Look who’s here!
That’s right: it is noted bachelor and baseball blogger Ben Hill, asleep at 10 AM on my very own couch even though he’s still ahead on east coast time. The sleeping part is expected. What is not expected is receiving a Ben call on a Sunday night and, through a heroic act of sponetnaiety, drinking with Ben on a Monday night. There truly are no downsides to divorce.
Who is Jill? Been thinking about that one for a while now. Jill is the path of least resistance on a path that’s too long for the scenic route. Jill is a steady exercise that builds a stout musculature in the tissues no one will care to notice. Jill is a reliable intermediate between happy and sad where your headspace is actually completely beside the point. Jill is an order of chicken tikka masala on a rail car to Delhi. As you can see, all I’ve come up with are alternate lyrics to the 1995 Alanis Morisette embarrassment, “Ironic.”
I spend half my time trying to be more like Jill and the other half trying to be nothing like Jill. Sometimes she knows before I even say the word and goddamit if she will always be a part of me. Whether I like it or not. She left San Francisco on Friday, possibly forever, for the greener pastures of Chicago. This appears to be a large city in the American Midwest. With a minimum of adverbs (and with Nick T.), we unsentimentally sucked down one final beer at the bottom of Potrero Hill amidst subject-predicate-object conversation. Jill is the opposite of so many people. All this is why I love Jill.
[audio:Alanis Morisette_Ironic.mp3]
On Friday, C.W. and I caught a photography show at RayCo Photo Center featuring the collodion process, which is such an antiquated technique that it was already obsolete by the twentieth century. The process required slathering a salt-coated glass plate with silver nitrate and taking a picture, all while everything was still wet, all in the field, all within about ten minutes. Aside from serving as a thoughtful fuck you to digital photography, the show was teeming with some of the most striking portraits I’ve ever seen.
Even better, though, was the vintage photobooth next to the broccoli table. At $2.75 a print, it’s by far the best one I’ve found in the city so far.
On Thursday, Kristin treated me to a belated birthday dinner of my choice. I chose to dress fancy and eat French Food. So we went to Cafe Claude near Union Sqaure and both ordered Onion Soup, Hangar Steak, and wine. Kristin accidentally ordered extra potatoes but then wouldn’t touch them, only saying “life is troublesome.” I would have thought that extra potatoes would help.
To-shi-o and I joined a softball team organized by his coworker Mike. So it was that ‘neath the Tuesday night moonshadow of the Golden Gate Bridge we were slugging it out against Victorious Secret with twelve of our new best friends. While the opposition warmed up on the field, we set up our grill. And drank. The first inning ended with a seven run limit, the hot dogs were brown by the third, and in the fourth I fucked up my left knee breaking up a play at third base. Probably because we only had an hour to play anyway, the mercy rule was not enforced. Final score: 22-1.
I seem to be back from the coast. The south coast. Of Lake Erie. Ben and Joe (barely) flew in from New York, I came in from Pittsburgh, and we all rendezvous-ed with Shal in his newish, possibly semi-permanent home. The night before, driving a Korean rental car upstate, I watched the aggressively uniform landscape of Ohio (is any part of this state uninhabited?) kind of give way to the sprawling, post-industrial mass bisected by river that is the greater Cleveland area. We spent most of time sprawling ourselves: in next-to-back row seats of a tight Indians/Yankees game, in corners of the kind of bars that pull you in with a seven thousand beer menu and keep you there with a Labatt special, and of course on Shal’s living room floor, where approximately one thirtieth of his media collection still fills an entire bookshelf two rows deep. Cleveland is a good place to hang out.
Then I got on the same United States Route 80 of my daily commute and drove East out of the state of Ohio and towards the state of squalor. I was headed to State College, Pennsylvania, where Danny was about to complete his last week ever of studying at the state college in question in a fantastically shitty shell of a house (further ravaged from a party the weekend before). At this point, studying is the generous description of what he does there, though we did wake up at 9:30 AM, after a night of watching DVDs in his warm bedroom, and slashed though a thicket of Ugg boots into middle campus to learn about monopoly. Later on, we went out with his friends to the kind of bars that pull you in with their $5 pitchers of bottom shelf liquor and keep you there because you are not physically free to leave. It was fun and it all made miss college. But not that much.
I completed my five hundred mile circle on PA Route 22 West, where central Pennsylvania transforms to western Pennsylvania via the Altoona Valley. Freight trains still do things like chug up proud green hills and cross sturdy steel truss bridges here. Once in Pittsburgh, I tried to make the most of my time there by visiting PA’s superior state college, eating a kielbasi fried pirogi sandwich, pinball, and meeting up with Stef and Alicia, who spend less on their new mortgages than what I’m thinking about spending on a studio space. As Alicia’s pup was licking my face over a distracted game of Guitar Hero, I thought, she’s got a pretty nice life.
Citibank‘s fine services over the last few years have afforded me not only convenient, cash-free payment options at my favorite merchants, but also 60,000 ThankYou! Reward Points, redeemable for exchange of an impressive array of national and local goods and services. For many months I have pondered my 60,000 ThankYou! Reward Points, the question of which Reward would put them to best use, and the mathematics of hospitality. Economically speaking, the item with the most favorable ThankYou! Reward Point to dollar exchange rate is simply a direct credit card payment (142.86:1). I’m stingy when it comes to anything that isn’t CDs, traveling, or the movies, but this option seemed too depressing even for me (it’s something Jill would do, though). The idea to treat my seven of closest and most carnivorous Bay Area friends to a opulent dinner of huge steaks and fine beverage came to me in the shower and so it was that before I was dry, half of my ThankYou! Reward Points were redeemed towards credit at the punctuationally-challenged Ruth’s Chris Steak House at a somewhat less favorable exchange rate (100.0:1). If you do the math, you will discover how laughably off-target my cost estimation was.
Weird thing was that it was kind of worth it.
On the drive home from work last night I got a text message from a student:
Approximately six seconds later, turning on to Cesar Chavez Street, I entered a plume of brown smoke quickly sweeping through the neighborhood. The smoke was coming from Valencia Street and before I knew exactly what was going on, there was a palpable sense of dread.
The fire was two blocks away, though. A full smorgasbord of citizens of the Mission-Valenica corridor gathered on the street to watch the scene unfold.
[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/fire.flv 320 240]
Nothing brings the neighborhood together like a four alarm blaze. I even saw Colleen (a fellow survivor of the UCSF Puttlitz Lab) for the first time in over a year.
Last weekend I found myself stranded in the Sierra Nevada with Mark, Keri, and Jill. By stranded, I of course mean snowed in for 48 hours at a luxury cabin equipped with frozen fillet mignon and four hundred channels of satellite television (which, to make matters even more hellish, required a 50 yard trek to remove the snow from the five foot-high dish). Speaking of positive yardage, I officially never have to see another replay of Eli Manning’s fourth quarter pass to David Tyree that set up the Giants’ improbable win on Sunday. I don’t care if it was the biggest play in NFL history: an afternoon of one Superbowl highlight is the 2008 equivalent of the Donner party’s snowbound hell in this same area one hundred seventy years ago.
Here are some other things last weekend taught me:
The zenith of my romantic life: August 20, 1993:
On Wednesday night, Nowell and I discussed Postcard #28 with a reporter from the Haight Ashbury Beat, which is a newish SF neighborhood paper. The paper took notice of Nowell’s Cole Valley address and was attacking the local boy makes good angle in what turned out to be a slightly surreal interview, if only because it lasted four times longer than the film in question. For a night, we got to feel like local heros.
Some exciting recent multimedia content:
Tahoe:
[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/tahoe.flv 400 300]
The Ocean Beach Christmas tree burn:
Inner Richmond storm aftermath:
Let the precipitation begin:
Adrienne‘s living in the Mission now. It shouldn’t be, but it’s almost hard to believe that I have a friend in the neighborhood. But I know it’s true because I got a splinter and a framed map of North Carolina when I helped her move last week. Her place is sweet, too. Part of the excitement is the small room that she’s planning on converting into an art space. In fact, she’s got big plans for the entire 900 block of Shotwell street. Something involving stoops and skills, which would sound crazy if it were coming from anyone else. But Adrienne has no shortage of ideas. And no shortage of furniture made out of old wood. Lots of splintery fucking wood.