Friday, October 28, 2005

Kong Me

I don’t know about you but I had a very productive day today.  I attended a long meeting at which I helped determine the distribution of nearly a million dollars of grant funds.  I knew what I was talking about and kept up with the facts and figures.  I ate well at lunch and didn’t fall asleep during the post-candy-binging afternoon session.  All in all, not a bad day.

But that was not all.... I also was able to assemble this important list of the....

KONGS THEY LEFT BEHIND ON SKULL ISLAND:

Bling Kong (he roams the jungle at night)
Ding Kong (with a delicious cremey center)
Ring Kong (the one Kong that rules them all)
Sting Kong (charismatic frontman)
Oglethorpe (not much of a Kong)
Schwing Kong (bummed that he missed both Faye Wray and Jessica Lange)
Cling Kong (keeping your flavors fresh in the fridge)
Thing Kong (could kick Ben Grimm’s ass)
Merovingian Kong (basically like King, but all fancy and like that)
Hong Kong (this is a Chinese city, not a giant monkey)

Have a good weekend and make sure you pick up the right monkey.

looking back: last weekend, before it’s too late; PLUS SWEET AND HOT CARROTS AND ZUKES

Oh man, how could it be Friday again and I have not even expounded on the last weekend, which was so joyful and delightful?  Here’s a brief recap before it fades into the mists:

I knew Friday was wrapping up well when I saw my favorite headline in months: Leak Probe Fallout!  How embarrassing!  What’s that coming out your leak probe, Scooter?  Is that a little fallout?  Not on my watch, capt’n!  I ended Friday (last) with a successful meeting and some good Zak and Kel time, and even 20 minutes of shuteye.  Then I drove ten minutes down to the ‘Mo while listening to some of my favorite music on the a.m. radio.  I left my car as dave drove up and we walked together to the venue and breezed on in through a fairly active sidewalk scene.  The show: DSO, as usually, played superbly, and the show they replicated (cuz that’s what they do), 6/6/76, is from my favorite slice of the G-Dead era.  Blazing Sampson D opener; blazing MNS; blazing Big River; blazing Lazy Lightning into Supp Jam; blazing Promised Land… two full sets of really first-class American dance music. 

But there was also - the scene: it was one of those shows where I’m likely to be around the middle of the demographic and there’s all kinds of lonely old freaks getting their harmless groove on.  This could easily have been one of those shows. Instead, I was one of the older people there, and I was surrounded by beautiful, youthful people who knew the Dead better than I did.  The first set was normal enough, about fifty feet out from the stage (house left), surrounded by a widely disparate crowd.  Then, during halftime, we met up with a friend of Dave’s from work and his friends, we forged our way to near the stage for the second set, and the tone of the evening shifted for me.  Suddenly I was mostly surrounded by beautiful women.  This has happened to me a few times before ... on the bus, or in an elevator ... the law of averages almost dictates it.  But I’m not used to it at an hour-long dance concert.  A rotating harem of dancing beauties circulated around me, each minding her own business but indisputably there adjacent to me.  It made for an entertaining evening, even apart from the blazing tunes. (And for the record, Kel was at home that night.  Dave had called the day before with a single ticket and I grabbed it.  Rather unlike my recollection of guys’ nights out, but maybe there have been developments in the past few months of which I was unaware.)

Finally, there was the Fillmore staff, who provided unending amusement and entertainment.  Four brief examples: watching the door staff loudly and vituperatively “86"ing a young man, shouting at his back as he muttered imprecations to the sidewalk and walked away as quickly as he casually could, “that guy doesn’t belong here!  86’d for LIFE!” For life, dude.  Bummer.  Within a few moments I was walking in past the same door staff, on the heels of a lovely young woman.  They checked her ID: “oh, you’re so young!” Then they checked mine: “Oh, you’re not.” Yeah.  heh.  shuddup.  Then there was the heroin chic bartender, all hot in her light black dress and long blonde dreds, looking bored and tired; I’m thinking as I watch her filling orders, I guess these guys see it all, they don’t care who’s on stage, it’s all the Fillmore to them and all we are is a bunch of slightly more courteous hippies, I guess this music means nothing to them ... and then she broke out singing along with the band to the chorus of Brown Eyed Women, which is a good barkeep’s song (brown eyed women and red grenadine, the bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean...).  Nice to know the ‘heads are around even where I am sure they aren’t.  And then, finally, on the way out of the venue, the staffer who stood out on the sidewalk littered with dazed dancers at one a.m., shouting his reminder to us: “Make sure you brought your shoes out with you...” Thanks, Mr Man, for that important reminder.  I wasn’t going to forget, but I can see there were a lot of unshod folk out there who needed your help.

So that was Friday.  Saturday was dedicated to housecleaning, shopping, and cooking dinner for Sha and Helena, who finally got to meet Zach.  I made orange roughy in a tagine sauce, fried plantain chips, a white bean and garlic puree, and a very tasty veggie dish I’ll describe more fully: 

SWEET AND HOT CARROTS AND ZUKES

The key to this recipe is julienning: you need a mandoline or a food processor that will chop toothpicks out of your veggies.  (And not just for this recipe - you need one anyway, in general.  Make a note of it.) Julienne some carrots (I didn’t measure a damn thing so you’re going to have to play this by ear) and get a little olive oil nice and hot in a pan.  Fry up a small handful of red pepper flakes in the hot oil, and once that’s cooking along add the carrots and some raisins; stir it a little to get it all in the oil.  Fry it up till the carrots are about cooked, and then add a tablespoon or three of sugar; stir well.  Then dump in about twice the volume of julienned zukes than you used of the carrots, and a few ounces of rice vinegar.  Cook it all together till the zukes are cooked, and then drain off the extra liquid.  It�s damn good stuff, and a cheerful addition to the plate.  Helena, whom I did not realize didn’t eat fish, was very gracious and said it was just as good as having a real supper.  I am dishonored, and the inclusion of a nice baked apple tart dessert in Bird’s Custard barely redeemed me.  Still, it was great to see S and H, and they were very gracious guests.

Sunday, then, was Dr Andy’s annual sukkot party.  The sukkah - a flimsy structure with branches for a ceiling and gourds hanging from the beams - stood on his new deck, which is palatial - stretching all the way up around the top of the big barrel hot tub.  I ate loads of roast turkey, spinach balls and dip, salads, fruit, home-baked challah, all kinds of tasty treats that I’m no longer clearly recalling - plus way, way too many of Kel’s pumpkin cookies, baked fresh that morning.  It was a great crowd and a great way to celebrate a great festival, even if we didn’t actually do an official lulav and esrog shaking ceremony like they tell you in the books.  Whatever.  We partied just as hard as any of them.  My favorite quote from the afternoon: “I have a plan.  All I need is a plane, a car, a house, and a stove, and I can blow somebody’s face off.” Jack said it, and I believe it.  And I don�t think there’s enough left to be said about my weekend to justify your time to read it, so I’ll leave it at that.  Today I have a big complicated important meeting that should be exhausting but fulfilling, and this weekend should be significantly less busy than last weekend was.  That’s good, too.  I’ve had a busy enough week already and I’m ready to take a nap. 

Seacrest out.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Joining the Bureau

this is the last in a series of essays about furniture and furnishings.  my problem is that I never know when enough is enough.  but this is certainly enough, so thanks for your patience and have a delightful day.

When my dad came to visit, the first thing he wanted to see was his grandson.  After that, I think it was the dresser.  I guess I can understand where he’s coming from.  It’s a powerful piece of furnishings, that. 

I have a vague recollection of being very young and having a wide, low chest of drawers, cheerfully painted in the clown-pants colors that were so typical of juvenile décor in the mid-60s.  But at some point early in my youth I got bumped up, furniture-wise: I got the old dresser set.  I don’t know where they’d been hiding till then, but in my defense I didn’t know much anyway.  I did know, though, as soon as the old dresser set showed up in my room, that it was old.  Not as old as it said it was on the matching mirror, on which the date 1762 had been carved in bold relief around a succulent bunch of grapes, but old enough that my very own dad had stored his very own goods and serviceables in it as a youth.  That’s right, I was using my dad’s drawers, and I used them thoroughly.

The mirror, as I mentioned, was festooned with carven grapes and was generously proportioned (not unlike myself, in some ways).  The dresser that matched it was a tall, heavy piece of work, with complex joinery and a chain pattern carved into the sides of the front.  The first two drawers were rather shallow and a little narrower than the bottom three drawers, which jutted out on the front and sides like the lower floors of a stepped skyscraper from bygone eras.  Drawer #3, at the top of this wide lower tier, was designed so as to give the impression that it was three drawers – two real narrow ones on the sides and one reasonable one in the middle, with four cast pulls across its face to complete the illusion.  Beneath this drawer was where the chain pattern started, on either side of the two broad, deep bottom drawers, both of which were designed to look like two drawers each, split up the middle.  Beneath the very bottom drawer was a wide panel incised with a grape vine relief and a sort of curvy swag pattern, bottoming out with a thick stubby leg on either side and one in the middle for luck.  All the drawer pulls, except for the middle drawer, were black iron rings fastened to black iron quatrefoils.  In all, it was a very solid, sturdy, heavy, large piece of furniture.  Frankly, it daunted me. 

I could barely see the top of it for years, being too vertically impaired for its lofty heights.  It smelled old, looked old, felt old.  Putting my underwear and socks in it lent them an air of sober dignity that the clown-color drawers never imparted. Dad’s dresser anchored my room like oxen anchor a barn.  Its presence made all my other furniture shape up and behave itself, and I tried to follow suit.  The mirror, similarly, reflected an image of sober rectitude, and I don’t mean it that way you troglodytes.  I mean, I looked serious in it, possessed of a certain grave sagacity.  My clothes, crumpled and mussed and cursed by my lack of sartorial sensitivity, still seemed worthy of respect when they occupied those wide oak drawers. 

The style, officially, ostensibly, was “Swedish provincial,” but I knew it better as the furniture equivalent of what I wanted to be when I grew up – solid, sturdy, discretely ornamented, capacious, and, somehow, overtly understated.  I liked my chest of drawers.  I like them so much that when I accidentally burned a hole in the top with an incense cone when I was in the fifth grade, I felt as badly as if I’d injured a friend – and I didn’t have enough friends to get away with that kind of crap.  As I took care of it, it seemed, I took care of myself.

Naturally I left the dresser and mirror behind when I went to college all the way on the other side of the country.  The first two years there I lived in dorms and used their standard-issue veneer pressboard dressers, which were as serviceable as they were uninspiring.  The last two years I got a great vintage cherrywood deco bedroom set that enabled me to build a residence for myself that became a party destination for friends and freaks all across Philadelphia.  But when I graduated and came back to LA, I moved back into the same old bedroom in my dad’s house in the valley and the same old dresser set again. 

They came with me when I Kel and I moved out to midcity while I was in law school, and then I took them back to Dad’s house two years later when we moved on to SF.  I wanted to leave those drawers behind me when we stared afresh up north.  I might be wearing the same old underwear, but I thought maybe I’d be moving forward if I stored it in new drawers. 

So I went to a cheap unfinished furniture shop and and got an undistinguished dresser, tall and narrow and well-furnished with drawers, but abjectly lacking in personality.  That was okay, though.  I had moved, in large part, to escape the past.  The absence of a received personality in the form of my furniture just improved my opportunity to build my own habitation and my own personality from scratch.  All I had to do was paint, varnish, and finish this dresser, and it’d be all that I could ever want it to be.  And so would I.

I never did finish it, though.  Over years, the raw pine wood mellowed to a soft yellow color, richly stained with various grimes and resins, lightly shredded on its middle levels by Sydney the cat, who used it to keep her claws sharp.  It did me well and I appreciated it.  So what, if it never inspired me.  It was furniture.  If I wanted inspiration, I knew better than to look for it in a piece of wood.  I was ready to set my own agenda, and, if anything was going to inspire me, it would be my own actualization. 

Not too long ago my past and future collided and I found myself again possessed of the dresser.  Dad had kept it all these years, wrapped up in his garage, awaiting my pleasure.  For some reason unknown to me, it suddenly grew incumbent upon him to get rid of it, and he offered me its custody.  I drove down and got it a year or so ago, and as I hurtled back up the 5 with a cargo bay full of hardwood and silvered glass, it felt as if I were helping a sibling or cousin move back to his rightful place in my family home.

The dresser set furnished our yoga studio for several months, imbuing my practice with gravity and focus.  Then came the day that the studio turned into a nursery.  That dresser was too much for a tiny infant so out it came, along with startling quantities of other stuff we’d forgotten we’d stowed away in it.  The dresser went into the study, which was rapidly filling up as an all-purpose storage area; the mirror hung around for a while where it was, peering curiously into the little room as it filled up with a crib, changing table, swing, and buckets of toys and clothes. 

Soon enough we solved the puzzle of what went where in our reconfigured living space.  The key was when we realized that the boy needed a dresser, and not one that was huge and heavy.  He needed my old unfinished pine jobbie.  We could paint it two tone sky blue with clouds and it would work perfectly for him.  And I – I’d take back the big chest.  Which, very recently, I did. 

The pine drawers just got their long-deferred surface treatment and they look fabulous.  The big old dresser sits across from our bed now.  I stuffed its drawers with my various sox and t-shirts and less mentionable items.  I look down now with startling ease on the nugget of char that I burned into its top, and the whole thing feels cozier, friendlier, supportive and familiar.  I admit, it still feels strange to grab those iron rings again, to rifle through those same unchanging drawers now full of clothes that reflect my own current condition, rather than the self I tried to be back when I last lived out of it.  I’m getting used to it again, though, and that feels good.

As for the mirror, it’ll stay in the nursery.  Somehow we acquired another one that’s bigger and matches the finish of the dresser more closely.  The original mirror looks more aged, with a dark patina and that weird 18th century date up top.  It looks good next to the door in the nursery, near the light-up moon and star and the mobile that plays real music by real composers.  Zach likes mirrors, and when I hold him up to it, it’s fun to see him giggle at himself, a sweet fresh face in that old frame, clear curious eyes reflected out of that old jaded glass.  I’ve seen my own face in that mirror so many, many times, scrutinizing myself with mystified skepticism.  I don’t know if I’m any less mystified or skeptical now but at least I’m okay with not knowing.  And now Zach can reflect on his own mysteries in that same silvered face, and in his own sweet time.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Closeted Doors

good gracious, he’s still on about furniture and furnishings?  here’s PART IV of this self-indulgent exposition on the inanimate that animates our lives.  plus, some photos at the end, in case you get bored!

The adoption happened faster than we expected.  There was supposed to be three or four more months for us to paint the nursery, buy stuff, and get ourselves ready to be a family of three. No complaints, of course, but the accelerated timeline left us scrambling to pull all the odds and ends together while bonding and keeping all the necessary tasks sufficiently addressed – laundry, feeding, bathing, diapers, plus some things we had to do for the baby, too.  It’s made for a full agenda most all of the time. 

The house has slowly evolved to accommodate more of Zach and less of the superannuated junk that we kept stored in various cloistered corners and closets, out of sight and mind.  For example, there’s the doors.  Not the doors of perception, but rather the opposite – the doors of concealment.  Maybe I should explain further.  No, really, don’t try to stop me. 

Our bedroom has a short hallway to the master bathroom.  Both sides of this hallway are lined with long, shallow closets.  At first, these closets were each accessed via two sliding doors, big wide panels of wood that rolled on runners and hid our various habiliments.  Several years ago, though, one of my doors stopped rolling quite so smoothly. Turns out, one of the plastic wheels on which it rolled had shattered.  Search though I might, I couldn’t find a replacement – the hardware probably dated to the 1950s, and it wasn’t generally available anymore.  However, I was able to minimize the inconvenience of the broken roller by lifting out the whole damn door and stashing it in another closet where we kept a wonderous array of crap.  Then I yanked the other sliding door and put it away too, and thus I obtained unfettered access to my entire collection of hanging clothes at all times.  I could review all my sartorial options in a single glance, instead of having to run the doors back and forth.  It seemed like such a positive step that Kel asked me to do the same for her – to remove her closet doors and stow them away in the cluttered junky storage closet in the spare room. 

It made life so much easier, and, shall we say, more transparent.  All was revealed.  Our ownership of our own clothing was renewed, and, by extension, we renewed our utilization of some of our old forgotten duds.  But more than that, the openness confronted us with - forced us to confront - that which we’d tried to hide.  Untidy tailings of existence were thrust into our awareness from where we’d left them, apparently hoping they eventually somehow would evaporate for us.  But they hadn’t, so we cleaned up what we’d uncovered, faced down those dusty unexamined corners of our most familiar hiding place, and went stalwartly forward.  Our closets – the ones from which we fished out our clothes every day – held no more secrets from us, no more surprises for us, anymore. 

That lasted a while, anyway.  Then, so much later that it was recently, we found ourselves hustling to turn our utility room/yoga studio into a nursery, and therefore had to delve the depths of the storage closet.  That’s where we rediscovered the old master closet doors, vast opaque faces soaking up darkness.  I hauled everything out of the storage closet: cinderblocks, boxes of books and personal memorabilia, disfavored luggage, and four six-foot-tall wooden panels ranging from four to five and a half feet wide, dingy white and dustwebbed, still wearing that blank rolled-back stare that provided cover for so long for that which I have already forced myself to face down.  I pulled them, too, out of the storage closet, into our long main hallway, where they leaned quietly against a featureless wall and very nearly blended right in.  They weren’t garbage – they weren’t even mine.  The landlady would want them back, eventually.  I didn’t know what to do with them, so they just stayed there, quietly, unobtrusively, hiding their own shadows and their own secrets, for several months. 

Well, we just finally took the last step: we shlepped them doors on downstairs and out under the airshaft steps behind the garbage cans in the garage.  The doors are now hidden in the landlady’s well-packed realms of unexamined surplussage, instead of in my own.  I don’t have to think about them anymore.  Or, more to the point, I don’t get to ignore what’s behind them ever again. 

and for those who care, there are some more photos in the extended entry.  sorry, none of them are of the closet doors.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Visitors from Another Timezone

hello again, here’s a quickie placeholder post to let you know I’m still here - just a bit overwhelmed lately with extracurriculars.  I’ve got to leave for a meeting at work very soon so I don’t have time to give up another of my lengthy “furniture and furnishings” rants, I’m sure you’re devastated to learn.  Houseguests left yesterday and I crashed pretty hard last night, so I’m behind in my posting.  However, I’ve had a chance to format up several photos and here’s a brief tour of our visit with Frandie and Maile:

here’s the kids trying to eke out some cuteness:

and the visitors plus zach:

Little Maile got into everything, which was great to watch:

We all took a nice car tour of the city and saw the vistas from the headlands

- and sealions at pier 39

- and the zoetrope building

- and Cafe Vesuvio, where the beats got nicked. 

We also took a walk through the park to a brewpub on Haight - see how Zach has learned from his daddy?

On Monday night some friends came over and we turned their kids loose on Frank.

And unfortunately, that’s all that this
intrepid traveller has time to share this morning.  Still to come: Golden Gate Park and the De Young Museum opening festivities.  Plus, several thousand words about doors and dressers.  I’m out of time, but certainly not out of words.  Have a great Wednesday.

Friday, October 14, 2005

Breaking with Tradition

Let’s take a momentary break from the “furniture and furnishings fest” I’ve been indulging in (yes, there’s more to come) to recognize the season of reflection that’s just concluded.  Rosh Hashona and Yom Kippur are days of deep spirituality and meaning for me - except for this year.  This year I was slammed at work with special jobs to finish and colleagues out ill or on vacation, and I had committments to see relatives making rare visits to the blustery bay, so I had to suck it up and work right through both holy days.  This actually bummed me out pretty thoroughly, and even Kelly’s thoughtful gesture of making a traditional jewish apple cake for R.H. didn’t really bring my soul back into tikkun olam fettle.  But I did get a lot of work done at my desk, was recognized as a member of a hardworking team, and could take some solace in my labors having had a positive effect on thousands of people less fortunate than myself.  It probably should have cheered me up, but it really didn’t.

Then came Y.K. and I still remained at my desk.  No fasting, no Story of Jonah, none of the traditional spiritual remediations I’ve grown to appreciate so much over the past many years.  I just worked, and groused, and grew increasingly scowly. It was as if I was punishing myself for failing to atone - a transitive punishment to be drawn out over the whole year, rather than expiated in one fell swoop on Yom Kippur.  Even my old traditional post-holy day gathering to break the fast at Al and Jackie’s house was off - we’d been invited but respectfully declined because we expected Kel’s brother and his family to have just arrived in town for a short visit and wanted to spend the time with them.  However, that much-augured arrival turned out to be on Saturday, not Thursday, so we’d backed out of the party for no good reason.  No services, no break-fast.  I felt adrift, isolated, unconnected and unfulfilled.  The longer the day went and the less spiritually I spent it, the more my dudgeon deepened. 

Then, as the day passed the half-way mark, things began to change.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Seating Arrangements, plus bonus photos

part III of an apparent series of riffs on furniture and furnishings.  does it mean something?  should I be worried?

I tend to spend entirely too much time in my chair.  At work, at supper, at large and in general, once I get myself planted I tend to stay planted.  Sometimes I even think of getting up for a moment, but then I get distracted by a piece of lint or something and wind up not even shifting my weight or straightening my back.  It’s another tragic case of PDI - Persistent Deskly Immobilization.  If they had a telethon for it, I’d be a heartrending case study.

Exacerbating this unhealthy habit, I’ve got a pretty decent place to work.  Sure, I don’t have a view, and I work in a cube with 2/3 height fabric-and steel miniwalls, and my my desk is a modular officespace workstation, but whatever.  I’m comfortable enough and I like everybody I work with. 

Without pointing any fingers, this was not always the case.  For a while there several months ago I had a coworker who just rubbed me the wrong way.  It got to the pint that I did everything in my power to avoid her, which was tough becaue my job and hers had a lot of shared duties and we occupied adjacent cubes.  It took a lot of concentration for me to build my little modular walls up to the ceiling in my mind, and it took a lot out of me.  I’d have been smart to have gotten out more during this era.  That’s one more thing I’d have done differently, in retrospect.  I can’t say I handled any of it very well.  But whatever.  I didn’t go anywhere.  I just sat at my desk and ignored her as best I could, and I think the feeling was mutual. 

This individual was of underenhanced vertical stature, and wasn’t comfortable with the standard desk furniture that the organization provided.  Consequently, we ordered a special smaller chair fo rher, among other such accomodations.  Well, long story short (heh), she decided to take another job elsewhere.  Fine with me.  Let some body else accomodate her.  Let me enjoy my desk-time in peace.

The only thing was, I started to realize not too long ago that my desk chair wasn’t really my friend either.  It couldn’t help how it was made, but after a few hours in it I’d start aching - my back, my head, my fundament.... it didn’t roll very well, either, and it was heavy, and the arms were too far apart.... Plus, my habit of eating at my desk, combined with my inherent untidiness and the chair’s broad geometry, had left the blue fabric of the lower cushion an unsightly map of spilled salad dressing, dropped won tons, and sundry other unconsumed comestibles.  It was getting to be too gross to sit in it.  My chair was actually becoming my nemesis.  When I got to work in the morning I didn’t even like to see it, much less settle my delicate undercarriage on it. 

In my typical way, I addressed this problem at first with serene periods of carefully ignoring it.  That only worked for a short while, though.  Once my mind alights on a subject, especially one that fries my scrapple, my attention tends to fix itself on it with a white-hot focus, regardless of resolution to the contrary.  Within a few days, if not hours, I could barely think of anything other than the stained and merciless Seat of Antagonism.  And just that quickly, the solution presented itself: the shortie accomodation chair suddenly reappeared on my radar.  I hadn’t seen it for months, but suddenly someone had rolled it into our mini conference space across the corridor from me.  I took a trial run, lowered my tired buns onto its barely-scuffed upholstery.  It felt good.  It rolled easily.  My elbows automatically found the armrests - I wasn’t strangely splayed, birdlike, when I used them.

That was to say, my former chair.  I hadn’t lifted back up off that friendly little deskchair before I’d committed to a trade-out.  And now, as I gratify my penchant for stagnation in the office, I do so with a light heart, a limber spine, and two glutei maximi that embrace their place joyfully and without fear of discomfort or disrepute.  The chair that we got on behalf of someone who caused me such stress, now befriends me.  So long as I can remember to get out of it every so often, I should be okay.  (After all, I’m two blocks from the ferry building - there are places I could go.) However, the new deskchair experience is working out better than I’d even anticipated.  I don’t know why good chairs happen to bad people, but if it’s got casters, that sucker will wind up where it’s supposed to be eventually.

next time: the series, improbably, continues.  meantime, there’s some zach in the extended entry if you would like to see him with his oma and opa:

Monday, October 10, 2005

Sucking and Blowing

Part II in my apparent series of essays about furniture and furnishings, with warm wishes for a delightful Columbus Day, unless you have syphillis or were stomped on by inquisitorial spaniards, in which case, I hope this day brings you ample opportunities to stick it to the man.  Whatever works for you, dude.

It was the night before our social worker’s first post-placement visit to us, to see how we were managing with our new baby boy.  We’d been attending to various pre-visit necessities for several days - filing court papers, printing out photographs, disposing of old furniture and building new pieces.... we’d been busybusybusy making sure that we’d give a suitably responsible impression and now it was getting late on the much-anticipated final night before the first visit.  I was trying to get the baby to go to sleep but, as usual, he would not let me release him into the arms of Morpheus - he was tired and cranky and crying inconsolably, so Kel put down the vacuum cleaner and stepped up to take over with her special baby-calming skilz.

As we exchanged our respective responsibilities she told me, “I’ve hit an impasse anyway.  The vacuum’s clogged.” I handed the squalling sack of cute over to her and decided I’d make up for being unable to get Zach to stop crying by fixing the vacuum, the two being effective equivalents in the hands of this particular dad. 

Up at the front of the house I saw that Kel had already detached the vacuum hose, robbing me of a quick fix.  She’d approached the problem intelligently, curse her domestic bones.  And, if that hadn’t fixed things, the problem was obviously tougher than I’d anticipated.  I picked up the “cannister” end of the hose, pressed it to my face, and blew hard into it, seeking to dislodge whatever seemed to be in the way.  A cloud of dust poured out of the sweeper end of the tube, but clearly the problem had not been fixed - my Gillespie-like exhalation barely squeaked out of the other side. 

I tried reversing my strategy, blowing in the other end; it was no better.  What started from my lungs as a Jerichoean blast wound up on the other side as a whimpering tweet.  It seemed that something serious would have to be done.  Something invasive. 

I started by trying to disassemble the hose itself, to remove the crook-necked plastic housings from either side so I could run a dowel through it and remove the blockage by brute force.  No such luck - I successfully pulled out a few screws but the housings were attached with more sophistication than I could bring to bear to the task, and I had to reverse course on that strategy and reassemble my handiwork. 

Next, I tried to run a length of string through the hose, hoping to engage in some sort of hoseflossing process, but the string snagged not too far down and went no further.  I’d need to gird up my technique.  After rifling a few drawers I found a small lock from a suitcase, which I tied to the end of the string.  Then I stood on a chair to achieve a nice straight target path, and lowered the now-weighted string into the hose with the patience of a bomb defuser. 

This is when Kel stepped up front, having successfully gotten the boy to sleep, to see me dislodge a few heavy agglomerations of hoseclog onto the hardwood floor.  Kel was impressed, but I knew there was a lot more to come.  I could still feel an almost-solid thrombus impeding the swift intake and passage of air and the consequent disposal of whatever grime resided therein.  I puffed down into the hose again and then dropped my little plumbline.  Kel watched the other end of the dangling hose and saw something, started to pull it out with the hook of a wire hanger. 

It wasn’t anything, really - it was everything: a semi-solid mass of previously-vacuumed material.  When she finally teased it out and it inhaled the unfettered air from the dining room floor, it swelled up until it seemed impossible that so much old floordirt had hung together for so long in a vacuum hose that still seemed to work pretty well.  I recognized leaves from a ficus that had departed our household nearly a year prior.  Of course there was pet hair, but that only went back four months or so.  The damn thing was stratified like alluvial sandstone.  It was like a new roommate. 

We disposed of it forthwith, and then resumed vacuuming.  It had taken a good 20 minutes to clear the hose.  Now the vacuum sounded stronger - doing more work with less effort.  Alsoly*, the air it was venting back out into the apartment smelled fresher and left the room feeling cleaner.  The machine worked faster.  It picked up bigger stuff from farther away.  It was just better.  Life was good.

I wondered for how long we’d been choking ourselves off at our own air supply to implement inefficient means to an inadequate end.  My lungs felt dirty and my face itched from my intimate labors with the black plastic tube, but, having endured those efforts, and now hanging out in a nice clean room devoid of the sour vapors of the vacuum’s erstwhile filth-filtered exhalations, all I smelled was the sweetnes of having put the past behind me once and for all, and letting the present fill up the space reserved for it. 

Needless to say, the meeting with the social worker went just fine.  Thanks for asking, though.

Friday, October 07, 2005

NZB and Me

We got most of what we needed at Babies R Us, which deadens me with its prefab conformity but impresses me with its deep product lines.  They’ve got two dozen of everything you need, and dozens more of what you don’t.  We walked out of there on our big shopping day with our heads spinning like brightly colored mobiles.  But even so, BRU didn’t have the proper range of some things we wanted.  In particular, we had a very specific set of criteria for a stroller, and for a baby jogger, too.  BRU didn’t have the models we wanted most to consider and evaluate.  We went to a few other places to explore broader selections but in the end the best option was right in our backyard - CitiKids, out by the eastern foot of Clement. 

Not only did CitiKids have the most choices, they had a guy on staff who really seemed to know his business, to lead us through the thicket of options.  What was designed to look good, and what was designed for sturdiness and reliability.  What was a cosmetic difference, a real difference, an improvement.  Why one cost more than another, and whether it was worth it.  Customer feedback.  Industry dirt.  This guy really helped us out a lot in picking a stroller.

But when it came to joggers he would only advise us so far.  He told us which ones were for runners, which were for off-roading, which for style and which for substance, and even with all these considerations folded together we still had a lot of choices. 

With so many questions in play, the ultimate answer usually comes down to personal preferences.  In this case, it meant a head-to-head showdown between two models, and I was selected to be the show-er-downer by a jury of my spouse and the CitiKids guy - consigned to take the two top contenders for a powerjog.  Though I was hardly dressed for serious exertion, I was wearing running shoes and was not suffering from any significant limitation on my mobility.  That made me both nominated and qualified.  Willingness to serve was not a relevant consideration.

“Of course,” CK Guy then told me, “you can’t just take it out empty.  It needs proper weight in the seat or it won’t feel right.  It’ll respond wrong.  You should find our test doll and strap it in, see how that works too.”

Clearly out-argued, I did as I was told and found the test doll - or perhaps it would be better to call it a post-apocalyptic hyperdense zombiette.  It appeared to have been, at one time, a reasonably realistic and unthreatening, if uninspired, example of the dollmaker’s art - that had then been ripped open, emptied of stuffing, and refilled with lead shot till it weighed 20 pounds.  The midsection was then resealed and wrapped with heavy duct tape in always-fashionable classic grey.  Already thus disfigured, the reconstituted doll had been in near-constant use at this busy shop while patrons tried out cribs, strollers, carriers, and all manner of juvenile chazzerai.  As a result of all this use, the adorable 20-pound duct-taped babydoll had grown grimy and somewhat ghastly in appearance, glowing eyes and limp body smeared and stained with greasy handprints like something recently and unceremoniously exhumed.  Adding to the overall image, all the toes on one of its plastic feet had been broken off, leaving a gaping gangrenous open wound.  The whole effect was disconcerting, but parenthood demanded of me the inner strength to face the Nuclear ZombieBabie - so I did. 

We got the first jogger outside and loaded it up with NZB.  I gave a shove-off and hove my creaking femurs down the block.  The shop is at the foot of Clement Street, near a haute restaurant and the typical array of Clement Street shops and storefronts, heavily trafficked by locals and wayfarers alike.  It was easy to tell them apart.  The visitors were the ones who looked at me with preliminary amusement (to see me jogging in slacks and an officeweiner shirt) followed by anticipatory pre-gush (as they looked expectantly down into my jogger to take a peek at my adorable bundle of joy), concluding with horrified revulsion (upon seeing my gruesome zombiebaby).  The locals, on the other hand, saw me coming a block away and knew better than to gawk.  Nuclear ZombieBaby is just another local, so far as they’re concerned.

NZB was a great help to us, and I do hope that he and Zach become friends.  It’s important to get in good with the movers and shakers in your neighborhood, and though NZB may not often be shaken, he sure does get around pretty well, despite his truncated foot.  And his zombieism, too.  I guess I shouldn’t leave that out either.  It’s a lot to overcome, and Zach needs inspirational rolemodels. 

(Note: the winner was the Sport Utility Stroller by B*O*B.  We have no excuse in the world not to make good use of it.)

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Fluxions

It was a real freshman move, one that no one with any experience or wisdom would have made.  The class met three times a week at eight o’clock in the aching empty a. of m.  Plus, it was way the hell out at DRL, a drab, cold building east of 33rd street, clear over on the other side of campus.  Plus, it was calculus – a class which the university required me to take and pass, but one in which I had no actual interest and for which I had only the merest aptitude. These conditions, in combination, served as a powerful disincentive to my regular and prompt attendance.

But the final straw came with the first lecture.  We arrayed ourselves, callow and obedient, in the old hall, equidistantly spread in fixed ranks of wooden chairs with fold-up desklets, perhaps 100 of us on musty old risers.  The professor walked in and presented himself to us, sucking confidence in his pedagogy out of the room like oxygen from a plummeting aircraft.  He was youthful in appearance, even childlike, with rosy downy cheeks and wispy sandy hair.  His jeans were unfashionably faded and his polo shirt appeared to have an embroidered “nerd” emblem over the breast.  A profound lack of charisma settled like a pall around him. 

He began to introduce himself in a quavering voice, offering the barest motes of useful information, most of which were already available to us in the syllabus and course description.  He had trouble projecting his voice to the back of the room.  He acted like he wanted to pee, or perhaps had just done so while standing there before us.  He didn’t seem comfortable, and soon, neither were we.

He began his lecture and, if I really concentrated, I could hear him and sort of keep up.  I’d better be able to - it was the first session of the first class of my college career.  I was treating it as a test of my mettle. 

Without wasting much time he quickly filled an entire blackboard with notations and equations.  He needed more room but he didn’t want to erase any of what he’d already written.  He looked up at a second blackboard, mounted on the wall above the first, unsullied and virginal in pristine slate-green.  It was housed on runners, seemed designed to trade places with the lower board.  He wanted it.

We watched as he lamely leapt up a few inches, trying to pull it down.  His fingers flailed at its lower ledge but it didn’t budge.  He grabbed for it again.  Nada.  He stood with his back to us, looking up at the boards, cogitating.  He pushed up on the bottom chalkboard.  It was unmoved.  His shoulders hove, then hunched forward.  When he turned back to us, his face was getting red and puffy.

“I can’t make it work,” he told us with a quavering voice.  He was actually whining.  He shifted his weight impotently from foot to foot.  We were caught uncomfortably between impatience and embarrassment.  He started to hyperventilate, clutching his chalk protectively before him.

A burly guy stood up from his desklet and walked down to the left side of the chalkboards at the front of the room, where a small control box was bolted to the wall.  He hit one of two buttons and a circuit kicked in.  The blackboards solemnly, gracefully changed places with a low electric hum.  Once the upper had become the lower, taking its place with a satisfying click, the student released the button and, wordlessly, without a glance at the lecturer, returned to his hard, cramped seat with the rest of us. 

The lecturer mumbled humiliated thanks and returned to his lesson.  I’d already learned my lesson, though: this guy was incompetent.  Math skills notwithstanding, he was no teacher.  He’d have to show me something very special if he was going to convince me to shlep all the way down to the river three times a week at the asscrack of dawn to endure his discomfiture.  I had better things to do.  Like holding down my mattress with my unconscious body, for example. 

I stuck with it for two more lectures, completing my first week of classes.  Then I quit going.  I didn’t drop the class – I needed it to graduate, and I had no interest in enduring it for any longer than absolutely necessary.  Instead, I put my faith in my ability to cram – intellectual bulimia, if you will.  Dumber folk than me learn calculus.  I didn’t need a semester’s worth of lectures to pick it up.  Instead of attending class, then, I used the time to homeschool myself – mostly, in hangover remediation. 

Four tests would comprise my entire calculus grade.  Before each of those three midterms and the final, I cloistered myself with crib sheets, got a few pointers from a roommate who was a math major, and got myself up to speed on the syllabus.  By doing so, I somehow passed all my examinations, an interloper mouthing unintelligible tongues with sufficient fluency to put me at the peak of the bell curve, though without any actual understanding of what I was saying. 

I still have the bluebook in which I wrote my final exam.  It’s a surreal artifact, filled with greek letters, relational markers, and arcane conclusions.  I got a C on it, as I had on all the prior tests.  How I did so, remains a mystery to me.  I can’t even understand the questions I answered, much less how I answered them.  However, the fact that I got through the damn thing at all, has given me the strength to confront any number of unintelligibilities since then.  I may not know calculus, but I know I can figure stuff out.  Just don’t ask me to explain any of it twenty years later.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Hardly Strictly

I was planning on doing a lot of things this past weekend - some writing, some housework, some exercise, and some other stuff too… but instead I spent most all of my time at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.  This is an annual festival in Golden Gate Park; we wandered into it by accident two years ago and were tickled by the low-key atmosphere - a bunch of good ol’ bands rotating around on a big ol’ stage.  This year we decided to attend on purpose and found that the festival had really expanded - now there are five different stages, very intelligently dispersed around Speedway and Marx meadows near the Polo Fields.  We spent about five hours there on Saturday in a heavy rolling fog so intense that Doc Watson had to pause repeatedly during his set to wipe down his instrument (a heartbreak I know only too well); even so, the temperature was mild enough that, at six in the evening, I was able to walk home comfortably in a short sleeved shirt without a jacket.  Sunday, on the other hand, was gloriously sunny almost all day long, and we stayed in the park from about 11:30 am to about six in the evening.  Standout bands included the aforementioned Doc Watson, Del McCroury, Waybacks, Hot Buttered Rum String Band, Austin Lounge Lizards, and Split Lip Rayfield - and by “standout,” that just means I particularly liked them out of the bands I got to see, but there was way, way too much music for me to take it all in. 

Zach seemed to have a grand time with the whole scene - we danced around and he giggled and gaped and got to play with some of his favorite little friends and even got in a little napping when necessary.  After Saturday’s gig, we were too bushed to cook and ate burritos for supper.  After Sunday’s, some friends came over to our place and we all gorged on cheap greasy chinese food, which totally hit the spot.  They left at 8:30 and I think I was asleep by nine. 

Maybe some of the things I’d planned to do didn’t get done this weekend, but I can’t imagine that the time could have been spent any more wisely.  After the past few weeks at work, this was like taking a vacation for two days.  The fact that they staged the damn festival just about in my backyard only makes it all that much more satisfying.  A few notable points:

Dave was drinking a V-8.  Precocious little 3-year-old Daisy (Zach’s girlfriend) wanted to try it.  “It’s vegetable juice, do you really want it?” “Yes!” He handed her the little can and she sipped from it eagerly.  The look in her eyes when she tasted it.... I thought she was going to cry. 

There was a pretty good crowd at the Star Stage all day long on Sunday; we’d set up some blankets there as a base camp for our cadre of musiclovers (about a dozen of us at some points).  There was plenty of room, though, because the meadow was broad and wide.  That is, there was plenty of room till after Split Lip’s set.  That’s when things started getting a bit too intense.  At the same time, things started making a bit more sense, too.  I had been intrigued by the very large percentage of the people who had been at this particular venue all day who seemed distinct from the typical bluegrass crowds we’d been seeing elsewhere.  Along with the hippies, coots and Rousseauian anti-intelligencia who constituted most of attendees overall, at the Star Stage there also seemed to be a whole lotta gay folk.  This is San Francisco; gay folk are a part of the landscape - but at the Star Stage it was a bit gayer than usual.  Sometimes it was just a quiet realization, “oh, that’s twelve guys with no women, some of them are holding hands, I bet they’re gay.” Sometimes it was, “goodness those guys have well-defined physiques, and they sure seem to be into each other big time.  I sense gayness.” Sometimes it was, “oh, those guys are wearing skintight lame’ disco dresses, have wild/fab hairdos, are shrieking and prancing and toying with each other’s body parts - those guys are super-queer.” It was, frankly, a blast, to be rocking along to the downhome funk with such a wildly disparate crowd.  But after Split Lip’s set, the demographic shifted a few more points to the right of the Kinsey scale.  The crowds poured in, and “typical SF bluegrass fans” seemed to be in the minority all of a sudden.  That’s when I realized: these folk were not the Split Lip/pickin’ and grinnin’ crowd.  These folk were here to see Dolly Parton.  She came on stage and their shrieks of joy totally overpowered her - the PA system was not loud enough and we could barely hear Dolly over the crowds of chanting, ecstatic fans.  We left to soak up the last few rays of sunshine on a hill by the model yacht pond, and then took leave of the park with a deep sense that we’d sucked all the hedonism we could out of the day.

Instead of buying expensive vendor-food, Kel and I brought some homemade sandwiches.  They were great, so I’ll share the secret: get a sandwich roll and toast it in the broiler.  Lay down some fresh spinach leaves on either side, and then add thinly sliced bosc pear, thinly sliced black fig, proscuitto, and goat cheese.  Slap it together, crush it down, and eat at leisure.  Fit for a king. It felt a little fancy for the bluegrass scene, but once things gayed up so much for Dolly’s set, it seemed like anything else would have been declasse.

Tonight, now, is erev Rosh Hashona - the beginning of a ten-day period of great holiness and self-reflection.  I enter this phase of the year with a joyous heart.  All that bluegrass just plucked me right up, I guess.  Hope you had a good one too, and that the rest of the week brings you much more to keep your spirits up.  And a big Shana Tovah, y’all.