Xmas con amigos

Christmas was a whirlwind of family and friends, as it should be.

Some moments:

Food, grass-fed, amazingly fresh, local (from Bolinas, Calif.) beef, champagne, super-nice red wine, some serious vinyl blues, Bob Dylan, a little reggae, some out-of-this-world cheesy potatoes, and a subtle cherry-infused chocolate mousse-like dessert, overlooking the sexy city from Twin Peaks and friends known since single-digit age.

Hills near Fairfield, Calif.

Xmas Mass:

Sea walking

No bike, since it (another one!) was stolen, so stuck walking (and skateboarding) to and fro, everywhere. That creates an interesting situation in the squall, greyed-out SF Bay Area rainy season. Today, at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, I stood in line at the Blue Bottle there (chatting up the solo dude working the three-barrel espresso machine - the side line is actually longer than the main one, though it looks quicker) and out the window glass doors leading to the thin swath of path that allows Ferry-ers to overlook the Bay while they eat and enjoy the Ferry Building, sea gulls dove past, amplified by the grey rainy day, their bodies part of a magical, hyper-magnified effect, taking the afternoon into dimensionless space, swooped to and fro. A large barge, loaded with dull-colored shipping containers, moved slowly by in the mist-distance, Angel Island in the background.

Walked home (1-ish mile) in the pouring rain. Soaking in the grey, green, soaked hood on, the Peralta Avenue mid-street park - part of the Bay Trail - creating a nice sliver of green, solace path in the downpour. The greyed out skyline adding a water-heavy gravity to the act of walking.

Lunch time in San Francisco

Had a lunch meeting with someone at a Dim Sum place located near the Embarcadero BART station in the city. It's a crystal-clear day. Leave work at 11am in Alameda and get to the West Oakland BART station, the last stop in the East Bay before reaching the city. There's a seven-mile-ish long tunnel under the bay between Oakland and SF that the trains go through. Somewhere midway (I imagine) on trips under the water, I sometimes (used to always) imagine the tunnel cracking and beginning to fill with water. Which way would I swim? Etc.

A guy with a beat-up bike but a put-together mien got on with me in West Oakland. I don't pay him too much mind, but then something alerts me to him, maybe I overhear him talking drugtalk on a burner-like cell phone. One look says dude's going for a mid-day heroin ride. (From Trainspotting: heroin's a thousand times better than sex. That always blew my mind. "My God! Then that's some amazing sh!%." Reminds of the time, one time, when I was helping a friend in Humboldt County, that Wild West, huge Northern California county on her 40-acre mountainside property. We were cleaning out her greenhouse; black widows had decided to set up shop in the white elbows of the structure inside. She was cleaning up the property from a previous owner, who had left rotting structures (full of rotting, silverfish-eaten books, and Playboys! and I remember a defunct, full-size school bus? I'd pound the back of an axe into the crumbling studs of the half-down structure, rat sh$% pouring down on me, decades-old raccoon dander, decaying possum hair, filling the air, coating my skin and my lungs? Anyhow, we found a jar of poppy seeds in one of the structures, literally poppy seeds. How do they differ from the bagel kind? The previous owner grew poppies, she said; they would grow the plants, let them grow flowerbuds and then take a razorblade and carve an X in them at night and let the sap ooze out overnight and then collect it in the morning, balling it up into a gummy, tacky ball of opium. They did that until the government helicopters rose over the hillside one day and spotted the plants and busted them.).

Got to lunch, quiet, early. Dim Sum ladies passing every few minutes with tacky-noodles filled with spinach, pork, other stuff.

Over at 12:30. The place absolutely packed now, walked a block to Embarcadero BART station and back to West Oakland and then Alameda at 1:00, after a drug-pulling stop at Blue Bottle, which was on the way (I swear!).

Mundane evening bus ride

Got on the bus in West Oakland with a pink-haired girl carrying an IKEA bag, yellow and blue. Once on the bus, I walk to the back, loaded down with a dress shirt, and a full backpack. "Look at that," says a woman in a purple pullover reading a book to herself about a nearby woman's grey, elaborate knitting. "It's really beautiful."

"I just admire people like you," she says. The other woman holds up her creation for a moment in the admiring glow.

There's a Pete's Coffee disposable cup holder on the floor of the bus, cardboard, and a berry-red Phillies blunt package lies, semi-crumpled, underneath the two-toned blue, hard plastic seat across the way from me. I'm sitting back right.

Mundane view from a mundane bus ride

The blue-marbled floor offers an extremely mundane background, like a dull ocean viewed from 2,000 feet above, white streaks, windblown whitecaps, moving in the light-blue surf, the water not deep enough for an unfathomable outer-space indigo, but bright, an uncomfortable light blue.

The bus is packed now after rolling through downtown heading south on Grand Ave. A woman, big belly pouring over her pants in a tan shirt reads "Living" magazine in the bus's back left corner. A man in a black-and-white checkered scarf, the design you see on those weird jackets in the Midwest mainly is checking Facebook on his iPhone; I can see that now-nauseating blue peak in spurts from behind and to his right as he faces forward.

The back window of the bus is recessed like a deep-water sub, supplying a Life Aquatic feel to the drippy, late-fall, dark, dark evening. The engine, humming, runs like it's been maintained by a sharp, easy-going mechanic, a cigarette dangling from his lips. There's no smell.

The Facebook dude gets up and gives a look over this way as the bus passes the up-and-coming Grand Lake neighborhood stop. He's wearing a plastic-like rain jacket, charcoal grey, carrying an Adidas bag, the bus sighing a hydraulic sigh as it dips to let more people on while he drops away from the bus's back door.

Dude across from me is staring at his iPhone 4 that sports a lime-green plastic protective cover. The night is dark outside. It's 6:28 p.m. "How long would it take to go from MacArthur to downtown?" asked a dreadlocked dude at the front of the bus to the bus driver moments before he got off and walked toward a purple-glowing Taco Bell in the Laurel District

Blue Bottle and a body

I've never been a coffee person. I didn't have coffee until I was 21 - that's disturbing. Didn't have coffee again until I was about 25. Started with mochas and then slowly got into the drug. Now (and forever!) it's Blue Bottle Gibraltars - that's two concentrated (ristretto) espresso shots with an equal amount of steamed organic whole milk. And when you add that the coffee is absolutely the best, you start to get a sense of what's up.

Dope Blue Bottle style, moments after gunshot on Saturday

Was there on Saturday with my partner before a late-fall evening hiking trip to Mount Diablo about 2:30 p.m. Standing in the long line, which is persistent on the weekends (there's only one! location - near Jack London Square - in Oakland (though it recently got bought :(, so the franchise disaster may be happening soon)). We heard an echoing smack in the distance, like a piece of plywood falling. My first thought was gunshot, but then dismissed that. Ten minutes later, police cars drive up and start yellow-taping off the street that borders Blue Bottle. Went to go ask the police officer what was up, but it was obvious. I live in West Oakland and hear shots all the time. The only time police show up is if someone is hit. Someone was hit.

We found out later via searching for "Jack London shooting" in Google that it was a fatal gunshot -- with a body lying in the middle of 3rd Street at Franklin. An Oakland, Blue Bottle moment.