STAGED BY POWERBOOK GUY

in Suite 1090 of the historic Flood Building at 870 Market Street. They recovered a great big part of my past, which I am always reluctant to part with, and for this they deserve the highest accolades, or at least a caffè latte from Peet’s, like the one I drank while awaiting the reforging of the grail onto my new hard drive, a latte proffered to me by a self-proclaimed Communist, and as I reached for it I asked, “It’s not going to rub off on me, is it?” And then, a la Seinfeld, “Not that there’s anything WRONG with that!”

As a matter of fact, I’m dating a communist. I do believe that’s enough to make me a commie sympathizer, yes? Sue me.

OK SO I DIDN’T QUALIFY

to enter the “Zip Code Olympics” sponsored by Don Blue and Star 101.3 because, though I do have a toilet and a blow dryer, I do not have a garbage disposal, a doorbell that rings, an egg in the refrigerator, or an animal that will vocalize on command—so I could not represent 94103, much to my chagrin, as I look to making a mark in my new neighborhood.

BUT THEY’LL HEAR FROM ME SOMEDAY!

even if only by my screaming out the window, HEY GUYS, I AM THE CHAMPION! The record-breaker, at more than a month’s retrieval time, of “Tier 2” hard drive data recovery operations in PowerBook Guy history. I think the former record was around three weeks. I be proud. I be the champion. I even raised my arms in a triumphant thrill-of-victory “Yes!” The only other thing I can self-proclaim to be champion of is “the rails,” for as I noted in “You’re Not the Only One I Love,” “Champion of the Rails, Olympia-Lacey [Washington] bills itself, meaning I know not what. But I claim the right to bill myself as such, as well.” I ride them often enough, after all.

I AM SO LOVIN’ YOU ON YELP,

I told PowerBook Guy himself, Daniel, an amiable and easygoing guy to whom I’d yelped “Help!” when first he answered the door. I had gone to the Apple Genius Bar because my OS X Leopard Time Machine back-up program was failing due to a mysterious error it would neither identify nor tell me what to do about. I was told by Genius Zach that my hard drive was about to crash and I’d better hurry and drag and drop everything onto my external hard drive and hie to PowerBook Guy to get myself fixed up. But before I did, I got The Blue Screen of Death, they used to call it on PCs. This was a different designer Mac shade of blue but dead dead dying death it was. Strange, because I have always considered the prolonged blue of dusk one experiences on westward flights, to be the color of death.

ANYway, today I left my laptop with the Guys to restore the recovered files, and thought I’d go down the street to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at SFMOMA. Go I did, but see I did not. And unless you’re tall, with razor-sharp vision, and not subject to claustrophobia, you won’t do very well either, unless you have hours to backtrack to those pieces earlier monopolized by the mass of congregants taking the audio tours, that happen to be free before another group approaches.

Of course, this was a Friday afternoon, the 4:00 showing. What was I thinking? If you’re good at darting, weaving, insinuating, and perhaps being rude, you may make a go of it. I actually thought I’d be better off going around the world one by one to the various venues the paintings are usually housed in.

FRIDA. KAHLO.

Suffering lover. Broken angel. Poetess and priestess of paint. A true original. That’s why I’d encourage you, ladies, to stay away from “The Kahlo Look” on sale at the Museum shops and sported by some in attendance. Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, and you are no Frida Kahlo. You’re who you are, just be happy with that. Homage or not, dressing like Frida won’t make you look like anything but someone dressing like an icon who’s been dead for 54 years. There are quite a few articles, like Mark Vallen’s blog charging that “ ‘Fridamania’ has refashioned the radical artist into a series of harmless and exotic clichés.” So dears, don’t be one of those clichés; the greatest homage is to be influenced by her to create wonderful worlds of your own.  After all, as I noted in “It Can’t Be Helped,” “Be yourself and you will always be in fashion.”

I’D HAD A SNOOTFUL

of frustration with the exhibit before I took off for Peet’s at Third and Mission to write about the experience, but as I entered the store I remembered, PowerBook Guy has my laptop! Luckily, I had allowed myself the indulgence, at the Museum shop, of a few carefully selected items, amongst the many tempting titles, including a clever, amusing and infuriating soft volume by Keri Smith entitled Wreck This Journal, To Create is to Destroy, an I’m-Going-To-Tell-You-How-To-Do-It-Yourself book of ways to wreck the journal, with page-by-page instructions like “Compost this page. Watch it deteriorate.” “Draw with glue.” “Infuse this page with a smell of your choosing.”

Well, of course, I wasn’t going to do any damn thing she suggested. I was going to ignore or rebel against anything she suggested. Oh, of course, I get it. It’s full of weird and wonderful suggestions for those who are intimidated by white space, with perhaps surprises and revelations and epiphanies in store. Perhaps you didn’t know, you can do ANYthing! But also perhaps, Smith suggests at the end, “it is not as alluring because you are being told to do it.” Of course the Instructions include “2. Follow the instructions on every page.” And “4. Instructions are open to interpretation.” And “5. Experiment.” On the “Materials” list the first item is “ideas.”

MY INTERPRETATION

of the instructions is to ignore them altogether, to consider the journal “nothing but annotated or decorated paper.” On the page reading “Add your own page numbers, starting here,” I write, “This is page no. ‘puke.’ ” The next page is “page no. ‘flush.’ ” “This coffee,” I added, “by the way, tastes like a hard pretzel without the salt.”

Of course I cannot deny myself the possibility of those things I might discover by following the instructions. I’ll have to see as I progress through the book. Anyway, the damn thing is provocative, and that is indeed the point. Check out www.kerismith.com. Charming. “You too can be an explorer of the world.”

PUKING AND FLUSHING

were on my mind because of my recent bout with either food poisoning or whatever stomach virus is going around, just as struck me in New York at Christmas—hours of undulating cramps and screaming torment altogether cured by a single cup of buttermilk, rendering me able, a mere two hours later, to sit through Prokofiev’s four-hour “War and Peace” at the Met. Remember to try buttermilk if it happens to you, because Pepto Bismol was good for nothing but being pink. Pinko like me. I don’t know what anyone’s chances are of having buttermilk on hand, but you’d at least better have at hand someone to go get it for you because when this thing strikes babe you ain’t goin’ nowhere no way no how.

Even with my history of crapulous sleep habits, I have never known such tossing and turning. I tried every position in the Kama Sutra and there was no way to be at ease. My ribs are still sore, when I laugh, from retching. I missed a Danger and Despair noir feature over it, as well as a date with the Communist.

THE COMMUNIST,

who is an artist, asked me the other day why I’d never shown him the prints and drawings I’ve made. I didn’t recall showing or not showing them to him, but I explained, I probably didn’t think of it because I don’t think of myself as an “artist,” that is, I am simply not compelled to create visual art like I am writing, nor do I have the imagination for it. I’m a proficient enough drafter, but I’m not interested in skill but in vision, and don’t feel I convey one of my own. It’s more my language to create pictures with words—but every now and then I indulge, for a change of pace and side of brain from words.

But I say, if you feel like you can’t do it, do it anyway. And if you like, print this column out and wreck it.

You’ve heard of A. Dürer’s “Praying Hands”—these are A. Jones’ “Praying Feet,” 1976, graphite on yellow paper.

OR AM I BORING YOU?

Is your brain not being stimulated? And I am the one not stimulating it? Or are you the one not stimulating it? I can’t imagine having nothing to do. Not because I always am doing something–I’m plenty capable of doing nothing and often do–but because, really, there is never not anything to do–you’re just not interested in doing it, or don’t have enough imagination to think of it, or enough passion to pursue it. The world and the people in it are in theory endlessly fascinating, but in practice, boredom is an element of the human condition. We don’t engage our minds, perhaps because our minds are overloaded with the crap of the day and the age, and we want a break from paying attention. Or, we are too engaged with our minds, which demand entertainment. We don’t know how to relax out of our minds, and experience stillness.

One faithful reader, Eddie Muller, Czar of Noir and self-proclaimed “noir-cheologist,” at least, is not bored with me yet, he said, after my expressing my suspicion that people are tiring of my mind journeys. (Sorry, Eddie, I had to scoop you on your own spontaneous clever coinage while introducing “The Burglar” at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive. Funny ha ha.)

Or am I tiring of my mind journeys? I spend a lot of time in my mind, having ideas and thoughts. I raised myself on words. But the time comes when I must put them away. They make my head spin. They lead me astray. They are not, ultimately, who I am. Who I am is nonverbal, preverbal.

I AM OFTEN CONTENT,

as an activity, to lie on the couch with a cat or two or three resting on my chest or stomach or feet. I do consider this to be “doing” something–breathing, or resting, being with my cats, listening to music or just thinking, because I’m engaged with what I am seemingly not doing, and deriving pleasure or relaxation from it.

BLAH.

Before I left Philadelphia for parts west, I fell into a habit of spontaneous complaint expressed as the impromptu “blah.” Blah! I’m bored with everything about this city and my life in it, I felt. “I have bled these city streets dry,” I reportedly said. So I hopped on a Ryder truck and left the east behind in search of newness. Any time I feel the “blahs” approaching, I’m thinking it’s time for a change.  For sure, I left Philadelphia, Portland, Berkeley and the Lower Haight, because of boredom, the need to refresh my perspective.

Someone named Rob L., commenting on a Dick Cavett New York Times column, referred to “that dreadfully-named Internet term ‘blogging,’ which is defined as the result of what happens when someone gags on their own bile.” That’s what “blogging” sounds like to me, “blah-ging.”

“AMBITION, SCHMAMBITION,

one man’s tale of avoiding the hamster wheel,” Chris Colin’s Chronicle article of 8/4/08, concerns a local fellow, Michael Skrzypek, who experimented with “jumping off the wheel of American Protestant work ethic and consumer culture — the wheel that says you must always be doing, always be achieving, always be motivated.” He was able to achieve this by making $100 an hour specializing in some legal trial presentation software, which work was sporadic, leaving him much free time.

I think the guy was mixed up, though. It’s possible to jump off the wheel of the work ethic and still be doing, achieving and motivated. Say, by your vegetable garden. Say, by compiling your family history. Say, by educating your children. With any project or pursuit that has personal, not necessarily universal, meaning.

“THERE ARE THOSE,”

said Colin,” who step further off the wheel than Skrzypek. Some people don’t work at all, by design or chance. Some eschew money altogether. But Skrzypek’s arrangement had perhaps the widest appeal — he had gobs of leisure time, but also a good paycheck….The arrangement was part recreation, part science.”

“I told myself there will be days when I don’t do anything at all,” said Skrzypek, “and that’s fine. I wanted to see what would happen.”

Apparently, not much.  No action in the petri dish.

“IT’S EMBARRASSING TO ADMIT,”

said Skrzypek, “but I don’t have an answer for what I did on an average day. Most days, I got up and wondered what I would do. It’s an anxious way to start the day,” he says. “A lot of days I wouldn’t get out of bed. I’d just read.” (The New Yorker, cover to cover.)

Friends had all manner of suggestions what to do with his free time. Take up bluegrass guitar, read the complete works of Dostoevsky, try writing short stories, volunteer at a homeless shelter, get in really good shape, get centered at the Zen Center, go to museums, work on a web site.

“Skrzypek tried to maintain his embrace of nothingness…He firmly believed that a person shouldn’t always have to be productive to be worthwhile. But each idea planted another seed of doubt. Why aren’t I learning to play guitar? he’d ask. Meanwhile, his empty days sometimes began to cry out for structure — especially when all his friends had full-time jobs.”

“I HAD ALL THIS FREE TIME,”

he said, “but no real motivating feeling, or direction. I was trying not to judge myself, but we’re so inculcated with a need for achievement. We need a way to measure how our lives are going. And if you’re not doing anything — where’s the scale?”

In yourself, dude. And you apparently fell off your own scale.

Finally, a turning point came. He wanted to be “as productive a member of the household–forget society–as [was his fiancee]. And partly, he says, he just wasn’t cut out to be a free spirit. ‘I sort of realized I’m a sheep. I need a shepherd.’” He now works 9 to 5 at the same work he did before, and was shocked by the ease of the transition.

“SO WHAT ABOUT THAT BIG WHEEL?”

asks Colin, “the Protestant work ethic, our obsession with productivity and goals?” asks Colin. “I see unchecked ambition as coming from neurosis. But in this culture, not having ambition might exact an equivalent toll,” says Skrzypek.

…when you’re bored and boring. The guy had no respect for the present moment, and how to honor it. “He who kills time,” said Thoreau, “slays eternity.”

“Once, in high school, Skrzypek conducted a similar “experiment.” He remembers thinking, “I’m going to do nothing today. I’m going to buy a bag of Cheetos — that was very decadent for me — and do nothing but watch basketball.” Well, he did it, and “was so incredibly bored.”You’re breaking my heart, dude.

“AH! TO DO NOTHING–AND DO IT WELL.”

- Veronique Vienne, The Art of Doing Nothing

There was quite a bit of negative comment on this guy, calling him a loser, lazy punk, selfish, space waster, a slouch, a slacker. To me, he lacks imagination, is not at peace with himself, and has consequently not mastered the art of doing nothing. The guy doesn’t know any better than to be bored, because he bores himself. He doesn’t give himself anything to be interested in. There’s “doing nothing” and then there’s having no interest in doing anything.

“THE MIND EXISTS,”

says Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks,

“in a state of ‘not enough’ and is always greedy for more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being satisfied.” When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind’s hunger by picking up a magazine, making a phone call, switching on the TV, surfing the web, going shopping, or–and this is not uncommon–transferring the mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting more food.”

Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were. A little at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of boredom will begin to diminish in intensity and significance. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.

“You discover that a ‘bored person’ is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.

“Nothing that comes and goes is you.

“‘I am bored.’ Who knows this?

“‘I am angry, sad, afraid.’ Who knows this?

“You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.”

I AM ONE OF THOSE

who do not work by design. Because I have enough money to live on for a while, I refuse to work for more of it. I must honor the now in which I am able to do this, because I have too much to do with my life to spend much of it working for others. What if I put my life off and worked for another year to enhance my nest egg, and died at the end of it? Truly living demands living now, even while preparing for an unpredictable and unguaranteed future.

“NEW YORK IS WHERE YOU GO

to live if you’re ambitious and smart,” quoted a commenter on the column, “Los Angeles is where you go if you’re ambitious but not smart, and San Francisco is where you go if you’re smart but not ambitious.”

No wonder I gravitated here. To me, you see, work has always been anathema. “Work” has always been something I had to do to make a living, that robs time from my real work, writing. I have never wanted a job writing because I have wanted not to associate writing with money. They seem mutually exclusive to me. As soon as someone pays you, they think they own part of you.

In fact I got an email from chitika.com, which sells website ads “designed specifically to maximize the revenue from your US search engine traffic,” and I replied, “Thanks, I just don’t want ads on my site. It’s all about words.” Then I discovered that Wordpress, for the most part, doesn’t allow them anyway.

I, TOO, HAVE HAD LITTLE AMBITION

throughout my life in the ordinary sense, of wanting always to advance in society’s eyes, of seeking more responsibility, challenge and money, of moving as high as I can within a company or field, of wanting to impress others by proving myself and my abilities in some capacity that doesn’t interest me.

I do have ambition with regards to writing–but it is not to be rich and famous–it is to have the means to be free to write and live without ever working for anyone else again. It is to make enough money writing to be able to keep writing without selling my precious time to someone. How do artists do it? How do they keep body and soul together? Everybody’s got a different story. I, as I delineated last time, have given myself some years of freedom cashing out on my real estate investments, also known as “homes.” Without that cushion, I’d be stuck up shit creek, working some job I have no heart for, and possibly not in San Francisco. Yet I still need to pursue being published, or I will simply find myself closing in on 60 with no means of support.

“IF YOU WANT TO HELP MANKIND,”

said Andy Rooney in a commencement speech at Colgate University, “find a job you like and do it as well as you can. If you take care of yourself and your family and provide that one unit of well-being in the world, you’ll have done your part. If you can do more than that, great.”

Of course some would argue that “your part” is not complete without civic participation, but first things first, I say. Happy people spread happiness. Happy people want others to be happy. Happy people are happy to work for the happiness of others.

I SPIT ON YOUR MONEY

A McClatchydc.com’s headline of 8/3/08, “Rift over luxury housing spoltlights rich-poor divide in Russia” describes the plight of Vorovino, a rural community outside of Moscow, that billionaire Aras Agalarov is bulldozing to build an 800-acre residential development, with some homes starting at $10 million. Agalarov is snapping up plot after plot of land, but not all residents are amenable.

Retired cabdriver Vladimir Vegorov surprised an Agalarov rep: “I told him right away I will never sell this place. I said I have been here all my life, you are a newcomer and you want to be here with all of your money, but I spit on your money.”

Is that not always the story of “progress”? The poor have to be razed from the land before it can happen. He’ll be out of there within six months, I predict. Sounds like San Francisco.

WOULDN’T IT BE LOVERLY

to spit on other people’s money, to eschew money altogether?

MAKE UP YOUR MIND ABOUT IT!

Know the D.H. Lawrence poem, “Kill Money”? Ya do now.

Kill money, put money out of existence.

It is a perverted instinct, a hidden thought

which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul.

Make up your mind about it:

that society must establish itself upon a different principle

from the one we’ve got now.

We must have the courage of mutual trust.

We must have the modesty of simple living.

And the individual must have his house, food and fire all free - like a bird.

I love the line: “Make up your mind about it.” I often tell myself the same thing, when floundering about in indecision. Girl, do you want something to change, or not? Do you want to try something new? Make up your mind about it! Nothing will change unless you change it. Skrzypek changed his life, taking on full-time work, but he did not solve his boredom. He simply no longer has time to indulge in it.

I have a shirt from the 2007 U.S. Social Forum that reads, “Otro mundo es posible. Otro EEUU es necesario.” Another world is possible. Another U.S. is necessary.

The U.S. will never change, and another world come to be, as long as we are content to be bored and do nothing about it.

Sign in the 16th St. commune where Food Not Bombs

prepares its Thursday afternoon meals proferred to any

and all at the 16th and Mission BART station.

UNPACKING UNMARKED BOXES

of treasures or trash, I run across a wooden box of miscellany, a carved parrot on the lid. Contained therein are a flattened penny and quarter, that my true-blue buddies Pete and Tom, at Union Station Portland to see me off, had placed on the tracks of my departing train, No. 26. They gave me the 26 cents worth of smooth metal ovals upon my return. The train really has ridden over them; I feel like I have the power of the train in my hand. They make me stop to daydream about the wonderful trips I took on the now-defunct Pioneer—from Portland starting on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge, down through southeastern Oregon, Baker and the Blue Mountains, through Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, through Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Mountains, up the switchbacks to Soldier’s Summit, to Denver through the Rockies, Nebraska, I-o-way, and in to Chicago. It was Amtrak’s greatest line, ask me, though the California Zephyr gives it a run. The not-so-shabby Empire Builder still serves the northern route to Seattle. It was on my first trip on the eastbound leg of the Pioneer that I saw, unprepared for it as I was, the most astonishing sight I ever did see.

THE 26 WAS RUNNING LATE

and I awakened to a chalky blue early dawn. I had my face pasted sleepily against the window holding my head up, looking lazily sideways out of half-lidded eyes. Had the train been on time I would not have seen, in darkness and no doubt asleep, the train creeping along until a sudden, hair-raising drop in the scenery expanded into the bowl of this completely unexpected dam. Damn! The tracks were on the damn rim of the thing. What if you were standing next to a crack in the sidewalk and the bottom fell away from everything on the other side of it? When the Big One comes, you very well could be. The Pineview Dam became the highlight of any trip east on the Pioneer. I can’t think of anything else, manmade or natural, I have found so breathtakingly and overwhelmingly spectacular. My mouth dropped just like the ground had from the side of the train. As far as I know, there’s no other way but train to see the dam from that angle. There’s also a rock painted Nebraska / Colorado, that marks the dividing lines between the states as you speed by, that we may never see again. I managed to snap a picture of it, but the film was in my luggage, which was stolen from the trunk of my friend Larry’s sister’s car at South St. Seaport. Also lost was my first cross-country train journal. At first I was just glad to have my money and train tickets—but when I realized I’d lost a piece of writing, probably lying among wilted lettuce at the bottom of a dumpster, I cried. It would be trippy if the book still existed.

Recently, during the staging of my flat, I was checking out my denuded fireplace empty of art objects, plants, Tibetan flags and the Chinese screen in front of the useless firebox (decorative only). I remarked to the stager that in this humble state it reminded me of the Magritte painting, “Time Transfixed,” of a modest fireplace with a clock on the mantel, and a locomotive steaming out of the top of the firebox.

Then I got an email from Laughing Squid about comic book artist Scott McDonald, who referenced Magritte, and was writing about it (in my last column) at Café International. Just as I was packing up to go, I got an email from Amtrak Guest Rewards announcing special fares, and when I stood up, on the table in front of me was a coffee cup and 26 cents, a quarter and a penny. A trip on Train 26, 26 flattened cents, many more trips since, the reappearance of the squashed coins, then Magritte’s train, The Long Now, Scott McDonald’s Magritte, the Amtrak message and another 26 cents. What is this all about?

GIRL, IT’S TIME TO TAKE A TRAIN TRIP!

I have plenty mapped out, but I’ll have to be mature and wait. How unlike me. First, there’s my kitten. I don’t want to leave and find her three times as big when I come home. Then, no indulgent spending until all the money gone out in the last year and-a-half, comes back in the form of a settlement check.

I AM ONE LUCKY, LUCKY WRITER

to have put myself in this position. I can follow my bliss to the moon and beyond. Want to hear my real estate story? It’ll make you sick. I was a worker bee in various offices, mostly architectural. I never earned anything that could amount to much. But in 1989, loving domesticity, I gathered up enough green to put a deposit on a beautiful 4-bedroom home in Portland, Oregon. There are plenty—and they all have side yards! I had fled gentrifying N.W. Portland and, like so many of us exiles, moved over the Bridge to S.E. Hawthorne and got in on the ground floor before prices started rising in lovely Mt. Tabor (that was the neighborhood volcano). I was 34.

Several years later, in 1996, I got bored, and at age 41 rented the house out and moved to Berkeley. I shared a house with artist Richard Congo, drummer and painter. Rent was $350. A year or so later, he visited a former girlfriend, a difficult relationship, and when he came back I asked, “Who’s moving, you or me?” I did not relish entering the East Bay housing market, especially in September after college students had snapped everything up, and one day I saw an ad that said, “If you’re paying $XXX in rent, you can afford a home of your own.” I called the number. I told the agent I needed an income property and we scoured the MLS.

THE FIRST DAY

we went out looking, we drove to a listing in West Berkeley, and, parked at the curb, I said to her, “Is that what I think it is? A fourplex apartment building with a separate stand-alone cottage next to it? Make an offer!”

Of course, still a worker bee, I had to refinance my Portland house to raise the money to make this happen. I didn’t give it a second’s thought or doubt, I was just going to do what I was going to do. I think I had a $28,000 mortgage at the time, my payment something like $327. This was 1997, and the house, in eight years, had quadrupled in value. I took part of the money and made a deposit on the complex and moved into the cottage. After six miserable years of landlordship under rent control (I had to take a second $100,000 mortgage to pay off my debts and establish some cash flow), I rid myself of the albatross, which had nevertheless more than doubled in value. In 2003 I cashed out and bought my Lower Haight flat.

In 2006, I lost my long-term Portland renters, got a line of credit on my flat and undertook to renovate the house and re-rent it.

“THE MAGIC CHECKBOOK,”

I called the credit line. But there wasn’t magic enough to cover my butt when the $60,000 job unexpectedly, with the surprise addition of a new foundation, became a $90,000 job. I struggled mightily with whether to sell the house or my flat. Sell the flat, go back to Portland, and I can afford to complete the renovation at my leisure, buy down my mortgage and live cheaply enough to not work for quite a while. Important for a writer.

ONLY PROBLEM

I don’t want to live in Portland again. Nah. Not enough stimulation. More important for a writer. I found my city and Portland ain’t it, though I have nothing but good things to say about it. Just too slow and laid back for me, and after 15 years of overcast and rainy winters, I’d had it. So what’s the conflict about, bitch? Sell the damn thing! Easier said. Why? Because of the San Francisco cost of living and the rental market. There is NO housing security here. The City can overpower you any time. To have the option, “I can always go back to my Portland house,” was an excruciating thing to give up. But I was determined to stay here (I can out-bitch you, San Francisco, you bitch), and eventually sold the house, at close to ten times its original price, which in 1989 had allowed me to put down a 20% deposit…a 20% deposit on a $41,000 house.

THAT’S RIGHT.

An initial investment of $8,000 eventually gave me the means to buy a two-bedroom Victorian flat in the Lower Haight of San Francisco. Strangely enough, when I first came here looking for housing, I stayed at the Easy Goin’ Hostel at 555 Haight St., and ended up buying a home right around the corner from it.

People always say, oh, you’re so smart, why didn’t I do what you did…but there was no plan. I didn’t think this out and form a strategy for my life. I barely consider myself an adult. In each instance I was simply doing what I needed and wanted to do at that time, all the while working full-time and having nervous breakdowns. Oh, I want to buy a house. Oh, OK, now I want to leave town, then, OK, I want to buy another house, and another. I ask myself, what do I have to make this happen? Can I do it, and will I do it? When I decided to leave Portland, I started by renting my house out. I’d have to go somewhere! The rest was like dominos.

One thing is for certain, you can’t be afraid to take risks and maybe losses. I never allowed that to intimidate me. And you have to feel free to ask the universe for what you want. As George Carlin put it, “You need a little danger in your life. Take a fuckin’ chance once in a while, will ya?” But if I’ve done so well at this game, why, with all these assets, have I been mostly cash-broke and often in debt? The cost of housing and living in San Francisco.  Even if you get in like I did, you have to fight to stay there.

“INTREPID,”

someone called me the other day. But make note, I am 53. I just happen to be old enough to have been there when such a thing could still happen. No one is going to be able to cop the kind of deals I made in ’89, or’97, or ’03, not in Portland or the Bay Area.

After five years, I found I could no longer maintain my flat on my own. Even working full-time and taking two roommates would still not cover my expenses, which include debts to the IRS and State of California for the capital gains tax on the Portland house, which I have been living on instead of paying. It’s heartbreaking to enter the SF real estate market through the narrowest crack even water couldn’t penetrate—I could not have supported the place for five years without the income and equity of the Portland house—and not be able to say with confidence, “OK, I’ve got my niche.” I haven’t even built any equity, I could barely afford the interest.

And even though I realized that if I moved back to Portland I would at least have my house, and if I stayed in San Francisco I would likely end up with no house and no flat, and perhaps no San Francisco, I simply didn’t care. I was just going to do what I was going to do. I would not settle for less of a life than I want for myself. The secret of happiness is needing less and less to make you happy. Having less stuff, less crackerjacks, was essential. The more stuff you have, the more space you need to store it in. And space in San Francisco = money.  It turns out that the prize is a booby-trap.

AFTER MY EPIPHANY

in “Contemplation Central,” my claw foot tub, described in “All I Needed Was a Train Ride,” where I decided that if I sold my Portland house and quit my job, which my bipolar disorder was making intolerable, and didn’t sell a book before the money ran out, I would simply sell the flat, no problem. It was supercallifragilisticexpialidociously obvious. I can practically put myself back in that water and sigh the same sigh of relief I sighed when I mentally let go of the house, and the flat, if need be. Now that the flat is on the market, I wonder why I waited so long. But it has taken me the best part of this year to get myself out of there.

THOUGH I HAD NOT A DIME

of unsecured debt, the flat was beyond my means and in a manner that was twice what I needed. I should have taken in a dozen comrades from the streets, like Dr. Zhivago. It all fell into place in that tub, because I knew that I was never going to allow myself to work again, that selling the flat was inconsequential compared to having to go back to work just to pay the mortgage. I don’t see how I could anyhow. Between bipolar and ADD—don’t call me irresistible; call me unemployable. Full-time worker bee is just more now than I can take. I simply can’t keep up with the normal world. I can’t think clearly. I can’t on-the-spot unravel my brainwaves and interpret them (talk, that is). I can’t add or subtract. I can’t manage my exhaustion. I have a hard time retaining information. I think I’ve missed 5% of every conversation, lecture, speech, movie I’ve ever tried to listen to. At this point, I can barely file. Luckily, I can write. In that I am blessed. It’s about the only way I can order my mind (besides the drugs).

I have before introduced, in “Pardon My Crude Mind,” psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel’s concept of the polyphony of thought, many different themes weaving together to form a whole, with some themes predominant, such as what you’re thinking right now—you might even be iterating it, reading it aloud in your mind to yourself in English—some themes harmonic, others dissonant—and others a mere whisper, but nevertheless articulated in some way and part of the mix.

I am constantly in the process of translating all this into English, into written language. I spew out whatever happens to be foremost on my mind, half a sentence here, a completely different theme there, switching quickly to something else, impatient that I can’t articulate everything at once, until I manage to massage the whole thing into some coherent flow. It can take hours, or days, whatever I need.

JUST AS YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS

has many layers of thought and remembrance occurring simultaneously, the human universe is richly populated with all the nations of the world, their cultures, religions, languages, dress, music. There is so much energy in the air, vibrating between one and another possibilities, conflicting energies as well, passing through everybody, it’s astonishing we’re not all tapped into it, zapped by it. When I’m in The Zone, when I hit it just right, I can actually see the stuff. It’s like radiating auras of energy.

Ever notice how cats seem to be awake while they’re sleeping? They lift an eyelid, their ears rotate like radar picking up a passing car here, a distant bark there. They are vigilant. They are sucking up vibes and recording information. A passing fly registers. Still they purr and dream. We would do well to be so alert, so tuned to our surroundings, even as we dream.

Park the car,  forsake the plane

Pack up your bags and go by train

IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS

Thou wilt find peace, was a “fortune” handed to me at a Renaissance Fair in Oregon. Fortune, refrigerator magnet motto, blessing or prayer—of the many things it may be, I know only that it was handed to me.  I have it wedged into the corner of a picture of Chekhov I have displayed on desks through all my life since Philadelphia, captioned “The aim of fiction is honest and absolute truth.” Also stuck into the frame is Jerzy Kosinski’s comment, “Nonfiction is outdated by reality. Fiction amplifies reality.”

GOD ARE MY SURROUNDINGS CHAOTIC!

Just like my brain—but there is no need to make sense of either of them right now. Because in the midst of it all, twenty some years after a stranger foretold it, I have found peace.

IT’S THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF AN ERA,

the beginning of the beginning of another. Saturday July 26th. Kind of a big day. For me. Today was the first Open House for my Page St. flat, which signals the upcoming end of an era, which could stretch on indefinitely into one long now. Though my new life in the Mission has begun, my life in Lower Haight has not ended. I was just over there sweeping the deck. Instead of getting anything done arranging my new headquarters I am enjoying the moment. You know, the one that’s always happening. Life, your life, the life of the planet and the universe, is one long now.

Ever say, “I wish this moment would last forever”? Well hey you got your wish! It forever is this moment!

THERE IS ONLY ONE ERA

(Now.) One long now emanating from the universe, incorporating in you. The universe flows through you continually, everywhere you take yourself. You’ve got a ticket to ride. You are the universe.

FULLY HUMAN

The things you do in your life, says my friend John Beck in Sweden, who I would have bet money has mown his field with a scythe, as he indeed has, are metaphorically representing the struggles of your soul. “Cleaning up, conquering new territory, pulling up weeds, clearing out old trash,” he says, “it feels good”.

“To be fully human is so enormous—there’s so much you can be, he says, “we’re all in baby shoes.” Exciting, our own potential, but also scary. How many of us live up to it? I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that…unless it involves my getting up and doing it. This past year has been a continual slashing of weeds and bringing order to an overgrown field. I’ve been swinging that scythe like a pendulum till I can finally see the path I tread. I’ve known my path for some time, but my ankles have been snagged in the brambles. No more obstacles within sight.

PEOPLE ARE MORE INTERESTING THAN TREES

said a much-admired-by-me visionary professor at Temple University, John Raines, upon his return from a rural setting.I am calling to Zahra for a hug, and find her behind my screen at my toe. I pat my chest for her to come lay down; she instead leaps into an empty box and immediately leaps back out and crawls onto my chest. Apparently people are also more interesting than former trees.

THE FEEL-GOOD DRUG

A friend told me some kind of chemical is released in people when they touch each other, oxy- something he thought. I don’t know if the composition of the chemical alters as to whether the touching is pleasant or unpleasant, but this here chemical’s feeling pretty damn good. I require solitude to live my life, but cats add a dimension neither obtrusive nor distracting. Everyone needs someone to care for. My cats’ breathing and heartbeats, the thuds when they leap off their perches, and needle-sharp claws tapping on the floor, rejuvenate me.

To Zahra, stroking and smooching her, I verbalize the feel-good concept: “It feels good to be touched. It feels good to be kissed.”

Mmm, indeed.

Her little purring motor is in high gear as she paws at my face. We can’t get enough of each other. It’s a regular love-fest. But eventually, like all lovers, we settle down into just being together. She is doing what she is doing (grooming herself) and I am doing what I am doing (writing about it)—she’s just doing it on me. Two as one. One as two. The perfect marriage. “Companionable as a cat,” I believe is how I’ve described my perfect mate.

I’ve always been attracted to older men, men like my high school creative writing teacher who became my lover, who was 23 to my 17, and then in my youth I usually found the famous father more attractive than his famous son—the olden days of Dean and Dino Martin, Jerry and Gary Lewis, Frank Sinatra and Frank, Jr., Kirk and Michael Douglas, even Julio and Enrico Iglesias (the kids just didn’t look fully grown), and now men like Howard Zinn and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and David Amram. They’re sitting on the Rock of Ages. So when a date told me the other night, “I’m 58,” it was to me an erotic statement. Only five and change years between us, but it’s sexy he’s almost sixty. Ten years ago I had given him a gift of a book of poster art, including a couple of his images, and inscribed “to my favorite San Francisco forty-niner.”

SUNNY DAY, FOGGY NIGHT

There are searchlights in the fog, they catch my eye and spark my curiosity but I won’t disturb Zahra on my stomach or Zazu on my knee, to go up on the roof and check it out.

THE THRILL IS BACK.

Except that I abruptly do change the energy of the moment to indeed go up on the roof, and wow, I’m standing out here in awe of the vastness of sky and elements continually around us as we live our narrow-seeming lives in one cubicle or another. Huge layer of fog circulating in the air like someone’s pumping insulation into the sky. Fuzzy searchlights cross like arms waving. Clouds fly past at the speed of wind, clearing one section of sky in seconds. Stars hold their own beneath the swirling skies. I’m in love with San Francisco again.

Back on the couch I notice it’s after 8:00, which stuns me, not because it’s later than I think, but because of the absurdity of attaching the number eight to this universe of time and space. I spend a lot of time on this couch but I am not, I insist, a couch potato. I am a red, ripe, juicy couch tomato!

I AM DOING THIS vs. I DID THAT

I asked outrageous Berkeley printmaker Mark “Silver Fox” Marsh what is the first thing he tells students in an art class. Different is OK. Outrageous is OK. The rules? Fagedaboudem.

A friend asked, in admiring my writing, isn’t it one of the “rules” of writing not to write in first person present? Whatever writing rules there are, I never heard of them. I’ll make up my own and break them. As comic book artist Scott McCloud puts it, in comics caps, “THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO WHAT YOU CAN FILL THAT BLANK PAGE WITH—ONCE YOU UNDERSTAND THE PRINCIPLES THAT ALL COMICS STORYTELLING IS BUILT UPON. IN SHORT, THERE ARE NO RULES. AND HERE THEY ARE.

I use first person present because it’s more lively and immediate. I find I can’t help it, because when I recall the past, I am recalling it in the present. When thinking about a past event, I do so in the now. So if I’m remembering and want to write about the time I was standing at 16th & Harrison waiting for the 22 bus, I write, as I did in “Welcome to Death Little Girl,” “I’m standing at 16th & Harrison waiting for the 22 Fillmore after attending the mini Cornell Woolrich “NOIRtaud” festival at Project Artaud, three nights of noir, noir and noir leaving me wanting moir, moir and moir.”

Because when you read “I” can you not help but put yourself in the starring role? Don’t you virtually have to picture yourself standing there waiting for that bus? I could well have written, “The other night I was standing…having attended the festival” but that describes the past, and when I remember something I am essentially reliving it, I am putting myself in that place, as I invite you, the reader, to do, to put yourself in my place. Well, yes, an event I describe may have happened already, but not to you. You’re reading about it now, and you don’t know what’s coming.

Besides, the present tense affords me the opportunity to narrate my stream of consciousness as things bounce in and out of my brain.

THERE IS ONLY ONE THOUGHT

You might as well be I, as we all share the same thought. You may not know anything about physics, but in the pool of humanity’s knowledge in which you are swimming, someone does. And guess what, you can learn physics right from Albert Einstein, because when you read his books you enter his mind and are exposed to the wealth of knowledge he communicated to us all. The ideas are out there. You can hook into them at your pleasure.

“EH heh heh heh heh,” someone laughs on the street, and Zzyzzy’s head whips around as if to ask, “What’s so funny?”

All-around great guy and saint, Eric Bergquist of The Page Street Center, turned me onto The Long Now Foundation. Soon after, Laughing Squid turned me onto Scott McDonald, author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, a book admired by Stewart Brand, Co-Founder of The Long Now Foundation. Their web site cautions, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.”

THIS IS NOT A COLUMN

Scott McDonald does a fun take-off on Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” (Ceci nest pas une pipe), the painting of a pipe labeled “This is not a pipe.” He made a series of iconic images—a flag, captioned “This is not a country,” a STOP sign captioned “This is not law,” a fast food meal captioned “This is not food” (that one serves double-duty), but my favorite is two panels of a man, in one about to tip his hat, the next having just raised it off of his head, captioned, “These are not separate moments.”

(This, as I write it, is not a column, it is a Wordpress file, but as you read it, it actually IS a column, in that the web is the format in which it is intended to be seen by the public. My Ax Files logo, however, is not my column.)

THERE IS ONLY ONE MOMENT

There are no separate moments, only the one you are living now, one era containing all the eras of your life, undulating like silk flags in the wind. “With the rain from a storm, a river is born/Winding down to the sea, and the river of time/Keeps on rollin’ thru eternity…” (Bill Miller,”River of Time”).

Out of the corner of my eye and mind, I am aware that parading proudly beside me is an elegantly arched feline tail. With what inherent, un-self-conscious grace does a cat move. They are not “cursed with self awareness” as Annie Savoy puts it in “Bull Durham.” They are never in doubt as to what to do next. They are fully here, now.

In Buddhist meditations I have participated in, there has been a random ringing of a bell, I believe to keep you present, to snap you to attention, to recognize the moment. That just happened to me with a crisp snap and rattle of my Venetian blinds. Hey girl! Stay present! This here now has been long enough!

Yes, brother and sister, you too.

REMINDS ME OF THE LINE

from “House of Games,” “Happens to the best, happens to the rest.” A reader commented, on “How the Tempus Fugits,” that the tempus fugits even when you’re not having fun, perhaps more so. True over the long haul, I reckon, but nothing drags like a day of work you hate. But speaking of time, you know what aggravates me? (Remember? Jackie Gleason used to ask that during his monologue as he smoked a cigarette with one hand a held a cup of coffee and saucer with the other.) You know what aggravates me—every time I click anywhere on the web, even my email, I am assaulted with the before and after scenarios of porcelain-skinned beauties turning into wrinkled used-up douche bags—and back again, after applying that week’s miraculous horse estrogen to their faces.

WRONG ALL OVER THE PLACE

But to start with, I don’t see ads of chisel-faced young men turning into deflated basketballs. Nor do I wish to be told every day that there is something undesirable and shameful about aging, something you have to hide at all costs from the viewing public. Mind your own business, and leave me and my wrinkles and cellulite and age spots and gray hair alone. Fuckers, don’t fuck with me!

At Bloomingdale’s, you can get one whole ounce of Freeze 24/7 wrinkle cream at the bargain rate of $125.00. “Hope might not exist in a jar, but miracles do. This dream cream is for real and delivers a powerful punch against wrinkles. Watch them melt away within minutes.” In minutes! Can you imagine anyone buying that claim—at $125 an ounce, no less!

Another lower-end, at $39.95, product, “Created by Dr. Murad to fight the signs of Hormonal Aging, Resurgence® is clinically proven to increase skin firmness by up to 42% in just 10 minutes!”Preparation H is even faster, and ten times cheaper.

My favorite is the miracle wrinkle-hiding cream “Deception.” At least they’re honest about what they’re selling.

THE PLAYTEX “GENTLE GLIDE” TAMPON

used to be my plug of choice, but I’ve boycotted them for years because of their tasteless, infuriating ad featuring a lovely woman reclining, who was apparently all trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, reigned in and pushed up and rounded out in their lycra spandex shapers, with the legend, “This woman’s body is not as good as it looks.”

WRONG ALL OVER THE PLACE!

I think that ad was yanked “within minutes.” Women bear no obligation for their bodies to look good according to anyone’s definition but their own. Public perceptions be damned. Try to ignore it, though. Might as well “hurl matches at the devil,” as Mark Morford recently put it.

Or do I just resent all this because my body is not as good as it looks?

No. I resent it because of the very advancement of the idea that there is any subjective gradient scale against which a woman’s, or man’s, body can or should be measured. I resent it because the uglier and more inadequate you feel, the more the beauty industry thrives and profits from your low self esteem. A multi-billion dollar economic engine that exists to make people feel like shit, but with mascara—which by the way is made of shit—bat guano. You can’t possibly get away with your own naked face, so here is some goop for your eyes, you lips, your hair, your skin, that should make you passable. Thus goop-encrusted, can you face the world.

There’s no reason to not want to look and feel your best, but the millions of dollars spent on products consisting of ingredients no more active than hope is shameful exploitation and waste of resources, both the world’s and our own.

“TELL THAT TO MY BODY!”

said a Walgreen’s clerk when a customer told her 61 is young!

Here’s a tip for dating older women, courtesy of Yahoo:

“5. Don’t focus on looks. Give compliments, but focus less on her physical appearance — she may be anxious about it. And even if you’re complimentary, she may worry that you’re too focused on looks. She wants to be appreciated for who she is, including her intellect and style. Compliments like ‘That color is lovely on you,’ or ‘You look great tonight’ are safer than ‘You’re in great shape.’”

Wrong all over. Don’t fuck with me.

WAVES OF PLEASURE

and relief pass through me as I enjoy a latte at the Café while someone else cleans my flat of five years’ habitation. Thank you, sweet Lord, for hired help. No more of this do-it-yourself crap to save money. Money’s not worth it! There’s a handyman in the East Bay whose slogan is Just Fix It! I’m his target market. Don’t tell me what needs to be done, don’t tell me how you’re going to do it, just keep me out of it and send me the bill. I’ll love you on Yelp.

THE BURDEN IS LIFTING,

the onus of owning. Buildings (four), appliances large and small, plumbing and lighting fixtures, rugs, dish- and glassware, utensils, power tools and hand trucks, lawn mowers and leaf blowers, couches, chairs, tables, cabinets, desks, ladders, hoses and garden implements, heart-shaped rock collections, statuary, computers, printers, scanners, 33-, 45- and 78rpm LPs, CDs, DVDs, pasta makers, food dehydrators, water heaters, beds and linens, bikes and ice skates, pianos and clocks and lamps and Tchochkes From Around the World, televisions and inner vision, jewelry, gloves, hats, shoes, thrift shop scores galore, art, kitsch, opera glasses, Oregon state flags, tents and camping gear, baubles, bangles, beads and books, books, books. I’ve owned nine refrigerators.

You can have it all, except for the four rooms I have once again crammed with some of the above.

“No fair blaming yourself for the excesses of Western culture in the late 20th-early 21st century!” wrote a friend. No, I replied, but I can be disgusted with myself for being emblematic of them. Shall I tell me what I think of me? I’m spoiled!

THE PAPERS ARRIVED

the other day. Not the newspapers, not my walking papers, but the dozen or more boxes of 53 years’ worth of letters, photos, articles of interest, concert programs, the trunk of misc. writings, journals, the 3-inch binder of my Collected Letters, half-written novels, scraps with incomprehensible scrawls, the uncredited quotes, phone numbers, and jotted-down musical works and opus numbers culled from the radio—a former forest of memories, glories and regrets.

“THERE SHE IS! THE SPIRIT OF SAN FRANCISCO!”

Said a street lady of me after she saw me hauling mirrors in a red wagon to put on consignment at the sweet little floral/gift shop Xapno at 678 Haight, two blocks from my flat. “It’s my car,” I told her when I first passed. Here’s today’s green tip: Go red. Next time you go to the supermarket, leave the car home and take the little red wagon.

DID ANYTHING EVER CHANGE OVERNIGHT

for you? Like little Ms. Zahra finding her way into my world and family? Like shaking a man’s hand and loving him for five years over it? Like someone cleaning your flat for you and feeling freer than you ever have? The ordeal is nearly over. A few last trips to the thrift shop, the stagers do their thing, the place is listed, and it’s off my hands. My part is pretty nearly over. I get to sit around my formerly charming apartment now inundated with papers, sorting those papers. I am going to get this stuff in order if I have to have a nervous breakdown doing it.  That’s my promise to myself.

The author’s pet, Zahra: Cat, or jackal? You be the judge. 

Author’s Caption: Zhara challenged Yulangi to a staring contest. The indifferent young jackal replied, with a lackadaisical sneer, “If we must.”

jackel photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/noodlefish/454513408/

“IT’S THE ULTIMATE EXPRESSION

of what life is all about—finding love.”

Who said that?

Gavin Newsom, of his impending marriage.

ISN’T THAT RIGHT, LITTLE MS. ZAHRA

What would your life be without love?  Over.  But overnight, upon Zahra’s arrival, domestic bliss chez Alexandra became feline discord. After ten days of mewling, hissing, butt sniffing, and suspicion, Zazu, Zzyzzy and Zahra can now share a room. Zahra has too much energy to be confined to the couch now and must dash and flop and slide across the floor whether they like it or not. The elders watch her gymnastics with bemusement. What’s all the commotion about? My downstairs neighbor must think the cavalry is coming through.

It’s become obvious to all there’s more than enough love to go around. It’s delightful having a baby in the house. My stodgy 2-year-olds are beginning to liven up. It’s Saturday night and I’m sure the clubs and bars are packed with revelers, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be than in front of my laptop with a purring kitten curled on my shoulder, Errol Garner’s Russian Lullaby not-at-all putting me to sleep nor waking her up. Zzyzzy’s been a gentleman, exhibiting a meet-her-halfway curiosity, but Zazu, who’s in love with me, is having a harder time sharing me. But Zahra was only 1 lb. 6 oz. when I brought her home and they know not to hurt her. Pretty soon they’ll love her too.

Because time flies.  Sooner or later, love will become the ultimate expression of what life is about.

The proud author with her late-in-life bundle of mischief.

MORE INPUT ON “THE SECRET”

to creative longevity and prolificacy. David Amram has provided the answer to Philip Glass’s inquiry, “Get up in the morning and work all day. That’s the secret. Is there another one?”

Yes. Have fun while you’re doing it.

I don’t really see Philip Glass having fun. Work to him may be an intellectual compulsion. Certainly he’s driven, but by what? I doubt he’d call it fun.

IT’S ON MY 2009 TRAVEL CALENDAR.

After referencing Amram and Guthrie in my last column, I thought to send Amram an email, and he responded from, of all places, Okema, Oklahoma, Guthrie’s birthplace and site of the annual WoodyFest in mid-July.

He needed more than 1400 words to outline his exhausting schedule of past months—exhausting for me to read, that is—all over the U.S. and Canada performing, speaking, receiving a 6th honorary Ph.D., recording, seeing his son married, and incidentally composing a piano concerto, and after all this he writes, “How the tempus fugits when you’re having fun!!!” And that’s three exclamation points worth o’ fun, more even than that barrel of monkeys!!

“When people ask me how I can get the energy to continue to work 16 hours a day,” he wrote, “I always tell them that since I am a young whippersnapper only 77 years old, I’ll do ANYTHING to avoid getting a day job again!”

Amen, brother!

“I really feel lucky every day,” he concluded, that I am able to survive doing what I love to do, and able to do it!”

“EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE PLASTIC.”
-Woody Guthrie, “Talking Columbia Blues”

I don’t know who you are out there, reading this, but I would say the same to anybody—if you hate your job, if it takes more out of you than it gives you—find a way to get out of it, even if it takes years, ‘til your kids graduate, or you reach the end of that rope that tethers us all.  YOU, I’m talking about, not your bank account. YOU, not some plastic replica. As human beings, we must be nourished to grow and evolve. You can feed your stomach but if you starve your soul you’re devolving, diminishing yourself.

Find work you love, and have fun doing it. Easy for me to say, not having any dependents. And not everyone can be a David Amram, a Philip Glass. But what I’ve done was not easy. There was lots of letting go. I have literally bought my time with money. I sold one home and am selling another. I’ve abandoned security, I rid myself of steady income. And I am happy, happy, happy.

“Work,” by its very definition (one of them), “the physical or mental effort directed at doing or making something,” sounds like work. Who wants to do it, unless you love it?

On author Ariel Gore’s website she quotes a writing teacher, Floyd Salas, who said, “All considerations of language, of ideas, of symbols and metaphors serve only one function: to convey the soul of a living being to the soul of other living beings and in that process break us out of our isolation and loneliness and put us in touch with the universal spirit.”

To be in touch with universal spirit is to be whole, at one with oneself and the world.

“AND IN THE DEW DROP GLITTER

Of some radiant crystal spray/We’d saddle up the weather/And we’d harness up the day/Weld up the eaves and corners/Nail up the hoists and beams/Organize the day of work/To rivet to our dreams”

-Woody Guthrie, “Harness Up the Day”

One’s work must convey one’s soul. And if it does not, perform that work in a way that conveys your soul. But the day may come when your soul demands more of you, when it’s time to live your work. Or else everything’s going to be plastic.

The porch of the Portland house the author sold to live as a writer.

AND IT FOUND ME.

Well, it’s the Fourth of July, which I hate and never celebrate because it was the last whole day of my beloved Jackson’s life. Zazu sleepily raises her head when a furious fussilade of whistling fireworks goes off outside my kitchen window, and lowers it back onto her paws when it stops. The booms travel over the roof and sound on the street. When it happens again she couldn’t care less. Later I find the spent detritus on 15th Street, with little scorch marks on the asphalt.My sunburned shoulders from my afternoon at Dolores Park, the sun still beating as the clouds flew by, tingle as the fog moistens my skin up on the roof. City Hall looks like a Kubla Khan fantasy, its stately dome blurred by mist. Not much to see, fireworks-wise. But oh, the beautiful fog blanketing the city and blurring its lights! I love knowing this sky is right above my apartment, over the sandwich of the roof; it reminds me, as one forgets in city life, that the sky reigns over all, no matter the interference from city outcroppings of buildings and communications towers.“I love your spot in the world,” Jon Crow told me. And wrote in my guestbook, “I’ve known all your homes on the West Coast, and this rates among the best…the perfect fit of elegance and place.” It does fit me perfectly, or perhaps I am coming to fit myself.I enact my yearly July 4th ritual of playing Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” my own personal national anthem. “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered, I don’t have a friend who feels at ease, I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees.” My dream’s not been shattered. In fact I don’t call my dream a dream; I call it life. As long as I can spend my days and nights writing and not being beholden to anyone, there’s nothing else I’m waiting to have happen.

PHANTOM LIMB

I’m still feeling a body appendage that was cut from me—my laptop. My dying dying dead dying hard drive died. The fate of my data is in the hands of The PowerBook Guy on the 10th floor of the Flood Building. “They love us on Yelp,” read his t-shirt. “I’ll love you on Yelp if you get my files back for me.”But this is rather lovely, writing with a pencil. It reminds me of sitting on the metal rocker on our porch as a kid, thinking my thoughts in the night, one of those close, dense, still Philadelphia summer nights when bats would circle Camac Street, the haunting Brothers Four song “Greenfields” playing on the radio…Once there were green fields, kissed by the sun.Once there were valleys, where rivers used to run.Once there were blue skies, with white clouds high above.Once they were part of an everlasting love.We were the lovers who strolled through green fields.Even back in school, this song struck an apocalyptic note of inevitability in me, almost as if I knew that day had to come, when all the beautiful things of the earth would now be “once” upon a time.I’ve always written drafts with a pencil, when I want to think slowly. Poems, short stories, the novel, anything in flux, because pen is too final, too satisfied with itself, and the laptop is too, too much an appendage. Through a pencil you actually write, form words, with your hand, not just by tapping your fingers on titanium keys. In fact I am an unofficial member of the Lead Pencil Club (unofficial because I love my laptop).  In all correspondence, says their Manifesto, “we will favor the lead pencil—simple, erasable, light, portable, and responding immediately to the mind, that quirky little expendable that the superhighway would like to forget as it rushes past on its way to oblivion.”

PHILADELPHIA, PENCIL MANIA

I’ve occasionally addressed a letter. As long as I include a zip code, it gets there. I still have at least one of the School District of Philadelphia pencils my first lover, my high school creative writing teacher, gave me in the early 70’s, and no pencil has ever been so toothsome, so gripping of the paper, so satisfying to write with.I leave my laptop at home when I go to Burning Man (desert dust—scared of you!) but when I misplaced my book bag with my journals, notebooks, blank books, my 30-year-old copy of On the Road, it was not my laptop I was missing, it was pencils, paper, and words in books. I don’t at all mind being disconnected from the digital flow of information—I love it, it’s part of the appeal of BM. So this year I plan to have my own little theme camp, a writer’s emergency station, featuring the 20-or-so blank books I uncovered while packing, that I’ve picked up or had given to me over the years, pencils, pens, tablets, legal pads, loose paper, stationery, miscellaneous books, a little desk and a comfy chair to enjoy it all in. I never want anyone to be stuck in the desert, like me, with no writing materials.

NEXT DAY, ON A WHIM

I take the 49 to Cesar Chavez and walk back down Valencia to see what’s to be seen. Not too far into my journey I spy a sidewalk sale in front of an Asian herbal shop. When I least expect it, I am struck by lightning.

AND I’M IN LOVE!

Who wouldn’t be, with this face?The author’s new kitten, Zahra, right at homeon the author’s couch. El sofá del autor, sofá del Zahra.A gal on vacation from San Diego had developed a rapport with a striped caramel cutie, one of three kittens in a cage on the street, one who immediately stole my heart. She turned her over to me and I knew she had to come home with me. She’d been waiting for her forever home, her forever love, waiting for me. It was a meeting that was meant to be. I’ve never been up on Valencia around there. My mission was accomplished. Her caretaker wrapped her in a t-shirt and I bought a fabric shoulder bag at another street sale ($5 reduced to $4—a dollar credit for the kitten). I walked her home in my arms, stopping to talk to kids and the owner of a tiny dog. Look, Zahra, it’s that thing they call a dog. Ever see one before?You will indulge the author, yes?The author’s column puts Zahra to sleep.The calendar shot from under the author’s toilet.Look! The author’s cat is no bigger than The NortonAnthology of English Literature, Volume 2!Zahra seen through a cardboard box handle.Too cute, even for the author!All right, that’s enough.

I’M A PROUD MOM, WHAT CAN I TELL YOU.

It’s an auspicious night—a layer of smoky haze over the city, Sutro Tower poking out of it, and a “silver slipper of a moon,” as Tennessee Williams put it, rising above it all. Brahms on the stereo, evening breeze through the window, cats on the couch, that’s my idea of home. I even broke my LaborFest movie date with Mark “Silver Fox” Marsh to stay by Zahra’s side and assure her this is home. Lucky, lucky kitty! It occurs to me that on July 5th, the anniversary of Jackson’s death, that this was the perfect way to pay tribute to him. It was meant to be.I’m trying to engage Zazu and Zzyzzy, but they are keeping their distance, growling and hissing, recoiling from the smell of kitten on my hands. They have taken up sentry posts in the hallway, staring, with thought bubbles rising from their heads reading, “What is the meaning of this?” No need to be threatened or jealous, but Zahra after all is sleeping with the alpha cat, the author. All in the fullness of time. I wish I could just tell them in English, I’m only doing for her what I did for you, giving her a home when she needed one. You understand, yes?

RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS, SENSELESS ACT OF BEAUTYin which the author revives her occasional feature of sharinggolden nuggets of prose encountered in her readings.

“We looked like a gang of lost corpses heading back to the boneyard.”“I’d seen a thousand kids just like them. They seem to come from homes somewhere that they’ve run away from. They seem to come to take the place of the old stiffs who slip on a wet board, miss a ladder, fall out a door, or just dry up and shrivel away riding the mean freights; the old souls that groan somewhere in the darkest corner of a boxcar, moan about a twisted life half lived and nine tenths wasted, cry as their souls hit the highball for heaven, die and pass out of this world like the echo of a foggy whistle.”“…the car jerked and buckled through the clouds like a coffin over a cliff.”

BEFORE ON THE ROAD, CAME

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory. Woody and Jack were contemporaries; Woody was born ten years before Jack, in 1912, and died two years before him, in 1967. Bound for Glory was published in 1943; Jack wrote On the Road in 1951. Richard Sheinen of the San Jose Mercury News said in his review of David Amram’s “Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie,” that “quintessentially American figures who lived large”—Amram, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kerouac and Woody—“were part of a loose-knit community of artists in New York City; everyone knew everyone. Or soon would.”Still I don’t know that Jack and Woody ever met, but if not, they should have. Maybe they were, unbeknownst each to the other, riding the same freight at some point. Woody Guthrie was not just a great songwriter, but great writer, period. I’ve been a huge fan ever since the early 80’s, when a strolling guitar-playing Amtrak troubadour brought me to tears with the State Folk Song of Washington, “Roll On Columbia,” as we sped through that spectacular state.Roll on, Columbia, roll onRoll on, Columbia, roll onYour power is turning our darkness to dawn,So roll on Columbia, roll on…Tom Jefferson’s vision would not let him restAn empire he saw in the Pacific NorthwestSent Lewis and Clark and they did the restSo roll on, Columbia, roll on…“Yeeeeaaaaah…” says Woody in the movie “Bound for Glory,” to the woman he spent the night with, who looks puzzled. “Yeeeaah, I’m married.” Scoundrel!Amram, said the Mercury News article, “sees Guthrie as part of a ‘Whitman-esque tradition,’ one that ‘embraces the open road and all the people who live in this amazing vast country of ours.’ It’s a tradition that ‘expresses the beauty part of life experience’ in words and song.”I met Amram in Kerouac’s hometown, Lowell, Mass., and attended the San Jose premiere of the Guthrie Variations. The beat goes on, I thought. A shiver of history ran through me, and my connection to it. I am an heir of Whitman, of Guthrie, of Kerouac. I have a passable folk-register singing voice and even once thought of forming a band called The Woodies (tee hee) to revive local coffee house interest in his genius. Guitar, harmonica, tambourine, fiddle? Anyone interested? If you embrace the open road and the beauty part of life, sign up here: axfiles@sbcglobal.net.

YOUR SATISFACTION. FIND IT HERE.

Here? On the Haight Noriega bus, as it pauses in front of Café International to let off a wheelchair? It’s an ad on the side of the bus for certified diamonds. Even though Catherine Zeta-Jones once said, of gifts from men, “Call me old-fashioned, but nothing says I love you like a big, old rock,” I don’t think I’d symbolize my satisfaction with a diamond. Nevertheless, what if my satisfaction were to be found on that bus, in some random guy, and I let it pass. Go ahead, pass on by. Like I said, there’s nothing I’m waiting to have happen. One can’t wait for life, or it never gets here.I came to the Café to show the matriarch, Zahra, her feline namesake. And I finish this column here. So, my mission accomplished, I bid you meow!The author has the whole kitten in her hand.

WELL, I MISSED THE OPPORTUNITY

to play “gay for a day” with my great Brooklyn friends Jon and Oscar. I had other things to be proud of. They arrived Friday on the Coast Starlight from Seattle, bemoaning the lack of gay visibility in Seattle, a travesty balanced by the gay population on the F trolley from the train station to my place. Wherever we are going for dinner, requests Jon, we have to be able to look out and see gays. So I lead them to the window counter at Fuzio where we have a perfect view of the pre-Pride crowd.

On the way I ask Jon to take seriously the danger of crossing SF streets recklessly. They drive like maniacs here, you know. “Then we’ll have to cross like maniacs,” he says, stepping into the intersection. He of course knows better; “They’ll cut you to the curb,” he agrees.

At Fuzio we pick up on the energy circulating and take to waving at passers-by to join in the vibe and get their reactions. Some are mystified, some approach the window thinking they must know us from somewhere, some wave back. We’re just having silly fun.

After dinner, on Castro, we bump into the Tranny parade braving the chill. How far we have come since Christine (née George) Jorgensen, one of the pioneers of sex reassignment surgery, b. 1926, d. 1989. She was big news in 1952, when she, as she later put it, gave the sexual revolution “a good swift kick in the pants” by being one of the first transsexuals to receive hormone therapy and, later, a vaginoplasty. The procedures took place in Denmark, and though an American ambassador helped her change her passport designation from male to female, Jorgensen was later unable to marry Howard Knox, a Massapequa typist, because her birth certificate still listed her as biologically male. She was ahead of her time, but her time has finally come. As it has for lots of now legitimately married folk.

EVER KNOW ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE

who is always upbeat, smiling, enthusiastic, optimistic, energetic, who always puts the best spin on things? Obnoxious, yes? We all know people like that, but how many of them are like that the day after they’ve had a bilateral mastectomy? I can name one, my friend “Kaye.” Kaye was first diagnosed with end-stage cancer in October of 2003. She was given a prognosis of two-to-three years. In 2004 I took a cross-Canadian train trip with her, not knowing if it could my last opportunity to spend time with her. She’s still going strong in 2008, and came out of her surgery like a champ, like she’d been on vacation, excited and eager to relate her experience. In fact, I told her, she reminds me of myself on a manic high.

I spent the Pride weekend in Berkeley helping Kaye get her bearings and tending to her. She has always had more energy than I, and this weekend was no different. What else would you expect from a woman whose calling card identifies her as a “creative appreciationist”? Thanks to a modern medical miracle called the On-Q Painbuster, which drips local anesthetic directly into the wound, she was pain-free, lucid and full of stories.

THE AX FILES HITS THE CENTURY MARK

I’ll tell some of them in time, but this is a quick one, y’all, on the occasion of my 100th column—pathetic an achievement though it be, as it took me more than three years to get here. That’s about 2.5 columns a month (though some of them are as long as a novella). I think h brown cranks out 100 in a month. Well, needless to say since I quit my job I have stepped up production, but once my flat is sold it’s time to move certain projects back from the back to the front burners. I promise I’ll keep coming at you at least once a week, for those of you who would actually miss me if I were gone. One friend and reader recently called me to make sure I was OK, because I hadn’t posted in a while. I am blessed with great friends and great readers.

So in commemoration of this milestone, upon the popular demand of exactly one reader, I have compiled a collection of the first one hundred short attention span poems—available as a Word document ONLY BY REQUEST to axfiles@sbcglobal.net. It is also a comprehensive listing of my columns along with links to them. Search the archives or browse for surprises.

I JUST WANT TO CELEBRATE

another day of living for us all. Welcome back, Kaye, to your large and loving, supportive fold of friends and relatives. It’s you that I was proud of this weekend.

Courage, thy name is Kaye!

The author’s friends Oscar Wiener and
the other white meathead, with Buddha.

BUT FIRST

admire the beauty and power of your shroom. Turn it slowly in your hands. Take note of the gradations of color, the blue veining, the wrinkles and gills so concentrated with magic it’s already radiating in your hand…

Wow, that was an awkward wake-up call. Stopped to phone what I‘ve always thought was the art studio number of the man who was man enough for me, the ex who is also a mycologist (mushroom expert), and started leaving a message about my column on the power and beauty of shrooms, to ask what is the technical name for the gills (it’s gills). There was a pause, when I thought he picked up the line after screening, and I chuckled about my message, but the silence continued and I asked hello? hello? Then I realized his young daughter, the daughter he fathered after I left him and went to Italy, had picked up, not he.

“I’m sorry—is your dad there?” “He’s sleeping,” said the tiny voice. I made my exit, having already left the message, which probably includes our exchange. It never occurred to me his child had access to that phone. I don’t know why at 8:45 p.m. he was asleep and his daughter was not, but I rather enjoyed the encounter, apart from my blunder. It gave me momentary entrance into someone else’s life, a Sunday evening vignette of a sleeping man and his curious daughter. I’ve heard plenty about her, but have never met her.

OOOH, MAKES ME WONDER

what would have happened had I not left him, because it was a unilateral move, my decision to end the relationship. Well, a lot of things would have had to be different, but in a parallel universe, the girl would have been my daughter. He (“Mark Marsh” I have called him) is a highly fertile man, and my turn would have come. I may have told this story before, but he came into my office to have lunch with me, don’t remember if I introduced him around, and afterwards a female coworker (rather oddly, I thought) felt free to come right up and ask me, “Is he a very sexual person?”

Well, I guess he must be, sister, if you picked up on it in two seconds flat! He certainly has enough children to show for it. Zahra at the Café also zeroed right in on his powerful vibe. He’s kind of an epic American type, like Robert Ryan or Gary Cooper. A radical free-thinker.

Anyway—just the usual sort of “what if” speculation—except that I have always known, or perhaps convinced myself, I am not cut out for the live-in and children trip—but suspect if I had been, it would have been with this guy. I always thought we’d end up back with each other, and I still can’t rule that out because, hey, the future hasn’t happened yet.

I USED TO THINK

there was an answer hanging in the air, as to how something is going to turn out, like who’s going to win the game tomorrow. Like there’s a marker of truth in the universe that has the information and “if only” we knew it, well, we’d place a huge, huge bet on it. I guess I’m thinking of it in terms of an all-knowing Narrative Voice, who relates the present with knowledge of the future, like the Stage Manager in Our Town.

I was trying to explain to a friend that whether you believe in predetermination or not, that answer IS there, something IS going to happen, but even though no one can know what it is, the answer IS “out there” somewhere. She was saying, no that can’t be. If it hasn’t happened yet, the answer can’t be out there.

I’m glad I didn’t try to win a logic debate, but today I firmly believe the answer is NOT out there. We make continual choices that make up the now and to say the answer is out there robs the present of its possibilities…well, it robs the power of now of its power, because a new now is always being created—that’s why we’re all “in” it. We are in the present, in the now. There’s nowhere else to be. And there are so many factors as to what influences the now, it’s virtual insanity to think we can predict the future.

I AM A WORLD-FAMOUS FISHMONGER

For instance, one of the market owners at Pike Place Market in Seattle, started with the premise that he could and would create the life he had in mind by telling himself, “I am a world-famous fishmonger!” Whatever your dream for your life, he says, “Declare it like it’s so,” and then, as Jean Luc Picard would say, “Make it so.”

Every watch a TV show—even the news—and they keep showing the same teasers over and over, to keep us watching? Are our attention spans so corrupted that we have to be reminded every few minutes that there’s more to come, like we didn’t just see the same clip? I don’t want to know what’s coming up. I want to experience it as it’s happening, as it unfolds. I don’t want a synopsis of a movie. I want the movie to tell me the story.

In the movie “Closer,” a man involved with a stripper says something that causes her to warn, “I’ll call security,” But they’re not at the club, and he replies, “There is no security.”

WE MIGHT AS WELL ALL FACE IT.

There is no security. Even if you’re with someone you utterly trust, who makes you feel safe and secure, there is no guarantee, not a marriage license, not a promise, not good intentions, that the situation won’t change down the road. I’m not saying never count on anyone, just be present at this moment. Live your live as it’s happening, don’t tease yourself with what’s coming up. You don’t know what it is.

So my idea of how something might turn out is just a serving suggestion.

NA. GA. HA.

I recently told someone something was not going to happen. Because I know. Because right now, I know that thing is not going to happen. Because right now, that’s my reality and it’s going to have to be his as well. He gave me a gift that I lost no time in telling him was beautiful but inappropriate because we don’t have that type of relationship and never will. Hard to say, harder to hear, but why waste his time with false hope?

I can’t admit to this person that I don’t know, that no one knows, that I may come around, that I could get closer to him and see him a different way. It’s just not happening now, and I don’t expect it to. But I can’t know. I could surprise the hell out of myself.

“It’s never going to happen between us.”

“I’ll love you forever.”

Those who utter these words may wholeheartedly believe them to be true. But seriously, people, they’re only true now, at the moment of the utterance, even if that moment lasts 10 years, 20 or 40 years.

PEOPLE DON’T LIKE IT.

No one wants to admit their long-time lover or companion or spouse could stop loving them. So we invent this crazy idea of “forever” and even sign contracts about it, promising each other we will always feel what we can never promise we will always feel. Get married if you want to. Because it’s what you want now. But don’t confuse “I do” with “I always will.” Besides death and taxes, no one knows what will always be.

I myself have wished that someone had done me the favor of saying outright to me, “It’s never going to happen.” And I would have expected myself to move on from there. But even if he had, guess what—he doesn’t know that! My shrink once told me to give up a fantasy that brought more frustration than reward. But you see, Dr. S., there is always hope, because, hey, the future hasn’t happened yet.

The answer is NOT out there. No one knows it. There is no marker of truth.

SHIT! PISS! FUCK! CUNT! COCKSUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER! TITS! FART! TURD! TWAT!

George Carlin is dead. Long live George Carlin! I shed a tear in tribute.

OK, I WAS WRONG.

It’s not always sunny in the Mission. Frigid San Francisco is back, and it’s fine by me. But I’ll never forget the warm embrace of that blessed night on the rooftop, the navy sky of scattered stars, the grey clouds rimmed with brilliant white as the moon passed in and out of them, the caressing breeze as welcome as a surprise tap on the shoulder from someone you love.

17th and GUERRERO

is not the most attractive corner in San Francisco, but hidden away nearby is a most attractive café. I’m not going to let H Café, though the most comfortable so far, monopolize my latte business like I did Café International, to the exclusion of all the other interesting coffee houses in the ‘hood. I stumble upon Café Petra and it has what I’m looking for, coffee, free internet and lunch, and a pleasant, welcoming atmosphere. No couch, but wall-length wooden benches covered with colorful rugs, textiles, pillows of mixed design, fronted by painted tables and chairs facing them. On a day I go there for lunch with friend Saand it’s silent as a library, every one of a dozen patrons on a laptop, lined up as if in study carrels.

GIVE ME LEISURE EVERY TIME

One mural is a desert with camels, featuring, as the name Petra would suggest, stone columns and buildings, rock formations. The other mural is Grecian in imagery. Curious mix. Floral stained glass panels above the picture windows. The proprietors are Asian, or at least the counter staff. The ceiling is covered in grass mats, with mini railroad lanterns stationed here and there. Six shelves of books. Eclectic mix. Romance novels, a 1996 Poet’s Market, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Looking for Mr. Goodbar and on the table beside me, Joys of Irish Humor, featuring Robert Beersohn’s “The Dignity of Labor.”

Labor raises honest sweat;
Leisure puts you into debt.

Labor gives you rye and wheat;
Leisure gives you nought to eat.

Labor makes your riches last;
Leisure gets you nowhere fast.

Labor makes you swell with pride;
Leisure makes you shrink inside.

Labor keeps you fit and prime;
But give me leisure every time.

I’M NOT AFRAID OF A HARD DAY’S WORK–

I’m incapable of it. I mean, I could write all day, no problem, but as to the rest, the jobs and careers of the world, I’m just not interested, and no longer have the emotional stamina to act like I am. I insist on living the way I want to, on my butt with my laptop at hand. I declare it to be so: I am a world-class wordmonger!

A riot of kids bursts in bouncing beach balls and creating general good-humored havoc. Ah, youth. The owner is patient and accommodating. I am loving Café Petra. My neighborhood is expanding. I don’t have time to miss Lower Haight. There is too much life going on here, walking the streets, frequenting the bars and restaurants, shopping the many markets, waiting for buses, hanging around 16th St. BART. Safeway and its miles of aisles can move over for the shop-local specialty grocery and deli, Bi-Rite on 18th. Serving suggestion for after your shroom course: their Orange Cardamom ice cream with a ginger snap and a sprig of mint. Eat it up on the roof.

The author’s cat Zzyzzy relaxes at sunset.
Give him leisure every time.

Shh. The author is hard at work.

NO SIR, YES SIR!

My shoes? I ask, when I keep beeping going through security at City Hall. I’m wearing a sterling silver rattle dangling from a mother-of-pearl teething ring I made into a necklace, so I take that off and keep beeping. I start taking my rings off, and the guard says, no need, it’s probably your shoes. My shoes? I say incredulously. How can shoes make a metal detector go off? I’m not concealing knives in them for God’s sake. Just don’t kick anybody or throw your shoes at anybody, he tells me, straight-faced. Is this guy for real? But whatever, I go on through. I have some time to kill before the Symphony across the street and stop at Mirkarimi’s art party.

COME TO THINK OF IT,

Ross might be a good guy to kick. I’m wearing my wedding/funeral shoes. (As James Joyce put it, “married and dead.” Two for the price of one.) Or, with good aim, this basic black pump with 2” heel could put a good dent in his forehead, like Vivien Leigh laid on Lee Marvin in “Ship of Fools,” a scene that reminds me of the time I killed a scorpion with a boot on the side of a mountain in Mexico. Think fast, Ross!

Anyone with an ego enormous as Ross’s has got to be part obnoxious jerk, yes? Maybe I’ll just kick him on general principle. But he makes a narrow escape taking off with Jake McGoldrick. So I’m “leaving the district,” Ross observed. I was looking forward to being in Chris Daly’s D6, but I am a 1/2 block away from it in D8 and stuck with the killer of Halloween in the Castro, Bevan Dufty. Bevan Dufty representing me? I don’t think so. Chris, you’re just going to have to adopt me.

Lower Haight activist and Ross’s aide Vallie Brown likes my black sheath dress and embroidered bolero jacket. I’m on my way to the Symphony, I explain, and she hopes I’m going somewhere after as well because I look great (a shame to waste it, I guess). Yes, I have plans for after the Symphony. They are to walk down Van Ness and take the F trolley home. I could stop at Safeway, but it raises my blood pressure. It took me a lifetime to find a bottle of water in there the other day.

INSTEAD, I DO SOMETHING I HAVE NOT DONE

since I used to walk home from North Berkeley BART. I cross Market Street and take off those deadly dangerous weapons, my shoes. You’ve got to watch where you step, but I love walking barefoot on city streets. As different from shoes as walking is from driving. A friend prefers a stick-shift to an automatic as “more of a driving experience.” Well this is more of a walking experience. There’s another kind of life down there you’re usually oblivious to. Changes in texture, temperature; it’s a friendlier way of relating to what you’re walking on. And if God wanted people to wear shoes, he would have invented Manolo Blahnik. (Apparently, he wanted people to wear really fabulous shoes.)

Vallie’s right though. It is a shame to waste it. On this rare night of true summer balminess, I should have a man on my arm. Reminds me of something a Portland (male) friend said after I headed south. “I hope they’re man enough for you down there.” Should I quote myself again? Let’s say it together: If I’m too much for you, you’re not enough for me. Man enough…there was one guy who was…but his hobby of impregnating other women came between us.

IT’S ONLY 1:11.

Should I go out on the strip? There are several around here. 16th Street, Church Street, Valencia Street, Mission Street, Market Street, take your pick. I’m steps away from any and all of them. Go out in your party dress, girl, and see what happens.

Instead I go up on the roof with my laptop, hitch my narrow skirt up to my hips and sit on a towel on the gravel, with the late great Oscar Peterson flying me to the moon. I can obliterate City Hall and the Bay Bridge with my thumb. There’s a broken wine glass out here, suggesting past…wine-drinking. I have never reacquired my taste for wine since I, well, never you mind. But there should be a man up here with me because the moon is full and so am I—“plena mujer” as Pablo Neruda wrote it and Todd Brown painted it. Full woman.

Full of myself. Full of it.

One half the sky is clear, but in the other the moon plays hide and seek with a bank of mottled clouds….is there anything more wonderful than a full moon over a San Francisco rooftop? Yes, sharing it with a man you love. Why did I just flash on having sex with K. in the back of a Volkswagen on N.W. Johnson Street? I could get my sleeping bag out and spend the night up here. But I’d rather cuddle with the kiddles.

THE CATS IN THEIR LITTLE FUR COATS

(sequel to “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses”) hate the heat and so do I. It has collected in my third floor garret just like in Philadelphia. But you’ve got to have hot days for buttery smooth nights like this. I feel sheltered by the sky, wrapped in its arms. I will take its magnificence to bed with me. I hope it doesn’t snore.

The author is a freako fetishist who enjoys taking
pictures of her own shoes. Sue her.
(Think fast, Ross!)