It feels at times that I'm out on sojourn for good running parallel to nothing, and everything keeps moving, including me, but goes nowhere. I'm forever temporary, moving. And it so happens that my track runs along many and we merge, almost all by choosing. These are the things that pass my time, waste my time- these near fictions that I keep my mind busy with.

All the nothing sports that take my time and beat my heart to their rhythm. The nothing jobs and nothing fancies in nothing towns. The something people, I don't know what, but something. Like a dream with meaning and you don't know why, you just know that it meant more than just a phantom, fantasy. It's got to, it's all we got.

I forget them too when they pass. The something people. Isn't that sad, I've forgotten everyone but one... and she too is almost gone. I pretend the rest. What does that say about me, what does that say about us? Am I heartless, feckless, cooling? Am I any representative for something more, or does my track run somewhere astray? Not unique, reckless and runaway.

It's the passage of time. Maddening if you pay attention. The where, what, and especially the why that wrecks the brick that builds. I get drugs. That makes sense. I don't get people that don't get drugs. And more, I don't get those that don't get people that get drugs. Where did they come from? Happy on this narrow plane called life and living, this sliver called love, and this one called communication. Good God what are we doing? Scraping inch by inch for even the scantest gain.

Having to so brutally earn not having the sonofabitch named John McCain as our president. There's an example from hell. Every small gain so dearly fought to quickly slip with too high expectations, the facts, and a pat on the back as oil drops below $70 a barrel and life returns to normal. Nowhere. That's where we're going. A massive delusion. And so I watch baseball, football, shit whatever damn sporting event is on, unless it be hockey (though I tried) or that stomach-turning ultimate animal fighting of men and women in great big cages. What is that? Give me a gun, put them down.

Beyond all the memory of this and that, those beautiful landscapes out there... God there's so many of them. And the faces with me there, they're nice too. Beyond all that, I miss me. I always wanted to keep myself right. Right in the head, whatever. Right in the spirit, in the heart. It's hard isn't it? With all the lying. Keeping it straight, face-forward, hands and arms, and heart beating right.

The End of the Innocence

There's only so much talk of the economy that one person can take and so I flipped the dial to the wholly uncreative realm of modern disc-jockeydom to catch Don Henley's billionth royalty roll of End of the Innocence. I've always liked the song (it's kind of shameful), but I do. I get those goosebumps sometimes along the back of my neck and upper arms. Such a sad song.

What's funny is its been the feeling and not the lyrics, which are terribly dreary as well, that effects me most. I never caught the politics of Reagan and the USSR, inner/outer turmoil, and youth awakening and wanting to go back and find that one place where they can't touch. I'd put my own meaning behind the words, meanings more convenient for me. I do this with much of the music I listen to and I'm sure it bleeds out into other facets of life, redirecting many people's actions and intentions to fit something more palpable for me (Sorry everyone about that bummer). Perhaps it's an effort to remain sane. To think of all the things I intentionally miss... sheesh.

Innocence. A recurring theme in every coming of age story or discussion. My kind of talk. I began to think the other day of what it means and toss the notion it has anything to do with virginity. Fuck that. I think it has to do with hope and optimism and feeling oneself to be unique. When those things begin to go, when it cracks ever so slightly and the light gets in, or the dark gets in... now we're talking. It's a kind of losing. Losing a bit of yourself each time and becoming less innocent for it. Knowing too much, that guilty hunger for that which brings you grief.

I lost something abroad a long way from home. I was nineteen and on a bus and some loud pan flute music was bumping this Blue Bird crawling up the switchbacks of a mountainside. Clouds formed from the breath of cordillera trees generating a peculiar microclimate in the dripping canopies. As we came to the pass in this rich jungle the road dropped away and the clouds parted and I saw a great swath of destruction below me stretching for hundreds of miles. Biblical shit. Slash and burn, cattle farming, tightly packed banana plantations, and the shanties. I could never not see it again and it was everywhere, it followed me. The garbage, the poverty, the ugliness, the lack of stewardship and responsibility and all those big words and ideas of the haves. The essential knowledge that racism is not nearly as important as the civil unrest between the caste systems. The glaring distrust and hatred between the haves and the have-nots, and the haves welcoming the bickering between lower classes as fodder for distraction from what's actually occurring: subjugation of the poor's labor and land. Bummer.

It didn't tick right for a while and never again ticked the same way. And there was home and relationships and the bitch which is high school. I watched my friends and acquaintances become cruel before my eyes, for nothing. I couldn't figure why some newly developed muscles and a patch of new hair between the legs could be reason enough for being a dickhead. And yet, there it was.

Growing up is never easy and some of us are still doing it, or at least trying. What's funny is the place I always felt purest and most hopeful was the place I was taught (and thank G-D I wasn't raised Catholic, can you imagine?) could bring the reckoning and an end to innocence~ in someone else's arms. Innocence is some hokey shit anyhow and its pursuit and attainment is as likely as individual predestination, Calvin-style. Talk about setting yourself up to get pummeled.

Rent-a-Relic

Cubby, our little Toyota Echo, is trying to get into other people's lanes. The front right shock is dust and with every bump the nose drags starboard. I quickly straighten out and prepare for the next bump. There's always something wrong with our car and this is just the latest.

I have the best mechanic ever. I mean ever. You know how the disembodied television voice recommends you talk to your doctor before considering anything? Well, I never got that, I've never had a doctor. I had a dentist once and then he retired. Now I got Johnny and he's smarter than most doctors I've met.

I finagled my way out of work today and drove the car in this morning to the auto shop. Cubby's gonna have to spend a few days away from home so I had to rent a car. Luckily Johnny had one out front belonging to a rental agency up in Berkeley. He gave the guy a call and I drove the rig over. The car rental shop is called Rent-a-Relic specializing in old crappy Ford sedans with no pretensions in a wide range of hideous colors. I instantly loved the place.


The latest line of Ford buggies.

The one I got isn't in the picture, it's around back. An old Escort beater with loose brakes and a hot pedal, painted a green that doesn't exist in nature. I love it. All the stations on both FMs are tuned to Mexican circus music and AM is of course drivel on all dials anyhow. I tell the guy I love this car. He challenges me to try to lose it in a parking lot. With that color it's impossible, he says. He's right. It's the color of 80's leggings, Teenage Mutant Ninja-style shag carpet. This guy's great. He's wearing what looks like an Indian Nation hat with mixed up dreamcatcher peace sign and the word Oakland below it. I get a few stories, nice ones... about how he met his wife and what it's like pushing customer service all day. I give him a few stories of my own and a handshake.

I drive out of there with the windows down into the Berkeley land mine of speed bumps. It can be pretty overwhelming turning down a street and seeing twenty speed bumps ahead of you. I think of all the pimped out Buicks and Cadillacs, butt end dragging with hydraulics pumped to the hood. It makes me feel better. I hope the homeys drag their fenders off every time.

Oh and get this, the best part, I'm paying forty bucks for three days. Nostalgia for the days I never saw.

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.