I knew anything else I said at that point would only make things worse, so I shut up till we got home. Then I ate a whole bunch of pizza. It was good.
So that’s the Silver Thunder story. Now go on with your bad self and make friends with some random stranger at the malt liquor cooler today - those guys are aright!
I think I feel a theme coming on. this is another post that touches upon pizza. and if you’re gonna touch upon my pizza, you’re going to have to wear these gloves. I have no idea where you’ve been with those hands.
We were surprised by the crowds there on Valentine’s Day - we’d picked Gaspare’s Pizzeria as a fallback when our #1 choice was inexplicably closed, expressly because we expected it to be an easy, unhurried, quiet experience. Who goes to the local lattice-ceilinged, basket-chianti and fake-grapes pizzeria on such a romantikal night? Well, apparently everybody does: big filipino families and tough young russian thugs with doe-eyed waify girlfriends, old grey locals and squinting sightseers examining the clumsily-painted murals as if they were florentine frescoes and the wall-mounted coin-operated mini-jukeboxes at each booth as if they were alien technology - the world had turned out. It was quite a surpise, all right - we’d grown used to this place as a quiet, un-updated storefront going back to the middle of the last century when so much of this ‘hood was built. Of course, we’d been there plenty of times, but I guess we hadn’t been there lately. I remembered it as relaxing, dusty, a relic hanging on for survival in a neighborhood where the primary emphasis had shifted from western Europe to Asia to the eastern blok over the past several decades. Now Gaspare’s is packed out the door. What gives?
We figured it out on our next trip there a few weeks later.
This was a heavy weekend, and I mean that from a purely food-oriented standpoint. I know I gained at least five pounds; I fear that there will be some sort of whiplash effect to bloat me up even more by the time tomorrow rolls around. Delayed-action gorging? Yes, this time the impossible may come to be - because this food was just that good and there was just that much of it.
Friday night I can’t describe very well because it was too complicated and pretty for me to begin to do it justice. We went to a new favorite place up in Sausalito, Avatar’s. The bleached blue sailcloth awning at the unassuming stripmall on Bridgeway gives no indication of the creativity and flavor going on inside. I had a mixed curry plate, which sounds dull but was absolutely not; kel had a punjabi tostada (lamb, I think), that was gorgeous on the plate and mindblowing in my mouth. The food was so tasty and the servings, so perfectly proportioned, that we didn’t even want dessert. Also, we knew what the rest of the weekend would bring.
Saturday we cleaned and did some shopping, and then Sha and Helena came to visit for supper. We dined on a fresh green salad with sweet cherry tomatoes and strange tiny avocados, accompanying a plate of carnitas (cooking in our stove from 8:30 that morning till 7:30 that night), seasoned chunks of fried yuca, and sauteed leeks stewed with fava beans. I was served a mountain of food and had no willpower to turn away from it until it was finished. This prepared me well for an enormous individual flan - Sha had brought four ramekins of custardy delight, each one hiding a reservoir of rich amber caramel syrup, and like hell I wasn’t going to finish mine and anybody else’s that was left over. Sha reassured us that it was a fat free, cholesterol free food… then broke into hysterical giggles, it’s like a thrombosis soufflee in there. Regardless, it was delicious and had a wonderful texture, capping off the spices of the seared, smoked meat and the crisp crunch of the yuca perfectly. Afterwards: a hand of Fluxx, half an hour of cartoons, and an evening’s worth of rambling conversation, and we called it a night - but a gut-stuffing, thoroughly delightful one.
The next morning I awoke to Kel in poor health, coughing deeply and worn out tired. She had to stay home and rest, and maybe even catch up on some reading for her coursework. I, however, felt hale enough to get down to the Tenderloin by 10:45 a.m. for a bit of a feed at Bodega Bistro. There I met up with Jeannette, Darryl, Sue and Randy, and the five of us started in with some lovely angelhair green papaya salad with roasted peanuts and beef jerky garnish. Then we were served seared chicken, pork and meatballs in spicy sauce with rice noodles, julienned carrots and broadleaf lettuce - wrap up all the items in the lettuce and dip it in the sauce, it’s a taste explosion that’s almost as much fun to make as it is to eat. The lettuce-wrap dish came with several quartered roast quail (I think), rich brown skin crackling with sweet salty marinade.
We whipped through a few quail and then were served a platter of two large crabs roasted in salt and herbs, juicy and buttery-succulent, irresistable and perfectly matched with a plate of garlic noodles that came along with it… soon, bowls of rich crab broth with oxtail and about four million unnameable vegetables also appeared by our elbows ("eat it quick before it cools! don’t forget to stir in these mounds of lettuce and chiles!"). The conversation had come to a standstill; all one could hear was slurping, the crunch of crabcrackers on the fragrant shells, and groans of oral gratification. Then a few fingerbowls were brought to the table, immediately preceding a tray of pan-seared red snapper, seasoned lightly and assertively firm between the teeth, along with a platter of cubes of perfectly seared filet mignon, marinated in a rich brown sauce and served with stir-fried vegetables. We chewed our way through as much of it as we could, and then, blissfully narcotized, parted company for our respective forms of recuperation. This restaurant was amazingly prolific in the variety of dishes they served us, and I think I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll be going there again.
I got home, did some reading and then took a nap, which was so successful that I had only a few hours of “productive time” to waste before I got to load the dog into the car for a final feast. Kel had stayed in bed all day with the dreaded homework and the hated cough medicine, and felt well enough to want to get out of the house for the evening. We drove out to the east bay and visited Dave and Kim and their kids in their new house, which is looking great. It’s especially nice that we could bring the dog and just let him lay out on the porch; the kids played with him very nicely and he was glad for the new scenery. Kel was glad to be able to rest and recuperate in the comfort of someone else’s living room for a little while, and I was glad for the two phenomenal pizzas Dave got from Zacharys. I ate one slice of stuffed chicken and one slice of plain cheese, matched well with a powerful Bonnie Doon syrah, and then, feeling about as stuffed as my pizza had been, went on and ate about seven million chocolate covered raisins for dessert, washed down with a tasty bit of oatmeal stout. When we got home I was ready for more sleep, and now here I am again, Monday morning, five pounds heavier, and every one of them precious. I wouldn’t trade them for all the gardenburgers in San Francsico. I mean, unless you wanted to garnish them with crabs, carnitas and cheese....
Here’s the thing: I have some essays written up, and more ready to write - all too wordy for today, there’s neither time nor energy for sustained thought. Ergo:
* I was getting into bed last night when I noticed that it had rolled away from the wall. I walked to the foot of the bed and pushed it forward with my shins. Kel stepped in and burst into laughter. I asked her phlegmatically (I am still shaking that cold) “what’s so funny?” She replied, “the naked thrusting is pretty good, but the fact that you’re doing it in front of an open window is what I find so amusing.”
* Please help settle a household controversy: A few years ago I picked up a pork tenderloin that came packaged with a sticker with a little cartoon figure on it - a personified meat thermometer wearing a hat and a broad 160-degree (f) smile, and the cheerful legend, “Thermy says, it’s safe to bite when the temperature is right.” So I peeled him off and stuck him to a cabinet next to the oven where he’s been grinning down on us ever since, my patron saint of roasted meats. Well, last night I was unwrapping some broccoli for supper when I noticed that it had come with a white plastic tag that had printed on it in blue, on one side, “you. me. dinner”, and on the other side, “Hi. I’m your broccoli. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” with a reference to a broccoli-themed health web site.
I think Thermy‘s weirder; Kel votes for the broccoli tag. The question is open for discussion.
* We saw Elf Pimp strutting out several months ago on Clement - all wide cuffs and lapels on his purple and pink velvet suit, flared trouser legs and oversized buttons, a robin-hood style hat and long, sleek, ronin hair; it was Legolas’ mack daddy suit for sure. Well, we finally found him a girlfriend last week on Geary - cellfone fairy waif, a spectrally-slender young woman in an outfit made of a dozen or so diaphanous scarves that draped over her and each other into a wispy, nebulous form. Her legs, emerging from the puffball of garments she was wearing, were very thin, and her cell phone seemed to shine right through her cheek as she jabbered in russian. Her boyfriend seemed a bit embarassed to be seen with her in that outfit in public. But Elf Pimp would have known how to handle her....
* The old crepe place is now the new asian dessert place, and they’ve got some freaky stuff for my mouth to play with. I got #45, mango cubes and mango jelly with mango and coconut juice, and it was delightful; but they make things that they call dessert there out of bird’s nest and crystal snow, which sounds fine til you learn that crystal snow is 4% frog fat. The place is part of a Hong Kong chain, tastefully decorated, well-patronized, with plenty of items on the menu I’d be interested in trying. Frog fat aside, I like the gelatinous shake-based asian desserts. Hey, at least I can admit it.
* Seen on a small piece of paper taped to a street sign post: “I ♥ people who are just as obnoxious and hateful as they always were but now have big glasses and ironic clothing because for the moment people are wearing shirts that say I ♥ dorks.” Beneath that, a link to http://www.ingredientx.com, an amusing site to which I do not seem to be able to make a link this morning. This all went well, I thought, with the graffiti on the local KFC/Taco Bell “double-bypass special,” that reads “LOL! OMG.”
And I think that ought to be enough of a brain-dump to let me concentrate on getting through my week. There’s only 20% of it left, after all… and this weekend might have some good dining experiences to report on come monday! Till then, keep your fat on your frog and I’ll see you next week....
I had always thought of it as a very bad place to try to run a business. The block was on a steep hill and this lot was actually mostly under grade; the wrap-around parking lot was bordered by an increasingly tall retaining wall that came right up to the edge of the sidewalk, as much as fifteen feet above the far end of the lot; an oppressive black welded fence marked the property line. Across the street was a featureless wall that ran nearly the whole block, and over that wall, a gorgeous view of downtown San Francisco, invisible from the store’s hidden acreage. Traffic patterns made it impossible to get into the lot except from one direction that was often not convenient. The paint store there had a dreary sun-bleached sign raised high enough up on a pole to be visible from the street above, and lots of open parking spaces. I think we only so much as set foot in the place once.
Eventually it closed. I expected the lot to be cleared, regraded, and turned into a commercially viable property with an expansive and expensive view. Instead, they only made one change: they took down the tired old sign for the paintstore and put up a new, yet exhilaratingly familiar, red-and-white sign with sort of chunky letters - Trader Joe’s was moving in. To my neighborhood. Thank you, Bacchus.
TJ’s was the one thing I missed most when I left LA. Those stores were always within a short drive no matter where you were, and they had everything the cheap gluttonous gourmand could desire, from produce and dairy to IQF fish to spirituous liquors to dog biscuits to dried fruit and 10-pound blocks of good chocolate.... it was a positive deprivation to move away from these cornucopii of concupiscence.
After we’d been in SF for a few years we discovered a TJ’s in San Rafael. It was 20 minutes and a toll bridge away, and it was a smaller store than those we’d grown accustomed to in the southland, but it was there and it had the goods: cookies and cheeses and fresh breads; frozen waffles and kitchen spices and coffee and tea and burritos - fresh and frozen.... On our first visit to this delightfully familiar store I overheard a young couple who were clearly at a TJ’s for the first time; their cart was half full and she was urgently whispering to him, “they’ve got to have chocolate here, we have to find it...” I’m still sorry I didn’t see her face when she found those 10-pound bars.
As time passed TJs kept opening stores closer and closer to us, and now, once again, I’d have one right down the boulevard. Frabjous. I awaited its opening with increasing anticipation and eagerness. But once they did open, I discovered that I hadn’t been the only one paying attention. Traffic was permanently lined up on that busy, barren street; the city wound up repainting the lines to give people waiting to park a place to stay out of the way. Parking was in such demand that the store had to hire people to direct traffic in the lot. The store itself was thronged, and it was generously proportioned too - plenty of everything. Before long, as I understood it, “store 100” was one of the most profitable shops in the chain.
Not long ago we were sitting in the car, one of a long line of cars patiently waiting to get into the TJ’s parking lot, and I noticed that, across the street, against the long, blank, wall that faced the obliviously unchanging black welded fence to my right, shrubs had been planted, dusty, dull, but living things, spaced every 25 yards or so. These were hearty specimens, six or eight feet tall, rising sturdily out of their missing squares of sidewalk and punctuating the cinderblock sameness of the wall with an additional, regular, but independent, constancy.
Except: I finally noticed, after more than a decade in this neighborhood, that those shrubs had been trimmed into different shapes - spheres and cubes, alternating. These large plants had not been suddenly transformed into Euclidian topiaries; they’d clearly been carefully, consistently, intentionally trimmed for many years to attain these full, dense, leafy shapes.
I wondered whether anyone had ever noticed all that hard work during all that time the paint store had been in the sunken lot. Back then, barely anyone walked these sidewalks - there was nothing worth walking to around there. Anyone who wanted to go to the paint store had been able to drive right down into the parking lot. Only with the advent of TJ’s came crowds that were forced to sit and wait in a place where the shapes of the shrubs could be discerned, their pattern recognized. How many years of effort and attention had gone ignored, and how many people were now finally to be granted an opportunity to appreciate it?
One more good thing in life - this time, brought to me by Trader Joe’s, some random gardener, and the strange little lot beneath Masonic Street.
What’s yours?
The sidewalk was as active and chaotic as the street. Everyone in the churning crowd was busy, distracted, immersed; families swarmed and youths skulked and sino-american princesses paraded coyly past the bins of produce and stacks of plasticware and all the innumerable offerings available to us that grey morning.... I was with my crew; it was JT and Laila and Rob’t, Sue and Kel and me, dipping our respective and collective toes into the mysteries of chinatown. We’d already been into cluttered alleys and explored obscure shopfronts, been exposed to much that lay beneath the surface and, in our little posse, we were starting to feel like we belonged where we were.
This particular stretch of sidewalk on the north side of Pacific was especially busy, being as it was adjacent to Portsmouth Square and old DuPont Gao. Navigating the foot traffic and the shopside obstacles took a bit of concentration: Watch your feet - don’t kick over any stacks of soft porn magazines or pirated CDs. Watch your sightlines - don’t let a bunch of sugar-addled kids trip you up, and don’t fall in behind a wizened clutch of nanogenarian women long since done with hurrying. Watch out for large bag-laden families bursting out of discount stores, blocking the sidewalk with inconvenient attempts to organize themselves and their booty and potentially separating you from your support group. There was a lot to keep track of.
It was in this spirit of attentiveness that Rob’t, and all of us, spied an old woman coming toward us. She wore shabby old clothes, dark and mismatched, that hung off her thin frame like a soiled pillowcase over a stick. Her skin was sallow and looked ill-fitting; deep creases lined her face and her thin neck was wreathed with wrinkles. She dragged a rolling wire basket-cart, stuffed with a variety of bags and sacks and carefully-selected random items. Her hair, black gone the grey of cremains, was loosely tied back with tired fabric; her gait was tight and fragile.... and over her mouth and nose, she wore a soiled, ill-fitting, seemingly superfluous paper respiratory mask. Even in this mad crowd, she seemed particularly mad.
Rob’t passed closest to her. We felt good enough about ourselves at that moment that he ventured a comment toward her in the clamor of the crowd: “Hope that’s working out for you there.”
She stopped on the sidewalk and turned on him immediately, her face racked with indignation, and from beneath the dirty mask that hid the sour gash of her mouth, she let loose a powerful stream of foul invective. Some words I didn’t recognize; some, I did, and they were words of the harshest vituperation. Her curses fell on us like black rain, like a rain of frogs. Between unintelligible words I assume were in chinese, I was able to discern some heavily-accented but unmistakeable comments in english. We were urged to interfornicate, and to cease to exist. Our mothers were castigated. Our ancestry was impugned. Our right to exist on the planet was emphatically denied.
She berated us with such passion and anger that, even in the agitated ruckus of the street, an old chinese man, that most phlegmatic of personages, grey dungarees on his lithe body and a mao hat on his inperturbable head, stopped in his tracks to stare at her, agape and agog, eyes wide with - fear? disgust? shock? A piece of all of these, it seemed. His expression was hard to read but had something to do with disapproval and amazement.
Her expression, by contrast, was all too legible. It was hatred and anger and bitterness, pure and simple - truly, the universal language. No translation was necessary. I had never been cursed out by a crazy old chinese lady before. And now that I have been, I can tell you one thing with confidence: If you’ve never been cursed out by an old chinese lady, buddy, you have never been cursed.
Listen to me, Blog Peoples:
Tell it, Chuckles!
Yesterday sucked. Testify! It sucked long and it sucked hard - and it did not suck in any of the nice ways. It didn’t suck in the way that operates a vacuum cleaner, nor as an old-fashioned fuel pump worked. Have mercy! Lo, it did not even suck in the manner in which physical desire may be expressed between consenting adults. It just. plain. sucked.
And why? Why, Chuckles? Was it because I did not feel physically well? Because I had many small detailed tasks to perform that were both dull and unsatisfying? Was it because of the farting guy with the smelly leftovers in a plastic sack who sat next to me for the entire bus ride home?
No, all these were merely symptoms of an essential suckiness, evidence of a much deeper, structural problem. What was that, Chuckles? What was the problem? My friends - my colleagues - Dear peoples of the web: Yesterday sucked big dangling donkey nards for one reason and one reason only: I sprang forward. And springing forward bites. Blows. Gnaws. Chokes. Springing forward macerates and masticates. It totally, totally sucks.
And don’t give me that crap about farmers and shopkeepers and saving candle wax and all the guff that Ben Franklin spouted back in the days of Poor Richard. I actually went to a college that purports to have been founded by Ben, and you know what? Springing forward sucked there too. No one gets any more done after springing forward. You know why? Because we’re all like the walking dead, off our rhythm and starved for sleep. Ben Franklin didn’t need sleep because he had lots of french mistresses and rum and electricity to keep him all juiced up in various ways. But normal, non-dead people like us who don’t have those things are often stuck with something else: alarm clocks. And whatever the opposite of being juiced up is, that’s what the alarm clocks bring us on Spring Forward day.
Here’s the thing: I love sleep. Sleep is golden, and dreams are diamonds on a chain of clouds. Sleep is what makes this country great. My supine time with the duvet on the big comfy bed is precious to me, moreso than I am generally even aware. And yesterday was my first workday in a year in which I had to function after having been deprived of a big piece of this beloved resource - my daily rejuvination more than decimated, a full hour out of the six I usually get, wrested from my weary, clumsy fingers. All else in life, that I could erstwhile manage in my fully-rested state, is fatally tainted, painfully exacerbated by this circadian insult. And I say - indeed, I preach and plead to you, and to every one of you: action must be taken.
Or, perhaps, inaction. There is no reason to compel us, as a workforce, as a sentient species, as god’s own creatures that partake of the divine likeness, to endure such ill-treatment, such indignity. We should just take the damn day off. I think the Monday after springing forward should be a vacation day, a national holiday: Get Some Rest day. It’s the least they could do for us.
But why stop there, Chuckles? Oh I don’t intend to, party people of the internets. As is my wont, I’ve got a little stack of other holidays I think are long overdue:
Let’s start with a moment of silent recogition. JP-II was a hard man, but he made a huge impact on the world and helped bring many people together. I respected the man, even when I didn’t agree with him. I hope his successor does as well, but in the meantime, his loss is one we all will recognize and feel for a long time. God’s speed, JP, and thank you.
Now:
Easter was not so very long ago, was it? As a jew in a secularly christianized society, I have developed an apprecation for the Easter message of renewal, and its far more preponderant blandishments of pastel bunnies and tiny animals made of marshmallow. I get a nice uptick in chocolate consumption for a few days, and people tend to be in a good mood. Why should (as the sages asked) this be bad?
The only “traditional” Easter tradition we really work to preserve is the butter lamb - an old Polish symbol of, erm, resurrected milk, made rich and golden by dint of… um.... churning… or something.... and it’s holy, because, oh, because it’s in the shape of an adorable lamb, the big guy’s favorite sacrifice: that’s right, it’s a little lamb made entirely out of butter, with peppercorn eyes and tiny leaf ears. This year, sadly, we failed in our search for a butter lamb, so I improvised and set us up with a
sort of a beaver-weasel cross. It was very holy and it sanctified our home quite thoroughly, and then we cut him into pieces and consumed him with toast and pancakes. Just like a real messiah.
Kel and my own tradition is to take a hike on Easter day, and we had a great one in mind - but Kel checked the weather that morning and saw rain coming in, so we scuttled that plan and did a big piece of the 49 mile drive instead. Our map was patently inadequate, so we just stumbled along looking for seagull street signs. We started by rolling right out Geary to
Ocean Beach beneath the Cliff house,
where we walked and
and
communed....
Kel suggested that we come back for a drink if we made it all the way around the route. I agreed, privately doubting that we would get anywhere near that spot again that day.
Our next stop was a quickie at the
It’s long been one of our favorite places, and we rarely visit there.
We then drove down to Ft Funston and around Lake Merced and then up again into Golden Gate Park, which is under construction so we kind of wung it there as far as the official route was concerned. We got out in the park for a short stroll through the arboretum and a quick lunch at an artist’s cafe called Canvas, which was
dee-
lightful,
and then got back on the route to go, eventually, to
which was gorgeous. Why hadn’t we taken that other hike, anyway?
Well, the drive was turning out very well, so I didn’t mind. Our path eventually took us past the old mission and up the
at which point we sort of accidentally missed a whole bunch of stuff on the official route in the heart of the city, but in retrospect that actually seemed like a good idea - all the touristy places we had passed had been jammed; it was a bad time to go to Chinatown or North Beach, and the Civic Center and Japantown were already on my daily commute.... so we just cruised (surprisingly quickly) through Fisherman’s Wharf, where we noticed that a sudden overcast we’d seen over Twin Peaks when we’d been down at the Mission, had developed into drizzle by the time we’d reached the Ferry Building, and was now full-fledged super-soaker rain. This felt right - clean and invigorating. We put the wipers on high and forged onward.
From the wharf we drove up into the Presidio by way of the
where we walked around the lake and among the columns and bereft caryatids; my only regret was that it was raining too hard for me to take many photos, because the place looked astoundingly beautiful.
The Presidio, too, looked great, with rain-drenched cypress groves and ocean vistas and stolid old military buildings standing watch against the fall of night, and I got a great view I hadn’t seen before of the huge new Lucas complex they’ve nearly finished building: it looks like it goes back to the ‘30s or even earlier, with a restrained, consistent design that brings out the details of the nearby smaller, older buildings that served it as models. Out, then, past the big orange bridge and the new “coyote crossing” sign where, a few months ago, I saw the biggest coyote I’ve ever encoutered, and then through to Seacliff and out to Lincoln Park, where we got out to take in the view from Eagle Point and at the big fountain in front of the beaux-arts temple that is the Palace of the Legion of Honor.
A final short ride down Geary put us adjacent to where we’d begun four or so hours prior; we parked above the ruins of
and walked down to the newly reconstructed Cliff House, standing like a grounded iceberg or cruise ship against the driving rain and pounding surf.... We admired the view and
for a few minutes, and then got drinks at the new
a reasonably hospitable if somewhat stark room high over the ocean with
and south looking down Ocean Beach - completing the circle as Kel had anticipated and I’d unwisely doubted. I had a hot toddy and Kel, a manhattan, and then we returned home for a nutritious supper of smoked sturgeon on fresh House-of-Bagels bagels, and chocolate in abundance.
I don’t know about you, but after a day like that, I feel positively resurrected - and I mean that in the good way. Passover is the next big thing on my calendar. Time to finish the chocolate and put the hollow bunny out of its misery.
Errata: Last week I messed up the names of two businesses in Richmond or Albany. I’m ashamed to have to post corrections, but the ‘hut will not conscion knowing misstatements of such matters, so: Caral, Div. Pic-n-Pac. Thank you for your patronage.
Welcome to Friday and the last of five consecutive essays about, one way or another, the place where I work. I wrap up with the final business name from Richmond or Albany, CA. Don’t say I never gave you anything.
Dogs are said to do it because of a temperature differential – a perfectly logical syllogism. Cool water is more refreshing than warm water; water kept in a plastic bowl on the kitchen floor is warmer than water kept in a shaded porcelain tureen; therefore, they drink from the toilet.
Well, I don’t go so far as to drink form that particular fixture, but all my life the bathroom has had the best tasting water in the house as far as I was concerned. It felt colder, tasted fresher than kitchen water. The kitchen tap was fine for water for cleaning things – not so much for drinking. I never actually did a test, partly from my perfect confidence in the results I’d achieve, and partly from fear that my hypothesis would be crushed, crushing me along with it.... But really, I know it and have always known it: in the house in the Valley where I grew up, in both dorm rooms and both houses where I lived in Philly, back in central LA and then up to Pacific Heights in SF: the sink in the room with the lock on the door gives forth the sweetest water. Needless to say, it’s true in both of the bathrooms at my current home – and it’s true at work as well.
I’ve had a lot of jobs, one way or another, since I was 16 or so. I can’t claim to remember all the particulars with particularity, but I can say that my experiences with office kitchens – real or “coffee” – have been predominantly, if not uniformly, disappointing in terms of drinking water palatability. It always tastes as if it had been stored in the fridge for a few days first, then left to rise to room temperature in a cardboard amphora. In the glass, it displays a milky opacity that slowly resolves into an infinitude of microscopic bubbles that, bursting, signal the expiration of all flavor and refreshment.
But as far as I recall, any place I was able to set up my own desk and workspace, I’d bring in a cup and start filling it at the bathroom sink, where the water was inexplicably cool and delicious right out of the tap.
( - and let me pause for a moment to confirm that, notwithstanding LA’s tired tap water from the tailings of the Colorado River before it evaporates into the Mexican desert, and whatever Philly has that it calls tap water (eau de Schulykill), the tap water in SF is exceptional. Pure Sierra runoff, captured in the vast reaches of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, a veritable drowned Yosemite, piped cold and clear and clean to us 24/7. Good stuff.)
I asked the maintenance supervisor at the building where I work about this curious phenomenon of delicious bathroom water and disappointing kitchen water, and received the unhelpful, oblivious answer I’d expected: “Is it? Well that’s weird. Well. I suppose it… No. No idea.” (Could it be that the bathroom water is routed closer to the building’s cooling vents?) “Oh! Well that’s… oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Naw.”
These incisive insights into the mysteriously refreshing washroom water have done nothing to diminish my appreciation of the indisputable facts. I now take my 32-ounce lexan bottle to the bathroom sink and tip it carefully to fill it, scrupulous not to touch the bottle to the edge of the tap where god knows whose raunchy hands may have only just now been thrust, caked with filth, potentially depositing viscous wads of uncleanliness on the metal spigot – but, despite this tangible risk, I persist in getting my water there, and nowhere else.
As an added bonus, sometimes I confuse people when I leave the bathroom with a full 32-ounce container of clear liquid. They look from me to the jug and back, two or three times sometimes. I force them to shake my hand, and then go about my business. Bathroom water makes me strong - if not positively cocky.
Final business name from Richmond or Albany, CA: Pic-n-Pay.
butter beazel
watched
Tulip
Garden
Twin
Peaks
Embarcadero
Palace of Fine Arts
Sutro Baths
soaked up the architecture
Zinc Bar
windows west to Japan
