Things

I. Golf

I approve of golf. Of pouring cash into titanium drivers and putters and woods. I'm not a man who plays golf. The last time I played anything like it I was soundly thrashed by a group of fifth graders in miniature golf three years ago. But then I am also a man who doesn't ski, surf, waltz or tango. I've just never availed myself of the opportunity.

I long for the focus, the exacting mechanics of the swing, the cozy, collegial, double-knit Republicanism of the country club. No gate-crashing persons of color, demanding activists from the lower classes or women to spoil one's Eisenhowerist reverie.

II. Computers

Available for tuppence, used, on E-Bay or Craigslist. But calls the siren song of the new. The box, the exactitude of the form-fit styrofoam, the fresh black plastic housing with its pleasingly toxic degassing. The warranty, so evocative of a mother's embrace. Booting up for the first time -- the tang of sexual initiation!

I understand those things. I have been there.

VO2 Max

Saturday: monster bike ride. Across the Golden Gate, through Sausalito and Mill Valley, up to Mount Tamalpais, down to Stinson Beach, up past Muir Woods to Panoramic and down Highway 1 to Tam Junction. And back. 51.64 miles. But the climbing. Hoary, brain-deadening, spirit-snuffing climbs. The heroic shackles of two chainrings.

Hills always exact a toll. The difference, in my experience, between being in shape and not, is that when you're out of shape the toll is mental. It's spiritual. It's a hammer striking on the anvil of your psyche. Deep, resounding, existential despair. Boundless misery. On the other hand, if you've got good VO2 max, well, yes, there's the lactic acid, the burn in the legs and lungs, you're drooling and your nose is still running and somewhere you know if this continues you will vomit, but it's just a physical thing. You watch the systemic breakdown with disinterest. The mind is on the grocery list or that evening's blog entry, and then you're ready for the next hill.

And now, an epiphany on Gatorade:

I am a slender man, a slight man, a man without fatty, paunchy reserves on which to draw. So this ride was a hard lesson in electrolytes. And replacing them. I mocked the urinous stream issuing from my friend's bottle of Accelerade, the highly suspect cellophane bag of Endurox powder from which he made apres-ride recovery drink. Truth be told, though, I was trashed. I needed....zinc. Copper. Something. Some way to recover the precious metals -- along with the potassium, sodium, magnesum, and the other common stuff you see in brightly-colored, toxic piles by railroad sidings -- which had leached out of my pores on the hot climb up to Pan Toll station.

So today I blew $72.99 plus tax on Accelerade and Endurox. Sure, it's half my take-home pay, but in the 00's, it's all about hydration catalysts.

Bilge

Riding my bicycle across the Golden Gate yesterday as a big freighter sailed beneath it. I stopped mid-span to watch. The Pusan Senator. Korean vessel, with crisp lines and a bright blue hull. Fine wave arcing from her bow as she sped into the bay. Containers piled high on her deck, filled with microprocessors, dremel tools and acrylic sweaters. Star fruit. Turn signals for Fords. Vats of xantham gum. Prosthetic arms.

Ah, the romance of a life at sea! Papeete one week, Port Moresby the next. Taking on toupees and stuffed wallabies in Sydney. Ultrasonic toothbrush units on Haiphong. Cap at a jaunty angle, a roguish smile, a woman in every port. The life for me.

Suddenly, I was enveloped in a cloud of oily, choking smoke from the ship's stack. An acrid eructation from deep within the bowels of the Senator that yanked me out of my maritime reverie and reminded me of what a fundamentally bilgey enterprise shipping is: for all the radar, all the neatly stacking intermodal containers and fresh paint, there's still cold muck sloshing around in the hold, tacky crusts of salt forming around rusty bolts on peeling pipes, and that one-eyed Maltese sailor who's sworn you'll never make it Yokohama. To say nothing of 90-foot walls of water and giant squid wrapping their tentacles athwart the beam, dragging ye down, down to Davey Jones locker.

A nasty business, No place for a bicyclist. I let the Pusan Senator glide off to Oakland and made for the Presidio.

On Sneezing

We consider the cathartic release of a sneeze.

The first enticing hint in the irritation of the respiratory epithelium lining of the nose, like a faint, salty breeze as you approach the ocean; the steady release of histamine or leukotrienes triggered by the trigeminal nerve, building stimulation to the nasal mucosa; the sudden onrush of the plateau phase; and then the thundering, joyous crash of discharge, billions of pneumococci and other toxins egressed in one explosive burst from the system. Afterwards, preternatural calm, peace. Tangled, stressed, chaotic brainwaves reset to a flat line.

Truly the high point of my day.

My cubicle doesn't afford me much privacy -- I can't carry on truly private phone conversations, catch a 30-minute nap, or have sex in here -- but I can give a sneeze the space it deserves.

At the first sinoid tingle I push my chair away from my desk, whipping off my glasses and cocking my head back to look up at the ceiling -- for I am a light-induced sneezer, part of the 20% of the population with photic sneeze reflex, and the flourescent fixture above my cubicle has the just the right light wave length, tint and total lumens to trigger deeply purificatory evacuations of the nasal cavity. Then, spreading out my arms at a 73 degree angle to my torso and tilting my head ever so slightly to the left while rotating the chair clockwise between 5 and 9 degrees -- this never fails -- I experience a profound spasm of nasal expurgation accompanied by a yell that violates office decorum. And no handkerchiefs either, please, none of this panty-waist nose-covering: these are minor apocalypses -- deep, shuddering blasts of spiritual intensity which leave me with my head between my knees in full crash position for 4-5 minutes.

My grandmother, God rest her soul, once showed me a technique for stifling sneezes that involved putting a stiff index finger under your nose. But she was from the old country, from a very different era. For my part, I cannot even imagine suppressing the urge to sneeze. It'd be like...like...God, I don't even know what to compare it to.

Finally there is no one here and I can get something done. So I've put on headphones and am listening to Internet radio. Live 365, one of the best things on the Net. My favorite station is one that features only music recorded with a Hammond B-3 organ. And that cuts a wider swath than you might think. Here's a track now, by someone named Ricky Peterson, driving, funky, very Quincy Jones. A soundtrack, I think, for a car chase through Harlem. I'm seeing a ground-level shot, a very green 1972 Oldsmobile Toronado screaming around a corner, knocking over garbage and a fruit stand and sending trash and oranges flying across the sidewalk. Right behind it, a '73 Lincoln Mark IV clips a fire hydrant. A plume of water streams 40 feet in the air. Men with huge afros, leather jackets and two-tone shoes watch from the stoops of brownstones as the cars tear up the street, firing indiscriminately at one another and shooting out windows. This is great. Glad everyone went home.

I am not being at all productive here at work. Christ on a crutch.

Chow Mein at the D & A

In search of food in Oakland's Chinatown. So different from San Francisco's. No chinoiserie pagoda roofs, no narrow alleys filled with last century's opium dens. Chinatown Oakland is stripped down, all business. And a bit dingy, too, in a way that shows up less quaintly than it does across the Bay.

Looking for a story, for literary as well as physical nourishment, I scoured the streets for a restaurant with some life. A place from which I could hear yelling, drunken laughter, conflict, breaking glass, perhaps gunplay.

Nothing.

I strode down Webster Street, but the only noise was from cars on the nearby freeway. Occasionally a plaintive strain from the two-stringed erhu would waft out of a second-floor temple window, punctuated by the wooden clack of a muyu.

Avoiding places with one diner, or no patrons at all -- which promised little in the way of a story or a meal -- I walked into the D & A Cafe. There's a D & A near where I live in SF, and I have never, ever seen a person of European origin eating there. Nor was there one to be seen in their Oakland location. With every table filled with Chinese people, I knew it couldn't be bad, but when I walked in, I felt ready to be treated as if I had transgressed some unwritten law -- to be stared at, or even attacked! Some hopped-up, chisel-faced Joe Boy teaching me a lesson in front of everyone, slamming my head repeatedly into the table. But nothing happened. Nobody gave me a second glance. I was not beaten to a pulp, nor did I have to wait any longer than anyone else for my shrimp-and-vegetables chow mein.

I grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown, more or less, and shouldn't really have expected otherwise. And yet, perhaps because both D & A's are so bustlingly and exclusively Chinese, I felt for the first time in I don't know how long what it might be like if you were Asian, African-American, or Hispanic in this country. To walk into a place, your face different from everyone else's, not knowing if you'll be shown to the social Siberia table, taunted by other diners, or worse. Looking at life as a white person, it's easy to minimize the social discomfort people of other ethnic origins say they feel in this country -- "Hey, what's the problem? This is a heterogenous rainbow of a society, it's the enlightened 2000's!" But the reality must be very, very different in the trenches of diversity.

Still...damn if I didn't want a story. A snubbing, or perhaps some internecine conflict, juiced with semi-automatic weapons, or a Cessna flying into the second floor of the building, a herd of wildebeest thundering through the streets...something!

The chow mein was excellent, by the way. Tender shrimp, baby bok choy -- infant bok choy, really -- but the attraction was the noodles themselves, tinted golden orange with some soy-sesame treatment I couldn't decode.

A note on the menu: fulfilling its mission as a neighborhood cafe, the D & A offers along with chow mein and mongolian beef a full slate of corner diner favorites like French toast and eggs sunny side up. In fact, the kids at the next table ordered macaroni.

The macaroni arrived topped with white cheese, bok choy, and pork. I had to look away.

Bringing Lice to the Public

Having made a commitment to blog daily -- a commitment I've already broken -- I've found there's a bit of work to it if you want to give your audience more than movie reviews and records of your phone conversations. To find the compelling stories, you have to get outside the cubicle. You need to experience the raw, filthy, lice-infested vitality of places like La Imperial or the Department of Motor Vehicles. Low places. Places without T3 or even ISDN connections, where men settle differences by beating each other with mallets.

I will try to bring those stories to my public.