my free advice - care of “Free Advice.” Now go outside and play in the molten nectar, already.
Free Advice is a service of my good friend Eliza Bombela. Wear it in good health.
The notebook returns to my hands with a simple surety that buttresses my spirit as I was not aware it so needed to be buttressed. It feels good to sit and scrawl again, fighting distraction, inertia and the jostles of traffic, a sense of homecoming inscribing itself on my soul. Back to basics. Return of the native. May it ever be so. Anyway, may it be so again soon.
For this morning I’m saying goodbye to four very different things. From the strengh in me gleaned from this bundle of spiral-bound college rule I’m clutching, let me now acknowledge the following things now gone from me:
1. Climate nerds already know what I’m saying here is true, and the rest of you will have to take it on faith: summertime in SF is often the opposite of summer. Cold fog rolls in wind-driven fists under pewter skies and there’s a chill that soaks right down to the bone. Summer arrived on the evening of June 20 this year, but even had I no calendar I’d have known the exact day it happened. That’s because I had occassion to visit the Crissey Field area of the Presidio on four consecutive days, at about the same time of day. The car has a thermometer for outside temperatures, which told this tale: Friday 6/20: 88 degrees. Saturday 6/21: 68 degrees. Sunday 6/22: 58 degrees. Monday 6/23: forty-eight goddamn degrees. Summer is over, suckers. Hope you enjoyed it while you had the chance. It probably won’t warm up again till football season.
2. Goodbye, Claire. Jamie, a bientot. It’s been one hell of a ride, guys - six novels, each in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages. Some of it’s over-written, sure, but much of it was lean, and much was crafted with appropriately lavish attention to detail. The plot was as thick and fast as that of any book I’ve read, and the action could be breathtaking. Many’s the time you made me groan, hiss, or curse aloud while on the bus; many more’s the times I wrenched myself scoliotic by the weight of those fat paperbacks in my messenger bag. It was a journey to savor, again and again and three times thereafter, through all six books. And now the journey is over. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series is now firmly ensconced in my past. I can start to move forward with my life again. I can start to write, to read non-fiction, to wean myself off the gaelic scottishisms that arise unbidden and in full brogue from my subconscious when I fash myself or have a wee bittern of sporran or something. Great characters, great scenes, great fun to read. It’s been months I’ve been slogging their trail. Goodbye, Claire; take care, Jamie. Don’t let the door catch your kiltrump on your way out.
3. All this was lead-up, wasn’t it, for one real goodbye. It’s not like I’ve got a whole lot of friends at work; I like my colleagues and we get along well but we do not go out or socialize or anything like that. To the extent I’ve met anyone outside my immediate work responsibilies at all, it’s mostly been as a result of my participation in union matters. I got into the union stuff when Scott was the local president of our chapter. He’s always been a good guy and a straight shooter. He built a reputation on hard work and decency. He was among the first to celebrate with me when Zach came home with us a few years ago, and he was among the most frequent to offer me a kind word or “hello” on those days I couldn’t hide my bad mood. He got elected to another union office this year so I have been including him in my correspondence about bargaining, but he never wrote back. Turns out he’s gone - been gone for nearly a month. His nameplate is missing from his desk, which he’d never let get so dusty when he was around. There’s no email extension for him in the network anymore. He had been planning for years to move to the North country, where he had some property. It looks like that’s what he’s done. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. I regret that. I miss him, and wish him well.
4. My ride: For close to three years I’ve had a strong, silent friend: 1BX. I live right off of Geary, so the 38 would be my usual bus of choice (including the 38L and BX), but Z-bot has been going to day care three days a week right off of California Street so I’ve been riding the 1BX downtown 60% of my mornings. It has always been a boring bus, full of people fixated on their blackberries or newspapers or mp3 players or some such. Office drones, like myself, made up to look good in a cubicle and not willing to share the pleasure of a beautiful morning with any of their co-riders. Like today, when I sat down on an empty bench, across from a mostly empty bench, and within ten minutes was surrounded by beautiful women, standing around me, sitting next to me and across from me, all of them actively ignoring myself and each other as they touched up their manicures, read their Oprah book club selections, thumbed their PDAs or just stared in gorgeous boredom out the windows at San Francisco. Well, those may have been the good times, buddy, and now they may be almost gone. On Monday Zach starts at a new pre-school, well out of the 1BX route. It’s also nowhere near my famous 38 line. In fact, it’s close to only one bus: the Presidi-Go. These are little mini-busses that service the San Francisco Presidio National Recreation Area, where Z will be schooled. I will have to traverse the main parade ground to get a little commuter bus, that will make only one stop on its daily trip from the old Fort to my old office. It’ll be the quietest, least provocative bus ride I could possibly imagine, a disney trip through frisco-land. Z will be doing a 4-day week at the new school so I do still get to ride my fun, grungy 38L downtown on Fridays, and back home every day. I’m shocked to say it but I think I’m actually going to look back fondly on my times riding the 1BX. So long, hot young office staff. If I miss you, you’ll never know it.
What are you going to miss next week?
After a few hot, suddenly summer days, and quite a handful before that that were pretty fully booked just with handling the necessities, we went to the Crissy Fields bay lagoon beach yesterday (two days ago now) and had a great time. I’ll have more to say about that later but for now it does make it seem all the more relevant to be putting something like this before you at this portentiously solsticial juncture:
We’d taken a day trip down to Monterey, Kel and the boy and me, to visit the aquarium with some friends. The day was idyllic and the kids frolicked in sun drenched corridors and darkened galleries with walls of iridescent water; they ran along walkways and evaded supervision and generally carpe’d the hell out of the diem. After the fish-viewing came the lunch-eating, and then a short visit to an overcrowded speck of beach just off Cannery Row for the surf-wading. Altogether it was a delightful day, but we all sensed that our appetite for the beach had been barely whetted. So we agreed to drive a little further down the coast, to a stretch of shoreline our friends thought worthy of recommendation.
We could see why they thought so when we arrived - the place was pretty cool. A moderate span of golden sand rolled up and down the coast, terminating just in front of us in a field of broken boulders that stretched out toward a rocky point that coalesced gradually from an open matrix of jumbled rocks scattered by the sea across a sandy stone shelf. These built slowly up into a fractured maze, falling denser and stacking up higher the further out it went, in a wide but distinct vein that built gradually to a berm that itself continued to rise until it terminated at a tall rocky point that jutted some hundred yards or so into the surf, with a fairly coherent structure and culminating in a pinnacle some 40 or 50 feet high. Breakers crashed impressively against the ocean-facing edge of this rocky point, but the tide petered out as it swept around it into a wide low range of rocky flats hiding tide pools in their deepest recesses.
The route out out to the point was too rough for Zach to traverse, so I carried him until we got over the rock field at which point he scrambled and scampered freely and with delighted excitement. We had company out there, of course - a dozen or so other folk were out with us - our friends and others, plus seagulls darting in and out of the towering spindrift from the waves that crashed against the rocky protuberance.
We stood on the promontory, me and Zach and Andy and Aliyah and Gabriel and Kelly and all of us and several others. But after a while we’d spent enough time out on that small rocky point so we clambered back down and across the flats to join Heidi and Jessica on the strand, where we then stood and basked and let the ocean mesmerize us.
As we stood and watched, a new family arrived at the point - adult children and older parents. Like us, like anyone, they seemed drawn towards the promontory, and delicately picked their way out toward it. The kids walked with surefooted confidence, but mom seemed a bit tentative, in her white capris and pink track shoes and pastel knit sweater. She was not in optimal physical condition; she tottered, arms outstretched as if grasping for balance, as she picked her way among the boulders towards her lofty destination. It took her quite a while and the effort it cost her was palpable - but she did make it to her goal, and when she did, she stood triumphantly with her family atop that audaciously jutting tower of rock and drank in the spirit of the sea.
We remained at the edge of the beach for several minutes, chatting and basking. After a few minutes, we also started noticing that the rocky flat that lay betwixt hither and yon was undergoing a transformation. The tide was rolling in. In fact, “rolling” didn’t begin to cover it - the tide was barreling, surging, waxing with a vengeance. What had once been numerous tiny separate tide pools were linking up into substantial ones; the tide visibly surged in gentle, inexorable eddies that reached out between the boulders, turning the high points of the flats into a series of water-slick islands that were shrinking in size and number before our eyes.
It was in impressive sight - though it seemed to escape entirely the notice of one particular family out on the rock. Everyone else out there scrambled back to shore nice and early in this process, but that newly-arrived family was just distracted by the beauty or something and they didn’t seem to notice their escape route drowning in front of their backs. Their predicament was growing more dire by the minute, as waves pounded the base of their refuge with incessant ferocity. By now I was watching that family and I could see the moment of their realization: the zaftig mom turned to glance shoreward and despite her large, dark sunglasses I sensed her snap to attention. Her body language shifted from the relaxed posture of a carefree tourist to the anxious tension of a woman marooned. She was stuck, and getting stuck-er fast. Tidal eddies swirled delicately but steadily across the rock field. I could see the water level rising with just a casual glance. The family on the rocks could not have seen things differently. Their situation was as plain as the sea itself.
A few of them plunged back toward shore at their first flash of awareness of their predicament, wisely choosing to minimize their exposure to the ocean water while they could. Mom, though, lingered on the patch of elevated rock which she’d fought so hard to attain. Even from a distance, and even though she wore shades, her disquietude was so intense as to be almost tangible. The pinnacle was tall and sturdy and clearly not about to be overwashed, but the exit route was disappearing before her eyes and she clearly did not like either of her alternatives - waiting for six hours for the tide to turn again, or to wading.
Her predicament seemed ludicrous to us - self-made, exacerbated by vacillation, and not worth the angst through which we could see she was putting herself as her features churned with frustration and indecision. We couldn’t help ourselves: uncharitable though it may have been, we began to laugh, and we weren’t laughing *with* her. This was *at* laughter, and I think in the end that’s what galvanized her into her eventual course of action.
She looked right at us - Heidi and me - from across a hundred yards of new tide pool, and scowled with the scowl of a mother insulted. Then she reached forth a pink-sneakered foot and began her wadeful trek shoreward. After a few teetering steps, thick fingers outgrabe for the occasional opportune handhold peeking out above the calm but still rising waters, she had her first slip and got soaked to the knee of one leg. Fury coursed through her; her back went rigid and her jaws clenched with the kind of effort usually associated with childbirth. Two of the adult kids trot-waded back out to help her, and she accepted their assistance with alacrity, if not good humor. With their help, she struggled back to shore, both legs drenched and her dignity fairly waterlogged as well.
Heidi and I had taken the lengthy period of her exodus across the waters to compose ourselves. We were no longer laughing at her when she got back to the beach, and in fact we offered her a halfhearted cheer. She was not fooled by our veneer of civility. She’d heard us laughing, I could tell by the way she stared at us. We shrugged to each other, Heidi and I, and prepared for the long drive back home. We’d seen that the path back home could sometimes be the most perilous one, but then again, we were paying a little attention to the forces of nature as well. We’d already avoided the rising tide, and things weren’t likely to get much trickier than that.
MORAL: There are so many to choose from here, aren’t there? I think I’ll go with “If you ignore the obvious, you’ll get it anyway.” I’d be curious whether any of you who happen by might have derived a different lesson that you’d share in the comments. For god’s sake it’s not like I’m asking you to give blood or anything. Although that would also be a nice gesture. I’m just saying.
The funny (but not in the funny way) thing about a post like that last one is, I’m not really sure what to say next. That’s the sort of speech that maybe a brash idealistic protagonist might use to exhort a throng into some kind of revolutionary uprising, or something like that. The blackness of the page after I finish reading it seems to lend a lingering tinkling echo to the words and thoughts. It was a fun essay to write (in the fun way) but once I was done it really felt done. It seemed to me that there should be some kind of formal break before the next post, if only to gratify my own conceit.
So you get this: the polar opposite of a heartfelt political screed; that’s as much of a break as I can manage. Yes, it’s a post I’ve run before, but I knew even then - yea, even then did I know it - that I’d have follow-ups. The list of such things is unending, and after the pig butchery and liquid nitrogen on Top Chef I know I can’t keep these valuable hints from you without hating myself for it every time I use them. Plus I already gave one of these away for free on the Free Advice site, though I don’t think it’s up yet. So buckle your toques, blogsters and blogstettes: it’s another episode of
THE CULINARY GENIUS OF CHUCK L. HUT
* Do you ever get those rectangular fresh-pak boxes of soup or juice or that sort of thing? I get my rice milk in one, they’re very handy and don’t take up much room in the fridge. These cartons should be shaken up before they’re used, especially the first time. Contents tend to separate, especially at room temperature, and the product will usually be more consistent and of better quality if it’s thoroughly reintegrated. I don’t think this is special kitchen genius, it’s just basic kitchen genius. I take no credit for such tactics - they are usually printed brazenly on the package itself. “Shake well before using.” It sounds so easy. But there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and I am here to share the right way: Open the package first, before shaking it. Let some air in; let the sides swell out a little. Then close it again if you can, or just put your thumb over the opening if you can’t, and give it a decent shaking. It’ll blend up much more easily and quickly.
* I use frozen fruits and veggies, for which I owe no apology. Freezer produce can be great: producers pick very high quality products, have great quality control, and the produce is frozen at maximum ripeness. The first dose out of the bag is always a great ingredient. The problem comes from keeping an opened bag in the freezer - it gets freezerburn that renders the product unpalatable and ruins its value fills your cooking with fetid liquids and dessicated, mealy vegetables or wizened, sour fruit. That’s not worth the convenience. You need a better way to keep frozen veggies and fruits useful. I therefore propose as follows: make the smallest hole you reasonably can, at a corner of the bag - use scissors, don’t just tear it off. Put the bag away again immediately after each use. Before you seal it, press your mouth against the opening in the bag and suck out as much air as you can. That’s where the water vapor lingers, and it all forms into ice. Evacuate that space and eliminate the problem. Keep it eliminated by carefully removing any space where air might seep in later: close the bag by folding it over and over in flat flaps down from the corner you cut off, and then clip it with an alligator or bulldog clip - something metal (that shrinks in the cold) with a tight grip. I think you’ll be pleased with the results. I mean, let’s not get away with ourselves. This is frozen peas we’re talking about.
* A PLEA FOR GENIUS: Just a quiet word to the good people who take care of the common carafe in the coffee rooms at your respective workplaces: I appreciate your dedication to ensuring the finest possible coffee experience for yourself and your workmates. Not everyone exhibits such selflessness and I commend you for it. I would just, respectfully, offer to you this consideration: To the extent that you use a surfactant detergent to clean out the inside of the coffee carafe, I personally endorse the practice of making sure to rinse out all the soap before refilling the carafe with coffee. I am learning now notice it before I get suckered into drinking it, by the presence of delicate multi-colored bubbles on the surface of my coffee. It is a really sour way to start a day, and it’s something we have to power to prevent. We share a common goal, thou carafe-cleaning friend, and I want to help us both reach it together. Just a few minutes more on the rinse cycle, and we can defeat the forces of.... delicate multi-colored bubbles. Because sometimes evil lurks in disarming guise.
As for which, thank you for your attention, such as it is. This has been Kitchen Genius. Utilize it.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a good rant, at least here in blogville, so I’m going to see if I can lay one down. I’m feeling pretty ranty, what with the, um, “news” and everything, and a significant uptick in child tantrums these days. It’s rant weather, folks, and I’m ready for it.
I think the spirit arose within me when I realized that Bobby Kennedy had been shot just about 40 years to the day before Barak Obama got the democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency. That seemed portentous, somehow, as if maybe we’d moved forward because the alternative, god forbid, was that we’ve just been treading water, in which case, something terrible was just going to happen again. I couldn’t bear to imagine living in that world. It feels live we’ve moved forward, doesn’t it?
But then I look at what’s really been going on, a nation at (undeclared) war with an ideology, still trying trickledown voodoo economics by preserving tax breaks for huge corporations and the wealthiest individuals, in a nation where wealth is concentrated in the fewest hands in its history and the economy is leaving more of us behind on a daily basis, where members of congress and famous TV stars are facing home foreclosures and oil companies are recording record profits even as working families are being forced to relocate because they can’t afford to commute to work, and I begin to wonder if we’ve made any progress at all. We’ve had so many years now of intentional ignorance, of fantasy instead of policy, of a government that actively misleads us into circumstances in which it is patently incompetent, and still there are so many of us who just believe what we are told and passively subscribe to executive, legislative, and judicial acts that seem to me no less than treason - a renunciation of the ethics and principles that underlay this nation and rendered it, for a while, a bulwark of relative liberty and justice. No, we’ve never been truly free or just, but we’ve gotten progressively closer for a long time - till recently.
But then we found ourselves confronted with a reality in which big money was actually able to buy public opinion again, despite advances in true democracy, equality of opportunity, and critical thinking. That was the problem, I think - freedom is all well and good if no one is smart enough to exercise it, but now we’ve got immigrants and womenfolk and low wage workers and so many who had been traditionally disenfranchised, actually in a position to exercise their franchise in a meaningful way for the first time, and that was a threat that the Dick Cheneys and Rupert Murdochs of the world just couldn’t abide. Their strategy was transparent, and I was sure it would fail - but it never did: dissimulation and mendacity. Confuse the issues, and lie about them. Accuse your opponents of chimerical wrongdoings; render them toothless against you by forcing them to fight meaningless battles. Why did Bill Clinton spend most of his second term arguing about marital infidelity, and why didn’t GWB spend his second term answering questions about his energy advisors and military failures? Even his erstwhile allies are throwing him under the bus now, McClellan and Bremer, finally making a clean breast of the virtually criminal evasions in which they willingly participated. These matters have, it is fair to say, troubled me - but I think I see a light at the end, as it were, of the trouble.
Mendacity has served them well - lies about science, about the war, about their “enemies.” Even now, they’re actively, blatantly lying about Obama’s tax plans, saying he’ll raise capital gains taxes on people earning “five figures” when he’s proposed starting such efforts at $250,000. And this is not some tangential hack who’s spouting this garbage, it’s Ben Stein, a former Nixon speechwriter who’s had a successful career as an actor and pundit ever since. They’re dissimulating, casting aspersions on Obama as a possible terrorist because of how he and his wife “bumped” fists - a stance (*widely* disseminated) that serves no purpose but to associate the candidate with an inchoate threat that leaves us exhausted and anxious. And they’ve continued with their hypocrisies, promising the moon while delivering prisoners to torture chambers where they have their genitals slashed with scalpels (and I wish I were making that up). Executive privilege has been abused to such an extent that it’s meaningless anymore, but we are blinded entirely to what has been done in our name though not in our interest. I could easily recite a list of individual counts under each of these three primary political vices committed against us - dissimulations, mendacities, and hypocrisies - but it would do nothing but make me angry and keep me from falling asleep tonight - and in fact, I think it might be growing just the tiniest bit irrelevant. I think a corner may have just been turned.
We did not turn this corner, and by “we” I mean “me and those who think as I do that this country has been steered down the crapper since Reagan smirked his way into the Oval Office.” For all that time evil has been perpetrated in the name of conservatism - a movement that has been co-opted by avaricious men (and a few women too) from a desire to protect what has been vouchsafed to us and to restrain governmental excess, to a melange of reactionary ideologies welded together by a variety of inherently incompatible self-interests. Modern fiscal and social “conservatism” have nothing to do with each other, and even fiscal conservatism has mutated into freewheeling government welfare to the most privileged echelons of society. These bedfellows were not just strange, they were ideologically opposed to each other. Yet they recognized their mutual interest in protecting each other’s stake in a government that would in turn protect their respective (not mutual) hegemonies, so they swallowed their bile and each pretended to endorse the others despite their nagging knowledge, deep where their hearts used to be, that those other guys just were not making any sense anymore - if they ever had.
Abstinence education and No Child Left Behind were both failures but could not be so identified. Global warming evidence was covered up. Military intelligence was re-shaped. Civil liberties were subverted. Programs to help the least among us were slashed, leaving them more reliant on others than ever before - even as those “others” lost the ability to help them. Enemies were excoriated to preclude our hearing their truths. And through it all, “conservatives” held their alliance together like a parliamentary coalition that used hate and greed to bind components that under other circumstances would have had nothing to do with each other.
But now, this week, I think we may have seen the first real crack go right through that facade. Living in earthquake country, I know that when the first crack makes it all the way through, structural integrity is fatally compromised and the collapse is, if not imminent, at least predictable in the not-too-distant future. And I know a crack when I see one.
Alex Kozinsky is a very big deal in conservative jurisprudence. He’s a full-on libertarian, which is still an actual ideology and not just a diluted sham of political chauvinism. I am not going to hunt down his many opinions with which I disagree; suffice it to say he was the youngest chief judge of the 9th circuit court of appeals (federal), appointed by Nixon and, while not personally a hardass, he has espoused and advocated for some very strict positions on constitutional law which I believe dishonor the spirit of that document. That’s a lawyer’s debate and not one to have here. The point I wish to make is that he’s been a favorite of the far and middle right for quite a long time. He’s “one of theirs,” even when he advocated strongly in favor of privacy rights in the workplace.
Why was he such a fan of the “right” to keep the contents of the hard drive in his chambers to himself? It’s all over the news now: he’s been found to have maintained a web site that featured images ranging from the offensive to the virtually pornographic. Half naked men cavorting with aroused farm animals, naked women painted to resemble cows on all fours facing away from the camera, “Bush for President” crotch shots, and many other items of highly questionable social value. He was illegally sharing, or facilitating the illegal sharing of, MP3 files. He was wallowing in prurience of the sort that Reverend Haggerty publicly disavowed (he of the amphetamines and male hookers). I’m not saying that the Kozinski website lacked first amendment protection - Edwin Chemerinsky has opined that it’s not even porn. And that’s fine with me. Justice Kozinski can watch what he wants, even as he presides (as he was doing) over an obscenity trial featuring bestiality and excretory gratifications. His impartiality has not been shown to be in question, and he had sworn a jury to address the actual factual questions of redeeming social value.
Alex has had the decency not to deny or minimize the significance of the items that have come to light. He has claimed that they’re part of a “ton of stuff” he’s posted, that he didn’t know everything that was on his site, that he didn’t realize it was available to the public, and he’s agreed to cooperate with a probe (!) of the matter. But “conservatives” are now in a quandry. This guy was a true champion, and now he’s shown himself to be as silly or ribald or curious or - heaven forbid - human as any of the “liberals” who want to teach sex ed in junior high or think our foreign aid shouldn’t be conditioned on the abortion policies of third world nations. It’s not like some talk show host or preacher who “had a lapse.” It’s not a congressman who got caught with his pants down. This is a man who’s sat on the second most important court in this nation for thirty years, enunciating opinions that the right has trumpeted for decades. The right to bear arms, the government’s inability to restrain “free trade,” and others I’ll let you assess for yourself. The internet has brought that power of directed inquiry to each of us, just as it has given each of us the ability to learn and decide for ourselves.
I don’t think that progressives - those seeking currently to reform the political climate now predominant in this nation - will find anything in these researches that will change our minds about anything, except perhaps to look on this hard-right jurist with perhaps a bit more humanity and sympathy on a personal level. However, I do think the nature of these matters will incite a lot of laptop research, so to speak, among many who had suppressed for a long, long time their nagging doubts about their political partners. Maybe some will decide they can’t remain in that partnership, and others might decide that partnership means something other than what they previously understood it to mean. In either case, the conglomerate is deconglomerizing. The solid face of right wing jurisprudence, one of the core fundamentals of the “conservative” movement, is breaking down, with Judge Moore’s 10 commandments in the courtroom in one corner and Judge Kozinski’s dirty priest jokes in the other.
Meanwhile, Obama is preaching a message of progressive change and inclusion, and Keith Olberman is beating Fox news in ratings for the first time in eight years. The U.S. Supremes have just decided that inmates in Gitmo have the right to contest their incarceration in a civil courtroom. Bobby Kennedy was shot 40 years ago, but I am not sure he’s still buried. There is a train coming through that dark tunnel, and we can fight it or ride it. I think - I believe - that every day, more of us are getting off the tracks and on the coaches. It’s been a long time coming, but troubles, eventually, end. We may just live to see it. I intend to, anyway.
Thanks. I do feel better now.
To paraphrase the classics, welcome back, my friends, to the blog that takes a licking but keeps on… um… doing whatever it is that blogs do. Which is, at the moment, more than I can say for myself. I’ve bogged down again in terms of writing anything worth your time, so feel free to skip to the links page or that viagra ad you’ve been wondering about. Or maybe it was that pill for hot flashes. Choose your poison before it chooses you.
Speaking of which, yes, I’m self-critical for failing YET AGAIN to sweep you off your desk chair with an essay of poignant beauty, like that one I’m almost done with about the seaside mishap I saw in Monterey. However, to be honest with myself (if with no one else) I have an excuse: I been busy.
Sure, you grumble understandably, we’re all busy. But you finished writing an opera, ran for senate, invented phlogiston, and broke a teen star’s heart. While qualifying for an Olympic team (even if it’s just biathalon). Now *that’s* busy. What’s my ostensible excuse?
Good question, rhetorical jerk in my head - I’ll tells ya. It’s tuesday, right? Sorta late? Let’s see where I’ve been since you last heard from me (in a post I will refrain from recognizing as equal in lameness to this one):
SATURDAY: the lord’s day, for the hebrew folk. Kel had a hair appointment, a medical appointment, and an appointment with the giant megastore down in Colma, so Zach and I went to the Irish bakery and then to the playground, where I gave him one of his two little Irish shortbread cookies. This instigated a screaming tantrum that lasted nearly an hour as he demanded his second cookie. I eventually dragged him home (wish I was kidding) and fed him some nutritious lunch (an eggle with roast turkey and melted cojak cheese, if you must know). I diverted him from his cookie with the television, which I considered a tradeoff between evil and eeevilll, and took a few minutes to post something bloggish - then I actually napped for 20 minutes, went out and got burritos for our supper, and watched Munich to round off the day. Believe it or not, that was a whole day’s worth of activity and no I’m not proud. So unproud, in fact, that -
SUNDAY: the lord’s day for roundheads and papish alike. I woke up in the living room (having been driven from my bed by a snoring child who had tantrumed out again at 2 am) and switched back to my bed for another hour of shuteye which I desperately needed, and still found myself up and alert by 7 freaking 30 a.m., at which time I realized we had no eggs in the house so I could not make pancakes. This was a serious crimp in my sunday schedule, friends. I fell back on cleaning the house, doing laundry, washing dishes, and a few minutes of playing with the boy - an activity which is being increasingly demanded of me, and which is in turn demanding increasing amounts of energy, patience, and nard-guarding. But by ten a.m. we were driving out to Yerba Buena to visit the opening day of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, a Liebsiend-designed repurposing of an old power substation which was itself designed by one of SF’s best architects of the post-quake era, Willis “wachu tokinbout” Polk. It’s a gorgeous structure with big blue cubes jutting out of the west side into Yerba Buena alley, where the Mexican Museum and Arts&Crafts museum and Papa Beard Creampuff shop are located. We cruised through the exhibits more quickly than I’d have preferred, but a bit more slowly than Zach wanted, which is the essence of compromise. Highlights included a very disorienting soundscape in a vertiginous gallery with slanted walls and ceilings, a keno-type display called “Playing God” that let you pick random creation-oriented quotes (mine was “All Creatures Must Work For Their Food"), a trippy circular screen set flat like a well in which multicolored texts in english and hebrew swirled down into a vortex, and a great exhibit of drawings by the guy who invented Schrek. We stepped back outside in time for lunch, which we bought at the local AG Ferrari deli and which we consumed at the serene, underutilized fountain garden at the east end of Yerba Buena, across the street from SFMOMA. From there we wandered over to the main part of YB Gardens to listen to a cool afro-fusion jazz quintet while Z charged up and down the ramps and stairways until he remembered that there was an actual playground across the street, which we then visited so he could ride the big tunnelslide and run around the hedge maze and balance on low brick walls and generally burn off a lot of kid energy. By now it was after three so we wandered back to the car (by way of a fro-yo place where I accidentally bashed Z’s head into the ceiling, hey these things happen) and then back home for MOAR laundry, a run in GG park (lungs remained within pleural cavity - whoo-hoo!), a quick shower and then a walk with Z to a produce market and a shop where beer was purchased. Home again, I cooked a truly delightful supper of pan-seared, lightly-crusted tilapia loin (gotta love them loins), with quinoa and freshly-shucked sweet peas. By this time it was time to bathe Z and to surf the net in a quiet stupor while K got him to sleep, which didn’t work at all - he re-tantrumed himself sufficiently to enbloody his own nose, so we hosed him (and his bear) off and I traded places with Kel, finally getting him to sleep shortly before 11. And that was enough for me.
Monday Z got two cavities filled first thing in the a.m., and then we played madly in the playground till he’d broken all the toys he’d gotten for being such an amazingly well-behaved young man in the drill-chair. We then made a quick trip to House of Bagels for a sprinkle-cookie and then headed home again where I made Z some banana slices with pumpkin butter and I had a tilapia loin sandwich which Z significantly shared with me. We had settled down for a few minutes of Finding Nemo when Kel got back from work and I headed out for my own half-day at the office. I got home late, had a tasty salmon, sauteed carrot and Israeli couscous supper, bathed Z, and cleaned up till Kel had him asleep. Then she and I watched a new Venture Brothers cartoon and went to sleep ourselves. (At some point there was a return to our own bed, but I don’t have the details clearly in mind.)
Today we got out of the house at 7:30. I dropped Z at day care (he’s been accepted at his preschool and will start at the end of the month so it’s all very bittersweet now), rode the bus to work, checked in and confirmed lack of overnight disasters, and then rode the bus back home because I’d forgotten my gym clothes. Rode back, worked worked worked, had some salmon salad for lunch, worked worked worked, went out and got an agua fresca ("sandia" flavah) and worked worked again, and then finally left for a yoga class out at Haight and Divis (hence the gym clothes). It was a good class and I was well-warmed by the time I got to the bus stop on Divis for the ride up to Geary. That lasted about 15 minutes, and 15 minutes after that I started walking in an increasingly chilly evening, wearing no jacket of course. I got home at nearly 9, cobbled together a bit of leftover supper, supported Kel as she, exhausted, concluded that Z’s tantrum required him to sleep in our bed tonight, returned to my supper, watched Top Chef (tonight’s winning dish: day-old couscous stirred into out-of-a-carton tomato soup, with fake-buttered toast and a cold refreshing beer), and now I’m here frittering away my few hours available for sleeping while I update you on my pathetic excuse for a life. And as I do so, I keep hearing the mournful, lonesome sound of a trainwhistle, hooting its way through the night. It’s a comforting sound, except that there are no trains anywhere around here and I find it very strange that their whistles seem nearby. No, it’s not a boat whistle. Yes, I know the difference. Maybe they put the train on a boat. You figure it out.
Sounds like enough, no? NO? Then let me bounce a bit of news off your screen, blog-daddy: Zach’s gonna have a brother soon. We’ve been in process for another adoption since January 07 and we got our referral just a few weeks ago. A baby boy waits for us in Korea and we’ll go there sometime in the autumn. Some of my spare time over the past few days has also been taken up with some of those details. And if that doesn’t back you off your “shoulda posted a real essay” ‘tude, well my friend, I guess you’ll just have to be disappointed with me. The line forms out the door. And when you come back, bring a new child seat for the Forester. Disappointment is a two-way street, but both directions require the installation of appropriate safety devices.
I’m home again, you insidious bastards, and curse your eyes for failing to greet me at 11 pm when I arrived back, four hours late due to high winds and bad weather, with a kegger and a massage table. No it’s too late now. But you’re welcome to send the masseuse anyway if you still feel like trying.
Speaking of feeling like, and trying, and such, I’ve just barely started writing stuff again, which occasion was marked by my losing YET ANOTHER delightful little notebook full of my most intimate thoughtlets. Authors I wanted to read, stories I wanted to write, people I wanted to stay in touch with and various important bits of phone-numberage are now consigned to the scrapheap of history, along with about six free drink coupons for Southwest Airlines I’d stored in the little pocket in the back cover (which is what really hurts, to tell the truth). The notebook has my phone number written clearly inside the back cover, and is lavishly inscribed with the name and logo of this website. Someone found it; there’s no way it’s just lying on the floor of a popular restaurant and it was definitely not left behind in my exhaustively-searched hotel room. It’s just that the finder has chosen to be the keeper. Ergo, the loser is the weeper. So okay, interloper-who-appropriated-my-inmost-thoughts, I hope you’re happy now. I hope we’re all happy. Some of us more than others.
Given these conditions, I am falling back now on something I generally consider to be among the cheapest and least-inventive forms of blogging, which is saying quite a bit: the dream journal. I do have a journal for jotting down the most bizarre or portentous of my dreams, though I don’t keep up with it as well as I might, no surprise there. Some weeks ago I had a couple of doozies in one night and decided to memorialize them, but didn’t have the right journal with me so I just put’em in my regular writing book (as if what I put in it on typical basis are “regular” writings). However, since I do most of my blogging out of that particular journal, I now feel as if those dreams are fit subjects to unleash on a foolishly-unsuspecting blogsylvania, and thus:
I was dying. Something was wrong with my heart. I passed out and felt the life ebbing out of me; I sensed the hallway of the eternal journey beckoning to me, dimly lit, unthreatening. I came back, but not strongly, to consciousness, and got myself into bed. I was a little anxious about leaving some things behind - incriminating, hurtful, inconvenient. I didn’t want anyone to see my truth but I felt my heart so weak in my chest that I didn’t think I’d be able to do anything about hiding my shame, not even a simple computer file erase. Kel got back from somewhere with Zach and was concerned, she seemed to recognize the gravity when I told her, barely moving my lips, “it’s my heart.” Z naturally didn’t understand and wanted to climb into bed with me. We let him. It was a great comfort to feel his small body, to stroke his hair and smell his presence.
Then I woke up to his plaintive cry in real life, and went to his room to fix his covers. That done, I returned to my own bed, remained awake for fifteen minutes or so, got up again to drain the pickle, and then, returning once more to my bed, fell back asleep, dreaming as follows:
Kel and Z and I were driving in the hills in the middle of the city on a bright sunny day, sightseeing. The hills were grassy and undeveloped, with a rough road that lead to a little lodge/restaurant we had been seeking. The paved part of the road ended but we continued along a set of worn tracks in the dirt. I saw the lodge and a ranger; we stopped so I could ask directions. He politely assisted us, pointing down the track, but when he realized we’d driven a car over the grass past the end of the road he took me into custody with a firm hand on my shirtsleeve. I protested but knew it would be to no avail. He took me into the lodge; K and Z followed. In the lodge we settled down quite nicely with some other visitors - I didn’t seem to be under arrest anymore. The lobby was rustic and featured an open display of small wild animals; K and Z pointed out some fieldmice or something, which scrambled over to us so we could play with them. My attention, though, was drawn to a big pit housing several snakes. I peered over into it and two big ones came out to slither over my shoulders. I was letting the snakes play with me when I woke up.
Now I’m not so sure I should be divulging these lurid windows into my subconscious, but hell, I already typed it so it’s too late. Lord willing I’ll sketch up some additional bloggage for y’all soon, unless I get mired in the final of my six-book series of novels which I have yet to start. Anyway, I’m home, my heart is strong, and I actually rather like snakes. And isn’t that what the internet is all about?
I’m going to be pretty light on the postings for a bit - first, this week, I’m on the road and very much booked solid for the whole time; I probably should be prepping my site visits right now but lord love me it’s late and I’m in a hotel room in the wilds of San Diego and I’ve got three more nights and two more hotels to go, so I’ll cut myself a shred of a break here. And then there’s some news on the home front that has rather taken my attention and will continue to do so for a very long time, but that’s for another conversation, eh? Maybe once we eject the lurkers and you and I can have a real heart-to-heart. Anyway. For now, here’s a tale of self-image gone awry:
It was probably when I was most sure of myself actually, finally, being cool. We were having some kind of party, and the cool kids came. But as is so often the case when immortals come on the scene, their comportment was unsettling. They unsettled me, anyway.
The cool kids were the friends of the cool co-workers, a penumbra of hip that had spread wide enough to appear to include even my unfashionabe self. The connection was all the more precious for its tenuousness: Kel had found a good entry-level gig at a co-op where the staff was generally young, smart, and interesting. She became friendly with a certain subgroup and we all started hanging out. They were cool; it was fun. And then one of them, the quiet dude with the goatee, introduced us to some of his other friends. I guess he knew them from waqy back but to me they seemed trendmeister fresh. Dave was tall with lank black hair and long gangly limbs, a puckish face and eyes of pure complicity. One look at him and I knew he was up to something; one look from him and I felt like I was, too. And it wasn’t like he actually was up to anything in particular, or particularly bad - but the way he looked, it seemed as if that wouldn’t have been such a big problem for him either. Dave looked like he’d welcome the excitement.
Along with Dave came the Idle Girls, two tall leggy slices of hot crumpet, fresh-faced and powerfully built, both improbably named, fashionably slim, and ready to rachet any party to 11. When Kel and I walked, one fine evening, into a packed bar full of Mission hipsters, and a good booth down the side wall erupted with cheers and calls for our company, and then the Idle girls burst out of its dim depths like sirens, one with long red hair and one with short blonde locks, and they drug us to their lair of beer and cheer, I really felt as if my own credibility had been well and truly established.
So: We had a party in our little crib out at the bottom right corner of Pacific Heights, and Kel’s friends from work came, and some of them brought their friends too, and thus it came to pass that the Idle girls were hanging out in our tiny little kitchen.
This was a truly efficient galley - I could reach every part of it without moving my feet. Plus, it had a window wiht a real view - if you leaned out far enough you could see the tip of the TransAmerica pyramid building. And you needn’t worry about leaning out too far, because there was a handy fire escape just outside, offering forged-steel assurances of safety. And since it was a party, and our place was, as realtors say, “cozy,” and our guests were, as social analysts say, “hip,” the fire escape on that particular day had been converted into an additional fractional room, which one entered or left via the kitchen window. I rather approved.
The Idle girls were hanging out in the kitchen, one lounging against the cabinet and one sitting on the stove opposite the other, framing the kitchen window like the valkyries of Partytown. Feeling my oats, I glibly excused myself as I breezed past them to take some fresh air out on the emergency lanai.
“Oh good,” one of them said, “let’s see some local style.”
“Local style?,” I asked, bemused.
“We’re ranking people on how cool-ly they get out to the fire escape. And this is your turf so I bet you’re smooth as hell.”
I smirked. Of course I’m smooth as hell. This was my house. Here’s how it’s done, I thought to myself, and launched.
Just because it was an emergency exit didn’t mean the window was easy to navigate. It was skinny and made skinnier by how the window swung open; the sill was higher than my knees. With one hand on an upper portion of the side of the sill, I kicked up and through, rotated sharply, propelled, re-rotated, withdrew my hand, and turned gracefully to receive my adulatory assessment from the judges. My supercilious smile to them, however, was met with grimaces of aghast disappointment. “Ya wanna try that again?” It sounded like charity. I grasped for it.
“Yeah, sure, I think my foot stuck on the rotation, or, um, yeah, lemme try it again....” I hopped back inside (an easier maneuver), eliciting renewed unenthusiastic glances. Putting their interim opinion behind me, I addressed the equipment, focused my ki, and made a righteous job this time around of the transit from inward to outward self. Nothing was rushed; everything flowed smoothly, from the lifting of the first foot through its extension forward, the levering and shifting of my hips, the transfenestration, and then the light, balletic landing onto the flat steel slats of the escape lounge. I took a moment to perfect the gesture, letting it come to a natural rest on its own terms. Only then did I turn around, secure in my having executed my own ideal traversal. I didn’t care what the Idle girls thought - I was satisfied.
What the Idle girls thought was obvious from the dismissive derision each of them amply expressed on their mutually beautiful faces. Their eyes said “fail” and their smirks said “dork.” Light poured through the window onto them, glowing in their alabaster skin and green feline eyes. I had let them down. I had been judged far from cool. Perhaps I was being seen by them, for the first time, for my true self.
Did I care about their opinion, now that I knew what they really thought? Part of me wanted to be mortified, or at least disappointed, by my ignominy, for having been unmasked before them as a fraud in the house of cool. Another part of me was fairly resigned to that fact already, though. I knew how cool I actually was, and at this party, it wasn’t “-est.” It had always been fun to hang with them and to consider myself cool, but the days of my perceived coolness were clearly numbered. However, as of that moment, those days had not yet ended with finality. It was still my crib, my party, my friends. While the good times lasted, I drank them deeply. For what can be more cool, than to revel in one’s own essential nerdiness?
That was a rhetorical question, by the way. Do not tell me. I’d rather not know.