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September 2016

Center of Gravity

If you live in the San Francisco Bay area you live in reference to the City, San Francisco.  Yet interestingly that city is on the westernmost edge of the continent.  So everyone in the Bay area faces west until they get to the City, then they stop.  Does San Francisco face west?  Arguably it has been the portal to the Pacific.  But I wonder which way San Francisco does face?  First thought is inward, as it tries to incorporate its exterior constituencies into itself.  The city contains much Pacific Rim culture, China, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia.  It contains Pacific Northwest.  And more of late it contains Silicon Valley.  For better or for worse.  On a recent trip through Silicon Valley to Cupertino, through Los Altos and out to Santa Cruz I noted, as always, the oak trees, open hilly spaces,  mid-century architecture.  There’s no way San Francisco contains that.  But the life of Silicon Valley, those young hipsters, they face San Francisco and San Francisco consumes them.  So who will win, the oak hillsides of Sand Hill or the restaurants and bars of the City?  The secret is the South Bay was always a staging area or a retreat from the City.  So you enjoy your horse farm and your vineyard in the hills south of San Francisco precisely because you can afford a retreat from the City.

I grew up in the East Bay.  The light industrial side of things.  There are so many people out there, UC Campus, lots of malls and community colleges.  It’s not the heavy industry of the areas immediately north and east of San Francisco, the refineries and former shipyards.  Just lots of people spreading out towards Mount Diablo, washing around it actually, a 4,000 foot mountain that will get a tiny bit of snow sometime during the winter on its deserty scrub and oaky slopes.  The dreams of those people are dreams under an oak tree in summer, ephemeral and gentle.  I see my high school classmates becoming more and more puffy and hunched over as they walk.  I suppose the best of them are like oak trees with a solid, enduring air.  Anyway, that is Walnut Creek.  I had a taste of Concord, also, with its working classes and cheese cooperatives, back in the 1970s.  Who knows what they do now in Concord.  I think it’s a back office city, so what goes on there is subsumed within the expression of multinational corporations to the world at large.  Seen in downtown Walnut Creek, where everything is actually sold.  A hub within the East Bay, a Chicago for the Bay Area.  And what of the Bay area’s Atlanta?  How will Oakland fare this time when it has taken some of the wind out of Little Chicago’s sails?  The wind blows through but as yet no large cranes catch the air and drive development forward.  Will they come this year?

In the meantime I can go to San Francisco to write, or just kick it in one of these other cities.  There’s a ferry from here to Oakland, the 3rd nicest city to live in in the US.  Or I can just have lunch here in the City and remember eating out with my family in Seattle which looks towards San Francisco past the heads of certain high tech giants.  We had a great week there and I can sit here and look back on that week in the city that looks back at San Francisco.  Yes a lot of mirrors and reflection.  And fewer beards here, less competition there.  You notice that’s two things about Seattle, not about San Francisco.  The consumer and the consumed — in a gritty reality contest you know Seattle would win.  But that’s like a contest between the brain and the stomach, the parent and the child, the theatergoer and the director.  Who is in charge?  Who writes the script and who approves it?

The Financial District is a bit unexplored for me.  I’m in a little burger bistro on a restaurant alley I didn’t know about.  It’s 1:30 and everyone suddenly left, except a few of us.  A couple of executives, a man with his sister, two men at the bar looking like they need to discuss important matters with the bartender, a big man and a woman at a high table.  The fast kids left.  Back to work.  The buildings are tallest here.  The water pretty far away.  These pedestrian alleys are cool, right in the shadow of the TransAmerica tower.  The servers seem happy.  Everything is so fast, how could anyone complain?  In the mania of it it almost feels like it doesn’t matter what all of us is doing, just that we’re doing something, and we care.  Counterpoint, my junior colleague at work chooses a pace that gives him lots of time for self-doubt and moaning and groaning.  What’s the point?  Why not drown your doubts and sorrows in enthusiasm and more work, instead?  The doubts and sorrows may go away.

What about me?  I definitely need to keep the momentum going.  And so I go in to work and scream through my calls for the day, finishing them quickly so I can shift focus to follow-ups and projects.  It’s like I’m in a whole different world from my junior colleague.  This woman calls me from Paris and says I’ve promised her an offer on her building.  I have people lined up to gather the info we need, analyze it, write the offer, schedule a follow-up call.  We will execute.  Meanwhile I hear the song Jessie’s Girl playing and celebrate Bruce’s enthusiasm but not his assumed pathos.  If you want a girl like Jessie has, you just have to go out and get her.  Probably in San Francisco, although that is one of the places in this world where you’d have to work harder than anywhere else.  Better try Chicago or maybe some weird hub city like Cincinnati?  Berlin?  Rio?  Goa?  Just don’t stay in that little suburb that Bruce is singing about, where everyone holds on to what they have as prosperity slips away.  Then you’d just have to be satisfied as Jessie’s sidekick.  What girl wants to go out with a sidekick?  Sidekick girl.  Still, that would be a more wholesome song than Jessie’s Girl, much more Marvel.

Over a thousand words.  I have a secret for you.  Wait for it.  Tainted Love plays and all but one of the guys at the bar and a big group praying in the corner leave.  One quiet male couple arrives to snack on sliders and salad…but we’re energized by the unseasonable heat and the Herculean efforts of those who have already gone back to work.  Those two guys don’t seem worried.  Seems like they could be sitting in Puerto Vallarta.  Maybe they own the restaurant.  Thank you, calm, shorts guys; if there’s anything I actually like better than Puerto Vallarta it’s idealizing Puerto Vallarta, and reliving the moments there that seem to have just the right combination of otherworldly and familiar, gay American and homophobic Mexican (or will Donald Trump and Jessie and his Girl have it the other way around?  Homophobic American and permissive, tolerant, long-suffering Mexican).  Just as an aside, Hillary Clinton actually called all of us racist in her effort to highlight the racism of Donald Trump.  Better to admit it and try to change it than to cover it up and have it come belching out under the influence of whatever makes us feel at home.  A woman stomps out of the corporate group praying to the ideals embodied by the leader, the one paying for lunch, in her high-ish heels — a commonplace late Admin exit.  You can hear someone bossily expounding over there.  Almost 2 PM.  Can she finish up in time to catch the Clinton/Trump debate t0night?  Did I mention it’s hot today.  Oh yes, but down here in the artificial valleys of the financial district there are cool breezes and U2 plays.  We shift quickly, here.  Mad rush to cool afternoon.  You find your place.  The secret is this place is not essentially different from Puerto Vallarta, or that pathetic town where Jessie’s sidekick watches his girl.  I have a feeling Puerto Vallarta and Sidekick Girl beat Jessie in his San Francisco suit every day.  The secret is Jessie dreams of escape and he’s probably always had a thing for Sidekick Girl.

 

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So Beautiful

On BART.  Again.  This time the fog hangs thick and low, cool over all. The trains swish in and out of curly tendrils, down into the heart of the cloud.  So beautiful, and the moment is mine.  Mad Max: Fury Road won a lot of Oscars yesterday and my kids saw the whole social-political spectacle.  A line from the movie mentions that our life is in the moment.  Every existential pain I feel is tied to this feature.  I don’t exist outside of it so I’m constantly under pressure when I try to bridge the gap between one perceived moment and another.  Why do neurons have gaps?  Humans have separate male and female counterparts?  The short circuit is death, life is in the gap, in the movement from one place to another.

In the gap time has passed since Mad Max took the Oscars home.  Months.  If I were Mad Max wandering the desert I might wonder how many months and see the stubble on my chin in a broken shard of mirror and laugh at death coming swiftly for me.  Have you noticed six months is 160th of a lifetime, an eightieth of a working career, a thirty-sixth of a childhood?  So if Mad Max looks in the mirror and it’s a flash of time since six months prior, and if that’s a single frame of a film he’s in he’s got 4.4 seconds of life since his birth.  Of course we don’t know what 160th of a lifetime is, because no one knows intuitively what anything from a thirty sixth through a 160th is, so it doesn’t matter to us (we can understand 4.4 seconds, though, it’s a long intake of breath).  How about this:  I’m likely to stay in a home for six years, stay in a career for nine, watch my kids go from preschool to college in thirteen.  Take any one of those items and six months is between one twelfth and one twenty-sixth of the whole.  That’s something anyway.  Impressive?  No, we have no idea what anything as small as one twelfth is.  Oh well, I just had the idea that six months is a big chunk out of a lifetime.  I know it is.  I know by the time I slowly draw breath (4.4 seconds) the leaves will blow through this narrow outdoor corridor of this cute restaurant in Walnut Creek once more and I’ll be dead.  What will my kids think?  What will those 4.4 seconds look like on screen, if anyone watches?  It’s getting so cold here, and you know what warms my heart?  The knowledge that I’ve changed so much about what I’ve written, today, that I will not publish it yet.  I’ll wait for a day, a week, a month, God knows how long, to review, revise and consider publishing.  My stand in defiance of the impossible power of the passage of time:  I’ll wait until the moment is right though it cost me everything, though the writing is stillborn, incomplete, or even a soul that never was…

Picked up this thread, So Beautiful, because I’m at Cesar, the tapas place with the good wine.  Thought it appropriate to appreciate beauty here.  More than wine, the bartender last week said their cocktails are of higher quality.  I’m usually disappointed with cocktails.  Because of the lower quality.  Take a mimosa.  Why adulterate champagne with orange juice…unless it’s not very good champagne, and then why drink it?  To get high from cheap champagne and also have a heart attack drinking orange juice?  Here at Cesar they play Spanish guitar music I can’t Shazam and take home with me.  Sometimes they come up with fresh garden vegetables you couldn’t get at the Chez Panisse.  And Cesar has a collection of Scotch that’s So Beautiful — varying shades of brown.  So I sip my Cabernet and observe their Scotch collection surrounded by Old People from Berkeley.  I’m relatively young here in this un-Shazamable place.  If you don’t know what Shazam is then Google it.  If you don’t know what Google is then congratulations to you.  Just kidding, of course.  You know what Google is.  But the point is I’m not a big Scotch drinker and yet I appreciate this Wall of Scotch.  It adds to the credibility of the place.  Even though I only sip the wine here.

Did I mention why I came to Cesar?  No?  If I do will you let me know, because I’m unsure.  And more than that:  I’m not at Cesar, I’m at Va de Vie in Walnut Creek.  Watch out, the transition from one place to another can seem instantaneous, even though a day, a month, a year or a decade passes.  Would I dare pick up this same piece after a decade?  Would it give you a chill if I said that’s what I’ve done?  I came (to Cesar, to Va de Vie) as an exercise.  I’m writing the script of a life, so wherever I choose to go and do becomes the story.  That’s obvious, but the point is my choices aren’t existentially important for what they produce but for their stories.  God, it just went from hot to cold at Va de Vie as the sun passed into shade and the wind picked up.  I’m reminded, as I have often been, of The Swimmer, a story in which the protagonist swims his way home through friends’ pools in the neighborhood but finds his self-absorbed focus takes him on a much, much longer journey through the loss of his social credibility and many of his friendships, and his youth before he can ever complete the simple exercise.  4.4 seconds.  An in-drawn breath.  I try to get my outbound sales calls at work completed by noon each day, and then shift my environs at noon.  For lunch.  But also to tell a story, the story of a creative afternoon.  Does it matter the exact course it takes?  No, the point is it’s not an office.  My client just called me after I sent him multiple prospects to review.  Another several weeks pass with no further contact with that client and another client calls me in person for the first time and says “Oh yes, I am open to doing this transaction” that would make half my year’s goal.  Half my year’s sales calls all realized in that one statement if it turns out that it’s realized…  Uncertainties and perhaps 18 months of extended transaction ahead.  What are the probabilities?  Has this intrusion into my creative time defined a success?  Or a half-hour step farther into the darkness of failure.  Or, guess what, no one knows and yet I am here, I am here, like the smallest Who crying out to the unknown.  Do I sit next to a high mountain peak in Colorado sipping Cabernet with family members?  No, but given I’m having lunch, having lunch, having it again, I can call my client back and the moment and the paella form a bridge to that mountaintop (and don’t forget the steak, and dare I mention one hundred other meals?)  A creative afternoon.  Maybe I’ll close a deal with my client (which one?), but not at the cost of my soul, I hope.  Not entirely, anyway.  A discount half price sale on souls for half a day today.  I have a break, the story has a twist, and today it was Cesar, I mean Va da Vie, I mean, shall I claim a future lunch date with myself, before it arrives?  The wind has died down.  It feels warmer… Notice the lie because there is no future.  Our family plans to go swim in the pool of an old friend of mine soon but be clear, please, we can only claim the plan.  And as we seek a date the weeks shift from September to November.  Big difference for a swimming date, though. 

Not on BART, or Uber, now.  Certainly not driving.  Getting places is important to the story, but how much more important being there?  Here.  Being here.  By the time my fingers reach the keys to type out where here is, it likely won’t be Va da Vie.  It’s not. It’s called Desco and they have great espresso. Looking back, too, perhaps this alley was once not paved with stones and dotted with tables (Perhaps?  Come on, you know it wasn’t.)  But the wind very likely blew leaves from the enormous oak tree even before either of the brick buildings formed an alley there.  Of course that tree was once an acorn, perhaps 120 years ago?  The current length of a human lifetime without accident, disease, or genetic failure.  I’m 50 in so far, so I’ve got a ways to go if I fight for it.  Or maybe 7% chance if I don’t?  Or, what, 20% chance if I do and the world continues on its current elitist development course?  And what does fighting mean and by fighting do I change my in-drawn breath from 4.4 seconds to 5.3?  Since I live in Berkeley I may as well eat at Cesar, seeing the vehicles swiftly pass on Shattuck Ave in the Gourmet Ghetto.  So close to the Chez Panisse I can see the shadow of its Chez Panisse (connifer?) tree.  I talked to their gardener the other day when he picked me up in his pickup to take me to a potential job site for him.  And he told me the name of that unusual tree that you see in front, and that surrounds the most cute dining area in the cafe upstairs that Bill Clinton probably didn’t get to sit in because his entourage was too large (all probabilities, of course, and what I wonder is what was actually on his mind and did he care whether he could sit with the unique bunya-bunya framing his, for that moment, Arts & Crafts window?  Did he know about the tree?  Did he notice it?  Would he have cared?  I think he would have, if someone (the gardener?) talked with him about it.  And I am here, in the shadow of the Chez Panisse and its bunya-bunya, listening to un-Shazamable music.  Oh, one of the pieces got Shazamed, but I don’t know which one, and it’s not available on iTunes.  For some reason this reminds me of visiting the famous main library in Seattle and my daughter hurt her leg running on the escalator and the Uber driver waited for us on the far side of the building.  I got so little satisfaction out of that visit because my daughter complained the whole time.  And in memory I have nothing immediately before or after.  Pike’s Place chaos market before?  Our tiny Airbnb apartment after?  Logical.  Still, I just remember beautiful escalators suspended in air, and my daughter falling on one and whining, whining.  The quality of her whining is so demanding, so confident.  I feel like the world had better watch out for her.  We’ll see.  Always in the shadow of something, I write so late in the summer that who can remember it’s summer?  The fog coming and going, mostly coming, over Berkeley, and at 2 PM in late summer of course it may be typical, if not the Indian Summer delight we look for.  Yet how can it be Indian Summer when it is still actual summer and so we must endure the summer fog.  And if six months have passed who can say whether that’s a big piece of my life.  I know it is.  And yet Seattle was barely six weeks ago.  Seven.  Eight.  Is six weeks long?  Seven, eight?  Is time long?  And when was it we were at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz and did not ride the tram cars, the cable ride, the one where you dangle your legs over the park as you travel over it?  My wife got beautiful and cheap sunglasses there.  And we got passes that we haven’t yet used.  Maybe we will soon.  Oh yes, Santa Cruz, I have you in my sights.

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Just You & Me..

Tanya Izz


Let’s get out of here, just you and me. I don’t need the promise of tomorrow and yesterday tastes bitter in my mouth. I want to watch the sun rise over a landscape that breaks into all the things I never thought I’d see; all the things I was too afraid to reach for. We’ll take your car and I’ll oversee the radio, I’ll play the soundtrack of my life and you’ll smile like you don’t know. We can chase the memory of passion lost, a trail growing colder with every mile we leave behind.

Let’s ditch this town, this tired collection of haphazard streets and lawns built on haste and disinterest. I imagine blue skies and sweet air that isn’t heavy with all the choices we’ve both made, the words we never should have said, and pretend, for a minute, that the grass really might be greener. I want…

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Cake

Deeper magic from before the dawn of time.  Because eating the cake is never enough.  You know we’re waiting for something beyond what we can see and touch, because even the dawn of time, that Big Bang when we really get started, or, if you look a little farther, right now, is never quite enough to satisfy.  That’s why we seem to need the even deeper magic from before, beyond and Outside our experience.  And did anyone ever mention you can’t have your cake and eat it too?  You know why they say that?  Because you have to either live in this moment or wait for another one.  And what they mean is you should wait, for a Better World.  Oh yes, wait.  ‘Cause if you eat your cake now you won’t have it any more, and everyone wants to have cake, right?  Wait, did I ever say I wanted to “have” cake?  Aren’t there contrasting parables about not storing up your grain, or hoarding your talents, and that birds and grass are happy even without “having” anything?  Oh, those radical Leftist Christians rallying against acquisitiveness and greed!

Don’t believe it.  We always have our cake and eat it too.  You can’t have one without the other.  How can you eat the cake if you didn’t spend some time wanting it first?  You can’t; even if you’re a dog you anticipate the treat.  To lose yourself in deeper magic from before the dawn of time you’d have to be dead.  Then you wouldn’t count anymore, not independently.  And so, the deep magic we have in the present is just the eating, just the reveling, and despite our fears (or hopes) of where that may lead, it’s worse than it seems:  not only does the reveling lead nowhere but it’s also unachievable.  You can’t get there.  Sorry Bohemian, your journey is just that, a journey.  You have no place to lay your head, not even Noplace.  No break, not really one moment of eating the cake that isn’t shot through with anticipation of eating it.  You can’t take one bite and just enjoy it.  Do I dare to eat a peach is the philosophical question of daring to think about these things, be aware while eating the cake.  The ultimate hubris (even though the philosophers would tell you it’s only natural to think about things while you do them, they secretly admire the proletariat freedom to just enjoy things, and so J. Alfred Prufrock is afraid of losing his teeth, missing out on sex, and dying; thank you T.S. Elliot, for sharing this perspective, but, sorry, this admiration for those who just do things is ill-founded: nobody, not even a dog, just does things).  I can try to lose myself in eating cake or peach but will inevitably feel the pull of the bungee cord of human reflection drawing me back to thinking about it.  If I jump in while conscious of the cost, the ramifications, the inevitable pull-back, the alternatives, something different may happen.  Do I dare to think about eating cake, the cake that I must forever both have and eat, that no matter how hard I try I cannot stop having and eating?  That’s the thing the Buddhists understand but the Western philosophers miss: the thinking about it mingled with the doing it is the real daring.  And the Western philosophers are doing exactly that.  They should pat themselves on the back!

Why is it all reversed?  You can’t have your cake and eat it too is wrong, you can’t not have your cake and eat it too.  Do I dare to eat a peach is actually do I dare to think about eating a peach.  The core of the Christian Gospel is radically leftist even though Conservative and Christian are words that travel intimately with each other.  Try too hard to do anything and you end up with the opposite.

What about this: sentimentality rots the core of our lives, it’s maybe one of several ways to ruin everything.  I listen to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd and see two miniature rat terriers lying side-by-side on a woman’s lap outside the cafe and recall the times I lost myself in that song waiting for another time to come.  There’s a lot of Waiting in rock music.  And of course isn’t there also a lot of Eating Cake — do I miss something to say there’s a lot of Waiting to Eat Cake?  Kind of crosses all the Political Divides because I could say I like Little People’s Mickey Mouse Operation better than Lynyrd Skynyrd, but would it actually be true?  I can’t bring myself to mention any politician’s name but what would it help?  If a woman breaks the Presidential Glass Ceiling this year does that speak more about her or about our society’s need for her (and for her opposite) now?  Can I deny I get a good feeling when I hear the opening bars of Titanium by David Guetta,  though I’ve got to slog through the rest to get to another, anemic rush when the woman shouts “I am Titanium”?  If I have the right speakers the off-beat bass is good, if I’m distracted during the build-up I may start thinking again the song is cool.  But there’s almost nothing left for me in that song but sentimentality.  And guess what?  The sentimentality, while it rots the core of our lives, cleanses us.  Your core rots out, you’re left with nothing, an empty husk, and then you go on and let yourself get filled up with something new.  So it goes: we begin this paragraph with the claim sentimentality is our best shot at destroying ourselves and yet its rot is the lifeblood of renewal, laying down the sod for the growth of new things.  Because to eat cake you must have someone go out and plant it, grow it and harvest it, and after all humans don’t know how to eat grass…  But if there were no cake we’d stop eating it, yet we wouldn’t stop trying to have something even while we’re eating it and saying it’s impossible, and always getting it backwards, except for the part we may notice about humans always thinking about things and never just doing them.

 

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