Marcel

Vanity Fair magazine interviews celebrities from time to time with the following questions, taken in the spirit of what Proust used to pose to his friends and acquaintances.  Since I haven't seen such a monster on the social networks (Facebook, I be lookin' at you, yo) in some time, and it's a slow writing day, here's a little near-bullet-point list for your reading round-up...

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Teaching anything and watching the learner suddenly get it.

What is your greatest fear?

Being ignored.

Which living person do you most admire?

Barack Obama.

What is your favorite journey?

The one my pen takes on a blank page, with no end in sight, accompanied by a cup of strong, black coffee.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Chastity.

On what occasion do you lie?

When someone asks me what I think of the food.

What do you dislike most about your appearance?

My hindquarters.  Apparently, and mysteriously to me, it’s desirable.  I’d rather have a knock-out set of, say, eyes.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

“Loathe.”  “Absolutely.” 

What is your greatest regret?

The men I have been intimate with.

Who or what is the greatest love of your life?

Writing.

When and where were you happiest?

When I was getting my bachelor’s degree.  I was teaching, men admired me for my brain, and I could read good books without being labeled a snob.

Which talent would you most like to have?

Playing the guitar.

What is your current state of mind?

Precarious.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?

My mother would still be living.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Having the courage to leave a “good” job with an abusive employer.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be?

A coffee bean.

If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be?

Shortstop/Mathematician. (Tie.)

What is your most treasured possession?

My penmanship.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Being seen but not heard.

Where would you like to live?

San Francisco.

What is your most marked characteristic?

My “mace face.”

What do you most value in your friends?

A sense of humor.

Who are your heroes in real life?

People who hear what can’t be done and do it in spite of the rest of us to make the world a better place.

What are your favorite names?

Moonlight Graham if it’s a boy, Charlotte if it’s a girl, D'artagnan if it’s a pet, Homer if it's a baseball pitcher, and Moleskine if it’s a notebook.

What is it that you most dislike?

Anything that “should” be done.  I don’t keep up with appearances well.

How would you like to die?

Quickly, not now, and accidentally.

What is your motto?

“Write what you mean.”

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.

Spilt Melk, or, Shortcuts

Warning:  This is a baseball post.

Oh, and...

Warning:  This is a writing post, too.

As the Airman used to say to me, "Sit down, shut up, and hang on."

*****

This morning my favorite PBS affiliate, KQED in San Francisco, posted this article to Facebook and Twitter, an open letter from a fan to the Giants.  In it, the fan deliberates so many repercussions of SF Giants' outfielder Melky Cabrera's positive test result for performance-enhancing drugs.  KQED asked in their teaser, "Do you still love the San Francisco Giants?"

Oo, boy.

Yes, Virginia, I still love the San Francisco Giants.  I also happen to still love every other baseball team, with the exception of the New York Yankees.  I love all of the minor league teams, I love the college teams, I love the Little League teams, and I love the little kid who was at the park the other night in a batting helmet almost too big for him sending grounders past his dad.  I love baseball, pure and simple.  I love so many things about baseball.

But I've only loved them recently.

When I graduated from high school, I was a huge Twins fan.  Loved all things Kirby.  Had my own "Buy a vowel Hrbek" sign.  Wanted to see the park someday.  I still haven't got there--and won't because they are in a new ballpark now--but I got a little heartbroken along the way and got sidetracked.  In the mid to late nineties I sort of gave up on baseball...right about the time Mr. McGwire and Mr. Sosa started beefing up and hitting home runs all over the place.  I didn't give up on baseball because they had been found to have used drugs, but because baseball, by my definition, was a sport where you didn't look like an athlete of any kind of stereotype but yet you made amazing things happen.  I stopped watching baseball when they stopped looking like average guys and started looking like cartoon characters.  To me, the game didn't look amazing anymore.

And, of course, we all found out why.

(Someone that I dated once said that he stopped watching baseball when the players went on strike in the nineties.  Strangely, even in my cash-strapped position, that would be less heartbreaking than drug use.  A union fight is a union fight.  Drug use is a short cut.)

I didn't come back to the game until 2004, and that's only because my brother was fool enough to take me to a ballpark.  I was hooked at the entrance gate.  Keep in mind that I saw Bonds play that day, and while I wasn't impressed and knew what was going on already with him, I wasn't following players at that point.  I was following ballpark experience, the experience of going to a game at AT&T.  Since then I have visited the Coliseum (blech; sorry, Oakland, I love you, but I hate your venue) and Petco Park (nice ballpark, no excitement, though).  AT&T still wins.  AT&T wins regardless of whether the Giants do.  I attended games through the Bonds' era, and into the long drought after Bonds, and even when I had to fight to get seats from opponents' fans who were sitting around me waiting for us to lose and Johnny-come-lately Giants' fans who decided to start flooding the ballpark in 2011.  I loved AT&T after we sent Molina to Texas and Dave Roberts moved to San Diego and Mike Matheny left to heal from concussions.  I'm not there now, but I'm still there in spirit.

Let me just say this about Melky Cabrera:  I didn't hate him, and I don't hate him now.  I can say that even though he doped up AND even though he used to be a Yankee.  (Chris Stewart is now a Yankee, and I don't hate him, and I have always love Sabathia, so I think the Yankee hatred lies in their leadership...no, I don't like A-Rod, either.)  Honestly, I was sort of ambivalent about him.  I liked the idea that we got a better batter for an awful pitcher (Sanchez), but I'm sure that now someone in Kansas City is getting the last laugh on that one.  I was probably more hurt by Mota getting suspended for his drug use than Melky, because I didn't know Melky as well.  But any drug use is not okay.  When Mota comes back, I'll treat his bullpen time like I did Bonds' at-bats, with silence.  I will pause the passion and look away.  And I'll do the same for Melky.

I too have questions on how this could happen, and what the Giants (or any other ball club) could do to stop it in the future.  It all comes down to this--do you assume that any phenomenal player is using something as a crutch?  Should we presume guilt on Jeter, Fielder, Wright, Vogelsong, Cain, Dickey, Harper, Pence, Sandoval, Strasburg, etc, etc, ad nauseum?  What then, would be the magic number?  What's "too good" for you?

I didn't hate Melky.  But I was bored by him.  I'm not bored by the Giants, or baseball, in general.  Only if the player is too good am I bored.  Show me your humanity and I'm interested.  Which, remarkably, sort of makes the guys who take the shortcuts perfect for the job in my eyes, if it weren't for my love of integrity as well, and my hatred for shortcuts.

*****

As a side-note, I promised that this post would be about writing as well.

In the past couple of months we've heard some pretty wild things from the political ad campaigns and from non-fiction writers fabricating certain things in their books.  I won't point fingers; you've probably read/heard about them from MSNBC, Fox News, or other news organizations.  It makes it difficult for me to care about current events, or to pick up a memoir without wondering how much of it is a shortcut to get me, the reader, to pick it up.

Does that mean I'm going to give up on current events?
Does that mean I'm going to only read novels?  (Hmm, that's a thoug--juuuust kidding...)
Does that mean I'm going to give up baseball?

Lack of integrity, and the short ride instead of run to the finish line, could ruin the journey.  Or it could pinpoint who I cheer for.  I'm still cheering for the Giants, but not all of them.  I'm still reading books, but not all of them.  And I'm still following current events, but not all of them.

After all, I have my own race to run.  And I can't afford a shortcut.

Sit down.  Shut up.  And hang on, dear reader.  

That Song by Alison Krauss, or, A Way With Words

Formal-ly

I go through cycles of music and podcasts when I head out on my walks to the ocean these days.  If all of the podcasts are spent, I switch to a playlist that drives me to pick up my feet.  If there are podcasts waiting, they get first priority, for walking allows my brain the only multi-task that receives the information.

I listen to all kinds of programs:

• "The Writer's Almanac" with Garrison Keillor;
• "The Rachel Maddow Show" with Rachel Maddow;
• "Here's the Thing" with Alec Baldwin (yes, THAT Alec Baldwin);
• "Selected Shorts" with various celebrities reading short works of fiction to an audience;
• "Alt.Latino" with Jasmine Garsd and Felix Contreras;
• "WTF" with Marc Maron;
• "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross;
• "A Way With Words" with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

Notice a pattern?  No?  Well, then just remember the last one on the list.  That one will stick out--like a sore thumb, as the saying goes--later.

*****

I've been in love with words all the way back to pre-kindergarten days.  According to legend, I'd run around the house playing with words (I was a neat freak even at that age and playing with my toys often meant, well, organizing them) that I heard from my parents, my live-in grandmother, and rare glances at television.  My mother was a huge proponent of children's literature, particularly rhyme, and I would beat out a song of Seuss or Silverstein until I drove everyone crazy or concerned.  When my mother saw how hungry I was for words, she collaborated with my father and grandmother to mispronounce some things, out of fear that my using words like "compromise," "obliterate" (say that one for a second...it's like a KA-POW from a comic book), etc would get me all kinds of teasing from my schoolmates on the first day.  So they "corrected" me to call that long, thin pasta with the accent on the first syllable instead of the second ("SPAG-hetti") and that "compromise" word as an altered promise instead of its own saying.  

As you can imagine, I got laughed at anyway, for the wrong reason.  I learned to shut up, in other words, which I guess is the blessing one is looking for when one's child is running around the house audibly tasting words like "obliterate."

As a side effect, I also learned to (quietly) be even better at grammar, spelling, and usage than most kids, then most adolescents (that wasn't hard--have you ever listened to teenagers?), and then most adults.  I wouldn't correct people, but I would look up what they said later if it was questionable.  It usually was, but, again, I didn't question the person who uttered the word or phrase--I just used it as a learning experience of my own.  I loved entertainers who played with correct and incorrect usage, or language that leaned to one tone or another: a favorite was David Letterman ("I don't think there's a man, woman, or child alive today who doesn't enjoy a good beverage," spoken with an extra-thick layer of cheeeeez).  I listened to Garrison Keillor on "A Prairie Home Companion" and spoke like a Minnesotan for hours after; I listened to my dad tell a story and would ask people the next day what the "Sam Hill" they meant by something.  I learned what was "formally correct" and loved the rest, just as much as a good beverage.

Somewhere in there, though, my mother's fears were realized.  I was a freak when it came to language, and she even admitted to me that when I went to college she was afraid to write me for fear I would sit at the receiving end with a red pen the size of a sword and proof her letters.  I found this both stunning and not surprising.  Sure, I loved English (with passing crushes on Spanish, French, German, Italian and varying dialects of English), but didn't everyone else, too?  Come ON, the word is "obliterate."  Slowly, roll it off your tongue.  The word is packed with passion, no?

Eh, not so much, answered the world.

College didn't help the addiction; rather, it festered there.  My first class was Intro to Literature, and there I read Joyce's "Araby," with its "music" in "horse harnesses."  Now I was hearing the music of words and the music that I was supposed to hear from description, and God help us all.  I took a Shakespeare course and learned that back in the Bard's day you had one way of talking to your friends and one way of talking to people higher in the classes than you were or could hope to be.  That taught me more about formal and informal usage than my French classes ("tu," "vous;" it's all you) and my required grammar course.  I put that grammar course off until the very end, thinking it was going to be some woman wearing a tight bun with a ruler in her hand ready to smack me if I mixed "I" and "me" the wrong way.  Turns out, that class was about shifting trends in English over the years, etymology, and the nuances of formal and informal.  No rulers would be damaged in the participation of that class, and the gentle provocations of my professor taught me to think about language with even more love and devotion.

Doktor Enabler.

After college I wrote training manuals and kick-ass emails on a corporate path to what I thought would be something phenomenal--a big City.  San Francisco must be not only full of metropolitan, worldly-wise English-speakers, but I was looking forward to hearing other languages, which didn't happen much in Southwest Missouri outside of a college campus.  I showed up in the Bay Area and soaked up the music of Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Italian (umm-HMMM, that's what I'm talking about), Cantonese, Korean, Tagalog...no French except from a friend who spoke it as a second (maybe third) language.  But the English in San Francisco...I was so disappointed, and had a hard time hiding it.  A regret now is that I shared my cringing at, like, you know, the vast, like, people who, like, talk like, well, you know, this.  Argh, I growled to anyone who knew me, half those words can be, what's the word, OBLITERATED, and we could have...English.  Musical, Seuss-ical, English.  Or I could stand to listen to your conversation.  Your, like, hesitating, is, like, killing my writing and wordsmith's ear.

Worse than alienating people with my love of language was when they asked me to help them correct the issue and I discovered that most of them possessed a) no love of language, and/or b) a strong aversion to learning a love of it after grade school.  My first roommate in San Francisco asked me to proof her college papers for a comp class.  I did, returned them, and she took offense.  "My instructor said this sentence was fine, and he used to work for the New York Times."  I swallowed the urge to point out to her that he used to work for the New York Times.  I backed away, telling her that I was probably wrong, and that I wouldn't mess her up by proofing her pieces anymore.  She looked relieved.  I felt relieved myself, but a little lonelier for the confrontation.  Didn't she love words enough to play with them?  Didn't she respect herself enough to question the instructor?

Maybe, though, I thought in a scary supposition to myself, I had been in the City so long that I was mispronouncing spaghetti all over again.

*****

These days, unemployed, I see plenty of assaults on the English language by people who are supposed to guide the rest of us to success.  I see people who are gainfully employed getting paid to treat words like dollar bills at Magic Mike's.  I see entry-level, middle management, and top leadership communicating poorly.  And I'm expected to expect less.

I do.  Because, regrettably, in the last few years expecting more has cost me friendships, and, still not regrettably, brownie points with managers.  But privately, secretly, in the dark of night or on those morning walks to the ocean, if no one's around, I correct myself, or correct big shots in media (NBC Olympic commentators, mostly, or business leaders who had it in for me).  I never correct friends or my beloved baseball players that don't speak English so well...not because I couldn't, but because I don't speak Spanish so well and I have no desire to correct people I love.  I guess that's part of the problem.  I should have remembered that regarding correcting myself.

Obliterate.  Ok, Rainman, enough...

Back to my podcasts...for in them lies the most release if there is no music playing.  (Can I just say that the best song lyrics are better than the words I used to say wandering around the house as a toddler?)  The last podcast on that list, "A Way With Words," is one of the rare cultural gems of San Diego County.  The show is recorded and produced here, where people used to, as late as last year, speak in golden sentences and now talk, like, you know, San Franciscan, like, English.  This morning I listened to this week's podcast with relish.  I learned why the word "colonel" is said with an "r" sound.  And then a caller came on and asked why we couldn't just readily exchange "I" and "me" in a sentence, and why the heck all the rules, and blah, blah, blah.

I held my breath, hoping there were no rulers in the room.

The hosts, as gently as they could, sympathized with the caller.  They expressed the belief that people who felt the need to correct others should probably be selective about the time and place for the correction.  And then The Reason came in, and my loneliness in love of language was relieved for a moment.  The female host expressed the belief that there are different applications of language for different situations in our world...formal and informal.  While use of "me and my friends went to the movies" isn't incorrect, it's not as formal as "My friends and I went to the movies."  There's a time and place for "Me and my friends went to the movies," and there's a time and place for "My friends and I went to the movies."  Knowing the difference, she explained, is like dressing for the party.  One kind of party requires t-shirt and jeans.  Another kind of party requires a floor-length gown.  It dresses the speaker for the situation.  She also mentioned that knowing the difference and using the difference is a form of respect for others.  Fitting the language to the situation works to respect the other person not only in fitting in with the group, but, she said, in putting others first.  "If you say, 'My friends and I,'" she said, "the placement in the sentence is putting others--'my friends'--before myself."

Wow.

And that, dear reader, says it all for me.  Que milagro, as they would say just south of here.  And I'll say nothing at all again about the subject for a little while, again, now. 

P.S. - This song is the inspiration for today's rendition of Life For Rent.  Silence, and golden considerations.

Just Ray

There’s a novel by Dennis Lehane--and maybe you’ve heard of it--called “Mystic River.”  In the book Lehane introduces a character by the name of “Just Ray” Harris, a man named because all of the other gangster “_______ Ray” names were taken in Boston.

I don’t know why, but I thought of that when I heard that Ray Bradbury had passed way Tuesday night.  Maybe it was because when I hear the name Ray I don’t think of Ramono or my cousin’s husband or “Field of Dreams” first.  I think of Ray Bradbury.  I haven’t read his books in decades, but I can tell you when I did read them and how they affected me.

To ignore that influence would be like removing one of my senses.  It’s more than amputation.  It’s more than a lost tooth.  It would be a denial of my own skin.

*****

Somewhere in the storage unit in Missouri or in a wicker hamper under my childhood bed in Ohio is a pink, loose-leaf binder, a little bit bigger than an iPhone.  In that notebook are scrawlings of my experiences in a special school program called T.A.G.  Once I briefly explain what T.A.G. was--no, it wasn’t the playground game, or what you do to people in photos now on the social networks--you’re going to accuse me of tooting my own horn.  The best part was, I didn’t toot that horn, then or now.  I was God-awful at grade school; when I was in first grade I was so sluggish that I kept all of my homework assignments rather than turn them in half-finished, and on the last day of the school year had to stay in a classroom with a teacher’s aid to finish them while everyone else went to another location to watch a movie.  I looked to be doomed academically--I did way too much staring out of windows.

(My mother got on to me for that at first.  Years later she had to explain it to my best friend.  “That’s where her stories come from--it’s best to just leave her alone when she does that.”)

Ok...T.A.G.

T.A.G. stood for Talented And Gifted.  Not many kids were asked to be in this program; I think in my class there were four of us.  (I won’t name names--that’s their horn.)  I honestly can’t tell you how we were selected, but I do know this--my parents learned something from this program, and not just me.  The program had a county fair kind of thing at one of the schools so that all of the students could mingle and the parents could watch us in action and talk to the county coordinators.  My mother met the director of T.A.G. and made some sort of self-deprecating statement about how she couldn’t figure out how her kids could be chosen for this program.  “Mrs. Schlosser,” he responded, “You must have done something right.  If only three kids in Williams County could be in T.A.G., two of them would be yours.”

So, yes, my brother was in T.A.G., too.  Which is also pretty remarkable considering his early years, but I’ll let him tell that story.

I don’t begrudgingly state that my brother was in this program and shouldn’t have been.  I state that because for a long time I felt I shouldn’t be in T.A.G.  For a long time I felt that my brother deserved to be in and that I was just piggybacking on my genius brother’s reputation.  (He’s still smarter and more gifted than I am.  Just saying.)  I wrote about my frustration in the little pink notebook.  Because I was known for my love of words, that’s what the program was trying to develop in me, so I had to turn in that notebook occasionally for the teacher to review and guide my writing.  She read my fears and wrote a small note next to them in the margins:  “Your mother has a great story from meeting the director about this.  Ask her about it sometime.”  I did.  She shared the story with me.  I stayed where I belonged, and played with my words in essays and poetry.

The program believed in pushing us outside of our comfort zone, and one way they did that was having us read stuff we wouldn’t get to read in the standard curriculum.  To this day I couldn’t tell you if the rest of my classmates ever got to read “The Martian Chronicles” or “Fahrenheit 451,” or if they had to wait for high school or maybe a literature class in college to get it.  (By my senior year of high school I was reading Dorothy Parker, so I’m grateful for Mr. Friend, my journalism/English teacher at the time, for believing in my literary development enough to handle her at 18.)  I was not a fan of science fiction, and while the “The Martian Chronicles” were satisfying they were slow-going (even for my daydreaming).  But “Fahrenheit 451” was mind-blowing--the writing, the suggestions, the idea that life could be found and preserved in very fragile, very flammable dead trees.  (To this day I am still working on a short story that plays on the virtual/ebook counterpart of "Fahrenheit" and just realized it writing this.)

If I fell in love with Ray in middle school, and then in college the infatuation grew worse.  I was at a Barnes and Noble in Springfield, Missouri, poring over the section of writing how-to books, and stumbled into a familiar name with what for me was a new title:

“Zen in the Art of Writing,” by Ray Bradbury.

I’m willing to bet that whoever finds that compact pink notebook will find, nestled next to it, “Zen.”

*****

According to sources, Bradbury took exception to being called a science fiction writer.  He thought of “Fahrenheit 451” as his only science fiction work, and the rest of his fiction was fantasy.  I can see that, somewhat.  I always thought of his work as literature, though.  Just literature.

Like the detective stories of Mr. Lehane.  Just literature.

Just Ray.  Just right.

Post Script--The evening after writing the first draft of this post I asked my brother if he remembered T.A.G.  “Sure,” he said, a little tight-lipped.  Did he remember reading Ray Bradbury?  “Some of it,” he answered, a bit uncomfortably.  “I remembered reading ‘The Martian Chronicles’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’--I still have ‘Fahrenheit 451’ in my bookshelf in there--and what’s the one with the guy with words all over his body?”  The “Illustrated Man?”  “Yeah, that’s it.  But I only remember the first two.”  (I had forgotten about “The Illustrated Man,” so it was all the same to me as well.)  He paused.  “That’s when I stopped reading for fun.”  With Ray?  “No, they assigned ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ right after ‘Fahrenheit 451.’  I hated ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ but we had to read it.  So I just shut down and read it, and then ‘The Illustrated Man.’  I didn’t read anything else or didn’t remember any other required reading for ten years after that.  I didn’t enjoy reading again until you sent me ‘A Fool’s Progress.’”

Huh.  So I wasn’t the only one to struggle with T.A.G.  Or hang on to “Fahrenheit,” one way or another.

Commencement

I loved my university years.  I got to go to a classroom  and talk about (and listen to) good books and writings, and I had to participate with a grasp (nay, a love) of the subject or hold a diminished opinion in the eyes of mentors I revered.  Despite that pressure, university life fit me like a glove.  I had clear expectations and yet enough play on the rope to either create a hammock or hang myself.  I always managed to create the hammock.

Sooner or later, though, I had to graduate.  Sooner or later, my luck in life ran out.  I got back to the same setting later, for a semester, at Berkeley’s extension.  But that experience was a mild reprieve, too brief.  Be sensible, sayeth the world.  Go out and do the things to support yourself, to conform, regardless of the cost in the long run.

In my own way, I dropped out of college.

*****

Lately, I’ve had a fascination with commencement addresses.  I find them on YouTube and Facebook--not by purposefully searching for them, but by skimming through the day’s news and stumbling upon them--and I post them on my Facebook page.  (“Share.”  Such a powerful word when I was a kid, and so diminished now.  Shouldn’t we call the button “Shout-Out” instead of “Share?”  Perhaps the term “Shout-Out” is too MySpace.)  Sometimes I post them first to watch later, and sometimes I watch them first.

I’ve spent the last two weeks reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, and at one point in the narrative Isaacson urges the reader off the page to go explore YouTube, to go find and watch Jobs 2005 commencement address at Stanford.  Jobs attended college himself only briefly, and spent much of that short stay skipping his required courses and attending courses that truly inspired him.  (If you haven’t seen the video, I too encourage you to see it, just to experience how a college drop-out--someone who would normally have no business standing behind a podium addressing a field of college graduates--addresses a field of college graduates.)

Reading about Jobs for the last two weeks, I realized that there were lots of things Steve Jobs had no "authority" to do.  His temper provokes most of that impression.  I can’t judge whether it should, for I have a temper myself, a temper that like Jobs tends to fester from what Jobs called “B players.”  In the opinion of most, Steve Jobs shouldn’t have managed people.  Steve Jobs shouldn’t have had kids.  Steve Jobs shouldn't have been issued a California driver’s license.

Well, that last one is more of an observable fact than a judgment call.

Questions on management and children, however, are an easy way out of the debate as stating that a college drop-out shouldn’t speak to a group of graduates.  Is this the phrase that should preface the judgment call?

“But then, who am I to say?”

I can say that phrase when I see a college drop-out giving a commencement speech, because, while I did graduate from college, I never got to attend my commencement.  A Missouri ice storm in December prevented me.

*****

“But then, who am I to say?”

My review of the Jobs biography will most assuredly be misconstrued for hero worship.  Fascination with the subject and the writing are sure to produce that in the reader who comes here wanting to know, “Well, how was it?”

It?  The life or the book?

The book was inspiring.  That’s the only adjective you’ll get, to take a page from Jobs’s simplistic style.  At times I worried that Isaacson might pull a little hero-worship of his own, but then he would throw in an anecdote or quote of Jobs and make you realize that Jobs could be the grumpy, moody, reality-challenged guy the media claimed he was.  Just when the reader is about to give up on Jobs, then Isaacson pulls you back the other way, and you look up from the book with a gasp and realize what a genius looks like.

The writer or the life...

Well, the writer, yes...I have to say that it takes a lot of courage to write a book like the book Isaacson wrote--a lot of courage and maybe a small measure of stupidity.  But the writer also brought a thin, Gorilla-glass layer of wonder to the page.  Isaacson is no techie--some of the terms are explained in repetition, and for those of us who hear “RAM” and “ROM” and “USB” and glaze over, that was helpful.  For anyone more tech-minded this might fester into the most boring account of Jobs’s genius that you could find.

But not having a tech-bent aspect to it, just a wonder aspect, means you remember the driving force of the other genius--Jobs--and what I now take beyond the last pages of the book: nothing’s impossible (even when it is).

“But then, who am I to say?”

The life of Steve Jobs taught me a lot about what drives me, too, particularly in my least favorable character trait:  my temper.  Surprise, I have one.  If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably encountered it, and if you haven’t, I’ll do my level best to keep it from you, but I will be fighting it all my life, so be warned.  For years I’ve fought with it--hard to say when it started, but it became much harder to control after my mother passed--but I couldn’t really give you clues into why it would surface so strongly and so fiercely.  After finishing this biography, I have a pretty strong clue--my tolerance for “B Players” is about as steady as Jobs’s.  

As Aaron Sorkin stated in his commencement address this year, “More and more we expect less and less of each other.”  Jobs refused to accept less, and I have a hard time with it as well.  Recognition is half the battle, no?  And now that I know why the trigger occurs, and recognizing it from seeing it mirrored in the account of Jobs, means I have a stronger hold on how to improve my approach from that of Jobs.

Curb your antagonism.  Nothing’s impossible (even when it is).  Not a bad take-away from 600+ pages.

Textbook closed, dear reader, and onward, to infinity.

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.

The Long Answer On Yelp

When I was a kid my favorite pen for writing in my Hello Kitty journal was a blue PaperMate.  They sold them in either all blue casings, or white with a blue cap.  They were ballpoints, but I didn’t know any better.

I hated Bics.  Still do.

If there were no PaperMates to be found I would write with Crayola markers.  This was back before my calligraphy class, so my handwriting was shit--I wrote more to play with words rather than to draw them.  I miss those days.

Ballpoints and markers stayed with me through college.  I had a brief stint with calligraphy in the sixth and seventh grades, but that was the tedious calligraphy with a nib, a jar of India ink, and no reservoir.  You dip, you pull off the excess on the lip of the ink jar, you write two or three words, you repeat.  Slow going, even for me.

During my university education I discovered an art supply store on National Avenue in Springfield, Missouri, just up the street from my classes.  (In this regard, Springfield is more cultured than my current town of Carlsbad, and the irony never ceases to strike me.)  That store got me started on Zebra gel-writing pens, and later I ventured to Office Max and had a whole color-cased collection of Dr. Grip pens (pink, pearl, purple, blue, green, and aquamarine, all with black ink).  I even managed to have my father write with the Dr. Grip pens, his in black.

And then I came to California.

By the time I hit California I was playing with a cheap (and leaky) Sheaffer fountain pen, one of those sets that comes boxed in a blister-pack with a collection of three nibs (bold,  medium, and fine) and five ink cartridges.  Natalie Goldberg was right--that pen was visceral, and not so flighty and disconnected as a marker.  But I also feel for other gel-writers, in so many colors, which I gobbled up from Patrick’s in San Francisco.

Once I moved to San Francisco from the South Bay, I found Flax, which is akin to finding the summit of Mount Everest for a mountain climber.  Flax has more pens and pen accessories (inks, rests, wax embossers and seals, papers, blotters, cases, nibs, etc) than anywhere I’ve ever experienced.  So, going into the creative drought of art supply stores and their pen supplies in Southern California, I give you the list of what I love to play with.

Gel-writers, disposable:

• Pentel Slicci pens, 0.8 grade, in every color but pink, from Paper Source
• Y&C Xtremes, 0.7 grade, in natural colors, from Blick
• My favorite of the disposables, Stabilo pointVisco style, fine 0.5 grade, in any damn color I can get them, from Blick, who only keeps them in blue, red, and black, but I don’t care for red ink pens

Gel-writers, refillable (but not in SoCal...probably an online venture...):

• Retro Tornado, twist retraction
• Montblanc Meisterstuck retractable, with the ballpoint cartridge pulled and replaced with a rollerball cartridge in black (I got that one as a graduation gift for college)
• Pierre Belvedere capped, with screw cap that also screws on the end of the pen for storage while writing, in blue ink
• Taccia capped, with screw cap, usually in black ink

Fountains, refillable:

• Sheaffer medium nib, which requires one of two cartridges built for Sheaffer, and the easiest to find of the cartridges at Blick or some Office Max locations
• Retro Tornado medium nib, which requires International cartridges, which aren’t to be found in San Diego County (I’m afraid to try L.A. on this stuff, but maybe someday I’ll get brave)
• A Faber Castell medium nib wooden fountain, which also requires the pesky Internationals, or, for added mess, I can research how to fill the reservoir option, which may be next
• A cheap Japanese medium point retractable fountain with a cap that is my secret favorite of the collection.  That thing cost me 12.95 and never hiccups or leaks.  Unfortunately, it also takes the blessed International cartridge
• A Visconti medium nib Homo Sapien style pen, complete with the vacuum reservoir and volcanic rock housing.  By far the most expensive at $600 (that was a consolation purchase after a bad week/month/year at my workplace), the pen writes with no pressure at all (you drag it across the page instead), and refills with bottled ink.  Since I have bottled ink coming out of my ears, that pen gets the most use.  It is also the most high maintenance of the pens--it’s a mess to reload, and I usually end up with ink  on my right hand like a 16th century playwright.  I save that one for home writing; I don’t want the damn thing stolen, and I don’t want to be covered with ink at the cafe or library

Recently I was asked on Yelp, after reviewing an art supply store in San Diego called Artist and Craftsman Supply, if I had missed their extensive calligraphy section when I visited there in vain hope of pen supplies.  No, I answered the curious reader, I hadn’t missed the calligraphy section.  I saw it, and sighed, wishing it were more than just calligraphy.  Calligraphy nibs are used for short bursts of text, like wedding invitations or announcements.  I discovered last week on Fresh Air that they can also be used for old school comic strip artists; Barry Blitt, cartoonist with the New Yorker, still uses them, as he has no patience for creating his art on the computer.  A guy after my own art, but more his art than mine.  I can’t use a calligraphy nib with the dipping every third word.  I already have to refill the Visconti once a page, the fountain cartridges once every fourth page, and the disposable gel-writers in a week.  It’s been suggested that I write with those seven year pens, which are ballpoints.  Writing with a ballpoint is like writing on paper with a bar of soap.

I write a LOT, on a daily basis.  It’s important to me to have an instrument that keeps up with my pace and fills me with inspiration.  It’s important to have a bridge to some measure of happiness in the process, and pens and paper, in the right choice, lead me me to the point of accomplishment.

The "Workplace"

I was raised in a house of tiptoe-ing--my father is a grumpy man sensitive to noise, and my mother was accommodating.  Surprisingly, despite hating this sensitivity in my childhood, I’ve ended up with the same condition as an adult.  (Yep, it’s a psychological condition called misophonia.)

I first saw it emerging when I was in college--if someone had a cold or allergies on exam day, you could bet my jaw ached from grinding my teeth by the end of the class period.  Since then it’s become terrifically acute, sharpened by noises emitted from the homeless and cell phone owners of San Francisco.  Here in Carlsbad it feeds itself on my sis-in-love’s enjoyment of coffee or tea and our neighbor’s abuse of her sound system.

My iPod has always served as a refuge (save for the tea slurping, which I usually have to endure).  Since I work independently on writing and educational software consulting, there’s a certain measure of sanity to be gained from working in a noise-free/noise-controlled environment.  If you were to search for a business or organization that should grant you some form of quiet work environment, what location would you think of first?  A cafe?  A bar?

Or would you go with a time-tried tradition of the local library?

Anymore, the cafe or the bar might be quieter.

Mind you, I am surprisingly not talking about children in libraries.  Remarkably, in all three branches of the Carlsbad City Library, the children are the most often shushed and the quietest of the patrons, and, remarkably too, the ones I not only can handle but enjoy listening to.  (I have this habit of attending children’s movies in the theatre so I can hang out with kids.  The movie is just a bonus.)

The children walk into the libraries hushed, reverent.  They probably have been waiting a whole two days since the last visit on story hour to come back and check out something else, to peek at another world.  They are a joy to watch.  Being a regular myself, I love seeing regular visits from the kids.  Even the teenagers that start to stream in for study groups after three o’clock are mindful of being quiet.

Senior citizens are comfortably silent as well.  I have gotten a routine picture of the woman who shops the dollar books for sale on Mondays, the man who stacks his hold selections gently on the corner of my table, the books and media covered in typing paper bearing his name and bound in rubber bands, and another gentleman, who looks like an East Indian version of Spencer Tracy, who methodically works through all of the newspaper subscriptions.  When they all go the way of virtuality--the dollar books, the hold selections, the newspapers--I hope God takes these gentle souls to a place where paper is still dreamed.

The young, the old, the bookends, if you will, of a life.  They respect the holiness of the this place.

Sadly, there’s a wide span of the population left that couldn’t give a rat’s patoot about the quality of sound (or striving for absence of it).  They sit with each other as though at a cafe, sometimes not even using their “inside voices.”  They talk on their cell phones.  They eat three-course meals from noisy Taco Bell bags.  They strike up forty-five minute whine and cheese festivals with the librarians, who vent right back.  At one point, I overheard a patron approach a librarian and ask her to “shush” another noisier patron.  For twenty seconds, I was grateful to my fellow patron, until I heard the librarian’s response:  “Oh, libraries don’t work that way anymore.”

Apparently, the quiet library is going the way of dollar books, selections on hold, and paper newspapers.

*****

Carlsbad Library didn’t always have this atmosphere.  As recently as last August I found myself sitting in San Francisco Libraries wishing, homesick for the quieter and better-behaved Carlsbad counterpart.  The only way to escape noise at a San Francisco Library branch was to find one with study or conference rooms and sign up or schedule them.  Again, the big culprits of noise were adults between college age and retirement.  Not that anyone got shushed there, either.  San Francisco is supposed to be progressive.

But as recently as Thanksgiving I started seeing a change in Carlsbad as well.  Now I go to the last known refuge--the genealogy floor of Georgina Cole Branch.  There you get dirty looks for the sniffles.  There are a lot of senior citizens up there.  I often move up there after starting out somewhere else in the building--it’s not the world’s fault that I have this condition, and I try to keep it out of the conversation that pops up in the world.

I do miss the children, though, and their occasional whisperings of wonder between the cracks of intrusive racket the adults throw around.

That Song by Snow Patrol, Or, Playing in Traffic

I’m currently reading a book by William Least Heat-Moon (his best known work is “Blue Highways”) called “PrairyErth (A Deep Map).”  Without giving away the gripping tale too much (I’m joking, actually; unless you love history, Least Heat-Moon’s meandering way with words, or the States, you’ll hate this book.  I got lucky), this book is a recount of Bill’s study of Chase County, Kansas.  His study included some poring over of the written records, some quotes from historical figures, and a lot of walking the county on foot and speaking to people he met along the way.  One local provided him with this experience:

I was walking, and now and then a pickup rolled past, driver staring, rarely waving.  When I stopped once...a fellow pulled up and said, Trouble? by which he meant Are you trouble? and I said I was heading to Matfield, and to indict me he said, Ain’t many to walk this road, and that was something I knew:  walking  here is eccentric; even when the citizens take an outing in the hills they go by truck, and to walk along a road is to suggest poverty or peculiarity.

Thoreau would be proud, for I found Bill’s predicament, right here in my own backyard.

*****

Most tourists to Carlsbad or the San Diego area either rent a car or get accommodations along the sea.  I’ve all kinds of reactions to my critique of Carlsbad in its lack of sidewalks.  Yes, I too love its really cute downtown and ocean proximity, where you can walk around without walking in the street.  In outlying areas of Carlsbad, out by the lagoons and in the newly developed sprawl, there are no sidewalks.  Street parking is common, double-parking is allowed--all actions that would get you honked at in downtown Carlsbad or near the ocean.  If you have ever tried to walk around a double-parked car when there are no sidewalks in a drop-off gravel shoulder on a backroad with more traffic crawling around you than you think would be necessary, you understand why I raise an eyebrow.  Word has it they don’t want to destroy nature.  Ah, yes.  The “nature” of the suburban sprawl?  Or the “nature” of me wearing a track in someone’s lawn?

Surprisingly, the locals have not only adapted well to this, but don’t seem to mind putting the burden back on the drivers.  They go out running, oblivious with earbuds in, down the middle of the road, and maybe move over if the car doesn’t show signs of drifting in the other lane to go around them.  Stunning.  That’s a lot of trust in modern drivers who often break the law to pull through the few crosswalks that occur and to look up from their illegal cell phone usage to see a pedestrian.  When I lived in San Francisco I often walked the sidewalks comfortable in wearing my iPod (deters most of those tripping on drugs), with few exceptions.  When I walk here, I leave the iPod in my backpack, for fear I won’t hear the cars, as though I could stop them from hitting me.

I guess if they did hit me that would be one way to reward my brother for taking me in--a nice hefty lawsuit on my behalf of my passing.

*****

My commute, twice a week for the past two weeks, has been a two-mile hike from the Cove to the Carlsbad Library branch on Carlsbad Village Drive.  Beginning Monday I plan to up the detail to three days a week; I was keeping it to two days a week to give my sis-in-love a better exercise schedule (she doesn’t like to walk/workout alone), but I’m not getting any work done when I go twice a week.  This will hopefully put me in shape faster myself.  You may say, “Two miles isn’t bad; didn’t you used to do three and a half one way daily to the ocean?”  Yes, but this two miles goes uphill for the first mile.  After that my sidewalk disappears, but at least it’s flat.

Each trip I pack my laptop, writings, and a book (even though I never seem to have time to read it), as well as water and food (thanks again, Tina).  I set out around 10:30 am and make the hike back at 4:30 pm, or about the time the sis-in-love starts to ask via text if I’m alive.  The first time I did the commute was nerve-wracking and exhausting, but now I’m getting the hang of it to the point where the ocean is damn beautiful to look at stretched out on my western side, and I can admire some of the architecture.  (Not all; most of these homes look pre-fab.)  The trip takes me forty minutes at a good clip but longer coming home due to fatigue and increased traffic.  So far I’ve never done it in the rain.

Last Thursday’s trip was slightly different--I stopped at Rite Aid for something medical.  The clerk behind the counter saw the dark patches of sweat on my shirt under my backpack straps and said, “Hot out there, huh?”  

I shrugged.  “It’s not too bad.  I’m on foot, so...”

Her jaw dropped.  “You don’t have a CAR???”

“No.”  I looked up from fishing for change and met her gaze.

“I don’t get it.”

They won’t.  I counted out nickels and dimes to pay for my purchase, and thought of Least Heat-Moon, hiking.  I must look like poverty in a car culture such as this.  

I wish I could have made that clerk feel better, and cared about her estimation of me.  But here I am.  Trouble.

Onward, dear reader. 

P.S. - The inspiration of today’s post of Life For Rent can be found here.  We’ll do it all, everything, on our own...just forget the world...