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.