Thursday, June 11, 2009
Why My Life is Fascinating - Flavors, Transit, Stench and Weightlifting Edition
For better or worse, my discretionary writing time has been pretty well co-opted lately by projects ranging from the provocative to the infernal. Time is at a premium as it hasn’t been since my junior year of college, with the distinction that then I was trying to fit in rehearsals and parties, and now it’s about getting the kids to fall asleep and folding one billion tiny shirts and socks. Sometime soon I think the extracurricular projects will wrap up and I’ll be able to return to concentrating on poetry and fiction and the recreations of creativity, to the modest extent that I am granted the means to exercise them. Meantime, I can’t leave this hut of chuquels standing untenanted, unredecorated, a target for squatters, spammers, and cynics who question my ability to entertain myself here, much less anyone else. So let’s do another ever-popular rundown of the jackstraws and jenga-blox that litter the playroom floor I call my life these days:
Condiment watch: What’s sweet, tart, and delightfully red? No, not Carrot Top, and please you’re upsetting the children. It’s rhubarb symple syrup! Drawing freely from information obtained on the “internet” (you should check it out), I learned that I could boil water, sugar and cubed rhubarb for a few minutes, strain it all out, and you’ve (I’ve) created a liquid that is, basically, like a bottled sunset. It looks like rose wine but tastes like a cocktail without alcohol. We’ve been pouring it into seltzer, but I plan to get some bourbon, crank up some lemonade, and make with the grown-up beverages. If you never do anything else with rhubarb, do this. You won’t regret it.
Modulation watch: I’m one of “those” guys. You know, the ones who pay undue attention to construction and transit projects. So it’s pretty hard for me to ignore what’s happening catty corner from my office, where a city block-sized parking lot has been torn out and is being resurfaced and embellished with little modular podstructures. They’re working on a bit of a new bus station, as it turns out. The city’s main bus terminal is, well, terminal. It was basically obsolete once it had been built in, what, 1940?, and it’s only gotten obsoleter since then. We don’t know yet whether the new terminal will be the 1200 foot tower that’s been proposed, or something on a more grand scale. All we know for sure is that it will be built on the site of the existing terminal. That will pose a challenge for the buses that need somewhere to stop while they’re tearing down the old and building up the new. So what they’re doing is building the temporary transbay, or “tempbay,” terminal, right across the street from my office. It might ultimately mean that my walk from the bus to the office goes from two blocks down to, oh, zero blocks. But in the meantime, it’s a fun little project to watch. I just hope it won’t kill my productivity. Some things I have a hard time ignoring, and they have a lot of big trucks down there these days....
Garbage watch: we live in a foggy damp area. I love it - I can feel the moisture in the air most days, taste the ocean on the breeze, hear the foghorns. It’s a pleasure, almost all the time. But two mondays ago something happened to make moisture the enemy. Here’s the situation: garbage gets picked up on mondays, and something terrible happened two rounds ago. Something fell. Something horrible, rancid, reeking and wretched fell from somebody’s garbage, or maybe the truck itself. It wasn’t our damn garbage. Nothing - NOTHING - we ever threw out smells that bad. It was like a solid waste dump threw up a substantial dollop of unspeakable hideousness on the street right in front of our house. Now, most places, that stuff would just dry up and blow away, but not here. Here, the rich marine fog has kept refreshing and invigorating the stank every night, so that every morning for nearly two weeks I’ve been able to appreciate it anew. Until today. Today, bless the holiness, the street cleaners came. The stankmess is gone. And wouldn’t you know it, the bright hot sun shone all day long. That’s okay. I’ll smell the fog tomorrow morning, and it will smell clean again.
Streets of Fire watch: Last Friday I took the morning off work to get J to a doctor’s appointment. That meant I was riding my swingin’ 38L bus at about 11:40 am. The 38 runs down O’Farrell Street, right through the tenderloin. And as we passed the Famous O’Farrell Theater ("Where Raunch is an Art Form"), we noticed that traffic was getting a bit, oh, diverted. Cars were turning off this major thoroughfare and the bus was riding pretty much alone. The cause? Probably it was the biblical column of black smoke erupting - not just pouring, or emanating, or emitting, but violently erupting - from a manhole in the middle of the intersection with Larkin Street. It was the kind of image that sears itself into one’s mind, and does not let go. Apparently 7500 pounds of CO2 were pumped into the substreet vaultworks to kill the flames, and even then it smoldered and re-exploded for many hours. The street is now - a week later - still closed to through traffic. Of course, my bus that day of the actual event sort of skirted the immediate disaster area but never changed its route. Not that day, anyway. Since then the street’s been totally closed and there’s a four-block detour around the flamehole. Words don’t do it justice. The photos are a bit more persuasive, but I have not even begun to describe the smell. Honestly, after all that garbage stank talk, I’m sort of stanked out, you know? I’m just honored and privileged to have been a witness to one of history’s great sewer fires. Is this country great, or what?
Fitness watch: As a final note, those of you (none) who have been tracking my YMCA workouts will be shocked and saddened to learn that they will be no more. I just never get out there anymore, like, ever. Forty-five minutes every eight weeks or so is not worth my membership fee, or the associated guilt trip. So what I’ve been doing instead is getting up at 5:30 daily to shoehorn in about 15 minutes of exercise before Jesse gets cranked up and demands to be released from his sleeping crate ("crib"). And once he’s out, there is no other exercise to be had but aerobic babychasing and deep cleansing bends as I pick up the toys he scatters and hurls. But now there’s a happy correspondence between these phenomena - my home workouts and my amazingly active baby: when we feed J, we strap him into a plastic babyseat that is lashed to a heavy wooden library chair. Jesse eats enthusiastically until he’s ready to get out and about again. But he’s strapped down, right? So he just grabs the edges of the seat of the chair and starts jumping while seated, lifting the chair off the ground and literally hopping it around the house. He could tip it clean over, if he wanted to. Plus, it’s loud as hell and the landlady lives downstairs. So what to do? Kel finally figured out that we can store my 25-lb “take that, YMCA” dumbbell on the crossbars under the chair. That slows him down just enough. For now. He is a growing boy, after all. So now instead of hopping the chair around the house, he’s taken to practicing his overhand pitching style. He can now lodge a fistful of chicken under the fridge from fifteen feet away. It’s both distance and accuracy for this kid. As parents, we are proud of his development. As housemates, we just wonder what comes next. I just got a chin-up bar… I suppose he’ll be using it to kick holes in our ceiling?
This is probably enough of this for now. There’s one essay maturing in the old notebook, and some notions simmering away in the memopad. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to slap something together for you out of all of that soon. Otherwise, just look for the weightlifting baby and the flaming manhole. I’ll be the one with the ringside seat and the rhubarb cocktail. L’chayim!