West Oakland signage

Stuff you see in West Oakland.

Beginners is a beautiful movie:

Sex, Life, Healing, Sunlight, Nature, Magic, Serenity, Spirit

"Simple ... Happy." This is what I meant to give you.

Misty Mountains

These are the East Bay Hills

Midnight Mass

Read from notes. Totally inane.

Winter Solstice, quiet, dark

See the blog's new home here.

There's something so quiet and dark about the shortest day of the year. The sky was a bruised, fading purple-pink. The ocean seen through the Golden Gate reflected the short indigo-ing sun's light, as the sun fell off the end of the globe.

$ flows like water

No joke.

Happy Hannukah!

Coming into the Mountains: Puma Robles

The Sierras, 6,000 acres, meadows, purple oaks, mountain lions, deer by the thousands, hot springs.

Head off into the mountains.

In Long Valley, the depression point between the east-dying Sierras and the inner Cascades, meadows pour off the mountain in gullies, their golden color, a frozen stream, rich. You can feel the meadows are gold. They've never been ploughed, though grazed in this sheep-rich American Basque country. Some Basque-style artisan sausages for breakfast bring that point home. Walking over the meadow feels like swimming, the bent-over, dry, winter-dormant grasses sponging your steps, thrusting you forward, and the sensation comes: you could just forego feet and dive headfirst and begin alligator-crawling down-meadow with a meadow-wave every now and then picking you up and carrying you forward 20 or so feet. From afar, in this sage desert, the meadows are narrow and obviously precious in their soil that's spilled along from their mountain's heights, 2,000 feet above, and, likewise, with their water, which always finds the lowest way home.

Meadow pouring off a purple oak Sierra hillside.

It's 5,000 feet here. And on the eastern side of the Sierra, which means it's desert; the Sierra's 8,000-foot crests block a lot of moisture. So, outside of the yellow, rich meadows, you have amazingly rich, earthtoned mauve, green, tan, beige, purple, mustard, olive sageland.

We set out cross-country, 6,000 acres, no fences to worry about. Felt aboriginal blood beating. Felt the hunting instinct come back as the mountain-worn ranch-complex, tucked into the valley between two of the country's seedfruit-meadows, receded from view and the jagged cliffs, just beyond the valley's only river, called. If you looked back, the last of the Sierra hills looming just above, near, the winter oaks spanning the hillsides to the ridges above, their branches a bruised, soft purple, tinging the slopes, subtly, with that one soft sageland color. A constant hushed whoosh, an east-bound wind cresting the sharp Sierra ridge, poured around you into the valley, the Cascades offering their distance, a super-big giant's half-pipe.

Blue-gold.

We sometimes sit for a while in the sageland, ducking the cold wind in the land's minor undulations, feeling the pre-Solstice morning sun bathing the valley, all of which makes this prime napping country. Walking again, we sometimes follow the clear animal highways, worn by all kinds of paws and hoofs (no cow), rabbit, kangaroo rat, bobcat, deer, mountain lion (we keep looking). The ranch is called Puma Robles, Cougar Oaks. The area's supposed to have the highest concentration of mountain lions in all of the Sierra. They're drawn by the wide, rocky desert and the abundant deer that stream out of the mountains by the thousands on their migrations to and from the food-rich high Sierra summer meadows. It seems like we just miss actually seeing one, a moment too late, just when one stops moving, ducks down.

We reach the jagged rocks jutting out of the smooth hillsides that border the river. They leave questions. "Do you want the scientific explanation or the Native American one?"

We jump across the river, walk up the hillside between masses of unusual rock outcrops, climb up one and crawl out to its western overlook, which brings those Sierras, the river, and a long, baulked train course along its base into view. Leaning against a large boulder, the sun beating down, a banana is split, and a long, heavy train, ominous, crawling, dragging hundreds of what must be oil-bearing cars, round, black, full. The train's feel was overwhelmingly dark. From our mountain outpost – and not only that, this was an evil load – the slow, struggling train, dragging miles of oil across the desert valley, felt like Lord of the Rings marching, soulless dwarves preparing for battle. One hundred dollars says that oil's going for war.

--

The cold comes down out of the mountains in the early morning. A couple of days ago it was at about 6:30; you could feel the temperature drop, your skin sting slightly from the waft of cold. It happens when the sun rises on the other side of Long Valley, said Marco, and we speculated that that early-morning, thick, orange, light-blue light pulls the mountain air down off the National Forest-owned Sierra hills, whose feet the end-of-the-road ranch sits on, 2,000 feet below.

Hot springs pour into the creek periodically. One has been tapped. Steam rising as the 130-degree water meets winter night air. A hose collects the water and directs it into a baby blue round plastic tub, a kiddy pool on steroids. Regulating the flow allows temperature control and you to soak in air-cooled once-130-degree streamwater. A couple of claw-footed porcelain tubs add to the atmosphere, too, one directly in the curving-, coursing-around-the-base-of-a-small-round-hill stream, providing a touch of Dali to the day and night. A tub in the hot-stream, prairie grass all around and nothing but water and grey sky.

The only sound this night far-off 395 traffic heading to and from Reno, which glows the sky pink and purple just northwest in Thursday night splendor.

A hawk ...

Play that sh#$, DJ.

--

More mountain views, aqui.

Black-indigo Sierra

Entering the Tahoe valley at night on 80 from the Bay Area delta, the night, indigo black, folds in, heavy, a few miles northeast of Sacramento. Entering the Sierra foothills, it's tar pit black, the sky, the numerous trees that you can't see, but feel, and the slow, upwinding road add to the lost-in-space feel of the experience. It's quite striking. The mountains begin to assert their dominance as you slowly wind up to Donner Pass, where they once asserted it unequivocally, as the mass of 87 people, taking a short cut, got caught at what is now Donner Lake, just a few miles away and 2,000 feet below their golden gate that would lead to the Golden Gate, so named because it's the only exit to the ocean for landborne glaciermelt, snowmelt, rain, and mysterious groundwater for 2,000 north-south miles of central and north California. Instead, as Richard Rhodes' The Ungodly tells us, they lost half their crew that winter and some ate each other. "It was the world's worst wagon-train tragedy." What a statement!

The striking, huge bronze caste pioneer family memorial at Donner Lake State Park, at Donner Lake, where the Donner Party built roughshod cabins and lean-tos that American mythical winter, is not of any of their party, but a dude and wife and young daughter and babe-in-arms that came three years before in 1854, and called an "American hero" by the accompanying bronze plaque, for having survived alone at the lake while nursing an illness and a generally frail body.


But check out that sculpture! 20 feet tall at least, and one look at those praire-sprouted, mountain-tinged people, squat, strong, weather-beaten, mule-ish, but overwhelmingly indominatable, you feel they could muzzle-gun hunt deer and bear, huddle against wind and rain and hellish snow storms and trudge mile by mile across country and survive. It's all there in that belt.

All water west goes to the Pacific; all east of the Sierra evaporates. That means Truckee River, which courses magnificently through the charming side of the freeway of that 16,000-populated ski- and country-living town. The river's the only outlet from the great Lake Tahoe and flows east 20 or so miles to Pyramid Lake, where, if it be true, it meets its east-side Sierra evaporation fate.

Woke up in the morning and had my friend, masseuse, assess my what-must-be broken rib. The break's been pinpointed to just under my left arm, but where the ribs are still thick and heavy like a train.

She put one hand on either side of my bare-skinned back under my arms and in the morning cold grey light felt softly both sides for a few minutes, and then pinpointed the hurt. Felt like a protruding bone maybe. No good.

My people, if you with me, where the f@#$ you at?

Went on a random West Oakland walk yesterday to break up work, work, and just happened across the planned 12.12.11 Occupy Oakland mob heading from downtown to the Oakland port today. It was a grey day that bled into the afternoon. Cold.

There's a park about five blocks from my house that I usually walk to when I walk. As I approached the park, a half-block away, a few masked bike riders rode down from the park, into the street that bordered the park, and then away. Then some more showed up, masked, like buzzing, scout bees. Some frontrunning ghostriders.



Then, as I approached the park and the divided, four-lane road, 14th St., that borders it, perpendicular to my walking path, I saw the mob of people about six blocks up-street, coming slowly like a massive grey fog in the somber, tired day. It was impressive. Five minutes straight and the four-lane road was still packed with people, slow-moving third-world-looking dumpster trucks booming weird, hazed-over pop songs, hauling ganja-smoking, somewhat-bewildered kids who danced disinterestedly, their bodies moving deadly as their faces spoke a certain serious despair, the same despair you saw on almost everyone's faces, thousands and thousands, in serious despair, no smiling, no joy, this was not a buoyant event.

Upon first seeing that mass approaching down the street, a slow-moving storm, I thought, "That explains the helicopter." Which had been humming up above for the last hour. The 'copters are semi-regular (there's one buzzing now up above; it's Tuesday night, 8 p.m.) and just seem to be up there, droning away, because they can, and that domain is definitely an untouchable kingdom. Like, "You may be marching down there, but we're up here and you can't do sh#% about it." Initially thought the 'copters were monitoring a traffic situation. Apparently not. They're keeping an eye on the port and the marching proletariat. Can you see the angst in the march from the video?


Thought of Wu-Tang's Killer Bees, immediately.

Happiness and some others' writing

Happy. To Nar!

Lost in the YMCA men's basketball playoffs today. Horrible.

My favorite New Yorker writer, one of my favorite period, art critique Peter Schjeldahl;
snippet from "Old and New: The reopening of the Islamic wing at the Met," New Yorker, Nov. 7, 2011:

Details in illustrations of a Sufi poem, "Language of the Birds," were painted with hairs from the bellies of squirrels. Sit, look.

...

But for the majestic halls that are hung with Iranian and Ottoman carpets, a gallery of mostly Iranian ceramics, often created for middle-class markets from the ninth to the thirteenth century, harbors more concentrated beauty than any other in the wing. I can close my eyes now and summon the aqueous aura of a blue-glazed bowl in which silhouetted fish swim, surrounded by radiating lines that are sublimely both perfect, as design, and imperfect, in the slight vagaries of the painter's hand. As a one-off visual definition of the word "sophisticated," that bowl will do. Exiting the room, I felt a trifle different from the person I had been when I entered.


The vagaries of war illustrated by World War II US Major General Curtis LeMay, who led the US firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 civilians, quoted in Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atom Bomb:

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me. So I wasn't worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side. Incidentally, everybody bemoans the fact that we dropped the atomic bomb and killed a lot of people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That I guess is immoral; but nobody says anything about the incendiary attacks on every industrial city in Japan, and the first attack on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic bomb did. ... I guess the direct answer to your question is, yes, every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

The Rare Urban Rooster

The rare urban rooster. Took some photos at The Ranch at Dogtown in late afternoon for the urban farming story today. Roosters aren't common because they crow, and neighbors, those who don't wake up at 4 a.m., don't like that. This one slipped through the cracks. The hen-supplier, said Kathryn Porter, who owns/runs Dogtown, mis-sexed the rooster. It will be sent up north to a farm sometime soon. The city just can't handle a rooster.

More photos:

Arcana of Public Life

In a dull, yellow-lit room of SF City Hall, wood-paneled, godfather clock carvings filigreed periodically into the wall, you can’t help but think about the pointlessness of public process. People and people and people and people talk for the preservation of life, then the preservation of money, then life. Two sides offering conflicting factual statements again and again.

Photo of Laguna Salada at Sharp Park by Matt Jalbert (mattjalbert.com), who donated the photo for the Bay Nature story that brought me into the metaphorically rotting bowels of SF City Hall to cover a San Francisco Board of Supervisors subcommittee meeting for a story on 417-acre Sharp Park, which, as a lowland, meeting the ocean for the Sanchez Creek watershed, is a rare-ish central California coastal lagoon wetland. That's significant because a federally-endangered snake, the San Francisco Garter Snake and its prey, a federally-threatened frog, the California Red-legged Frog, both live there. And what you don't see is the 18-hole golf course which winds in and around the ocean side of the park, the wetland side. This photo was likely taken from a fairway.

See the guy eating in the doorway in the background? He's Sean Elsbernd, one of three supervisors on the subcommittee, and he's against the ordinance to transfer Sharp Park's management from the SF Recreation and Parks Department to the National Park Service. The supervisor really supporting the ordinance, he wrote it, is John Avalos, and he's sitting down, but you can't see him because the standing dude is blocking him. Avalos and Elsbernd jabbed back and forth at the beginning of the meeting.


It's guys like this that help long public meetings. Guy laughing next to me heard on the video, which was shot from the overflow meeting room downstairs in City Hall, was the primary author on the 211-page ecological study on Sharp Park commissioned by two environmental groups and published earlier this year. Pretty interesting.



Guy just starting singing, clearly freestyling. Amazing.

What a beautiful building to hold such insanity.

Trucks in the Sky; A white, 8-cylinder M3 BMW semi-remembered dream

These trucks fly in the sky above the unfortunate West Oakland neighborhood, South Prescott. It's horrible. Basically, the neighborhood's tucked into a triangle, bordered by highways on two sides and the raised BART rail on the other. The BART rail, I just realized, is above ground everywhere in its north and northeast East Bay routes (outside of two stops in downtown Oakland0) besides its Berkeley section. As soon as it enters Berkeley, it goes underground; as soon as it leaves, it shoots up.

Anyways, on the ground in the South Prescott neighborhood, it feels like you're in a Fifth Element-like future city with flying cars, trains, and a chaos of noise. Feels like the houses are burntout chunks of white, loose bedrock of a weed-straggled forsaken, sunburnt parking lot. You know the kind. There's no rest, no peace. I went there to see about an EPA project that revitalizes the lead-infested soils of the 100-year-old neighborhood, contaminated by years of car exhaust and lead paint peeling, dribbling into the soil, by depositing ground up fish bones. The high concentration of phosphate in the bones reacts with the toxic forms of lead in the soil to make them harmless to humans. The New York Times did a pretty good article on the situation. This research continues the urban farming story, which is a sprawling mess of a subject. It's going to be hell to write. Just did 400 words. How do you keep it all straight ... and which plethora of data do you include ????

The EPA dude was smooth, polished, had designer blackframed glasses, the kind with a subtle, elegant burgundy on the skinside of the frame, and wore a musky cologne and some kick-ass cowboy boots. Spiked, gelled, stylish black hair, handsome. He walked out, and immediately I thought, "Harem." And he was polished in the government way, the know-the-game, know-the-rules way, in the hit-your-numbers, have at least one immaculate-showcase-available-to-show-off way.

We talked outside his office in front of his attractive, tough jeans-wearing assistant, woman, and first went to the boneyard outback to see the one-ton bags of ground Pollock bone and smell their surprisingly still-fishy smell, and then to the South Prescott neighborhood, which was just around the corner from this outpost, temporary headquarters.

---

Remnants of a Sunday morning dream:

Multi-colored, electric green, yellow, orange, red, 8-cylinder enhancing things. Asian shop. Called Two Stairs Chop shop. It was a shady operation, to say the least. I kept wondering why the fuck I was bringing my car there.

Posey Tube, Chinatown, Occupy Oakland Trees, Job

My new part-time job is in Alameda, the little island that noone knows about unless you live in the East Bay that's just a channel-skip away from mainland Oakland. It requires tube-travel. It's the travel that almost killed me going to Alameda for the interview of the very job I have today via the Alameda-bound tube, the Webster Tube. The Posey Tube is outflowing. Now picture, after watching that video, a person riding a bike through the tube, on the road, no shoulder, no lights, no helmet, early in the morning. The Webster tube has no measly sidewalk like the Posey. Didn't know how to get there and was going to be late. Should be dead.

The video above is from the absolute nadir of the tube; judging from its depth, the water surface must not be too far above, maybe 20 feet from the top of the tube? And, as you can see, it's loud, and the yellow, blaring light is disorienting. Riding along that narrow path, I keep waiting for:

1. A big overhanging bus mirror to knock me out;

2. My bag to snag on the leaning, inconsistent metal railing, which would bend my front wheel toward the wall, send my back sliding along it briefly, and then, after a time-dragging prologue, the climax: the bike finally catching for good on the metal railing, corkscrewing me, with 200-pound momentum, into the shoulder-less road and an amazing modern stampede death;

3. The same thing to happen, but the inciting incident would be an 18-wheeler (which do come through there often) and its amazing negative-pressure whirlwind rush;

4. Me, losing it in the yellow light and blaring noise, throwing my bike over the railing and walking, stat, to Chinatown, whose chaos pulses on the Oakland side of the tube, to eat sesame sweetgum-filled beanpaste buns and mysterious, stale-tasting rice-noodle stir-fry for the rest of the day.

Chinatown welcomes this impending daylong flipout.
With sesame "ching doi."

On the way home from the new job, which I'm thankful for, but something that leaves you thinking empty thoughts and assuming some cog-wheel, office identity. Weird, the dynamic of what I imagine to be most "professional" offices. Reminds me of The Office, really. And, it's where you learn, while researching for a short news post, that startup companies, not this one, lose $20 million a year and then $6 million a year, and it's considered normal, acceptable. How does business get done like that? Guess I'm stuck in a mini-micro-economic mindset. That sh#% just doesn't fly in the real world. But that seems to be the sugardaddy, read private equity, hedge fund, weird unreal world we live in now. Confounds the mind.

And Oakland's trees, or should write tree, are, is, still being Occupied. Just so you know. This dude's been up there for a few days. The tree's occupied in shifts from a couple of days to four or more. "It's a nice retreat, if you're into that sort of thing," he yelled down.

Urban Farms, West Oakland murals

Doing a story for BioCycle Magazine on Urban Farms and their related urban ecosystem milieu. Went to meet with the owner, a friend of a friend, of The Ranch at Dogtown, a 14,000-square-foot urban farm that spreads over an acre and a half of property behind a high-ish sheetmetal gate at a ghetto-rattled corner in the micro-neighborhood Dogtown in West Oakland, a little piece of the rough-and-tumble city that bunches up against the freeway and the Oakland port and holds 25,000-ish residents. Where industry, metal working, recycling, etc., merge with rundown, dilapidated, forgotten neighborhoods. It's probably the most well-known, well-studied food desert in America. With UC Berkeley (see urbanfood.org) and the Bay Area, and affluence, humming all around, it's the perfect case-study in food insecurity, largely black, and my home.

Novella Carpenter started a semi-commercial farm in West Oakland and wrote a very good, well-acclaimed book about it, Farm City. She farmed a vacant lot in Ghost Town (a West Oakland mini-hood, like Dogtown), of which there are many, that bordered her rented place, and it stands about 10 blocks from me; and although the farm's story is told from an estranged position, Novella's very funny, self-effacing, and interesting in how she describes growing veggies, fruits, chickens, ducks, two huge pigs, among the Buddhist monks, families, street people, thugs and junkies that roam her street. Near the end of the book she writes what will be the underlying principle of my compost-focused urban farming article: "Although my holding was small - and temporary - I had come to realize that urban farming wasn't about one farm, just as a beehive isn't about an individual bee ... Urban farms have to be added together in order to make a farm." (Bold and italics mine).
Interesting flow of Novella's Ghost Town Farm still-active blog on getting her conditional-use permit. In Oakland, it's not permissible to grow food or livestock on a vacant commercially-zoned lot. If it was residential, no problem. And, just in April or June, Oakland allows Oakland residents to sell urban-farmed food with a fairly inexpensive, $40-ish, business license. Sets the stage for a possible new trend: hyper-local seasonal produce stands. See Novella breaking down her farm life, and the possible start of a roving, pipe-announced, dog-led goatherd providing fresh milk to her neighbors, here:

OBSESSIVES: Urban Farmer - on CHOW.com from CHOW.com on Vimeo.

-- Which begs the important question: Can any of this be done economically? Most of Oakland's urban farms are nonprofits and heavily underwritten by grants, subsidies, donations. While that's the case, the whole endeavor has a never-never-land feel. My sister-in-law works at an Oakland-based social equity thinktank, and she spends, as she says, some time on urban farming. She agrees that making it cost effective is the catch. While researching this urban food article, came across an organization that focuses on market urban farming and making a sub-acre farm profitable, SPIN, via a north East Bay industrial town's, Richmond, urban food org, Urban Tilth. A test case, from Pennsylvania's Department of Commerce feasibility analysis of Somerton Tank Farms: over the 4-year program, grossed, yearly, $120,000 per acre of urban farmland! And that's in Philadelphia! --

Novella's farm has been down since March 2011, I think. Here's the flow from her blog: First finding out her farming is illegal, April 1, 2011; frustrated Novella asking for help with $, April 5, 2011; Novella almost losing it after finding another letter from Oakland enforcing some arcane policy/code, April 8, 2011; more peaceful, maybe it's working out, April 10, 2011; made $2,500 in donations for her CUP, April 12, 2001; no more summer gardening?, burn out?, May 28, 2011; no CUP yet, but a pop-up farmstand, October 25, 2011; aaaaannnnnnd that's it.

Tonight I went to the final class at Cal of a semester-long course in Edible Education, hosted by famed food author Michael Pollan and Nikki Henderson, executive director of a West Oakland food-equity organization, People's Grocery. It was funded by the famous Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard, an acre-big teaching garden, housed at MLK middle school in Berkeley. Each year 1,000 kids deal with its produce. Pollan was kind-of boring, as I've heard he is in person; Nikki was slightly overbearing and buzz-thoughty. She said the 25,000 West Oakland residents spend $58 million a year on food, which apparently is not a lot. Damn! That's for the poor in West Oakland. What an industry!

Spoke with former superintendent of education for the state of California, Delaine Eastin, today, too; she served for eight years around the turn of the century. She was awesome and nice. She started the A Garden in Every School program. She said, now, of the 9,000 public schools in California, 3,000, and possibly as many as 5,000, have food gardens used as teaching and eating laboratories. She shared one funny anecdote about visiting an elementary school in Union City, a working-class East Bay city a few miles south of Oakland, named after her; a child came up to her and asked, "Why did your parents name you after a school?" she said, laughing over the phone. She was cooooool.


Anyway ... the murals above were by a former art student, Mark Bode, of the Dogtown farmer Kathryn Porter, who commissioned Bode and some of his friends to colorfully mural (the geisha-girl) one of her ghetto-facing gates. She said to me, basically, "I guarantee that a brightly mural-ed wall will not be graffiti-ed." An acquaintance of hers down the street bought her logic and painted a mermaid-centered ocean-reef scene and a mammoth Moby Dick mural on his scrap-metal buying business. Moby's giant body destroys Ahab's boat and his giant spermy head engulfs docking trucks. Could be a future article: the murals of West Oakland.

Electric Blue, San Diego

The electric blue of San Diego sky was prominent all weekend on a recent trip.

Black's Beach in La Jolla, a few minutes away, a tucked-in small bay ringed with 200-hundred-foot-tall sandy cliffs. The exposed, sheer bleached-yellow faces, the sand dune-made cliffs, aged into sheer faces by time, sediment toward the bottom, still shifty and windswept, the layers at the top, harder-looking and rocky-ish. Every so often, as you curved down the narrow beach that spanned about 20 feet wide at high tide, the lapping ocean pulsing toward the sandy cliff, a convoluted canyonbreak wound up and curved and undulated (-ish) deep into the cliff face. Bulges, flutes, of sandy mangrove root-like cliffwall would twist and flow from the canyon's entrance-edge down to its beach intersection.

The beach, itself, especially the low-tide exposed smooth, glassy sand, had abstract blacksand patterns interspersed periodically; some clusters were uninteresting series of streaks, others were abstract art splotchings that extended, diluted over the beachspace.

The waves pounded the surf in a constant hush, hush, hush, and the small sand divots, created in the wave-wetted sand where running barefeet landed, echoed a consistent plodding, sucking sound as feet pulled out from each sticky, wet step. In the water, surfers broke on six-foot, hard-hitting curls, breaks, some flying over the peak of the waves, shooting like a ski-jumper or a diving dolphin, the board flying randomly in the air.

Surfing next day at winter twilight at a smaller-, smoother-waved beach a few miles south, the sun, an ocher globe in an ocher sky, slid off the horizon, a stringwrapped gumball that some Atlas-like giant god slowly pulled from a few feet below the ocean offing's table-edge through a viscous gel. Before the yellow-haze sinking sunsky, pelicans dove their deadweight dives in the near and far distance, nats buzzing the winter sunset, swarming the water. Once the sun hit the lower horizon, it dropped smooth and deceptive, Rolex-like, millimeter by millimeter on the horizon; its fluid, quick disappearance gave the heart, mind, eyes a mild vertigo. The waves kept coming in. About every 20th one was a decent surfing wave; every 50th one would break where you were, and catching one in, the darkening sky behind and the greying beach ahead, made the evening feel ten-degrees greyer, safe ... and forlorn.

A wetsuit keeps you surprisingly warm, no problems.

The electric blue sky.




To the beach

San Diego host, Kacey, on the right; I love that girl a lot for some intriguing, subliminal reasons.

Thanksgiving

New niece Thanksgiving. Look at those eyes. Still won't let me hold her for long. Couldn't eat my butternut squash soup because of the butter and leeks. There's more to this to finish later. Good night.

...

Jolie and I walked to the park, despite the morning-fog burning sunshine that slowly, slightly evaporated the morning's cold, dripping moisture. She had run ahead, bicycle helmet on, following her mom, who had Evie nestled in a running stroller, quite fast, white iPhone headphones in her ears and the ever-diligent first one arm swinging and then the other. Jolie's dad, my brother, pulled a u-y in the cul-de-sac and on the way back took Jolie's helmet, and as he passed me said, "Try to keep up," which would proved difficult because my ribs started ripening a bruise from Sunday's YMCA basketball game, where I landed straight on my chest after having my legs swiped out from under me. It was an odd play. Landed on my left chest, could feel my rib cage compress. Landed pretty hard.

Jolie was running to mom, but when mom turned around in the cul-de-sac, too, she realized that it was just me and her, to walk down the narrow alley-way back steps that dot the neighborhoods of the Oakland and Berkeley hills. Before reaching the stairs, the maples were flaming on the side of the street, and the bay sky peered blue between the houses, downtown, the TransAmerica building triangle looking sharp in the distance, some clouds wrathing the distance behind the Golden Gate Bridge, a long thin red-budded plant stem shooting across the frame.

We walked down the steps and talked about how we should have a skateboard to go down and Jolie's little fantasyland brain giggled up at the thought, however absurd, knowing it was impossible, but dreaming about the realities it would allow. We had quite a shortcut. The entrance to the park was on the left, a break in a chainlink fence, wooden railing guiding the muddy path down into the valley's park, redwood trees tall on the slope, four people struggling up on the muddy path, soupy with the drizzling rain from the morning. We stuck to the pine needle-covered path just under the downslope wooden rail and then entered the center when the mud became a little firmer down the path. The parking lot spread below us, about a hundred feet.

It was a good-ish park.

But I had to hurry back to finish the meal that my sister-in-law doubted would start at three. I still had hope. But when you're cooking in someone else's kitchen and your mom, who's cooking too, has a tendency to confuse any situation into a fluffy, appetizer-laden, dirty dish-, utensil-filled, fish-heavy affair, it took some drilldown focus to finish it. Especially braising cooked still-firm sweet potatoes with a jalapeno-molasses sauce and grilling for a few minutes. Was quite a mess. And making a pie crust with a pieced-together recipe. Ugh. But it came together with white whine and red, a football game in the other room. The kids asking for something to do, anything. But nothing could be offered, because managing is a lot trickier and requires more organization than you can imagine.
So be it.

Occupy Oakland goes west

A few weeks ago, the day after Oakland's general strike and march, at the City Hall original Occupy Oakland site.

This morning and last night, the permanent members of the movement, read homeless, have moved west from downtown into West Oakland. After being removed from Fox Square, just a few blocks north of the original camptown in front of city hall, they have moved a few, and a few more, blocks west into my West Oakland neighborhood.



On Saturday, some Occupiers tried to tent-up in Fox Square. They pummeled a gate set up by the city to keep them out, and set up a rave-like situation. A good point why the movement is not going anywhere. Why are you dancing? Understood, it's Saturday night and fun is in the air, but it just felt weak and marginalized, much like the movement as a whole has felt from this casual, basically accidental, observer. When the tents first went up downtown in front of City Hall, I walked through; it was a similar vibe, except there was a get-any-drug-you-want, dissolution Reggae-on-the-River-like camp-out feel. Not impressive from the beginning. There was a makeshift dog pen of pallet wood against a concrete structure that held ferocious-looking Pits and site as a whole had a general malaise, with an undercurrent edge of let's get high and I want some attention.



Camera crews were on the corner a few houses down from mine this morning at 6:30 a.m. as people milled about and around the vacant lot, now filled with tents, at an intersection of my street and another. Apparently, the lot's being foreclosed on, which means that the bank, as a bank, was part of that big bail out, takes the property, and the little one, the owner, loses it. Messed up on the surface of things. But this occupation isn't about that. It's about the extremely disenfranchised taking the opportunity to be in the spotlight. This will blow over. If a doctor or lawyer was in the camp, or someone that looked like he or she had some societal power, then it might be different. It's just a fringe, lost cause.



And one dude, at the original downtown Oakland site, moved to the trees. Caught this funny video of some dudes on the ground grilling him about life in the tree. Where do you go to the bathroom? A bucket. How do you shit? Another guy on the ground, answering for him, laughing: Stand there and I'll show you. "It's gonna be colder than a motherfucker."

Black smudges, gray clouds, ganache

Golden line from the opening story "introduction: hunting years" from Tom Franklin's story collection, Poachers (1999):

Buzzards float overhead, black smudges against the gray clouds.

Makes that whole story live. Great. Amazing how one line does it. It really does.


Had an early breakfast date with my niece Jolie this morning at the best cafe, handsdown, in Berkeley - Elmwood Cafe. She stares her thoughtful-look out the window for a moment at the green horizon Berkeley Hills, a cup of housemade ganache-infused hot chocolate, pumpkin waffle with housemade pumpkin butter and real maple syrup before her. How do you beat that?

Elmwood's ganache sits on the counter next to their espresso machine in a small plastic container, a thick, dark, chocolate-y butter.

Sitting in the Cold

Went up north again for a few days. There are some friends with a Zen temple on 40 acres in the mountains up there and it was Sesshin, an intensive retreat session: about nine hours a day of meditation, a little work, a bath, and some food.

The meditation hall, the Zendo, has no heat, so you better dress warm. The day I arrived the trees had all turned, and as you can see from the sky above the weather was just beginning to come in. It snapped that night, and really snapped the next morning.

Two of the temple's five buildings are constructed in somewhat-traditional Japanese joinery style - no nails or metal in the framing - and, inside, exposed, four large tree beams form a rectangle. I slept in one of those buildings in a small never-not-damp, non-heated room. The second night, I pulled out all the bedding: sleeping bag, futon, fleece blanket, faux down blanket, someone's grandmother's blanket with a band of pink at the top cuff and pink flowers dotting the rest. Felt like a mouse.

Sitting that morning in the Zendo I had silk long underwear on, top and bottom, some cotton pants, cotton long-sleeved shirt, wool sweater and then a robe over all of that. At one of the sitting breaks had to go get another sweater. If your spine gets cold, it's over.


So, that was a couple of days. There's a family of deer that basically live on the property, a doe and two yearlings. It's a safe haven, I imagine, from mountain lion country with the people presence. A few years ago, in mating season, I saw a couple of huge-antlered males and their harem of about 10 does. Interesting, walking by the group at this time, you can feel the males checking you out intensely - they're ready to charge. There's real fear there. From about 50 feet away saw two males go at it, antlers locking. Kept imagining that the weaker one would have his neck broken, because the antlers get so tangled that the stronger male basically twists the other around. They fought for a few minutes, and then the weaker one bolted downhill, crashing through the brush.

In one night the huge entrance oak tree lost most of its leaves. And two somewhat-straggly turkeys wandered a bare, grassy hillside.

So, this trip was full of sitting and apt Zen aphorisms:

Clouds sweep the vast sky, a crane nests in the moon;
This piercing cold has gotten into my bones - I cannot sleep.

He stops his carriage just to enjoy the sunset in the maples,
Whose frost-bitten leaves are redder than spring flowers.

When alive, your wealth is the dew on the grass;
After death, your fame is the flowers by the roadside.

Riding the great dragon in the shadow of a needle's point,
With ease I knock down the moon from the heavens.

North, south, east, west - no road penetrates.
Iron mountains rise sheer before you with their awesome crags.

The ten thousand mountains cannot keep away the moon tonight,
A crescent of pure light, bright beyond measure.

Where the snow lies deep, crows are silently stirring.
From clouded peaks far away, a winter wind returns.

The great Master Baso was seriously ill.
He said: "Sun-faced Buddha, Moon-faced Buddha."

White-money Green

Went to an urban farming forum last night at the epic David Brower Center in Berkeley. And was overwhelmed, even before one of the presenters talked about it, again by the class-race conservation divide. Looked like the crowd of about 250 all had graduate degrees and were white-ish. Also, the buzzwords started to pile up from the five presenters - a verbal SEO greenwash fest:

Food commons

Landprint

Foodshed (i.e. watershed)

Foodscape

Seed-saving

Carbon-banking

Populist education

Ecological literacy

Artisan quality

40 percent of the bay area landscape is devoted to agriculture. Wow.

The second presenter, a youngish dude, editor of the Earth Island Journal, mentioned that the biggest challenge to successful urban farming was bridging the race-class social divide. His urban farm, Alemany Farms in SF, gets younger, whiter, college-educated volunteers but not so many others. They have an Autumn Harvest festival and an Earth Day Barbeque - that's why there's nobody there. It's too cute, too ineffectual, too nonprofit. Got to be a way to make it REAL.

There was one cute presenter with a swallow-tail cardigan.

Ride

Had to ride to Alameda, the little island-city nestled right near Oakland's harbor, and was stuck going through one of the tubes. Scaaaary. Was going to be late if I had to bike three-ish miles south to the above-ground bridge that spans the narrow channel separating the island and mainland. So, went down into the dark, echoing tunnel with no bike lanes and cars barreling down at 50-ish mph. I had no lights -- was scaaary. Cars were whizzing by me, thought I was going down.

But it worked out with only three cars passing. Caught the right window, but my heart and legs were beating explosively by the time I emerged to daylight on the other side. Hallelujah!

Napa, Bitches!

Don't you just want to be a grape, soaking that Napa sunshine all day? It would be sweet. Felt like one for a moment.

A glorious Saturday drive and wine-tasting-Michelin-lunch day. Napa's less than an hour from my front door! Which every somewhat-hip Bay Area resident must know, but it's easy to forget if you never go. As the above photo shows, there's a depth to the colors, probably more a feel than color, as the valley solidifies around you as you head north on HY 29 from the East Bay. The land's flat, an extension of the San Pablo Bay until the valley becomes more pronounced as the mountain ridges to your left and right slowly hug the valley tighter as you head north, starting from about Napa (city) forward.

Etiole Restaurant is a one-star Michelin establishment. That one star shined through in the pear creme-brule dessert and also the girl's (woman's?) little white-puffy dog at the very next table that didn't want to stay on the ground, but twirled and desperately tried to claw his way up next to his mom (girlfriend?) at the dinner-couch, which also held her short-flip-flop-clad boyfriend (anti-sugardaddy?). When she lowered her waterglass to the floor to let the pup lap and slobber all over the rim as it snuffed up some ice-H2O, there's no other response but cringe. Maybe star number two comes somewhere in the no-dog-slobbered waterglass realm. Who knows? Really, the dog just added some flavor to the awesome experience. Nothing like getting daydrunk on sparkling wine, sparkling wine, to semi-great service with an idyllic view. The idyllic view was peppered with at least one sugardaddy and big-boned blond. Given the circumstances, harmony?

Enhancing the drive and experience, is the increasingly rugged character of the valley as you head to Calistoga, where you enter the fringe of urban, country. You can feel the shift from urbane to hunting, country, rough-hewed sensibilities. Farther up the hill east of Calistoga is the insane Harbin Hot Springs, a New Age lostworld, where couples congregate in a series of communal warm, HOT!, semi-hot, and cold-plunge pools to somewhat dryhump, float and bliss their minds out in that alternate reality that is dragons and crystals and no-eggs-or-meat-in-the kitchen hippiedom. Hard to believe that's still going.


Harbin; video from a previous trip.

At the Domaine Chandal winery tour, our tourguide Jeffrey explained a little boringly about how sparkling wines are made and that rosé is really good with creamy foods. And that the wine-barrel-themed architecture of the headquarters was shaped by various twisted, majestic oak trees. Two of them framed the back entrance very well.

The more-than-cute partner in crime.

Napa River flows through Napa Valley, too. It’s one of the healthiest rivers of the Bay Area watersheds. It has 60 or so miles of stream that’s spawnable by the river’s several anadromous fish species. Anadromous refers to a fish that is hatched and grown in freshwater, goes to sea and matures, and then returns to the same freshwater stream to spawn. Steelhead Trout and Coho Salmon still run the stream.

There.

The Art of Pick-up Basketball

Post-"Cage", pissed off, exhausted, my brother broken-rightwristed (on the left), with our Fuck T-Shirts. An epic photo. We ran the court. In NYC, there is no "And One." You call foul and that's it, no basket, even if you make it. Check up top. As you see in the pitch below, that leads to barrages of elblows.

Out of frustration with doing some recent articles that are no fun to write, like Smart Meter privacy concerns and green technology on contaminated lands, I've spur-of-the-moment pitched the voluminous, logorrheic Bill Simmons' website Grantland. The Art of Pick-up Basketball.

Here's the pitch:

I've been a baller for 20 years (I'm 33), played Div II ball at a small university in Austin, Texas. Grew up in Austin, too. My life has spanned the indoor, outdoor, YMCA aspects of pick-up hooping. I have stories and photos of playing at NY's West Fourth court, "The Cage," with my brother. In NY, if you call a foul, as we found out, the shot doesn't count no matter what - there's no "And One"! Encourages bloodshed, brutality, because there's no disincentive to foul as hard or as often as you want. Guys were basically throwing short-arm punches and swinging elblows when you drove to the basket, especially because we were white-boy outsiders. We ran the court, regardless, but my brother broke his wrist early in the process - played through it.

The article would chronicle the culture and the nuances of my pick-up ball life (which I assume mirrors many others') that vary location by location and time by time. Like 10 a.m. on Saturday mornings at the University of Texas Rec Center, when you'd find solid, older-guy games and some UT Basketball veterans and serious-minded contemporaries; like 5 p.m. weekdays at UT's Gregory Gym when the gymrat, preeners, hooplah-ers, come out, along with, in the off-season, the UT Men's and Women's players; like the solid, older-guy 6 a.m.!!! games at the University of Missouri Rec Center (I went there for journalism school; woke up early one Tuesday morning soon after I arrived to shoot some hoops alone, and found out there were Tuesday/Thursday consistent games ?!?!?! – only in the Midwest, I think); playing at my elementary school outdoor court as a 13-year-old against the paint-spackled and drunk, and getting drunker, regulars.

The story would cover, also, the generalities of pick-up: how to pick a good team; the etiquette of pick-up - is it your court?, holding a spot, determining the rules (points, straight-up or by two, fouls); how the magic rhythm of the game only rarely unfolds in a pickup situation; how unspoken understandings appear for people on the team: the rebounder, the hustler, the picker, the shooter, the ball-handler, and, also, the ball-hogger, the black hole, the pretty boy, and the guy that should not be allowed within 50 feet of any basketball court.

Now I'm in Oakland, which has a surprisingly weak outdoor pick-up scene. There are some good-condition outdoor courts, though. I've yet to play in a tough, good game, even at Mosswood Park, famed playground of Gary Payton. Now, I'm in the YMCA years, which is close to the best, consistent pick-up I've experienced. Tues/Thurs at 5 p.m. the same guy, Coach Ray, runs a clock and monitors the score, ensuring quick games and very little B.S.

Come on Bill, et al pick it up.


I finished Freedom yesterday. Devastating, nihilistic-ish, lived-happily-ever-after surprising (kind of) finish. Franzen created a psychologically-consistent story. Impressive. I cared about Patty from the beginning and was hooked. But, like Atlas Shrugged, surprisingly, there was some tiresome sermonizing on the compelling idea of our modern-life freedom from Joey, Patty's, the protagonist, son. But over all, it captured the rabbit hole impossibility of freedom as an idea for fulfillment. Explored the soul-crushing and emotionally-empty ramifications of that search, and exposed them to their neurotic, self-loathing, wine-drinking conclusions. The book could have trimmed fat, about 30 percent, and it would have been significantly better. But, overall, a decent read, but not anything to enhance your literary brain. Very prosaic prose.

Steel head

Researching a piece on the multi-agency effort to restore steelhead trout to watersheds of the San Francisco Bay estuary. It's hard to grasp the story because so many agencies are involved, 17 according to Oakland-based Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration (CEMAR), which seems to be the point organization of the Bay Area restoration effort. Much of the restoration and preservation action is in the south Bay, because that's where the protected land and drinking water reservoirs are. In one of the reservoirs, the one formed by Calaveras Dam, which blocks the famed, popular Alameda Creek and stands seismically unsound to be rebuilt by 2015, live an interesting population of rainbow trout. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission just started work on the new Calaveras Dam; here's the early Sept. 2011 San Francisco Chronicle article on the dam rebuild project that spurred this whole story idea forward: aqui.

The section from that Chronicle article that caught my eye was:

The rainbow trout in the reservoir are believed to be landlocked steelhead that are descendants of the indigenous fish population, biologists say. Conservationists hope to use those fish as a potential gene pool for restoring the original native steelhead runs.

So, there's some trapped rainbows behind Calaveras Dam that are genetically "itching" to be oceanbound, to be steelhead again? And there's a longstanding effort to restore Alameda Creek's steelhead runs? And Alameda Creek is the third-largest SF Bay watershed behind the San Joaquin River and the Sacramento River watersheds? And there's an historical ecology study of Alameda Creek going on?

And, the motivation for pursuing the story became, immediately - I want to see Alameda Creek and learn more about that landlocked steelhead population, especially since Jeff Miller, director of the Alameda Creek Alliance, listed the Sunol Regional Wilderness, in the heart of Alameda Creek's watershed, as one of his favorite outdoor spots in the Bay Area.

Map of Alameda Creek's watershed.

The big question becomes: Why restore steelhead runs in the first place? Steelheads are, I didn't know this, identical to rainbow trout; steelhead are rainbows that have been to sea, where they earn harder, steel-colored sides and sharper, meaner-looking mouths and heads, replacing the rainbow-y, downy-appearing, peachy coloration characteristic of rainbows. I asked Jeff Miller the key question and his answer is: because it's an indicator species, and it allows a focal point for the restoration of a whole watershed. This answer opened up the story to a whole different level. Especially since, Gordon Becker, fisheries scientist and Bay Area steelhead restoration point-person at CEMAR, said, "They are the species the public grabs hold of the most." If you lose steelhead populations, he said, you lose the public momentum to restore and preserve healthy creeks and streams, which themselves are critical because many people's first connection to nature is, as kids, with their local creeks. True! I explored Boggy Creek next to my childhood home in Austin, Texas, almost every day as a kid. So, the story immediately became a much larger, immediate, powerful one.

Steelhead above, Rainbow below. See how much tougher the steelhead look. They're the exact same fish genetically. Once the Rainbow goes to sea, though, it becomes hood.

Steelhead restoration is an avenue to explore the raw, ingenue, burgeoning opportunities to encounter vibrant nature, be fed by it, and begin a relationship that invariably sustains for a lifetime and arguably makes you a better earthbound human. That's the pitch I made today for a Bay Nature feature piece: Steeling the Bay.

Note: Coho and Chinook salmon once had runs in the Bay watersheds, but they aren't being brought back because they're more finnicky spawners; they usually spawn in a stream's headwaters, which in today's heavily dammed and culverted waterways is a nearly impossible obstacle. But steelhead are more adaptable. Indeed, some of the rainbow population in Calaveras Reservoir are landlocked steelhead; as Jeff Miller put it, "They look seaworthy." They're tougher-looking than other landlocked rainbows, like they could head to sea tomorrow and some in the population would make it back to spawn. In Upper San Leandro Reservoir, which sits idyllically placid, pure, untouched-looking just over the East Bay Hills (I see it on my long bike rides bordering a windy, looks-like-it-but-not-so-backcountry road) a good bunch of miles north of Calaveras Dam in the East Bay. Miller says the rainbows in the San Leandro Reservoir have similar "wild" genetics to the Calaveras Reservoir rainbows, but they just don't seem or look as hardy. A 1999 genetics study indeed shows that the Calaveras landlocked steelhead do not have the weakened genes of the five area hatchery rainbow strains, and are closely aligned with those wild steelhead in Lagunitas Creek, a Marin County stream.

San Leandro Reservoir on the right of the image.

A new genetics study is going on now, says Brian Sak, San Francisco Public Utility Commission scientist (SFPUC) involved with the restoration efforts in the East Bay. The SFPUC manages Calaveras Dam and its drinking water, lands upstream of it, some as far away as the Sierra. Of course, SFPUC also manages the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a whole other, amazing story.

Menlo Park, Oakland B-Ball

BART-ed to Menlo Park for a sister's Birthday Saturday hang. Cold, rainy, and downtown Menlo provided the homely-less atmosphere of some drafty drawing room in a long-forgotten western European castle. There were some nice 20' by 10' wool/silk rugs for $9,000, though, and some cold, institutional bagel places and one coffeeshop sporting handwritten signs. A peak inside didn't lend confidence to the quality of the food, however. Sister is going to Stanford, which is just a short bike ride from Menlo Park. And Stanford's dweeby character comes through very clear in its smattering of biking Saturday Stanfordites, the computer meetings spied while passing by its maze of buildings, in its business motifs and stone Spanish? center-of-campus architecture. Its tower, where Condoleezza Rice hides out apparently, is ominous; a long, thick largely-windowless structure. Riding by, it's easy to feel a cold, Condy-eyed world, cruise missiles, clean, monarchical furniture, and dull-domed, officious, chardonnay evenings.

Stanford Tower, ominous as hell.

The day passed quickly. Sister was crashing and burning as happens when you sleep too much and let down during a high-pressure PhD first semester, which includes a lot of journal clubs and unclocked labwork. We sat through People magazine-accompanied pedicures and doze-inducing hot-rock initiated leg and foot massages, a few hours after a rough-country, suburban, comfort food brunch?.

Pedicures are real, people.

So, left a little early with her lounging on a blanket-crumpled couch, her black-and-white outlaw quiet cat hovering around, some Hulu-plus shows like Parks and Rec and others navigated via an X-Box controller and a grunting, first-of-the-season furnace blowing some comforting toasty air into the book-lined, blind-drawn apartment. Stepped out into a drizzling, cold, miserable evening to bike to Caltrain down the street. A night to be doing what my sister was doing, not commuting on the institutional, plastic-heavy Caltrain, whose interior bright lights somehow made the drizzling dark outside that much more forlorn.

Pre-boarding, stocked up on some orange juice and cheese crackers from the 7-11 just near the station entrance. And some layers Trident. Hmmm.?

The building in the center of the photo is the Oakland Y. Below that expanse of noticeable windows is the gym. Walking by you can hear the games. Hoorah.

Played the fourth game of the Oakland YMCA fall men’s basketball game today. Our team is mostly white (besides one Mexico City-ite) and lacks aggression most of all. We’re good, but turn the ball over a lot. We won – we’re 2-2, now. It’s a tough league. Last week some guys on the other team dunked on us. Not appreciated. Getting older, and slower, is tough. I used to be one of the best players on the court. Now, you see the past ability and flashes of inbred-skill, but mostly, I assume, it’s just a sad flow of images. Maybe getting in good basketball shape, after healing this janky, twisted right ankle completely, will get things on the right track. ….

Reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen finally. Good. Appreciated the Don't Look Back reference, a moment in the documentary where Dylan not only punked Donovan, but distinctly gave the small crowded room, and us, the difference between skill and genius. Freedom: "The breathtaking nakedness of Dylan's competitiveness! Her feeling was: Let's face it, victory is sweet."

Dylan, to a train-chugging, softer-then-louder-then-softer guitar:

You must leave now, take what you need you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast. He understands your orphan with his gun, crying like a fire in the sun. Look out, the Saints are coming through, and it's all over now, Baby Blue.

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense. Take what you have gathered from coincidence. The vagabond is rapping at your door. He's standing in the clothes that you once wore. Strike another match, go start anew, and it's all over now Baby Blue.

DAMN. That swirling Dylan, asshole-magic.

Occupy Oakland and an ankle

Sorry for the shaky, unedited video. Still? figuring out iMovie.

Occupy Oakland stormed downtown Oakland yesterday with a General Strike. The whole day downtown felt like a festival, people were in the streets, some businesses were shut down, and some semi-serious anger.



I live in West Oakland, about a mile north of downtown, and could hear the low, annoying hum of circling helicopters all night as they kept tabs on the protest that eventually shut down the Oakland Port. Today, Thursday, the day after, everything's humming back at normal speeds. A long, cold rain set in, seeming to cap and end the long, glorious Indian Summer that peeled the low-slanting autumn sun up and sliced a waft of warm air underneath. Cool-looking, but warm. Not too bad.

Breaking up scar tissue in a rolled ankle is underrated. Wish I had done this my whole life. Has cut down on recovery time by weeks.

Adios.

Humpbacks

Did a story published today on humpback whales visiting insanely close to Santa Cruz Harbor for Bay Nature's website. Started it yesterday at about 3 p.m. and finished it today at about 11:30 a.m. It's tough to turn around something that quick even if it's short.

I mean, wtf do I know about humpback whales. Wikipedia is a good orienting tool. And you just call the sh#$ out of people and try to find out what's up. Took a long time. Finally got a responsive, cool, knowledgeable dude. Whenever a story has one of those it's a big blessing.

I pitched the story because my housemate got back from kayaking with the whales in SC Harbor last Sunday. "It was one of the coolest experiences of my life," she said, which made me stop. I can only imagine, because humpback whales are the big showy ones that breach big time and do the bubble-net feeding and verticle lunge feeding. She said you could hear them singing as they came up to blow-hole and even when they were under the water, too.

After the whales, there were about 7 to 9 of them, did their rolling breaching, about 30 to 40 sea lions would surface after them, she said. And there were pelicans and dolphins - a crazy, live-wild aquariam action. Must have been miraculous - check out how big those whales are in the photo above, taken at SC Harbor a few days ago.

They were close offshore, because their winter migration south matched a nutrient-rich cold-water uprising that coalesced for whatever ocean current, wind reasons at the mouth of the Santa Cruz harbor. The nutrients fed phytoplankton, which fed plankton and stuff and then krill and then anchovies and sardines and other baitfish and then the whales.

Baby Niece

Went to drop off some chocolate to my sister-in-law, who fell and had a level I or II concussion, the evidence of which was extremely scary. Shed whole new light on the NFL situation. My brother and she have three kids. A girl, 6, a boy, 3.5, and a 5-monther?

They live in the Oakland hills, on the very top of one of them, near a cul-de-sac. The CEO of the Raiders lives in the cul-de-sac, and doesn't appreciate disparaging Al Davis half-jokes, according to my brother. Guess he was loved.

Everytime I go up there from the wasteland of West Oakland, it's glorious. You walk in from the street on the top floor and there's nothing but a Bay view and sky, Mt. Tam. Also there're little kids to play with. Held the little one, who just wants to stand and play at a plastic piano with no batteries. And she sits in your lap with those bowlegged baby legs that tuck up into the lotus position so easily. Her head at the perfect height for nibbling. Pretty cute.

Anyway, that's a blessing, at least.

Adios.

Shots in the Dark

Yesterday, Oct. 27, at about nine p.m. I left home for a walk down Linden St. to Lowell Park.


There was a thick darkness about, just a day after a new moon, only 1.7 % illuminated. At about 16th and Linden, I heard what sounded like 20 or so muffled, rapid handgun shots coming from up Linden. I wasn't sure, so I went to the middle of the street, which was illuminated there by a streetlight, and stared down for a few seconds. It was dark. There were no lights from where the shots came, no noise. Then I heard 15 more rapid shots, no noise, no lights, no cars. Then a bullet whizzed by over my head within about five feet and I jumped behind the building on the corner. It felt like the bullet appeared out of the black; staring down, it was a black hole, quiet.

I continued walking down Linden's sidewalk, keeping out of the street, to the park at 14th and turned around. On the way back from the park, before 16th, three dudes smoking in the dark of their front yard halfway-called out to me as I walked down the middle of the street. "Did you hear the gunshots?" I usually ignore people talking to me in my neighborhood because, as this story attests, it's shady. Prostitutes, crack fiends and dealers roam around. He had to say it three times, softly, as if giving me the opportunity to willfully ignore three shadowed figures in front of the house that has the most shady action in the neighborhood, occupied cars always parked in the street in front, people milling around, kids, women, dudes.

I said, excited, because it felt like a close call. "Yeah, did you hear that bullet come by? Somebody was going for it down there." He said, "Yeah, I was wondering where it came from." I told him it was from down Linden, and one of the other two said, "Yeah, it was West Grand, then." We kept talking for a few more seconds and then I left, saying to he and the other two, "Well, I'm going into the belly."

I kept looking and listening for the cops, but never heard any. About 15 minutes after the shots a cop car casually rolled up at 16th St. and turned down Linden toward the shots. I strolled down. One guy, about 30, in basketball shorts, house slippers and a white t-shirt stood in the intersection of 21st and Linden. His girlfriend?, a bigger black girl strolled up, and we all started talking, and then started toward the action, a block away. The girl was saying, "I was just frying some chicken ..."

Twenty minutes after the shots, the cops were just starting, quietly, mindlessly, it seemed, to flashlight the dark area on Linden St. just north of West Grand Ave. Four or five cops milled around the scene, their flashlights, sweeping the area with sharp, cool, blue-white crisp beams. Back and forth, back and forth. Gave the impression of ants swarming a fresh kill. I crossed the street to get a closer look, but as the police presence grew, and I knew I'd have to talk, I backed off, not wanting involvement.

The action centered around a bullet-riddled off-white Cadillac that barely was made out in the haze of a weak streetlight, a block-jump north. A cop finally, casually, started stringing up the yellow Crime Scene tape across Linden at West Grand. Not one siren had sounded to this point, and none would. Must have been premeditated murder: the second-darkest night of the mooncycle. Another day in West Oakland.

This morning, it occurred to me that that bullet that whizzed by from the black hole darkness of West Grand and Linden was likely aimed at me as I stared down from the well-lit intersection at Linden and 16th. I was in the middle of the street and staring down. But I was, according to Google Maps, a third of a mile away - a long way for a handgun bullet to travel. I think. Went to the scene this morning. It looked a long way to 16th, which re-confirmed my suspicion that that straightline bullet was purposely shot downstreet from 0.3 miles away, and not a stray from the car-bombardment. Who knows? Next time, I'm ducking no matter how silent, quiet, dark. After seeing the scene again, it is definitely too far to be aiming at someone. It was a stray.


This morning the street's open, as if nothing happened.

What's up, Sucka?

This will show the post-race photo of the Mount Diablo Challenge. Did the Mofo in 1:09.36. Hit my limit over and over. Could not have done it faster.


The winner did the 10.4-mile base-to-summit trek in 43 minutes. That's 14.5 mph! Uphill!!!!?? Don't think I hit 14.5 mph once. Damn.