"...in her spare time Cathleen enjoys saving baby seals along the Bering Sea coast, putting in time at the local orphanage, and fishing garbage from the banks of Lake Merritt."

Jesus Christ! Pt. II

Last week we did a good deed and were rewarded with a free dinner of our choosing. The afternoon was getting on, the horizon paling salmon and orange... I was enjoying the Cowboys defeat on the tele, Cathleen was pulling clothes from a box rummaged in the garage. I was voting on each shirt, boo or somebody's gotta like that, get rid of it and occasionally, oh, very nice. We went through a few boxes and then hit the drawers. Despite the twenty shirts Cathleen tried on... oh, and the thirty hanging in the closet, and handful in drawers, she made mention of being short on shirts. This is an outline for future discourse on the subtle differences between women and non-metro-men.

Anyway, we got hungry and thought to cash in the karma ticket at this sushi place we've never tried. I thought it also sounded good cos I was feeling thirsty for sake and this place in particular has the bottomless option and is known throughout the neighborhood for its strange staff and owner who push exorbitant amounts of rice wine on the meek clientele. Well, so it goes... we walk down and the streets and shops are slow or closed cos it's Sunday and people are chilling in their homes and on patios. We find our joint and have a seat up by the chef and commence with an honorary, hands-behind-the-back sipping of our sake from square wooden receptacles (a sake ritual for first-timers apparently). The food is good, we order in waves and I'm really digging on the salmon cuts, but meanwhile every time our squares get lower they're filled again. The deal is, if you don't flip the fucking thing over they will be very pushy to refill it, no matter what level it's at. So we get trashed, unconditionally. Near the end, I'm starting to fight it a little bit and the lady of the house tells me she doesn't speak english, Only the Japanese as she fills my square for the umpteenth time against my wishes. I've always been part of the clean plate club... I just want to put that out there... in other words, this is a potentially disastrous situation for me. Somehow I manage to finish that portion too and quickly, I mean quickly, flip over my square. Cathleen does the same and we're having a good laugh at that cos we're having a nice evening, and the social lubricant has abounded. That's when the owner comes over, a slender smiley grayhaired man and he comes straight over to me and flips my square right side up, and refills the fucker. My reaction time is pretty slow at this point. The lady of the house is telling us a story about people not being able to find the door. Jesus christ!

We thank everyone and sign up our bill and head for the door. There's like eight people eating and eight people serving. The staff is shouting goodbye and we're doing the same. Just as we're getting a few paces from the place, the lady of the house comes running outside with a big smile and shouts after us, Can you walk straight? and all I can think to shout back is, You are such a bad influence! We stumble home in a drunken fashion discussing the restaurant approach of getting your customers shithoused and what that does for repeat business, and/or will they remember how the food tasted. It's called Coach Sushi cos the old grayhaired man use to be a baseball player, and then a baseball coach back in Japan. Now he's the coach of this restaurant, the supercute blondhaired hostess tells us, and I'll get in trouble if he sees me not keeping these full of sake. She has a wry smile as she says this, she knows where this is going. These people are crazy...

Justice is served

Did you see that?

Four news stations spouting garbage on the Seahawks upset-to-be, meanwhile playing at home where only one game has been lost? Redskins Win won for the Gipper propoganda, a ridiculous proposition following the death of their gangster, try-to-kill-em hitter Sean Taylor. Did anyone see one of the best passers in the game, with little credit behind him, come back in the fourth and demolish the Skins? It was a great game on both sides. Even in closing thoughts, any credit?... no.



Did you see that?

Hines Ward in the endzone Fourth and Goal, a hand in the facemask, a hand grabbing the shoulder? Defensive pass interference? Bumblebees getting a first down and going on to take the lead in closing minutes because of the bullshit call. I'm not seeing any mention of it in ESPN recap coverage. Are you kiddding me? Someone should be fired. Is this the fucking 2005 Super Bowl? Eat me Pittsburgh! Eat me officiating crew! It was hard earned tonight by the Jacksonville Jaguars. They had to go through multiple teams and they earned it. So let it be known, 2008 predictions are tried and true. Bumblebees fall and that is justice served!

Deprivation on so many levels...

I am taking a deep breath now and contemplating going back to bed. I've fulfilled my duties: stirred awake a friend upon the couch, put coffee in our delirium tremened hands, and managed to drive him to the airport. I rewarded myself with a shower and breakfast, a second cup of coffee.

I am looking at the calendar now. Cathleen has merged our lives such that a Gmail calendar foretells future plans with family, friends, and places along the way. We got nothing, it's beautiful. The only plan we had was called off this morning when I awoke hungover with a voice of gravel, foreseeing a day of Battlestar Galactica and new-fashioned ready-to-eat packaged food.

I have nothing to do. Future possibilities in employment lie dormant, hibernating through the annual budget analysis and holiday hangover. I spoke with a few employers yesterday, kind bored HR types issuing dates of the ten-step hiring process, consulting mundane calendars. "Thank you Mr. Reebs for applying. We felt your interview went very well and would like to string you along for another few weeks before a follow-up interview. How does that sound?"

I made friends last night. Local Oaktowners with major promise in vocational connections (through one's Daddy) and a future tennis partner to take the strain off Cathleen, who I daily ask for a tennis match requiring her to more often than not decline. It was a big dinner party at a friend of a friend's restaurant in Sebastapol. Four courses and forty dollar bottles of wine lining the table. Great conversation and a little yo-yo in the bathroom compliments of the chef. At a local watering hole we played shuffleboard and drank cheap bourbon. I somehow managed a lightning sobering act and got us on the road after one, pushing south 101 to a car filled with chatter and deafening music. Life can be so good.

I want to thank friends for a wonderful week. The love helped me stave nausea for Christmas, my least favorite thing to do... right up there with selling narcotics to children. I want to take a deep breath and manage to cleanse the temple a little bit, lay off the sauce until football rolls around. Want to tell the Bobicks that I respect their guys out there doing battle on the gridiron. May the best man win. And if you got any more lip, eat me.



My baby likes mimosas...

2008 predictions Pt. I

Seahawks walk over Redskins in a 2005 fashion.

2008 predictions Pt. II

Steelers fall early. Roethlisberger can't take the heat.

2008 predictions Pt. III

I will continue to eat and drink copiously of G-D's finest in the coming year.





This year's brewing will be better.

2008 predictions Pt. IV

Baby will buy us a goat farm up in the rugged hills of Carolina.



She'll be briefly be checked into a mental hospital following a run at modeling and the big lights of Los Angeles.



Balance will be regained and a life of love and leisure will resume.

Christmas came and went
A giraffe mug unwrapped on Tuesday morning
Santa in a sleigh overhead
And the Christ child rolling in his grave

Yesterday afternoon I traipsed home in a buzzed glee of Seahawks victory. Sound and defeating, similar to the destruction of the Pittsburgh Bumblebees, shells smashed, juices flowing, wings twitch legs are going, don't get sentimental, it all ends up drivel, a Radiohead song to sing. Disassembled at Foxborough in Masshole glory, earning me another well-won bottle of rum and a few bragging rights.

The afternoon light fading, Lake Merritt lighting up orangeyyellow and the days scant warmth leaving quickly. Reached home in time to kiss my girl, wash my face and run out to meet the buyers of Wheaton. Oh Wheaties, bless your heart, I sold you for five hundred bucks to a World of Warcraft-looking warlock named Oliver and his beautiful drunk redheaded girlfriend. They were sweet and I liked them from the first

To Wheaton: May you embrace your new family and live a long life across town in Alameda.

To Andrew: ... Payback's a motherfucker.


Happy hour on the patio...


Andrew's brain on Wild Turkey...


Socked in on the Golden Gate...

A conversation at the ballpark

In honor of Wheaton 1991-?

That's Wheaton back there behind us. A little four-door Nissan from 1991. That's Rebekah I have my arm around and a jade plant on the roof that she gave me. We're heading through the Canadian stretches in the Spring of 2005. Rebekah was struggling for sanity down in Antarctica working with a bunch of quasi-scientist frat student types on that big chunk of ice. That was the year Antarctica split in two, one big crack moving across the frozen continent. I guess the continent is a pair of gigantic islands shaped similar to two lungs alongside one another, though you'd never know land to be beneath except for the rocks showing on the peaks of the Transantarctic Mountains. I imagine the crack running that line of water beneath, separating the two. Nonetheless a significant occurence; certainly more interesting than Earnest Shackleton and his dummies, but maybe not as much as that baby Emperor penguin in Happy Feet dancing to his heart's content.

While all this was happening I was working three food service jobs in Portland, Maine... struggling with two somewhat undefinable relationships, smoking and drinking copiously yet running and otherwise exercising like a madman. There were unaccounted sleepovers, walking pneumonia, depression and confusion, longings like a lost student, and too many Japanese authors' words in my head (likened to the Germans or Russians if you ask me). Danger for the fragile soul mind you; rationalization of the morbid, beauty in sacrifice.

That's around the time I found Wheaton. She was abandoned for a year in this cleared space in the northern woods of Maine. A red Sentra left to the elements of rain and snow, the salty damp of the coastline. Beneath her hood a dead battery, the engine block rusted and flaked reminding me of barnacles on a pier or side of a humpback. The owner was an estranged adulterous husband; the seller was his wife. She signed over the paperwork and sold it for a steal, partially out of spite.

I wanted to get back out west and put together a plan with Rebekah (who had similar wishes) on some scratchy sat phone connection, maybe distorted by polar magnetism or some such thing. She flew in to Philly and connected to Portland and then we set out. Wheaton saw the provinces, almost every damn one, the Great Lakes. She came down into more G-D fearing country, ran the line of the Pacific and inland to the western states. My wheels, my salvation, my demise, my ridiculous car-love and growing superstitions. She never criticized my alcoholism, my compulsions, half-baked plans and erratic heartbeat... never put down my passengers, or refused a state of place or mind, only delivered me safe and sound and often confused, but otherwise cheaply traversed by high mpg. Oh bless that damn car.

I can only imagine her breaking heart now on the houseside curb, with her replacement just feet away. A 2003 Toyota Echo named Cubby with power-steering, unheard of to the likes of Wheaton.

Little surfer little one
Made my heart come all undone
Do you love me, do you surfer girl
Surfer girl my little surfer girl

I have watched you on the shore
Standing by the ocean's roar
Do you love me do you surfer girl
Surfer girl surfer girl

Wandering where the lions are.

This one starts in Oakland on a cool, damp evening. We're hitting flat tennis balls over the net to all stretches of the court. Only five o'clock and the sun's going down behind a thick blanket of clouds over San Francisco. And up in the hills the houselights are watery in a lighter haze of gray. I'm like a dog on my side of the net, the dog that's been waiting for his owner all fucking day long... eager and upset and frantic. I'm running after every ball, running it back to the fence ten armlengths away. There's something inside of me that's trying to get out; I'm trying to wear it down. I smile and sweat awaiting the next ball, as if to wag my tail. I've done this before.

I think this is the night I beat it, but I had to go through me to get there... face to face. And so I picked up a wicked cold, a night soon after four blankets over the bed and I'm shivering delirious and half-awake, at war with some invisible aspect. And in the day my skin burns as I walk down the street and this facetious National song in my head.

I'm put together beautifully
Big wet bottle in my fist, big wet rose in my teeth
I'm a perfect piece of ass
Like every Californian
So tall I take over the street, with highbeams shining on my back
A wingspan unbelievable
I'm a festival, I'm a parade
And all the wine is all for me

We had some happy obligations south of the city, I mean south like Mexico. Way down in the bottom of the American boot, the legging or whatever it is. The ash settling on Orange and Bernadino; some mansion policies cashed in Riverside, Los Angeles. The drive down this way unimaginative, God's cutouts of earth and vegetation the color of cardboard. I imagined the smog caught in valleys encouraging to the imagination, like the voids of whites and grays in a japanese silk painting, or multiple endings of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. But I was too cynical to imagine anything more than the already true dust and wasteland and stripmall lying beyond. I drank tea and listened to Dylan's Time Out of Mind, that nicotine voice somehow sweet. My baby took a nap and I passed a lot of cars.

Four-hundred and fifty miles into the six-lane freeway network of SoCal, weaving between fine driving machines recently rolled off the lot. Cathleen's sister had dinner waiting for us in her cozy apartment, a strange mix on the stereo and a couple dewey bottles of beer on the table. I dreamt of shallow darkness and street vendors. I saw dust-laden soldiers thick with gear tramping through Nasiriyah and Baghdad. Something didn't feel right, there was something unsaid in my life... an inability to do anything but feel or not feel the atrocities beyond the bubble. Somehow not in conflict with the love abundant in my life, but nonetheless real. The sleep of NyQuil and safe harbor.

Jack London was born to a lower-working class family and grew up here in Oakland. He wasn't a Niners nor Raiders fan, and certainly didn't root for the lowly mongering motherfuckers in Pittsburgh. But he did like booze and women, and apparently morphine... which was the death of him.

Cathleen takes a moment to reflect...

October bumbling

I looked kind of mean in the mirror. I took out an extra chunk when the clip fell off the razor. It took a minor tantrum to bring me around and the fact that without a job, nobody to really impress... and readying for a roadtrip in the Sierras, there'd be time for it to grow back. I made a couple tough faces at the glass and took a shower.



Puffy and i took a moment to remember what really matters and the people we wish to celebrate this ridiculous life with. A number of drinks in order, we sat down for a few cardgames, some smoking and star-gazing, followed by mid-morning reruns of X-Files accompanied by lewd peanut gallery chatter. I of course scandalized Mulder in lecherous comments; Erin chimed in superbly, waxing sickness with Scully.



Our first day on the road, northward through different shades of gold and brown... white salts flats bordered in sage. We stopped in Alturas, a small town near the border of Nevada and California and tossed a football in the city park. Further on we found a diner and ordered some shakes and fries to go. We ate on a strip of lawn outside an ominous Latter-Day Saints church. Some rednecks looked on from a porch down the street, beers and smokes burning away their afternoon.



Surprise Valley dazzled us with ghost towns and farmland out into an enormous dry lake. All habitations snug up against the foothills of the Sierras and its angled evening light stretching livestock and fencepost shadows. Surprise Valley you are the sweetest fucking valley i have ever seen and i'd like to see you again.

Stopped in at a tavern late at night with a few gaspumps out front. Went inside to find someone to pump some Oregon gas into the car, gotta love that mandatory statewide full-service. The two tables inside were filled with ranchers drinking regular and light beer out of mason jars. The walls were filled with animal heads and horns; i listened to some hunting conversation while the bartender ran the adjacent grocery store further down the counter. "I can't wait to get a buck on my arrow," one offered, which reminded the rest of the table about latest buck whereabouts and more suitable weaponries.



A few hours later into the night we found our destination, Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge. Had a few beers on the hood under a new moon astral sky, the Milky Way brighter than we'd ever seen, then climbed into our tent until morning. Bright light found us in a kind of paradise, autumn colors in the aspen and willow, smell of sage blowing through. A crossword and morning hotspring, couldn't think of anything better.



That's Cathleen fighting the wind for her pants...



Driving across the plains of eastern Oregon, white-knuckling the wheel against sudden bursts of wind... finding little groups of antelope out in the sage. Dark clouds on the horizon and Cathleen excitedly pointing at the sitting livestock as redneck meteorology of impending rain. Up in the mountains we found the most beautiful trail along the Deschutes River and walked until my hypoglycemia nearly drove me to eating my hand. Found a hotel room, cracked a bottle of wine, ordered a pizza and took our troubled selves to the jacuzzi.

Another thousand words...

A month in review

The month began with a solo train trip beneath the bay into the frenzied madness of downtown, rich with Asian tourists ogling trolley cars and storefronts that can also be found in their hometown. I went hither into this mayhem with the intent of birthday shopping for my baby. This is the ceiling of the downtown mall, a shout out to money and all that it can bring.



My girl came home dirtier than I've ever seen anyone who lives indoors. I scrubbed her twice in the shower and baked her a cake for her birthday. After all, twenty-five only comes once.



The beer gods were kind to us; we just barely had enough glass to bottle the hefeweizen and kölsch, a couple delightful summer sissy ales brewed fresh in my bathroom. My brother grabbed a few extra cold bottles from the fridge and downed them to complete the world's fastest recycling process documented.



I awoke one morning to note by the calendar's watch It'd been three months since I was employed. I celebrated with a bubble bath, a peek at the classifieds, and a margarita and some chips.



We pulled into camp, quickly packed anew and set off for North Dome. The trail meandered along a granite ridge alternately climbing steeply and falling away beside pine and spruce canopies. Upon reaching perhaps the most beautiful place ever, we crouched beside a boulder and ate lunch. To our right Yosemite Valley opening by guard of El Capitan and to our left Half-Dome taking the cake for pure granite sweetness. "You rock, rock!" I uttered in awed homage. Before long an east coast couple stumbled along and stood beside us, on this giant rock miles from anywhere. We watched with equal awe as the fellow pulled out his cellphone and made a call only feet away. We took a few pictures for them, they posed blissful and stupid together... and then took a few for us.

A night on the other town, San Francisco...

Joey has been waiting tables at Scoma's for thirty-one years, a decent seafood restaurant at Pier 47 in North Beach. He's cool and facile with a wine-key in hand, breathlessly explaining which fish are fresh today and what else comes on the plate. Joey is large, perhaps a 47 waistline and his lungs strain to fill. Maybe it's the white suitjacket strangling or the sharp Bogart bowtie. Though I wouldn't be qualified to say, I think he's a good man. I like him and I can appreciate his service, something I've struggled with since being a server. My self-consciousness sometimes rises to levels of mind-reading where I swear I can hear the waiter's thoughts, cursing our presence. But not Joey, he's calm and weathered, in no rush and half-asleep but still gentle about his ways.

We eat large and drink two bottles of chardonnay, washing down halibut, tuna and cioppino. The sourdough is fresh and good with an extra slab of butter. We look out on the harbour and silly Fisherman's Wharf skyline, the poor bastards over at Ghiradelli eating chocolate flavored wax and the bleach-white butchers stainless in garb selling farmed fish at the Cannery. Across the street a homeless man holds up a wall of limbs and leaves and crouches down by a garbage can; he's pretending to be a bush and pulls it off pretty well, scaring the shit out of tourists as they walk by.

We fill up and head out toward the street looking for a taxi. A junkshow bar pulls us in, up a flight of stairs to the sound of a blues-trio above. Warehouse style windows look out and we can see the helicopters hovering over downtown rush-hour, Coit Tower is looking particularly nice with the evening light glowing orange on its side. The musicians are bored professionals playing riffs without feeling, running down songs they've prolly played five hundred times. Cathleen and I sip a pint and amuse ourselves by watching the only dancer in the place, a surprisingly beautiful woman obviously alcohol lit gyrating in the corner enticing all the sorry male souls. Our company doubledate gets up for a song and dances at a friendly distance; they look pretty moving together, knowing each other's step so well.

Back on the street we hail and cab and race across town up that mother of a street hill overlooking Alcatraz, you know the touristy one with the streetcars, also the one I nearly burned my transmission out on trying to parallel park last year. Good times. Up over the hill. The girls are singing a classic rock song together in the back seat, the cabbie has the mic to his mouth most of the time speaking what sounds like Farsi in short emphatic sentences. I'm craning my neck out the window, rich pretty couples are strolling in rich pretty Nob Hill and our doubledate passes by in a bright yellow cab.