The emptiness of sun-struck concrete

Erotic poem?

the midnight bodies
upending the world

the cold of interstellar space
upon a wine-dark dark sea

the apathy of the stars
a day going into night
the same sky above

Ride

Yesterday, at the greyed-out bus stop, the overcast sky dampening the thought of sound and thoughts themselves, the Asian dude who was doing calisthenics -- squats, push-ups -- on the first day at the stop drove up in a van and asked "Do you want a ride?"

 The open way he asked, spontaneously, since we rode the bus everyday together, made me spontaneously say yes. Plus, something about him seamed interesting and hardcore. His left eye, I noticed when I got in was slightly puffy, as if from a fight. He started complaining about the van. And I said it's not bad. He said he used to have a Benz. I asked what happened. He said the Feds took it, money laundering. Spent five years in jail, was in a half-way house near my new place. In jail for five years ...

Redwoods

Went to Mt. Tam this weekend and finally hiked its southwestern flank, the one that pours into movie-worthy and mad-tourist-hangout Muir Woods. It's heavily forested, and from Panoramic Highway, the road you take to short cut from Highway 1 on the south to Pantoll Ranger Station (and beyond, including a shortcut to East Peak, the mountain's stone ranger-hutted tallest point) -- passing the scone-spot Mountain Home Inn -- this section of Tam offers mysterious, fog-shrouded views of its redwood underbelly and possibly the only side of the mountain with all-year-running creeks.

Everytime I go to Tam, I'm impressed by the variety of landscapes that a single trail offers; it's a constantly-shifting landscape - one point open, with dry, dusty soil, another forested and rain-forest wet, another just woodland-like. Rolling, soft-footed paths, hard, up-and-down rutted trails, ocean-view meadows, powerline vapidity.


The redwood trees themselves in Muir Woods -- which is larger than you initially might think with its curated, bulk-touristed presentation and is actually free anytime (saving you the $7 per adult entrance fee and a much more organic, in some ways impressive intro) by backcutting in from any of the many trails that network into the park -- like the old-growth giants elsewhere defy the brain. Their heights keep going up and up. For the video above, I had to limbo back, almost bending over to get the crowns and rainy sky. Makes the chest swell ...

Dear Yeezus

For all those

not reading this blog, Barkada Bakery + Cafe in Oakland's Temescal neighborhood is the bomb.

For those of you wondering what baking books the cafe, which makes Gibraltars and other good coffee drinks among croissants (not that flaky, though) and petit desserts, has on on a shelf near a window that looks into the buzzing bakery room, they are:

Tartine Bread
The Art and Soul of Baking
Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy
Bouchon Bakery
The Professional Pastry Chef
Book of Tarts
Chez Panisse Vegetables

Mama's boys, swimming

Two mama's boys talking loudly, walking down the purple-flowered street that pours on to Grand Ave. "She didn't call," said one to the other, loudly, "because either she didn't like me, which would be the simplest and most likely reason, or she was so busy she just hasn't had a chance to get back to me yet.

"If I didn't like someone, I would wait four days and then call them and say, 'I'm calling you out of courtesy to say I don't want to see you.'" Whoah!

A girl at the bottom of the hill in a bright, floral skirt stands outside the door of the chaotic, dirty neighborhood corner store, which seems to have everything from hookah pipes to spices to yellow onions to a dirty-@$% ATM. She stands tall-ish, waiting but not waiting too hard with a white pit bull-boxer mix, who's a little overweight and is definitely waiting for someone to come out of that store.

Went swimming in the glorious Temescal swimming pool, that gets swam in several times a week, where you see lithe bodies swimming their laps, resting -- a little bit of a sexy place.

Bright blue

Sharp purple. Jasmine milk. A still-sunny sunset. Boys running. Teacher-student emptiness. Little bicycles with big wheels. A stone courthouse more stately than thought. Two good-looking girls. Boy, girl running. Wooded, shadows. The sun behind buildings.

Random thoughts on a Tamalpais day

The mountain circles in the distance very close, exposed, known, a burned-out expanse in the sun-hot day, a cleared, overexposed floating sensation, obscure by the very nature of the light, a two-tone filter over everything. Yellow and lighter than light blue.

The Bay mud, a sticky, clogging-feeling mess -- hair in a drain catcher, mucous in an exhausted, overworked, slightly asthmatic pair of lungs (like just having breathed in the air to power an overweight body's legs on a bicycle up an insanely steep trail through the woods) -- merges with the sensation of the mountain's sight.

The known. The unknown. "Not knowing is most intimate." It's always best not to know, to see everything with fresh eyes, moist-new to the world. Whatever.

Floating in a vapid, treasure-less space, pierced by the image of the fire from a .45mm handgun's thick-ass ammunition when fired. What is a day? A thought never to be known?

Sitting down

The day went slow and halting, but it, as days will do, went.

Sitting now in the sunshine, semi-full of rosemary-olive bread soaked in olive oil and a Gibraltar, the leaves of the large oak? overhead filtering a clean, glowing East Bay light.

People -- including a woman in big sunglasses and a purple bandana, Tom's shoes, a yoga mat-showing backpack locking up an old, red 10-speed bike with a cheap-a$@ lock of the same brand that failed to protect my Bianchi fixed-gear (I'm not a hipster!) from some thief who enjoyed slicing the lock and freeing it -- drift by on the sidewalk.

An ambulance passes and the toned-down Miles Davis-like jazz filtering overhead slowly melts the day.

Cup o' Noodles morning, languorous, gently-buffeted day

The day starts greyly and a little late. Roll out of bed in the cool East Bay air that swirls in our room, pass the piano keyboard that crowds my side of the queen-sized bed, which is a smidgen too small, along with the super-comfy comforter, for us.

Tired body opens the bedroom door, seeing grey morning light fill the room and the little cat, lonely sleeping on his bed, which is actually a sitting cushion rolled up.

It's island-in-the sky quiet; at 6am you'd expect more noise. The walls themselves, and the blinds, appear to be sleeping. 

Walk to the bus stop a hundred yards away over the not-busy-yet highway. Arrive at the bus stop, an empty "Cup of Noodles" cup rolls on the healthy sidewalk gently in the slight, steady dawn breeze. An Asian dude does calisthenics, including squats and holding his body against the bus pole. He's doing something that looks like a glorious stretch - folding over his toes into a forward fold and then twisting his chest to face upward along with one hand.

I sit on the narrow, painted-wood bus stop seat. The woman next to me on the miniature water lily-colored seat has some rhinestone-laced open-toed flats on. The rhinestones make up the middle of a flower. Her black-painted toenails have fireworks of colors painted on them, exploding.

Bright lights, big city

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.

BLOG.PAULHAGEY.COM

For all the mysterious blogreaders out there, the new site is blog.paulhagey.com.
Send me a note sometime and let me know there are humans reading this, if so.
I'll take suggestions, in a few months.

New blog location

blog.paulhagey.com

Better photo/video display. Adios blogspot.