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Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell "To His Coy Mistress"
Doing my part to bring culture to the masses...
During my mother's visit to see me over Christmas and New Years she gathered a large number of photographs (I'm the family archivist, and the guardian of the family photos) and bought a small library's worth of photo albums to keep her occupied. During this trip to Phoenix, my mother pulled out a carry-all full of what appeared to be bricks. Upon further inspection I saw that she had proceeded to fill something like eight or so albums with photos.
So on Monday, I was speeding on the highway towards the airport at 4am trying to ensure that I am not late for my flight. Car sorted, I am lugging this bag of what feels like bronze age lithographs through the concourse and check it in time to wait at the security line. I was the last person to board my plane and promptly fell asleep under the disgusted gaze of my fellow passengers.
Upon arrival home at the end of the day, I opened my bag to unpack and discovered a pamphlet from the Transportation Safety Administration informing that they'd had to examine the contents of my bag for security purposes. I must say I don't feel any safer with the image in my head of a bunch of TSA folks gathered around my bag flipping through an album of my brother's first 7 birthdays.
I decided to fly out to Phoenix, to surprise my mother who is there visiting my siblings. So after work I got dropped off at SJC. As usual, my Southwest Airlines flight was delayed and I ended up sitting next to a young woman and her newborn. I was busily trying to read a New Yorker article when she turned to me and said, "Is that Jerry Rice?" Looking up, I saw the hound dog eyes, bald head, and the fluid gait that we'd all learned to equate with athletic superlatives. It was and he was followed by two tween-age boys - I can only imagine that they're his kids. But what was he doing flying Southwest Airlines anywhere (let alone Ontario, California)?
I can only imagine that things aren't going so well for Jerry - either that or he's teaching his sons something about humility and such. Either that or she took half.
Last night I stayed in the south Bay. This isn't some sort of caveat emptor from my move to San Francisco, it was simply an attempt to show up to my early teleconfrence on Tuesday. I ended up spending the night with Ickles who lives in Campbell near the border with a subdivision of San Jose called Willow Glen. It's unassuming in the same way as every subdivision in America is, though there was something somewhat comforting about it - I can see why Hatchet Face likes it, despite its "bad school district".
Ickles and myself chatted for a bit before heading out to dinner. Since he was so keen on getting some Mexican food, we settled on a place called the Plaza Inn. It was in many ways quite a find, as it apparently doubled as a dive bar. Now I'm not an alcoholic - despite what you may have heard in the liberal media - but I am an afficonado of the dive bar. Like many middle class folks before me I am secretly drawn to the seedy underbelly of life, and dive bars provide a fix for that. This particular place had dining tables next to the bar which allowed me examine the wildlife.
It was an interesting mix, looking to be all locals (judging by the house shoes that they chose to come in), having a drink while waiting for their take out to arrive (conversely they could have been using the take out as a pretext for coming to the bar). There was the Lonely Drunk, sitting at one end, with his nose in his beer and his shoulders near his ears. There was the Boisterous Fat Guy, joking with the bartender and his buddy, The Guy With The Broken Nose. Together they hooted and hollered, joking with the bartender and punching each other in the shoulder - well mostly it was The Guy With the Broken Nose trying to teach the Boisterous Fat Guy how to "take a guy out" and "win a fight". Presiding over this chaos was the bartender himself who was just as loud and boisterous, dancing to the Mexican pop beat coming over the speakers and backed up by what seemed to be a long suffering waitress. The food wasn't that good but the entertainment? Yeah, the best that money could buy.
Living in San Francisco has been pretty good - I know you've been waiting for an update - but it's rather weird. It's the techie's version of living in Hollywood. By that I mean that the casual resident (if such a thing exists) frequently encounters either the locations most closely associated with producing the technological diversions that litter the modern world, or the people who are responsible for creating those diversions.
Example: You are currently reading my blog, which is - perhaps mediocre is a bit harsh, but at the very least is somewhat commonplace. One forgets that there was a time when blogs were not quite as common and seemed to be the exclusive province of the Netaratti. Impossibly hip, and eloquent, they entertained some of us with tales of life in a place where the tech savvy and the aesthetic cognoscenti rubbed elbows and were in many cases the same people.
All of that, that is, till Six Apart began to distribute things like Movable Type [disclosure: the author actually uses Movable Type and rather likes it]. One can say the same thing about Blogger for that matter. Suddenly any of us smart enough to be able to install the code on our servers were looking for things to write about for audiences numbering in the single digits. Being a part of the second wave wasn't as glamorous but it certainly was rewarding.
Hence my delight at finding myself walking past the extremely modest, but neat, offices of Six Apart last week, as I strolled home from the train station. It was late and the offices were closed by I found myself smiling and wondering if I should swing by when they were open. After all, I thought, it's always good to see where your possessions are made - and while my blog is mine, they were the ones to make it so easy to produce. The only thing that they didn't provide was the inspiration, which brings me to my next surprise spotting.
On the train home from work two weeks ago I found myself passing a familiar face. It was a woman in her mid- to late thirties, knitting with bright lime green wool yarn. She was talking animatedly to her seatmate, a similar looking girl. It was only after I had passed through the car that I realized she was none other than Heather Champ, the creator of such seminal sites as Harrumph and the Mirror Project. Those two sites alone prompted me to such an output that for a while I was synonymous with mirror images in the cutlural wasteland of Phoenix. But what does one say to someone like that? "Hey, you inspired yet another talentless hack to put his life on display"? Not exactly compelling. So I just walked to my seat and smiled, knowing that somehow or other I'd found myself at the end of a minor pilgrimage.
Today epitomized the image that I had in my mind of Northern California. Even the morning was warm as I stepped out of my apartment onto the shady sidewalk of my neighborhood. By the time I was on the train, the sun was streaming in through the windows making it almost unbearably warm in my wool slacks and button up shirt.
The rest of the day was gloriously warm with the merest suspicion of a breeze. It was perfect in every way, with air like sheer silk diffusing the light and making everything a pale yellow (dare I say like the Coldplay song). I went running at lunchtime and were it not for a cramp and a sudden unexpected bout of hayfever, I may have just run forever - or at least till the sun went down.
aside: In my old age I find myself increasingly concerned with the weather. Whereas the very term was synonymous with boredom, it is now a viable topic for converrsation with anyone:
"Isn't the weather just great today!"
"My God! It's just glorious today!"
I mean, I ask you, who says "glorious" in this day and age? Certainly not people my age with any amount of sense. Yet, here I am doing and saying. This may presage the coming of actual old age, or some sort of premature superannuation that I had hitherto been unaware of, or worse this could just be the sort of paranoia about aging that I swore never to succumb to. So here I am, caught between the devil, the deep blue sea, and a sunny day.
This has not been a great Monday. Some of it I'll leave for a Tales from Cubeland post, but this? This is for here. At lunchtime, for what appears to be no reason at all, I got a blister on my eyeball. Right in the white of my eye, just below the bit that actually does the seeing, and brings the ladies a running. A blister, full of a shiny, yellow fluid. After an eye wash (not pleasant at all let me tell you) and having my eye irrigated, I was feeling only marginally better. Mainly it felt like having a large, and rather warm eyelash in my eye. My head was filled of talk of beams and motes.
On the way to dinner I passed by a Crenshaw funeral. It was ... odd. Lots of young casually dressed kids standing in front of a Baptist storefront church drinking oilcans of malt liquor. Surreal.
In a seemingly unrelated incident I had dinner with two Jens, and then drinks after with two Steves. A sign of the impending Apocalypse? Only in the context of the news from Faceless Corporation.
It's been an inordinately long time since I've posted (not unusually, just inordinately). Partly it's laziness, partly due to playing catch up at work, and partly due to my distaste for computer work of any kind once I get home from a day of slaving over a hot keyboard. So my apologies. There is some to come though. Things are happening including my housewarming party. Yes that's right, a party, you read right. So be patient with me.