Monday, October 26, 2009

Spooky and Shiny

That gentle stirring of the cosmic soup is me, starting to move around again.  Let’s not go crazy with it now, though - we’ll re-initiate activities slowly and gently, so as not excessively to shock my system.  That’s what I tried last time and it landed me in horktown for a solid week.  So now I’m looking for ways to make things easy on myself. 

Here’s one good example of that: Halloween is coming up, as they tell me, soon, and bald dads like me will be expected to get thematic right along with our kids (Zach will be Plex from one of his preferred shows, Yo Gabba Gabba, and Jesse finally has a devil costume to complement his essential inner nature.) Bald guys should have it easy as far as costumes are concerned, since there are quite a few characters who can be fully invoked without much effort beyond a shiny scalp.  So, for my own future reference as well as my present convenience, I’m stockpiling here and now a ...

LIST OF SIMPLE COSTUME IDEAS FOR BALD MEN

Mr Clean (white t-shirt and pants, bulging forearms)
Kojak (Blazer, necktie, lollypop, parking space directly in front)
Lex Luthor (Blazer, cruelty, kryptonite)
Dr Manhattan (hydro-atom on forehead; blue and nude; capacity to self-replicate infinitely and to assume gargantuan size)
Howie Mandel (blazer, soul patch, twenty-six leggy models carrying briefcases)
Mt Baldy (t-shirt emblazoned with legend, “Mount Me")

After that they become distasteful, although quite simple.  Anyway, these ought to get me through 2014.  After that I’ll probably have hair again or something.  No plans that far in the future are worth the internet script it takes to predict them.  Like, who knew I’d still be typing this drek?  ouch.... 

Friday, October 23, 2009

two weekends worth of health enhancement

Okay, this has been ridiculous.  I’ve lost a full week.  That’s seven beers, people!  I have been coughing, queasing, getting clammy, being achy for just. about. long. ENOUGH.  Now I’ve got a relative staying over and people are having a good old time and I’m still hacking up gorilla glue and catarrh.  It’s not like I don’t appreciate pity, but isn’t there more to life than being a walking, talking cough? 

Here’s a thought, dammit: how about casting myself back over a few pleasant weekends and seeing whether that distracts me?  I mean, long enough for the nyquil to kick in?  What a great idea, Chuckles ol’ pal.  That’s the ticket right there.  When do I get paid again?  Is this cheese real? 

Oh silly grasshopper, the nyquil is obviously already well into its nefarious ways.  Relax your inhibitions, then, by gazing over these delectable photos:

These shots were from the Sonoma County’s Tolay Lake Harvest Festival.  NO HALLOWEEN IMAGERY WHATSOEVER.  For thar be-ith the satanism, ye ken.  OOOGABOOGA!  O now I skeered ya.  Sissy. 

The Hay-Bale Maze - both kids loved it.  Good times amid the biomass.

Z has a booklet in his hands - there are spaces for ten stamps, each representing a different activity around the ranch like “Indian Village” and “Candle-making” and “Blowtorch Sculpture.” His book is at this moment wide open, and he’s trying to figure out where to go next.  If you embiggen this photo you can see his eyes are literally popping from his sockets with excitement.

A seasonal favorite: reindeer.  Or something.  Whatever.

Jesse took a moment to hang out with his friend the enormous gourd.  They look good together, I think.

Both boys, riding garden tractors.  Soon they will power our factories!  And you know what that means - sticky, toy-strewn factories.  Blergh.

The festival features olde-timey household and construction equipment - an old washer, an old pump, that sort of thing.  This is the rotating drum of a cement mixer produced by the Wonder company.  Later, as I understand, it wrote the book of love.  Who figured. 

Zach remembered his close personal relationship with a squash from back in aught-sebben and wanted to relive the magic.  As easily said as done, young master Z! 

Zach, hunting down the perfect pumpkin way out by the bending-point of the event horizon.  Quantum-tastic!

I should mention that the single most memorable thing for me about the day was the amazing sizzle I experienced when I got some fresh Kettle Corn, right out of the kettle, and shoveled a whole mess of it into my mouth, and a big chunk of molten sugar and salt fell into my tender maw and burned a new contour to the inside of my lip.  I could feel it bubbling as it stuck to me, people.  Still and all: good times!

The next weekend I woke up a little under the weather on Sunday but was not going to let that, a ticket-timing mixup, or rain, prevent me from taking Z along on a trip to Dolores Park, where this year’s Trolley Dances began.  At the park, we saw three dances; then we boarded the trolley and rode three miles to Balboa Park.  Along the way we saw a wonderful tango performed along the street for us, and then at the park there were two more dances and then some synchronized swimming.  My camera ran out of juice before I got very far, but here’s some memorable moments from the first little segment:

Within the interstices of a palm tree’s cut-frond bark - a dance with clover and moss

A Mexican folk-dance by the statue of El Liberador de Mexico, who was apparently a 20-foot iron priest.  Very impressive.  Also, those guys in the back with the instruments?  Super serious.  The guy with the tiny guitar had a voice in the Alto range.  The guy with the kefiyah scarf - he’s playing a festively-painted goat-jaw.  Really well, too!

One of the powershots from the dance on the pedestrian bridge over the trolley tracks - “Men Think They Are Smarter Than Grass.” I choose to be insulted by that title, but then to rise above it.  The dance was inspirational.  I think I got a shot of this guy last time, too.

That’s when the batteries wore out, and coincidentally, this is when mine wear out too.  The funny thing is, I’m actually working on a piece of fiction to post, but it keeps getting longer and longer.  It’s going to be unreadable by the time it’s finished.  Which sounds perfect to me!  So… wait for it, and I’ll get more to ya when I can.... 

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

update from the sickbed

sorry blogopolis, I’ve been under the weather and on the road and disconnected and then very very under the weather.  I think I had some ideas for things to post but they’re not making it out of the feverdreams so you are stuck with this lousy placeholder:

Two Questions for Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli:

Did you try any of the other colors of Tuscadero before resolving on “Pinky?”
How does it feel to be the person who actually jumped the shark? 

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Big Jim, Taffy, The Wiz and Me

I didn’t mean to write an essay but a theme got presented to me - The Wizard of Oz - and damned if I didn’t fire one off just like cuttlefish ink.  And now you get to read it.  My sincerest apologies, unless I don’t like you, in which case, you had it coming.  A blessing on your houses, and a warm compliment on your garages. 

Jim was pretty much the most favoritest guy in the whole neighborhood. He was a scowling, lantern-jawed 40- or 50-year-old, and he drove the big white ice cream truck. Jim’s ice cream truck was not the only one to ply our quiet streets, and we’d chase after them all with fistfuls of sweaty change - but Jim’s truck had the biggest selection, the nicest counter-window, the sweetest jangling music, the most different kinds of everything… and he’d let you take your time choosing, as if you hadn’t just waited in line for 10 minutes with every chance in the world to decide what you wanted, but still you found yourself standing at his counter recapitulating the classic “cremesicle - wacky packs” quandry for yourself yet again, and everyone behind you was laughing in the hot sun in the middle of the street, impatient but happy, and still, Jim wouldn’t rush you. He’d just stare down at you, wordless, almost sneering, arms crossed and faded tricep tattoo stretched to unintelligibility, waiting for you to decide what kind of sugar to buy from him. When we’d hear the chimes of his old van coming around, nothing else mattered to any of us but getting outside to see him. Even if we couldn’t at that moment afford to buy his candy, we’d just want to be there and soak up the atmosphere. Jim was, for us, in our small world, The Man, and we loved him for it.

Such small greatnesses filled my world when I was young - the greatness of the ice cream truck and of Saturday morning cartoons and of shopping for school supplies. The annual events were particularly noteworthy, in fact, because they arose so rarely and therefore had to be experienced to the fullest extent possible when they did come to pass - major yearly landmarks like the school-supply shopping trip, seeing the fireworks on the Fourth of July, and the annual showing of the Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz was this really old movie - older than my mom or my dad, both of whom had seen it as children which conclusively proved that this movie was from somewhere prior to the beginning of time. It started, as old things always did, in black-and-white, but then it burst out into color after a catastrophic - well, I don’t want to ruin it for you, but let’s just say Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas any longer and this movie wasn’t like regular movies, either. It had a witch who was genuinely powerful and frightening, with a cadre of flying monkeys at her command; there were freaks and manimals and all manner of disturbing entities prancing around, seeking an omnipotent wizard who lived in an antisceptically utopian city surrounded by fields of drug-laced flowers.... a golden road led them forward through fearsome perils to a series of confrontations that challenged each of them at the essential core of their psyches .... and finally: iconoclasm, triumph, reassurance, return, re-monochromatism, credits, and one more year before we’d see it again. What a great event.

The Wizard of Oz, in those days of tripartite television control, was shown once a year, and was not otherwise available for viewing (by me, anyway). There were no VCRs, and the idea of a DVR would have rendered any householder incredulous. You saw it when they showed it, or you waited till next year. When the Wizard came on, I’d be allowed to stay up late to watch the whole thing, a process which took on a certain ceremonial air. As I recall, I demanded a tee-vee dinner for this event - I specifically preferred a Libby’s brand with embossed characters at the bottom of every section of the divided foil tray. I appropriated the entirety of the couch in front of the television, and forced everybody else in the family to find seating elsewhere. But perhaps most importantly, I ate taffy.

There are two kinds of taffy: the chewy nuggets, individually wrapped in twists of wax paper and sold out of nostalgically-unsanitary barrels on boardwalks, and the other kind. The other kind is a thin, flat sheet, mostly off-white with a colored stripe across the center. It was wrapped in wax paper like regular taffy, but this paper is sealed shut and has big red letters printed imposingly all over it. If you put it in the freezer the paper peeled off fairly easily, and bits of taffy snap right off. These shatter when eaten, reforming in your mouth into a bolus of sugary goodness. It doesn’t seem to come so much in flavors, as colors - purple, not grape; red, not cherry.... It was a fairly straightforward glucose delivery system, so effective that I was only allowed to buy sheet taffy from Jim once a year - on Wizard of Oz night.

Jim seemed to know his place in this process - though his schedule was notoriously variable, he always seemed to come around on Wizard Saturday. I’d line up at his truck, every cell in my little body shivering with excitement as I handed over my small change and got back, without reply or commentary, my taffysheet. I’d trot it back indoors and pop it in the freezer, waiting in a pre-candy fugue state for the movie to start. I would postpone my supper till the opening credits, peeling back the foil from my scarlet pasta or breaded chicken lumps as the MGM lion roared, and then tucking in vociferously during the initial scenes. Dialogue was obscured by the scrape of my fork on the foil, but all I was missing was predicate, the set-up, the obligatory exposition we’d need before....

Dot’s storm-tossed house lands with a bump; she tentatively pushes open the front door. Outside, for the first time in the movie, color blazes from the screen, shimmering gold and verdant green. Eyes that had grown used to using only the rods suddenly found the cones fully engaged; a brain that had forgotten that it was filling in the color to a colorless image found its work now redundant, leading to a super-saturated awareness of color so intense as almost to be a texture as much as a hue. It was a mindbending cinematic moment, one I specifically anticipated for a year at a time - and it was at that moment that I, traditionally, peeled the paper off my wafer of taffy and started working my way through it.

As the Lollypop Guild capered and crooned, I felt the surge in my taffy-loving soul. Dorothy skipped off down the road and my heart palpitated with the sugar rush. She’d meet her various friends and I’d finish my treat and sit in a stupor, overenergized and utterly focused on the 19-inch screen and blissfully insensible to the nauseating combination of foods I’d just consumed. I’d had my teevee supper, my precious Jim-bought taffy, and now there were monkeys flying out of my television. It was scary, but not too scary; I knew things were going to turn out okay in the end. But for the moment, I could just sit there, alone on the couch, cradling my elbows under the big brown afghan, sugar-addled and riveted by technicolor. It was a double whammy of an event, two once-a-years in concert. I had a solemn obligation to get as much out of it as humanly possible, and I always took such obligations seriously.

Times have, to say the least, changed. Television just isn’t an event anymore; I almost never get to see a movie in a theater at all. But sometimes I still pick up a sheet of that taffy from a toy store near my office; it’s not the same as buying it from Jim’s truck but it is still fun to eat. And I am looking forward very much to seeing the Wizard of Oz someday soon with my young son for the very first time. He knows that we can watch whatever we want on television, whenever we want to, but I think it will still be meaningful to him to watch it straight through with me and know that’s how I saw it when I was his age, how Opa saw it when he had been a little boy. And if I need to keep anybody’s attention, I might hold a sheet or two of taffy in reserve till that first scene in color. It seems like a classic combination, and I am a great respecter of the classics. 

Friday, October 09, 2009

Of An Estuary

July 5, 2002: I guess I didn’t yet have a blog, because when I left a comment with Pea I signed off with my name - my actual name, not an email analogue or on-line avatar or other such pseudonym.  I signed off as me, to the following words that I suppose I made up on the spot as a comment to it-matters-not-what:

Like convolutions of a brain
or branches of the bronchioles
the stinking brackish water filters
through a comb of peat and mud
that splits and quivers, plunges, bifur-
cates among the sedge and pickle;
sunlight, rosy in the waning,
glints against its purling surface
like the gleam of ruddy diamonds
winking in an old man’s mouth.
The pipers strut among the channels
stabbing with their curved probosces,
stabbing with the joy of being,
stabbing for their furtive supper.
The air is full of respiration
molecules exchanging atoms
water drains across the wetlands
pulling back the living curtain
furrows glisten, odors
rising from them as from wombs
I cannot tell which way it’s flowing
only that it all is moving

You tell me that it smells good
and that is why I have to love you.

This, chilluns, is potery, as writ by poterists as famous as Whatshisname and That Guy With the Coffee Breath.  Also, it relieves me of the burden of writing something fresh for you today.  The weekend deserves a little new copy, I think, and damned if it looks like I’ll get a chance to scriven any - there’s Chuesok festivities at the Asian tomorrow, and the Harvest Pumpkin Festival out by Petaluma on Sunday.  And don’t give me that “Monday’s a Holiday” crap.  It’s Columbus Day, and that means I need to build a freaking caravel and sail it around Lake Merced with my stalwart band.  Or maybe I can just expel the Jews from Spain.  Right now it’s sort of a tossup for me which one I’ll do, but neither leaves much room for blogging.  Didn’t you hear it was a dead medium anyway?

Well, from my dead medium to yours, have a relaxing weekend and try not to discover any land masses you aren’t prepared to take good care of.  Remember what happened with New Guinea?  I didn’t think so.... 

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Eyeballs Ready! - the photos I stockpiled till now

It has been pretty much a total wordfest here lately, which must be very irritating to my many illiterate visitors.  However, during the long image-free interregnum, I did have the good fortune to stockpile a, how you say, crapload of photos worth the effort of your focusing your beady little peepers upon them.  Behold them now, and tremble, o masters of the internet: My Photos, a Veritable Crapload thereof!

First, a few low-res items from the cellphone:

From my walk from the express bus stop at the foot of Bush street: One Bush Street, getting a little makeover:

From a Friday evening late in the month, when I ran into Critical Mass and thankfully not vice-versa:

At the Bay Area Discovery Museum for kids, a view through a massive section of redwood trunk:

And finally, from Rosh Hashona, here’s an atmospheric shot: the Amidah is a big, heavy prayer full of personal communication with the all-powerful forces of the universe.  It’s usually said in a manner that invokes privacy and interiority.  When I went to services at the Arboretum, we all went outside for the Amidah and stood around a gorgeous little meadow to pray for re-integration and renewal.  I leaned against a massive redwood to read my little machzor to myself, and then looked up and ad libbed a little dialogue with the inexpressible while gazing up at this:

Okay, that was a refreshing warm-up.  Now let’s bring out the big guns.  Big cute guns.

First: Jesse, contemplative.

Next: Jesse, deflecting blame onto a defenseless if well-loved teddybear.

Next: Jesse, morphing into Froghead Jesse.

Next: Jesse, gleefully ignoring his brother’s assiduous gaming.

All this may make you wonder why I’m only photographing Jesse.  It is because Zach is not photogenic.  Here, I will show you. 

Okay, let’s shake off that insulin rush with a few photos taken on my innumerable perigrinations around this my city faire:

At the GGPark Carrousel (yeah, they spell it that way, garrish, eh?), a rhinestone cowboy’s petrified steed:

At the Sutro Bath ruins, a strangely 3-D image of the Seal Rocks blowhole (try embiggening this one in particular, it’s kind of cool):

Also at the bathhouse ruins, the view from inside the tunnel:

Out at the wharf with my dad and family, here’s the chocolatorium sign and the Maritime Museum rehab project:

Also at the Maritime Museum, newly-refurbished tile mosaics - and this is nothing compared to the frescos in the main lobby:

At the piers, a view through the headworks toward the Jerry O’Brian, the last surviving Liberty Ship:

At Pier 39, where the sea lions hang out: here to kick some seagull butt

I think we’re all now in a properly awe-struck and meditative frame of mind.  Let’s wrap up with some appreciation of the weird and wonderful things that have come my way in the recent past.  Some are weird; some are wonderful; and some partake freely from both conditions.  However, in any and every case, your life is incomplete until you’ve seen:

Down in our backyard area, the landlady (or maybe her mom?) has started home-curing her own bacon.  I can’t help but think that it’s probably really good, and I’m impressed as hell that they have the marbles to eat this stuff but more power to ‘em:

A recent addition to the Chuck L. Hutte Galleries is this amazing image of the beloved Dr Girlfriend from The Venture Brothers.  Mia made it for us; hit her up at her Etsy shop and she’ll do you right too.  But it will perforce be a pale imitation, because this Dr G is super-great and paranormal:

come on, click through on this enlargement and immerse yourself in the amazitude!

Additionally, as if that were not enough, the final book in the Outlander series recently arrived at our home.  YES it is being read.  NO not yet by me.  Cool your jets, and if you have not already done so, it looks like you’ll want to read the Lord John books too just to get fully prepped:

But wait, there is more!  Have I mentioned the unbelievably cool sweatshirt I recently got made by the genius who created the design for this very self-same blog?  It is just about the coolest warm thing ever made, to commemorate the wonderful day care facility where J attends:

Yes, it’s juvenile-artifiact-toting mongol warrior!  It makes me happy when he’s marauding across my chest.  However, to close things out, I got one more nice chestful of graphics to share with y’all - yesterday when I got home from work Kel gave me a t-shirt with this design on the pectoral region, in appreciation for my long hours not being sick and taking up the slack while she gets over walking pneumonia:

Kids, ask your grandpappy about this one.  I’m loving it.  It’s such a commentary on the purity of aesthetics.  Which is, I think, my cue to be done with this.  Have an eyeball-satisfying day and I’ll see about catching up with you later on with something about my giant toe cyst or the old typewriter or something.  Just get off my back for right now, already.  I am so done for today. 

Thursday, October 01, 2009

What’s Your Sign?

From portents, maybe I don’t so much know, but I’m certainly not about to ignore the signs. I live in a fairly active city and signage can be pretty important.  It informs, entertains, educates, and sometimes even protects.  I read billboards and awnings and bumpers and handbills, all the public writings my eyes encounter, indiscriminately and compulsively.  Especially street signs.  Those suckers can save your life. 

Street signs can keep you away from bad neighborhoods, clear of cross traffic, close to bus lines and generally out of harm’s way.  Sometimes they help you get where you’re going even if you aren’t sure yourself where that might be.  This is the special circumstance of the philosophical street sign, of which a prime example now resides in my workplace neighborhood.  Or, less obliquely:

I work near the intersection of two streets, one of which is five lanes 1-way.  A familiar sign to that effect appears at each corner, encouraing cross-traffic not to turn the wrong way.  You’ve seen the like before: a rectangle sharpened to a point at one end, black with a white arrow marked inside, and the arrow inscribed with black letters: “ONE WAY.” Such signs are commonplace; they’re hardly worth noticing, really, unless you’re about to turn the wrong way, of course - or if they really say something different altogether that demands a little more thought.  Such as, for example, the one-way sign at Mish and Main:

Clearly this is not a one-way sign - not anymore, it isn’t.  It’s an “NE WAY” sign, which I pronounce with the first two letters given their proper names and the last three combined in the traditional wordly manner.  Aloud, it sounds like “ANY*WAY.”

This declaration of ambivalence is fitting because I can’t tell exactly what it’s telling me.  On one hand, it could be that, regardless of the sign’s express directionality, I might feel free to go “any way” I please.  All the options are open.  Still, the insistence of the arrow suggests strongly that, whichever way I choose, I had better take it: I may go “any way” I wish, but go I must. 

On the other hand, the sign could read as a single word - “anyway:” a word of conclusory dismissiveness.  It focuses on what happens after an event; what’s important isn’t the choice but the followup.  The phrase “any way” is about a decision; “anyway” is about inevitable results or conditions that ensue regardless of the predicate choice.  One is a matter of the chosing, the other renders the underlying choices irrelevant as against the consequences. 

I really don’t know which, if either, of these is meant by this provocative streetsign.  Except, of course, that Main is still a busy five lane street with all the traffic hheading north.  So long as I don’t forget to keep my eyes open for that, I can ruminate on the ambiguous philosophies of streetsigns straight on till I’m at my desk.  From there, anyway, any way I’ve decided to read it, it comes out about the same. 

And to continue the celebration of signage, here’s some more semi-manipulated phone photos I took at some places I’ve visited in the past few months:

I’ll have more photos for you soon.  It’s fun to be using three different cameras now!  Meantime, don’t you have something more productive to be doing?