feather2pixels

The Mission was in top form for last week’s Day of the Dead. The procession traversed a couple of blocks about twenty-fourth street and there were lots of the following:

-candles
-faces painted white
-drums
-(bacon-scented?) incense

To-shi-o, Corinne and I stumbled down the street to take it all in and I’m now convinced that all parades–even non-occult related parades–should take place at night. The darkness enhanced everything good about it: the intrigue, the seemingly controlled chaos, the sense of the familiar becoming unfamiliar. The brown bagged beer also enhanced these things.

[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/dead.flv 400 300]

Oh, and the oil spill. The fucking oil spill. The Chronicle led the next day with a 140 gallon estimate and at an actual figure of 58,000 gallons, as usual, the Chronicle was 0.8% correct. Or 99.2% wrong. Depends on your perspective I guess. Of course, the error isn’t really the Chronicle’s fault (although a six block walk to the bay would have confirmed this number as ridiculous), as everyone is now sorting through the explanation of the USCG’s now famous slowness in getting its story straight (it now appears that at least part of the explanation involves damage to the sounding tubes used to measure tank depth).

Overall it just sucks. Every major beach in the area is closed except Ocean Beach, the greatest of the beaches, and it’s unclear when they will be safe or even if they will ever be truly safe–even small amounts of benzene are enough to can cause drowsiness, dizziness, rapid heart rate, headaches, tremors, confusion, and unconsciousness. Anyway I was on the beach today and it was very unclear what was going on. There were ominous looking signs and loads of workers in white haz-mat outfits picking at the sand, but there were also plenty of surfers, dogs, and general beach miscellany. Are we safe or are we unsafe?

As the media hunts for prey to satiate its never ending bloodlust for blame, the people around me seem to be reacting with varying levels of defensiveness and xenophobia (“Down with Hanjin!”) across party lines. The old boys club at the Maritime Academy (which may actually turn out be the alma mater of the pilot in question) has been decidedly defensive. If you are asking me, they are giving way too much attention to the reactionary nonsense of the first 48 hours, which has included everything from “no single hulled ships in the bay” to “no ships in the bay.” Right. Also, they were really pissed about the front page pictures of oiled birds on day two of the Chronicle’s coverage. One thing conservatives have grown to hate, I’ve noticed, is any level of insinuation that non-human life may be as important as human life. Or human money. Or human jobs.

Wow, for ten minutes I didn’t write on endlessly about myself! (Though you should know I printed some really shitty new postcards this week) Here are some pictures.

Joe’s gone. Before he left, Nowell, him, and I enjoyed a fancy civic center dude evening with the Kronos Quartet at the never comfortable Herbst Theater (has it always been hot as hell in there?). After checking in with the wives, we headed down to the bars south of Cesar Chavez, which are slowly becoming my favorite places to drink in the Mission: the courtyard at El Rio is downright charming, the photo booth at The Knockout is second to none, and for good measure there’s even a Taqueria Can-cun in the area. Even the Argus lounge makes up for an overall lack of inspiration with free shots of vodka gimlet and projected Kubrick films.

It was good to have a night out drinking. The moon was high and brilliant. Mission Street felt like a loving old relative with questionable hygiene. The city glowed. Joe is a believer in the well-timed sentiment and so we spilled lots of beer over locked-eye toasts as we made our way through the rounds. Each new drink comes with a small slug of intensity and that’s how drinking with Nowell and Joe is. Later, Joe learned that on this side of the Cascades, ordering a “carne asada” gets you a plate, not a buritto. Nowell successfully ordered a chorizo burrito (every time Nowell gets chorizo, it seems to generate a new inside joke) and I got my secret weapon: cheese quesadilla.

A few days later, I found myself south of Cesar Chavez again, with Adrienne to watch her boyfriend’s band play the Knockout on a Monday night. Spontaneity! Plus a chance to revisit the photo booth! Adrienne remind me of me. Since starting graduate school, she’s been constantly embattled, yet she’s full of plans for displaying our crafts to the world. Thank goodness somebody is.

Halloween in the Mission District took the form of a mass of costumed nine year olds, most with pumpkin buckets and parents in tow. The sheer number of kids in the neighborhood was fairly amazing to me and seeing them all dressed up made Mission Halloween that much better—it all seemed worlds superior to the non-celebration going on in the Castro, where an armada of cops was apparently deployed to ensure that nobody was having too much fun. I was disappointed that our apartment didn’t receive any trick-or-treaters, but apparently hitting up the local businesses rather than residences is more in line with tradition. For the sake of variety, this probably makes more sense and an informal survey discovered vegan mini cupcakes being distributed at Ritual Coffee Roasters, peanut butter cups at the Bartlett/24th liquor store, and mint flavored toothpicks at the take-out Chinese place across from the BART station. As usual, this area was the center of activity.

After a bit of aimless wandering, I put on my biking gloves, climbed up to our back balcony where nobody can see me, and played songs into the cool night air. This is becoming a routine during these solitary times. It finally feels like Fall.

Another great photo booth shoot, taken with the outstanding unit at The Knockout, after Thursday night Bingo. I especially like the second one:

Look at how nice these photo booth pictures of me and To-Shi-O from The Knockout came out:

Spring Break is great! Although I mostly just continued the aimless roaming through museums, coffee shops, and neighborhood cinemas that I started over the weekend, the city just feels different on a Monday. Especially the Mission. There are a lot of kids here and they make me laugh.

Here are two good things, two bad things, and one reason for alarm

-I am in the best biking shape of my life. On Thursday, I biked to the top of 17th street, just to see if I could. My drug test doctor said I had a pulse of sixty, an 80/50 blood pressure, and nice quads. Then he felt my balls. Nothing can stop me! Except for probably even the smallest car ever made.

-In her prime, Emmylou Harris was what could be the most beautiful woman who ever lived. I have a retroactive crush on her.

-As of today, I am caught up with my 2007 resolution of averaging one movie a week in the theater.

-In a single night I scored and lost a press pass as a photographer to the most anticipated San Francisco rock show of Spring 2007. Technically my name is still on the guest list but there’s no way I can show my face there.

-This is not a joke:

-It’s surely a sign of insanity, but I am getting used to the horrifying sound of my car. I find myself putting off the repair and not just because I am lazy; I am turning heads on the street and I secretly like it. This is what school counselors for years described to my parents as “bad attention.”

How do I want you to feel about my life today?

Well, I finally started cranking out some silkscreened postcards. I am still cutting most of them out, but a limited run (of postcard no. 9, out of sequence only because they were the most plentiful) was dropped in the Mission and 24th mailbox on Friday. Prepare yourself.

There are more on the way. I seriously underestimated the issues involved in screening 220 postcards (matching fronts and backs, successfully printing little letters, finding a good halftone but that’s vague but not too vague) but that’s what workshops are for. Joanna continued to crank out some pretty cool stuff too. I grabbed one of her test strips.

On Wednesday, Phanna and I won trivia night with an unprecedented two man team! It came down to a rare tiebreaker question: “what was the average weight, in lbs, of a knight’s armor in the middle ages?” We said forty-five. It’s fifty. Add one Pig Buck to the bank.

Work is so silly. I read about valves and programmable logic controllers and things like that, and the next day I show thirty-five college kids what I learned. Part of their training is licensing as a third engineer (on a ship) and this week Baby Bluehawk and her friend passed the exam requirement. She stopped by my office beaming to deliver the news and it was charming. So that’s a good part of my job, right?

The second Critical Mass of 2007 was much more successful than the first. This time I coralled the Bulldogger and Marella to join me, but we cut it too close and, again, I missed the beginning (do they really start at 6:30?). Luckily, we intercepted a fellow straggler who came prepared with a walkie-talkie and he led us to Fisherman’s Wharf, where somehow the mass had extended itself. After that (and besides a rare Pac Heights excursion) it was a pretty standard ride. The guy with the ridiculously loud speaker cart was there this time, which makes a big difference.

This week, after nine and a half years of post secondary education, Jill started her first job since the ol’ sandwich shop in high school. That’s the kind of irony grad school gets you. But suddenly she’s a development engineer at a fancy biotech company on the Peninsula and I am very proud of her. I still remember first meeting her in Dr. Stewart’s Physiscs class on virtually our first day at Pitt. We ended up choosing the same major (bioengineering) and working together on just about every group project, sometimes against our will. I caught up with her for a rushed Guinness (which she claims to only drink with me) on Wednesday night and asked her how it was going. “Lonely,” she said. She will be fine. Jill is always fine.

Oh Morgan Jameson, what the fuck are we doing? I wrote her a really heartfelt email a little while ago but it was utterly unsendable. So I didn’t send it, we didn’t speak for a while, and now, somehow, I am doing this thing where I write her about every little detail of my madness. And make no mistake, it is madness: we wrote 5,548 words to each other this weekend. It’s helped bring things to a conclusion but now she just thinks I am insane and self absorbed, which of course is kind of true, but I think I regret it. As it stands now, the plan is to not write each other for a month.
I went to an Oscar party at Louise’s tonight. I will say several things about Louise: (a) she throws a damn good Oscar party. Just like last year, it featured her baked potato bar, which is executed with such authority that it transcends the irony that would surely destroy any lesser baked potato bar. This brings up another good thing about Louise: (b) she’s groomed her irony into sincerity, which seems to me like your only viable option if you are going to stick with this type of disposition(At least without becoming an insufferable Mission jerkoff). Louise does karaoke and Stevie Nicks parties and sundae bars because she loves them. We also made buttons, which I realized is an awesome thing to do.

After another Sparky’s breakfast this week, Sadie took Nowell and I to the giant camera obscura at the Cliff House. It was closed (apparently because the day wasn’t “beautiful enough”) but at least it made for a good Polaroid.

I tried to start this blog post a bunch of times but it hasn’t worked. I guess that means I can’t figure myself out. I can’t. The imaginary is a drug and I am addicted to it. And that inevitably means pushing away the real and the people who actually have something positive to offer me. I am powerless. I live to torment myself. But hey, it was another wholesome weekend. I went surfing for the first time. I got a plant. I went to a Berkeley party where people had names like Pepper and Io. I ate Taco Bell. Check out these Polaroids!

God dammit, I totally lost a blog post. The gist of it was that I had the most action-packed weekend in recent memory.

Critical Mass wasn’t quite rained out on Friday, but I would say that the mass wasn’t quite critical enough. I got there (The Ferry Building at 18:30 on the final Friday of each month) late and joined a group of maybe twenty other stragglers for a subcritical mass. Subcritical Mass was in some ways more fun but noteably more dangerous than real Critical Mass–there aren’t enough bodies to stop traffic and at one point a Honda Prelude came within a foot of hitting me head on at forty-five miles per hour as we biked the wrong way down Folsom Street. We finally found the main group, but it didn’t really have enough people to form a collective conscious. Instead we were a bunch of indecisive assholes, tentative at every intersection, and I biked home to work on feather2pixels.com.

So: feather2pixels.com: check it out. I guess this is my best stab at a first draft. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Not that anyone needs any of this crap. I feel good about the modest format, though even this laughably little took me months to program. I can’t escape computers.

So after blowing $10 on a misloaded film cartridge, the old Polish dude at Action Camera in West Portal showed me how to properly load my new Polaroid on Saturday morning. After producing a few successful shots, I say “I can’t believe I waited till I was twenty-seven to pick one of these up.” Every frame looks like it was taken in in 1976!

That night, after finding my favorite Dylan album on vinyl, I made it back to the Exploratorium for a sound festival, which was a little disappointing by Exploratorium standards, but I saw some old friends and I felt very cool to be known at the greatest science museum in the world. A pepperoni and mushroom pizza with a pitcher of Bud was enjoyed afterwards at Vincent’s.

Sunday started with a surprisingly solid breakfast in North Beach followed by a hike in the Marin Headlands. I’ve never actually hiked there, but the hills smelled strongly of Calfornia and the Pacific was sparkly from the summit. There are endless clusters of abandoned forts up there, decaying in the caustic fog sixty years after the Japanese didn’t invade. A murder of crows kept their eyes on us as we climbed through the ruins and wished that I had bothered to bring along my new camera.

This is Sarah:

After three unsuccessful attempts to find Rocky II at area video stores, I met Krisitin at the Sunset Baskin Robbins. We settled for the original, which wasn’t really a bad thing. And there you go: an exhausting, exhilarating, perfect week. A model for what I want out of life.

My roomates three want to hire a maid. A maid! Don’t they understand that I already work a semi-professional job, commute to work, and have a retirement account–any closer to the precipice of middle class hypocrisy and I’ll fall right in.

But there is dust in the corners and I’ve been the least active member of the autonomous cleaning plan. I am not in a position to make a big fuss. To be fair, though, I always clean up after myself and there’s been no formal system for anything beyond that. So we are getting maid.

On the plus side, this will double the number of Latino people I interact with in the Mission since right now it’s just the guy that rolls my burrito at El Farolito. True, this could start to get weird. Luckily, there is plenty of Noam Chomsky in the living room bookshelf. If I start feeling like the politics of my own life are a little off, it will be easy to remind myself where the real problems are situated: with those individuals not associated with the American progressive movement. Can’t do shit about that, can I?

It freaks me out how long you can go before you catch on to people. Especially when you want them to turn out to be a certain way. How exactly does one determine that somebody is a not good person? I’m not talking about a bad person–that’s easy. Just someone who doesn’t particularly care about other people. That confuses me. Everybody wants to appear like a good person and plenty of people are good at being friendly. Some people are exceptional at it. Maybe this is all just a matter expecting nothing from people.

But enough of that. Hip hip hooray for seventy-two hour weekends. When I was working at the museum, every weekend was this long. Man, that was a another life. These days, I wake up at five for a commute to an office where I am three months behind my grading, which is impressive in light of the fact I have only been working there for two.

Today, though, I got to escape reality at the end of the continent with the Bulldogger. We met up for a simple breakfast in the Mission and then we were off, traversing through the park and whatnot. That’s been my weekend life for the last few months, but I’m not used to having company. It was interesting to have a companion.
Looking ahead, I’m hoping I can hop skip and jump my way through this week and towards nine whole days of Thanksgiving break. I can’t fucking wait. Danny was supposed to make his way over here for the holiday but apparently the people who do things like buy Danny’s plane tickets couldn’t find a deal. A shame: I know he would have been up for football on the beach and midnight movies.

I think plan B is to accompany Jenny down south to where the air might not be so clean but I can think everything over in the sun. I actually haven’t been down to L.A. since I moved West and this is my forth year here. I have been so lost in this city that I’ve barely scratched California’s surface.

Pictures of my new neighborhood:

I am starting a new online journal. Let’s get a few things squared away:

A. Motivation
The only way that the stupid shit happening to me makes any sense whatsoever is allegorically. Trust me, I have been trying to deal at face value with the basic structure of my life for a few months now and it’s been a minor disaster. That shit is for the birds. And I am no bird. I have hair all over my body, give birth to live young and nourish them with my milk. The life of the mammal is shrouded in metaphor.

B. Fuck You
Just like you, I believe that publishing a personal journal on the internet means that, at best, you are a narcissistic loser and, at worst…well, there really is no lower limit is there? Anyways, fuck you I don’t care what you think about me. Don’t get me wrong, if you find me creative and charming that’s exactly what I am going for. If not, though, go dot-com your asshole to a tree.

A lot of stuff has happened to me in the last few months. After living together for 3+ years, me and The Rascal broke up and I moved to a 4br in the Mission district. I got a full time job teaching electrical engineering to college seniors on the shores of San Pablo Bay. Lastly, I spent the summer back in Berkeley, doting on a mysterious woman who let me down. Maybe some sort of chaos is a better characterization than “minor disaster.” I prefer the one that makes me appear more victimized.

The mysterious woman was alluring from a distance. Here is a list of things we did and didn’t have in common:

In Common:

• Both honest more in writing than in person.
• Both took French.
• Both twenty-seven and on the verge.
• Both work well with people professionally.

Not in Common:

• I project what I feel, she feels what she projects.
• The word “hella.”
• I let people in, she ins people let.

We had an amazing elixir summer but in the end she broke things off with me hella quick after a Friday night in the Marina. Was it Al Green who had his baby change the lock to her heart on a Tuesday while he was at work? I know how that guy feels. Actually, that’s bullshit–nevermind her heart, I didn’t even have the key to her front porch. And I constantly wonder how I ever felt so close to someone so opaque. Because I wasn’t. OK, since my new online journal is already at risk of boring my one reader back to craigslist’s casual encounters, I will just say that my biggest problem for now is that I am confused about what it means to touch someone. I don’t even know if I want anyone touching me for a while. In other words, nothing good ever happens when you go out in the Marina.

The job is as ridiculous as it sounds. If you return to feather2pixels.com, you will understand.

My bedroom still resembles the storage unit that preceded it as the place I keep my stuff, but you could make a decent argument that my house is sitting on the best block in the entire city. It’s right off the BART station and there is a lot of foot traffic. That’s what makes the Mission awesome–people’s lives here are happening on the streets. It seems like the type of place where you get into a band because your neighbor had a CD on the other night, not beacue you read a review online. As for the hipsters, they are harmless really. I actually think it’s quite charming how so many of them are mediocre, making up for it with some kind of creative energy. I can deny it all I want but I fit right in.