Sequence: A San Francisco Blog

2010-01-04T23:16:00.000-08:00

Blowing the Wogs Out of the Water

I found myself cheering on the Indian Navy as it sunk a pirate ship during the piracy crisis of late '08 (never mind that the boat turned out to be a Thai fishing vessel) and thinking about how much it would cost to put Blackwater guys with RPGs on every ship or to simply slap a 5" gun turret on the freighters. About blowing the kaffirs out of the water and sending them scurrying back to shore. And then I think about why I'm so eager to take the fight to these Red Sea raiders, these brown buccaneers. Isn't it a form of racism? Is there anything that makes us different from stuffy peers on a London club in the 1900s, puffing and fulminating about the brazen wogs (Sepoys, Boxers, Afghans, Zulus) and how what they need is the taste of good English iron to put them in their place?

Could it be that with our own empire crumbling, the industrialized world going to hell in a handbasket, the American economy settling into its own dust, that we approach the piracy problem with a special verve? Like the tyrannical schoolyard bully with the abusive father and the alcoholic mother?

2007-11-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

A bad political haircut.

From an aesthetic standpoint, Communism was without a doubt the least appealing political system, like, ever. Other than the Russian Constructivists, whose stylistic forays never quite meshed with the industrial and social imperatives of the moment and fell into disfavor, the style of Communism -- Socialist Realism -- was always a bad look. Cloaking the aspirations and esprit of whole societies the way a big, badly made, ill-fitting suit hides a good physique, social realism gave Communist countries a shambolic image redolent of old potatoes, body odor and stale cheese. The Soviet bloc style was the aesthetic projection of a sodden, Orwellian reality: what future you will have will be without joy.

A friend has just returned from Hungary, where all the Soviet-era statuary that littered Budapest were gathered up and stuck in Szobobark ("Memento Park"), a desolate spot on the far edge of the city, where they moulder and tarnish and collect bird droppings, unseen by all but the most crusty, die-hard, party loyalists.....beribboned old functionaries looking up at Lenin and gumming silently in a thin, late afternoon snow.

2007-10-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

Heed the Call of Vigorous Commerce!

What is it about the Victorian broadside that so pleases me? Is it simply nostalgia? Portly, vested, mutton-chopped America in the Guilded Age, relentlessly optimistic and vigorous in pursuit of its Manifest Destiny? Or perhaps the self-assured, hearth-fire coziness of the British Empire? Sherlock Holmes on the case, the Hindoos subdued, the labouring classes mindful of their place?

Or is it instead the sheer hysteria of the medium? Overblown, stentorian exhortations and adumbrations - "LIFT HIGH THE SHINING CUP OF ENTERPRISE FOR ALL TO SIP!" "SMALL INFRACTIONS, SEVERELY PUNISHED!! A DEFENESTRATION OF PETTY THIEVES IN THE STRAND A FORTNIGHT HENCE!" A zillion different fonts try to outpoint and outserif each other.

It resonates with my own, overwrought rhetoric. And if I only could, I would post each blog entry in 15 different wood type styles, each one redolent of horse urine, sagebrush, cool granite banks and the sweet cedar of freshly-built gallows.

2007-10-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

Surrealist Journalism - A Post-Structuralist Critique and Meta-Textual Dialogue

[Mark wrote:]

Interesting, funny, disturbing and strange. Morbid yet opaque. Piquant yet clairvoyant.

Here is my assessment:

1. It’s an ’88.

2. I have bad posture?

3. My eyes are dead ? ? Gee...thanks.

4. I have latent violence? Well yes I guess I do, but it’s only about scum, assholes and criminals.

5. The front is seats are cloth, not vinyl, and there are two seats. Yours and mine.

6. The impression I have of your brother is that he’s a heartless, soulless, uneducated, cigarette-smoking proto-serial killer. Is that accurate?

7. Have you ever thought of writing surrealist fiction?

[Doug wrote:]

No, the actual Mark was not slouching, nor were his eyes dead. The actual Mark has little if anything to do with our story. The Mark of the story, however, is a cold, hard man, a man of action, a man who drives a cop car and has seen the bad side of the world. He is a man qualified to cut through the crap. He calls life as he sees it, and he sees it with clear, hard eyes. The rose tint wore off long ago.

His slouch is a statement -- a strategy. Cigarettes, while implied, were at no point stated.

The Dodge Diplomat of the story is an '86 with vinyl bench seats. And the Doug of the story (wait, he is never named, let us call him the model narrator) may end up in the back seat, behind the prisoner grille. Which, by the way, the Diplomat of the story will have.

Anyone who knows you will think this is funny, anyone who doesn't will think you are world-wise, impressive -- and dangerous. Umberto Eco will write an essay about "The Layers of Mark". A course on Mark Gorney vis á vis Mark Gorney: Sémiotiques Syncrétiques will be taught at Université Toulouse.

2007-10-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

In Which I Am Advised to Embrace my Inner Lightweight

So my brother and I are driving across the Golden Gate Bridge the other day in his 1986 Dodge Diplomat police cruiser. He drives it with the slouched, knowing crustiness of a detective who's seen far too much in his years on the force. Because he's a world music publicist.

For my part I've spent the whole of our trip up to Napa and the whole of the way back talking about my Novel, or rather Problems with my Novel, or rather Reasons Why I Can't Conceive of Starting to Think About Writing my Novel. In a thousand sentences launched with a screwed up face and "See, the thing is...." I have talked about Structural and Metaphoric Subtlety, and Biblical Mythos, and the Hero's Journey, and a gazillion other tricks the Real Writer has in his bag, none of which I feel I have, all of which make me a Fraud, a Hack, a Fake. I just write about Stuff. And if I have anything to say about the human condition, any compelling and nuanced psychological insights to fold within the subtext, it will be entirely of the reader's invention. I have no subtext, I whine. When I write, see, it is what it is...and that's all.

My brother scans the road with dead eyes as we pass between the Art Deco towers. The thick, red cables dip down, swoop up. His fingers touch the wheel with the latent violence that only a life in world music publicity can culture.

"Look," he says to me, "have you ever said anything profound in your entire life?"

"Uh, well.....no."

"So what makes you think you could put anything profound into a book?? Just write, for Christ's sake. Jesus."

The South Tower looms over me. I roll my head and look out at the Pacific.

Dude. The rest of my life is opening up to me in a sweeping vista that, were I not on the vinyl bench seat of a police car, would stagger.

He's right. I'm like....a dolt.

I don't have anything in particular to say.

And....that's all right!

Coming tomorrow -- my first novel.

2006-05-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

Wickedly Forbidden.

The 300HP Dodge Charger Hemi Police Special. My next car? Fuel economy is certainly not its strong point...and yet...as we near the time when our society will come to a sparking, grinding halt, there is something even more alluring about power for its own sake. The carnality of poor mileage....the almost sexual temptation to be crushed hard against your seat by the throbbing power of eight thick cylinders with hemispherical heads....but then, when your precious petroleum fluids have drained away, oh, the post-accelerative depression.....

2005-12-29T21:37:00.000-08:00

On breasts.

Wonderful things. I don't know that I'm a breast man, per se -- the legs, posterior, hands and ankles all must be factored in -- ankles perhaps the real litmus test -- but the breasts have their heft in the equation. And then there is the whole breast-buttock ratio to consider, as well as the chunk-in-the-trunk zaftigity that tends to accompany a pair of real, screaming gazongas. Real here meaning natural -- and so comes the topic of structural augmentation. Jane Anybody desperate to attain an epic, globular status worthy of a south Indian temple frieze or perhaps a '57 Chrysler's bumper. But I need to recuse myself. Breast implants paid for my education, braces, and shoes, Dad being a plastic surgeon. I'll just say this -- in my first job, as a filing clerk in his office, I encountered an implant lying on the counter like a tumescent water balloon, with all the lateral slurdge attendant to its unfettered state. And...well, that kind of took the bloom off the rose right there.

2005-12-24T13:16:00.000-08:00

On choosing a Jewish identity rather than that other thing.

Well, a Gentile friend says I'm Jewish, dammit, and I'm not going to argue with her. I always wanted to be something, growing up nothing. And why not Jewish? I'd be proud to be a Real Jew. The Jews have the lion's share of the great violinists, biochemists, movie moguls and tough generals with eye patches. I'll go with that. Anyway, it's easier to be a Jew without having anything to do with the religion, per se. Saying someone's a Jew is tantamount to saying they're Irish. That is, just as you don't have to do anything except wake up and there you are, blang, red hair and a tendency towards gab, fistfights and alcoholism, being a Jew doesn't mean you have to stand up and be counted in temple at High Holy Days to prove it. Whereas being a Christian, well, that implies a proactive, participatory religiousity, does it not? Along with an evangelical fervor and a slow-talking, high-waisted, neatly-combed, somewhat Talibanistic zeal for cultural censure.

2005-12-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

On not really being Jewish.

I never received any Hannukah gifts.

Because it's my dad who's Jewish, not Mom, a Presbyterian-turned-Anglican from Minnesota, I get a big "thanks for playing!" from all but the most relaxed Reformed Jews. And I've never heard my dad say "I'm Jewish." But then why would he? He's a rabid atheist, and a bit of an anti-Semite. That's another story, however. This is the Christmas story -- my Christmas story. [Cue "Little Town of Bethlehem," faintly, in the background.]

Mom, from her side, loved the tradition of Christmas. The carols, the wreaths, the tree and so forth. So we always celebrated the holiday growing up, and I guess we celebrated observed it pretty much as any other American family would: with shopping. A lot of shopping. Hundreds of presents. Thousands of presents. Millions of presents. A consumerist wet dream under which you could hardly see the damned tree. All of which had nothing to do with Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ but rather with Dad, or more precisely the expiation of guilt. I guess he felt he was never around enough...I mean, he was always off in Vietnam or Central America -- or even St. Francis hospital, across town -- operating on deformed children rather than spending quality time with us or dealing with his marriage.

Sure worked for me, though! I could hardly sleep for weeks leading up to the big day. And then, wow! Bikes, radio controlled cars, mainframe computers, elephants, Nubian slaves -- it went on and on for days! Sounds of ripping paper and squeals of delight, followed by more ripping paper, and soon the delight and squeals dispensed with to conserve energy for the grim and unceasing ripfest, the struggle to separate twelve square miles of paper from combined industrial output of Germany and Japan. Pets and younger children lost under wrapping, ribbon, stick-on bows and To-From cards, some never to be found again. Hours later, the last gift wrested from under the tree and summarily violated, my dad would sadly say, "I guess that's all, huh?," signalling to the rest of us that it was over and it was now time for us to sink into a black, post-bacchanal depression that lasted through the New Year.

The Christ Child as such, and especially church services, upon which my dad frowned and about which we children thus had no clue, played no part in this.

2005-12-06T23:58:00.000-08:00

Dirty Ice in Wheel Well. Goddess and Mezzanine.

As a San Franciscan, my mind -- if not my budget -- is always running to matters of style. Posh clothes from Wilkes Bashford, a Maserati to drive up to Napa on weekends, logo-splashed cycling jerseys for just the right look as you glide across the Golden Gate on your Colnago. It's a sybaritic malaise for which there is only one cure: the Midwest.

Just back from two weeks in the tundric wastes of Iowa. When snow falls, ice forms, slush pools, and frost blinds you to oncoming traffic, when nose hairs crinkle and snap, it's all about survival. Dreams of Versace lost under puffy, mismatched layers of wool, down, fleece, and nylon and stuffed into slush-covered boots. Ice, snow and filth accrete into stalactites around your wheel wells, morphing the Maserati of your fantasies into a '72 Ford LTD or perhaps, yes, a good used Volvo. And jogging down frigid highways is seen clearly for what it is: an exercise in bourgeois, West Coast narcissism, a waste of vital energy that should be used for hunkering down.

Californians don't understand hunkering. That's too bad. A good hunker is very centering.

The moral compass of this country, its only hope in the current political climate, is the hunker vote. Delusional, imperial ambitions cannot float for long against the irresitible, stoic gravity of the hunkerers, the counterweight of big, snaggy chunks of ice and grit and dirt and corn chaff lining the underbody of your '69 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser wagon. Forget the democratization of the Muslim world -- will the damn car start?

A note on the flight -- at the airport, the waiting area may be filled with seraphic lovelies, but my seatmate is inevitably the grunting equipment salesman who smells like sausage, his abundant midsection breaching the armrest and smushing me against the window. Yesterday, however, on the all-too-short flight from Moline, Illinois to Chicago I sat next to a goddess with her nose in a Nicolson Baker book. We got to talking about The Mezzanine, which she had not only read but enjoyed. So right there you're talking soul-mate. And even though she was married, and lived in Brooklyn, it's nice to know that women like that exist. Gives a single man hope.

Unless she was the only woman who has read and liked that book. Which is possible.

2005-11-07T23:38:00.000-08:00

A Vignette of Exquisite Awfulness

Oh, God.

This whole thing, the protra-a-a-a-acted breakup, has been a hyperbolic, slow-mo nightmare, a caterwauling fall through a mineshaft of unpleasantness. Why couldn't it just have been, "Look, Doug, I don't love you anymore. I know yesterday we were madly in love, but today I feel differently. This is so over. Now, I have things to do. Please get out." Something neat, clean, sharp and crisp. Snappy!

But I'm taking so LONG to process everything, to realize what's going on. And then there were those indeteminate months where we tried to be friends. The net effect is that I'm sludging through new levels of dull pain like a little plastic fish in a ball of gel, or an old record playing at 16 RPM -- ooooohhhhhhh IIII gggeettttt iitttttt.....ooooooooouuuuuucccccccccccchhhhhhhhhh!!!

OK....stop it. It's time for someone. A rebound relationship. Something a bit shoddy, not well thought out, filled with rough sex on a worn, iron-frame bed. Nights spent staring at the ceiling. Cigarette smoke drifting out the open window, flickering blue light from a neon sign playing on the wall.

People who are heartbroken treat it as if it's the only time, or by far and dramatically the most tragic occurence to take place with anyone, anywhere, ever. But, really, it's a bit like vomiting, isn't it? Such a horrible thing, and yet rather banal, so terribly ordinary. And oh, there will be more of it to come,
whether in a few years, a few months, or a few minutes.

Still and all, while one is wallowing, or crouching over the toilet, or what have you, the drama is absolutely exquisite, is it not? Every so often I step back from the bitter, nauseating misery and cluck admiringly -- LOOK what a masterwork I am creating here! How fabulous! I am a damn GENIUS! Oh -- but more black there, in that corner, something sort of purply, like a welt...

2005-10-12T23:46:00.000-07:00

Romance is Mush

So this blog has thus far been stringently impersonal -- observations, thoughts, musings, but nothing of the author's own feelings or relationships.

But now, whether out of the overpowering gush or thoughts and -- yeck -- feelings, or out of the exhaustion of other material, I will divulge that the author's great romance and engagement has come to naught.

Well, from a certain perspective, one can ask why one would ever get into relationships in the first place unless they were strictly unavoidable, unless someone were to hold a gun to your head, threatening to squeeze the trigger if you didn't steal that first tingle-to-your-toes kiss, if that first I-love-you-darling doesn't sort of flop out of you.

I'll admit that even more than losing myself in the rosy haze of a new romance, I really I am very much enthralled with the drama, the wry, urbane, bourbon-sipping, sheer worldliness of losing love -- more even than having had it in the first place. It's a new toy for a former monk reentering the world. An artfully tarnished medallion of Being In Society, the very thing Cole Porter and Billy Strayhorn and the rest of those brilliant, arch (and flamingly gay) swells used to define American sophistication for generations, even if in the end it really ended up being about emphysema and corroded livers.

Romance is mush,
Stifling those who strive.
I’ll live a lush life in some small dive...
And there I’ll be, while I rot
With the rest of those whose lives are lonely,
too..

But again, such undeniable pleasure in identifying and tasting these things I'd heard about, these icons of Worldly Living -- falling in love! getting engaged! oh, boy, getting dumped! -- trumped whatever minor emotional discomfort might actually have been felt at the moment. Every part of the relationship, almost especially the end, has been like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time.

Well, I'm going to take my hot water bottle and toddle off to bed in my smoking jacket, the ice in my bourbon clinking softly in the glass. I pause at the bedroom window, looking out over the twinkling lights around Central Park, and pour myself more bourbon...I find myself humming the great Jerome Kern song...

They, asked me how I knew,
My true love was true,
I of course replied, something here inside,
Can not be denied.

They, said some day you'll find,
All who love are blind,
When you heart's on fire, you must realize,
Smoke gets in your eyes.

So I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed,
To think they would doubt our love,
And yet today, my love has gone away,
I am without my love.

Now laughing friends deride,
Tears I cannot hide,
So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes,

Smoke gets in your eyes.

Ah. Just so. (Takes a long pull from the bourbon. Then a drag from his cigarette, and another pull, this time directly from the bottle.)

2005-10-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

Blood Lust and Aging Boys

So we have our boys' school 30th class reunion coming up. A friend has for some reason volunteered to organize it and wants me to give him ideas for activities. Well.

If this doesn't descend into a Lord of the Flies-type scenario, I told him, I'm frankly not interested. I can't abide the thought of us as contented, fat, balding adults standing around in Dockers, sipping pinot grigio. What, after all, does that have to do with nine years of regimentation and David Copperfield-like toil under the lash of a system that hoped to mold us into "leaders"? Yes, 90% of all my knowledge may have have come from that institution, but so did 98% of my deep-rooted stresses. So I'm lobbying for a one-hour game of Blood Lust.

Blood Lust: 80 kids, one ball, no rules. We developed it in 7th Grade as a way to, well...you get the picture. Now, 30 years on, I figure this is our final opportunity to return to the feral underbelly or our childhood, the last chance to go down under a frenzied and unsupervised scrum of screeching males, crushed to the asphalt but never, never, never letting go of the dodge ball.

Alternatively, we could play Kill The Goalie. Kill The Goalie differs from Blood Lust only in that it involves four goalies, 80 center forwards, unlimited soccer balls, and a cement wall.

Basically, if the evening doesn't end with a draped body being rolled into a paramedic van, it will have been a failure.

I'm hoping it's an opportunity to let me start to come to terms with some of my issues.

2005-10-10T14:35:00.000-07:00

Pre-Decompression

Saturday I attended a pre-Decompression event at the Sublounge.

I'd expected The Sublounge to be a lavish technoplayground,
plush with subdued lighting, bubbling blue drinks and
flickering pop images everywhere. Instead it was a ratty,
unstylishly undecorated hole that two weeks ago probably
served rockgut to longshoremen and Hell's Angels. It
boasted two floors, but that's only because they let people
into the basement, where you expected to see rusty snow
shovels propped up against the wall. The whole thing was a
bit like, hey, kids, let's put on a party! Which made it
work, in a funny way, I guess its lack of, or utter failure
of pretention.

More than a few people had that fresh-off-the-playa look, with
luminescent clothing and goggles and golden horns. A man (I
think) in a large, furry, cat/bear/amoeba suit was giving a
massage to a braless girl in a transparent blouse. A guy
dressed as Jesus, crown of thorns and everything, stopped
dancing to come over and tell my friend Ananda that he'd
just come out of the closet.

My nod to the theme of the evening was a big Santa cap. I
figured, Christmas at Hallowe'en, that's like, whoo,
semiotic dissonance, I'm an artist.

We danced up a storm for a half-hour or so. Left for
Oakland (Ananda lives there and I was housesitting for
sister that night) only to find a massive traffic jam
leaving the city. Took almost two hours to get on the
bridge. I'm all for earthquake retrofitting, but maybe
they could rethink doing it on Saturday night????

What would we do without italics? I'd actually have to
write something shocking -- instead of just implying it!!

Do you know what I'm saying here????

2005-07-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

CAPS LOCK PANIC

WHAT IS IT ABOUT CAPITAL LETTERS THAT REALLY CONVEYS A SENSE OF PHYSIOLOGICAL URGENCY AND ALARM ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE IN COURIER FONT AND WHAT IS IT ABOUT NO PUNCTUATION THAT REALLY IS DISORIENTING I DON'T UNDERSTAND BUT IT IS SO TRUE ESPECIALLY WHEN PEOPLE GO ON AND ON AND ON ABOUT THINGS AND CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH THE IMPORTANCE THAT YOU DO THIS AT ONCE OR ELSE THE WHOLE WORLD WILL COLLAPSE RESPOND AT ONCE OR YOU WILL BE JAILED AND BEATEN AND THERE WILL BE A SUDDEN FLOOD OF SEWAGE AND A RELEASE OF SAVAGE GERMAN SHEPHERDS YOUR COMMUNITY WILL EXPLODE AND EVEN AS EVERYONE IS DYING THEY WILL KNOW IT IS YOUR FAULT AND IN THEIR LAST MOMENTS WILL INITIATE LEGAL ACTION YOU MUST TAKE ACTION REPEAT YOU MUST TAKE ACTION IMMEDIATELY DO IT NOW NOW NOW END TRANSMISSION STOP

2005-05-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

An Unfortunate Display of Excessive Xenophobic Hostility

I love Canadians, and in theory find the Canadian accent charming, precise, literate and intelligent. In practice, however, their manner of speaking infuriates me.

I give you as an example the Canadian woman who comes on to tell you, "We're sorry, the number you have reached is not in service." The way she says "o" in "sorry" and "not" makes you want to hurl your phone against an innocent bystander. It sounds over-enunciated, mannered and affected. Your rage is compounded by the utter irrationality of an Houston, TX-based American phone company hiring a Canadian woman to record its messages. And of course you are livid at having misdialled.

It takes several bottles of medication before the feeling subsides.

2005-05-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

Yeah, We're Talking Heavy Metal.

So just for once, let's talk heavy metal. This is not your heavy metal kind of blog, not usually, but I was flipping by VH1 and there was an early video of Deep Purple doing "Highway Star". Ain't nobody gonna take my car/gonna race her to the grou-ou-ound! The desperation of Ian Gillian, the screeching -- the commitment.

Oooh it’s a killing machine/It’s got everything...

My God the man was in earnest.

But a note on proto-metal bands of that period -- early 70s: they were dirty. As in grimy. Physically unclean. Beads of sweat mixed with iron filings and God knows what. Stringy hair. Underwear not changed for weeks. Sometimes I think that hygene didn't really make it as a cutting-edge cultural phenomenon until like 1981.

2005-05-04T02:26:00.000-07:00

La Enchilada de la Virgen

Another apparition of Jesus Christ in a bread-based entree: this time, a quesadilla.

Might not our Lord have appeared thus to Mary Magdelene and St. Peter on pita bread or a lavosh? And similarly, is His bidding not served by waffles, tortillas, naan, injera, mu shu wraps?

There is a slight tension connected with the mystery: is it, as it seems, a shameless hoax, intended to prey on the gullible, or does the seller really see this supposed image? And, if so, is he only slightly less awed by the Virgin Mary in his Eggo than the man who in turn purchases it from him for over $10,000? Perhaps the biggest regret of the people who sold that grilled cheese sandwich with Jesus' visage for $25,000 is that they needed the money for their kid's dialysis so badly that they had to put it up on eBay. And even then they had to think about it for a long time.

2005-04-30T22:46:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting site about Roy Orbison and cling wrap.

It's fairly important.

2005-04-22T21:02:00.000-07:00

SpamQuest

Received an e-mail this evening from one Caspar Xrrioe. Something about, I don't know, mortgages or toner cartridges or adding 3" of length or XANAX CIALIS AMBIEN.

Who are these people? I want to write a book about spam...no, a movie, in glorious 35mm Technicolor, a modern-day remake of John Ford's The Searchers, called Finding Caspar Xrrioe. Two men set out on an epic quest to find the spammer who has smashed their dreams of a connected, utopian information age.

In the end they meet up with Caspar in a cheesy office over a convenience store in Hackensack and it ends bloody.

2005-04-20T22:46:00.000-07:00

The Condescension of Young Chinese Men

Went to Fry's Electronics this evening. It's is an experience you put off until it's absolutely unavoidable. And, long story short, it was unavoidable. Now Fry's... Fry's stores are these vast yet cluttered places, not undecorated so much as underdecorated. Warehouse Gothic married to a patchily applied, kitchsy Wild West theme. Tiffany-ish, fake gas-lamps and Buffalo Bill motifs tossed here and there amidst raw aluminum shelving units. Your basic, deconstructed, warehouse/storage/industrial attitude can be knowing, muscular and full of promise. But this is decorated just enough to make you depressed -- and no more.

And oh, the people. The humanity! The milling, teeming multitudes with home electronics predicaments, children in tow, elderly grandparents being wheeled along on gurneys, women with baskets on top of their heads, chickens under their arms. All with whatever few posessions they could gather together before joining the tide of displaced peoples heading to Fry's. Brown people, Jews in yarmulkes, Russian babushkas, whole Sudanese villages. Water buffaloes with rings in their noses. The wretched of the earth.

But I'm straying from the point here. My issue this evening is that I got talked into getting the faster, $179 Hitachi 60GB internal drive as well as the $35 three-year Fry's warranty. Which I am now quite sure I shouldn't have gotten. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. The cell phone with the camera in it: classic example. A daily reminder of my craven timidity, of how easily I can be sold something beyond my needs and over my budget.

Now, I'm fairly hardened against your basic white sales guy. The hype, the mousse, the wide football stance. The relentless pressure to get the Caprice with the undercoating. "What's it gonna take to get you into this car today?"

Pfft. Doesn't even register.

No, here's the one you really gotta look out for: the young, Chinese geek.

Fidgety, post-adolescent, looking at the floor and flicking black hair out of his glasses, it's not like he's trying to sell you anything; he's not interested in being there. He's not interested in customers -- or people, for that matter. He doesn't even particularly care about making money. All he wants is to be at home playing Halo.

And if you knew anything about anything -- which clearly you do not -- he wouldn't have to waste his time explaining to you that 60 GB represents the minimum level of technology you have to have to exist in the world. He's like, Duh!

For your part, well, you want to have the esoteric understanding brought by this visitor from the future. You want the secret of fire. So you buy the damn thing. And the warranty.

He's too young to have pity for you, and in a few years he's going to be extremely busy running his own company. So in all probability he's never going to have the opportunity to develop the emotion at all. But if he felt anything towards you it would be pity. Because my friend, you are the wretched of the earth.

2005-04-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

I like you a lot, but I only want to be your friend

I think in general my high school experience was a good one, a largely enjoyable time, amusing, supportive, nourishing...all that crap. But still, even in the most positive high school environment, you can't avoid the fundamental cutting cruelty, the angst of adolescence. You can't avoid pimples, and saying cripplingly awkward things, and feeling deeply, suicidally melancholy on occasion. And most of all, you just cannot avoid someone like....oh, who was it, anyway? Someone like Leslie Graham (Jesus Christ!!) who takes you on the balcony at a party to tell you: "I like you, but I ONLY WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND YOUR FRIEND YOUR FRIEND FRIEND friend friend friend...." and having that echo in your ears for MORE THAN TWENTY FIVE YEARS. I mean, to this day I CANNOT TALK TO FEMALES. And it's all her fault.

OK, that's putting it a little strongly. But still. I sometimes think adulthood is about recovering from adolescence.

2005-04-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

Sequence...the book?

So, now, there's this idea of a book. Taking the blog, a collection of undirected, unstructured musings, and turning it into a book. A small, oddly-shaped book -- I'm thinking some kind of irregular polygon -- filled with small, odd reflections and impressionistic reportage about...whatever. Sneezes. Toupées. Street shouters. Triathlons. Execrable Mexican food. Yes, I like it. Going to move forward with it. It is, unless I want to change the way I write, which I don't, the only way to go, and I'm well on the way via my blog. I mean, the blog is the book, in the process of being written.

A colleague has stepped forward with moral support and the offer of designing the book! I am psyched. She has suggested a pithy title: On Sneezing.

The main problem, as I see it, is not so much that my writing is monumentally pointless -- it's that it's offensive.

Within a mere eight blog entries I re-read this evening, I managed to put down Catholics, poor people, people with Tourette's syndrome, the homeless, Chinese gang members, and the proprietors of the La Imperial restaurant in Hayward.

But...well, it was all very loving. In the spirit of *fun*. Or, that is to say, not insulting in spirit...really. Except perhaps for the La Imperial piece. And...OK, I showed the entry about Easter services to the Catholic friend I attended them with, and she was not happy.

But you know...I can only say that I am a slave to my art. These things are not necessarily things I think about, hold deeply or have any desire to propound for the sake of simply propounding them...it's what comes out. It's my voice...no, more accurately, it's what my fingers do when I let them. It's intuitive. Reflexive. Spinal.

Jackson Pollock, now, there's an example. Lord knows he had his critics, but when you think "American Art," when you think "abstract expressionism," who do you think of? Who's the man? Jackson Pollock. And how did he become immortal? He let it all hang out. He let the muses use him completely, thoroughly. He was an unapologetic vessel for the creative sense. He was who he was and he did what he did and that was it.

So OK, maybe I have a mild degree of literary Tourette's syndrome. But often, I find I craft shapes with my prose that trace the lines of societal templates -- mocking them, caressing them, turning them on their heads. And I think after so many years of not doing things, of not knowing which way to go, of rejecting my voice as an...all right, as an artist, a writer, it's time for me to reject doubt. To close my ears to the imagined scolds of critics.

I remember the words of the master sculptor with whom I apprenticed in days of yore: "Be ruthless in the pursuit of your art." That is what I must do.

Of course, he did end up leaving his wife, taking up with another woman, and moving to Maryland.

2005-04-14T23:13:00.000-07:00

Here's what to drive when you're making for the border with your girlfriend's child.

You're thought the kid was yours when you left, but now you're not sure.

He wants grape juice.

2005-04-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

Shouters

The Preamble: Here's my thesis tonight: for the San Francisco Bay Area, Ronald Reagan's most vivid legacy is not the corporatists and yahoos who now run our country, but rather the shouter.

As Governor, Mr. Reagan slashed funding for the state's mental hospitals, casting into the street thousands of patients, many the casualties of the previous decade's experimental excesses, for whom a lifetime of medicated, institutional restraint was clearly indicated. As such, the sidewalks of early 1970s San Francisco and Berkeley filled up with a subspecies of the homeless distinguished by oratory fervor -- Tourette's-like declamations on any range or topics, though more often on no topic at all.

The Shouters: There was a gentleman known as Serge, who anyone who attended the University of California, Berkeley in the late '70s and early '80s will remember wandering up Telegraph Avenue in his tattered green army jacket, uncut, unkempt, unwashed red hair reined in only by a large half-circle of styrofoam tied to his head with a rag.

Rumor had it that Serge had been a fellow at the Rand Institute until he burned himself out on acid. He now spent his days staring fixedly at the ground 30 ft. ahead of him and muttering, "at which point they went to operations and performed in-out reverse loop procedures over time defined by certain sequences and parameters fourteen fifteen sixteen eighteen twenty-seven times any previously indicated bi-metallurgical route established by convention with consideration of the subassigns," as he cut a swath through the crowds of students by dint of his sheer stench.

But I've gone astray. Serge wasn't a shouter. Serge was a droner. Your shouter...your shouter may drone, your shouter may mutter, but only as preamble to a forceful exclamation, sometimes accompanied by a jump, thrashing action, or other violent gestural activity.

For my brother the paradigmatic shouter is the African-American gentleman he saw lurching down Market Street in a raincoat one day, a large hood draped around his head, saying "I AM NOT....CHICKEN! I AM NOT....CHICKEN!!!!

Robert was my all-pro shouter: Robert had a guitar, some kind of rasty Gibson clone, an electric with no amp. He spent his days "on the Ave," Telegraph Avenue, in a rarified, Hendrix high, cutting chops that only he could hear. He'd walk a few steps then stop to gyrate, drop to his knees, play the guitar behind his head and generally get, you know, down. "Voodoo Child" was blasting in his headphones 24/7. But of course there were no. . .headphones.

There was, however, vocalization. "STAND UP NEXT TO A MOUNTAIN," he'd yell, and that was all you heard for a while, because he was crouched over his guitar, coaxing forth a solo well beyond your range of hearing. Then he'd jump out of a doorway, "IF I DON'T MEET YOU NO MORE IN THIS WORLD THEN UH I'LL MEET YOU IN THE NEXT ONE MMMMM --"

Sorority girls would scream, Blondie's pizza slices flying into the street.

Like Serge, Robert wasn't on the street with anybody else. In his world, there was only him. And, it appeared, Serge.

But Robert wanted to be alone.

As he outwieghed Serge by about 75 lbs, that was a problem for Serge. It may have been his only problem, aside from establishing quadrant sector coordinates in the logistics bay and proceeding within the bifractal time-period procedures established by previous loop reversal cycles. Many was the time he'd be droning up of Telegraph with Robert making right for him -- "HEY!!!! GODDAMN MOTHER SHOW YOU DO THAT KIND OF MOTHERFU -- MOVE OVER ROVER!!!!!" and simply adjust his course for the other side of the street without missing a beat: "...modeling a categorized subassign without reference to previous substantive operations during which in-out loop procedures loop procedures loop procedures could be generally classified over the seventy-three-four-five point five point five point five aspect ratio of a scalar uptake continuum..."

Anyway, you just don't really see the good shouters anymore. Oh sure, there are a few at Powell and Market, and some MUNI lines have their resident shouters...sometimes I think they should rename the bus lines, in fact. The 38 DIETETIC GODDAMN HOUSECATS...the 5 FUCKING SON OF A BITCH!!!...the 42 YEAH THAT'S THE DEVIL'S SPOON ALL RIGHT -- YOU WANT IT, YOU CAN PAY WHAT HE'S ASKING. ME, I USE A FORK.

But in general, the shouters have pretty much either died or been forced out by a more mercenary, addictive class of professional homeless. Though I can't imagine where to.

Ross? Blackhawk? Manteca? I'm not seeing it.

2005-04-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

It's significant

Now this....this is really quite important.

I'm sure you'll know what to do.

2005-03-01T11:46:00.000-08:00

What We Need to See

A hard-hitting and angry documentary about people who get sucked into things -- the refrigerator, the disposal, the dryer, the couch, the space between the counter and the stove -- and are not found again.

2005-02-15T15:38:00.000-08:00

Cinema of the 1970s as Public Urinal

The French Connection, which I watched most of, again, last night, as I was flossing my teeth (it was a long floss) is the grittiest police procedural every made.

Dirty snow in July. That was what I took away from it.

Actually, dirty snow in October -- from the previous winter.

And the movie had a dank feeling, the feeling of a public men's room in a large city on the Eastern seaboard.

The film was not afraid to be completely, utterly unglamorous. Particularly the scenes where the police are ripping apart the Continental Mark III and where Hackman hunts down Fernando Rey in that abandoned crematorium. The set was a shambles. It gave the distinct impression of being filmed just as they'd found it. Not a pretty film.

I'm going to go on to say that that was the strength of films in the '70s -- unprettiness. Grittiness. Hardness. Hollywood has utterly lost that. Everything has to be glowing, made up, perfect. Even when they try to show grittiness and hardness it's pretty and softly lit. Indie films, mostly because of their low budget, have taken over that role.

There was a graininess to the film quality in the '70s, too. Which brought out more grit, more of that dank, toiletty quality.

God, the East Coast is foul. Oh, yes, there is a sense of place. I mean, you go there, and it makes sense. There's a dynamism. There is energy, and culture, of sorts, and that can be a powerful attractor. Yet compared to Telegraph Hill, Marin or the coastline of Sonoma, it is, on the face of it, resolutely awful.

I really want to write a multi-volume tome about dirty snow in July and the dank, toiletty quality.

2005-02-15T12:20:00.000-08:00

We Can't Ignore it Any Longer

I want to produce a black and white documentary entitled "People With Horns". It will be a sober, sympathetic investigation of the thousands of Americans with hard structures projecting from their heads -- bony cores covered with a sheath of keratinous material or hard protuberances, such as an antler or projection on the head of a giraffe or rhinoceros. Necessarily, there will be a fair amount of blurry, surreptitious photography of figures running through the woods.

Running time: 320 minutes.

2005-01-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

Still Another Dialogue

Doug: Do you have special plans for the weekend?

Mark: once again, I have to tend to dad's needs

Mark: he's also being forced to have a big party for his birthday which he doesn't want to do but seems to be more concerned about the fallout than anything else

Doug: You mean, a bigger party than other years?

Mark: yes

Mark: because he's 80

Doug: Like, with all these Doctors Company people wandering around, and Dana Wringhammer from the Napa Auxiliary and all the criadas in uniformos?

Mark: probab

Doug: Oh Christ.

Mark: YOU'LL BE THERE

Mark: AND YOU'LL MAKE PLEASANTRIES WITH CHRISTIANS

Doug: Tell Cynthia. She will be enraged. It will be entertaining. I am really only interested in the entertainment value of rage.

Mark: I can't be bothered. let her find out for herself

Doug: Are you (A) Sour (B) Bitter (C) Crusty or (D) Beyond rage?

Mark: there is something primally awful about having the metal of one's zipper make contact with the penis.

Mark: somewhat analagous to having something at or on one's neck.

Mark: a primitive, instinctual urge to protect vital parts.

Doug: Have you tried, oh.....UNDERWEAR?

Mark: I do wear underwear but it still happens.

Mark: and it's not pleasant.

Doug: You need a cardboard layer, too.

Doug: All professionals have one.

Mark: cardboard underwear is comfortable

Mark: what if everything were made of cardboard?

Doug: The thin Russian cardboard.

Doug: The even thinner Khazakh cardboard.

Doug: The papery Bangladeshi cardboard.

Doug: Yeah! Developing countries. You gotta love 'em.

Doug: Hey -- clasps! Anyone got one of those things? Yeah -- I LIVE IN TRENTON!!!

Mark: I am going to open a Mopar Performance outlet in Accra.

Mark: I wonder if there are any Chargers in Ghana? what do you think

Doug: Dodge Chargers?

Mark: no, kia chargers

Mark: of course dodge!

Doug: 1969 Charger R/Ts?

Mark: ANY chargers

Doug: In Go Mango orange?

Mark: ANY color Mark: ANY year

Doug: With the Hemi -- or the 440?

Doug: If more people in developing countries had muscle cars, we would have none of these troublesome terrorism issues.

Doug: I am already concerned about this party and it's a month away.

Mark: SON YOU AND LYNNE ARE COMING AND I WANT YOU TO TALK TO THE PEOPLE FROM MODESTO AND TO THE CHRISTIANS FOR CHRIST'S SAKE

Doug: Dad explodes.

Doug: He's locked into an ongoing explosion that lasts a month.

Mark: have I informed you that I just won something fairly provocative on eBay, and it's $240.

Doug: Is it a naked lady made of pewter?

Mark: nope

Doug: Is it an alabaster kitten?

Mark: nope

Doug: Did you with the Apparition of the Virgin toast?

Mark: that went for $12,000 or something

Doug: Link, yes. But I have been drinking Tazo Chai all morning. It's the only tea here. It's the only thing these blasted Hindoos drink. So I have to urinate forcefully.

Mark: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4053170127

Doug: I'll be interested to hear that.

Doug: The Government will be interested to know you have it.

Doug: "SON, ARE YOU ON THE NO-FLY LIST AGAIN????"

Mark: I can justify the purchase because I have an additional $800 coming in in the next couple days and then $1600 around the 2nd

Doug: Don't forget that $356,394,012,937,352.98 you owe me.

Mark: oh, the US national debt? don't worry about it.

Mark: did I tell you about the new law prohibiting people from pronouncing "kitten" as "kidden" and "mitten" as "midden" ?

Mark: and the law prohibiting people from asking "where's it at?"

Mark: I can't stand that

Mark: I am a linguistinazi

Doug: These could be planks in the Gorney Party platform.

Doug: Which is mainly about prohibiting things.

Mark: Yes!

Doug: But the things that haven't been prohibited before.

Mark: Why do I like prohibiting things?

Mark: Am I a prohibitionsist?

Mark: There is a certain amount of glee in prohibiting things.

Doug: Yeah, kidden, but then there are also restrictions on pronouncing things too clearly. People who pronounce mid-sentence "T"s really definitely and super-clearly.

Doug: It infuriates me.

Doug: A lot of Canadians do that.

Doug: The Gorney administration. Lasts 74 minutes.

Mark: God people would hate us.

Mark: As much as the Bush admin.

Doug: We'd have to put land mines and punji sticks around the White House.

Mark: The degree to which people would hate is practically immeasurable.

Doug: Well, puzzled, first. Then hate.

Doug: The cheese sandwich sold for $28,000.

Mark: to some IDIOT

Mark: the person who bought it should be beaten over and over again.

Doug: No, no, to a casino.

Mark: oh.

Mark: well the casino should be forced into bankruptcy.

Mark: and its owners should be beaten over and over again.

Doug: In Florida. Who will make easily that much in a few days off idiots who will pay them to see it.

Mark: anyone who goes to see it should be beaten.

2004-12-13T18:11:00.000-08:00

Yet Another Dialogue

Doug: Are you writing an article for someone?

Mark: yes, why?

Doug: You had made mention.

Doug: Explain.

Mark: for the Beat.

Mark: it

Mark: s

Mark: an

Doug: more slowlly please

Mark: obit

Mark: of

Mark: errol

Mark: thompson

Mark: better

Mark: known

Mark: as

Mark: "ET"

Mark: he

Mark: was

Mark: a

Mark: studio

Mark: engineer

Mark: and

Mark: dub

Mark: mixer

Mark: he's

Mark: dead.

Mark: now

Doug: How did it befall him? The death? Pray tell, milord.

Mark: his heart did fayl him.

Mark: No! I err in my speeche.

Mark: there was lacke of suffycient aire to his braine

Mark: they calle it in some parts, a stroke.

Mark: we didst predict that he woulde ryse and walk againe, but the the spectre of the man with the scythe did appeare, and he was taken to the other worlde.

Doug: That dist befall milord Paddington this fortnight hence. Hark! I hear him now, his spectral form...that braying which does plague me as it did in life, oh God! Still my aching pancreas such that I might live another day to see my Lady Bettina on the threshing floor.

Mark: the grym reaperre did dutyfully performe his grym chore, and his spirite was no more.

Doug: And having laide him on the floore, he exeunt through the doorre.

Mark: Lady Bettina WAS raised into the aire, and when she came back doune agayne, it was on a spyke of irone.

Doug: A most painful boille didst she, late of Hunsdon's Faire, develop internallye.

Mark: someone should write jacobean or elizabethan tragedy in 2004.

Doug: Nice.

Doug: VERY gory.

Doug: After a while you're not able to see the film, were it be a movye, for the thick filme of bloode.

Doug: I hope you wrote the obit in the Jacobean style.

Mark: I wrote it in Gyoko-San.

Mark: I have to deal with dinner.

Doug: Godspeede.

Doug: Good my liege.

Doug: Take my kidneye, sire, may it serve you welle.

Mark: I hath lain down upon a gilded sword, and it hath penetrated my back.

Doug: Hark, my liege, for I heare the Giante Bunnie of Exchester!!!

Mark: Hithens! To the ramparts with violent haste! Chaste the risens! Hairsclombe the adronials!

Mark: Gleesen the Mound of Filth!

Mark: Do chubbit, my whizzens. For the burling whappit doth range amongst feral fear, and my horse is rent asunder like a tail-wind dog.

Doug: Slarth the umberlins! Chaywaste to the barrowcats! Ha, ha! Let this be the undoing of milord Guppy's blisterwinkles!!!!

Mark: Hath ye no mind for mavens??

Doug: [General alarum]

Mark: [Many are slain]

Doug: CURTAINE

Doug: Annnnnd that's a print!

Doug: Okay, see you all back here tomorrow.

Mark: All the actors are charcoal black racist caricatures, peeling off Kenneth Branagh masks

Doug: Who peel off the blackface and are albinos.

Doug: Who rub away the white pancake and are hedgehogs.

2004-12-13T18:02:00.000-08:00

A Dialog

Doug: How is karate? Have you continued?

Mark: yes, with the instructor alone, and it is gruelling and difficult.I don't look forward to it.

Mark: i look forward to being done with it!!

Mark: I don't like it.

Doug: Wait -- what happened to the other students?

Mark: the other students were eaten.

Doug: By the instructor?

Mark: yes!

Doug: He must be good! Very good!

Mark: the best.

Mark: I have to be on my guard.

Mark: how much would you pay to see a film wherein a karate instructor devours his class?

Mark: lots of growling, teeth, blood, screams, blurry, very blurry, red blood splashing everywhere, guts, entrails, at the end he wipes his mouth with a napkin and bows.

Doug: The thing is that the film must start in the middle, without explanation. There can be credits, but they should be over black, with a simple title that doesn't give anything away, like Mr. Yamura's Mid-Day Meal.

Doug: Then all of the sudden the film starts, several people already partially consumed, their remains scattered about, the instructor chasing some girl right into the camera and chewing her arm off, gore spattering the lens, camera knocking over, looking at the ceiling.

Doug: It starts quite abruptly, mid-sequence.

Doug: The lighting is poor and there is no way out.

2004-09-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

This is one to drive through the plate-glass living-room window when you arrive late for Thanksgiving dinner. You reek of Yukon Jack. The license plate tags have been expired since 1987.

2004-09-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

This could be the best thing to smash into a friend's garage door when you show up, drunk, at his daughter's bat-mitvah.

2004-08-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Race Day

3:45 a.m. Zero hour. The alarm pulled me out of a fitful doze. I stared up at the ceiling, steely resolve tempered by a burning desire to crawl back into the womb.

Splashed my face with water, meditated, and forced down breakfast (my last?). Lynne and I drove the 250 yards from the motel to Shadowcliffs, the site of the event.

Shadowcliffs. A gloomy, Tolkienesque name. Particularly for a lake in downtown Pleasanton, California.

We registered, laid out our stuff at the transition area, and waited for the sun to rise. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering in my swimming trunks. Tall figures with muscled jaws, long femurs and outsized shoulders stalked around. Sleek, lycra-flanked blondes stamped the ground, chomping at the bit, whinnying. Where were the fat slobs I had envisioned, cannon fodder for my triumphant entry into the sport? Christ. What had I gotten myself into?

I went to the bathroom. The first, gray light showed the buoys marking the swimming course, just over the horizon and far, far, far away from one another. Surely that was longer than the advertised 1/4 mile! Clearly it would be longer than I'd ever swum in one stretch.

Christ.

I went to the bathroom again.

They gathered us first-timers together. Everyone else looked like a product of some East German eugenics program -- well, at least everyone but me had enough bodily substance to stay afloat out there. We listened to this petite blonde with a voice like paint stripper, a veteran of dozens of Iron Man tri's whose motivational speech had but one point: the swim was going to be a bitch.

Thanks. Really needed to hear that.

The first wave took off, Iron Man pros using the Tri For Fun as a warmup, a stretching exercise. I had never seen humans move so fast in the water. They jetted around the bouys, 10-foot rooster tails following in their wakes. They were in and out of the water in under four minutes.

Then the horn sounded for the under-35 men. I watched the roiling mass move away from the beach. My group, the over-35s, inched forward. For the first time, I really understood what it must have been like when the ramp of your LST dropped down off Omaha Beach. Of course, we were on the beach, but still -- all that was missing was Germans raking the buoys with machine-gun fire.

"Honey, this is so exciting!!" Standing behind me, Lynne grinned and jumped up and down. I went to the bathroom. Again.

Back at the beach with two minutes to go, I drifted to the back of the group, as directed for those who felt their swimming was "a little sketchy". Which would be, in my case, a charitable way of putting it.

The horn went off. The herd of adult males entered the water. And as I stood there, watching these guys find a place in the water and start swimming, a sense of calm settled over me. The kind of eerie calm you feel when you have completely, utterly lost your bearings.

"Oh," I said to myself. "I'm going to take a dip. What fun."

Then another thought started to form: "And...I see I'm about to enter a swimming race. How very interesting! You know, actually, I believe I shall instead go back up the beach and visit the bathroom."

But I was pressed forward by the crowd, the water swirling around my thighs, my chest -- and then everything went black, an inky gloom of duck spoor. I broke the surface in the center of a thrashing, frenzied scrum. Elbows, feet, knees flying, punching, grabbing for anything. I tried to move forward and freestyled up on a guy's back once, twice, three times. I stopped, took a breath, pointed myself in another direction. A long strand of water hiacynth wrapped itself around my torso. A Samoan swam over me.

After a few minutes of this, I looked up and saw the first buoy to my left. Rounding it took an eternity. It was beginning to dawn on me, as I slid further and further away from the course and into the center of the lake, that I could not find my stroke. I had no stroke. Instead of extending my body in a long, elegant line, I was pulling myself into a fetal ball. Every breath sucked in pints of lake water, ripe with protozoa, amoebas and zooplankton. One of the dozen or so lifeguards, watching us carefully from surfboards, called out to me: "you okay?"

I didn't answer.

Now was not the time to cave into that nagging doubt that comes whenever I slide into a pool, the feeling that I don't belong there. I clearly don't know what I'm doing. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can execute a basic crawl stroke, and have even been studying this Total Immersion DVD, but still, more than 40 yards and I always expect some lifeguard to see my form, do a double-take, jump in and haul me out.

I didn't want to talk to any damn lifeguards, didn't want to think about my bad form, didn't want to dwell on my insecurities. So even as I gagged on litre after litre of giardia-laden pond filth, even as I said to myself, "ah, so this is what drowning is," I was determined to get through this damn thing.

And the hell if they were going to pull me onto one of those surfboards and cut my swim short.

The back leg of the course was endless. And my crawl simply wasn't there. I defaulted to a kind of spastic breast stroke. A side stroke. Floating on my back. But I kept...moving...forward.

I drew some comfort from not being the last guy in my wave. Five or six other poor souls also plodded along on their fronts, their sides, their backs. I'm sure at this point the under-35 females were gaining on us, maybe even passing us, maybe getting on the bikes already. I don't remember. In fact, the whole thing's a blur now, a jumble of frantic images, splashes, a wet lens, shark's mouth gaping, a severed leg, water full of blood, camera at a crazy angle.

I pressed on. Where were those warm, slimy plants? Out here it was cold, with chalky sunbeams slanting down into the fathomless depths of the Marianas trench.

On the home leg, breast-stroking furiously, I followed our motivational speaker's instructions to keep swimming until there was sand right under me, until I couldn't swim anymore. And when I dove ten feet straight down, what do you know, there was the sand! I walked under water for 20 yards and up onto the beach to my bike.

Fumbling with my helmet, shoes, gloves, hands shaking. Jacked up with adrenalin. Pulse racing, my mind a whirl. I had faced death -- and worse, humiliation -- and I had prevailed. I was back in my element. I didn't even know I had an element before this, but now I was on my bike, air all around me, terra firma beneath, and I was flying! I passed everyone I saw (more than half of whom were on mountain bikes, but still). Pulling up to a young woman I'd been following, I checked my speed from her computer -- 21 mph -- took it up to 22, 23, left her standing still, and in a flash I was back in the park, pulling on my running shoes.

I took off at a fairly easy pace, but damn if I wasn't passing all the runners, too! The futility of the swim transformed into the swaggering confidence of a well-trained athlete! Ha! Me, Doug! Fleet of foot, high of anaerobic threshold! Kicking ass, taking names! Lynne and I grinned wildly and high-fived as we went by each other on the course. The nauseatingly fit couple!

A few people passed me, OK, but only six, and only two of those were GIRLS, and one of them was an Auschwitzy, emaciated, ultra-marathoner type, so that doesn't count because she could probably have run until next week anyway. Then I overtook a big guy who'd passed me on the last hill, jousted with him for a moment in the last quarter-mile and LEFT HIM IN THE DUST with a HUGE BURST OF SPEED at the finish line!!!!

I shot under the sign, arms up in victory -- where was the olive wreath? where was the American flag to run around with?? -- and then remembered the clock! My time! I trotted around to the front of the finish line again and looked up: 1:29:13. So...let's see...third starting wave, subtract 10 minutes, and then the time it took to come back around to the clock...uh...1:18:55. Or so. Yes, the real triathletes had finished the race and left the park 25 minutes ago, but hey, that was not a bad time!

Elation. Bliss! Ready to do it again!! The horrors of the swim expunged from the memory!! Standing by the finish line, waiting for Lynne (starting smack in the center of the over-35 women's wave, she was even more freaked out at people swimming over her and kicking her, and didn't complete the swim any faster than I so I was able to beat her time by 35 seconds -- a major victory for the male ego), everybody was cheering for those crossing after them, a tremendous collective euphoria and accomplishment and relief -- except, perhaps, for one girl bent over next to me, vomiting prodigiously. I patted her on the back and said, "good race, huh?" She grinned up at me and said, "yeah!"

I knew just how she felt.

So anyway, I found that I am in halfway decent shape for a rank amateur cyclist and runner. I told Lynne flatly two weeks ago that I really would have no interest in thinking about another triathlon once this was over but, I have to admit, the whole experience has me thinking. So if -- IF -- I do another one of these things -- I have GOT to get the swimming thing down. Knuckle down, face the music, throw myself back into lakes, rivers, lagoons, estuaries, the bay -- gulp -- the ocean.

Christ!

I've got to go to the bathroom.

2004-08-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Plants. My God, the Plants.

So my girlfriend railroaded me into entering a triathlon.

For almost two months I've been training myself into exhaustion for something that slovenly, out-of-shape people who haven't practiced a single hour will show up for with old mountain bikes and tennis shoes.

Went out yesterday to Pleasanton to take a bike ride and then actually swim in the lake where this thing is going to be next week. Very important for the aforementioned girlfriend, who, while a strong swimmer, has open water issues.

We swam out beyond the frenzied, screaming chop of the recreational area. The adult swimming lane spanned the horizon in a single, bleak line. I grabbed a pylon and stared at the twin ropes stretching ahead of me and disappearing over the curve of the horizon. It was simply a question of exactly where my heart would give out -- at just what point my faltering stroke stopped and my lungs filled with water until I slipped with a tiny ripple into the depths below.

I drew in a breath -- my last? -- lowered my head, stroked my arm forward -- and came face to face with SLIMY PLANTS. Right at stroke level. I mean to say that when you bring your extended arm down and in, you graze the tops of the SLIMY PLANTS. So if you have goggles, and if you swim with your head submerged and your face to the bottom, with correct Total Immersion form, you spend the whole time staring at MANY, MANY, MANY SLIMY PLANTS.

Lynne shrieked and shot out of the water. She has SERIOUS ISSUES with SLIMY PLANTS. After working for a year to perfect her crawl, she announced that she will be doing the breaststroke the whole way, keeping her body out of the water from the knees up.

As for me, the fear I face is not the fear I thought I would face. It's really not even the plants and the overall murk. Consider this: 1500 people have signed up for this race. 1,500 people, all of them running at the gun, surging from the beach, plunging in and swimming all at once, a kicking, stroking, elbowing, zig-zagging mass of humanity, stirring up the muck and the slime and the dead fish and the plants.

Many will urinate in terror.

Or worse.

And I haven't even mentioned the way the loose plant strands wrap around your legs and shoulders.

2004-08-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

Another Dialogue:

Doug: All your dishes -- which you never used -- have chicken fat all over them.

Doug: And small encrusted spinach leaves which only reduce slightly in diameter no matter how furiously you scrub at them.

Mark: And stuff, you don't even know what it is, that you have to scrape off with a sturdy knife.

Mark: And broiler racks that have never been cleaned, ever.

Mark: That grease that becomes molecularly bonded with your skin.

Doug: Until you scream FUCK! FFUCK!!! FFFUUUCCCCKKKKK!!!! and slam a fying pan through your television screen.

Doug: And then your hair bursts into flames.

Mark: Dad has been gliding though the house recently, his feet a foot above the ground. Gerri too.

Mark: They pass each other in the hallway.

Mark: Dad in his bathrobe, Gerri in Flemish armour, circa 1385.

Doug: Is it a jousting contest?

Mark: Pikas scurrying up and down the outside of the house.

Doug: A mariachi band that keeps appearing at the bedroom door at 3:30 AM, playing La Cucaracha.

Mark: Their bed slams them into the wall every night at 4:12 AM.

Doug: Yes! Then Dad shoos the mariachis away, Gerri tries in vain to find them the next morning, and the next night, they are back.

Doug: And again with the bed.

Mark: OK here it is: it's August, it's 95 degrees, and it's pouring rain in their bedroom.

Mark: How much would you pay for footage??

Doug: Only if it were sudden and quite unexpected.

Doug: And arms were waved.

Mark: I want to see their bedroom sopping wet. Everything is absolutely soaked.

Mark: The cars won't start.

Mark: The power goes off.

Mark: There is a beeping sound.

Doug: Cue the German shepherds.

Doug: Bounding through the house, clawing the floors, barking.

Mark: I think we should fit some sort of spring-launching device under their bed.

Doug: Knocking knick knacks off shelves.

Doug: And that's when the dolls attack.

Doug: Victorian dolls versus German shepherds.

Mark: And smelly bums.

Doug: Gerri cannot break up the fight.

Mark: Dad and Gerri wake up with a foul homeless man in their bed.

Doug: Dad says, "Oh, Christ," and walks off the property in his bathrobe.

Mark: That's when the entire house disappears into a giant sinkhole.

Doug: I like it.

Mark: The only thing left is Dad, hair wisps at attention, bathrobe, FFFFFFFFUCK!!

Doug: "Son of a BITCH!"

Doug: ChrrrrrIST!!

Mark: He's not devastated, just really, really, really irritated.

Doug: That is how the journal gets started.

Mark: Vanilla enriched soymilk with Quik is pretty good.

Doug: And we didn't even talk about the wolverines Gerri encounters in the laundry room.

Doug: Quik?

Doug: Oh. My. God.

Doug: How about Strawberry Quik.

Mark: The Taste of Duluth.

Mark: Are you ever going to go back there?

Doug: Don't plan on it.

2004-08-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

Lawnmowers

The sound of a gas lawnmower evokes heat, humidity, the absence of any particular responsibility. Staying in bed until noon. Timelessness. A floating, ambient quality: no one knows where you are, and you can drift without end.

A manual lawnmower's grating slash, however, means that you are likely to get in trouble with a stern elder.

It's worrisome.

2004-08-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

A Dialogue:

Doug: You know how there's a small drop of water somewhere but suddenly your whole goddamn hand and half the counter top is wet? You know that?

Mark: One microgram of honey = smeared absolutely everywhere, including in your bed, on your computer keyboard, on stereo knobs, on refrigerator handle, on car door handle, on steering wheel.

Mark: And in your hair and down your pants.

Mark: You wake up with honey in your nostrils.

Mark: You can ruin someone's life with a small pot of honey.

Doug: Another one, by the way, is mustard.

Doug: Mustard has greater spreading and smearing power than any other substance on earth.

Mark: I don't know, honey has profound self-multiplying principles.

Doug: Hmm...maybe the scalar increase of honey is greater.

Doug: I think it's 1g > 58g > 34567 g > 3469732 kilos

Doug: Talk about the self-multiplying principles.

Mark: One gram multiplies itself into 2 grams, then into 8 grams, then into 32 grams, then 156 grams, etc.

Doug: We need to get this published in a scientific journal. Mark: GOD DAMN IT -- The Journal of Extreme Irritation

Doug: Dad is Editor Emeritus.

Mark: The Journal of Irritation is published in Chicago.

Mark: I wonder who would subscribe?

Doug: Dad would subscribe to the Journal of Extreme Irritation, read the thing, and get extremely frustrated, try to rip the pages out, not be able to, and hurl the thing out the window, screaming in rage.

Doug: It would be a journal with the power to exponentially increase annoyance to the point of homocidal fury.

Mark: I see it as some sort of soothing tonic for easily irritated people.

Mark: Catharsis through reading other people's extremely annoying experiences.

Doug: Yes, but these people would be so easily irritated that they would get annoyed for no reason and end up smashing their head through plate glass.

Doug: Screaming all the while.

Mark: Would you like to see a 1.5 hr. film of people hurling themselves off different cliffs?

Doug: I would rather see a 3-hour film of rotund individuals running full speed into walls.

2004-08-06T14:57:00.000-07:00

Toupée III

OK, there's more on this. To see someone in a toupée today, in the 21st century, gives you the shock you might experience stumbling into the year 1934. A time when men with ill-fitting suits and brown fedoras would say "Hey, what's the big idea?" or "Aw, wise guy, huh?" There's something about a toupée that predates America's coming of age (via Vietnam and Watergate), a time when butch-waxed, hungry men with shirtsleeves, lean jaws, raw fists and pep held onto a vision of American opportunity even as their future dried up, even as they grew gristly and hard-bitten and old, even as the dust bowl and locusts swirled about them. Men who felt that if they could just throw some hair back under the fedora something might turn up.

2004-08-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

Toupée II

So there's this guy who works in our building, a fellow in his 30's, who wears the most absurd toupée in the universe...this is what got me thinking about the toupée issue. It's just like, I wonder what the is dude THINKING!!!! Be BALD, man! Nothing wrong with that! Or wear a hat if you must! But he looks like, I mean, beyond surreal. Something out of a Fellini film. Like someone masquerading as a person.

Or maybe it's just making fun of people who have hair. Maybe it's an ironic statement about hair, made all the more twisted by the fact that actually, underneath the rug, he does have a full head of hair, and it's a sort of irony on irony, like people who shave off their eyebrows and paint them back on. There is something of a burlesque about it, something like kabuki or noh theatre. Perhaps, yes, it's the cranial equivalent of a mask. You know, how other-worldly and spooky masks really are, as if suddenly you're in the realm of magic, of pure allegory, removed from the measured, analog reality of everyday life and thrown into some classical Greek drama staged and acted with the stark severity of an ancient and completely alien ethos.

2004-08-06T14:49:00.000-07:00

Toupée I

Men who wear bad toupees -- OK, what toupee isn't, when you get down to it, but some just scream "sleeping rodent on the head" -- well, I'm going to asset that there's something wrong with those individuals. Something defective in the brain physiology.

You can't really disagree with me.

2004-04-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

The First Quadrant

I am waiting for the AAA guy to come. 3rd time in less than a week, I think. Battery. The thing is, as of yesterday the battery was, no bones about it, dead. As the proverbial doornail. So this morning I installed, myself, personally, a new battery. Which I felt very good about until the car again would not start. I think -- I hope -- the problem was that the battery was sitting around so long in my car since having bought it that it lost its charge.

My life is an ongoing mess. My fiancee says (she gets this from "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" course, which she taught while working at Livermore National Lab) that I deal only with, um, I think it's called First Quadrant issues. That is, the stuff that has to be taken care of immediately. I'm not proactively on top of anything. If I, like, installed a battery at the first sign of trouble, or paid my taxes in advance, those would be Second Quadrant issues. The thing, I guess, is to keep your life in the Second Quadrant. Not a great skill of mine. Lynne's somewhat better -- OK, infinitely better, by my standard.

2004-03-22T22:20:00.000-08:00

Eating Rocks

Mountain bike riding yesterday for the first time this year. Briones Park in Pleasant Hill. Spectacular NorCal setting. Sun setting through gnarled oaks. Hilltops as smooth as a baby's bottom. Drastic climbs out of tight scrub-and-laurel canyons. Screaming descents of trails which can't be descended -- if you actually looked at where you were going. Long, leaping bunny hops for the sheer joy of flight. And to impress the girlfriend.

At the bottom of the hill, a 1/4-mile of chunky gravel snaked down to the parking lot. Perfect opportunity to practice power slides! Nailed three or four turns, whipping the back of the bike around in a spray of gravel...and then went down hard on an innocent-looking right. The rear tire went wide left, the front went right, and I smushed for ten feet through bits of granite that ripped the skin off my arm, my hands, my hips.

I watched myself eat rocks with a detached air of inevitability. First road rash of the season, after all. Had to happen sometime, might as well get it over with.

2003-09-03T22:21:00.000-07:00

An Incident at the Toll Plaza

Just back from a weekend meditation retreat, wonderful experiences after breaking through the tar pit sludge accumulated from months and months of cubicloid droil and commute hell, deep, profound, unbounded awareness that reminded me of my time in a monastic setting in the Catskills, an infusion of pure consciousness now likely dissapated in trying to get over the Bay Bridge last night. I left Berkeley at 10:30, and by midnight I was 400 yards past the toll booth.

A car carrier had hit the side of the bridge at Fremont St. on the San Francisco side, dumping its load of new cars all over the road. In a separate incident shortly thereafter, a car and a truck collided midspan. Traffic was down to one lane, and with cars now stalling, running out of gas and overheating the problem had compounded until, as I stared up at the umoving sea of tail lights on the incline, callers to KGO-AM reported crossings of more than three hours. People simply parked on the bridge, lying on their hoods, picnicking, chatting, screwing, whatever. Others suffered. Parched tongues clacked in dry mouths. Bursting bladders asserted themselves, drivers staring blankly at the wetness spreading across their laps.

No. Couldn't do it.

With waves and a broad, fixed smile, I managed to sidewind my car through traffic from the right lane all the way across the toll plaza parking lot, and onto eastbound 80. Hitting freeway speeds, I screamed in release. Catharsis! Heavy nose breathing! Adrenaline, endorphins and seratonin pumping through my system as I drove north to Richmond, across the Richmond-San Rafael, down through Marin and across the Golden Gate. Got home at 1:00 AM and considered myself lucky. Would likely have been 2:30, 3:00 or later, had I not taken matters into my own hands.

Thoughts of New Mexico. South Dakota. Manitoba.

2003-06-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-06-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-06-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-06-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-06-04T19:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-06-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

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

2003-06-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-06-03T00:20:00.000-07:00

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.

2003-05-31T01:06:00.000-07:00

La Imperial

This evening, driving up 880 after work and gripped by a fierce hunger, I pulled off in Hayward and ended up at La Imperial. La Imperial enjoys a modest reputation for its Mexican food, but in plain fact it stands out as an extraordinarily low-class restaurant even in a city as utterly graceless as Hayward. Polished, urbane, witty, knowing, ironic, recherche, faux...these are not words one can use at La Imperial.

It's an establishment of vivid, strident slovenliness.

A heavily bandaged waiter with a three-day beard, bleary eyes and a tractor-pull hat lurched between tables filled with economically disadvantaged people staring angrily at their menus, clearly unable to read. At the front a 300-pound woman took money and screeched at customers. Babies howled. I half-expected to see someone defecating on the floor.

My God it was awful.

2003-04-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

The Will to Blog

I've been informed that I need to blog more.

2003-04-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

Haroseth and Cherubs

Had a Passover Seder (dinner) on Wednesday night with the extended family, minus my dad, who has finally said "to Hell with it, I'm not going to waste my time with that goddamn religious nonsense," or words to that effect, and once you're pushing 80 you can say those sorts of things. Cousin Wendy had, to my surprise, flown in from Montreal, and we had as our guests the Butlers from across the street, an African-American couple experiencing their first Passover and liking the haroseth.

I am, by the way, only sort-of Jewish (semi-Semitic, if you will), my mother having been a Gentile. To say nothing of my Jewish father being a strident atheist and a bit of an anti-Semite....

And just so I have all my bases covered, I just got back from SS. Peter & Paul in North Beach, where I attended Easter service. A CATHOLIC Easter service. A first for me. A friend asked me to accompany her -- she is rediscovering her Catholicism, so I said hey, what the Hell, and went along. (Of course, we first had to fortify ourselves with dinner at a nearby Italian place -- lots of pasta, imperative for attending two-hour Easter services at SS. Peter & Paul.) The service was....well, somewhat interesting...the sermon itself focused on Exodus, with a lot of attention paid to the Passover element of Easter, the whole Passover story from the plague of the firstborn to the flight from Egypt. The priest said that ultimately Easter was about finding "shalom" within ourselves. Shalom, the Old Testament word for peace, not just being the absence of conflict, but of inner harmony and wholeness. So I could get to that, spiritually, and it made me feel less threatened as a Jew.

That said, though, I have a problem with the use of the vulgate. These services, particularly the chanted liturgy, sound so canned and unappealing in English. I think whatever power there was in Catholic/Christian ritual was lost with the departure from Latin, so much more magical and ancient, charged with the mystery of the divine. Name and form and all that. Chanted liturgy just sounds silly in English -- like setting an instruction manual for a cordless telephone to the tune of a Gregorian chant. Plus, with Latin, at least if you are a casual observer, you won't be focused on the curious and inherently unsatisfying dogma of original sin.

Here's another thing: while the soaring, dark recesses of European Gothic cathedrals inspire spiritual awe, in their mouldy, midaeval way, American Catholic churches tend just to be tacky. Lots of gilded plaster, inadvisable baby blue accents, waxy cherubs. Hardly tokens of the timeless and boundless.

2002-10-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Notes Towards a Manifesto on Automotive Gigantism

Much more to add on this subject of automotive gigantism. No time now, but I should return to a Deconstructionist critique of 1960's automotive aesthetics in re liberating the car from referents, from the formal vocabulary of house, coach, bird, fish, spacecraft, and sugar plum fairy. Car in its own terms, automobile sui generis. Car qua car. Pure and simple, a slab. We reference the 1963 Continental. The self-referent car -- and yet, with mass. Considerable mass. Pure mass. Without biomorphic or architectonic abstraction. An essentially unembellished industrial extrusion. Reference also the hard-edged sculptures of Tony Smith and Ellsworth Kelly. Can we tie Derrida into this? The French post-structuralists?

10/12/05 - A Reader Responds:

I think your desire to convince the reader of your intellectual prowess throws the piece off balance. We need to feel the mass of the car, the sheer momentum of 3K lbs. of Detroit's finest steel pushed by 8 cylinders and 460 cubic inches of ozone-depleting, gas-guzzling, heavy metal thrust rather than be reminded or reassured that you know who Derrida was.

2002-10-01T21:50:00.000-07:00

Manifest Destiny and The Theory of Pure Mass

People ask what my position is on SUV's. I say I am staunchly opposed to Harley Davidson motorcycles; where do it come down on the SUV problem, then?

Now, owning an SUV in San Francisco is as politically correct as riding around on a palanquin carried by slaves. That doesn't mean people here don't have SUV's -- there are probably as many as anywhere else, if not more so, and San Francisco's SUV's do tend towards the egregiously ostentatious: Range Rovers, BMW X-5s, and Porsche Cayennes -- but on the other, more P.C. side of the cultural divide, SUV's are real lightning rods, inciting a degree of vitriol far beyond what might be called for by their admittedly poor emissions, gas consumption, and safety record.

At this point, it is appropriate for me to disclose that until quite recently I owned a 1967 Dodge Coronet 440 convertible. Midnight blue, with a white top and interior, vintage Cragar mags and a finely aged glass-pack muffler. A thing of beauty. 12 mpg. I wholeheartedly support the maintenance and operation of vintage automobiles -- particularly those over 17 feet long, and with engine displacements exceeding 350 cubic inches. I feel that vehicles of this sort say good things about America. They are a clear affirmation of our cultural and historical identity.

I also feel that, ultimately, they are good for the environment.

I will return the environmental benefits of the full-size American automobile. I feel first it is important to give weight to the significance of the full-size American car -- and I do say "full-size" as we once thought of it, when we were a strong and confident nation, a nation capable of shouldering the defense of the free world and manufacturing a surplus of Chrysler Cordobas -- at the same time, mind you -- as a metaphor for who we are as a nation. For where we came from, and for where we might find ourselves again.

Think for a moment of the Mini. Of the VW Bug. Think -- those who have seen one -- of the Smart Car. What these automobiles have in common, of course, is that they are small. They are...tiny. And they speak to a continent long settled and circumscribed. To a world of boundaries. Of limits. The Mini, appealing as it may be, says "I have found a small pocket in which I can breathe, a small little niche in which I can express myself, a small scrap of largely recycled aluminum I can use to manufacture a machine from. I exist and define myself within boundaries." This is Europe. A place where all land has been demarcated, all thoughts thought, all social possibilities long ago clearly and restrictively defined. A place whence our forefathers came, seeking a new life, new freedoms, new possibilities, and much more leg room.

Next, consider, if you will, the 1958 DeSoto Firestar. The 1970 Plymouth Fury III, perhaps. Yes, and the 1974 Lincoln Continental Mark IV Bill Blass Edition....or, for that matter, of the recent Ford Excursion! Massive, lumbering vehicles, conveyances on a truly staggering scale, with the handling characteristics of a swimming pool, requiring inconceivably powerful 400 and even 500+ cubic inch engines simply to get them across the intersection -- to say nothing of taking them to Interstate speeds. Speeds at which, flying along with an inexorable force too great to bother with the principles of aerodynamics, and given that F=MA -- force = mass x acceleleration -- a wall-fronted '73 Mercury Montego Brougham could easily generate enough force to level a whole Belgian village.

These are automobiles that say: "I live in the new world, a world of inexaustible resources. As far as I can see, all this is mine, to use as I see fit, to harvest, mine, process and squander!!!" Ah, the orgasmic pleasure of squandering!!! O the ecstacy of waste!!!! A bacchanalia of resource extraction!!!!

For these are the children of Frederick Jackson Turner, of the Monroe Doctrine: latter-day industrial symbols of Manifest Destiny. Their chrome-plated tonnage and unimited power challenge nature itself: the land to restrain them, the wells to power them, the mines to build them. "I am Roadmaster, car of cars! Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Fast-forward to the Chrysler K-Car, a sea change for the U.S. auto industry. How the mighty had fallen: Chrysler, the makers of the Fury, the Polara, the Newport, and the Royal Monaco -- the Imperial, for all love, the Green Hornet-mobile itself, a statement of aggressive luxury with cosmetic fore-and-aft bulk so gratuitous that the car was banned from the demolition derby circuit -- now reduced to eking out anemic Aireses and Turbo Colts. As the oil embargo and stagflation hobbled America, it could be seen in the uncomfortable, dispeptic winnowing-down of tonnage, displacement and fuel consumption that has continued to eat steadily away at our national spirit.

The Harley Earls and the Virgil Exners are gone from the Big Three. And they took their rococco stylings with them, their fins and bulbs and nipples and chromium wet dreams. The wind tunnel now serves as head designer at every car company in Detroit. Not again in this life will we see the agressive, confident, forward-canted, Kennedyesque look of the 1965's: the Imperial, the Ford Galaxie, the Pontiac Le Mans/GTO...oh, never mind that JFK was already dead by the time they hit the showrooms; they were designed under his administration, and are clearly imbued with the clean-lined, hard-edged optimism, the modernistic vigor of that era. The hot car in the showrooms twenty years later: the ovoid, stringently neutered Ford Taurus. A Europhile exercise in moral timidity. And a dark night of the soul for America.

Yet all is not lost. No, hope springs anew at, of all places, Chrysler. Never mind that it's now a German company, we need not speak of that. What matters, more even than the fact that it has re-entered NASCAR, is that Chrysler has re-introduced the hemispherical-chambered engine. A 460. Evocative of the 426 of yore, the power plant of the fearsome Coronet and Road Runner R/Ts.

I feel that this bodes well for America. We may yet enter another golden age of unbridled power and resource consumption!

But to return to the question: what about the SUV's?

I cannot in good conscience approve of their driving characteristics, of course, their tendency to tip over. I do not, as a principle, approve of the attendent needless endangerment of lives, particularly since (A) it is a documented fact that only 12 people in the United States actually took their SUV's off a paved surface last year and (B) the only acceptable context for an SUV accident is on a butte or wash, or possibly an arroyo. Nor can I approve of the tendency of SUV's to drive over smaller cars, because, though there is a certain symbolic appropriateness to that particular type of collision, there are fine and worthy people who drive small cars and who may lose their lives in the process. I am foursquare against the pollutants that SUV's add to the environment. (Although it's true that cars from the 60's and '70's are also held to looser emissions standards, the environmental laws that grandfather them in recognize, entirely sensibly, that technologically unsophisticated manufacturing technologies at the time they were manufactured preclude them from meeting contemporary standards and so, really, what is one to do?)

But I am strongly FOR the complete and total exhaustion of fossil fuels that the Ford Excursion, Dodge Durango, or Chevrolet Suburban have continued to make a real possibility in our lifetime, carrying on the proud tradition of the Oldsmobile Belmont, the Pontiac Grand Safari station wagon, and the mighty, V-16-powered 1936 Cadillac Sedan de Ville. American automobile makers proudly point the way for the rest of the world, churning out full-bodied, confident, swaggering battle-wagons that will accelerate the country's industrial engine into a glorious, grating, sparking, rod-throwing, Tinguely-like demise as the last very drop of gasoline is squeezed into a GMC Jimmy on a dusty back road in New Mexico.

Forced from our dependence on fossil fuels, the United States will be a happily quiet place, powered by sail and hand cranks.

2002-09-29T19:07:00.000-07:00

Half-Life

Took a job in Fremont, an hour away, in a sterile, unpeopled high-tech office park at the end of the Bay. The office is an open cube farm. The routine: asborb flourescence in Cubicle 76. Don't move a muscle.

Having been a happy, if spottily engaged, home-based contract worker, it is interesting, in the most detached, clinical, observational sense, to measure the effect of full-time employment in that sort of environment. It's a kind of semi-life, a bit like being on life support. Or perhaps in suspended animation (like movies about space travelers to far galaxies who are kept alive but unconscious [and unaging] for 50 years until they arrive at the Antares 12 system and all wake up unchanged and rub their eyes and have coffee and go out and get eaten by an unsightly alien): there are always plenty of tasks, so one doesn't think about one's personal life, or about anything much at all, in fact, except for the matter at hand. An operation, of course, in which one has no personal, moral, or aesthetic stake. And so one's brain is slowly emptied of all inherently interesting, individuating content, while the body is weaned off of its prior dependence on sunlight, oxygen, and physical movement.

The irony here is that, even though this is a patently unhealthy way to live, a hospital-like, environmental simulacrum that limits the body to 5% or 10% of input/output capacity, I believe it is in fact possible to remain alive in this manner for 400 or 500 years. I mean, consider a tree. What has the tree got to do but just, you know, be? It doesn't get to run around and engage; one can put a cubicle around it, and it will likely live to be 300+ years old. All right, trees do get sun and oxygen, but still, I think, being part of your life, by definition impossible in a career like this (particularly with the cyborg-friendly 10-hour days start-ups run on) is what is fun and evolutionary, even if it is also what triggers the aging process and eventually kills you.

On the other hand, perhaps this kind of employment is more like being frozen. Cryogenics. A Ted Williams thing. Or is it more like being freeze-dried?

Which begs the question: in 3-5 years, can I just add water?

2002-09-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Gorney Party Platform

This may be the arena in which to launch the Gorney Party.

The Gorney Party answers the crying needs of the day: peace and quiet in the cities, and orthodoxy in professional sports.

Here, then, is an outline of our platform:

I. America is entirely too noisy. Let's keep it quiet. Here's how:

A. Leaf blowers will be banned.
1. Those employed using them will be given rakes.

B. Car speakers over 5" in diameter will be strictly prohibited.

C. Car alarms also will be forbidden.
1. Those cars found to be in violation of this statute will
be promptly flattened.

D. The Harley-Davidson Motorcycle company will be given six weeks to
adopt contemporary muffler technology.

E. Convene a House committee to investigate the implementation of
laser technology as a means of eliminating -- and eventually
banning -- jackhammers.

II. Professional Sports in America have gone astray. Here's how to fix them:

A. General
1. The use and manufacture of Astroturf will be prohibited.
2. All dome stadiums will be reconfigured either to open-air
structures or simply destroyed.

B. Baseball
1. The designated hitter rule will be eliminated.
2. Aluminum bats will be prohibited.
3. The playing of music from sources other than the stadium
organ will be expressly forbidden.
4. Baseball will be federalized.
a. A Commissioner will be appointed by the president at
the Cabinet level.

C. Football
1. All helmet facemask bars shall be gray.

D. Basketball
1. NBA Teams which consistently underperform --
the Golden State Warriors, for instance -- will be
relegated to the CBA or other minor, pro-am, or neighborhood
leagues until such time as their record and quality of
play are deemed adequate to justify their fans' attention.

E. Hockey
1. Why the fighting?
a. Convene a Senate subcommittee to investigate.

F. NASCAR
1. State education budgets in the Southeastern states shall
be federally supplemented.

2002-09-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

What I Want

I want to write a rambling book that touches on many topics, something which lets me really set down my world view and cause people to say, "what is it with this guy?" Something that causes them to reach back deep in their gullets and spew forth a jetlike stream of...well, let's be frank, a most vile, bilious liquid -- a physiological reaction even a trained health professional would turn away from.

The book could be titled "The Book I Want to Write". It will be a 347-page proposal, or rather conjecture, of a book that could not, in and of itself, be written, or at least marketed, but of course in attempting to describe the book's confusing, diffuse, wholly unconnected subject matter, to say nothing of the shocking array of regurgitative, excretory, and conniptive physical reactions its author wishes to elicit, enough pages will accrue to make up a book.

It will get a great Staff Review at Green Apple Books. It will sell two copies.

My father will ask me to reimburse him for 16 years of tuition.

2002-09-13T23:40:00.000-07:00

After Dark on the 31 Balboa

Worked a day of temp-proofreading at a design firm in Oakland. Wrapped up at 7:30. back on BART, stopped for a meal as expensive as it was mediocre, took a long MUNI ride through the underside of SF back to my building.

SF has a precious, rent-inflated, chi-chi, candy-coated image, but it's still crunchy in the middle. Large swathes of the city remain untouched by yuppification. The bus stop was a bit dicey -- Market, Jones & McCallister -- but the interesting stuff happened once I got on the bus. Lots to see out the windows, like a Disneyland ride. Passing the corner of Buchanan and McCallister there was a cluster of five police cars, a large man in handcuffs, an officer rummaging through the trunk of a Honda. An ugly crowd was advancing on the policemen, and at least one
person was brandishing a baseball bat. It was a post-apocalyptic film, a world of eternal night where all order has broken down.

"Yo, that's my boy's car!," a passenger said to the bus driver as we pulled away. "Damn! Don't have to be doin' my boy like that!" The passenger then told the driver the story of a recent fight he had been in, one that ended with three policemen bringing him to the ground and hitting him on the head. "Shit...tried to take my dome off...but I popped they domes right back! That's right!" It was already just a pleasant memory...he was relaxed, contented. He might have been telling a fishing story.