Day in the life

5:30 a.m. up: (Overslept by an hour). The intense 11-hour day at the office the day before had fried me a little, even with the blue-gold mountain photo I printed out and taped to the glass partition of my cubicle, which I looked at several times an hour to pretend I was in wide-open space.

5:30-5:40: made bed, meditation. Usually do a lot more, but overslept.

5:40-5:55: dressed, did not shave, thankful that I had packed my lunch and ironed my blue jeans and shirt the night before.

5:58: left on skateboard for the bus, after "tying" my Timberlands with a knot instead of a bow (this cast leaves me mostly one-handed)

6:06: arrive at the bus stop. Ran over a couple of large twigs, almost throwing me off the board, in the dark, streetlight-less portions of Market St. on the way.

6:08: bus comes, get on, and read some of the semi-current (Jan. 23) New Yorker I brought with me. Think about the article I had read the day before in the magazine from an 83-year-old poet (Donald Hall), poetry drained from him, not poetic prose, however, about the reality of old age. It's coming for most of us, and wow:

After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other – thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with the total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty – and then came my cancers, Jane's death, and over the years I traveled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying – in the supermarket, these oldies won't get out of my way – but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

6:23 - 6:28: arrive in Alameda, get off the bus, and skate the 100 yards to work over smooth good-skating asphalt parking lot. Get there and my boss, the managing editor, is arriving, too, and he says, "What are you doing here?" Then I remind him I'm making up hours because of time missed on Tuesday on account of a fractured finger.

6:30 - 11:30: work. Prepare a report by mindlessly copying and pasting info in and making sure it's correct, and edit a 1200-word feature I finished, in one long draft, the day before on reptile-friendly homes. Nothing like editing. Wrote a new, much-better lead. Wish I had time to do some rewriting - that's when the real writing comes out.

11:30-11:34: skate to bus stop.

11:34: catch bus to downtown Oakland. Write an email to a source for a Bay Nature story published earlier in the week expressing my disappointment at the mind-numbing editing job by the editor of the story.

11:44: arrive downtown, where a friend's waiting for me in his car to go to lunch in North Berkeley at Tacubaya, near the site of another friend's restaurant-in-the-making.

noon-ish: wander around the shell of our friend's restaurant. He points out where the tables will be, the bar, the kitchen, the rental places, the stripper poles (j/k). The lot is huge, right on San Pablo Ave. A lot of work for him as the contractor. When we pullup, he's sketching some designs on graph paper sitting in the back of his Honda Element.


12:30: we eat at Tacubaya. Get the vegetarian tortas. A thin swath of black beans, some avocado, and fried chiles fit, thinly, between a big bun: $8 for 80-percent bun. Not so cool.

1:15-sh: go by the beer/wine-maker supply store near the restaurant site for my friend to get some bottles for some bottling he's doing tonight for a Belgian-style that's ready. See all the variety of hops, a copper cooling helix.

2:00: home. Wiped. Take a 30-minute nap, then read some Dark Sun, apply for jobs and delete some emails.

Resident Canada geese at Lowell Park

3:45: take a West Oakland walk to Lowell Park. Some cops are milling at an intersection chatting casually with some neighbors, a smattering of residents are on the sidewalk, milling. Something's happened, but not quite sure what. Ignore it, and finish the walk around the cops at the intersection to the park and turn around and come right back. Pass the cops again. On the next block, a young-ish Asian guy is standing in the sidewalk, and I ask him what's up. He points to the ground at his feet - a smattering of 9mm bullet casings are on the street. Thirteen of them in a chaos of directions. It looks like someone had ran around in a circle firing a gun. The Asian guy says you usually see bullet holes but there were none. Apparently, the shots were less than 30-minutes old. The cops drive over while I'm standing there. I ask the cop what's up with all the violence on our block recently, and he says he's been on this beat for 10 years, and this is the worst it's been. I ask to take a casing; he says maybe. They want to leave them there as they wait for a few minutes to find out if anybody shows up at the hospital or morgue from gunshot wounds. Then, they'd take them for evidence. I walk by later that night; they're all gone. Maybe the neighborhood rugrats picked them up, or somebody showed up with the casings' bullets in him/her.

A few of the bullet casings that scattered the street near 16th St. and Linden St.

4:30: two phone calls

5:00: skate to the gym and then dress and run around Lake Merritt. Pretty exhausted now, for some reason.

7:00: home. Bake some tilapia with onions, carrots and red pepper and place that over stir-fried kale, all topped with paprika and turmeric and watch the Indiana basketball team get manhandled by Wisconsin on ESPN2.

8:00: Room. Delete some emails. Do something I'm forgetting, exhausted.

9:00: sleep!