Laughlin

I am spending today recovering; it seems that I have been go-go-go for weeks, and today I sit down with laptop, writing instruments, and a glass of water to set a stage or something.  I have witnessed two baseball games--one awful, one nail-biting--pushed and shoved two loads of laundry, cleaned the kitchen, my bathroom, and my bedroom, and now I'm here, fresh out of excuses not to be.

So, in the spirit of Jamaica Kincaid, here is what I have been doing lately:

• Not sitting in trees or dreaming, two things I wish for;
• Working without a day missed until Friday, when I made my first trip to the doctor in 2 years.  The result?  I may have a thyroid issue that goes beyond the regular symptoms instead of having a thyroid issue and Crohn's.  I can only hope.  I received a tetanus shot, a lecture on my cholesterol ("you're too young for that medication"--it's your call, Doc), a thorough exam, and a dosage of birth control.  The thyroid meds followed yesterday.  To describe what it is like to be without health insurance and the proper medication for years and then rejoin the healthy was overwhelming this morning as I took a pill that will bring me back to vitality, focus, and, hopefully, dropping forty pounds;
• Work is back to going well...and I am learning to let it affect me less.  I'm shopping for a position 470 miles north of here, but learning all I can while I stay;
• The desert continues to master me.  I hate it.  I hate the sprawl that it has prompted.  I hate the conservatism, homicidal tendencies, and entitlement it provokes.  But one day last weekend, on a Sunday morning with my sister-in-law watching from the beach, I stepped from the sand of Laughlin, Nevada and into the coldest summer river in my history.  The water was clear, the current strong, and, at best, the temperature of it was about 60 degrees.  60 sounds fine, but in water temperature it feels like it possesses a windchill factor of 30.  I stood ankle-deep, waited for the ache to pass, waded to knee deep, waited for the ache to pass, drifted to waist deep, waited for the ache to pass, and then dunked down and up quickly.  It was like dunking in menthol, peppermint oil, snow, lightning, vodka...anything cold and stripping.  Eighteen months of dry, baking, desert sun and wind fled my soul.  Down and up, gasp, down and up.  Bless the mighty Colorado;
• My writing has been limited to miles of journaling, free-writing the novel, and what you see here;
• But I read like a M.F.-er.

The podcasts and a boss who loves words as much as I keeps me sharp.  Talking workforce management eight hours a day is a gift, writing for my love of it is a gift, and that river was a gift.  (Are all a baptism?  I guess there is redemption there.)  

One more thing should be noted about Laughlin:  I am normally not a gambler.  Gambling (as with most games, save baseball) bores me senseless and rattled.  But our first day in Laughlin I could feel something was up.  I dropped $5 in a machine to expel it from me and landed $120.  About six hours later I landed $40 on $5, and the next morning I tried to break the hundred dollar bill from the first win and pulled in another $30.  So, my gut instincts still have it.  I say this not to roll in riches (the money went to the doctor and pharmacist this week), but to say that I know, I can feel, that I will go home, not only as a goal, but as an unavoidable destination.

I wonder what it will be like the second time.  A gamble, again.

Onward, dear reader.

Book and Music, By...

As I write this today I am listening to a collection of music that I own but haven't heard yet.  Every Tuesday I lengthen this listen:  my Starbucks Rewards app on my phone holds up a red-circled "1" like an auction bidder, and I go in to check the notification and find a free iTunes song waiting for my redeem, and every Tuesday iTunes itself features a free song for downloading from the home page.  The current playlist of new stuff looks like this:

• "Amsterdam" by Imagine Dragons
• "If Only" by Dave Matthews Band
• "My Dear" by Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics
• "How Do You Ruin Me?" by Black Prairie
• "Trouble" by Jose James

I don't know if any of these songs or the artists singing them are the latest "in" thing.  It's free music.  It's not likely I'll remember the songs or the artists in the morning.  Music is my one-night stand.  That explains why I probably knew who Amy Winehouse was but couldn't remember who she was when her death was announced.  Unless your name is Bruce Springsteen or Mary Chapin Carpenter, I probably love you, but not enough to marry your music.

It's free.  I'm no judge, going either way.

*****

I am reading a LOT of library books this year.  More than I ever have since I was a kid.  When I was a kid, all the way up to when my mother passed away, I hoarded books.  At one point in Missouri I had over 500 books, most of them literature (technically, I still have them--they're in storage in Missouri with a collection of other things), and I organized them by color.  I expected to live out my life in Missouri, even though my life of nomad behavior pointed to moving again at least once more in my life.  When my mother died, though, something no longer connected there.  I read books and donated them to the library.  I packed up the unread ones when I moved to California, and when I read most books in California I donated them to the library, sold them in my last weeks in San Francisco, or "set them free" through an application called BookCrossing.  I still considered books precious and requiring a physical care, but I could let them go when I read them, with few exceptions.

This year I've evolved again...books, through reading them, are starting to morph into the vehicles that I am sure they have been all along.  Don't get me wrong--I would not arbitrarily deface or destroy a book, but I am learning of ways where it is acceptable to do so:

• If you have decided to journey a substantial length of a mountain range on foot, and your backpack starts out too heavy; read Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" for particulars on burning your books along the trail for fire starters;
• If you want to write in a book but you don't want others reading what you have written, tuck your secrets in the negative spaces of others' books; read "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje;
• If you want to pack a fat novel that you've always wanted to read but it won't fit in your bicycle's handlebar pack, slice up the book and pack it in your backpack, deep in the gaps...but don't toss the wrong section; ask Willie Weir in his blog of his experience of reading "Atlas Shrugged" in cycling through South America.

Or just borrow a book from the library and return it after.  Whichever is lighter and fits the journey.  Borrowing a book from the library preserves it, yes, but...someday (I write this smacking my lips in some sort of lust) I want to be on a journey where a book becomes that one-night stand, that song that I remember but can't name, either by title or artist.

Onward, dear reader.

That Song From West Side Story, or, Wish You Were Here

First, memories.

When I first moved to the California in July of 2004, I was acutely homesick for Springfield, Missouri.  I didn't so much miss the people (at that point my best days in Missouri were over--I had graduated college and the only people left in my circles were trying to "save" me) as I missed knowing where everything was.  My first few days in California my brother took me everywhere in the Bay Area to show me the wonders of the place to where I had moved--Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Francisco.  I marveled in them all, and, clichéed, dipped my feet in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.  I showed the proper amount of wonder.

I had hoped, in the weeks to come, that I would learn where everything was.  This was more difficult to do in Sunnyvale, where we lived, than I imagined it would be.  Streets didn't run straight, they changed names, and traffic laws were crazy to begin with...and THEN other people broke them continuously.  More and more I got on foot when I could, and learned, through the joy of the internet that I found in cafes on my laptop covered with travel stickers, that mass transit was all around me.  I started "learning" the ins and outs of Caltrain, Muni, SamTrans, VTA.  I found the Bay Area on foot.

At night, I dreamed of streets in Springfield.  I dreamed of green, of rain, of square city blocks, of fall leaves.

Two years later, I moved to San Francisco.  For my entire time there, I never, NOT ONCE, took my residence there for granted.  I could criticize or praise San Francisco, I had the license, because I lived there.  I didn't necessarily love the people; like Springfield, there were a few kind people, and the rest were in their own world.  I didn't have a husband (nor was I likely to find one there of all places) or kids, my friends were in and out of my life, and I accepted the fact that my "family" was my beloved City, with its Giants and its food and its ethnicity that I had never known until then.  I found San Francisco on foot.  Even now, eight months after leaving, I can tell you how to get around by the naming of an intersection.

I dream in color when I dream of San Francisco.  Not of its people, necessarily, although sometimes they sneak in.  Still, of place.

Here in Carlsbad I live with family, and I often feel (although they've tried to reassure me otherwise) that I am in the way.  I don't fit in with Carlsbad as a place, either.  True, they aren't trying to save me here; they're ambivalent, actually.  In many ways Carlsbad The People is exactly like San Francisco The People.  But San Francisco had ethnicity of greater variance, and parks, and art everywhere, and architecture everywhere.  San Francisco was expensive but had good and cheap/free events somewhere every weekend.

San Diego still might.  But San Diego is as far away as Sunnyvale from San Francisco, and the train to San Diego doesn't run half as much as Caltrain.

Here I am.

True, there are moments when I've hated Carlsbad.  True, I still dream of San Francisco.  But somewhere in the last month I've learned to let Carlsbad go.  My ambivalence equals that of a local.  Place no longer has the role of husband/child/friend in my life.  I find joy in slices:  the ocean, a curious snout of a puppy that meets me along the beach, a child at the library learning to read at the table behind me, the breeze when it finally switches and blows over the balcony, writing in my favorite coffee shop. What place used to hold, absolutely, is now held by time to tell a story on the page.  I knew Ohio, Missouri, and San Francisco.  Carlsbad is where I will know the map of me.

I'm sure Carlsbad has plenty to offer.  I'll let someone else find it--someone with a surfboard, SUV, and cell phone.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration for today's edition of Life for Rent.  A time, and a place.

That Song by Brandi Carlile, or, Plotlines

Tell me a story, riddle me this.


Tell me a story with a happy ending.


Tell me a story I'll believe.


Tell me a story I'll want to listen to.


Tell me a compelling lie.

*****

I follow a lot of stories lately.  On Twitter I follow the stories of baseball games, usually involving the casts of men from San Francisco, Oakland, Tampa Bay, D.C., and Texas.  I follow the journey of a young gay poet from Harlem who recently sold his possessions and is traveling the world.  I follow the success of a Oregonian who walked for three months straight in 1995 and lived to write about it.

On Google Reader I follow the continued adventures of a baseball fan who has found a delightful amount of fantasy in the California flora.

On Facebook I follow the uplifting adventures of a fellow artist from way back as she bench-presses.  Dead-lift?  She brings it to life.  I follow the continuing story of one of my favorite authors as he leaves the City we both love and lets go, goes on.  I follow a friend I met twice who lives on the other side of the world, the land of this year's Olympians, and takes photos of rings without color, giving them clarity.  I follow a former teacher as he writes the final sentence in a chapter of his life.

I'm from Missouri.  You've got to "Show Me."

And they do.  Stories like this are my lifeline, the bubbles back into what is at times my own flat soda.  I follow them for so many reasons the character motivation becomes murky, at best, but primarily they keep me afloat.  They are not stories with happy endings.  They have no ending at all, bless 'em.  As to happy...bittersweet.  Bittersweet is better, bittersweet is easier to believe, bittersweet shows me that they are human instead of "perfect."  I am wary of "perfect."  Bittersweet has a rounded flavor, a richness..."Your cat exploded?  Make good art," says Neil Gaiman, a bittersweet statement if there ever was one.  Every one of these people has a setback or challenge to get past, whether it takes up an hour, a day, or years.  The poet from Twitter is afraid of the Phoenix airport.  The Giants have two struggling pitchers.  The Nats have a nark.  The hiker wants us to be brave, regardless.

The triffids may get us all someday, but wouldn't it be better to walk on the wild side?

Ah, sweet friends...tell me a story.

Tell it well.  Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This song is the inspiration by today's installment of Life For Rent.  "Lines across my face," lines across my palm, same thing.

Flight Without Instrumentation

Yes, I'm grounded
Got my wings clipped
I'm surrounded
All this pavement
Guess I'll circle while I'm waiting for my fuse to dry...
Someday I'll fly, someday I'll soar... 
~ J. Mayer

Back in the States, when I had just moved from Ohio to Missouri, some friends of mine suggested that I read an author by the name of Richard Bach.  You might remember Bach from the book "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," but I was recommended Bach's "The Bridge Across Forever."  By association, I came across "Illusions:  The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" at a bookstore in Manistee, Michigan on a vacation with my parents just a few months later.  I read "Illusions" in a day and reread it every year until 2004, when I came to California and the book went into storage in Missouri.  In the book Bach plays on his nomadic experience as a biplane barnstormer to describe a fictional account of meeting another barnstormer named Don in the "hills of Northeast Indiana" who wants to join Bach for a time on his travels.  Bach is uncomfortable with Don; Don performs little miracles like stopping a plane without enough runway distance, "lifting" the bugs off of the cloth body and visors in the cockpits so that the creatures can live again, and performing routine maintenance without ever greasing the engine.  Bach knows at some point this kind of behavior will produce a mob of followers (this was before Facebook and other social media, so think "followers" in a Biblical context), but Don insists that the powers he possesses can be attained by anyone.  I'll let you discover the ending, if you want it.
The book opens with an account of what kind of parable Don might tell if he were to relate a modern-day "Sermon on the Mount," and the story goes something like this:  there was once a creature that lived along the bottom of a fast-moving river.  The creatures could breathe underwater, but they struggled on the river-bottom all the same, getting beat by the current against the rocks.  One day one of them posed the question:  "What would happen if we just let go of the river-bottom?"
"Are you crazy?" asked another.  "You'll be smashed upon the rocks and die!"
The first creature wanted to take the chance anyway, and he released himself into the current.  At first he was dashed upon the rocks, and then he began to drift away from the rocks and rose up in the river, floating with the current, seeing amazing things, like other rivers...lakes...oceans.  The rocks occasionally bruised him when he came to new terrain, and yet, he knew they wouldn't end the adventure.  They were a part of the freedom for him.
I was thinking about that passage the other day when I caught AMC's airing of the 1997 movie "Contact."  In one scene Jodie Foster's character is questioning the building of a restrictive chair in the spacecraft, a chair that is not mentioned in the schematics that the "aliens" have transmitted to Earth.  Later, secured in the chair, she suffers all kinds of jarring and turbulence; it takes watching a piece of jewelry that she was wearing float in front of her to trust her instincts and leave the "safety" of the chair.  As she floats quietly in the cabin, the chair breaks away from the spacecraft and slams into the top of the cabin, where a moment more of thinking safely might have broken something on Foster.
Like, say, a hand or arm.
*****
Around the time I got the Bach recommendation I was friends with the first of two pilots in my life.  He was a student at the College of the Ozarks, studying airplane mechanics and working part-time at the same luggage store that I worked for in Branson, Missouri.  Occasionally, if the conditions were right, he would take me flying.  As I remember it the planes were mostly Cessnas; I trusted him enough not to get airsick.  Most of my motion sickness is psychological, so the trust part was crucial.
I don't remember if we ever flew completely without instrumentation--I remember taking sunset pictures and I remember a floating trick where he placed a hat on the dashboard (is it called a dashboard in a Cessna?) and then dropped the nose of the plane so that the hat "floated."  Lucky hat, I thought, laughing out loud, every time the pilot did that.  Lucky hat, to be set free from the rocky river bottom.
*****
"What do you need, Pete?"
"Glider practice."
~ "Always," 1989

Visibility.  Wikipedia calls it the most important aspect of flight.  Most of the time, flying, you're high enough to have visual perspective--if there's no cloud cover you can gauge the geography.  If there's cloud cover you can very often get above them and gauge the horizon and distance.
Over the weekend I read a fantastic short story by Colum McCann about early transcontinental flight pioneers.  McCann is well-versed in historical fiction; his novel "Let the Great World Spin" intricately covered the Twin Towers from their early days to their last ones, and he leaves no detail unturned with the story "TransAtlantic."  (You can look it up online for the April 16th issue, but if you aren't a subscriber you might do well to sit down with a copy at the library.)  In the story two friends fly from America to Ireland overnight in a modified Vickers Vimy.  At one point three failures occur:  the weather forecast (it was supposed to be clear), the exhaust manifold (a failure that creates a loud, steady white noise that threatens to put the aviators to sleep), and the electrical system (killing the heat and the instrument panel).  The pilot hesitates to drop below the clouds or try to climb above them; in the cloud cover, with no instruments, there is literally no way to determine which way is up.
With no perspective, would it be best to give up?  Should our heroes let go of the safety and just let the plane fall?  Or should they trust the thin air in front of them, and hope that somewhere, somehow, a horizon will emerge?  Let go, or go on?
Perhaps letting go is a form of going on.
*****
I can't stand to fly
I'm not that naive
I'm just out to find
The better part of me...
~ "Superman" Five For Fighting

I have no instruments for conventional flying.  I possess no pilot's license, for VFR, IMC, or otherwise.  I have been a passenger only all of my life, trusting the pilot.
Conversely, I have never spent significant amounts of time on an actual river-bottom, or in a spacecraft bound for a replication of Pensacola.  I do not possess those instruments, either.  I'll have to take the current for granted, or the dreams of Carl Sagan.
Still, I possess certain instruments that allow me to fly.  My little boat of thoughts floats in the vast ocean, my little glider of dreams graces the skies with instruments of vast and billowing communication.  I find possibility in job boards, publishers' Twitter accounts, and ties with friends following my plume.  I skim over nothing.  I have picked up every detail on my dashboard--dials and gauges called Monster, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, email--for a year now.
Four months ago, all of the instruments worked.  My little glider may have been grounded, but I could still gain access to to the skies.
And then I moved to another land.  One after another, the instruments either failed forever or were disabled.  I had to grab the stick, stare at the cloud cover, and either let go or go on.  I picked up a pen, some paper--these are my throttle, steering.  I let go of the instruments that wouldn't work (strange freedom!), like rocks on the river-bottom, and held on to my little vessel with just a pen and paper.  I wrote my way out of the paper bag.  Back to square one...and sooner or later I spotted Ireland.  I landed without hitch.  Bless the person who repaired my little vessel, Lord, and here's the ground, and there's the plane, ready for me.

I'm on my way up again.

And the arms of the ocean are carrying me,
And all this devotion was rushing out of me...
Never let me go never let me go...
~ Florence + The Machine

This Worldwide Life

According to my Facebook feed, I was promised an early edition of This American Life this week.  The content was supposed to be a hot topic.  The broadcast was supposed to be popular and full of angst.  I've been checking my iPhone for THREE DAYS on the cursed This American Life app, for crying out loud, and no episode!  I finally had to manually find it on the Internet.  JEEZ!  WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY IS THIS...?

*****

Yeah, that paragraph above is a lie.  I actually have been checking the app, but I've been dreading listening to this episode.  Dreading it because society needs someone to be the center of a witch-hunt.  Dreading it because I agree, but not wholeheartedly.
What was magnificent about this episode of This American Life, once I bit down on my belt and listened to it (correction:  I did not bite down on leather of any kind), was not that another episode had to be retracted.  It's not the lengthy pauses of the liar's answers (burn him!). 
It was Act III.
In Act III of the broadcast, Glass goes out on a limb and trusts a guy who really does claim to be a journalist--not just play one on the stage--and ask him about what actually does happen in China in the manufacturing of some of our most beloved electronics.  In case you don't care to listen, I can summarize:  the situation in Chinese manufacturing is disputed because workers and managers can't agree on whether or not the overtime is wanted or not, the situation of safety in the factories could be safer but isn't because it's not a contract demand, and the situation of labor cost is not the determining factor in keeping manufacturing for items like Apple products in China.
I'll let you absorb that last one for a moment.  Maybe I'll even restate it:  the situation of labor cost is NOT the determining factor in manufacturing Apple products in China.
That wasn't a lie.  Honest.
What IS a determining factor in manufacturing Apple products (and other electronics) in China?  Supply.  Pure and simple.  You can get all of the materials for making Apple products immediately in China.  China is willing and able to provide a faster delivery time than the US, or any other country, for that matter.  It's all a matter of TIME.  We want our toys, we want them now, and Apple will get them the fastest way possible if they make their products in China.
It's not labor costs.
It's because everything must materialize...NOW.

*****

James Frey.  Greg Mortenson.  Mike Daisey.  Let's lynch 'em.
I have to wonder, though, while I go gather rope.  (Hey.  I'm lying.  There is no rope.)  I have to wonder what makes a person do this.  I have to wonder what causes them to resort to fabrication to get in the door.
Maybe...that they aren't getting famous fast enough?  Maybe that they don't know how to do what other, admired, effective, honest activists or memoirists do, but they still get asked by their friends, family: "Hey, how's that fight against substance abuse?"  "Hey, how is that school in the Middle East coming along?"  "Have you managed to change the working conditions in China?"
How you like me now? comes the answer, when the account is on Oprah, when the tea raises millions, when Apple is brought to its embarrassed knees.
Not that all three accounts couldn't have happened honestly.  But honesty requires two things in literature:  effective, well-executed prose, and the time to execute that prose.
A short-cut, in essence, would mean saving time.  A wild account that isn't true could help you, the reader, overlook the prose, or allow you, the writer, to break the rules for prose.  Or break the rules for journalism, memoir.
I'm just thinking, maybe, just maybe, the writer has run out of time, and doesn't know how to make the idea work to sell, and takes a shortcut.
We want spectacular, and we want it instantly.  By God, there it is again.  Like watching a baseball player shoot up 'roids because the fans want more home runs, and they want those runs NOW, THIS SEASON.
Onward, dear reader.  And hurry the hell up.

Into the Wild: Bukowski and Drinking

A few weeks back I wrote on my brother from another mother, that fella from the Midwest too, Monsieur Hemingway.  I particularly loved his letters back to his home and family from Paris, a love of mine that normally leads me to North Beach, of all places.  It ain't Paris.  Hell, it ain't even Italy (but don't tell the wait-staff that--I want them to keepa speakin'-a Italian, ifa you knowa what I mean).  But North Beach manifests in a great cafe culture.  You order a drink or two or cannoli or two and you sit with your book or your journal and you watch the world.  You hope other artists show up.  You hope to overhear a great debate about the writings of Sartre and Camus.  Or, barring all of that, Jo, you snob, you just listen and let the world wash over.

Probably the only disappointing aspect of Charles Bukowski's is something inconsistent with Hemingway--and that's a hatred of baseball.  Bukowski was not a baseball guy.  I can forgive him for it.  I have forgiven him for it about two hundred times since I moved here.  Not everyone likes baseball, after all.  The number one complaint that I've heard is that it's a slow sport.  (Usually the people who say this to me don't watch hockey either, which I would think would be the polar opposite of baseball, but watch football instead, a sport where much of each quarter is spent slamming into each other at the 45-yard-line just trying to get a down.)  Still, I'm trying to be open-minded.  So it's okay that Bukowski likes the ponies instead of sluggers or hurlers.  I'm fine with that.

I found Bukowski's "Sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way" about the same time that I found the Vesuvio Cafe.  But one at a time, gentle reader.

When I first moved to California in 2004 I was unemployed by my own hand as well, and living in Sunnyvale with my roommate, my brother.  My writing cafes were on Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale and off of Dana in Mountain View.  I would park the car, unpack my HP laptop, and go sit with caffeine for two hours and write emails back to people I missed in Missouri.  On one of those sojourns in Mountain View I wandered around and found a two story bookstore in Mountain View one afternoon, a bookstore I found out was later a California chain called Books, Inc.  (It's still there, by the way.  Yes, I'm just as shocked as you are.)  I wandered around as I normally do with my book selection process, trying to find the best book to leave with, when I picked up the Bukowski volume, read the first page, and knew I was done shopping.  I took Bukowski back to the cafe with me and didn't bother with the laptop.  I just spent two hours reading his gruff, sympathetic voice.

Since buying that book in 2004, I've dabbled in it.  This year I sat down and read him every morning, after finishing my morning pages, one poem at a time, until I was done.  I knew I couldn't keep him, and I knew where I wanted to give him away.

The Vesuvio.

On another trip to Books, Inc (that was lethal stuff, finding that bookstore) in 2004 I came across a book chock full of San Francisco cafes, and I decided that while I didn't want to learn how to park in San Francisco, I did want to learn how to get around there.  North Beach, while a hike from the N-line (I didn't take buses until I moved to San Francisco in 2006), was a favorite.  I loved the beat culture--I had brought "On the Road" with me from Missouri as a part of a small, migrant collection.  Walking up Columbus, I found City Lights Books and one of the cafes in the cafe book that I could write on and cross off the list, Vesuvio.

I know that seasoned San Franciscans will probably disagree with me, but I don't think it would be much of a stretch to call Vesuvio a dive bar.  The space is dark despite a wall of windows, decoupaged from floor to ceiling with any manner and color of coasters, flyers, paraphernalia, and statements.  I walked in, and, miles from home had no desire to get drunk--the only thing I could get without alcohol was coffee or juice.  I went with coffee, a dollar a cup in 2004, and climbed up the narrow stairs to the second floor.  The Vesuvio, in all of it's funkiness, looks out over Jack Kerouac Alley to City Lights and to engraved sidewalk blocks with Ferlinghetti verses stamped in them.  Color, like a coat, is everywhere, and crammed.

I haven't been back since that writing in Vesuvio, until this past Saturday.

Once a year San Francisco has an event called Santa Con, a self-made, city-wide convention of men and women who want to dress up like Santa for a day and go revel in the streets.  There were groups of them at Vesuvio Saturday.  Across from me, completely unrelated to the revels, were two women with a pit bull in the booth with them, talking about the DVD boxed sets available of the Real Housewives and Jersey Shore.

Ah, but in front of me, dear reader, was another scholar, deep in a book, sipping his coffee, and doing his level best.  Level best at what, you ask?  Beats me.  Beat poetry.  Take a beat.  Prop Bukowski against the window.  Write with a vodka cranberry.  Pack up, leave Charles for a hope of a scholar, and walk out into the night.

Just the way Bukowski would have done.

Onward.

Pablo Stairs

Some of you have been hinting around..."What are the 'Pablo Stairs'?"

Well, other than reading my earlier post, here are some pictures.  I did not take them.  (The only electronic gadget I take up the Pablo stairs with me is my iPod.  It provides more inspiration than my phone.)

Stairs leading up from Moraga Street (five of the flights, the other two flights are below the buildings in the center of the picture.  My neighborhood is pictured.  Photo courtesy Jason DeFillippo):

The bench at the pinnacle of Moraga Hill/Grandview Park/Pablo stairs (provides view of Golden Gate Bridge.  Photo courtesy the SF Chronicle):

Ocean view (Pablo stairs are also apparently called Larsen Peak, according to unnamed credits):

Boardwalk stairs on Daly City side, on what I call a "treehouse effect" day (meaning you can't see any view at the top due to the marine layer, or, you're enclosed.  Photo courtesy Derek Sisson):

View of Downtown San Francisco, approaching Pablo stairs for descent (blogger also calls this "Turtle Hill."  Photo courtesy The Toasted Blog):

Now you know where I am every morning after breakfast.  I wouldn't sneak up on me, though--I tend to be combative during workouts.  (It's all that Taylor Swift tunage I listen to.)

Onward, dear reader.

That Song by The Boss, or, Where I Was

For the last two weeks, all kinds of media has asked me to remember.  "Share your story," demands Twitter, Facebook, the New Yorker, The New York Times, the LA Times, most cable networks, even some libraries.

You talkin' to me?

Ok, once upon a time, on September 11th, 2001, back in the States...

• I was working two jobs at the time.  I was working two jobs because I had thought that I would be in a higher paying job in New York City training people to make fundraising calls on behalf of art organizations like the opera and museums and such.  My training was to have been held, starting in August, 2001, in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  I turned it down because I would have to pay for the relocation.  I would have been fine with one job but my mother got sick and created a boatload of expense to go back and forth from Missouri to Ohio to take care of her.  That's why I had two jobs.
• My morning job, from 7 am to 12 pm, was to enter benefit paperwork for Blue Cross and Blue Shield.  My evening job, from 1:30 pm to 10 pm, was to train people how to be nice and knowledgeable on the phones at Bass Pro Shops.
• That morning I was wired, because my mother was starting radiation 680 miles away.
• My morning job was solely data entry.  During that time, because I missed learning and missed college so much that I ached, I listened to NPR on headsets.  Everyone else listened to rock stations.
• At around 7:55 am Central time, Carl Kasell came on the radio with his news update stating a plane had hit the World Trade Center.  At that point the news was being broadcast as though the crash were a malfunction.  I still found myself standing up, nevertheless.  The woman working next to me said, "What are you doing?"  I replied with the news.  "You're crazy," she said, and begged me to get back to work--we were measured on metrics.
• Five minutes later was our break.  We made our way to the breakroom and turned on the television.  By the time we had just about settled into watching the news, the second plane hit.
• When we all finished our break, everyone's radio was on NPR.
• In the distance between my first job and my apartment, gas prices were rising faster than I could drive.  And I was on a third of a tank.  Luckily, all of my workplaces were in one city.
• When I got home, my brother had left a message that WW III had started.  My parents had left no message at all.  I didn't eat lunch.  I just rotted in front of the television until 1 pm.
• When I got to my second workplace I sat and watched the news in the breakroom for my entire shift.  No calls were coming in to the call center, save for one notable one that someone got wanting to know why he had not received his camping gear when he paid for one day air.  We issued a credit and told him his gear was probably grounded, and that he might want to turn on the news.

That's where I was.  As to all this 9/11 remembrance hype, you've missed it with me, dear media.  That was the year my mother was sick.  In my selfish, scarred heart, I was just glad for the diversion that day from the silent phone from Ohio.  But I do remember 9/11 in my own way--every time a digital clock reads 9:11, either am or pm, I think of this song.  That number seems to remind me not to rot in front of the news.

P.S. - This song is where the title for today's post of Life For Rent comes from.  You can call me Jo.

Those Songs by the Proclaimers, or, You're Not Really Lost

My brother has this saying: "You're not really lost until you run out of fuel." He said that a lot when I first moved to California, along with the advice that the best way to get around and know where you were going was to just drive out beyond your comfort zone and get lost.

I had a car for my first two years in California, and, having not had a car for the last five years, I have to say in hindsight that I missed a lot those first two years. I knew this, even then. I would often hop the train in Mountain View and just take off for the Peninsula cities on foot, picking a name off the list and exploring Burlingame, Palo Alto, San Francisco. I was scared at first of San Francisco, and then thought to myself, "Ah, well, you gotta die of something," and took the train into the City more and more. Then I got a job there and got lost the first day. Embarrassing. But I didn't mind--it was a temp job and I loved seeing a part of the City I never would have known otherwise, even if it was the Tenderloin (no joke, and *gulp*). It took me two years to ride my first bus (I limited myself to foot traffic and light rail in the beginning).

Flash forward to 2011. Not only can I find my way around the City without a map or GPS (no joke, again), but I can be in a different city entirely and give you directions and transit routes in San Francisco. I can also find my way to any location in the Bay Area by transit or by car, with a little map help. Yes, I do drive. I don't enjoy it in particular when I drive, but I have that talent. Or, lack of fear of driving, if you will.

The only part of driving that keeps me from doing it all of the time is parking. I loathe and despise parking. Even in places where there is a parking lot, I'm putting my faith in the universe not hitting my car or towing it by some un-posted or poorly-posted law. I hate leaving a good share of me out on the asphalt to trust that it won't be tampered with. But I drive if the need arises, or if the love of adventure dictates it.

This past week I was in Carlsbad, California, visiting family. Carlsbad is a lot like Santa Cruz--mellow beach town. In Southern California, to which Carlsbad belongs, the culture is one of driving. EVERYWHERE. This is a little bit limiting for those of us who rely on the power of our own legs for groceries, work commute, health care, sightseeing, etc. But during the week I had that power--I could take off on my own. I was given an apartment key and, though the insistence was to drop me off where I wanted to go, I had a tendency to wander. I had a backpack with water, snacks, and writing supplies, and I would hop from cafe to library to beach to boutique. My sister-in-law thought I was nuts (she was partially right--they were having a heat wave down there, but hey, I brought water). I just thought it was a wonderful way to really adopt the pace of the city, to get to know the people, to see the nuance. I was right. Carlsbad residents (in fact, the San Diego area in general) are some of the friendliest and most down-to-earth people I have ever met (beating out even Southern and Midwest towns), and I probably would have missed them if I had a car and crammed in a whirlwind tour of the sights. Librarians greeted me as a new regular. Small children taught me how to check out books, operate drinking fountains, and which desserts are the best, by friendly force on their part, if necessary. Wait staff asked me for book reviews and leadership tips. I wouldn't call these people nosy--I would call them refreshingly curious. You knew they were going to take that experience somewhere else and do something with it, just by the nature of the way they asked. You knew they were traveling, too.

Here in the Bay Area, the feel is a little different. I have more friends than not who are outside of my beloved City (although, with the writing groups, that is changing), and from time to time I get asked about the best way to navigate it. I'm wary. Most people who live in the Bay Area but don't live in San Francisco abhor visiting San Francisco--mass transit takes too long, Muni is unreliable, there are too many "weird" people here on the streets, there's no parking, parking is too expensive, what's with all the one-way streets (that last one is the most amusing to me--there are no one-way sidewalks), the tolls are too high to come in, etc. I know. I don't understand, because my adventure threshold is higher, but I know. It's a pain. I just have a higher pain threshold. And I've met others of my kind. A few weeks back I met a traveler from England who journeyed from Fisherman's Wharf to the middle of the Mission via the City's mass transit for a writing group meeting only hours after getting off the plane. THAT'S adventure. I'm not sure even I could do that, jet-lagged and all.

I do have my moments of shame. This past Sunday Mike and Serena wanted to fly kites at the ocean. I was carrying one of my favorite handbags (I'm an art supply/handbag whore, I hasten to admit), and my brother decided, halfway through the journey, to take us on a back-path to the ocean that required cliff descent. Now, I should know better, because my brother loves this crap and does this to me every trip, somehow. But I lashed out. "I wouldn't have packed this handbag if I knew you were going to do this." I'm ashamed to say I sounded like a spoiled-brat city girl. Lesson to remember for Sarah:

1. Visiting brother/loved one?
2. Carry small, athletic, cross-body necessities, and...
3. Open yourself to the opportunity of falling on your ass.

Which, when I think about it, isn't a bad approach to traveling anywhere. Well, for me, anyway.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S. - This (and this) is the inspiration for today's title of Life For Rent. Yeah, I love my Scots, too.