6/11/15 - Comfortably nestled into the second trimester, we are embarking on what is popularly referred to as a "babymoon." Does the portmanteau have any merit beyond a high score on the Cute Scale? Compare it to its well-established namesake. The other well-known -moon, the honeymoon, follows weddings; babymoons precede births. A honeymoon is the trip where couples decompress from the pressure-cooker of wedding planning and execution; a babymoon is the trip where couples pluck the last few wild hairs they still have before the great paradigm shift that is parenthood.
Upon further reflection, though, comparisons can be discerned. Both celebrate couple-togetherness: the former marking the beginning of the union, and the latter marking the end of the exclusive union and the precursor to a little person creating a little daylight between the united parties. Both provide an opportunity to gain marital perspective: the former on what is to come, and the letter on what has already transpired.
I guess there's some legitimacy after all.
***
All morning travel is rushed if for no other reason than all morning travelers have been amped for hours and have been trying feverishly to maintain a schedule despite their tired bodies' sluggishness. As to evenings: the later in the day, the less happy everyone is. Flights have been delayed or cancelled. No one plans on jet-setting at 8:00P, especially not flying over half of the US' territory. Saturdays and Sundays are a flurry of coming and going since most everyone already has them off and, thus, make elegant starts or endings to trips.
Thursday afternoons are serene times to travel. Who is in a hurry on a Thursday afternoon? These travelers are easing their ways into the weekend. They have the luxury of capitalizing on the airline industry's dynamic pricing soft-spot, to fly when so few others do because these mid-weekers could fly at any time, really. No rush.
***
Things a traveler wears: a black T-shirt with three bedazzled wine glasses across the chest and underneath "Group Therapy" in shimmering silver sequins. The wearer: a blonde momish woman with manicured red toenails restrained inside dressy sandals.
***
I am reading Everything and More by David Foster Wallace on this trip. One of the footnotes I was reading while flying over middle Missouri's farmland recounted the statistical probability of plane crashes. What are the odds of reading about--completely unintentionally--the odds of being in a plane crash while being in a plane, midair.
***
During a spasm of inattention, I saw another plane flying at about our altitude. Something about the depth threw me. It was either too small or too far away. My eyes told me it was closer than a nearby patch of clouds, yet the object's scale was off. It looked like a toy. Then it hit me: could it be a drone?
I saw another one later in the flight. By then I was more creeped out than surprised. They were foreboding, the avant garde of a swarm of electric locusts. Science fiction has trained me to fear technologies like them and the future they herald. I have a vision of humanity mesmerized by their VR glasses while in the Real World they are inching along a conveyor belt to their mechanized slaughter.
Then I tell myself it's a long time till Skynet becomes sentient.
Then I tell myself it's a long time till Skynet becomes sentient.
***
How can a person not be amazed/enraptured when staring out a window at 35,000 ft. above terra firma?
***
When handing out the snacks ($2 retail value) that were doubtlessly buried in the price of our airfare ($376 per person, taxes and fees included), the stewardess gave us with three options: cookies, crackers, or cheese nips. (What an honor, by the way. A person comes to us to give us "complementary snacks" and inquires as to our preferences. Well played, Southwest, well played.)
When Megan and I both requested the salty, cheeseless option. The flight attendant plucked out order from a box she cradled in her arm and handed us each a bag. She looked into our eyes. She declared, without any emotional warmth in her voice, what she was handing to us. "Crackers. Crackers." And I thought for a moment this was the snack our black stewardess always hoped her white passengers would request so that she could call them a derisive term to their pale faces and get away with it.
When Megan and I both requested the salty, cheeseless option. The flight attendant plucked out order from a box she cradled in her arm and handed us each a bag. She looked into our eyes. She declared, without any emotional warmth in her voice, what she was handing to us. "Crackers. Crackers." And I thought for a moment this was the snack our black stewardess always hoped her white passengers would request so that she could call them a derisive term to their pale faces and get away with it.
But then I noticed she included a bag of dry-roasted peanuts with my Ritz Crisps, and I was too giddy to pursue the line of thought any further.
***
People telling you there's nothing to be afraid of when introducing themselves does not put you at ease. Why would the person think it's necessary to clarify? Doesn't such reassurance suggest that of all the attributes that could be predicated of them, that "dangerous" is the first that comes to mind? Wouldn't dangerous people try to temper our alarm in order to obtain their objectives?
***
Judging from my travels, St. Louis is the least stoned city in America. Every other urban area reeks of the stuff! The streets of Oakland was lined with hotboxing vehicles--at least under cover of night. I had a contact high after walking a couple of blocks from the MacArthur station.
Speaking of the Bright Side of the Bay, the first thing one sees entering Oakland from the south on light rail is the shipping yard. The mountains of corrugated steel shipping containers, the hulking ships staked high with still more containers, the cantilevered cranes in various phases of on/offloading, and the barbed wire fences to keep smugglers away: it all sets a tone. This industrial welcome mat forestalls the pretension for which its Silcon Valley neighbors are renown. Oakland gets dirty. It gets things done. It doesn't have the time to boast, and it doesn't need your venture capital.
Speaking of the Bright Side of the Bay, the first thing one sees entering Oakland from the south on light rail is the shipping yard. The mountains of corrugated steel shipping containers, the hulking ships staked high with still more containers, the cantilevered cranes in various phases of on/offloading, and the barbed wire fences to keep smugglers away: it all sets a tone. This industrial welcome mat forestalls the pretension for which its Silcon Valley neighbors are renown. Oakland gets dirty. It gets things done. It doesn't have the time to boast, and it doesn't need your venture capital.
6/12/15 - A recording of the BART hurtling through the Transbay Tunnel would make for a nice addition to any nightmare's soundtrack. I have to believe its engineers were as surprised as the rest of us when the inaugural ride from Oakland to San Francisco sounded like the cry of 1,000 forsaken Banshees.
***
We went inside the Hyatt Regency to have a peak at it's spacious atrium. We stumbled upon the 13th Annual International Cord Blood Symposium. What new could be said about cord blood on this, the 13th iteration of the conference dedicated to it?
I leaned up next to a wall near a women's restroom and scribbled in my notebook, hoping to look like an unassuming male waiting for his female counterpart's return. I strained an ear and tried to read a circle of attendees' lips. One of the women saw me. She leaned into the group's center and lowered her mouth as though to screen it from my view. Another one looked over her shoulder in my general direction. Sensing a game of scientific espionage was afoot, they dispersed before I could hear any of their cord-blood shop-talk.
***
***
You enter in a straight line, bearing directly towards the center and feel, at the seventh or eighth step, as though you will be arriving at the vaguely floral destination shortly. You wonder if you've cheated and overstepped a wall on accident. But then, the path veers off to the left and, though you are still relatively near the center, you are no closer to it. You're a little off-kilter, and you have to take caution to stay within the lines. Soon enough, though, you get how the silly game is played. You pick up the pace to ensure this detour is momentary. You start taking quick toddler-on-the-run steps and make serious headway. Then come the switch-backs, some sudden and some only after many paces near the perimeter. With time, you gain a new perspective on the finish but not necessarily from greater proximity. Your heart-rate is elevated beyond its baseline, now. You become impatient and realize how stupid you must look to your friend who brought you to this hallowed place but passed on this foolish exercise, briskly walking, staring at the ground before your feet, turning on a dime, and almost retracing your steps.
On top of your burgeoning self-consciousness, the labyrinth gets very boring and you wonder why it is you're on this path, anyway. Like, what's so great about the middle that everyone wants to go there? The middle would look very different if it were up to you. But you also don't want to be left out. You're surprised by how much harder this unicursal path is as opposed to how easy it looked 10 minutes ago. You start to resent how your journey has been determined for you by some hidden authority figure, and it starts to get demoralizing by the end of your time in the second cell. But you persist because the only thing that would look stupider than what you've been doing is stopping now and quitting like some whiny disaffected youth. You double down.
Sometimes you move into the sunshine and feel very much encouraged by its warmth. You're going to do this! Other times, at least at 3:30P in June, you recede into the shadows and languor in eddies there, wondering how so much distance can be packed into such a small space. You imagine yourself coursing through an intestinal apparatus, being methodically processed like countless clumps of human bolus. How can something so childish be pitched as spiritual and meditative? Then the breeze, which is chilling in the shade, carries the scent of nearby roses and star jasmine. By this bouquet, you feel you can persist in the drudgery.
The more of your afternoon you invest, the more you're determined to finish. So far in, you have the hang of it. You can anticipate the twists and turns. It's like you were made to do this very sort of thing. You remember how this trek is what you set out to do. You breeze through the third cell confidently. You know you're going to make it. Completion is only a matter of time, and because of that fact, this undertaking becomes boring all over again. You've done this all before. You start asking yourself what's the point of snaking through this mess once you're in the fourth cell. Then you pass by the entrance's straight away, which had become a distant memory, and the vision jars you. You can't believe your journey is coming to an end. Perhaps you've missed the point of this exercise. You slow down and try to take the time to ponder where you've been and maybe do a little last-minute soul-searching. Abruptly and without any fanfare, you're dumped into the heart with no where else to go.
Standing there, having traveled through this network of interconnected passages, it occurs to you that your life is a lot like a labyrinth. Yes, the metaphor has its limitations. None of us is privy to the comprehensive view that onlookers have. Rarely are our options so constrained (i.e., go right to follow the path or quit). But if you think about the path as being a twisty-turny representation of time and you, the sojourner, are effectively aging, then the profundities open up. And if the labyrinth walls were insurmountable instead of imaginary, you can see why people have been constructing these things for millenia. You can see how your four-dimensional life with its four-dimensional problems bears a striking resemblance to your 2D issues in that both are basically navigational. You aren't sure when or how you're going to reach the end. You're essentially along for the ride.
But is that all that's going on when we're intricately scuttling about? Reconsider the labyrinth in terms of how we think of our lives, not how our mortal lives really are--this one-way lemming-like march to death. Then there's a sweet, gooey center of reward encapsulated by a hard, sour shell of toil. Actually tasting that treat involves a great deal of sucking and chomping and teeth-chipping. And the process is replete with set-backs, both physical and mental. When you're positive you're making progress, you're later discover you had actually been making involuted regress. You expend a lot of energy, but that's what learning requires.
The idea of what exactly the center stands for demands still more deep-thinking. When interpreting the labyrinth-as-life, death is the center. Labyrinth-as-pursuit-of-purpose, though, flips the polarity. It becomes the object of desire. How we think we orient ourselves is in opposition to our timely demise and, consciously or otherwise. It's a quest to find perpetuation, be it wealth, fame, family, or everlasting life.
Standing in the center you ponder what exactly you just accomplished by running through this course. Did you reach your goal or reach your expiration date? Moreover, to what extent was either a fool's errand?
You feel a little dizzy.
***
Overheard in Little Italy: "You spend the first day gagging, and then you get drunk, and then you're fine."
***
Due to an ongoing drought, the city of San Francisco turned off the water that normally courses through the Vaillancourt Fountain and rendered it the Vaillancourt Slightly Moldy Basin. However, over at Yerba Buena Garden, obscene levels of H20 cascade over the Martin Luther King Memorial Fountain. The public policy backstory to this decision would have been scandalous.
Meanwhile, the koan of what is a waterfall without the water may yet be posed future, parched generations.
***
Tourists do not have complete opacity in the eyes of employees tasked with dealing with them. The employees see past us as though we are apparitions who can only be cast out with the drollest of incantations.
***
Twin Peaks Park, the windiest perch I have ever tried to stand atop, prominently featured swaths of native habitat restoration. A sign announced one of the honored guests sought to dwell therein was the mission blue butterfly. Were there a Suggestion Box nearby, I would have asked how confident were the ecologists that the butterflies left because of changes in the vegetation and as opposed to the incessant gale-force winds.
***
Observed at Twin Peaks: people laugh when accosted by the wind. What else can one do? If one reacts to a tapped shoulder, one must surely do something when having their clothes pinned against them, their jowls jiggled, and their hair instantly tangled. We, who are solid, hefty, and have the requisite power to at least stand up straight, have to lean into this normally diffuse, invisible natural element. We find it funny. The incessant atmospheric violence is absurd, and there's humor in the absurd.
***
San Francisco is the only place I've been where there are more adults than children on the jungle gyms. Near Chinatown, we stumbled upon the parkour equivalent of a jam session where small-statured men swung around the monkey bars like gibbons. In the eye of this hurricane of masculine activity, an aspirant film maker twirled balletically, trying to catch the edgy gymnasts in a move brought to flawless completion. (I don't think he ever recorded such perfection. The traceurs are more prone to showy warm-ups than showy tricks.)
Later, we arrived at a tiny park consisting of two smooth concrete slides as a laborer was padlocking grates to forcefully blockade evening sliders. We were heartbroken. Regina, Megan, and I milled about the abandoned place, ready and willing to break the rule about being accompanied by a child but unable to break the one about playing after 5:00P.
***
At Grand Lake Farmers' Market in Oakland, you learn that some of God's blessings are package deals. Not only will He give the Bay Area the best weather possible, humanly considered, He'll thrown in the best produce your tongue will ever taste. Walk down the aisles of farmers' tents. Farmhands thrust slices of white peaches, yellow nectarines, and green honeydew into your hands, guaranteeing that their crops are the best. You become the healthy equivalent of a kid in a candy store.
***
There is an on-demand dog-walking service here. Download the app and invite a stranger to take Fido on a stroll in minutes! Only in San Francisco.
***
In California, litter includes wine bottles. We spied a bottle of Quail Oak Merlot ($4.99 Suggested Retail Price) in a shady thicket at Lands End. Compared against the Bud Light bottles back home, this trash doesn't seem so bad.
***
Our friend and tour guide brought us to the outdoor roller rink, AKA 6th Avenue Skate Park, AKA the Skatin' Place at Golden Gate Park. We arrived at about the time a woman was pushing a stroller onto the asphalt oval. Her child was an iPod, wired to a PA speaker, wired to a car battery. Once the music started, so did the circulation. We watched skate park fixtures like Morpheus, Terrance, Linda LoveToSkate, Amy Bruchner, and David Miles, AKA the Godfather of Skate, AKA the Pied Piper of Skating, AKA the Mayor of Golden Gate Park, revolve with varying velocities and dance styles. Some went fast. Some went slow. Some stayed in the middle and performed the roller equivalent of line-dancing. Some glided about wearing jeans. Others wore shorts. Others wore fishnet over colorful tube tops. Others wore Adidas track suits. Some trailed capes behind them. A trench coat billowed behind another. A few were decked out for cosplay.Although I did not don any wheels, I was moved. Usually when eccentrics gather, conventional types are pushed out. Not so at the Skatin' Place. You were free to be who you are. You could be: a pro, amateur, or other; short, tall, or other; big, little, or other; young, old, or other; male, female, or other; single, married, or other; gay, straight, or other; black, white, or other. You were welcomed. All you needed for membership was an earnest desire to be a member.
***
We stopped to smell the roses in Oakland at the Morcom Rose Amphitheater. Once we had our snoot-fulls, we visited the ladies' room for the thousandth time as Megan felt our little one cha-cha atop her bladder. When Megan rejoined Regina and me, we started plotting our day's next step. A young woman inadvertently interrupted our deliberations. She walked onto an adjacent grassy knoll flanked by roses bushes, stopped, and faced us without making eye-contacted. She dropped her sack purse and slid out of her sandals. She began picking at her shoulders and back, removed her bra, pulled it through her tank top's arm hole, and dropped the lingerie in a pile next to her discarded Birks. Staring off into the hill-obscured horizon, she began a silent, slow motion dance routine.
The difference between Tai Chi and BS never has been more indistinguishable.
The difference between Tai Chi and BS never has been more indistinguishable.
***
At the Bay Street Shopping District, you can pay $2 to enter a booth called the Hurricane Simulator. As the graphic-heavy instructions panel portrays, simply insert your cash, slide the door open, step into the phone book-like stall, close the door behind you, and experience all the fun of a natural disaster without the risk to property and person.
***
Racial integration appears more happily uniform here than in my own segregated home town. I've seen far fewer cross-sidewalk scowls in passing, for example. Tell us in the Lou your secret, O-Town. Is it your population density? The arrangement of your transit lines? Your police training curriculum? The history of your neighborhoods? Your traffic ticket revenue caps? Or are you more accustomed to pretending everything is copacetic? Will everyone drop that mask of neighborliness the instant a member of a majority group murders a member of a minority group? And if so, how can we defuse our region if even yours is an uneasy peace?
***
Patience on the road bears an inverse correlation to patience in stores. While we've been honked at dozens of times for the briefest of media res pauses, I've watched people bite their tongues for minutes on end while a barista carries on in great depth about Jerry Seinfeld and his post-sitcom career.
***
The stop announcements on the Metro are whisper quiet. Does this decrease the incidence of violence on public transit? Does it keep ambient noise levels down as riders strain to hear the updates?
***
A Bay Area convention: place unwanted items on the sidewalk. One of your fellow citizens of this modern-day Bohemia may take and treasure it by sunrise tomorrow. If not, the sanitation workers will snag it eventually.
***
New additions to my list of beloved public art: 1) the magical elf door in the hollow of a maple tree trunk in Golden Gate Park and 2) enormous giraffes painted on the cylindrical concrete piers girding 580 Freeway.
***
Even midwesterners know that west coasters eat late dinners. They are infamous party animals. But the flip side of that trait is less well-advertised. They are not morning people. Businesses don't flip the lights on until 10:00A, and, aside from coffee shops, no one engages in commerce pre-11:00A.
***
The Wave Organ at San Francisco Bay is less of an organ than an instrument of disappointment, or an idea that is good in theory but bad in practice.
***
Sobering moment of truth: All vacations end. Unlike your own dying day, everyone sees the end of a vacation coming. It's the clarity of the one and the obscurity of the other that inspires most of us to more deeply morning the return flight than our own last breaths.6/17/15 - No one talks on public transit anymore. All you hear over the car's clanking is the distant, tinny soundtracks leaking out around ear canals and the sporadic birdsongs of message notifications. Am I the only one who suspects this social isolation is playing into corporations' artificial hands? Or is this akin to my Skynet fretting?
***
Oakland, as the name suggests, is home to oodles of trees. Even on the city sidewalks, there's a square of cement removed ever six-to-ten feet with an adolescent oak tree growing in it. But, more noteworthy than this, is all the trash caught by the weeds in these beds. Candy and fast-food wrappers are a form of mulch here. Government officials could pitch the phenomenon as a Green Initiative were the plasticine refuse not leaching toxins into the soil.
***
Despite all the technological advances, the PA system in the public transport terminals still uses a text-to-speech translator that hasn't been updated since the 1980s.
***
On the train, by the doors, there are two seats that run parallel to the length of the car. A triptych of white on blue figures strike the following poses. The first appears jauntily mid-stride with a straight cane angled aggressively out front. The middle figure stands erect with a pronounced paunch. The final figure is stoop-shouldered and leaning on a Mr. Peanut-style cane. Together, these panes non-verbally assert priority seating is reserved for the blind, pregnant, and elderly. A caption warns of fines for occupying said seating at at time when prioritized parties are present and wobbling into others' personal spaces.
After much observation, there appears to be two types of able-bodied people who gravitate towards these seats: the pragmatists who take the seat to get out of the way and the egotists who lay claim to all available amenities as their due. More of the latter type ride during peak commuting hours and block out the surrounding glares of peer-pressure through Zen-like absorption in the handheld devices. The former, who will vacate this spot in the priority row for my pregnant wife, feel so strongly about the rightful heirs to their abdicated thrones that they will no take "No" for an answer. As they're pushing my wife into the still-warm seat, the look around as if to communicate, "Do this for me someday when I am am member of one of these groups. And the day-trader, who has never shifted his finely-tailored pants leg on the fulcrum of his other finely-tailored pants leg, stares still deeper into the abyss of his iPhone.
***
Question that arises in the coach cabin on our flight home: what is the best way to communicate to an inconsolable child who is screaming a phlegm-gurgling scream that, "I want to come home! I want to go home! I want to go Home! I want to go home!" is exactly what this trip is doing?Follow-up question: how should a parent respond to the child's insistence to be put down--as in on the ground, not the floor of the plane, when 39,000 feet above said ground?
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