I want a quiet place with a cold drink under some small tree with a simple breeze, nothing special. I want to listen to nothing and be content with it, maybe just the crack of ice chiming on glass. Make that a double.

Giants V. Diamondbacks

We went to see the boy from Bellevue, the next Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum, do his thing against the Arizona Diamondbacks. After tonight he's 16-3 with a 2.49 ERA with 225 strikeouts. Amazing. twenty-four years old. A lot of fun to watch. I'll try not to think about Mariner scouting now.


...borrowed from tonight's photographers

Dear Seahawks,

It's been seven months since I last saw you. There were times when I profoundly missed you and others when I felt like I finally had a life. But, you're back again now and I find it's hard to see you with others. It's strange, you aren't the bully you use to be... you're almost gentle the way you let other people push you around.

I know, I know. You had to get up at five in the morning and it was raining. Buffalo can be a very cold place and it was kind of creepy with the thousands of ponchoed voyeurists watching. They were enjoying the spectacle. It didn't feel right the way you didn't protect yourself and couldn't break free on short slants or upfield. It was shameful the way you fell down on the slippery grass and watched them run by you. It wasn't age or experience, no... it was cos you suck. I could name names, but I want to love you again and feel the way it use to feel.

Next week I want you to stand up for yourself. Remember last year when we hurt people? Yeah, that was good. Flex your muscles, be yourself. It's okay to be a bully. Sometimes it's necessary. I know your mascot is imaginary but there's something real about you. You're not like the others, they're so hard to love. Let's hurt the others, cos they aren't beautiful like us.

It's funny, one day you're the best there is and the next you suck. But look on each side of you. It feels good doesn't it? Those others closest to you suck even more than you do. Take heart in that... and punish them.

Yours forever,

Jesse

Slowdown

I haven't had a thing to write in weeks. Do you ever have a spell where everything seems done? Every thought you have and every idea you try to put down? As if someone else had done it, or maybe even you years back. I think the feeling is called unoriginality, or at least it should be. Utterly normal, average. That's me.

A very anonymous thing. Like walking in the woods and hiking up to some nice overlook above the treeline, so there's a goal, and then all the beauty along the way. In this environment for some reason it's an easy feat to drop all the self-conscious blather and walk natural and think better, meaning less. Obliteration to the unique, destruction to comparing everything to things actually unalike (doing that human thing where you spin it closer, as if things shared a shred of common ground). Lowering the goddamn bar, for everything.

Hey Andrew! Alterum ictum faciam. Which is to say, I'm going to take a mulligan. And why not?

In this episode Cubby manages to lock his own doors and consequently me out of the car

I was on my way to work the other day, heading up to a new site along the ridge looking down toward the Pacific south of the city. We just put in twenty traps near a tree farm recently bought by the Open Space Trust. They do nice things like that, buy up land and make it public. Sometimes they take everything out and restore it with native vegetation, which can be pretty intensive. I like it when they let it just go wild, let it go. I'm hands-off in most scenarios. Abbeyian ideals of just closing off the road, let the treeroots break concrete, bridges chip and crumble, let the invasives go... I think they'll eventually lose.

This tree farm is up on Skyline, a beautiful winding road leading the length of the San Francisco Peninsula. It's a long way from home and with a few cups of coffee in me I was struck with a desperate need to pee along the way. I found a side road, turned off, and quickly parked against a wall of willows. Leaving the music a little loud and car running I broke into the willows. Returning to the car I found all the doors locked and my cellphone inside, brilliant. One of those moments where you just know memories will be made. My coworker was expecting me up at the worksite and I couldn't reach him without the phone, not knowing his number nor having the means. What I did have was my hoodie and after a little searching I found a big slab of concrete that the road no longer needed. Wrapping the chunk tightly in my sweatshirt, I wound up and gently kissed the backdoor's small window practicing my aim, then slammed the chunk into glass. A hollow thud resounded and back my concrete chunk was bounced. I did this four more times giving more hmpff with each blow and each time rejected by the mighty glass.

A car on the road now. I flagged down the quintessential elderly affluent caucasian in generous luxury automobile, returning from a friendly tennis match I learn. He cautiously looks me over and listens to my story, his dentures gleaming in the sun. The running car beside me helps my case. He decides to take me up to the mcmansion, but won't let me in. Instead brings me a phone book and a sterilized (thank-god) bottle of european aquifer water. He's alright though, just has to keep an eye out for all his shit now that he has it. Gotta protect the casa, you know the story. I work it out with my insurance company and beat my chest once for the big guy (not really) and that extra ten bucks I paid for roadside assistance.

The towtruck guy finds me and has a laugh at my story. Apparently I tried to break out the second most expensive window in the car. You wanna break in he asks? Just kick this one in here, he smiles pointing to the passenger side. I didn't tell him I hadn't planned on paying for it, I imagine he assumed so much. He deftly inserts a sheet between my doors and pumps it up, creating a good inch of space into the car. Checking the blood pressure, he grins. I wonder how many times he's said this. I have to say though, this guy is good. He then chooses from a variety of rods that he's rolled out on the hood, exactly like a chef's knives. A true artist of the trade; he inserts one and opens the door.

August and Everything After

It was good, don't deny it just because its ridiculous now (perhaps Adam Duritz was a little whiny). Always is easy looking back on things like Hungry Man (people still eat that!) and 80's hair (Mexicans still wear that) and making a final opinion on it, forgetting the initial hysteria. That makes up many of the chapters of my life, somewhere with someone and me making an ass of myself, that's how I remember it now.

It's August now. What does that mean? Well, I guess it corresponds with the coming NFL football season, which for some reason is very exciting. That's me right there, by the way... me, being true to myself. So be gentle. What else? Where does time lead? Seems like us Americans tell time by stretches between vacuous holidays. Bummer when you despise each one of them. I use to be partial to a few, Halloween and Thanksgiving or some such thing. I'm moving on that. I like good times, give me that... skip the holiday, whatever. The Holiday: as if to say, oh I almost forgot... I love you or I care. Remember love forget the rest.

Here's something to look forward to: clouds, rain, weather patterns. Give me autumn, I'll look forward to that. Color and contour and shading. Steep hills with moist soil that gives to the boot and knees. Wetlands and reservoirs filling up (maybe even the aquifers too, for those suckers who believe in such things). Good things to come.

Another letter to M.

Dear old friend M,

It's been two Christmases since I wrote you, not counting the note I didn't leave when I slipped out and down the old creaky steps to the street. Two holiday seasons now without word and only this water between us and a bank of smog across this vast coastal empire. You were at school, art school, the worst kind, probably continuing our previous night's conversation about Christo and how he's an environmental artist, please. That was a lousy conversation and it proved to be our last.

I was excited about you. All the books you sent me that winter made trips to the post more frequent. They kept me up at night, those god-awful long Alaskan winters with no reason for anything. You kept me good for a while and then brought me home, and I guess I owe you a thank you.

I work for a herpetology consulting group now. We drive around and look at things and then write them down in yellow notebooks. I really like it and think it's going to last longer than most things do. I still think of you from time to time, but not often. I know my friendship was tinged with an urge to get in your pants and I'm sorry about that. All in all, I just wanted to be your friend. You were so witty and full of what old people call spunk. It drew me to you and sometimes I wonder now if I read you right. Or if all along it was just my energy driving the two of us. That can be tricky. It's unfortunate remembering you in such a light.

Today I thought of you and all the books I'd tell you to read. And you're the type that would actually read them. Do you know how unique and hard to find that is these days? I wonder what you're reading now, probably something lighter than the shit I've been dabbling in. You were always the pithy urbanite author reader, the McSweeney's novel type. And me, god I don't know. Maybe I always read what I thought would get my heart closer. What I thought would help me understand that which I want to become.

Still M, I am a sheep among lambs. Someone spiked the grass, it doesn't chew right. The shepherd's not here and sometimes I wonder if there even is one. I'm leaning toward no. So I continue to do what I do.

In another field,
J

Ante meridiem

Cool morning fog. Dark sky and soft gray clouds slowly crawling from the Pacific. They made it this time over the Santa Cruz Mountains, often dissipating on the eastern descent. Hiking up there on those days, looking skyward and seeing the thick wisps disappear into the atmosphere. It's eerie and unnatural, like a wave that never breaks.

This is my favorite time. I made the coffee just right today. I couldn't sleep and disabled the alarm clock hours before the set. I don't think in overwhelming thoughts at this hour. Everything is manageable. I sit back in my chair and picture myself in the day's activities. I walk myself through each one, little pictures along the way that show me where I am. And then I try to time it and make sure there's no overlap, no feeling of being rushed. I can't be rushed. It kills me in restaurants especially, or sometimes in the right space at the grocery where shoppers demand that you edge forward with every available inch toward the register, everyone's personal bubble already popped from years of city, unaware and okay. Me in the middle, screaming inside. I plan the day on my terms. I'd rather wait an hour than be late and rushing across the city powerless to the whim of traffic. I say, bring a book.

I dreamed that streets were shiny with fresh water running down to pool in the flats and further on it filled the thirsty arroyos of the impossible Southwest. I imagined the plumes of dust and ash rising with the pattering of droplets on the burnt paths of the California fires. Half-awake I knew it was the fan that likely sounded of rain, but I let myself drift back to a better thought and watched the water clean this city and fill our empty reservoirs and water our vegetable garden.

Still life with car and traffic.

Driving home today over the San Mateo Bridge, with the wind catching our light car and shoving me into the other lane, I was hit by a wave of contentment for the work I'm doing and for the home I'm heading to. There's always something with me; never a moment that I'm not agonizing over a thought. A thought which pushes me toward some drastic solution that I fantasize about, often revolving around a plan of escape. It's been the school, the job, the town, the person, you name it. I took a moment to enjoy this feeling and then lost it.

Everything gets muddled doesn't it? Who thinks straight any more? I watch the politicos on the tele and wonder how they manage to deliver on such concise terms, although often saying absolutely nothing. How do we stay on track? Where did focus go? I'm thinking this when a little flimsy Ford Focus flies by me (always on the right in California). Oh, the transparencies in the domain of motor vehicles! Give me your Excursion, Explorer, Land Cruiser/Rover, Escape! As if to say, Let's get the fuck out of here! Or for the impotent ashtanga-spiritual deskjockeys the Insight, Focus, Breeze, Elantra (sounds like elan, elation!). And on a side note I'd like to mention that new Dodge models have the most powerhungry homoerotic names possible: Magnum, Nitro, Caliber, Avenger. Like petnames for military toys.

I'm thinking this and checking out the new billboards. I have them all memorized now along the great Bay Area loop from the Bay Bridge to the San Mateo. I, along with other drivers, enjoy the respite of new media and relish the experience of new eye candy. Carrie Underwood smiling with her beautiful symmetrical face and breasts at the Bay Bridge merge, I was sorry to see her go, but it never made me want Vitamin Water. Let me tell you, we all are very much over the Apple billboards with silhouetted dancers kicking and shaking. Currently a 30X20 smiling face of Kevin Costner looms over 101-80 interchange, goddamn is that unsettling, especially since it explains nothing about his coming movie. He's happy? Is that it? I bet, he's filthy rich and a self-proclaimed director/actor extraodinaire. Dances with Wolves was good, I'll give him that.

I turn on NPR and try to drown out the stop and go. Cathleen was telling me the other day that an international news mediasaur haunts the airwaves on behalf of the United States, informing the world on our national affairs. There were two things that interested me the most about this. First, apparently it's illegal to broadcast this media source within the nation, a perfect framework for unchecked misinformation. The other is that the broadcast conveys everything using 1500 words, a strategically whittled down vocabulary for communication purposes. I'd really like to hear one of those programs. For now I roll down the window and turn up Talk of the Nation.

There's a giant dispassionate looking dude leaning back in utterly useless pearl clothing with a giraffe chilling behind him on the plains. Abercrombie & Fitch. Grisly technique those fuckers have. I'd take the elite trophy whores of Bebe over them any day. It's okay though cos this billboard lets me know I'm close to home.

Looking back i've always liked what i was doing, at least for a little while. Mostly for the experience, more often for the preposterous unexpectedness of it, for example: slinging dishes in Portland, delivering soda and other junk food in Sitka, accepting donations in the frigid Jackson winter, picking up litter on the interstate. Less often it was the love going on: watching birds in Idaho and Alaska, getting my eye and loupe to the ground in good old Washington State. I'd like to welcome myself back to a good job. This week's highlights:


coast garter snake


santa cruz garter snake


juvey rubber boa


psychotic killer alligator lizard

California is on fire again. Its been an ugly week and beyond the haze mixture of smoke and smog, I hear (and read) its getting uglier. Cathleen found some rare ears of corn for us to eat last night. I drove out this morning into rush-hour traffic and cut work early to avoid it on the way home. We try to continue doing it our way here in California, and beyond the enormous guilt and unease, I gotta say I'm enjoying this life.

America is the vampire of myth that can't be stopped with the regular slug of firepower. This devouring machine needs something special to slow it. I don't know which element it'll be that brings it to its knees. I must say that whole Mayan 2012 thing is shaping up nicely.

Road Rage: Quiet style

If you want to see what humans are capable of on the level of shameless and selfish, I recommend you go check out rush hour in the Bay Area. Every day thousands of motorists use light Exit Only offramps until the last minute, before cutting in on thick bumper-to-bumper traffic where cars have been crawling, pushing it back further every minute with cheaters. Sometimes right before they almost plow into your bumper or reduce your one car-length to nothing, they use their blinker. I really appreciate that.

Across the bay in the Walnut Creek area one can witness a stream of jerkoffs exiting to quickly reenter Highway 24, gaining at least twenty carlengths in the process. What ever happened to good old ass-kickings? Who wants to join me? Lets wait for these people. Meet me at the first Orinda exit outside the Caldecott Tunnel. Bring your own weapon. No more anonymity you bastards! I want guilt, I want shame! Blatantly cheating your fellow man and wo-man.

Day One

In the inner recesses of Hayward, California. A flat-out ugly city teeming with traffic and life. I found the office again in the maze of industrial buildings, alleyways and cul-de-sacs. Wandered in to meet a few co-workers and find a seat at my desk. I worked through the morning signing autographs for permits and tax forms and allegiances to the state mandate.

In a back room a grid of caged snakes reach up toward the ceiling. Mostly garter snakes: San Francisco, giant, aquatic, and the especially striking red-sided. All hanging out in their confines waiting for the next meal. In one bucket I have a bunch of goldfish and in a small pitcher I have some tiny minnows. Watching snakes eat fish has to be one of the coolest things ever. I'm use to the squeak and thrash of rats and chicks going down the gullet of our old pet Burmese Python. That's great and all, but can turn a stomach caught unawares. This on the other hand is awesome through and through. I'm holding Mario the office gopher snake and watching this slaughter go down in the serpent highrise. The coast garter snake just ate five large goldfish and has an equal amount of bulges along his frame, Damn!

I'm putting together my field bag equipped with PIT tagging syringes and microchips for implanting the poor slytherines. Scales and probes, loupe and gps. I feel prepared for anything like MacGyver or Jack Bauer. Heading out in the morning for my first field day in the Oakland Hills.

South to the city.

The last week on Angel Island boiling in my Tyvex suit beneath an angry sun. An island of abandoned buildings and fields of thistle, an old immigration station now a historical site, and the empty bases where cannons were placed facing the Golden Gate. Angel Island is wasted. So much for stewardship. Across the water in Belvedere a moderate 3/2 is listed for 37 million. Tiburon prefers to be with like-minded individuals.

I quit again. Tomorrow a new one begins. I have the coffee table littered in plant and herpetology books and filling my brain such as a night before exams. Cramming, what a bittersweet memory.

Tiger and Rocco are facing off in the U.S. Open playoff and soon Euro 2008 will volunteer its distraction. There are always good excuses for letting the mind wander.

Thanks, Mr. Hipster Record Store Clerk.

Date: 2008-02-26, 5:25PM PST
A quality excerpt from a Bay Area Craigslister:

Dear Hipster Record Store Clerk,

Thank you for judging me on the CD I bought yesterday. Our passive-aggressive altercation made me realize how conformist I am for buying an old Rage Against The Machine album. Your condescension was just the intellectual wake-up call I needed.

I discovered a new me yesterday, and my eyes were opened in a new way. Thanks to you, I realize now that the key to enlightenment is reading Pitchfork, watching High Fidelity, listening to Velvet Underground, having a tattoo of a star on the inside of my wrist, growing an ironic mustache, living in the Mission, and wearing a too-small sweater, multi-colored 70’s ski-vest, chunky plastic-frame glasses, a high school sports T-shirt, air-tight black jeans, and Nixon-era Chuck Taylors.

I had it all wrong, man. You showed me that a skilled job and a comfortable living is just a lie. I need to go to art school, have my parents pay my rent, join a Joy Division-influenced band, and wait for a record deal, like you. I’m totally missing out in life.

So thanks again for mocking me. I mean, at first I thought you were just a pathetic, frustrated musician trying to feel better about yourself. But now I see you’re an uncompromising visionary.

No one will ever understand you. You’re so different.

Signed,

Everyone Not Like You

The Incident on Lakeshore Ave.

I wasn't even supposed to be there, I should have been at work. But, early as the sunrise, 5:30 am, and my mobile is chirping and I'm fumbling for it on the dresser. It's my boss. He pulled out his back the other night and says stay home. He says, write it down like you went in to work anyway, and I say, of course you got it. Hell, it's not his money anyway but I appreciated the gesture. I thanked him and wished him well then sank back into my pillow.

Now it's afternoon and a friend and I are playing frisbee down at the panhandle park on Lakeshore Avenue. The grass is dry and brittle beneath my feet and the wind is gusting toward me. I catch the frisbee and have to really wind up to get it back to her. I almost hit a BMW across the street on a wild arc.

Our bag of groceries is nestled in some shade by the sidewalk next to my sandles. And here comes the frisbee far to my left, riding low and fast. I run to my side for it, but it's already behind me. Picking up speed I reach out for it, maybe even touch it, when out of nowhere comes an electrical transformer box and the full brunt of the corner tears into my sternum, square in my chest and ripping downward like a record player needle coursing the groove. My feet go out and I'm leveled on the grass, wind gone... breath shallow and sharp. Scared as hell I manage to sit up, feeling the shape of my ribcage. I'm not ready to look at the damage yet so I lay back down and try to fill my lungs. Gina is at my side now and she's saying something, I don't remember what, and I get hysterical and the laughter feels like a fillet knife between my ribs.

I'm imagining the all too common shtick of hollywood comedy, some wimp watching a beautiful woman right into a pole. I'm that guy. And that gets me going again. Gina is eying me now and I'm worried now either that I'm half-mad or have a bone sticking out of my shirt.

She helps me home, stopping on the hilltop curb. A numb across my chest is starting to fade and a throbbing pain is coming through. Gina hands me cherry tomatoes and keeps me talking. We're sharing embarrassing stories, we're talking about our childhood, and despite it all... it feels good, something real about the exchange and the sharing of a ridiculous moment.

Hooks in the water

With so many hooks in the water, it's hard to tell what will come up first. I find myself applying for positions that make no tangible sense regardless of the number of times I read the description and qualifications, skimming downward to compensation and noting a few keywords along the way, I apply. It's kind of fun... these many interviews always on one side of a long meeting-room table with nothing beside me but empty chairs, no lawyer or agent to assist. And on the other side, the business trifecta with stapled pamphlets in their hands, smiling and nervous. My last interview they were more nervous than I; that was a first.

They always come in threes. And I'm clueless to everything but the fact that they need to like me, the bottom line, and anything concerning my credentials would be a bonus. The next one is in a week. I'll crawl back to my old job until then and make a few dollars. I'm on a slow tour, my publicity is growing I can feel it. Makes me miss Idaho. It was so easy. Cold can beer fishing and never catching anything. The Bay Area tugs the line. I'm the fisherman that comes up with a dripping shoe, sole peeled up from the toe. I always liked that old cartoon cliché.

I was sipping a gin gimlet in the early Scottsdale evening with my feet dangling in the pool. Too Slim & The Taildraggers were managing to rock pretty good for a small group of businessmen and women, their spouses... all getting a little sloppy drunk at this point. Somewhere in the upscale community a neighbor is dialing the police for noise ordinance violation and soon a few uniforms will be at the front door. Back in the moment, life is serene and beyond doubt ridiculous.

New lows for Richie Sexson and the Mariners

The other night the Mariners extended their scoreless streak to 22 innings. Richie Sexson vented his frustrations on a run-of-the-mill high fastball above the plate (*click on title for link), choosing the most rash reaction by charging the mound. I've silently fumed about the past two weeks but now am fully ready to give my top five solutions for righting the ship.

#1- Get rid of Richie Sexson, freeing up millions of dollars and the hearts and minds of Seattle fans which have not seen one ounce of production out of this guy in three years.

#2- Fire McLaren and reinstitute a coach that's comfortable with breathing down the neck of pitchers and the pitching coaches (no more sitting back while relievers like Baek and Rowland-Smith put the game out of reach).

#3- Stop fucking with the rotation. Let hitters get in the groove a little bit and stop starting Burke one night and Kenji the next. A little consistency please.

#4- Bring back small ball. With extra speed in the batting order, attempt a bunt once in a while and start executing the hit-and-run (once again~ note: Mariners coach John McLaren couldn't pep up a fucking little league team).

#5- Pray things get better.

Shomer Shabbos...

Cathleen is watching the plants grow out in our new garden. That's what she said for the third time walking out the front door, I'm gonna go watch the plants grow again. And that's what she's doing.

A few weeks ago we enlarged our tiny garden to a small garden by pulaskiing the heck out of a thick line of African Lilies that were choking out a line of earth along the far wall with our neighbors. Now we have rainbow chard, carrots, spinach, lettuce and tomatoes poking their heads from the soil and the final crisp pods of snap and sugar peas growing on some stunted vines in the flower bed.

She found another sprout of one of her mystery plants growing from seed on the balcony. These starts are surprises and she won't tell me what they are. Perhaps a superstition to my hampering their growth if I only knew what they might be. Whatever the case, she tries and succeeds in making my quiet life interesting every day.

Lately I've been a real pill, carrying an erratic mood about me all this past week. Today I feel it breaking away and am happy for its riddance. The stress of job searching and the panel interview are behind me. There's nothing to get your blood moving like three interviewers all eyeing you curiously and frantically scribbling answers to methodical questioning. And knowing in that mid-afternoon screening that matters had proceeding exactly this way since early morning; the only difference being the person in the chair I was seated in. Phew! The bay area has many ways of wearing a person down.

And so there hasn't been quite the spry step in my gait lately. Instead I've been kind of bitching and temperamental and not really doing much other than following the NBA playoffs, shopping for groceries, and for the most part eating them.

Today has been beautiful. The summer warmth we felt last month has returned and plenty of bugs are finding their way inside our home. We ate Lucky Charms Cathleen bought from the pharmacy and walked down to the Saturday market. We bumbled around the stalls for a while and bought some minneolas and then headed over to the library and lakefront. On the way home we had one of those coincidences that make a person feel kinda special regardless of whether they actually are. Stopping at a yard sale we found a brand new hand-capping instrument for bottling beer (which we'll be in need of next week, considering our current one is on the fritz). We also found a trivial pursuit board game for a buck, which has been on the list of things to purchase. Plus a few non-necessities that yard sales are known for. I know it doesn't sound like much, but I know the Great Magnet when the Great Magnet comes to pass.