Storm settlement

Big Sur on Saturday morning. In an orange Volkswagen bus, an old one still running, veering from side to side because of great winds and pummeling rains. On the bridges, on the Bixby Bridge for instance, I thought we would tumble over into the ocean. But we made it with our brave driver and our strong faith in reaching our destination.

They said we were crazy to go on the trip, that it wouldn't be any fun because of the rains and the winds and not being able to keep a fire going or take a walk to see the ocean. But we went anyway knowing that there would be a shelter and that we would find some way to embrace the rain. At least, I knew this. And I think my friends knew it too. We did make a fire and keep it going. We even almost put up a tarp to shelter us from the rain, but, after much to-do with bungee cords and rope, it didn't work out. Umbrellas were in order and we were fine with or without them. My jacket got soaked through so I donned a sweatshirt under a sweater. We kept the fire going for hours. We saw the ocean during a detour on the drive back when we pulled over to a seaside road near Carmel and saw the huge waves tear at the rocks. I don't remember ever seeing bigger waves. The water was white with the violence of crashes and the sight calmed me.

We drank seven bottles of wine between the three of us. We danced in our cabin. We danced in the tavern. We were there to see a band. And we enjoyed the opening acts.

And inbetween bands, I saw someone that I hadn't seen in years. So out of place in Big Sur as I had known her in South Carolina ten years or so ago. We were never close. She was a friend of a friend really. But seeing her stirred up alot of memories that I've only just laid in a shallow grave again after another long haunting. But the stirring up didn't punish me as it has before, it only seemed like another ending, another epilogue, not a mysterious sign or signal. Only a coincidence. And as I sit here in the city in a coffee shop, I feel both more separated from these memories and more able to contain them somewhere safe inside me.

Life's a gas

Pine trees aligned dream-like. a sharp fade into day from a long, long night. I am looking for a job and dream moments brush by my logic-laden rationale. The one I want. The one I am trying to pursue. The glances that bounce from me now, the reverberations not quite silent. So, begins from today another week of cloudiness and rain in this Pacific civilization propped up from behind with two by fours, marbleized cardboard facade.

The job. there is nothing romantic about it. It might not even pay enough to justify my doing it. Well, it really doesn't matter at all, oh it really doesn't matter at all...life's a gas, I hope it's gonna last.

ghost of christmas past

I took Amtrak because I had always romanticized trains having grown up beside a railroad tressel. I thought sometimes I might want to take a train across the country to California and so I decided to try it out with a run from Chicago, IL to Columbia, SC around christmas 1997.

I remember having to stop and change trains in Washington, D.C.

I remember being so excited to get back to Columbia. It had been only six months. I was leading a lonely lonely life in Chicago. A life without a group of friends to cling to, to watch tv with, to eat dinners with, have a beer. Nope it was just my great uncle Benji and me living together in his apartment building on the far north side of Chicago.

When I got back everything was all the same and different.

One night there was a little party going on. It was at this house that had belonged to this couple - he about 21, she about 41 - and her kids when I had left. It was a nice house, it was a grown up house, but there were kids living there now. All around my age. Some I had known from working at the same restaurant. A few I did not know.

Those close friends who brought me to this house on this night (I don't remember when but I remember it was on this trip), well, this was their new group of friends to watch tv and eat dinner and drink beer with. But I didn't fit in with this group and I felt uncomfortable and so I went to go and hide out in the kitchen and sulk about no one noticing that I was not there.

That's what I was doing when I noticed a painting being painted in the breakfast area of the kitchen. The painting was of some rabbits ice skating in a park. I looked over the painter's shoulder and made an approving noise. When I realized that I had rudely intruded, I apologized, then introduced myself.

I am haunted by this memory and a dozen others.

I am waiting to be able to begin to hope to be free of this haunting.

I found the experience of being on a train for eighteen hours without a sleeping berth was too uncomfortable and claustrophobic to attempt again. I haven't been on a long train ride since then.

The Subtle Disntinctions

is the name of a band in that novel i was reading.

I just realized that 1987 1997 and 2007 were all wild and crazy out of control weird years of my life. I moved to South Carolina in 1987, moved to Chicago in 1997, and had a crazy year in San Francisco in 2007.

I want to change my life.

Significant snow

They're expecting snow - like it looks like a foot or so - in New York City. I used to get so excited when it would snow there. It's strange how snowfall was transformed into something less than magical during my time in Buffalo. At all other times and places in my life I have loved the snow. Snow days. Snow forts. Snow plows and snow angels and snowballs and snowbanks and snowflakes. All of it, and as much of it as possible, please. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow - I invoked it.

I guess I was just so down in the dumps in Buffalo that even the snow lost its loveliness for me. It was only the time or the place tho because I am longing for a snowstorm now.



Here in San Francisco, it's the first warm and sunny day after a solid week or ten days - it's difficult to keep track - of rain and storms. I took a little walk.

Thank you for letting me share your table

Since I am illegally, according to the landlady, staying in my friends' guest room and she came over today to fix a window that was broken by the storm, and the Mission branch library reading room was full, I sat drinking a hot chocolate in Cafe La Boheme for an hour or so's while this afternoon. In the middle of it, a lady sat down after asking me if one of the seats at my table was taken. She sat with a fat little notebook. She never ordered anything. She seemed to sense that her movements were distracting me from my book and so slowly inched away from me so that her chair was pulled up to the corner of the table. I just kept my face down and to the page for the entire duration of our table cohabitation. Then, abruptly, she asked, "Want to feel something?" I looked up to see her hand outstretched toward me. "Give me your hand," she said. "No," I said. She repeated, "Don't you want to feel something?" "No," I repeated. I went back to reading my book, carefully avoiding any semblance of looking up at her. Finally, after what seemed to me like hours, like time unfolding in another dimension, she got up and left. But not before mumbling, "thank you for letting me share your table."

Monster storm brings widespread impacts

Up all night last night waiting for the second of three storms scheduled to hit the San Francisco Bay Area in over around 72 or 84 or 96 hours I guess. Read a cool interview with Dennis Cooper about his old zine, Little Caesar, that he made in LA in the late 70s.



I figured out that I really like Mary Gaitskill's short stories. I'm wanting to read more of them. I saw her novel, Veronica at the library. I guess I've started reading Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem though. It's so weird how my old buddy Alison Bauknight from the Basil Pot (vegetarian restaurant where I worked in college) lent me all of those Jonathan Lethem books way back then and I read them, thought they were strange but good. But I never yet have read his two big new hit novels, Motherless Brooklyn and now that Fortress one.

I'm losing by 20 points on my current game of online scrabble, or Scrabulous. It sucks. I won by 20 points on the last game though.