-->

Pages

Around the Firepit


Remember those late night debates in the dormitory. Do you miss them? I don't. Well I don't miss being 19 and talking and acting like I knew more than I did. But I do miss the conversation, the camaraderie and yes, the mind expansion that flow from interactions like those. I enjoy the feelings that honest, open, intense conversation engenders.

I was reminded of this a few weekends ago, when some of my olde grad school friends and I got together, had a big meat laden barbeque and then late into the night, we tossed yet one more log on the coals and launched into one more topic. Sometimes I miss heated conversations where polysyllabic utterances are not discouraged and where loud and pointed disagreement is often met with laughter and even agreement.

Read all you will, ponder until the dragons come home but articulating what you are formulating to an interested and attentive cadre is oh so satisfying. Even when they beat up your still half-formed thesis.

Gotta do that again soon.
Labels: ,

Telegraph Avenue


I have lived in several university towns and spent a fair amount of time in many others: Ann Arbor, Madison, Cambridge, Austin, Westwood, Berkeley. While they all show the liberal influence of the ivy covered walls, they are all somewhat unique. Most influence neighborhoods they share, others dominate the entire city. And then there is the People's Republic of Berkeley.

Such a mixture of liberal/radical politics existing right alongside fantabulous contradictions. For a place of peace, freedom and social justice there are a lot of regulations. Mostly these are seen as "for the people" and against the establishment but rules are rules and are therefore necessarily anti-freedom. But politics and bureaucracy are not my topics today. Telegraph Avenue is.

Telegraph Ave. is less than 5 miles long. It runs from downtown Oakland north-north-east to the south entrance of the UC Berkeley campus at Sather Gate, which then spills directly into Sproul Plaza where "those" protests took place in the 60's. But when most of us hear Telegraph Avenue, we think of the last four blocks at the UCB end of Telegraph, where you can still buy beads, candles, radical bumper-stickers and incense. I live about five minutes from this stretch of Telegraph, so I know the restaurants and other necessary establishments there, yes olde friends I live within walking distance of Tienda Ho.

Early last week, I was up on Telegraph running errands, I hit the post office, grabbed a sandwich at Cafe Mattina and was looking for a place to make my seasonal lottery purchase. After casually keeping my eye out for a lottery sign, I realized that in the mecca of anti-establishmentarianism there was not going to be a retailer who would alienate the local clientele by trading in such a income discriminatory hidden tax. I think I must have been smiling even more broadly as I turned off Telegraph to head back to the apartment. I rounded the last corner stepping slightly around a well dressed young woman, who I noted was a bit out of place on the lingering hippy sidewalks of Telegraph when I heard her whisper;

"Date?"


There it was, in the heartland of free love, a Tuesday afternoon solicitation. I wish I had not simply strolled on. I would like to know more about prostitution on Telegraph Ave. Think I could have gotten five minutes of conversation for what? maybe twenty bucks?

The times they are achangin'.
Labels:

Twenty Years Ago



Twenty years ago today I lost my best friend.

Regret is not something I deal with all that often. I don't wonder where all those years have gone. I don't joke about all that grey hair in college reunion pictures. For me, time passes and we leave signposts along the way. But this one, twenty years ... this one got me.

I don't miss him every day, I never have. But when I think about Tom and the South Bay years, I know those times changed my life. At his memorial service I read one of my favorite pieces of writing from John Steinbeck because those words described so clearly why time spent with Tom was so memorable. I offer you those words on this day.

"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy--that's the time that seems long in memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."

My wish for all of you is that your times be splashed, wounded and crevassed.
----
photo credit: flower x-rays
Labels: ,

San Francisco Salt


Those colorful waters pictured above can often be seen during final approach to the San Francisco and Oakland airports. They are salt ponds, part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The ponds actually produce salt for a wide range of commercial uses. The vibrant hues have to do with the aquatic life that thrives on the ever increasing salinity levels as the ponds dry and concentrate in the sun.

The refuge is over 30,000 acres of protected wetlands around the southern perimeter of San Francisco Bay. Millions of birds, over 250 species, use the area permanently or during migration. Included within the refuge are 9,000 acres operated by Cargill Salt. They use the Bay salt water and a vast network of drying/concentrating ponds to process salt naturally using solar energy to slowly leech the salt from the ocean water. In the process higher and higher concentrations of salinity are achieved in the evaporation ponds, this process gives rise to marine life in the form of brine shrimp and blue-green algae, which attract a wider range of marine birds than would not be attracted to the uniform concentration of naturally occurring ocean water. It is one of these algaes, Dunaliella, that changes to the brilliant red or vermillion color when the salt content of the water reaches high levels.

Eventually, the water is baked away by the sun and the salt and other minerals are harvested. Commercial uses include: road salt, home soft water conditioners and eventually after a final cleansing process -- table salt. If you have Diamond Crystal salt in your kitchen, this is where it comes from.

Cargill has an interesting virtual tour of the process on its website.

If you happen to live in the Bay Area or are in town for a conference, you can visit the Wildlife Refuge and tour the salt ponds.
Labels: ,

Fog City


"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." 
- attributed to but never said by Mark Twain

I'm back to window gazing from my perch in the East Bay and now that summer is nearly upon us the infamous fogs of San Francisco are beginning to appear. Out my window I can get three different views of the grey shroud that is summer around the Bay. As I have mentioned previously, directly out my window about ten miles away is the Golden Gate. Yes, there is a bridge there now but long before the two towers of the span were erected the gap was known as the Golden Gate. It is the narrowing that separates the pacific ocean from San Francisco Bay. Through the gates can pour fog at a pace that literally fills the Bay. Now SF Bay is over 60 miles long and I can see over 50 miles of that length from my window. So the effect of the fog on the surface is never quite the same. How far will it creep today? How can it move so fast? And where might an cargo ship pop out of the fog?

Then to the immediate north of the Gate are Sausalito and the Marin headlands that rise up to 2500 feet at Mt. Tamalpais. When the fog comes up and over the headlands that means a big fog bank is rolling in from the north. Since the sun is setting way up to the north these days, the sunsets take on some interesting shades of pale. More of a sunglow than a sunset.

The south side of the Golden Gate is the City at the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula. There is a ridge that runs down the center of that big thumb of land. On the west side (the ocean side) are the Sunset and Richmond districts of the City. The temperature is always cooler out there, often 10-15 degrees cooler than downtown and as much as 20-30 cooler than over here in Berkeley. But from my vantage point the buildings of downtown San Francisco, Coit Tower and the Sutro Tower on Twin Peaks are what the creeping fog can slowly swallow when it creeps up & over the peninsula divide.

All this weather means a daily summer time viusal treat from mother nature. I wish you could see it. Come visit sometime.


Labels: ,

Picking Your Battles


I remember a younger version of me who was adverse to waiting. Taking time to make a decision seemed like just a waste of precious time. The facts were the facts, the options were clear, just get on with it. I guess with age may come wisdom but certainly comes patience and contemplation. For nearly a year I have been pondering one particular interpersonal relationship with no fear of deadline or timeline. I didn't have what I required to move forward. This is not simply procrastination. I do think about the issues involved, I sit with what was before and what might be in the future. It just isn't yet time.

When a similar situation came up over Memorial Day weekend, one of my friends who was directly involved said something about "picking your battles" and while not precisely a fight, it was a conflict which could easily have led to a confrontation. He chose to linger in limbo rather than push forward while still "unprepared and unarmed" (his words not mine). The warlike metaphors seems a bit overwrought, so I engaged in a little wordplay.

Battle has militaristic, confrontational overtones but crusade or campaign might work.

Picking conjures synonyms like cull, sift, harvest and gather.

It became clear to me that I was more into the picking than I was into the battle. I was indeed gathering my thoughts; culling my feelings, sifting through the possibilities and gathering myself for an eventuality.
Once again the younger me spoke up and suggested this period of rumination might better be called out as mental masturbation. Ah, the impetuousness of youthful ganglia. But I had to think, it has been nearly a year, perhaps my friend has something to say about our estrangement. Perhaps the time had come. Could I get a sign or a stage direction here?

As if in the "ask and ye shall receive" mode, I dropped by while another friend was doing some household divesting. They offer me several tables of items that will soon be the property of Goodwill. I did not care to even check the inventory because I am still post-accumulation. But then she said: "Well maybe one of our friends might need something here." I took a quick glance and sure enough right there in the first pile was an artifact of our youth my olde friend had talked about perhaps ten years ago. Here was my sign. I picked it up and that evening made the call. Now I just need to find the words before the next full moon.
Labels: ,

A Prickly Nightingale


According to a recent biography, Florence Nightingale was "devout and unforgiving, inexhaustible and chronically unwell." What history remembers is that she fought against limitations imposed on her by her gender and launched what we now call the modern health care system. Apparently she also saw "earthly friendships as a hindrance on the path to true righteousness." Obviously a complicated and complicating woman. She is said to have been so driven that she worked two of her loyal followers to death. But what struck me about her life was not the details (didn't finish the book) but the concluding words of a short review:

"This is a terrific biography of a woman to whom we owe a great deal, but would perhaps never want to meet." Mark Bostridge

Got any nightingales in your life?

I have just one in mine right now, though in the past I have had many more, some as big a vultures. A nightingale is someone we admire, someone we share an abiding passion with or even someone we love but . . . someone who we just cannot tolerate being around. I know I have been a nightingale myself at times, in fact I remember being shouted at by an olde flame, she really could have used this newly coined association with nightingale; it would have saved her a lot of four letter approximations.

I truly admire individuals who can look beyond the befuddling, muddling, perplexing exterior to the heart of gold, silver, bronze or platinum. Those with that patience make great social workers and I think good mothers must have a modicum or more of such grace. Me -- well I am an advocate of the timely retreat or the cowardly pythonesque run away. But this time, with this nightingale, I am going to attempt to work through the gritty, abrasive interpersonal slime and see what might be on the other side. And I am going to start that soon, maybe next week or right after the solstice.
Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)