San Francisco All Stars

Thu, July 12, 2007 - 10:21 PM

I watched the Home Run Derby and All Star game this week with a genuine shitload of enthusiasm, mostly because it was here, in San Francisco at Phone Company Park and what a great time it was. My job has become brutal and the summer is here so baseball is there to get me through it all as it always has.

There was Willie McCovey, number 44, at the Home Run Derby. Phone Company Park is one of the hardest to hit a Home Run in, which is another reason why Barry Bonds is one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

Barry sat out the Derby because he's old and you could see how it would have killed him had he made it to the second round when Matt Holliday, Valadimir Guerrero, Alex Rios and Albert Pujols worked their asses off to hit home runs to narrow it down to the final two, Guerrero and Rios. I got home early to see the kayaks in the McCovey Cove and all the Aerial Shots of our fair City, up 3rd, into SOMA, the City skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge.

There's no better ballpark in America if you ask me.

Jenny likes Guerrero because he didn't wear gloves or a helmet or (she says) a cup. I couldn't really make out the cup thing. I enjoy watching her watching baseball. She goes to one game a year at the park and she'll watch stuff like the World Series. But she'll deny that she likes any sports, even though I know she likes baseball since it's zen and she likes to give me a hard time for enjoying the game...

The game itself was the usual, except it was, as I mentioned, in San Francisco. Pre-game, was all about 76 year old Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid, getting adoration from 40 thousand plus fans; adoration you rarely see for older folks, but Mays is a legend and it seems like Sports and Astronauts (and now Rock Stars) elicit such adoration. Our's is a country that doesn't generally hold the old in great esteem unfortunately, but those three fields of career seem to be good paths for having a stadium still rocking out to you when you're in your 70s, riding in the back of a Pink Cadillac, throwing balls into the crowd. You gotta give it to Mays.

I you don't know anything about Willie Mays, read about him. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Mays. He was number 24.

And the media was really building Barry Bonds (#25) up. At the All Star break, he was 4 away from Hank Aaron's all time home run record of 755 and with all the controversy, well, in my opinion, that just gives the Barry haters something to fuel their fires. They always hated and booed him because he always kicked their asses. Now they can bitch and bitch about an asterix to his career and on and on ad nauseum, but really, Barry Bonds is the greatest playing baseball player alive today. Here's a little bit of what he's done.

- Holds record for most home runs in a season, (73)
- 2nd all time for career home runs, (751)
- Holds record for most walks in a career (2,512)
- Holds record for most MVP awards (7) and consecutive MVP awards (4); (1990, 1992-93, 2001-04). Note: the current version of the MVP award has been given since 1931. Prior to that year, the League Awards were only given to a player once (from 1922-1929) and sometimes not at all (from 1915-1921).
- Holds record for most pitchers homered off of (442)
- Holds record for most consecutive games with a walk (18)
- Shares record for consecutive plate appearances with a walk (7)
- Holds record for consecutive seasons with 30 or more home runs (13)
- Only player in 400 homerun and 400 stolen base club
- Only player in 500 homerun and 500 stolen base club
- One of four players in 40-40 club (40 homeruns and 40 stolen bases).
- Holds record for most consecutive seasons with .600 slugging percentage or higher (8)

etc. etc. ..

...so you can kiss my ass if you if you don't think Barry is one of the greatest. Yes, his prime is past. Yes, he may have taken performance enhancing whatever, but it wasn't illegal and the 1990s will always be a time when baseball players may have been taking that shit. But he's got the cred. People who hate him, do so because he's beaten them bad, made their pitchers look like little girls. And he's our player, a San Franciscan, the Godson of Willie Mays.

The game itself was ok. There was well deserved booing from the fans for The Anaheim Angels and the hated Dodgers, both teams who have fucked the Giants over when it really counted, the bastards. The Blue Angels flew over at the Chris Isaac Star Spangled Banner and I tried to count how long it took them to get from the Port of Oakland, where the blimp first filmed them, to when they buzzed the park. I think it was around 10 seconds. Then, not two minutes later Jenny looked at me and said, "You hear that?" and it was the Blue Angels flying over our house out in the Sunset.

As far as the game went, Ichiro hit big in the 5th, an in park Home Run off Ken Griffey, the first in the park HR in Allstar game history. Griffey did hit a sac fly in the 6th to to make it 3 AL and 3 NL. And the American League eventually won, as they have fo the last 9 years.

It was great week of baseball all in all.

But back to Barry.

It occurs to me that, in my short "adult" life, there have been 4 or 5 men who were "Stars" who I have admired and Barry is one of them.

They're people I've never really met, but I may have shaken their hands or nodded to them, or yelled out loud enough for them to hear me, and they're all flawed in one way or another. Perhaps their flaws and their greatness make them more interesting, because they're all doing what they do, and they aren't destroying shit, like some of the "men" these days who are driven by nothing but what seems like just pure fucking evil. Men who aren't even tragic, they're just assholes. I don’t need to mention names.

I know Barry's heard me yelling at him at Phone Company Park, or back at Candlestick. Mr. Jerry Garcia was another man who was dear to my heart and who I mourned sincerely when he finally died. I remember tripping and yelling out shit in my deep drunk way at shows and being told not to freak Jerry out. And there was Bill Clinton, who I believe cared about this country and left it in good shape from his 8 years in office, but who wasn't part of the oil current slime crew, so the witch hunt took him down for his definition of sex, only to have all the abundance and good will he'd worked so hard to leave as his legacy for this country, looted by the profiteers who stole the 2000 election. I shook Bill's hand in Union Square as he got off a cable car, down into the crowd and I knew then that I'd support that guy.

And there was Willie Nelson who played 3 versions of Whisky River at the Fillmore that one weekend of Jack Daniels soaked concerts when I'd scream out Whisky River and he'd find me in the crowd then nod and go into the song yet again. And I used to teach Bukowski at the University of South Florida Modern Lit class. Never met Buk, but I wish I would have.

Ahhh, blog blather..

But perhaps I'm thinking about these All Stars because my friend (who I admire) is writing about his experiences finding himself in the jungle drinking vines with shamans and just after, he came back to the states and his father died after a long illness, and I think that’s affecting me. And another friend of mine (who I also admire) just lost his dog of many years (again after illness) who was his and his wife’s child and they’re in so much pain right now I can’t even write about it, but I want to do something for them, and writing is the only thing I can think would even be close to doing something sincere, but I have to wait until the first tidal wave of grief has passed over them because when we’re in that state, we can’t do anything but feel the intensity of the pain of our loss and just keep our heads above water.

If you consider smoking dope or being an alcoholic or a junkie shaman, or taking performance enhancing substances or getting a blowjob from an intern and lying about it flaws, then I suppose these men are all flawed and damaged, but to me, they're all kind of real and, dare I say, heroes. I'm flawed and damaged and I'm just trying to do the right thing, the thing I was meant to do, and my flaw is that I let myself get sidetracked, and I drink and work jobs that are unfulfilling and I find excuses for not just quitting what I’m doing and starting something that would be exactly what I think I should be doing at the moment. I believe there's something I'm meant to do and I haven't done it yet, so death can't quite get his grip around me. I keep slipping out.

And I think we're all like that. People who hide their flaws are full of shit and I don't trust them. What are they hiding, anyway?

And maybe the National League will win next year. Or maybe not.

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~npmelton/sfmap96.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Run_Derby
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_McCovey
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/all_star/y2007/hr_derby.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Mays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Bonds

Bars of the Outer Sunset

Work's been boring. I find myself fantasizing about taking another 6 weeks off, but now I'm feeling a lot stronger and I've come to terms with a lot of my new lifestyle bullshit so I think it'd be more prolific in the writing sense than it was just this last time. But alas, I'm out of vacation and they let us loose next for Thanksgiving. Then Xmas week.

I measure out my life in vacation days. I'm trying to stop doing that.

I've been spending time at Grandma's Tavern on Taraval lately. They serve me my 3 glasses of Merlot. I watched the World Series there and I check out Monday night football sometimes. They're a good bunch of people at Grandma's, dive dwellers, with the occasional Hipster herd that floats in for some pool and martinis. The bartenders are all nice (to me anyway). Dick owns the place and between him and some of the other old time Sunset crew who seem to live there, they know pretty much every bar in the Sunset back to when they were growing up out here in the land of the fog.

Grandmas was originally on Noreiga, where the Eagles Drift In is now, between 20th and 19th. Dick came over to Taraval when the Philipino owner's son came in one night when the bar was open and decided that they weren't charging enough rent since it was obvious to him that Grandmas was making money hand over fist. Dick is classic old school Sunset. He tells it like he sees it and you pretty much know where you're at with him. All the old timers make no amends for being entirely un-PC and letting you know what nationality it was who did what when and where. It's refreshing, but sometimes I find myself with my jaw dropping then laughing and thinking, did he *really* just say that.

The building that Grandma's is in was the Blue Crystal in the 1920s, when there were more bars out here. Taraval was in the center of the Parkside Subdivision that was named Parkside because most people thought of sand dunes and desolation. The Twin Peaks Tunnel that goes beneath the mountain at the Castro and comes out at West Portal was opened in 1918. That street car line opened up the commerce strip of West Portal and Taraval. The Parkside Theater is in the block above Grandmas and there's a Copy Central there that used to be called the Auld Saud and before that Panama Central and before that the Spinning Wheel.

Farther down Taraval is the Dragon Lounge where a lot of the cops from the Parkside station hangout. That bar used to be called Faheys, and had the slogan "Where the elite meet". I moved out here when it was still Faheys, now they serve a lot of frou frou drinks, but the vibe is still chill and they've got a nice pool table.

All the way down Taraval is the Rip Tide and they allow dogs in, so I took Sailor there when he was just a small boy a year ago. I need to get back there. It's around 47th and evidently it was owned by some brothers who were always getting into trouble back before its current incarnation when it was called the SandBar. Before that, it was called the OarHouse and that name goes way back. They countered Fahey's slogan "Where the elite meet" with "Where the debris meets the Sea". This may well be the western most bar in the City.

Between Faheys at like 25th and the Rip Tide all the way down at the ocean is the Four Deuces. It was called that when I moved out here, then it was taken over and renovated and renamed the Old Rouge for a while, but it's back to being called the Four Deuces again. That bar is at 34th and evidently the name, the Four Deuces comes from the fact that the owner's original bar was at 2222 Irving.

Those are my favorite Sunset dive bars. If you take the L all the way to the end of Taraval, past the Rip Tide, to where it turns to go to the Zoo, there is a large Synagogue there called B’nai Emunah. Evidently that building used to be a large bar called the Sand Dunes and they had go-go dancers in cages from the late 60s to about 1975 when the Synagogue moved in. I thought that was pretty funny.

Other bars of note out in the Sunset are Club Scirroco, and I'm not sure that's still around. I used to go there to eat the spaghetti in the crock pot and hang out with some cool people. It was on Judah and 20 something I think. There was an altercation one night where some Asian gangbangers came in, caused trouble and were told to leave. They returned later and shot up the place, killing one innocent person. I saw the fliers around the Sunset for a long time, offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the killers. Damn shame.

There's Sam McQuires at Noriega and 45th, just up from the Safeway in that 3 or four blocks of little Chinatown. It is an Irish bar and has been for a long time evidently. I heard it was originally Antons, then Rodney's Fishbowl, then the owner wanted it to sound more Irish in the 70s so he named it O'Freethy's. Then it was McCarthys. When I moved out here it had been renamed Playland and there were photos of Laughing Sal in there. Its current incarnation is Sam McQuires.

And at the end of Judah, probably the westernmost Bar in the City (in a close race with the RipTide) is the Pittsburg Pub. This place was called the Reef before and evidently that end of Judah had a bunch of bars at one time, the Redmill, the Seagull, The Gables. And there was something called Slots at the Beach. And Playland wasn't too far from there...

I try to make it to all the bars in my neighborhood. Someone dropped off a book called "Dice Bars of San Francisco" at Grandmas and I was reading it the other day. None of this came from that, it came from the regulars at Grandmas, and I searched for that book and couldn't find it online. I'd recommend it if I could find it. I *can* recommend Lorrie Ungarretti's book San Francisco's Sunset District for some cool photos of this neighborhood.

We'll stick around until the landlord kicks us out. We never know when that'll be. Our rent is so cheap that we can deal with the "stuck in the 1950s" reality of the Sunset. We can deal with the frozen fog and the rain that comes in off the ocean. Its nice to be able to always hear the waves whenever you take the time to listen for them.

And if I ever get 86'd from a bar, there's always another one just up the street

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_District,_San_Francisco,_California
http://www.sfhistoryencyclopedia.com/articles/s/streetNaming.html
http://www.sfhistoryencyclopedia.com/articles/c/chanSunsetDistr.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Peaks_Tunnel
http://local.yahoo.com/details?id=32356625
http://www.yelp.com/biz/jRy3Zwbe4V1JqWVoQ_GIkw
http://www.amazon.com/Franciscos-Sunset-District-Images-America/dp/0738528625



*Ali Baba* Alexandra Davies


Mon, November 20, 2006 - 1:09 PM
Don't forget the Western Neighborhoods Project--they've got some cool old photos and info.

There was a nice pic in the Sunset Beacon a few weeks ago [?] with a pic of GGpark and surrounds from 100+ years ago, around world fair time. I kept it.

We were weary of the Four Deuces for awhile, since you can't see in from the outside--but it was chill when we checked it out. Mostly just stay home and drink with the roommates in comfort--much cheaper, and for us ladies, the security of knowing the bathroom won't be nasty is always nice. ;P
[not that I remember any particularly nasty Sunset toilets, but ya never know with dive bar type places] ;S

Getting Stabbed in the Tenderloin

Tue, March 7, 2006 - 7:36 PM

I just posted to Red Tux's Blog: "Last night, I was almost murdered", where he was at a club when some gangbanger shot at him and people fell and he (being a trained EMT guy) tried to save some guy, but the bullets just tore the patient apart and there was nothing Tux could do because the damage was done.

Here in the bay area we don't have near the kind of violence people are seeing in Iraq or Afghanistan. But even here, with the random acts of violence we do encounter, the taint is just as strong in that moment. When it happens to you, well, there's no discounting it, eh. There's plenty of bloody horror to go around. And at anytime the whole artifical notion of civilization could be stripped away, regardless of where you are.

The whole civilization thing is fragile and always at the tipping point. But there is a fine line between paranoia and intellect. We have to keep producing enough children who understand that line, otherwise we'll all be living in red states eventually, with the Haves behind walls that separate them from the disenfranchised Have Nots out there. ...with the Haves sitting on their security and waiting for their imaginary concept of the Rapture to take them up into the fuzzy clouds where they'll all live happily ever after.

Does every culture have a mythology that abdicates it from the responsibility of raising up the underclasses so we can move towards utopia? Ours certainly does.

I blame the Baby Boomers for all this. They've always been hedonistic to a fault and my age group follows in their wake. Now I've got to see all these drug and health commercials as they start breaking down into the slippery slope of gaping death. Greatest consumer generation in our history. And now that they've done all their drugs and had their sexual revolution and rebelled and bought their houses and IRAs , they're finding God.

God, please spare me from your followers.

But I digress, Red Tux was posting follow ups to his blog, the murder, the investigation, and I remembered when I got stabbed in the Tenderloin.

Here's one of my funny "I was almost dead stories". I've got a couple.

I've spent some time down there, in the Loin and in the Mission, doing things I'd rather not get into any detail about. Back in the nineties, between serious relationships I was known to galavant and befriend the people who live beneath the stairs and who wander the streets at early morning hours with tweak in their step and guns in their pockets. I've sat up in No Tell Hotels with a girl for hire and a pipe, with her angry pimp prowling about and with me at the peephole sweating and then sitting in the grayish pallor of a television droning in the corner thinking what the fuck was I doing there.

I've known those girls and those gangstas who are all probably dead or long gone by now and I've been in those uncomfortable situations where your tiny paycheck will be devoured that weekend and you will be dying with the poison you've injested.

I remember one night, walking home from the Montgomery BART, thinking, tonight I'll be good. I won't hook up with the freaks or the gangbangers or the homeless or the other assorted San Francisco losers who have been sucked into that hectic paranoid survival zone of pain just behind the Welcome to San Francisco sign. I was bopping along with my bag and not a care in the world. Up past the bars and the liquor stores. Up past the girl who saw the taint in my eye and asked if I wanted to "Come upstairs" and I said "no darlin."

Then I was going down Larkin towards the Civic Center and suddenly someone blindsided me from behind with a huge punch between the shoulder blades, causing me to spin around and to grab into my bag where, if you'd have asked if you could borrow my knife, it would have taken me 5 minutes to find, but the knife was in my hand and open.

There were five or six kids, all youngish, wearing big puffy Raider's jackets, staring me down as I stood against that fence. The biggest of these kids said, "Give me your money," and I took out my wallet which was empty and showed them I was busted. I was actually on my way to the ATM, but I didn't mention that. One kid said, "He's got a knife."

Ha. It was a tiny, laughable knife.

I said, "So what are we going to do here?"

They stood there in front of me for a moment and I expected them to be on me like a pack of wolves, but the big kid said, "Nothing, we got the wrong person." and they were gone, ducking and holding their big Raiders' jackets about them as they made their way around the corner.

I stood there a moment and looked at my knife and laughed, then I made a big whew, right as the sun slipped down behind the buildings and those sick yellow street lights came on and flooded that filthy concrete expanse. I collected my wits beneath the Air Travel Motel sign and resumed my bopping along, down towards Civic Center.

A block or so later I felt something on my back that tickled and I stuck my hand up there behind my shirt to scratch it and I felt a warm and stickiness and pulled my arm out and around to find it covered and glistening with rich crimson blood all the way halfway up my arm. It was bubbly bright. Frothy even. I was like, fuck. That son of a bitch stabbed me.

I walked a couple more blocks to a coffee shop that was open and went in. At the counter I said, "You need to call an ambulance."

The girl behind the counter shook her head and said, "No can use phone."

I sighed and put my arm back up my shirt and let some blood pool into it then I slapped a big puddle of warm bubbly blood onto the counter that splattered all over the doughnut display case and the Leukemia quarter cardboard collection thing and her and I said again, "Call an ambulance."

Luckily for your's truly, some guy was in there who said he was a doctor and he ran behind the counter and called 9-11.

I took a seat at one of their rickety round tables, bleeding heavily, and I lit a cigarette and bitched about how the kids in the Tenderloin just couldn't be trusted these days, and I remember the blood all over my cigarette and caked in my beard where I'd rubbed my face. There were other people in there who were horrified with all the blood all over me and the smoking inside, then the paramedics came and for some reason they cut off my trousers and right as they were putting me on the stretcher I started nodding off.

They took me to General where I was moved to the front of the line in ER because evidently I was dying and a nice nurse woman held my arm as they inserted a chest tube and I remember her saying, "This is going to really hurt," and it did. They cut a slit in you down into the ribs, then they have to force the end of the tube through your chest peritoneum and they can't get in there with anaesthetic or a scalpel.

It was kind of fun watching the tube after they put it in because they just let it drop down and all of the sudden all this blood starts pouring out into an open bucket on the floor. I kept that tube. Still have it, bloodstained and all, down in the basement at my workbench.

I spent 2 days in General. They gave me morphine for the pain and it was in a drip. Whenever the nurses would change shifts I'd get the new one to give me an extra dose. By Sunday night I was ready to go. They'd taken out the chest tub (an orderly assisted a medical student with his first chest tube removal on me) a procedure that also, as they told be beforehand, hurt like hell.

I took out my IV and my roommate gave me a ride home. I went into the Cop Shop on Bryant Street that week to get my back photographed. They'd missed my spinal cord by about 5 millimeters. Man I'd have been pissed if they'd have paralyzed me. And when I told the cop that a kid in Raider's jacket had stabbed me, but I couldn't really remember what he looked like, he told me he doubted they'd ever find them. At least not until they'd killed someone.

Waiting in that dull room in the police station, in the Victim's Unit, with the cheap polaroids taken by a desk duty cop, with the mug shots and the Victim form -- that was when the feeling of being a Victim is most likely to take hold. It hangs in the air there like a sick helpless demon ready to pounce on you. But I'm not a vicitm. I like to think that I'm moving through this life like a glacier, cutting out valleys behind me. Son of royalty. I'm going to spray paint myself over any boring surface I encounter, leave my scent, so someone says, "A big animal slept here" and I'm going to inject myself into the bloodstream of our species.

It'll take a lot more than some kids with a knife to slow me down.

After that I found that my body wouldn't let me go to the Mission or the Tenderloin any more. I could no longer hang out with the hustlers and the gangsters. I couldn't make my feet walk there because I'd break out in a sweat and become cold and nervous. I've never really understood anxiety, and objectively I could tell that this was a reptillian brain response to what had happened, but subjectively, I just wasn't able to go back to that life. And that worked out well for me, actually.

I was suddenly cat sensitive to people walking closely behind me (and I still am). I went through a period where I carried a .380 around in my coat, then I carried a 12 inch knife. I remember finally getting rid of that knife the night that Jenny and I went to the Cellspace for the first time for some Casino Night thing Chicken John was putting on where he had a large roach that ran around in some kind of gambling game.

Years later, I can do the walk down the Loin or the Mission. I can still sense the dealers and they see me but I nod them away. I carry that taint in my walk even though it has been years since I've been lost down there. Jenny had a show at the PawnBrokers Gallery, now part of the Shooting Gallery last year and I found myself walking the 1/2 block down there to stand beneath that Air Travel Motel sign and to watch the good people pass by beneath those sick pale yellow street lights. It was good mojo.

And I'm glad that I was the one to get stabbed that night and not someone else who may have had a harder time of it. I hope I took the bullet (or blade if you will) for some other unsuspecting schlep who may have been there in the wrong place at the wrong time.




2 Comments

RedTux


Tue, March 7, 2006 - 10:17 PM
Ya sounds like you can pretty close to purchasing the farm so to speak. Glad that was not your day to meet the maker. :-)

Any time there is a trauma situation the patient will get what's called a "strip and flip". That's where all of their clothes are cut off so that every surface of the body can be visualised.

Glad you're still here. :-)

Tracy


Wed, March 8, 2006 - 12:47 PM
wow....
Holy shit. That is a fuckin nightmare. I've learned a bit more about "residential hotels" this year than I ever wanted to know. But you never think that you're actually gonna get rolled.

I wonder If I met you at the Lost Vegas where you ditched your knife? I work the crap table.
Chicken will be doing the 1st Lost Vegas in 5 years on April 14th. All the old crew & I'm very excited. Happinin at Nimby & I'm lookin forard to seein you....

Perhaps, in your honor I could mug people at the event.

The Mall

It being the great American Consumer Holiday, Jenny and I decided that we wanted to get ourselves some cameras. She wanted an expensive digital SLR that would allow her to photograph her paintings without us having to pay someone 200$ a pop and I wanted the cheapest and hardiest camera available so that I could photograph the things I write about and remember what the hell I was thinking when I stumbled from writing spot to writing spot.

It was the day before Christmas Eve so we went to Ritz Camera at the Stonestown Mall as much for kicks as for the cameras themselves.

We never go to the mall, but that day we were brave and spontaneous so we drove up past the YMCA and into the parking lot where it was like a rock concert with all the cars and we eventually found a space way out by the eucalyptus trees.

We entered the holy mall through Macys and passed though the initial Christmas displays of trees and wreaths and designer ornaments all on sale due to the late date and that particular section was steeped in the sweet edible scent of mulled wine, cinnamon and other holiday spices which triggered memories of Christmases past.

Then we went up to shoes and leather items, all heavy and tanned, like roast beast, and my nostrils remembered fresh leather, tasty, with almost a hint of chocolate and something fresh yet sour like lemons, then we were around the corner into the perfumes and there was a 10 foot square section where the leather mixed with the perfume and I stood there saying, "You know Bird, there's got to be a job where the department store plans how to lead us along with the mixing of all these smells."

Macys pushed us along, olfactory science planned perfectly to take us from the leather mix into the perfume and beauty counters where young Macys makeup girls stood chittering amongst themselves and appeared to be busy in a manic way, creating false excitement, and on every counter oval mirrors awaited your makeover to the tune of your Macys card charged to the limit. Those girls were like used car salesmen, waiting for the next sucker who wanted to do away with those "crow's feet" and "frown lines" and "jowling at the jawline", "deep folds" or "marionette lines" that are all symptoms of the natural and dignified process of growing older and that have all been properly defined as something negative that can only be "cured" by the latest product offered at Macys.

We escaped beauty and perfume out into the semi controlled chaos of the Mall Proper and the scent of Boudin Bakery mixed with brand new tennis shoes (Just do it, please). Godiva chocolates mixed with that brand new load of mall merchandise; wool sweaters and rows and rows of plastic candy tainted toys, more leather and the ever omnipotent burn of electronic gizmos. There were the yellow lamps warming up large pretzels and hot dogs on a stick up to the food court where broken and tired families sat four to a small table to devour all manner of insincere Asian Pacific noodle and rice plates, or inferior sushi, or faux Philly cheese steaks.

The food court was all sanitized below and manic neon glowing above at each restaurant, with hoodlum wannabe mall warriors talking on cell phones and making high school passes at suburban Latino and Japanese girls done up in their best ghetto makeup with eyebrows pruned then penciled in and all wearing lowcut jeans that enunciated their 17 year old J-Lo asses. And everyone, EVERYONE, on cell phones, so much so that I wondered if at least half of them weren't just acting like they were talking to someone since most of their friends were probably here, at the mall.

Ah, but maybe that was it, they were all talking to the kids a table over.

And there was such a din of talking on those phones...that din was rising up all around us, and they were all moving like cattle in lines, but less orderly since they retained a semblance of their human disorder so they'd break away and jump ahead like healthy salmon swimming upstream to spawn sometimes.

Santa was there in the middle of the mall, below the food court, holding his own court like he was the Pope with pilgrims in line to kiss his ring and sit on his lap. Parents lined up around the great lit Christmas trees with children to get photographs taken.

Santa was Saint Peter and all the good consumers swished though as if they were clubbling or there to talk on their cell phones or simply there because it was the place to go and Bird and I stood at the balcony taking in the voices swirling up into that grand cacophony, up into the vault above him, into the apex of that blinking atrium where it was all white twinkling and bold colors below, reflective spaces and wide open, and those bold color schemes below all defined singular spaces of large inviting entrances where retail slaves stood watch, waiting cheerfully to help you along with your purchase.

Each store was colorfully branded like their websites. Like a lifestyle. And everywhere offers of better buying power, better deals, don't worry, you'll never be left out of the yearly holiday buying frenzy. Don't worry my entirely immature child who has absolutely zero concept of what borrowing really means, you can charge it all up now.

I noticed actual open space benches, but they were taken by the hardcore who lived there and who'd invested hours of their time in that place, so the benches were theirs and they were aggressively guarding them. The only other places you could sit came with a purchase of coffee or a pretzel. Watching is discouraged when there are so many places you can investigate and make a purchase.

We made it to Ritz Camera fully expecting to be disappointed, but we were "waited on" by a smart kid named Paul who knew cameras and told us about the lenses Jenny needed and we dropped a grand with him. I asked him if he got a commission and he said, "A small one" so that was cool. We grabbed a catalog on the way out because I felt like we'd made a connection. Something almost sincere. We'd go back there. The scam worked. But Paul was cool nonetheless.

Then we were back into the Mall Proper that flowed like a rushing river and each store was an eddy, a place to relax and escape that constant pull. We'd been to our store. But we didn't have another store. Or did we?

Soon thereafter, we ran into a wondeful friend who was with her mother and I was able to try out my camera.

The true American Christmas spirit of consumption pulled us into stores we'd never seen before to examine their wares, to touch their fabric and almost buy, then leave and move onto the next. It seems like the Mall is our latest incarnation of the carnival, but without any rides or games, since it is so well engrained into us that consumption is the game and the ride. We need more rides. We need better rides. We can do better.

Each store comes with a soundtrack, music to match the mood of each branded establishment, with decorations and shiny things in between to keep you moving along. It is the physical manifestation of all that advertising money...and it all lives inside the Mall temple to Mammon who is capital and the exchange of that capital for goods.

It is, in essence, America and our holiday mania that really is more concerned with getting the right gift for someone rather than celebrating the birth of some long diluted and hijacked godhead who would probably spit upon all this commercial excess and wonder why the fuck we weren't taking care of the least among us.

But I digress. I was at that moment, one of those fish swirling around inside that peculiar fishbowl.

We needed to accomplish one last thing at the large sparkly commerce temple before we left and that was to buy a DVD for the nieces. We believed said DVD was available for sale at the Disney store. The Mall became overwhelming and as the sun went down outside, automatic Mall lights came on inside the skylights to give the illusion that time did not exist and all was well shoppers. You have garnered an extra hour of two of your lives while you were inside here. I looked up right as those light came on and it reminded me of how the casinos in Vegas control the environment so you won't flee and realize that your life is passing you by as you sit there, a monkey to the lever, hitting that pleasure center.

Bird and I found the Disney store and that store is a microcosm of the Mall Proper. There are various branding zones. There was a Cinderella section with music piped in overhead and surrounding you, and videos played on the multiple televisions. There was a Young Einstein section. There was a Chicken Little Section. And all through the store there are the impulse buy situations, smaller, cheaper shit at a child's eye level, much like the meaty bones in our petstore, down so that the dogs can grab them with their mouth and their owners can think how cute it is that their darling pet selected something on their VERY own, so much so that they can't help but buy it even though they are holding the 100$ Cinderella doll that's two feet taller than the child they are buying that doll for.

We couldn't find the DVD. We looked around the place and felt ill. There was a long sad line of parents with sniffling children in tow waiting for the Happy Disney Associates to ring them up so that they could move on to the next store. Disney is the master of distilling wants and needs into something easily digestible like baby formula and in that instant the mall burped around us. Jenny rolled her eyes and I smiled so we fled.

The exits weren't clearly marked to keep the hamsters in their cage no doubt, but we eventually made it back through to Macys and the smells led us downstairs then outside and and we opened those doors out into the night and gasped the cold wet San Francisco air and we passed darkly as crowds of freshly showered mall kids goosestepped while talking on their cell phones towards the open maw of the mall and we ran to the car parked out by the eucalyptus and went home.

When we were finally home we played with our new toys.

We got some nice cameras.

it is hard killing your best friend

Thu, October 13, 2005 - 12:31 AM

... so I had a dream that when you died, the state you were in when you died was the state you were in the afterlife and you never really left this realm, you just hungout with the other dead animals.

The person who told me all this in my dream was my last dog Satchmo and he told me I should die as young as possible so that when I passed over at least I'd still have my muscles, attitude and wouldn't be shitting myself. He said now is the time to die. 40 is a good time to do it because you aren't an idiot kid and you also aren't geriatric yet.

Hmm, there is a certain stigma surrounding listening to dogs who tell you things about life and death, but I grow old and perhaps that reference is lost on many people.....

That whole dying when you're supposed to, evidently is the nature of things and this whole keeping us alive beyond our years thing is an abomination. That's what he was telling me when the alarm woke me up yesterday.

He was a little pissed that I waited to put him down until he was unable to walk and I had to carry him down the stairs then hold him so he could do his business. He said he didn't have anyone over there to help him do that and it was just embarrassing. Satchmo always had pride. Maybe he really just wants me to come over and help him. I don't know.. I tend to make a habit of distrusting the dead when they come to me, regardless of how well they know me...

I let him live because I loved him and couldn't bring myself to kill him even though I knew that animals in our stead rely on us for that last act of compassion. And that's selfish, keeping a being alive when you should let it go. I finally took him to a vet who said, "yes he can't walk and his spine is fused together and he'll wake up one morning paralyzed and he'll freak out because he won't be able to even stand up and all he wants to do is please you because he's a Lab and he loves you."

.... so Bird and me sat on the floor of that vet's office and the vet gave him the pink juice with a big needle and Satch just stopped breathing within 10 seconds. He had a weird dog smile on his lips when he left his body. We cried in there for an hour. And I kept taking his arm and rubbing it on my face. He'd gone from this living being to a dead thing. As much as we wailed, there was no turning back and he was really dead. We left eventually, tearstained, mourning and horrible, leaving his dead carcass there to be shuttled off to Pet's Rest and to be burned. I didn't want him laying in the ground in the summer, boiling. I wanted him to just evaporate and be free.

And after he was dead I saw him every day I was walking. He was running next to me. Free doggie. goddamn I loved that little guy. I like to think he became a crow because I see crows all the time and they seem to have pretty good lives.

I've got his ashes now. I showed them to Sailor and he tried to eat the bones in there. I miss that boy. You will never get over losing a pet who was your friend, never..

... and in my dream he was so cold. The dead are really cold evidently. They just kind of exist. There is no higher place. Just here. And they watch us. The great joy they get is watching us fuck or jack off or stress about what'll happen when we die. Yeah, they get a big chuckle out of that.

I looked at him and tried to warm him up by the propane heater out back where we used to hang and I told him I'd think about dying soon, but I've got a lot of stuff to finish before I can go there.

We'll see what happens.

Satch was such a great dog. He and I were friends for 16 years. I trust that little Black Labrador dog friend of mine. He was loyal and he loved me through all my early life. Damn I loved that dog.

If you've ever had to put a pet down to ease their pain, it is the last responsible thing you have to do for them.

Satch has a website I never finished after I put that boy down at www.violetshivers.com/John/Sa...dex.html

Ha, but it was just a dream. Those don't mean anything, right...
Thu, October 13, 2005 - 12:31 AM - permalink - 8 Comments




8 Comments

RedTux


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 1:30 AM
sniff....
Damm you... you made me cry... Not a day goes by where I don't think of my old friend Cara. She was a Black Lab and I feel the coolest dog ever. She was smart and caring and always happy to see you. I never got to say good bye to her, I was living in England at the time and she was with my Aunt and Uncle in California. I'd like to think she led a good life. My aunt told me that every day she'd wake up around 3pm from her afternoon nap, that was the time I'd usually come home from school.

allison lange


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 4:05 AM
heart breaking
delete this comment
-
-
offline 152

Thu, October 13, 2005 - 5:48 AM
one of the best blogs I have ever read


♥╚@ü®α Queen Bee♥


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 8:47 AM
Oh man...
I just lived through the time of "missing", and then "found, dead" with my best friend, whose best friend from her whole life took herself off a cliff. Days, nine days she was missing before they found her, and I was there for the whole thing. I have yet to shed a single tear, my job right now is to be a comfort to her.

I have a beautiful guy, Jack Bennett. he turned 11 this summer. His eyes are getting a little milky, his muzzle is going gray, and the little dog gets two treats to every one of his because he can't see so well to catch them any more. This dog has been with me through many a drunk, was there for me when I was getting sober...I love him more than any being that didn't father me; that I didn't give birth to.

I finally cried, reading your story. One of my biggest fears is to come home and find him in his final sleep; have to get him out of his crate and deal with the furry remains. I now know that I would much rather that than to have to do what you did for your buddy.

I think our ability to feel this deeply is both a blessing and a burden. I'm going to go out and throw the ball for Jack Bennett, and give him an extra pet, since he's still here, and I can.

Jennybird Alcantara


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 9:25 AM
man baby, you are kicking asses and taking names with this one, I've already cried twice, once reading it and once reading the other posts.....you have a way.......

shekky


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 5:52 PM
one day, my old cat clem will no longer be with me...
i'm not looking forward to that day.

clem (aka "growler the cat") has been with me through a lot of ups and downs, and all he's ever asked for is some crunchies, fresh water and a can of processed whale meat every once and a while.

anybody who tells me, or one of my friends that they're "just animals" has never experienced the pleasure of the old cat resting his head in my hand every night. clem has slept with me (and whoever i happened to be sharing my bed with) for sixteen or seventeen years now, it's been so long i've lost track.

again, i'm not looking forward to the day when my furry little buddy curls up in the crook of my arm and puts his head on my hand, just like a pillow.

my heart goes out to all of our feathered, furry and slithering companions, for making a worlds a better place.

Nicole aka ~technopatra~


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 6:29 PM
Oh John, I had no idea. I remember Satchmo at one webteam meeting you brought him to. So sweet. I remember hearing the thump of his tail against those weird table legs. I am so sorry for your loss.

My one and only dog was a smallish black Lab mutt with a white patch on his chest named Hershey. When we moved to Laguna Beach when I was 6, he just walked in our open front door, looked around, and decided we were good enough for him. For me, it was love at first sight. It is sad but I can say that I loved that dog more deeply than I've probably loved anything, or anyone, in my life - with the pure love of a child.

He was so smart he'd look both ways before he'd let me cross the street. Hand to God.

He slept with me every night. My mom wanted him on the ground, but I always let him under the covers after we'd sung our sleepytime song, "The Rainbow Connection", and she'd kissed me goodnight and left. My brother and I shared the room and he never ratted me out.

We moved to Hawaii a year later, and my mom gave him away. She told me that he was in quarantine, thinking that within 6 months I'd forget about him. I kept bugging her and bugging her and she finally told me that the people who were taking care of him in quarantine loved him so much that they moved without telling us. My heart was broken.

I had a dream once that I was at a fancy club, and everyoen was ignoring me. Waiters, people dancing...I just moved thorugh them frustrated and sad at getting no attention. They had all the trappings of things I wanted - hip clothes, great hair, fancy little food and cocktails - but Icouldn't connect with any of them.

I was wandering around a found a hallway that was being used as a oat check, and both sides of it were lined with red furry coats. In the middle of the hallway was a decidely unhip looking older woman. She had a moon face and a plain sack dress, but she smiled at me. She didn't speak in words but somehow I heard her tell me that she knew i was hurt and frustrated and angry and sad, but it didn't matter because those people didn't matter, They were a distraction. They were immaterial in their materialism. She told me she'd show me something make me feel better. Then with a wave of her hand she released me from my body.

I didn't even have time to be scared, I just felt myself discorporate. My vision blurred into colors and then into nothing, because i had no eyse, and my body dissolved into everything, and I felt the rapture of going back to into the cosmic soup, a physical and spiritual sense of rapture beyond anything I ever felt in real life.

I was beginning to lose my identity, the specific mixture of parts that make me...well, me. But then she pulled me back into my body, and I was back in the hallway with her. She looked at me, still smiling, as if to say "See?".

Then I woke up.

Maybe it was only a dream, maybe it was my mind going about its nightly defrag, but I sincerely believe that's what death is. No form, no judgement, no heaven or hell, no heat or cold, no rules no philosophy, no identity and therefore no separation, no thoughts...no sensation except the immeasurable energy of the cosmic soup.

I bet Satch liked going back into the soup, too.
.
*Ali Baba* Alexandra Davies


Sun, October 7, 2007 - 3:43 AM
This totally made me cry. But then Nicole's comment made me smile at the end.
And also remember a dream...very similar to the end of hers: I had knowledge of the feeling of death and it feeling wonderful, being light and radiating and just fabulous.

I tend to believe, though, that we have an afterlife where we get to hang with our peeps and animals, spend some good time loving them and hanging out and learning until we decide we want to come here and live another lifetime. ;D

Of course, as I learned in anthro of religion, people believe in something because it works FOR THEM.

Could I have met Satch at the Carousel Numinous party? His adventures sure brought me many smiles today. A fantastic fellow indeed.

Autumn in the Sunset.

Wed, October 12, 2005 - 11:12 PM
Autumn is falling down across the California Coastal region. This time of year it always nuzzles in from the wide open ocean. It is an unmoveable force flowing over the sea lions and whales and other briny sea mammals that inhabit that cold Pacific, and we humans out here in the Sunset can smell that summer is gone without a doubt of it reappearing, if even for one weekend. The Outer Lands of the Sunset are now in winter mode.

That creature Autumn comes on with a front of cold arctic fog that pulverizes any semblance of warmth the ground may have absorbed in the three or four weekends of sun that graced us between August and October.

It soaks us in chill and our summer is literally measured in weeks out here on the northern California coast.

This time of year, when I drive home from work on 280 from San Bruno, I'm usually hot and wearing sunglasses to deal with the sun that's moved lower on the horizon and is setting around 7:30 but is most obnoxious and orange around the time I'm driving home.

Driving home. I pass the National Cemetary and I note whether the huge U.S. flag is at full or half mast. It is usually at half mast these days, which sucks because I know not that many old veterans are dying and being planted in those perfectly manicured rows and rows of dead soldiers at the foot of those white headstones.

Continuing on home, the Large Red Truck curves downward in a big left then moves to the right at the Hickey Blvd exit and I see the cemetaries of Colma to the right, beneath a white flowing sheath of clouds being pulled like a tube towards the warm SF Bay. Then around that corner, precipitiously, 280 drops down around the Greenland and Woodland cemetaries towards Serramonte and the Big Red Truck drifts into a huge gray cavern of cloud churning off the Pacific and I have to take off my sunglasses to see as I drive into that tunnel of roaring overhead fog.

It is like driving into a frozen underground garage. Seriously.

That's what living on the coast is like in California.

The air is prematurely crisp and everything is dripping wet. You smell fires in fireplaces like you're tasting them and the dull salty ocean stomp of another season is moving in at us. The Sunset is wet and ready to return to the reason no one ever really wanted to live here in the first place. Lake Merced is enshrouded by more fog, so much that you can't even see the lake you could see a week ago.

Once around Lake Merced and off Sunset, there is a swirling miasma of Chinese or Thai food and Korean barbeque. The food mixes with the oncoming fog soup along Taraval.... and there is the heavy menthol Eucalyptus dripping down, mixing with the water as a salve around any open green space. There is the smell of last minute burning tar roof fixes against the oncoming rain. There are the people who move along, gray figures in the fog to make the L or hangout at the bars, to get a Quickly. There are all the people with dogs. And there are broken old people barely visible though that transparent carapace, moving like lonesome frozen ghosts, and there are people who are going into the warm, lit places to conjoin and energize themselves with others who have made it out of the house. Yoga, Arthur Murray Dance, young couples with sweaty chidren who have just finished Tai Kwon Do and who are moving them along the street to their minivans and SUVs.

And the surfers are waiting for the winter waves.

There is a constant noise out here. You can hear it any time and it is the sound of the ocean. In the summer it is easy to avoid that sound unless you are down on the beach, but as the Autumn moves in, the roar becomes more pronounced. By December, it is deafening if you realize it is all around you. The ocean becomes hungry for sand and it pounds and scrapes the beach relentlessly.

But this is just the beginning. In a couple months, the rain will fall down and soak everything and that ocean wind will come on relentless and chill us even more. that is when there will be wave reports at Mavericks. That will be when the surfers will take to the ocean in mad packs to ride those frozen 12 foot plus waves.

Coming home to the Puppyboy and the Bird on nights these warms me like I've got something real for my short moment of existence. I do have something real to come home too.

Tonight Bird is getting ready for Open Studio this weekend and I helped her move some paintings around. I streamed most of the first Burning Man webteam meeting on my laptop out back and was on IRC with catilin and nani and gutowski. There was talk af bacon and next webteam meeting I have to bring my coleman so I can make bacon for everyone throughout the meeting. It was another instance of being with my friends. My glorious friends who I am so grateful to be aquainted with in this age of such detachment.

Burning Man is an ending and a beginning each year, whether I like it or not. Halloween has become the first holiday of my new year. I always liked Halloween. This Burning Man gig has rearranged my perception and when I get back from the playa, I have a period of down time that is interrupted with Decompression, then the meetings begin again and we figure out how to keep the information flowing.

Back in the day, I think all that back to reality started after New year's eve. But then again, I've never been one for embracing "reality". I'm getting older and watching my time slip away, so precious, that time, and all I really want to do is leave a little bit of myself that will live on. Some words or something that'll survive the times. I am cursed in that I always feel like I've got so much time to do that.

I've got my Bird and my dog and my writing and my friends and my crazy family. And I've got this yearly fog that rolls in to start the Autumn of the world out here. And I've got that ever pounding powerful ocean that I can hear anytime. I've never lived more than 20 minutes from a coast since I was born. I love the salty swill of the ocean. And I continue to end up next to that ocean, whatever ocean it is.

Bring on the fog.

____________

4 Comments

shekky


Wed, October 12, 2005 - 11:39 PM
bring on old man winter
then the fog lady will crawl under the golden gate bridge again until next may.

sorry johnny, i don't like the fog. i long for the sun and summer heat, which don't often visit san francisco. when was the last time it was warm enough at ten o clock in the evening to sleep under just a thin sheet in the city?

i guess i'll never become a true san franciscan, even after living out here twenty two going on twenty three years, more than half my life.

maybe that's one of the reasons i keep going back to burning man, to celebrate and revel in the renewing energy of the desert sun.

bring on old man winter, and rain, mother nature, then i'll know your warm sun will visit our city come march, april and maybe the first half of may.

allison


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 4:31 AM
that was beautiful. thank you. i have always romanticised the fog. i am due for a trip to the sunset TO VISIT YER ASS and to maybe swing by the beach.

allison


Thu, October 13, 2005 - 8:37 AM
i quoted a portion of your blog in my blog, hope you don't mind.