January’s 31st Post

It never occurred to me until my last night (tonight) to have a look at Italian TV. It’s just like any other TV and a whole lot easier to understand than, say, Chinese. The TV is tied to the other electrical circuits in the room, obviously, and the scheme is very strange to me. A special pin on the room key ring has to be inserted into a hole in the wall in order to turn on the electricity in the room. This is a scheme to prevent guests wasting energy when they’re out. It’s a lot of fun scratching around in the dark trying to find that little hole.

Speaking of hotels, the concierge has not left the building in nine years. He lives on the top floor and is on the job at all times. His wife is dead, his mother in hospital and his daughter and granddaughter in Switzerland. He has no friends, excepting perhaps the couple that have rented the original owners’ quarters; but he doesn’t know their names. He’s a very nice guy, no nonsense, speaks English well. Takes all his meals in the kitchen, watches TV in the bar. Says he’s part of a dying breed, that people these days want weekends off and so on. Did hoteliers once upon a time literally live their entire lives in their hotels?

Speaking of fear, if we distill the worst fears of Bush’s more left-leaning domestic opponents into their simplest and most direct form, that he has sought to gain power without any checks and balances, they would still pale next to the reality granted today to their Venezuelan hero Hugo Chavez. To his credit, the opposition press has not yet been silenced.

Speaking of silence, we drove in three cars up the highway, took the last exit before Switzerland and started winding up a steep hill on a narrow road lined with neat stone walls and neater stone houses, below which Lake Como was a black surface, full of reflections, gondola lights stretching straight up the steep mountainside opposite. The silence of a distant town at night hung over the lake like an invisible cloud, a delicate fragrance, a watchful spirit. Il Gatto Nero was as beautiful as any of the houses, with a lake view that must have been breathtaking during the day. There were several beautifully-appointed rooms within, each holding a handful of tables so that every party had intimacy, even a large one such as ours. The waiter had to transfer my water from my wine glass because I’m a rube. The lamb was delicious and the spaghetti was full of subtle flavors and possibly the best I’d ever had. I almost felt guilty being there but our hosts, being Italian, knew how to do hospitality. Later we took a stroll through part of the town and found ourselves walking through Piazza Alessandro Volta, named for a hometown boy who became a great physicist and a pioneer in the study of electricity. Speaking of electricity ...

Small Pleasures

Jen said, “That's the thing about traveling for business that sucks. They send you to all these awesome places, then lock you in an office so you can't really see them.”

But there is a positive side. As a tourist, who do you interact with? Hotel and restaurant staff and the tourism people. Workers in the service industry, in other words, and that's about it (unless you're really outgoing and can go to pubs and add local drunks to the list, but that unfortunately isn't me).

But when on business you interact with locals all day long. Eight plus hours in a conference room working out myriad details, the day leavened with moments of shared humor and side conversations. This creates bonds between people. You go to lunch together, you go to dinner together … You drink too much and the bonds are cemented after a fashion. I feel as though I have friends of a sort (though I suppose that could change with one bad business decision) in Italy, in Belgium, in England, in Taiwan, in China … With luck more will be added to the list. (Note re Belgium, I’ve never been there but one of the team flew down from there, and I also met him in Oregon a few months ago and we talked Burning Man so now we’re fast friends. Antwerp and Milan are about the same distance as Portland and Sacramento, so the nature of his commute was easy to grasp.)

You also get to ride around in private cars to strange places. In Taiwan it was to a manufacturer of miniature cameras. In Italy it was to be to a plastics factory this afternoon, but some of us begged out in order to stay in and hash out more real work. Still, could have been, and that fits the point. Last night we caravanned to possibly the best restaurant overall that I have ever been to … But that’s for another post, if it’s to be written at all (for which the odds right now are less than even).

Tonight, one more oversized meal, in all likelihood, and then airports again tomorrow. Another good thing about the business travel: someone else is paying for it. This might tempt some people to feel as if they are important somehow, that they get to go here and they get to go there and they're really special because someone else is paying them to. Surely there are people who develop such an attitude. It is part of my personal jihad that I never do that and I guess we’ll see how that goes; because of course in truth, all these small pleasures can be found anywhere, and so can people like me.

How to Make the New York Times Bestseller List in Five Easy Pieces

1. Formulate an idea that has broad appeal. Something you would want to read if you had a long plane trip ahead and not very much laptop battery. Failing that, something inspired by a massive best-seller.

2. Come up with a plotline full of twists. Make them daydream-realistic but not reality-realistic.

3. Come up with a cast of shallow characters whose purpose is to tell each other what's going on, serve as different reflections of your own personality, and experience occasional moments of easily-resolved self-doubt.

4. Write the damn thing. Don't think about it, just write it. Contrive tense moments in the action for the ends of chapters. Include irrelevant details of characters' private lives. Don't even think about writing well, just follow standard practice in sentence and paragraph structure. Have your characters swear just enough to seem normal but not enough to attract attention. Use lots of the same words over and over again because few of the huge audience you want will notice. Just shut up and really write the fucker all the way to completion. (This is the hard part.)

5. Shop it around to get it published. If no one buys, keep trying. If no one buys, keep trying. If no one buys, write something else while you keep trying.

I cleverly figured this out all by myself. I haven't tried all of it yet, but I expect within about fifty years I will. I figured it out last week after buying a book at an airport. I had a long flight (Chicago to London) and they were about to close the gate and I realized my laptop was good for about an hour and wondered what the hell I was going to do so I panicked and ran to a shop in the international terminal and grabbed The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury because of a fascinating conversation I had with a Scots gentleman on the train from London to Edinburgh in 2003 that culminated in the mysteries of what might be buried under Rosslyn Chapel ... and I'd read The Da Vinci Code and thought it was interesting if a wee bit contrived ... and I have a passing interest in the technical aspects of assembling a hundred thousand words or so into a marketable product that then nets me several million dollars. Sort of like what I really do for a living except in real life I am but a small part of a large fluid team, we assemble electronic, mechanical, thermal, various peripheral and software components instead of words, and someone else (i.e. several disparate corporations) gets the millions of dollars while I get my salary and benefits -- which is sufficient but hardly the stuff dreams are made of. Anyway, my entire point is that the author is making a mint off his book yet it's so bad I can't always force myself to keep reading it. How tough can writing such a thing be? Huh? Huh?

Earliest Memory

Jeff asks, and so does gekko, what is your earliest memory? Mine is of the extended family gathering for a portrait in our back yard, great-grandparents to little kids -- and off to the side is a sad little boy in drab clothes whom no one can see. When I was fifteen months, my eldest brother died of leukemia. So if this is a real memory, it's of seeing something I have since lost the ability to see.

After a Late Dinner

Maybe I shouldn't have had the grappa. I'll find out in the morning.

It’s an interesting experience to have four people from four countries –- U.S., Britain, Italy, Belgium -– who are all in more or less the same sort of business so they wind up talking about which is their favorite Italian restaurant in Taipei. We all have children about the same age too, going through the same sorts of things. The moment is a reminder that we really are becoming a single world.

There are more pressing concerns. Italians and other Europeans are pondering the same puzzle as Americans (and increasingly the Taiwanese). We remain competitive by moving our manufacturing operations to China and India. Those countries offer the world low production costs. But what do we offer? In the short term, the ideas, the capital and the expertise that drives the manufacturing. But that can’t last forever. What then, when they’ve become as good at the entire production cycle as us? We’ll need something else to do that the entire globe will find value in. No clue yet what that will be.

This dovetails with doomed discussions I have periodically with a certain editor of books who is convinced I know shit about economics. The reality is I haven’t the energy or interest in providing a clear education. Besides, when a given worldview is internally consistent, any external discussion becomes nothing more than a religious argument.

The weather in northern Italy is unseasonably warm. Apparently it hit 21 last weekend, a record high. Locals are recounting the colder, foggier days of their youth. Interestingly, the Englishmen are recounting the exact same thing. Farmers in Worcestershire are planting wine grapes, something Britain hasn’t been famous for since Roman times. It all raises questions. Some people of course point to it as proof of global warming. The truth is we don’t know. Events caused by weather cycles that have periods longer than we’ve been taking data may appear to be troubling anomalies. But we all do agree there’s no harm in reducing emissions. We only need the industrializing nations to cooperate, and maybe then the biggest polluter of them all will buy in too.

Well, I don’t know if it was the grappa, or the white wine before dinner, the red wine during, or the dessert wine after, but it’s after one in the morning and I’m more wired than the radio towers outside Art Bell’s studio. I think I’ll lie down and stare at the ceiling for a couple of hours.

Nights, Mountains

Too damn tired to write anything and too damn geeky not to. Also I wanted to average a post a day this month and though that ain't happening I'd rather die trying.

Never went to Windsor but for a walk up the High St and into a French restaurant in the old train station. We wound our way in the cold air Friday between clumps of cursing teenagers clutching cell phones for whom it was clearly Drama Night. A beautiful place at night, lit up in the way of old towns that must seem like nothing to people accustomed to it, but for those of us raised in places that didn't exist before the electric light and the automobile the effect is fairly magical.

Especially with that ancient castle looming over.

Last night, alone, I took random trains and found myself walking down Whitechapel under the walls of the East London Mosque and through a sidewalk being cleared of its Saturday market, Arabic conversations everywhere, halal fast-food joints, even an Islamic bank for those who want to conduct business in accordance with their faith, its policies acclaimed by a council as being true to sharia'a. Not far from that, a "gentlemen's club", table dances £10. It must be difficult; but everyone who comes to London knows it is not like home.

I forgot to bring a tie, and tomorrow the meetings begin wherein a tie would not be inappropiate. My employer's normal policy is in line with the modern Silly Valley mode of casual, and a tie worn to the office would be a subject of rude speculation. But not so much tomorrow, at least for the first day. White shirt, too! For my only other dress shirt is black. So I bought a cheap souvenir tie in a stall in the Leicester Square tube stop, blue with little crosses of St. George, on argent gules.

I dozed in and out today with clouds below and awoke with a start over the broadest and whitest mountain range I had ever seen. I could not imagine how anyone got elephants over it but beyond that, its beauty was far greater than I had imagined it could be. We moved beyond the snow and dropped into a new world for me, one it took but minutes to develop an intense desire to explore in detail. Not much of that this trip, but with luck there are other years left for it. Right now it's eleven at night and I'm here, wishing a conference room wasn't my venue tomorrow but a simple open road.

Road Again III

So far as I know this post will have no point to it. I'm waiting for a plane. I want to know why airports provide almost no electrical outlets for people. Maybe most people aren't hopeless geeks.

I'm rather tired of cigarette smoke. We get spoiled in those states that disallow public smoking. Yes, I oppose the blanket ban on it. I'd rather let restaurant owners and the like decide. And frankly, I have little patience for people who complain about it. But I mean complain out loud. I'm complaining silently here, not bothering anyone, not asking for a change in policy. Just observing.

Strewth, cig smoke doesn't bother me much at all. No more than would, say, an open sewer.

Anyway, Heathrow has these enclosed smokers' dens, cloudy places enclosed in Plexiglas, the yellowish, wrinkly people inside hunched over in personal shame as the rest of us walk briskly by, averting our disapproving gaze.

I probably walked five miles yesterday, on top of riding trains and buses, wandering again by myself. Got to the Royal Observatory ten minutes before closing and was priveleged to rush through the place and see about half of it. There is a green laser shooting north along the 0 meridian, visible as it crosses the Thames late on a gloomy afternoon.

Strange day: Woke late, hit the rails, never broke fast until about three and wasn't particularly hungry then. Maybe when we walk fast enough, our bodies react by shutting down the hunger center, I don't know. But the previous days' overeating prepared me for a day of relative fasting, I think. At three I lingered over the Daily Mail and a steak and ale pie at the Spanish Galleon down in Greenwich. The Cutty Sark, nearby, is near totally disassembled for restoration.

Some tube lines were down for repairs so the underground ant farm was even more hectic than usual, especially as the evening wore on. Unimaginable crowds of people, mostly young, some drinking, pressed through every tunnel going in every direcetion. It was hot and crowded and noisy and fun. Fun if you don't have a curtain time to catch.

I caught a bus at random to ride the upper deck and watch the night streets below. Got off when I realized we had gone past the northern edge of my map and walked back through neighborhoods of suspicious glances. But my instincts are American: there were no threats. London has a reputation for some crime, but I never saw the meat of it.

Well, I'd gabble more but they just annonced my plane and I'm not going to presume I can log in again today.

Aquae Sulis

I passed through Swindon on a tour bus a few years ago, when we went from Oxford to Bath. It looked like what it is, a British version of the same sort of town I now live in. Imagine a patch of mold. Imagine that patch of mold on the wall next to a fine painting. The painting is a great city. The mold is a suburb.

The mold grows. It grows around the painting and threatens to choke the life out of it; and in its relentless self-replication it makes a quantum leap, mysteriously spawning a new patch of mold several feet away. This patch is not attached to any great painting and can grow and fester as it will. Though once a small town, it is now indistinguishable from any other suburb and in its inexorable rush to dominate the planet, spawns industries and other features of its very own twisted economy. It becomes a city, this patch of mold, and in its ghastly way, it thrives.

Infamous Megamultinational Corporation is one of many that have set up offices in Swindon, and I spent a day and a half within its hollowed walls doing those mysterious things that I do that net me an income. I was pleased to note that, though a patch of mold, Swindon compares well to Slough. While Slough is made up of rows of tiny houses of yellow brick, Swindon has many yellow brick houses lined up in rows. There are other differences. For instance, Swindon is pronounced “Swindon”, while Slough is pronounced “Slaaa-uhh”, using that endearing flat ‘a’ of southern England that sounds like a child who’s swallowed a marble.

My cohorts had never been to England and when we decided to give it up at noon, discussion ensued as to where to aim the navigation system in the rented Prius for the afternoon. We settled on Bath rather than Oxford. I’d been to both, but hadn’t a clue what to do in Oxford, whereas Bath has the very coolest Roman … thing … I’ve ever seen. It’s not a ruin. I don’t know what to call it. But Bath is cool, and so to Bath we went.

Just like last time, I was lost in reverence at how cool a place it must have been in its heyday: Temples, a natural hot spring greatly improved by Roman engineering, a prosperous town, people coming and going all the year. Of course, in those days the bar of coolness was not held very high. But it’s a great place today as well. It’s a university town and looks it, with young people going about, and shops galore, and a very pretty river. And just like last time, I had to rush through it, except instead of a tour bus waiting for me, we had paid for three hours’ parking and the meter was about to expire. So I guess this means: I still need to go back.

We Take A Break From Travel Blogging

As I sit in a corporate cafetaria sifting through emails and skimming PowerPoint^® files, an email comes through with the following text:

Need help, fast: Sometime between 1:30AM &
6:00AM this morning we were burglarized and my
greatgrandfathers colt revolver and the pipe he
carved while in prison were taken. Would you be good
enought to send out an alert to the group for me.

I know this is mice nuts to the world at large but it's the sort of thing that places a permanent spot of darkness in the life of a man, as well as to his children, whichever one was hoping to inherit. In a mobile society such as ours, wherein the vasy majority of people descend from penniless immigrants, family objects of any antiquity can be treasured miles beyond their intrinsic value. I can just imagine the man's heartbreak.

I have the Colt Model 1911 .45 that my grandfather was issued as an Army officer in 1917. I would be upset if it was stolen. But not nearly so much, I think. The above message suggests personal stories, personal connections that are lacking for my little heirloom.

Related note, a collector of Civil War memorabilia in Germany acquired a pistol and researched its origins. He found it had been issued to a cavalryman with a unique Germanic surname. He contacted the few people he could find with that name and, long story short, a friend of mine now owns the weapon that had been taken from his great-great-grandfather upon being captured by the Army of Northern Virginia in 1863.

Across The Smoke

Crossing the street in England is like taking some song and changing it from a major to a minor key.

Wandering around an airport two days ago (all right, three, but sitting back in an airplane with my eyes closed doesn’t feel as though it should count as a night) I amused myself by humming the Star Spangled Banner in a minor key. I wanted to know what it would sound like. All that means is you take the thirds, sixths and sevenths and shift them down by half a tone. It’s a way to turn some happy happy joy joy song into a funeral dirge. Doing this to our national anthem didn’t improve it.

Humming a song you know takes no thought. You just do it. When you change from major to minor (or vice versa) you change the relationships between many of the notes. This does take some thought. But after ten or twenty seconds of concentration, the new relationships were set and I went ahead and hummed this new tune without thought again. I could release myself from thinking about it and just hum the tune as if I’d always known it.

Until another few minutes passed. Then suddenly I realized I wasn’t thinking about it, and had to think again to make sure I had the right note. Wait – where in the tune is the primary? Is this next note a third, does it need shifting downward? Or have I already shifted it downward and am about to suppress it into second-dom? Is this progression up TO the primary, or up FROM the primary – do I minor-ize the notes in between or not? Needless to say all this concentration ruined me and I started getting the wrong notes. I had to relax, release control to the ill-trained but instinctive inner musician, and start over.

Just like crossing the street. When Americans are at the crosswalk they look left because that’s where the cars are coming from. It’s become an instinct – we don’t think about it. Scores of them have been splattered across English roads because of it. So we have to think about it when over here and force ourselves to defy that life-preserving instinct and instead look to the right. After awhile it becomes more natural, and at some point we are looking right without thinking about it.

I did that for a little awhile. Twice, maybe. But my inner desire to live wouldn’t let me be so complacent. This meant always thinking about it and this meant getting confused. I really didn’t want to get hit by a bus. So at every street I looked left – no, right! Which way? Where are they coming from? My inner monkey would not let me cross the street without looking left. But was it the American monkey or the American-in-England monkey, adapting to a new country, looking the correct way as effortlessly as if humming the S.S.B. in minor? I couldn’t be sure, so I’d look left, no right! Left! Right!

I wandered about central London yesterday as well as across Slough to get to and from the train station, and at every street I looked one way, then in a panic the other, then got embarrassed by my obvious Yank-ness and held my head still and crossed with my eyes darting back and forth, looking for danger from all directions. Now my eyes are tired. I guess crossing the street isn't so much like humming a tune after all.

* * *

"Wandered" is correct. I am absolutely not a sophisticate. I didn't come to the world's premier city with a plan to Do this or See that. I know and generally care nothing about what to See or Do. I was here a few years ago with my family and we saw a bunch of the stuff you see, such as the Tower, which was interesting as hell but took all damn day, and rode the Eye and so on. But those are the things you do and when left to my own devices, I don't care about the things you do. I just sort of live from moment to moment.

Which is a terrible plan but there you are. I walked all about, feeling vaguely lonely, taking pictures, and being butt-ass cold. That's because it was butt-ass cold yesterday. The patches of snow in Trafalgar Square were not melting very fast, and there was a breeze up. Still, I couldn't help laughing at the day's big headline:

INCH OF SNOW BRINGS CHAOS

Heh. An inch? Ten inches I could see wreaking some havoc. Four or five. But ... Come on, guys.

All right, big talk from a guy who lives in a place where the first freeze leads to fourteen thousand stupid and totally avoidable accidents. But still. They could have made it read a little less ridiculous: "Two point five four centimeters of snow brings chaos!" You can't have just "one".

Road Again II

I was the man. I was important. Seat 16A in a Boeing 757 is hard by the port wing emergency exit. The lives of dozens depended on my ability to a) reach upward, sideways and downward, b) grasp and push, pull, turn or otherwise manipulate, c) push, shove, pull or otherwise open, d) lift out, hold, deposit on nearby seats, or maneuver over the seatbacks, e) remove obstructions, f) reach, g) maintain, h) exit expeditiously, i) stabilize, j) assist others in getting off.

Hu-hu-hu-hu-huh. They said getting off.

Wait a minnit. I had to sit over the wing. That meant I had a real shitty view. Awesome legroom, and a shitty view. Nothing but wing. Nothing but wing when I could have seen my house as we bore east. For a moment I saw the lake and the rail yard, and by triangulation knew my house was d’oh! behind the engine nacelle. Crud.

The pilot was a sweetheart, though. He banked left as we approached Tahoe so I could get a glimpse of that, anyway. The mountains are so dry it’s scary. There’s snow, but not much, like powdered sugar on coffee ice cream, just a flavoring. Drought rhymes with rout, and follows a freeze that killed ninety percent of the citrus crop. I love California. She’s a beautiful, beautiful woman who, as soon as we get comfortable, slaps us around.

* * *

Okeydoke, I'm not in Chicago anymore but I was for about an hour and the above is what I meant to post from there except it took the whole damn hour to a) find somewhere to plug in and charge the battery and b) get an internet connection. My company is supposed to have covered the connection but the magical works-everywhere wireless connection software didn't work and I ended up buying 24 hours of internet time for $6.95 of which I used about thirty minutes. Boss is gonna love that.

PST it's midnight thirty but here it's eight thirty in the morning and just getting light and I can't get a room yet and have nothing going on and my internet connection is going to time out soon and it's kind of snowing. Good times.

Road Again

As in, "On The". But sung in a minor key to enhance the melancholy mood of seeing the dawn lighten the sky over the airport at Sacramento while miles away my wife is putting our son's breakfast on the table.

Okay, enough melancholy. Travelling can be fun if you let it. The taxi driver was from Laos and pronounced it Lao'. He also said it is easy to learn Asian languages such as Chinee. I had a sudden recollection that it used to be, or maybe still is, considered racist or rude to "mimic" foreign speech and say Chinee when you mean Chinese. But the fact remains that Asian languages are soft on ending consonants and that's the way many people will actually say it. Mimicking and making fun aren't the same thing. We spoke of China 'cause that's where I went last time I went to the airport at ungodly o'clock in the morning, and he learned Chinese while working in a restaurant years ago. When I was over there I met someone named "Wa-fah", or so I thought. Sounded like someone from Deep L.A. saying "What for?" But I think it was really Hua-Fong.

Another thing that occurred to me as I ran the TSA gauntlet was that airport security people get a raw deal. People are always complaining about them frisking litle old ladies. But as it says by my profile, I'm too serious, and rather than jump on that bandwagon I gotta say that if they start using their own judgment they will let the little old ladies through, and the little old men, and then the late middle-aged ladies and gentlemen, and next thing you know some clown with a bone to get wise will detect a pattern and dress himself up like Bob Hope with a prosthetic arm full of explosives and ... You see? Better to frisk 'em all and let God sort 'em out. Something like that.

On Being Pro-Life-Choice

Rather than go on at length about abortion, let me just say that since today is Blog For Choice Day (I'm only linking to where I heard about it), and nobody would dare say otherwise, I am not hard For or Against but tend to lean towards the side of Life and Freedom. That is to say, there's no Freedom without Life, and precious little Life without Freedom, so let there be Life in which every woman has the Freedom to choose whether or not to have sex with a fertile male, and if the silly thing goes ahead and does it, let her have the Humanity to Live with her Choice -- and to make that choice without being bullied by any impersonal entity (e.g. the State) butting its head into her business. As for me, I don't believe in gods or spirits, but humans evolved such that we need them anyway, and so listen to them as you will, just respect that I am essentially against abortion because I'm atheistic and favor liberty and human value, not otherwise. Here's a source of inspiration on that.

A Wandering Minstrel I

Maybe it's because he turned out to be such a competent performer; that he fit himself so well into the role. When I watched the stage, I didn't just see my son doing a surprisingly good job in his first theatrical performance and thus fill up with pride. I saw the Mikado, grave one moment, giggling the next, then silencing the townspeople with a glare. I saw the Mikado singing in a reasonably accurate bass about letting the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime. At some level I knew it was my son and at that level was amazed at his ability, heretofore unguessed. But on the surface (which is evidently where I normally experience the world) I was just enjoying the show, the music familiar from listening to D'Oyly Carte records when I was a kid, the updated lyrics that made Koko's song about his list and who won't be missed something to laugh out loud about. I haven't burst yet. And maybe I won't. We're a family of performers, of a sort. I might have inherited a tendency to be serious and critical, happy for the effort, but happier still if it's done well, something my father makes no bones about. He's not afraid to note a seventeen-year-old singer's lack of depth. But my parents met while in the chorus for H.M.S. Pinafore, and their children and grandchildren all do musical performance, so maybe a relatively light portion of merely sentimental appreciation is to be expected. We all had a lovely time in any case, and the lady who gathered these talented thespians, who ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-two, did a phenomenal job getting their act together.

Jewels and Gems

Thursday I flew in and out of Hillsboro in a Brazilian-made Embraer 135. It's a neat little plane that holds about three dozen people, two thirds of whom have window seats. On the way home I sat behind a guy who is about four levels in management above me and cringed at the thought he might realize he'd seen me around and decide to chat. You know, ask my name and how I'm doing and just what did I use this expensive corporate air shuttle for today anyhow? Us employees have a lot of autonomy and I should have no worries -- and believe me, using it is by itself no indication of importance -- but I would just as soon avoid the third degree.

Anyway, I just wanted to write about one little thing: the view out the plane when we hit the Bay Area. It was fun to watch Hillsboro and Tualatin and points south drop away into little pinpoints in the night, but nothing prepared me for the sight of San Francisco. I had forgotten we weren’t flying into Sacramento. When I looked out the window, I tried to understand the landscape in the context of approaching Sacramento, with no indication of north and south and nothing visible but the electric lights. Which is Woodland? Which is I-5? But as we continued towards a greater concentration of lights, they didn’t shape themselves into the configuration of the capital city. They were spread apart into unfamiliar blobs, very beautiful blobs, but not what I was expecting. And suddenly with a flash I realized that the great dark region was not farmland but San Pablo Bay, and that was Richmond across there, and we were flying over Marin; and with no further warning, the tiny highrises of San Francisco came into view, glowing gold and silver, set like gems in a vast glowing brooch, surrounded by the impenetrable blackness of the waters. The Bay Bridge was tiny pearl-strings, and Market St flowing with traffic, and the red sign of the Castro Theater a ruby set nearby.

This panorama was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

When I was a kid my mom took me on the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland. I was enchanted by the flight over London. For just a few seconds we floated over a sea of tiny buildings, tiny lights, tiny carriages going to and fro. It was a moment to be kept frozen forever, like a beautiful musical phrase, a slow visual orgasm, something to be experienced whenever possible yet seen so very rarely. Few things are able to demand my full attention. Our passage at night above the opposing peninsulas of Marin and San Francisco and then down into San Jose -- intricate dark yellow streetlight patterns, silvers and light blues and greens diffused from countless tiny windows, red and white electric ants following their trails -- was such a thing.

Thin layers of ice and snow

I flew up to the Portland area just for the day, for a short series of meetings and then home again. The views from the air were idyllic: Trees dusted in powder, farmhouses and barns under a white blanket straight out of New England, fields in alternating patterns of brown and white. On the ground, it's not all that cold outside. Well, I missed the storm, is why. Darn.

Fearing people will never end. I would always rather hide in my electric blanket than go put my personality, my knowledge, my judgment out on the line for all to see. But I can't hide because doing all that is part of what the job has become. Should I choose to try the job, or kill myself with self-doubt?

Thus the meetings. The trouble with meetings is they are a direct engagement, face to face, brain to brain. That's also why they are indispensable. I came all the way up here for just that: Face time. For the value it has over talking on the phone, a value my management evidently feels is worth the price of airfare. That I would much, much, much rather work it all out in spreadsheets sent in email is not the main issue here. Getting the job done is the main issue. However ambiguous the job turns out to be.

The great thing is, well, the great thing is people. We all cover ourselves with a veneer of sorts. Especially engineer types. Most engineer types would rather do the spreadsheet and email thing than talk face to face. But that doesn't work so well so here we are, and those thin layers of ice and snow really do melt and shovel aside fairly easily. You only have to try.

Midweek Maundering

So one day, I was blasting around a tight freeway onramp and when I got to the bottom, durned if there wasn't a red light. I never use freeways on weekdays, just weekends when the metering lights aren't on. But this was a weekday and I was taken by surprise. Well, it was too late to stop. I tried, but there was no way, so I gave up and hit the gas. The onramp was a two-lane job and there was a truck in the inner lane, just slowing down. He honked at me. Why not, I was the asshole in the convertible Mustang breaking the law, not him. I had to ignore that and just get going.

Thing is, Mz Liz (or is it Mrs. Hip, I guess the Liz reference doesn’t mean anything to folks who never saw the previous blog), she said I was screwed because there was a camera taking down my license plate. Well, that sucks, I said. Prospect of a multi-hundred dollar fine put something of a damper on the evening. But you know? The ticket never came. Slipped under the radar again, I did.

Not like that other time. Pennsylvania, July 2003. Rented a car to drive from Gettysburg to Harrisburg and when we got to the tollbooth, everyone in the car but me saw that I had pulled up to an automatic quick-pass type of booth and there was no one in it to take my money. I sat there gawking like an idiot. Finally pulled over to the side and talked to a toll-taker in another booth. Nothing she could do. I’d already driven through and there was no procedure with which I could pay the toll. Sorry.

So I went on and sure enough, several weeks later a citation came in the mail complete with a nice picture of the back of my rental car and a bill for a hundred bucks. I felt stupid all over again. And paid the fine.

I writ this rather than leave a long-ass comment at Paula’s.

Fearing People

One thing that took me years to discover is that I’m a little anthrophobic. I just made that word up but what I mean is I sometimes feel I have an inordinate fear of people. Not just shyness, but real fear. Or maybe it is shyness, if shyness can be a bottomless pit deep inside that occasionally prevents a grown man being able to do his job.

As a kid I had friends but I was also the kid that other, meaner kids liked to pick on and it was my friends who, sometimes, stood up for me. This didn’t happen often, but I remember it.

As a youth I was virtually unable to think, much less talk, if within fifty yards of a girl. Yet I had a girlfriend, somehow, throughout most of high school. She was a special case, though, as was I. It was a unique relationship I have just decided I won’t detail here.

After high school for awhile I had two friends in the world, including the ex high school girlfriend. I remember a period of time during which, no matter where I was, if I wasn’t with one of those two I was keenly aware of it; as if they were the only humans I could interact with. Everyone else alive (outside of family) was just too scary.

This was fixed by the brutal method of working at Taco Bell and McDonalds in less than the best of urban neighborhoods. But it took awhile.

Time passed. I distinctly remember one day at my new job as a manufacturing engineer in the medical devices industry, age about thirty four, when I had a simple question – where’s the fax machine, where can I get a lab notebook, something of that nature. What I remember is making the conscious decision to quit looking all around for it and just ask someone. It was like deciding to ford a cold swift-running river rather than go miles upstream in search of a bridge. I steeled myself, did it – and then in a small way never had to cross that river again.

Except I did, many times. But each time, it got a little easier. Easier enough that I still have a job, indeed have not been involuntarily unemployed since my early twenties. So something is going right.

But it never ends. I can’t count the number of one on one discussions I have needed to initiate in order to do my job but that I’ve delayed for weeks at a time. One way or another I get through them, or around them, and my job does get done. But it’s bizarre what a series of roadblocks I create for myself.

Next week I’m traveling with a colleague I’ve only met once. When I did, he was more than six inches taller then me, a manager of vast experience, and though a very nice guy seemed to be regarding me from atop a mountain. An ancient mountain, the kind that lightning-throwing gods used to live on. I knew I had to meet up with him beforehand, but he’s based elsewhere. That meant … calling him on the phone.

And I did but that pit of fear delayed me by a good fifteen minutes. Maybe half an hour, doing other stuff that seemed more immediate. But I faced the music and then everything went perfectly fine. It usually does. There are lessons in that phone calls and meetings and the like usually do. But it’s a lesson I have to learn over and over and over again.

There is a relentless progress under way. Way back when, I was terrified of everyone but two people. Now I’m terrified of no one and only halted by reluctance in the case of strangers I have to interact with one on one in a meaningful way. Groups are fine. Taxi drivers are fine. Thugs on the street (though I haven’t been approached by any for decades) are fine. One on one professional or personal relationships that are new and have some sort of meaningful subtext – not so fine. Not yet. Getting there.

And there are exceptions wherein the Fear never appears. Don’t know why. Maybe it has to do with the stakes. If the stakes are too low to matter, or so high one can take solace in having lost boldly, then no worries. Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Every days’ new, and often a little bit better than the one before. If nothing else, I can look forward to some day when I interact with the world without fear but simply in the joy of meeting people, and getting stuff done.

Fun With Hard Water

In the summertime it gets mighty hot around here, but everyone says that's okay because it's a "dry heat". Well, now it's cold and it's real cold because it's a dry cold. No clouds, not even enough humidity to ice up the windshield. But there's ice in the gutters, and nothing but fun to be had when those knuckleheads in their great big SUVs go screaming into strip mall parking lots, cross that icy gutter and do a surprise two-ton pirouette into the sidewalk.

Someone down the street set up a sprinkler next to a bush and the tire swing. Instant art!

We keep a children's plastic swimming pool outside for the dog to cool off in. He drinks out of it too, especially if it's been collecting dead leaves and muck for several months. But now it's frozen over and it pisses him off when he bonks his nose on it. Aha! I thought. Let's have fun with ice and animals. I went and got the cat.

I held her over the pool and she didn't react at all. Ho hum. So I dropped her. Ack! she said, but landed on it, grabbed into the ice with her claws, looked around without concern, gracefully leapt off and pranced away. No panic at all, not even a tuft of fur out of place. Stupid cat.

Blogito, ergo sum

Journalist Paul Conley writes:

"I had a conversation a few weeks ago ... in which I said part of the reason I blog is that, for me, the act of blogging has become part of the act of thinking. I'm a writer. And when writers think, we think as writers. Sometimes that means we think with pen in hand. Sometimes not. But it always means we assume there is an audience for our thoughts. It is that single personality trait -- an arrogance of sorts -- that allows us to be writers."

Is this true for you? It is absolutely true for me. Writing is an important part of thinking. A thought or a concept is often much more clear to me once it is before me in print. Many times I've written a paragraph, only to read it and realize that, though the paragraph expressed my thoughts well, they were not thoughts I agreed with.

I take this further. Oftentimes, my thoughts are not clear to me until I speak them. This has not only led to a lifelong struggle to keep from talking to myself as an aid to thinking. It means that in important conversations, much is left unsaid. If I am not confident that what is ready to come out is what I am really thinking, then not much is going to come out. Because spoken words can never be retrieved, I've developed a tremendous conservatism when it comes to spending them. An email, blog entry, weekly report or technical criticism can be backspaced over and verified for truth before it is saved. Not so with anything said. And so, I am silent. Too silent, but what would you? Better to keep quiet and be thought a fool, than speak a provisional thought and ... you know the rest.

The post title (which I wish I had invented, but several thousand people surely thought of it before I did) is not entirely accurate. Blogging does not lend me existence. I lead a huge amount of life that never makes it onto this thing, just as everyone else. But blogging provides a release of sorts, a board to nail my card to, a tree to climb and shout from now and then. No idea why I need that. But I do, and that too is a personality trait that allows me to be, demands that I be, a writer.

Four Facets to Friday

1. Busy. Cow orkers visiting from four different states. Meetings. Trainings. Discussions. A team-builder at the ancient bowling alley. I won our group with a score of 105. Such athleticism.

2. Cold. Clear and windy. I had to go out to my truck and it looked nice out so I just wore a t-shirt. Yeah, and pants and shoes too. It was in the low 40s with 17 mph winds. Brr. Wouldn’t mind so much if there was any precipitation. But what little snow is left up in the mountains is just blowing away.

3. Pissed. Mother in law arrived yesterday. When no one was home, “helped out” with a kitchen cleaning job. Consisted of throwing away the old brown bananas. The perfect, mushy bananas that her daughter had been saving to make banana bread for the school bake sale. No other option late at night. Nothing to take. Tears, frustration.

4. Proud / Worried. Band concert tonight, finals week, high score in trig, wrestling and scouts going well ... Other son depressed, no direction, no motivation. Polar opposites. When children are just like their parents, parents are clueless. I know what I should have heard when I was seventeen; no idea what my son needs to hear.

Hay Now

Just off the freeway between Davis and Dixon is this piece of sculpture.

I Take It Back

San Francisco being notably friendly, I mean.

All cities have problems in the form of stupid young men. But this particular violence may correctly be labeled an only-in-San Francisco story.

An a cappella singing group was visiting the City and invited to a private party. They launched into our National Anthem, and were mocked. A fight may have ensued, for which everyone, possibly including the singers, should take responsibility. The singers retreated, but were attacked in the street by a mob of thugs called in by an uninvited guest. One of the singers has a broken jaw.

What makes this only-in-San Francisco?

First, that the fight should start over objection to singing the "Star-Spangled Banner". It's not a great song, but there are some lovely arrangements for it, and at no time should any performer thereof be made to pay for someone else's misapprehension of the song's momentary political implications. San Francisco's a tough town, its national image notwithstanding, but I'm not sure the tough boys in other cities so easily embrace mindless anti-patriotism.

Second, the uninvited guest who called in his "boys" and started a street brawl is reported to be from "a prominent Pacific Heights family". This is where the richest of the rich live, an area that is an absolute delight to cruise around in if you like huge houses and can avoid the extra security patrols. What a fine example of the new elite.

Where else will a privileged rich kid start an anti-patriotic fight against musicians? Makes sense to me. Okay, I shouldn't bash the City if I can't make a strong case. But these columnists seem to think they can.

Anyway. Fuck all those fuckers. Fuck them for objecting to the "Star-Spangled Banner" (and anyone else who objects to it on principle*); and fuck them for taking their hopeless angst out on a group of young male singers, a cappella singers at that. It's not like they were punk hardcore rappers or some shit.

UPDATE, thanks to a toss from Sal: The SFist weighs in. Let it be said this is getting attention because it really isn't typical San Franciscan behavior.

*There may be times when the National Anthem is sung as a form of harrassment, depending on context. This clearly wasn't such a time.

Can't Get No Favoriter

Last week, instead of snowboarding, my son and I went to San Francisco. It’s not such a bad place we live, if we can choose mid-morning between going snowboarding at Donner Summit or walking around everyone's favorite city. Less than two hours’ travel either way.

My recent travels to big cities – Taipei, Shanghai, Chicago – have reminded me what a small big city San Francisco really is. It’s bounded on three sides by water and simply will not grow any more. You can make a nice day of it walking from one end to the other. It has an intimacy about it the other cities lack. Or seem to – San Francisco’s intimacy for me may be a perception bred of familiarity, for I grew up in sight of the place. From the rooftop of my childhood garage I could see its towers gleaming, and on some days straight through the Golden Gate to the Farallons, gray and dim at the horizon.

But the intimacy is real in some parts at least. We had lunch in North Beach, seated at a sidewalk table at Panta Rei under the warm gaze of Sal’s little hill. The table next to us was full of young women speaking Italian, and as the waiter held his station by the front door numerous passersby stopped to chat with him in Italian as well. People walked by or waited for the bus, and one or two commented on how good our food looked. My son – who’s growing up in a small rural suburb and feels distinctly cosmopolitanly challenged – came to the conclusion, Crocodile Dundee-like, that cities, where people have to live close together, are friendly places. In San Francisco, I’m not sure I’ve ever had an experience to really counter that assertion.

He especially dug the area because he traveled to Italy last June and came home with very high standards for his pasta and gelato. In that one block on Corso Christoforo Colombo, his standards were met.

In a break from standard practice, I left my camera at home. This meant of course that I saw scenes and images worth photographing at every turn. One in particular stands out: A view down Hyde, perhaps, or Leavenworth, of The Rock, gleaming in the low winter sun, a bright jewel of cream and green in contrast to the shadowy buildings along the line of sight. Indeed much of the City had a fresh look to it, the light quality being something other than I was used to thanks to the time of year. The main reason I wrote this was because someone else noticed it too, and wrote about it better than I could: Cool sunlight of winter transmutes city's views.

Sunday Mutterings of my Own

Paula and PJ are playing around with BlogExplosion. I signed up too. But even after five minutes poking around and reading FAQs, I have no idea what it's for. I mean what it's really for. Increase your traffic ... rent your space ... Okay, so maybe someone lost his job in the commercial real estate sector and was inspired to see if there's any cash to be suckered out of the blog world, see if those rare paying advertisers might actually find a few blogs worth renting space on. If so, then the BlogEx people can get their cut. That I understand. But if that isn't it, then I don't know what the hell it's for beyond being just a vast mutual linking and blog-lurve circle jerk. So, like, what's it for, anyway?

* * *

I drove a tent until today. Seemed like it. The glue holding up the headliner in my Jeep finally gave out -- hey, the thing's eighteen years old -- and left the fabric hanging down and billowing like the roof of a medieval pavilion after a bad storm. I took to slouching while I drove and leaning back in the seat all the way, so the material wouldn't lie on top of my head. Any idea how annoying that is when you're going to work in the morning, having a sheet of automotive velvet caressing your shower-wet hair? So today I took it out. Undid the panels and the hatchback supports and pulled that sucker out. It's a sheet of foam-covered cardboard, cut to fit, and now sits on the front porch under a tarp, because there's nowhere else to put it and I don't want rain on it and I don't want dogs on it and I especially don't want cats on it. One of these days I'll either get some new material and a spray can of glue and re-do it or I'll take it to an upholstery shop, whichever, but meanwhile the interior of my Cherokee is all stark and industrial-like and I think I kind of dig it. Maybe I'll take out all that frilly carpeting and plastic paneling and shit and turn it into a Real Man's truck: All black or dark blue diamond plate. Wash it out with a hose.

* * *

While I had the hatch up I saw a peculiar thing for the dead of winter and inside one's truck: An old yellowjacket nest. It was small, about the size of a marble, but it was intact and all the little cells were empty, meaning that while it was parked out in the side yard awhile last summer, it provided a home and birthing room for a dozen or two nasty stinging insects. Nests up to softball-sized and beyond turn up in the eaves of the house all the time, especially way up high where there's almost no way to get to them. But in my truck? *shudder*

* * *

Picking up dead Christmas trees is fun. I get to drive around through obscure neighborhoods I'd otherwise never see, I get to pull a trailer (it's just fun, I don't know why, especially having to back out of some tiny little side road), and the boys get to muscle the trees around and jump around on the branches. All that part of it is fun. The rest is not. I won't detail the not-fun part, though it represents about thirty hours of volunteer work on my part, cause, well, who cares? It's all good in the balance. But today I had to go out on my own and collect a few straggler trees we somehow missed yesterday, and they will sit in my yard for a year or two until I turn them into firewood, because the tree chipper was available yesterday, but not today ...


* * *

I never know if any curious would-be stalking soul ever clicks the "location" link over in the side panel, or assumes I'd be detail-oriented enough to center it over anything in particular, or figures I wouldn't quite be dumb enough to center it over my house. Though if you go all the way in and then back out a few, my house does come into view. But anyway, I never know.

* * *

One more thing, added after first publishing. Maybe it's just me, but the text following an image looks closer together than before the image. Does anyone else see it too? It's like the line spacing shrinks after the img tag. One more weird little Blogger thing, unless of course I'm just hallucinating.

Snap To It

I hear mutterings, like dark little whispers, or tiny disturbances in the Force. These voices I hear, they don't like the Snap preview thingie. It's annoying. It doesn't work. It gets in the way.

Well, quit yer fuh-reakin' whining. I'm fixing it. Dig? I already fixed it so it doesn't work on comments or on my "About Me" thing. I especially fixed it so it doesn't work on images. That was the worst. Inadvertently float your pointer over an image and pop! another image would pop up, just like one of those annoying, uh, pop-ups. Well, I fixed that. Here's proof:

See? No pop-up preview there, yet plenty o' pop-up preview here. Gaw DAMN I'm smart.

So anyway. I was walking down Yan'an Xilu one sweltering summer day, under the elevated road, minding my own business, preparing to sell more trade secrets to the Chinese, when my eagle eye espied the trap that a security company in the hire of my corporate employer had laid for me. If you study this photograph, taken with the camera cleverly hidden in a piece of equipment commonly carried by tourists (my cleverness amazes even me sometimes), maybe you too can see the principals in this vain entrapment scheme: the faux policeman, the supposed speedster, the lookout man relaying to his cohorts my every move. Hah! Such amateurs. With studied nonchalance I casually turned down Zhaohua Lu, and when out of sight, vaulted a wall, sped through a construction site and down a few alleyways, and hailed a taxi on Changning. Ha HAH!

You May Kiss My, uh, Ring

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Most Serene Highness Lord Don the Recumbent of Chalmondley St Peasoup Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Playground Bullies

I hate not posting even more than I hate posting. And I hate missing the last two days, though I missed Wednesday for good reason. So much for my secret post-per-day resolution. Anyway, as I labor here in the depths of this corporate sepulchre I feel an impulse to post a piccie of cute widdo animals romping about having fun. These guys live near where I do. Can you just picture them running about the house in their plastic ball?

Oooh That Smell

Clue: I was indoors all day, except for a brief excursion to an auto parts store.

Clue: Today is the first day I wore these shoes.

Clue: Same for the shirt.

Clue: Pants straight out of the laundry.

Clue: I took a good shower after working out this morning.

Clue: No untrained animals are ever allowed in the building.

Clue: There is no trace of biological material on the soles of my shoes.

Mystery: Why, since mid-afternoon, has it smelled like dog shit around my cubicle?

Hypothesis: My breath is REALLY bad. (Note: Dentyne Ice didn't fix it. Ew.)

Action: Will test upon acquisition of a kissable subject. Time to go home now.

Now You See It

So I tried this thing that, if you float the cursor over a link, gives you a preview of where the link is going. Neat, huh? Thanks to Sal.

Hangover Holiday

The weird thing (okay, a weird thing, one of many) about suddenly having teenaged kids is they can run off on New Year’s Eve and we don’t know where and we don’t have to worry.

“Where are your boys tonight?”

“Oh, we don’t know.”

This would not have been possible in the pre-cell phone era. Anyway, we knew where one of them was. The one who drives, though, I have no clue where he went. But I called him this morning and he was alive and well and that’s all that matters.

The neighbors had a party and we walked down there. It’s actually kind of a long walk because they're over there, down by the creek, and by the time we went – eight or nine o’clock – the outside temp was already below freezing. So it wasn’t exactly a slow stroll. Besides, I was carrying beer and fireworks. The beer was heavy.

Almost no one else was there. Four adults and five small children. My neighbor told me this couple had bailed and that couple had the flu and this other couple, their new friends were Irish and “didn’t want to impose” so they stayed away. What is it with people? Someone should have delivered them an order: Impose! Drink my beer! Eat my food! Now! But no, didn’t happen, and that’s odd, because I thought the Irish were among the least unwilling people to impose on someone else’s alcohol. Not to put forth an old stereotype. But I’ve always suspected it is my minority Irish ancestry that helps make up for the heavier German side when it comes to having fun.

Well, whatever. Speaking of putting forth old stereotypes, it is probably typical of me to admire nothing about his house so much as the garage. It is a wonderful garage. Room for three vehicles, sure. And also a pool table, a fusbol table, a stereo and refrigerator and cabinets and tools and a wood-burning stove that had the garage in the mid-seventies while the rest of the house was in the sixties and the outside dipping below thirty. Yet it’s not a no-brainer where we spent the bulk of the evening because there was food in the kitchen and karaoke in the living room and adorable little brats both places and the best thing about the adorable little brats? They were somebody else’s adorable little brats! Score!

My neighbor was bemoaning the fact he never caught a buzz. I guess we change as we get old. I haven’t caught a buzz let alone felt particularly drunk in ages. Which means nothing because we had a great time anyway. But it’s weird. Three or four beers, a shot of Don Julio and a glass of champagne and then up until four, and when I awoke this morning I hadn’t any hint of a hangover. Felt fine.

All that racket from twelve to twelve-thirty was us banging on tom-toms and blowing off fireworks left over from last July and running chainsaws and leafblowers and weedwhackers to the tune of the drums, while kids ran around screeching and the neighbor’s dog kept shoving her wet stinky chase toy into my hand. Next year we’re thinking of doing it in our driveway because my immediate neighbor is easily annoyed.

Well, all that said, I hope that by now everybody has had a chance to bring in the new year with a bang. ;-)