Blog-azic

I think my eyes are starting to adjust to the Bay's expanse because when I look East to the Milpitas hills, on the drive back to San Jose, I can see what looked like one flat, two dimensional range suddenly has depth: a low ridge in the front, then a long space behind, followed by the high barren hills rising into the sky, merging with a purple cloud, bending south and west, finally becoming a glowing, molten sunset over Palo Alto. I hit the streets downtown in San Jose looking for food and found a burrito. San Jose might seem posh, overly hip, expensive on first glance, but there are cracks in the pavement - so to speak - where grunge, dirt life, alternative mindsets, independent thought   pokes through. Forget the phrase "a diamond in the rough." Flip it if you like (a rough in the diamond), or abandon it altogether for something more real: a dandelion in the concrete. So, I found myself at an art collective and performance space (and bike co-op) o...

I asked Kate about the leaves - if they are really just turning now - in the car after she picked me up from my hotel, and she smiled and nodded. "These deciduous trees aren't native," she said, and I realized my whole view on the Bay - probably even life itself - was colored by Eastern winters. She swooped down after work to ferry me across the Bay into San Mateo, and then north into San Francisco and the Mission District, where I ate a half chicken with roasted vegetables and chocolate cake. Rob drank wine and coffee even though he was not quite over a bout of flu. Kate ate half her empanada and then rubbed her belly and looked uncomfortable, and she probably was, being near eight months pregnant. Back in the car, when Kate pulled up to the hotel, I gave her the Mother Goose book hoping that their child might find some joy in it. Maybe it's the book, or subconscious desire, or a biological clock, I've been dreaming about children and parenting thi...

Riding the BART to Berkeley for the experience of it, enrapt by the heavenly haw of the train, cloying inebriation. The low tenor, rubber squeals near Oakland are horrendous, almost painful, and I'd plug my ears except for the futility of it - something I think the locals understand since they stare blankly ahead through it all, unmoved and unmoving. The incorporeal soprano consumes me, vibrates my head, scrambles my thoughts. It's ecstatic, histamine glory, a hot shower release. I swear to God, it's a magic sound.  I walked the wide avenue in Berkeley wide eyed, like a freshman on campus, dodged into a book store, and searched through the comic books. There was an old man in a chair clutching a large book, nodding, asleep. No one seemed to mind. I perused for a bit and finally settled an a trio of Wonder Woman comics and a book of nursery rhymes, black and white checkered, 'The Real Mother Goose', which I used to read out of it as a child. I loved the way tho...

I return to the wonder bowl of the West, the Bay, with its invisible topology that boggles my mind - I have a hard time judging distances here - for the second and final visit to Silicon Valley, where I'm struggling against long odds to diagnose a WiFi problem.  In San Jose as I leave the airport, it is raining. On the cab ride to Fremont, I'm looking at those desolate hills southeast of the Bay in Milpitas County, and I detect a hue of green where, one month back, there was only thirsty brown. It would seem that the country, the flora, is awake, brimming with the prospect of spring, so juxtaposed against my memories of long, dry summer days. It must happen every year: arid summer days that shrivel, desiccate, turn to paper and flake away to reveal Autumn, moon cool nights and December, electric winter. (I hope the people here have enough sense to use LED bulbs in their faux icicle holiday lights. Humbug.) The bright, young green of the grass - the green of hope not envy -...