California Vacation Notes 8/4 – 8/18

California Notes (August 4th 2008 – August 22nd 2008)

August 4th:
From The Plane
• Saw a Buddha cloud coughing out wisdom, other clouds oblivious.

• Being on an airplane makes me oddly comfortable with the thought of dying. Knowing that, at 30K feet, if a wing were to snap of, I would be unquestionably fucked really somehow makes the thought of death OK. I always take stock of things, you know, I think I’m pretty ok with everyone. If I were to kick tomorrow, I think I would more or less be at peace with the populace.

• Got a headache. Probably from no food. I should eat, but traveling makes my stomach shy. Should sleep too. Feel like ass, but want to get to sleep quickly tonight – not sure how easy on boat.

August 6th:
Berkeley
• Now that I have begun my traveling life, so to speak, I’ve had time to ponder something that people find so spectacular about different parts of the world. We travel in order to see what we can’t see at home. People marvel at the glory of sites, culture and such, and the more I see humanity dressed in the various landscapes of our world, the more I realize that it is the world, the earth that makes us beautiful people, our awe with nature, our cooperation with the spirit of life and death. However, it is ourselves that make us horrible, our desires for power and property make us villains who spoil the earth and each other. In my conversation with Sean earlier, he and sort of agreed on the point that, the inevitable destruction of our species may be a good thing for life in general.

• Cordonices Park is quite a treat. I walked past the hordes of screaming children and guitar playing camp counselors of, I kid you not, World Peace Summer Day Camp. All cynicism aside, I bet they’re doing good things. Back to the point. The park is lovely to the extent that I would not be too shocked to stumble upon some Hobbits and a Peter Jackson film crew. Though I doubt my park visit will extend past the 3-hour mark.

August 9th:
San Francisco
• Been through Nob Hill/Tenderloin, North Beach, some of the SOMA/Financial District areas. Now recouping at a S’bucks near Embarcadero BART stop. Feet hate me, too much walking for sure. Now, Some rest for an hour or so, then maybe find out where Sean landed (Sean planned to sail over to SF from Berkeley and meet with me at one of the piers and stay there overnight. It turns out we met up at Pier 1 ½, had some dinner and sailed back at night. It was fun, and the view of the skyline was incredible from the water at night.) Cell battery ran out, so charging here. Fuck I would enjoy having a car right about now.

• Observation: City Lights was cool, looks bigger than it really is, but that is OK. Still pretty cool. Had all Plate in stock, Raw Shark Texts, Cleavenger, bought new Alatriste TPB (third book in the series). Saw Keruoac’s coffee spot – Caffe Treiste. It was busy and plagued with customers, so I moved on.

• SF shopping on a Saturday – not quite Mag Mile but not far off. Good to see the Next Great Depression has yet to hurt Williams Sonoma. Hypocritically I write this while drinking a $5 coffee. In my defense, it was free. S’bucks was the only place in SF financial area still open right now, so I bought a S’bucks card in order to circumnavigate paying for WiFi, a trick Livius taught me. After buying the card, I ordered a drink. The dude didn’t ring it up, he said it was on the house. Sadly, in order to rock free WiFi at S’bucks, you need to register a S’bucks card that you’ve made a purchase on within the last month. I was thwarted by rare human kindness. Lots of SF still to see, parks & ocean. Gotta hit Castro and Haight/Ashbury for sure. Try to find a place to catch Pineapple Express.

• Chinatown was exciting. Ran across some kind of Drumline nightmare in the street, but with dragons. It was nice, a good area of town, at least to walk through. I’m positive that if I stopped walking, even for a minute, I would have suffered multiple anxiety attacks. Busy, loud, cramped.

• Getting the hang of public trans. Not as simple as Chicago. I think MUNI trains are coin only (Actually, not only, but primarily. I later bought a 7 day “passport” for unlimited rides – will describe odd mechanics of that later) which irks me. Should be a consolidated system. No idea what is going on with the buses. Need to find out quickly, feet are suffering.

• Chicago is pretty. It’s good to look at, and as you radiate out from the loop it gets uglier and uglier (with obvious exceptions.) Loop for the most part is really nice. As you go out a layer, South Loop, Gold Coast, West Loop all looking pretty well put together. The next layer, a little homlier, until eventually you come across neighborhoods like Rogers Park and the Cottage Grove area. Not as fun. It’s interesting to see – locked right in with the Mag Mile of San Francisco are stretches of area that are dirty and run down. So are the people. Dreadlocked woman without shoes laying in a doorway on a sleeping bag just four blocks from Union Square. Sure, Chicago has its sampling of transients mixed in with the beautiful people, but something here is DIFFERENT. If you saw a scraggy bearded dirty dude just off State Street on Chicago Avenue, you would think he was out of place. Here, they seem like they belong. They cane, they fought for this chunk of existence, and there’s no doubt – they are right where they should be.
I like that, It’s like the homeless have won a victory (See Mission notes later, and photos – homeless rights not so secure)

August 14th:
Oakland
• Been staying in Oakland since Monday. Loveseat, but whatever – I’m down with any free lodging. Checked out what must be the two good areas of Oakland: One area off of Rockridge BART stop on College Ave. Very indie area with shops and boutiques, coffee shops. The other area is Downtown Oakland, which with lots of walkways and carless avenues, reminds me of something’s like Evanston, wrapped in South Side Chicago. Downtown has good selection of vegan restaurants, coffee places, used book stores. Lake Merritt a let down. Weird and dirty.

• Checked out a Gnostic Mass on Tuesday night. It was heavily (Read: Entirely) populated with gamer-type nerds. Big time, hardcore nerds. The mass was interesting to see. I appreciated the gender equality of it. It is performed with a Priest and Priestess. The whole ceremony (ritual, whatever you want to call it) was very overtly sexual. VERY. The priestess kissing the priest’s staff and things like that. Not my bag of juice, but it was fun to check out.

• After mass, hung out with Eric’s frineds from the OTO (Order of Thelemic something or other) who were a little strange. I have not seen so much weed smoked in a long long time. Later that night, we accompanied Eric’s friends to their friend’s house because he was having people over – evidently it was his birthday. He grew up (and went to high school) in Mundelein. Name was Jarret or Jarred something, investigate. That was fun, Eric’s friends were writers, and everyone seemed to enjoy my book store concept.

• Played Epic RPG with Sean and Eric last night. Good concept, might actually be fun, but I’m not so into it. Supposed to do it again tonight (didn’t happen – instead playing the 20th?)

• Saturday is WordPress conference – get there on 3rd street light rail.

• Got pic of Craigslist.org office. Looks lame, tough to believe that the dude is worth dozens of millions of dollars. Across the street (9th St. between Judah and Irving) is the SF location of Café Gratitude. 9th St. in Sunset is pretty nice area.

• Spent a couple of hours in Golden Gate park. Took Muni train down to Ocean Beach and walked back up. Made it from 48th street up to 9th, then diverted into Sunset neighborhood. Took some pictures in the park, it was good. I was not expecting to see so many sprinklers. Also, seems that the closer you get to JFK St., the nicer the park gets. If you walk along random paths, it’s a little nasty. Lots of utility sheds and fences and stuff. It was a little disappointing in that respect. Otherwise, really nice park, certainly a good place to kill time – spacious. Would require multiple visits to cover the 3 x .5 mile expanse of it.

• Reading House of Leaves. Gives me the willies (now done reading it, willies throughout, but overall a good read.)

• On Muni yesterday (8/13), found wallet of some chick laying on the floor as I was leaving. Obviously large bills inside, twenties. I would guess somewhere between $60 and $100, credit cards too. Got off train with it, handed it over to the Muni employees on the platform. Felt weird about the idea of just taking money, though I really could have used it. The Muni employees probably did take the money, out of greed. In fairness, maybe humanity is a little less foul than my faith in it, but probably they’re equally foul.

August 15th:
San Francisco
• What’s with tourism in San Francisco? Seems like every rube with a CANON or NIKON has plinko’d their way to this poor city. I fight the notion, on one side, that some of these people are card carrying San Franciscans. Were that to be true, SF may well be the most fertile area for Pro-photogs in the lower (contiguous) 48. On the other side, every soul with a digital SLR within the 4 nearest time zones would have to be magnetically drawn to this “city by the bay.”

• Tattoo Museum I went to check out was a bust. So far as I could tell, it was just a Tattoo shop. Balls.

• Spent a little time in the Mission. 16th & Valencia and the surrounding area. 16th seems to be where a lot of shit is going on. Shops and things. Had coffee at Muddy Waters on Valencia. No relation to the Minneapolis coffee joint of same name, when queried, the clerk responded that it must be a gunpowder situation – discovered in multiple places exclusive of each other. Good area – need to make it back for more hanging out and exploring. Reminds me of Wicker Park, but less gentrified and more ethnically diverse (read: Nicer.)

August 17th:
San Francisco
• Back in the Mission yesterday. Woke up late and missed registration for WordPress conference. Looked lame anyway, I did a fly by. Mostly workshops – no booths with free shit. So, I ate lunch at Panera by the Caltrain station (I know, but they have free WiFi and it looked dead in there. I needed a quiet place to munch.)

• After food too Muni to BART to 16th St & Mission. Walked around Mission more. Ended up hitting four book stores, and almost picked up a 1st edition signed copy of Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore for $15. I didn’t, because I didn’t want to travel with it, and I’m not boned up on 1st eds. Or Chris Moore’s signature enough to know it’s authentic. I did make it to a couple other bookstores, and at Dog Ear Books (?) I picked up a copy of Peter Plate’s Soon the Rest Will Fall, and a collection of shorts by Victor Pelevin. When checking out, the guy working there asked me if Plate was still around. I said I didn’t know, I was from out of town. Turns out Plate used to do readings at that shop, back when he was starting out. I thought that was cool.

• Met up with Julia last night (August 16th?) had Thai at a place called Ducit on Mission and 28th(?). It was good – I had Oyster Beef. Later went back to her house, and hung out with her and her housemates. Eventually we made it down to Ocean Beach to have a “bonfire”. I guess it’s some tradition for a buncha people to head down there to celebrate the full moon. There were maybe 15 to 20 fires spread across the beach, it was pretty cool. It was a little cold and misty, but all in all it was a good time. Toward the end of the fire-session, a drunk and shoeless pyromaniac tired to fall into our fire. Everyone was reluctant to tell the dude to fuck off after he essentially invited himself to hang with us. I would have, but felt it would offend the sensibilities of my hosts, so I held back. Still, I was sufficiently sarcastic and subtly rude. Eventually I did tell him to find a new fire to bother.

• Today was chill, slept on Julia’s couch until 11:30 or so, escaped while rest of household was still sleeping to go find some food. Had breakfast at a place on Mission called Jim’s, then it was back to Muddy Waters for coffee and WiFi. Made my way back to Oakland to chill for a bit, change into less smoky clothes. Slept for like a half hour on the couch, and went into Berkeley for dinner, coffee again.

• Tomorrow = me certifying for Unemployment benefits! First call, then have to make another call every 2 weeks for up to 6 months. Nice.

• Finished reading House of Leaves. Now, between 8/4 and 8/17 I have read over 1,900 pages, and am at 7,626 total for the year. I am pacing to far exceed my goal of 10,000 pages for the year. As it stands, am rapidly approaching my total for ’07 which was somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,600. Hooray for being laid off!

• Monday August 18th will see me certifying for my mooch money, paying for Shayne’s birthday cake (Nope. Closed Mondays. Balls.) and picking up the ’08 Writer’s Market Deluxe (Nope. ’09 is out, but not in stock. Balls.) I intend to be published much more by the close of ’08.

August 18th:
Oakland
• Woke up and headed out to Rockridge BART stop. Got out and checked out Diesel bookstore, which was nice for sure, but didn’t have what I was looking for. Skipped over to Hudson Bay Café for a cup of Joe and some free Internet. Did my usual checking of things, and called in my first time for unemployment benefits. It was a 7-minute call, and easy as pie. As far as I am aware, I’m good to go. Just gotta keep applying for jobs, and I’m set.

• Left the café and headed toward the Piedmont area, which is the other neighborhood that was worth checking out for cool shit. There were some bookshops and cool looking coffee places, but I was in the mood for lunch, and so I kept going. Rather than backtracking and going to College Avenue to et back on the BART, I walked down Mac Arthur to the freeway, and cut over to the Mac Arthur BART stop. It was a roundabout way, and certainly not a safe area. But what can you do? I was born to check shit out.

• Took BART to 12 st stop and had a sandwich at Quiznos, just because it was fast and I was hungry. After that, walked down to Jack London Square on the waterfront, to hit the Barnes & Noble. Sadly they also didn’t have what I needed. I found out that the ’09 series of Writers Market books are out, but they didn’t have the one I wanted. Offered to order it, but that was lame. I guess I will call WCF when I’m in Chicago again, might as well support an independent bookstore, of course.

• Jack London Square seems quaint. Good place to bring your parents to prove Oakland isn’t a total shit hole. But I wasn’t feeling it, so I headed back to Eric’s place to do some much needed vacation notes transcribing.