Sunday, August 30, 2009

Meteorological Histrionics: Storms that Changed the Landscape in my Mind

Looks like a dag-blame essay series comin’ in.  Better lay in some supplies.  Chuckles has been known to make this stuff really last. 

There’s something about a good storm that really makes an impression on me.  I mean, I remember lots of storms.  Some were serious, and some were ridiculous. It’s one thing for the rain to fall for three days straight and the dry wash to overflow its cavernous banks; it’s something else entirely to experience conditions that become, effectively, a personal iconography, a vocabulary of images illustrating my own personal mythology.  Concepts like “deluge” and “maelstrom” and “end of days” have appropriated specific historical embodiments out of my own experiences, though of these there are not too many.  Sitting here now today, I can only think of five storms that really hit me where I live in that visceral way.  But for a personal mythological iconography, that’s probably not a bad start. 

A word first deserves to be said about the storms of my childhood.  It has been said that it never rains in southern California, and I can’t speak for how things are there as of this writing, but when I was growing up it sometimes rained in SoCal and sometimes it rained like a sonofabitch.  I’ve seen your midwestern summer downpours and your east coast drenchers and even a tropical South Florida storm.  I know real rain when I see it, and sometimes, as a lad, I sure enough saw it.  Thick, heavy drops that changed the way light and sound worked, a sensible reduction in the amount of air in the air, and this would go on, more or less, for three or four days of non-stop cloudbursts.  Kelly was flabbergasted when a serious storm hit L.A. not long after she’d first moved there from PA.  “Don’t these damn things ever stop?,” she asked (or words to that effect) and we just laughed and laughed because really, that would be commercial suicide for a place like L.A. never to have sunlight ever again.  It just feels like that sometimes, but then the rain does stop and everything is clean and clear and renewed, just ripe for the taking. 

That’s a powerful feeling, one of my favorites, but that’s all beside the point I’m making here.  These words are about particular storms, not some generic memory of rain.  Maybe there were some I should have remembered in particular, but I just don’t.  My typical non-specific childhood storm was one where I’d go out in yellow slickers with buckle-latch closures, to float foil boats down fastrunning gutterstreams in rain-dimmed murk.  Generic rainy playtime.  No special storm.  Doesn’t count.  As if I’d have let that stop me.  Which I obviously didn’t.  So, moving on:

1.  San Fernando Valley, mid-70s: Or maybe this was a little later, but not much.  I’m pretty sure it’s referenced in the novel White Oleander, a rain of ashes that filled the sky with the convective power of massive wildfires, huge ones up in the San Gabriels or Santa Suzannas or something, lots of timber ablaze, forests incinerated so utterly and instantly that its remnants came floating down to us in perfect replication, twigs and leaves, all rendered down to the tiniest detail in light-grey ash you could catch on a fingertip and crush with the slightest touch.... It swirled around on the pavement, covered lawns, piled into drifts like flash-fried snow.  It was a strange storm - warm weather, no water.  But ash was raining down from the sky; we couldn’t go out to play, and the air was thick with dead matter that stank as it wafted over us from a hell a hundred miles distant.  It was a storm unlike any other I’ve ever been in and I hope never to repeat it.  Once was enough on that one.  Post-apocalyptic, man. 

Up next: more storms, baby....

public sculpture; across from the Ferry Bldg: welcome to san fran

another cell-phone special

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

He Comes By It Naturally

Back when I was getting haircuts, I took them fairly seriously.  A couple really bad experiences, a couple really good ones… I could see how much was riding on both the haircut, and on the haircutting - the actual experience, my subjective enjoyment of the process.  When I left the chop shop, did I truly both look good and feel better?  Mene sano in coiffure sano?

It was thus with gratitude and relief that I did actually find excellent haircut places here in my neighborhood, and I proudly patronized them back in the day.  It’s been hard enough as I’ve relocated over the years to find one place that made a decent job of it; to have found two just a few blocks from my home verged on excessive good luck.  Grand Opening Haircuts and International Dick’s Haircuts both served up a decent trim and a relaxing experience.  These guys even did rubdowns, for god’s sake.  Not some new age chakra-tickling nodal stimulation, either, but an honest-to-god rubdown from a single strong hand to the back of which a plug-in oscillator had been firmly strapped, tough fingers kneading the vibe deep into tired shoulder muscles and numb, newly-nude necks.  It’s a very refreshing end to a workmanlike, attentive, well-executed dry haircut.  It’s how dudes like to do things, every other month or so.  A ten-spot got me out the door, too.  One of these places would have been enough for me, and I had two.  It was enough to make me proud, a little.  And that was enough hubris to bring me the hairy eyeball, though it took till now to happen.

Used to be, I’d chat with Paul at Grand Opening, or with International Dick, during my haircuts, and we’d nod to each other in the street.  We had a “local neighbors” sort of friendship.  International Dick felt like an ally, though perhaps of an unusually inconsequential sort.  He could give you a good haircut.  That’s significant, I knew full well, but it’s been five years now since I’ve needed a haircut at all.  I manage my own scalp, tyvm, and on the one occasion that I brought it, stubble-ridden, to the barber for a shave, he didn’t do such an all-fired great job of it, so I’ve stayed home for the self-ministration regimen.

Some mornings now, though, I’ll find myself out walking past International Dick, of International Dick’s.  It’s right here in the ‘hood, after all.  It would be weird if I didn’t run into him every so often.  And sometimes when I see him he doesn’t see me - he’s busy with a customer, or talking to someone.  And it does seem that he’s doing a decent business.  But it’s for absolute sure that he’s not getting anything off of me; it’s plain as the nose on my face that I’ve pulled my trade from the marketplace.  And on those occasions I happen past him when he’s just out smoking and watching the world, waiting quietly for someone to summon him back to his hydraulic chairs, and our eyes meet through that smoke, and I smile and nod to him, he just looks at me.  No nod.  No smile.  Just dark eyes tracking my progress, quiet, expressionless, watchful.  Nada.  It chills my blood, really, the barber’s hairy eyeball, his mute reproach. 

It’s not like he’s going to make me change my mind, stop shaving and return to the fold of his patrons.  He’s going to glare at me and I’m going to have to grow a spine and ignore him.  But if anybody would be predisposed to crankinng out a seriously hairy eyeball, wouldn’t you figure it would be a barber? 

cellphone photo - sidewalk, 18th Avenue at Geary

Friday, August 21, 2009

With Apologies to Paul Rubens, plus more eye candy

I wasn’t so very athletic in grade school, but there was always something cool about the balls.  Those were some heavy duty high-test playground balls they had for us.  The four-square balls - so big that they sort of wobbled when you hit them; the sock-balls - smaller, more rigid, more resilient when punched out into the playground; the kickballs - yellow, heavier, faster, less forgiving… and, of course, let us not forget: the pee wee balls.  These were a little bigger than softballs, very firmly inflated, lightning fast and light enough to soar unrivaled distances when soundly struck.  They were hard to catch but easy to throw.  They made sockball exciting again.  Those pee wee balls - they were some damn fine balls indeed. 

Like so many of the minor benignities that palliated my grammar school experience, like the charming steam radiators and the gnarled pepper trees, the pee wee balls faded from my thoughts not long after I left Riverside Drive Elementary and didn’t bother coming back again till fairly recently.  For it was but recently that Zach was playing with his little mini-fake soccer ball (or “MFSB"), a small white rubber ball with a pattern of black hexagons imprinted on it to replicate an old-school stitched-together euro-style football.  The MFSB wasn’t really a soccer ball, of course - it was too small, for one thing, and all made of one piece of rubber that was scored all over with a faint pattern of swirling hash marks. 

Those little marks rang a long-neglected bell for me, a bell that I promptly and cheerfully ignored.  The MFSB did not merit bell-rung cogitation.  It was nothing more than a child’s plaything; my enjoyment of it was the enjoyment of a dad playing with his son: vicarious, paternal, but not really specific to the ball itself.  Honestly, the MFSB was sort of weak - it didn’t bounce very well, didn’t travel very far when kicked.  It felt lethargic - “dead,” one might say, were one so inclined, which I really wasn’t.  I just did not care that much.  The MFSB was just another of Zach’s many toys, and no more inherently interesting to me than any of his other playthings.  In fact, to an extent, it was actually less interesting, because it was so underinflated.  It really wasn’t fulfilling its potential. 

A solution, though, was available to me - an actual sports pump, the sort with the metal needle you lube up with spit and then jam into a convenient inflation port.  Such a pump languished in my kitchen junk drawer.  Improbably, my dadly status had compelled me to go and get one of these devices months prior, to keep our little collection of basketballs and volleyballs and such in appropriate fettle.  And now it seemed I had yet another call for it, though this time on a ball of far lesser status than some of the others we owned.  The basketball and volleyball and “real” soccer ball were all made of traditional materials, looked and acted like they were supposed to.  Not like that little dead MFSB.  MFSB needed help, for sure. 

So I got out the device and employed it with the aplomb of one who’s done it for a lifetime, albeit only sporadically.  I pumped that sucker like it’s never been pumped before.  And it felt good.  It only took a few strokes before I realized what was happening.  That flaccid little MFSB was transforming in my now-trembling hands into a real live honest-to-goodness pee wee ball, just like I remembered them: bouncy and responsive, insoucient and eager for fun, textured with those micro-ridges like the tines of a thousand tiny forks, just a little more than a handful and ready for any kind of action you’ve got.  Any action I’ve got, anyway.  I was gobsmacked, thunderstruck, startled and shocked: after thirty-five years of ignoring how badly I wanted one, I was now suddenly on the verge of having a pee wee ball of my very own.  All I’d need to do was get rid of the kid, and the pee wee MFSB would be mine, all mine. 

Well, maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to dispose of the kid entirely.  Maybe I could sort of share the MFSB with him for a while - to start, at least. We’d just have to find a way to play with it together.  That didn’t seem so challenging, actually, since he’s such a great kid and I prefer to play with him than to do just about anything else.  And even more so now than ever before.  Because now, there’s a pee wee ball to toss around with him.  And one thing I learned in grade school was, that things go better with pee wee balls. 

That ball has never let me down since I pumped it up, either, although it did prove to be somewhat eccentric (which only endeared it to me more).  When you roll it, it sort of wobbles across the floor in the general direction in which you aimed it.  But if you just punch it or kick it or chuck it across an open field… oh baby, you can really get some air on that sucker.  It flies like a dream, and as it turns out, some dreams fly for thirty-five years or so. 

MORAL THE FIRST: Sometimes the right choice is a pee wee choice. 
MORAL THE LAST: The proper internal pressure makes all the difference in the world. 

But that can’t be the last word, it’s too much of a lead-in to spam comments flogging virility enhancers (yes, here those are spam, tyvm.) So check the extended entry for some photos.  Some are cool, some are cute, and one just documents a climactic moment in the history of humankind.  Do click through, won’t you?

Monday, August 17, 2009

Oh, there you are, Perry

Mysterious Hiding Places of the Monkees

Davy Jones’ Locker
Michael Nesmith’s Vanity
The Shoebox under Mickey Dolenz’ Bed
Peter Tork’s Over-Designed Cargo Shorts

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Walking Slow - the reprise (Plus Living the Jethro Tull Life)

In my rich repertoire of recurring themes, slow-walkers was one I didn’t expect to come back. I guess it’s just one more example of how little I know even about my own life, writerly and otherwise. Slow walking is in the ‘hood, homies and homettes, and I’d be derelict in my essay-ism if I didn’t make with the run-on sentences and tortured modifiers about it.

NeoSlow Walker No. 1 is seriously slow, every time I see him, and I’ve been seeing him about once a week for a few months now already. He’s a black dude, medium height, medium build, hair naturally nappy and trimmed to a decent ‘fro… His face is wide, friendly and unblemished, and his smile often shines through his tidy moustache/beard combo. He wears slacks and a midweight brown jacket in all weather, whether too hot or too cold, the jacket now fading from incessant exposure to our occasional SF sun. He is shod in brown leather loafers that remain in surprisingly decent shape, considering the amount of use they get. He’s on them constantly. Then again, maybe they don’t cover too much ground.

Whenever I see him he’s up to the very same thing: he’s got his hands in his pockets, his back curled gently forward, and his eyes pitched a few sidewalk squares ahead. He’ll stand there, foot poised, ankle flexed, grinning expectantly for a minute or so, well thirty or forty-five seconds anyway but that’s a damn long time to be standing still while ostensibly walking, and then he’ll slide the lifted foot forward with a short gentle movement, toe out, ankle drop, heel-ball change, like he’s doing a tiny one-step dance to a song that’s playing just for him, so sweetly he just can’t help but move to the beat. By which I mean, he moves one foot forward, about one inch. At most. Then he waits again, smiling quietly, waiting for the next moment to perfect itself in which to repeat the motion with the other foot.

It’s almost painful, how slow he goes, until you check his face and see how so perfectly satisfied he seems with his progress. He’s grinning, and nodding his head gently, and looking ahead with an easy gaze. And yes, he’s slowly bleaching out in the sun and fog; and yes, he’s slim as a whip and seems lost in the middle of a neighborhood he ever strolls and never leaves.... but maybe for him, that’s all okay. Maybe I’m a speed demon, but maybe we needn’t all be.

NeoSlow Walker No. 2 is a real old-timer. For as long as I’ve ridden the 38, I’ve seen him out in the mornings, trudging along with grim determination. He’s an older guy, face deeply tanned and craggy, a bulbous nose, brillo hair brushed back and trimmed conservatively. His body is stocky, not tall, not tight, but compact and seemingly strong with that puissant “old man strength” that begs no assistance and brooks no impediment: - big shoulders, heavy hands, a barrel for a torso and tree trunks for legs.

He wears a consistent uniform: a knit cap that rides high on his grizzled brow, a heavy sweatshirt, a bright orange safety singlet like those worn by street crews working in traffic, sturdy track shoes, baggy shorts, and a velcro knee brace that fails utterly to conceal a huge brutal scar enveloping one leg. It honestly looks like he got operated on with a can opener - and not one of those nice fancy ones, either. The tissue is dark and gnarled and just plain angry-looking.

It’s almost enough to make me wonder how he could even move the leg, much less walk on it. But walk he did, and walk he does - rain or shine, heat or cold, week in and week out, the scarified man makes his gritty way up the sidewalk, jaws clenched and eyes locked forward.

For years, his pace was measured. Let’s be honest: he was slow. He limped heavily, favoring the damaged joint, almost dragging it along behind him like a ham hock or a sack of recyclables. It looked really tough. Then again, so did he. And maybe he wasn’t going too quickly, but then again, he never slowed down. He just kept on walking. Every day. For years.

Years now have passed, and brought us all to the present day. Old Scarleg is still making his heavy limping way down our sidewalks, his cap high on his boulder of a head, his legs inexorably exchanging places with each other, the one thick and robust, the other chewed up like it got jumped by a garden weasel. But he’s moving steady and God love him he’s picked up some speed over the years. I wouldn’t say he’s walking fast, but he’s faster than he used to be. He’s barely even slow anymore. And on those days his path crosses mine as I wait at the bus stop, he now sometimes glances up from his efforts, catches my eye, and smiles. He may not be as fast as he’d like to be, but step by step, he is getting faster. 

In the extended entry: my life, an interview composed entirely of Jethro Tull song titles.  Because sometimes Facebook isn’t enough all by itself. 

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

snapshots from the road and electronic highway

As I intimated to my intimates not long ago, I recently took a bit of a road trip to north-central California for a bit of business.  This involved my driving up the 101, out the 37, over the 80, and then up the 99 to Marysville; then out the 20 and through the levee roads up to the 5 and 505 back to the 80 home.  (Yes, in California we provide numbered highways with definite articles, i.e., “the.” Also, we don’t call it “Cali.” Just so you can blend in better next time you visit.) I brought my camera, too, because I knew I’d be passing a few items of roadside interest I’ve wanted to memorialize for years. 

Item one was something I’ve glimpsed from speeding cars as whipped along THE 37 past the Petaluma Marina, where the Petaluma River empties into the northern reaches of the San Francisco Bay.  It’s a dinky little marina in the big empty flatlands, but outside one of the gates there’s an old rusted-out hulk of a dodge pickup truck.  This was photographic subject number one. 

Aside: seen on the 80 heading east, a truck from the “Pacific Mechanical Service” company.  Their logo is an acronym.  I think that’s a poor choice.

Subject number two is the world’s record holder for Smallest Mountain Range.  When you think of mountain ranges, usually you think of things that are hundreds of miles from end to end, filled with dozens, hundreds, even thousands of peaks.  The Rockies.  The Sierras.  The Caucasuses.  They are epic.  Except when you get to Sutter County, CA.  There, you can find the Sutter Buttes, which are ten miles from end to end and top to bottom.  The highest of them is about 2200 feet; the others are about 1,800.  None are terribly tall, but they do make an impressive sight over the Sacto Valley ricefields and fruit orchards.

That’s them, end to end, the whole mess of ‘em, from the east and from the west.  Pan out any farther and all you get is farmland.  So let’s zoom in a little, instead.

One thing I didn’t expect during my drive-through was some kind of drilling operation with a flaming vent.  Gotta love the flaming vents, right?

Aside #2: One of the “highway cleanup sponsor” signs out towards Marysville listed the sponsors as “Atheists and Other Free Thinkers.” And I say, God bless them all.  That’ll show them!

Finally, just to round things out, here’s some visual input on how much my boys love computers.  Even when they’re not actually connected to the internet, they surf like kahunas. 

And, given the chance, Jesse will just take over the other ‘puter and go two-fisted:

Yeah, he’s 18 months old and doesn’t really talk yet.  I’ll be in real trouble when he learns to code.... 

And that’s enough for tonight.  I’m on vacation for a few days - 20th anniversary and all that.  Hope this holds you for the nonce.  Otherwise, get a smaller nonce.  You don’t want any chafing.  And I’ve cornered the market on nonce-salve.