Perhaps I should clarify: I don’t mean me.  Any running I personally do or may once have done fails to rise at present to the admittedly low level of significance meriting blogworthiness.  However, there is another runner, one to whom I introduced you on this very screen a mere eight years ago.  And even then, that runner was verifiably old, having already been at that time my bosom friend for some 22 years.  And still was he older even than that - judging from his costume and haircut and overall vibe, this man on the go had been poised for action since the 1920s or ‘30s.  That’s a long time to be in cleats.  Well, I’m reporting today that it may be time he called it quits and hit the locker room for good.  End of an era, man.  Times change.

The running man to whom I make reference is less partisan than any political candidate, far more benign than Ahnold’s superhuman game show contestant from the eponymous 1987 blockbuster.  He’s just a man in outdated track gear, crouched at the starting blocks, photographically replicated in a big-pixel B&W image that occupies most of the transpectoral portion of a very soft grey sweatshirt.  I’ve worn that sweatshirt with greater or lesser frequency since 1982, when I splurged on it to the lordly tune of $50 at Philadelphia’s most prestigious department store. The running man sweatshirt has been with me through good times, bad times, neutral times and times that defy description.  It’s voluminous and comforting, and that picture on it is sufficiently distinctive as to have garnered more than its share of compliments in its day.  And its day was surely long and mighty.

But even long and mighty days eventually wane, and thus it is for my grey running man sweatshirt.  After what’s now been 30 years of use, it appears to have succumbed to a condition that afflicts various articles of my clothing from time to time: idiopathic shrinkage.  Some favorite garment that fit just fine for some indeterminate but lengthy period of time, suddenly… doesn’t.  And let’s not take the low road and accuse anybody of contributing to the situation by bulking up, because that didn’t happen.  Nothing else doesn’t fit.  Everything else is exactly the same.  It’s just that one item is now too small.  It’s also happened to favored shirts in my regular rotation that, one week, fit perfectly, and the next week, don’t reach my wrists.  All the other shirts remain properly sized, but for that one that went short overnight.  Everything in the universe is consistent save a single garment.  Like dark matter and Taylor Swift, it’s one of nature’s inexplicable miracles.  I don’t know why it happens, or how.  It just does, and I have no choice but to submit to the mystery.

This mystery has now visited itself on the running man sweatshirt.  It’s long enough down the trunk, fits comfortably around the neck, is not disreputably stained and remains plenty warm.  And of course, that running man still looks awesome.  But I find my arms are suddenly almost an inch too long for each sleeve.

Technically, I could keep wearing it, but to do so would, for me, denigrate the glory it once embodied.  The running man sweatshirt has served too well for too long to sully its memory with ill usage.  I owe it an honorable retirement.  I will miss it something fierce, but I prefer to remember it as it once was, than how it would be henceforward.  Goodbye, Ruff-Hewn Brand running man sweatshirt.  That was the best-amortized $50 I may ever spend.  Raging Mongol Daycare sweatshirt - it is time to step up.  You have big cleats to fill. 

Which brings me to today, and myself.  (Big surprise.) As it turns out, I turned out - exactly forty-eight years ago today.  I’m still scrambling to make good on the hype.  I’ve gone from breathless birthday anticipation, to anxious birthday dread, to spacing out on it altogether, to philosophical musings, to philosophically spacing out, to poetry.

That’s the phase I’m in now: the poetry phase.

Since 2003, I’ve produced a fresh slab of uptight scansion every time my birthday’s rolled around.  Tricorder readings indicate that makes nine poem-years - plus one more today.  That’s right, imaginary peoples: today we’re up to ten self-indulgent jinglefests, each rhymier than the last.  No, really, you can even check, I’ll just wait here in suspended ani
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
I know, right?  It’s like, really?  Really? Rully. I so totally know.

I mean, ouch.

Even for a Taurus, ten feels like a lot.  Maybe even enough.  I shouldn’t predict what I’ll be up to at this time next year, but maybe it’ll be time to move on from poetry.  I might be coming up on my Interpretive Dance phase .  I don’t want to commit quite yet, but I’m going to Febreeze my body stocking just in case.  It’ll be ready for me if I need it next year.  This year, you’re stuck with more ridiculous rhymes.  Oh, here’s one now!

Blow It Out

48 is super-great
It’s solid gold with platinum plate
a masterpiece rich and ornate
the kind you ought to laminate
It makes the ego to inflate
But listen now as on I prate
A birthday’s just another date
so why should it my heart elate?
This rhyme scheme makes it plain to me
that I have strained credulity
by acting out unfettered glee
this natal anniversary;
it’s forced and simple, dull and twee
repeating metronomically
with sophomoric repartee
a pattern anything but free
For what is it to have matured
with 8 by 6 years to my name
but to embrace myself, inured
to imposition, jape and game
to sleep with solace, dwell immured
in self-possession if not fame
Yet once again I feel lured
to glorify myself - my aim:
to reconcile this sinecure
embellish that which I became -
some poet-warrior begirt
with syllables from crown to wame,
each scintillating stalwart word
reflecting joy, deflecting blame
till ultimately I’m interred
in legends sweet as aspartame.
What abnegation of the self
compels me to conflate this tale
invoking superhuman might
and wisdom that exceeds my own,
charisma matched but by my wealth,
pillow prowess without fail -
making cinders of the night,
invoking flesh from naked bone?
I set the stage with slinking stealth
more in deception than travail
calculating to incite
mob passion as by pheremone -
full knowing my spot on the shelf
is well within the settled pale
So if I’m hoping to ignite
this weary world I must condone
a certain hubrisistic gloss
implying things which I aspire
to achieve - to scrape the dross
from how I’ve cast myself, inspire
a share of gilded gravitas
despite the sense of something dire
looming, some inchoate loss
as I maneuver through the mire
advancing onward like a boss
some tragic hero without choir
a rolling stone beset with moss
blind peregrine trapped in its gyre
or some exhausted albatross
that’s given up on flying higher
a gander cooked without its sauce
astride both frying pan and fire
And still this paper popinjay
keeps chirping out his roundelay
though all the world has gone away,
abandoning the cabaret
where I remain in disarray -
my face unguarded, lines astray,
no audience to hear or pay
for paltry chuckles I purvey
this poem, droll as child’s play,
because despite my deep dismay,
regardless what I might convey,
there is a truth I can’t allay,
a law eternal to obey:
no traveler can overstay;
the road is short and runs one way.
I’m forty-eight years old today
Hooray, I say - hooray

The phrase “cruising up California Highway 1” can invoke a broad range of images.  Growing up in L.A., it referenced Santa Monica’s beaches hemmed in by the Palisades, Malibu’s glamorous strand and rocky exoticism… up north, it’s a breathtaking, nervewracking, stomach-wrecking jangle of hairpins clinging to cliffsides above startlingly blue water and disturbingly exuberant white surf… But here in Fogtown none of that applies.  Great Highway is the beachside road, broad and beautiful, dune-hewn and accessorized with a delightfully undulating multi-use path.  It should be the Coast Highway, but it’s not.

Hereabouts, Highway 1 - the Pacific Coast Highway - mostly runs up 19th Avenue till it hits the park.  There it swerves through the verdure before emerging to the north at Park Presidio Boulevard, whence it rolls up into the Presidio itself and regains its limited-access “highway” street cred.  Up in those furthest reaches of Frisco it’s a beautiful road with greenbelts and a lake and the General Douglas MacArthur tunnel that brings you out to gorgeous bay views.  But the 19th Ave bit of Hwy 1 is something of a nothingburger, lined with auto shops and undistinguished cafes and plainfaced churches.  So when I say that J and I were cruising up Hwy 1 after dropping Z off at Korean School one Saturday morning, don’t start imagining anything too California-dreamy.  We were just plugging along up a busy boring street.  There wasn’t much to look at but the other cars.  However, other cars can sometimes be interesting enough.

At one point we saw a candy-apple red sportster with big fenders and bigger attitude in the adjacent lane.  I drew J’s attention to it as a very fast car, but I couldn’t tell exactly what kind it was.  Then traffic in our lane suddenly opened up so I scampered ahead to check it out.  “A Dodge Viper,” I told J as he gaped at its low-slung profile and yawning air intakes.  “Much faster than us.” “Daddy,” he observed, “we’re beating it.” He was so right there was no point disputing it.  True wisdom is self-establishing.

Next we saw an old MG with the six-figure yellow-on-blue license plates that California stopped issuing in 1980.  I pointed it, too, out to J - how it was an older car, once quite fast and possibly still so, but surely a lot of fun to drive - tiny and responsive and so close to the blacktop.  I wondered aloud how much of its old racing spirit the old MG still retained.  J listened to me politely but seemed unimpressed.  Historical automotive personality analysis has yet to acquire much attraction for him, unless in the context of talking animated vehicles - of which, needless to say, this stretch of Highway 1 was markedly boastless.

But when the Maybach pulled up alongside us, that did get J’s attention.  Mine, too.

It wasn’t particularly ostentatious, for a 20-foot-long rolling hotel.  It was painted an understated shade of burnt umber, clean and shiny but not garish.  As it came up from behind me in the next lane over, I first noticed the distinctive stacked “M” hood ornament - not for that which it referenced, since only about 200 of these were ever sold in any given year.  I didn’t register at that moment that I was seeing the world’s most exclusive luxury vehicle heading into GG park with me.  What I noticed was that the hood ornament was bent a little to the side.  I thought, “Tacky.” This must be some neglected, road-battered vehicle.  Then the rest of the hood kept coming, and coming, and coming up past me.  I peeked to J’s seat behind me - he was watching, rapt, as the massive vehicle slowly overtook us in traffic.  We began to get a sense that this was a different kind of car, albeit on a very same kind of street.

The cab finally came into view, tall and spacious.  Behind the wheel sat a washed-out man with neat silver hair and wattled jowls.  His suit and tie lacked all personality, and I thought, Right - he’s not the sort for whom this car was made.  He’s aiming too high, and missing badly.  That busted hood ornament tells this guy’s whole story.  Tacky, I thought again.

The Maybach kept moving past us, with the inevitable incrementalism of cars traveling just a few MPH off each others pace.  The passenger compartment kept getting longer and longer - providing not just legroom, but literally enough room to recline your chaise and grab some horizontal shut-eye.  It looked like you could play croquet back there.  And then, finally, the back seat pulled even with us.  And that’s where the whole story came to life:

There was one passenger, seated in sublime repose.  I couldn’t see what she wore - everything below her neck was subsumed in the chocolate luxury of her chambers.  But her neck was slender and erect, and her head was exquisitely poised.  Through my window and hers I could sense the creamy smoothness of her skin.  Her gaze was fixed skyward, profound and thoughtful; her lips were pressed delicately together like halves of a strawberry cut and then rejoined on a plate.  Her profile looked as if it had been etched with a laser and her hair, of course, was perfect.  She was marmoreally motionless as her road yacht slowly outpaced our little Soob.  As it left us behind in the grumble of traffic, its long trunk slipping away like the flukes of some magnificent whale, I noted in particular how beautifully the blinds across the back window were pleated.  I thought three normal carlengths forward to that bent ornament and felt sure the chauffeur would attend to it as soon as circumstances permitted - but that only a qualified craftsman would be allowed to handle any repair, no matter how trivial, to this sublime machine.  Better to stay superficially broken, than to be ineptly fixed.

I looked in the rear-view mirror, back to J again - he was watching the Maybeck as it got (marginally) smaller ahead of us.  “Nice car, eh?,” I asked him.  “Big car,” he replied.  Truer words were never spoken, and my gritty little piece of Highway 1 had surely never carried a classier car.  Hell, I felt classier just driving next to it.  That faded, of course, after it left me far enough behind.

What hasn’t faded was my recollection of that woman in the back.  I have not spent as much time as you might imagine with royalty, and it’s not even for sure that her blood was truly blue - but no matter.  Next time I think of a princess I will think of her.  And next time I stumble my dusty way down 19th Avenue, I will not forget that it is now, for me, an avenue of aristocracy.  That’ll elevate my next trip down to the mall, all right. 

It’s never easy to leave the house two-and-a-half hours earlier than usual in the morning, especially when you slept poorly and it’s raining and you still haven’t entirely shaken off that whole “spring forward” thing. So, when I headed out at 4:50 a.m. for a quick visit to the southland, I was already working on diminished capacity. But at least that was something internal, something I could address on my own terms. It was me, myself, who was tired and breakfastless and a little anxious about all the tight transfers I’d set up for myself. But I made my downtown bus in the dark in the nick of time, and my ride thereon was moderately entertaining and basically restful. It got to the point that, when I disembarked for my train-sfer at Union Square, I was almost feeling back on track again. The misty outside air felt clean and refreshing, and the facades of the fancy enameled buildings around me glistened with moist jewels of reflected streetlight. I’d gotten cheap earbuds to replace my nice, expensive, broken ones, and the music pumping through them was somewhat misty and glistening too. I lowered my guard. Just so. My own undoing.

I descended into the urban bowel of the Powell street BART station, whence at that soggy predawn hour I knew I’d be encountering certain individuals to whom we will refer euphemistically as “denizens.” I trusted most of them to be asleep at that hour, or at least too dazed to rouse themselves to accost me, and mostly I was right. The first three or four along my wending way through those stark, billboard-lined passageways were indeed wrapped up in unsavory textiles, horizontal lumps recognizably human mostly by virtue of their size and shape as they lay in rumpled mounds along the edges of my path. I passed them by easily enough. One was standing up, though, leaning back against a support pillar as I finally reached the slumberous heart of the station where ticket booths stood dark and vacant and ticket machines stood stacked against the walls like so many phlegmatic droids. This man at the column made eye contact with me as I walked by, but walk by I did and I was relieved that he didn’t so much as move a muscle to importune me as I went past him. My morning wasn’t yet going so well that I was ready to put up with importunation.

I got to an AddFare machine and fished out an old BART ticket from my wallet that still boasted $1.90 in remaining fare. I needed to add enough to it to get me to the Coliseum exit in Oaktown, plus another $3 for the AirBART bus to the airport. Base fare: $3.80.  This was enough math to slow me down, and before I was done with it I had company.

It was the man from the column. He wanted something, and I could guess what. I told him, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” but he wasn’t having any of that. He pulled out a BART ticket from the depths of his disreputable trenchcoat, showed it to me. “No, I’ve got my own, I don’t need that, goodbye.” He waved me off, put his ticket in the machine adjacent to mine. It read $12 - more than twice the fare I’d need for this trip today. If the price was right, it might be worth pursuing this opportunity. I turned to face him.

He was a tall, thin man, dark skinned, dark clothed, with a dark expression on his youthful face. He gestured with his hand - five fingers. Five dollars? I asked him. He nodded. He tapped his fingers on his chapped lips twice - eating. He quickly mimed a cradle with his arms - baby. His lips never moved - mute. His eyes never wavered - needy. I didn’t know if his story was true, but I could smell his neediness. I was ready to embark on a mutually beneficial exchange.

But as I went for my wallet I realized to my chagrin that I had taken out more money than I usually carry. I had a $5 bill for him, but I also had another $5, a $10, a $20, and several singles. Objectively not a lot of money, but this was a realm of tangible subjectivity. I fished out a $5, but as I handed it over I saw his eyes gleaming with the reflected magnificence of the other bills. I handed him the Lincoln, left my empty hand open for the ticket. My bill was swiftly deposited in his dank pocket, but he left me hanging, holding up instead three more fingers. He wanted eight dollah. That hadn’t been our deal.

We argued; I grew agitated, aggravated, ineffectual; he remained stoic and implacable. He had my $5 and the BART ticket. I didn’t want to start my day by beating down a purported mute over $3.  I mean, assuming that I even could.  I pulled out more bills, told him I was about to call the police if he didn’t give me my ticket. The $3 changed hands and I grabbed the ticket from his calloused fingers. He seemed shocked and outraged, but said nothing, just signaled $12. I signaled back $5, then $3, then “bye bye.” In a poor mood I entered the turnstile, testing my new ticket to see if it worked. It did.  I’d half expected it wouldn’t.

The ride to the Coliseum was uneventful. I picked calming and diverting music to salve my mood and by the time I left the train I had regained my equanimity. I pulled my ticket from my wallet as I approached the exit-stile - but it was rejected. I tried again, and again. “See attendant,” the terse message read. My AirBART bus was just outside the station gate, doors open, loading passengers for its - my - trip to the airport. My agitation returned. Faced with a strategy that wasn’t working, I kept trying it. It took intercession by BART staff to remind me that I had two tickets, the one I’d bought from the mute and the one I’d started with, and I had been assiduously trying to use the wrong one. I switched tickets, exited the turnstile (yes, it showed I’d started with $12 and still had more than $8 left over), and dashed outside to wave bye-bye again - this time to the brake lights of the AirBART bus that was leaving without me for the airport. My frustration was palpable.

Now I had ten minutes to bask in the sodden murk of the dark dawn and count my blessings. I had a BART ticket worth $1.90 and one worth eight dollars and change; I had one bill in my wallet of each denomination from 1 to 20 excepting the always-amusing $2 bill. I was dry, and still not too badly off schedule. My cheap new earbuds felt okay and sounded fine. Everything seemed all right, so something was probably wrong. I put my mind to figuring out what it was, and it didn’t take me long, either.

AirBART tickets cost $3 in cash or BART fare - and change is not given. I’d planned, back at the outset of my day, to add fare to my old $1.90 ticket to cover both the train and the bus, but then I’d acquired and used a $12 ticket instead. So I still had $1.90 on the original ticket, plus a $1 bill.  That left me one thin dime short. I could pay with a five-spot - representing a $2 donation to the Transit District.... or I could scrounge. Since I’m a cheap bastard, I opted for scrounging.

At the opposite side of the station gate from me stood a mountain of a man. He easily had five inches and 100 pounds on me, lounging broadly with sleepy eyes, a trucker hat, well-used work pants, a Carhartt coat, and earbuds. He could have been part of the architecture of the shoddy station, except that he was more solidly built. No one else was around. I pulled out my buds and approached him.

“Excuse me...” His eyes flickered to life and he gazed upon me as one might view a well-cared-for housepet running loose in a grocery store. “I’m very sorry but I really need your help. Would you have one dime you could spare so I can catch my bus?”

His eyes narrowed, as if the pet in the grocery were slowly squatting to pee. “What,” he said, without inflection.

I explained my circumstances, AirBART-wise, and he inclined his head a few degrees in comprehension. A massive hand dropped into his pants pocket, emerging full of pennies. He shook them a time or two and pulled out a dime, handed it to me. I thanked him sincerely; he absorbed my thanks like a carved Buddah absorbs sutras. I stepped away and left him to his meditations, and returned to my own.

Soon, my bus arrived, I paid, got to the airport, flew to L.A., drove to the office, had my meetings, drove back to the airport, flew back to Oakland, got change for my $5 bill, rode the bus back to BART and rode BART back to Frisco and took my regular old bus back home. As I sat in my regular old bus seat at the end of a day that had been unusually heavy on hours and miles, I thought back to the give and take of which I’d partaken. I’d made a payout to a homeless man and gotten a BART ticket bargain; I’d made that bargain better by imposing on the charity of a stranger for a dime that was worth two dollars to me, bestowed upon me free of charge in a demonstration of true largesse. In the end I came out ahead, better than I’d had a right to expect.

I’ll want to keep that in mind next time I feel I’m being taken: that the give and the take can really go hand in hand.

My commute to and from work pulls me through a number of neighborhoods of varying interestingnesses and vibratude, but one of the most interesting - now and historically - is the Fillmore.  It was once a multi-culti destination, where Japanese immigrants established a burgeoning community cheek by jowl with jazz-blues machers who built there their Nor-Cal Harlem.  Up to the ‘50s, nightclubs and hot spots peppered the vicinity of the intersection of Geary and Fillmore.  But WWII and urban “renewal” put an end to most of that, first by entirely displacing and dispossessing the local Japanese community in one of the most shameful episodes in our national history; then by bulldozing whole blocks of gracious old homes and replacing them with public housing that’s the architectural equivalent of thorazine, together with an unfriendly shopping citadel that turns a bland, blank face to the spurned street.  Even the streets themselves were riven asunder, Geary having been forced by trench-happy city planners down and under Fillmore, disassociating their intersection so cars could speed more speedily east downtown or west to the bridge - while at the same time brutally disrupting the action on both streets.

In time, this intersection turned into a transitional area, did Fillmore @ Geary.  An old church became a mecca for the disaffected, with whom the neighborhood was plentifully endowed - a church with a charismatic preacher who ultimately injected himself into the popular lexicon by dragging his entire congregation, plus a congressional team, to South America to actually drink his Kool-Aid and put their troubles behind them.  To the north blossomed the stylish boutiques and boites of Western Pac.Hts; to the south was found an area Clint Eastwood had described to Tyne Daley in The Enforcer as the VFW - “very few whites.” And right at the corner stood two bastions of other times: the Boom Boom Room, and the Fillmore Auditorium.

The Fillmore Auditorium was a dancehall back in the ‘20, I think, Then it went dark till Bill Graham lit it up as a significant vortex of the psychedelic movement till around 1968; then it went dark, went punk, got quakeshook, and finally reopened around 1990, since when it’s been going strong as a first-tier midsize venue for bands local, regional, and legendary.  Its history is too rich to detail further here, though - because this is not an essay about the Fillmo’.  It’s about the Boom-Boom Room, and in particular, the BBR’s south-facing exterior wall.

Before it was the BBR, it was Jack’s Bar - one of seemingly countless “Jacks” around town at that time, but this one distinguished by having been a live music venue for decades.  Even when “the ‘Mo” was mo-ribund, Jack’s kept the Fillmore District’s musical tradition going strong.  John Lee Hooker bought it in the ‘90s and upgraded it from dive to nightspot - which capacity it continues to fulfill to the present day.  Even its neon sign advertises “live grooves.” It’s a hepcat hangout, holding over a heritage from back when Duke and Billie used to kick it thereabout till daybreak.

As a proud symbol of this heritage, someone pained a mural on the BBR’s long side wall fronting Geary Boulevard.  From the corner at Fillmore to half-way down the block, where a handful of other random shops made their stand (doughnuts, hair weaving, Mr Bling Bling IKYN), a gorgeous, celebratory image had been painted, sidewalk to cornice: musicians, expressionistic in lush colors on a dark background, faces sometimes little more than

shaded ovals, bodies and instruments woven together as organic wholes, interspersed among whom were cubist representations of frozen music.  Looking at that mural, I could almost smell the whiskey and feel the downbeat.  For many years, in that rough ‘hood, this painting stood in honor of a past that was not past, imbuing the worldweary present with evergreen effervescence.  I’d pass it twice a day, and every time I’d appreciate it anew.

In late 2011, something changed.  The city replaced the bus shelter that had stood on Geary west of Fillmore, in front of the mural.  That’s nothing special, they’re all being replaced; a new design is being installed all over town.  At this particular location, though, it seems that the old shelter had crowded the street in violation of the ADA.  The new one came much closer to the building behind it, shielding people between it and the mural as they had never before been shielded.  This was a temptation that the numerous and eager local taggers could not be expected to resist.

It started small but quickly ramped up.  Within a few weeks the whole lower half of the mural, along full two-thirds of its lengths, had been spectacularly defaced with outsized signatures, caricatures, glyphs, and assorted self-indulgent crap.  The singer’s mike stand, the guitar player’s fret-fondling fingers, the drummer’s kit abending under the assault of his supple sticks - all fell beneath the onslaught of graffiti.  Soon the tagging had taken primacy, had become the noticeable part of the image.  The lovely mural commemorating 90 years of cool became little more than a backdrop for garish scrawls.

At the same time, some secondary works had been mounted along the street’s architectural canvas.  The pastry shop at the far corner brought in a respected street muralist who painted arresting images down to the west end,

purple cheshire cats and graphic mashups wrapping around the ass-end of the building; this creative burst continues right down the

dirty little alley past the plumbing supply loading bays, glorifying a tradesman’s space that normal folk will never see or appreciate with

visions of byegone swank.  Mr Bling Bling’s roll-down steel security door received a festooning of sunny yellow and incendiary violets (to be appreciated only after business hours).  The hair salon seems to have commissioned a

striking monochromatic post-op panel.  Even the ultra-low budget 99-cent store (lately bumped up to $1.25 but still a decent deal) put up a mural on the piece of their side wall that rose up above the BBR’s roof,

a primitivist array of comestibles available for purchase there, floating high above the street-side fray. (At the same time they updated their signage in the simplest possible way, producing a slogan that is refreshingly honest.)

But all of these are small emplacements, spatters of color and/or creativity scattered rather at random along the side of a slighted building.  The one piece that really occupied that space, uplifting it through explicit reference to a glorious past that might yet still presage a funky future, that sweet swinging jazz-age mural, is basically now history itself.  Having been so thoroughly overtagged by antisocial opportunists, the owner of the Boom Boom Room, facing city sanction for maintaining tagged property,

overpainted it in black.  All that now remains is the top third of the mural, the point at which the vandals could reach no higher and the vandalism consequently ended.  What’s left is painfully partial - half-faces contorted in ambiguous emotion, truncated instruments, parts of abstract shapes that once represented barrelhouse rhythms and now stand for the spoiling of our social fabric.  Better, I say, they should just paint it all black, that this work of art disappear altogether rather than remaining defaced.  A flat black wall is not a happy vision, but it’s better than what we’ve got right now.  Black is beautiful enough for me, given the alternative. 

and for the record, 4-yr-old J took the op-art photo and some other great shots that I just didn’t have room for.  He’s got quite an eye.  To say nothing of his left hook.  Bam!

White Walls

We spend a great deal of time in our kitchen.  We meet there, eat there, work there… there’s the time spent putting away groceries, checking over school paperwork, cleaning dishes, putting away dishes, reviewing the mail, plotting overthrows, quacking - all these time-consuming activities happen in the kitchen, and that’s doesn’t even include just walking through on our way to other parts of the house.  It’s right off the front door - the first real room when you come in.  And in our whole apartment, it was the only room with wallpaper. 

It’s a good sized room, about 12 x 15 feet.  Two of the walls had been papered sometime, I’m guessing, in the early ‘80s.  For something like thirty years, that paper hung on those walls, soaking up smoke and stink and tiny particles of airborne crud.  The design was a countrified flower motif in ecru and blue, laid in two complimentarily insipid levels.  I never really liked it, but I learned to live with it.  After a while I stopped even noticing it, and then I kept living with it for another fifteen or twenty years.  During which time, the ugly wallpaper failed to improve appreciably.  Ignoring it started to take more energy.  It became an active process.

Then I decided to do something about it.  Or my wife did, anyway, which wound up being pretty much the same thing, as far as I was concerned.

She learned that one of her friends at work actually owns a wallpaper removing device, so she arranged to borrow it. And thus, one fine day, she moved every piece of furniture out of the kitchen, even the big green shelves we stained and varnished and screwed together our own Ikea-loving selves back when we still had enough focus to hate the wallpaper, back when we needed to cover up as much of it as possible. 

Behind where those shelves had stood, we could really see how the old wallpaper had weathered the ensuing decades.  Which was, bluntly, not well.  Seeing so much of it at once, for the first time in so many years, was rather an unpleasant shock.  So, I - by which I mean we, or more properly, she - took a tool like a tiny handheld version of the mouth of spice worms of Arrakis, full of rotating interlocking razorwheels, and I (we ((she))) scored those fugly-country walls with thousands of tiny gashes.  Then out came the steamer - basically a standard home-model device with a long hose ending in a broad flat attachment like the side of a box, which we (she) held up against the wall.  Then there was the scraping with the plastic putty knife, at which point the old paper just peeled off and fell to the lino like so many massive pale grubs.  The room smelled sharply of old soaked-in kitchen scents, processed paper, newly-revealed glue, and that deep almost-odor of electric power as the little steamer kept the water vaporized.  It smelled like progress, basically, but that is not to say that it smelled nice. 

K cranked through the whole job in just two hours or so; then I took over to clean up what remained.  Taking off the paper hadn’t removed the glue that had held it in place.  Trisodium Phosphate, applied with a scouring sponge and heavy rubber gloves, was the only way to do that.  I worked on one small bit at a time till every inch had been subjected to a vigorous scrub.  This took us (me) three hours, but it was worth every minute.  The walls went from rough and schmutzik to smooth and even smoother, and I revelled in passing my hands over their fresh unsullied surfaces until the whole thing got a little intimate and weird.  And even then I kept at it a little longer. 

Then I stepped back to look at the walls I’d just cleaned, all together, not just as a bunch of little patches I’d worked over individually but as one-half of all of the sides of the whole room.  And from that broader perspective, it truly felt like something big had happened.  The walls were closer and more substantial, visually, but also more cheerful and self-assured, if you get my drift.  They seem to break the space into comfortable, reassuringly clearly organized parts.  One of the two walls wears the old dingy beige paint featured in the rest of the kitchen, which, now being sparking clean on the once-papered wall, points out both that this is a really sad excuse for a color, and also that the rest of the kitchen really needs a TSP treatment too.  As to which no more need be said. 

The shorter wall is lighter in color; the longer wall has a few screw holes where bracket shelving had been installed once upon a previously.  There’s a faint red line running around both naked walls where the lower panel of the old wallpaper had been made level, and… nothing else.  No leftover paper, no glue, no tired western cornflower pattern, no ripped-off corner where baby J sort-of started the paper removal process for us informally some years back… Just walls.  Walls that neither apologize nor prevaricate.  Simple and clean.  There’s nothing to them, and I can’t say enough about it.  Obviously.

Of course, we’ll paint soon.  God knows I’ll probably write a freaking novel about that. 

But before that, I have a black wall to talk about next.  I know, I know, but you gotta wait.  All good things in all good time, people.  Including, inexplicably, this. 

It’s not a terribly long drive from Bosssier to Monroe – 100 miles on Highway 20, straight across the top of the boot.  You could do it in your sleep, and I have done more than once.  But from Monroe down to Eros… well, keep your eyes open for that part of the drive.  Those are two lane roads with no shoulder and all manner of surprises dashing across your path.  I never thought twice about going back to Monroe, but those extra 20 miles down to Eros are another matter altogether. 

But mama was in Eros, and I wasn’t sure how she was doing.  She’s a smart woman and she’s spent a lifetime looking out for herself, so I didn’t often go out of my way to check in on her.  But she’d left me a message at home last Tuesday, asking me to come and pay a visit Saturday night.  She sounded all right but she always did.  She didn’t bother asking me to confirm.  We both knew I’d be there for supper. 

It was always a trip back in time rolling down Route 34 or one of those other little roads, and as I drove I found myself remembering things long-past so clearly that I wasn’t always sure they were just memories.  So, when I smelled food cooking as I drove up the trail to mama’s place, I hardly realized at first that it wasn’t just in my head.  There was a spicy scent weaving through the trees - pepper and vinegar, oregano, sage.  But under those sharp notes was a rich earthy fragrance – stew tomato and celery and green grown things and file’.  Sweet onion and red pepper filled in the gaps, with garlic for counterpoint.  And through it all, two fragrances that never failed to set my stomach growling: smoked meat, and meaty smoke.  Altogether, it was a smell that brought me back to a world I had nearly forgotten.

I recalled this smell from trips to Eros back when my grandfolks lived there, when I’d visit them over summer break.  They’d cook in a little shed out back – barely more than a chimney with walls around it.  Back in the days of firewood cookery it had been the only sufferable place to prepare a meal during the hot seasons.  It always smelled fine around the cookhouse, no matter what they were making; whatever they cooked there tasted better than expected, too.  As I rolled now through the spindly woods where mama lived in the house where her parents had raised her, I had to convince myself that I was really smelling cookhouse cuisine again. 

click through for the rest, it’s hiding in the extended text

Well this is a barrel of ritalin-deprived monkeys if I’ve ever seen one, and in fact I have not, but every indication suggests that if I had it would be pretty much like this. I’m bringing work home on a nightly basis; we’re room parents organizing our share of a fundraiser we can’t go to for the child development center both kids attend; we’re organizing Z’s 7th birthday and subsequent party; and if that’s not enough to keep me busy it turns out that Wednesday is Purim, bless our souls, and I had totally not scheduled time for my annual ‘tashen-baking festival.

So today, I managed to get Z to Korean school with J in tow, took J with me to Trader Joe’s and bought cookie fixin’s, then got him to a playground for playgroundification, followed by a trip to Royal Market for some fresh orange-blossom essence (for the cookies) and a fistful of puri bread (because you do *not* go to Royal Market and not get puri bread). Then home to unpack the groceries that needed refrigeration, and back down to the nether reaches of the city again to pick up Z and bring him home… a quick lunch of paejon and kim bap and then I spent 90 minutes slamming together two batches of cookie dough and three kinds of fruit filling (prune-cranberry-raisin, apricot-mango, and a TJ blend of blueberry, cherry and strawberry that seems a little light on the pectin so let’s see how that works out).

Then I read an application, closed my eyes for seven minutes (would have been ten but I got interrupted by kids in cowboy-spy dress-up gear hollering at and lasso’ing each other), went for a run in the park, showered briefly, and then whipped up a tasty load of peanut noodles with seared shrimp. Next came the nightly 90-minute putting-the-boys-to-bed routine, during which I read another application, and then - then! - I got to relax with a glass of vin ordinaire and a tivo’d Project Runway.

So it’s been a long day, but even so it’s not over yet.  I’m also doing my taxes, which is tricky this year - we upgraded from Quicken 2002 to the 2012 version, which is *awesome*, except the new version is too advanced to read the cyber-cuneiform of all our old records dating from the late 90s through 2011. So I had to install the free Q-2004 program, which uninstalled my hot-damn Q-2012 but allowed me access to my records from last year, so I could figure out my child-care and -education expenses.

And now I’m re-installing Q-2012, but it’s taking for-freaking-ever, because why should anything be easy for the love of all that’s holy. But at least I have a nice tumbler of whiskey to keep me company, and a tiny shard of good news to warm my heart: The City has seen fit to settle with me with regard to the towing of our car from outside Golden Gate Park, so that’s nearly $600 in tow charges, citation payments, and court costs back in our bank account. And with everything else going on, maybe that’s what I should dwell on tonight.

It’s the court costs that figure most significantly here. Not because they were so very costly - in fact, they were the smallest piece of it all, just $25 and about three hours of my time at the Hall of Justice, located at 7th and Bryant in San Francisco’s Garden District, fame for its plentiful bail bondsmanosity and McDonaldism.

The thing is, my time is valuable, holmes, and those three hours were not just donated to the public weal like all those obsolete printers and busted-up dining chairs we recently replaced. Nor do they represent the full extent of my time investmetn in this grand farce.  I’m glad to get the dollars back but there is still the matter of my freaking life, which has been negatively impacted by this whole shenanigan(s). After spending uncounted hours dealing with getting the family back home when we discovered our car NOT where we’d parked it for the awesome bluegrass festival, and then the glamor of retrieving it from the auto return facility, then typing up our appeal to Parking and Traffic to have them refund our tow charges, then appearing there for two hours to argue my case with a hearing officer, then following up repeatedly as the case dragged on for four months, then another lengthy call with my hearing officer who clearly telegraphed that he was not about to infuse any justice into this situation, and then waiting in an interminable line at the Hall of Justice to file my paperwork to appeal the damn thing in court… well, after all those hours, I want to get some credit for time served, as it were. And this is where that is going to happen. I mean, why waste time keeping a blog if you can’t use it to complain about the wasting of your time?

The HOJ is a prime example of urban brutalism, a 1940s-era temple to making you feel like a bent cog in a very powerful and unforgiving machine. I arrived at 8:30 when the doors opened, which is to say, half an hour too late to get a decent spot in line. By the time I cleared metal-detection, I was in a queue that was at least 100 yards long, stretching along a broad tiled hallway punctuated on either side by locked office doors that generally bore messages clearly telling you not to lean on, touch, or look too closely at them. Lighting was unflattering; decor was non-existent. However, something told me that I’d do better without my earbuds in, so I endured the line without the benefit of Dave Alvin, Johnny Cash, or any other jailhouse-appropriate songsmiths. Instead, I held my water, stood my ground (as it slowly, so slowly, slid toward the room where I needed to do my business), and listened to my fellow complainants. Two of them, in particular, or really, one plus her boyfriend. And now I get to share it all with you. I considered it my gift from the city. You may consider it as you deem fit.

They were about thirty feet in front of me in line, but their voices were easy to hear - they were loud, and no one else was speaking much. She had a round face, a big belly, and was short; she wore leopard-print leggings, a diaphanous white T, and a knit scarf. Her hair was long, chemically blonded and artificially kinky, and she accessorized with blue eyeshadow and rhinestone sandals. He wore richly-colored blue jeans, white court shoes, and a striped jersey; he was taller than average and square-jawed, with once-sculpted hair growing back in untidily, and gold rims around some of his front teeth. She was pink like an opossum; he was brown like oil-slicked beaches. Behind them a small latina had lined up; she had thick straight black hair, calf-high boots, jeans, and a black wool coat. Clearly she appeared here in a supporting role.

My attention was first drawn to them when they argued about her cellphone: she had announced loudly that she would go and get them both a bottle of water, and began stomping down the hall with impertinent jiggles. He let her get past me, maybe fifty feet down the hall, and then shouted after her for her phone. She stopped and shouted back, louder, hell no; he asked why, in a shout, and back and forth up and down the hall it went. Why didn’t you bring yours. Why you got to be like that. Eventually she stomped back to him in a dudgeon and handed over her small pink cellphone, after which she turned away again back down the hallway. He was already texting someone. When she finally returned with their Hawaiian Punch, they shared it without comment on their argument.

Then they started talking to the the woman behind them, and got into a lengthy explanation of why they were there at the HOJ in the first place. It seems they were stopped by the Highway Patrol in Truckee for expired tags, then apparently towed to Nevada where they were left on the roadside at night, their backpacks thrown by the po-po to the dark dirty blacktop. The cops did a drug search, ripping out the driver’s seat upholstery but finding nothing. Social services wound up buying them supper and a bus ticket home. Allegedly, and not surprisingly, it was all “some racial shit.” The conversation had turned tense, but then he said something in a low voice and started everyone laughing again.

She pridefully identified herself as his girlfriend, but not the kind he can push around: for example, “he can’t make me go to sleep.” He laughingly agreed: “Ha, I can’t make her sleep...” The thought of them late at night, her awake and him wishing she were not, took up uninvited and unwelcome residence in my mind.

In the next audible part of the discussion, the woman talked to the woman behind her about personal safety, describing an incident when she’d been walking through Oakland in a 2-piece and a wrap one summer evening, having gone clubbing with a friend. She was heading back to BART but got grabbed and thrown down in a garbage-can alcove, by a man who ripped her clothes off her - it was an attempted rape, but she fought too hard for it to be consummated, screaming and kicking till her assailant ran off with her clothes. She grabbed a box and pulled it on, then went looking for help. A nearby samaritan let her call her boyfriend but he wouldn’t answer because his phone didn’t recognize the number. He eventually learned what happened when she got her mother to call him; he drove across the bay to pick her up, then drove her back home without saying a single word. From what I’d seen of this garrulous guy so far that morning, that meant something. The woman made no mention of reporting anything to the cops. As she told this story, her boyfriend - whose expression had typically been cheerful - looked very grave and serious, and he made no joke afterwards to break the tension.

A little later, she gets a call - it’s for him. She asks with affected professionalism: “Who may I say is calling?” Her face darkens with what she hears. As she hands the telephone over she hisses at him, “Why you givin’ out my number to those bitches?” She hands him the phone, he takes it to the other side of the hallway, to a foyer for a locked side door, to conversate in private. The woman turns to the other woman and admits, in a voice that carries perhaps farther than she realizes: “He’s a player but I’m the only one he sleeps with.” A few minutes later she clarifies: “I mean, of course I know he sleeps with her, but it’s just that, nothing but sex; I’m the one he comes home to and loves.” And shortly later still, while he’s still on her phone to someone she doesn’t want him talking to: “It’s all there in the Book of Ruth, King James Version Old Testament, you can read the words of truth - men will fuck around, if you wanna keep yours you gotta let him do his thing but don’t let him push you around.” And later still: “She’s just a useless bitch, I got my cosmetology degree, I bring money into the house; she just lie around all day till he kick her off the foot of the bed...”

The line eventually leads us all into a modest room, its walls punctuated with barred windows behind which hunker clerks who already look exhausted at 10 am.  We shuffle back and forth between webbing straps as if waiting to ride Space Mountain.  There’s a flat-screen teevee on the wall, showing Dr Phil taking down an oxy-addicted mom who steals from her kids for drugs.  The weaving of the queue brings me into closer proximity with the people I’ve been watching from a distance all this time.  Suddenly, when I happen to be quite near them, the woman asks the latina behind her to take a picture of her and her man with her phone. They pose for several shots, grinning together and embracing. After the latina is done taking photos she hands back the phone. She and her man look at the photos, him bending over so they can press their heads together and view the tiny screen; they both grin unashamedly. Then they turn to each other, close their eyes, and embrace, standing very still, eyes closed against the crowd, until they are called to one of the several small barred windows and they settle down to the business at hand.

Tonight:

After all that, I finally got my settlement check back from the city, and it’s a decent piece of change - but in some ways, that image of those two holding each other while the noise around them went unheard was worth even more. It also bears mention that TONIGHT is purim, my ‘tashen turned out great, even the mixed berry ones, and all our myriad crazynesses are moving smoothly in the right direction. As may it be unto the generations. Later, Ahasheres.... 

I don’t recall if they were good times or bad times or - most likely - mostly neutral. I’d started school, but it didn’t feel much like all that. They had us collaborating in groups and picking out letters from a banner that ran around the upper part of the walls, and there was plenty of time to play. They had outside playtime, and there were books of cartoons and mazes; there were board games and puppets and blocks… and also certain other blocks. That’s what I’ve been wanting to unblock for myself: the other blocks.

Mostly, blocks were for building things - forts and castles and little blocky houses, most anything featuring right angles and a flat roof. Some of the more careful children could build semicircular castles with keeps and Guelph merlons and all other sorts of delicate architectural elements. Not me. I could build anything that was rectangular and that was about it.  Sometimes I tried to put columns on top but those usually fell over pretty fast. I had to admit, blocks were fun but they weren’t really my oeuvre. Not the regular blocks, anyway.

But there were also the other blocks. They didn’t get stored higgledy-piggledly in the big wooden block box - they lived in a tidy cardboard container, with a snug-fitting cover and a special slot for every piece. It was easy, too, to see which one went where, because every block was just the same width and thickness, differing only in color and length. One group was just a bunch of little cubes, painted white and as high as they were deep as they were long. The next bunch was twice longer, like two of the cubes set end-to-end, and all a cheerful red. Then came a light green series, longer than the reds by the length of one white cube. The pattern went all the way up to a ten-unit shaft in vibrant orange, equal in length to ten whites, five reds, a light green and a black, a lavender and a forest, or the ever-popular brown with a red at the end.

Technically, they weren’t even blocks - they were “rods.” This technicality counted because these were technical counting tools that had come all the way from Belgium, home of technologues such as Georges Cuisinaire - a music and math teacher from an era before the dawn of the transistor age. He invented this series of colored rods to teach young Walloons to love math. I don’t know if it worked for them, and I wasn’t sure if it worked for me. I didn’t actively hate math in kindergarten, but I didn’t go out of my way to do any extra, either. However, I did really like those colorful little rods, and played with them frequently at the outset of my academic career.

I’d completely forgotten about them until I was visiting a friend’s house a few years ago and for some reason he pulled out his own complete vintage boxed set of Cuisinaire Rods. Everything about them struck a chord for me - the size and shape of the box, the font in which the product name was printed, the name itself - so disevocative of math toys that I recalled puzzling about it back in kindygarden, unable to read it for myself and sure I was getting it wrong even though I really wasn’t. The rods themselves were like sticks of candy - taffy or fruit chews or some kind of extruded treat. That day I saw those rods again, I didn’t give in to the immediate impulse to fall to my knees and build a colorful ziggurat or psychedelic rectilinear fractile or any of the other creations I so enjoyed making back in the day, but I sort of wish I had. Those Cusinaire blocks felt good in my fingers and triggered my creative impulses, despite their being so small and slender and limited in profile variety. Other blocks came with arches or cylinders or other non-squared-rod shapes, but I only built square things with them anyway. Cusinaire rods didn’t build structures, they built ideas.  They just seemed more interesting, somehow.

Even after reviving this recollection at my friend’s house not so long ago, I didn’t put 2 + 2 (or red + red) together and realize what they’d actually done for my thinking till only a few weeks ago, when my first-grade son was exploring some theoretical matters with me. He’s been doing a lot of arithmetic in school, and talking about basic theories of addition and multiplication and positivity and negativity and such. He was painstakingly explaining that any number plus itself must produce an even sum, but that an even number plus and odd number never do.  I had a little academic (or “acad") flashback on hearing this - to my own brainstorm moment at about the same age. I had imagined numbers as stacks of little cubes, all laid out in rows. An even number could also be laid out in two rows of equal length, but an odd number would produce two rows, of which one would be one cube longer than the other. If you put two odd numbers together, those extra left-over cubes could be alternated so they evened out - one left over in each row meant neither row need be longer, both rows match, and the total’s even again. Odd plus odd equals even; even and odd equals odd. Just like Z was telling me.

As he spoke, those little Cusinaire blocks were floating through my mind again. No, not again - still. That old Belgie’s math toy, those rods that were already twenty years old when I played with them in 1970, still seem to be shaping my thinking 42 years later. That is to say, a number of years equal to three oranges, two yellows, and a red. I could break it down a few other ways, too, and build a cool little pattern out of my years on this planet, but you get my point.

Cusinaire rods - not so much a memory to be preserved, as an aspect of my own intellectual structure, one of the ways I make the world make sense. And since I’ve come to recognize this enduring mental legacy, I’ve seen it reveal itself many times over, when working out problems and looking at art and other ways too. Frankly, I’m as surprised as I am pleased.  Now I’m thinking of getting a set for my boys to use at home. Maybe they don’t need them, won’t use them, already know what they’d learn from them and have internalized the lessons they objectify. Maybe not. I guess we’ll find out in 40 years or so. 

Well, par example, here’s what went down last weekend - thank God it was a long one:

Joined a new writing group
Ran in the park - first time in months - on trails I’ve never tried on foot
Made a delicious smoked trout salad with bun mi pickles and shredded fennel
Trip to the city dump - divesting our household of 140 lbs of child seats for the car dating back to that 8 month period where we suffered three no-fault car accidents
Trip to charming park in the shadow of Mt Tam for children to run around like monkeys on speed
Suppered at mainstream American bistro, which was reasonably palatable - and the kids were pretty well behaved too, considering previous speed-monkey antix
Watched Justified
Attended Warren Hellman memorial concert with friends old and new, and even got a stylish new tshirt and an awesome korean burrito
Watched 45 minutes of Bridesmaids before realizing I was just not that into it
Watched Amazing Race instead
Took the boys to view a classic car museum (thru window) and then they played with sidewalk chalk and rolled around in it to my dismay on a questionable stretch of alley sidewalk
Got both boys’ hairs cut - possibly best ever
Visited local playground, then the produce market for fresh bread and nutella treats
Stripped wallpaper from kitchen
Detached and then re-attached the doorbell
Cleaned under the fridge and other places untouched by cleaning products for many years
Used TriSodium Phosphate to clean the walls of two-decade-old glue
Washed, folded, and ironed plentiful laundry
Watched 30 Rock
Wrote a new piece of fiction for the writing group
Prepped a tasty salad for work lunches

Now I find out that I’m in charge of a fundraising potluck for Z’s after-school program, and I’m up to my lobes (you pick which) in applications to review for work - many of which are, shall we say, challenging.  And that doesn’t touch the union activities, professional fundraising activities, doing-my-taxes activities, computer-updating activities, or occasional other activities presently incumbent on me.

I think I need to stop listing and start living.  I mean now.  Peaceout and have a rocking lent!