Internet Stapler

If you've ever seen that episode of Seinfeld...

2010-03-19T18:43:00.000-07:00

There's an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry sees that The Dream Cafe isn't getting any customers and he goes in to befriend the owner, Babu, and offer him (what ends up to be useless) advice about how to improve business. As always, Jerry is lauding himself excessively the whole time, thinking, "I am such a great guy. Who else would've gone through the trouble of helping this poor immigrant? I am special. My mother was right."

And of course, after Babu puts a ton of money into Pakistani-izing the place, nobody else shows up, The Dream Cafe goes out of business, and Jerry doesn't turn out to be a very good guy at all. Then the whole gang goes to Monk's for coffee.

Well, there's this Indian restaurant in my neighborhood that's almost always empty. Every once in a while there are maybe three or four tables taken, but otherwise there's usually someone standing by the entrance looking bored, as if wondering why they bothered moving to this strange country in the first place. All those strangers on the street, passing them by, in a city renowned for open-mindedness, multiculturalism, and acceptance. They had opened a traditional yet relatively upscale Indian restaurant, complete with white tablecloths, flickering tea-candles and a fresh rose at each table. On the walls were paintings of couples embracing; in each, the man seemed to be pursuing the woman, and she was playing hard-to-get.

(As a sidenote: The paintings made me wish I were a bit more forward with women, and briefly self-conscious about my usual boyish nevousness.)

This restaurant had changed ownership around the beginning of this year. Another quiet, mostly empty Indian restaurant had gone out of business and been bought out by a small San Francisco franchise. They had obviously put a ton of money into repainting and redecorating the place by the time I passed by it in late January on the night of their Grand Opening (there was music in the street, the women in saris, a small buffet outside with samples for the public). There was a rush of business at first; or at least it wasn't empty.

Then on February 7, an outbound 22 Fillmore MUNI bus driver pulled away from a stop with the wheelchair lift sticking out, and BOOM: http://sfappeal.com/news/2010/02/traffic-muni-service-presumably-disrupted-after-22-fillmore-hits-fire-hydrant.php

Knocked the fire hydrant right over. A geyser erupts, reportedly rising up at least three stories. The adjacent building gets drenched. Two floors of apartments, a family owned cafe, and this Indian restaurant (just a week or so after their Grand Opening celebration), all soaked. The water damage was extensive, and took a few weeks to repair enough to the point that the businesses were functional. I remember walking past this place with its furniture, the walls, the ceiling, the bar, all covered in clear plastic tarps to collect the water.

It saddened me to see it, but I had my city blinders on...had to get down to the bus, to work, and come back, places to go, people to see, etc., right? Onward & forward, as they say. Or whatever they say.

Anyways, was coming home from work tonight with a $25 extra bucks in my pocket from a "staff appreciation drawing" at work. The restaurant on the corner was open, completely empty except for the waitress gazing dully out the window at the street and a fellow somewhat listlessly lighting tea-candles at all the empty tables.

Empty, I thought. Empty again.

Then I thought of something:

I'll go in there, I said to myself. I'll go in there and lift their spirits if it's the last thing I do in the world.

I had the extra money in my pocket, figured I'd spend it on a decent meal, treat myself. Of course, I can only treat myself to something if I give something else back. Otherwise I end up feeling slightly like an ass, even when I'm not coming off as one.

The OPEN sign was blazing its neon red through the window. It occurred to me as I crossed the street: Holy crap...this happened in a Seinfeld episode. I laughed, remembering the line, "I am such a great guy...my mother was right." Somehow, it reverberated through me--the way a piano string will start to vibrate if you match its tension with the pitch of your voice. Then I remembered how that episode ended...how Jerry's righteous, yet at the same time selfish, desire to help "this poor immigrant" ended up ruining Babu Bhat's business and eventually getting him deported back to Pakistan.

Suddenly I realized that maybe I was being selfish too. I guess you run the risk of being an ass no matter what you do or how innocent your intentions. It's like something a very wise person once told me: No matter what you do, you might regret having not done the opposite.

Screw it.

I know I'm a mensch.

I'm not gonna boast about it, or say that I don't have faults.

I'm just gonna march into this restaurant and have a nice relaxed dinner alone. Maybe I'll strike up a convo with one of the employees.

As I pulled open the door to the place, I was greeted by the tall dark fellow who had been lighting the tea-candles. He spoke rather formally, and with a thick North Indian accent. "Hello sir, what can I do for you?" His voice, and his eyes, had that slight sense of listlessness that I had imagined. Or maybe he was just tired. Hard to tell.

He seated me next to the bar, handed me a menu.

"Something to drink?" he said. "A glass of wine? Or a beer perhaps?"

I looked over at the bar. American beers. American wine. I could get those anywhere. I wanted something that matched the art on the walls, the flavor in the air, the distant homeland time forgot.

Started flipping through the menu.

"Could I have some chai please?"

He smiled. "Yes, sir," he said. "Right away." And in the blink of an eye he had disappeared.

I heard him say to the waitress in a very hurried, managerial way, "One chai!"

The young woman jumped into action, tearing her gaze from the busy street outside. She scurried across the room to get some chai. I watched it all very curiously. I was curious what things were like for these two in a restaurant otherwise emptied of humans, business, and, from all appearances, running a bit low on hope.

She brought the chai in a teacup on a saucer. It was filled nearly to the brim, and steaming hot. The smell was comforting. Not so much that it induced some calming memory, as so often happens with smells (I remember reading somewhere that olfactory sensation is connected somehow to long-term memory in the brain). This felt like more of a primal thing, as if something deep within my evolutionary organism was pleased by the very scent of it.

For several minutes, I sat enjoying the hot chai, just gazing around the room. Saying nothing. Taking it all in.

This place was a presentation of someone's ideals, somebody's pride and joy, somebody's baby. In my imagination, it was the realization of a dream. A dream to own a restaurant in America, to have clean white tablecloths, to have the servers dressed in starched white shirts and black pants, to have candles and roses. High class.

And in exactly that way there was something really tragic about it. The Grand Opening, the fire hydrant, the flood, the reconstruction. Money lost, client-base gone by the wayside. Tuesday night, an empty restaurant. All the candles flickering. All the places set, napkins folded, the kitchen hot and ready for anything. Anything but another night of nothing.

I started thinking, as I sat there with the chai in my hands, the menu flat on the table: This place is in a hip neighborhood full of young people; maybe if they toned it down a little bit, made it a little more funky, or modern, or something--something different. Something to bring in the business, because an empty restaurant, in many ways, means little more than empty pockets and lost time.

My thoughts were interrupted by the eager, somewhat nervous voice of the tall, managerial fellow. "Hello sir, are you ready to order?"

"Oh, damn. I haven't even looked," I said. "I've just been relaxing with this chai. It's very good."

He said, "Thank you, sir! Thank you. Take your time and let me know when you are ready."

I nodded nervously and returned to my endless pondering. I started trying in vain to brainstorm something that would go over better on that corner, but realized that I really don't understand the Upper Playground, super hairstylist, tattooed, DJ Shadow loving crowd in my neighborhood very much at all.

Even more importantly, I realized that I was really brainstorming ways to americanize this cross-culturally communicative public space. Of course, I had had only the best of intentions, but in a way I suddenly felt that even pondering ways the place could be changed would be insensitive and disrespectful.

The waitress came by and filled my water glass. She seemed to have a relatively hard shell. She was acting the role of "waitress" in a very stiff, matter-of-fact way. I tried to make eye-contact with her, but she looked away, so I just thanked her verbally and watched her nod as she turned to continue pacing aimlessly around the front of the restaurant, occasionally stopping to stare out the window and watch the cars go by. She looked incredibly bored.

Everything on the menu sounded really good, and I was a bit perplexed about what to get. I had a couple of ideas though.

I closed the menu with my finger between the pages to hold my place to signal that I was ready to talk about food. The waitress saw my nonverbal cue and hurried over to the table and said, "Ready to order?"

As I started to say that I had some ideas but I wasn't quite sure, she scuttled off again, disappearing into the kitchen. I watched with the curiosity of a pig that had wandered into the chicken-coop as she was swiftly replaced by the managerial fellow, who recommended the Chicken Tikka Masala.

The food came pretty quickly, but in kind of a confusing way. I was given an empty plate, a beautiful kind of goblet full of rice, and a small metal bowl, along with a huge piece of garlic naan. It felt to me like a kind of puzzle: I struggled to decide whether to eat it in the best way I saw fit or to ask someone how it all goes together.

Maybe if I do it on my own, I thought, I'll get it right.

That said, I found it to be kind of a fragmented, disorienting presentation.

I decided to take the leap, first taking spoonfulls of rice from the goblet and dropping them onto the plate, covering that in the tikka masala sauce and dropping a few chunks of chicken on there too. Then I broke off some naan and tried scooping up some of the mixture, but got a bunch of sauce on my fingers.

After that it was fork and knife all the way.

The waitress asked how everything was going. I told her the food was great, but I was a little confused about the sequence of events. Would I put the sauce on the rice and scoop it with the naan? Put both on the naan and eat it like a burrito? Do I put the rice on TOP of the sauce? Do I put them on my plate separately and then eat them alternatively? Can I take the rice from the goblet and put it INTO the tikka masala bowl? Would I put the tikka masala into the rice goblet? And what about the naan?

I was feeling kind of like a cultural idiot.

She ended up being sincerely confused by my question, but eventually cleared it up by saying I could eat it however I wanted. "Usually though," she said, "you would use the naan to eat them together."

The sense of idiocy fell beyond the cultural level, into the abyss.

Then I had another bite of naan, and my sorrows were all forgotten.

I chatted with the manager-dude, who's name was Sujid. He's from Punjab, came here with his entire family three years ago, saw his first American hailstorm yesterday afternoon, but had seen worse back home (hailstones the size of basketballs, causing all kinds of damage). He may not be selling a lot of food, but he sure is generous with a We spoke about the fire hydrant incident and apparently during the time the repair was going on, people had thought the place had shut down. I asked if the city was paying for the repairs, and Sujid let me know that the city was offering to reimburse a percentage of the cost.

"The city owes you the full amount, man," I told him. "This place got seriously damaged after the negligence of a city employee, and you have a right to be reimbursed. I don't know what the law says, but you have a basic human right to run a business and hold the city accountable...but you've got to fight for it, be strong and don't give up when they tell you 'No' because you deserve it. They don't WANT to, so they'll do anything they can to keep from giving you a dime."

Sujid and I shot the shit a while longer, I told him I'd drop a review on Yelp and tell my friends about the food, because it was kinda pretty good. Plus, I felt like such a mensch, and it was a good feeling to connect with the two people in this quiet lonesome restaurant. Made me a little less lonesome too, to be honest, on a Tuesday night when I would have otherwise gone home alone, boiled some rice and grilled some veggies and done nothing all too special.

I guess I'm not as bad as Mr. Seinfeld. I mean, I didn't give the guy advice about how to run his business. We just had a friendly chat about the world. Reminds me of a quote I read recently:

"'The man was in such deep distress,' said Tom, 'that I could do no less than give him good advice.' Said Jim: 'If less could have been done for him, I know you well enough, my son, to know that's what you would have done.'"

-Jebel Jocordy (amazing name, right?)

The Great San Francisco Pillow Fight of 2010

2010-03-18T17:21:00.000-07:00

Academic Jesus Freaks

2009-08-11T19:52:00.001-07:00

so i was down at the cafe doing some studying, reading about adler and freud, when i found a magazine on the chair next to mine. the magazine, titled Academic Catalog, Fall 2009, has a very Terry Gilliam feel to it, but with a brownish, haloed Jesus figure standing in a boat, pointing at some fish with their eyes rolled back in their heads while twelve bearded men pray and look surprised and solemn. i wasn't sure what to make of it at first, and set it aside while i continued reading-up on treatment of generalized anxiety disorder.

eventually i opened this Academic Catalog to a random page, only to find a book titled "Just War as Christian Discipleship." i was overjoyed, in a way, to find such an absurd set of words before my very eyes, that i decided to take a break from my studies and go through this Academic Catalog (which is actually more of a BOOK catalog, in which everything's at least $20 before shipping) and share its contents, along with my opinions and interpretations on as many individual books and concepts as strike my fancy in the same way that the first one did.

i guess i'll start with that one, since it's just so g.d. amazing. "Just War as Christian Discipleship" is a discussion of "recentering the tradition(s) [of war] in the church rather than the state", which basically amounts to a new era of Crusadership, in which wars are waged from a basis of what is preached in the pulpit. The Catalog quotes an excerpt on Augustine describing war as an act of Christian love. i'd love to know the details of the arguments put forth by Dr. Daniel M. Bell Jr. of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in favor of Just War, rooted in love, and ordered by the Church in the name of God.

God; I've never met the guy.

The seminal book, it seems, of this issue of the "Academic Calendar" is a book titled "Introducing the New Testament", the cover of which matches the cover of the magazine itself, with Jesus on the boat, blessing the orgasmic fish or whatever it is. This book, 560 pages, hardcover, $44.99, includes "helpful teaching aids like sidebars, maps, tables, charts, glossary, diagrams, and suggestions for further reading"...all of which i'm sure this hippie Jesus fellow would totally have been down for seeing his teachings reduced to. pie charts and sidebars. wonderful. i'll go right out and buy that one.

skip all the prophet commentaries and gospel interpretations. i'd rather watch ESPN postgame shows, and i really wouldn't go out of my way to see those, either.

there's a book called "Are You the One to Come", subtitled The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question. this book presents itself as "a rigorous critique to the dominant arguments used against attributing a messianic self-understanding to Jesus." in other words, shooting down people who say it's absurd that Jesus actually thought he was the Son of God, picking apart the naysayers and dissecting the viewpoints of skeptics. i've met people who thought they were the son of one god or another, and while they may have spoken of values similar to those of Jesus, they rarely practiced what they preached. honestly, Jesus seems like he would have been an okay dude (granted, i've never read the gospels and so don't really know what kind of a dude he might have been), but Son of God? this metaphor seems to be something he might have spoken of to get people's heads out of the clouds, to bring people down to the earth, to stop looking into the sky for questions about what's on the ground, to wake up from their delusions and be present and loving with their fellow human beings, to forget about the rules and regulations put forward by the priestly class who claim to have a T1 connection with the divine, to get people to look up from the scripture, the primitive cell phones receiving texts from the heavens, and to be here on the ground. frankly, i think it's utterly superfluous to debate as to whether or not Jesus was of divine origin, and even more than that, totally missing the point of what this person who may or may not have existed may or may not have said. the message is, here we are, on the earth, for a while; we're gonna die eventually--in a way we're sent here to die, because it's the only sure thing--so let's make the most of it, and let's make the best of it, and be decent to each other, care for the sick, party it up with some wine, be empathic and reasonable with our neighbors, and so on. the question of "Are You the One Who is to Come?"
is plainly stupid. the fact is that you are the one who's here right now, you are Jesus, the body of Christ, you are God and the Holy Ghost and blah blah fucking blah i sound like a preacher i'm tired of this book let's move on.

ok.

speaking of death and dying, we have next a New Release titled "Death and the Afterlife" asking the question of what happens to us after we are through with living. basically some Catholic theologian going on for 208 pages about something with no basis in science aside from what peoples' brain synapses fire off in the dream-state of near death experiences (these he takes as proof of life after death). Otherwise he challenges the scientific and philosophical establishment, "providing readers with a theological guidebook for dying well" ... good god, after all that i've done wrong in my life, i hope i can at least get dying right!

alright i have to admit, here's one that i can't completely rip a new one..."This Mortal Flesh, Incarnation and Bioethics" -- while i have very little interest in the theological discussion of the extending of human longevity as "adverse to core Christian beliefs and convictions, i've gotta come clean and say that there are times that i wonder about the psychological roots of the "denial of mortality" inherent in humanity's crusade for the prolonging of human life. more than relating it to christianity, i wonder about freudian theory, the "death instinct", fighting off the fears of dying with a vigor unparalleled, petitioning government grants, experimenting in universities, researching in the field. i'm not saying that we ought not be afraid of death, and that we ought not practice medicine to help people stay alive -- death is scary as hell to me, too, and i'd rather stay alive as long as possible, and i'd rather have the people i love stay alive as long as possible. i just think it's interesting is all, that we do so much work to fight off something that WILL eventually happen to all of us. it's great to be alive, but we're all going to die. and i don't see this as a cynical view; i see it as being deeply rooted in realism. we are all going to die; until then we are alive; let's stay alive as long as we can, and let's make the best of it, and let's be decent to each other, et cetera... but as for the "significance for medicine of the fundamental Christian claim that the Word became Flesh" i could care less...i don't even know what that could possibly mean, for a word to become flesh...is that like in the old Gumby show when he would jump into books and have adventures? in that case, i'm all for it! ... what would it look like for Gumby to have jumped into the New Testament? would he roll up in a ball? would the Romans all be blockheads? possibilities abound!

up next is an interesting concept: Secret Faith in the Public Square. gold, i tell you, gold. this one's about the "theologically profound, fruitful, and rigorous challenge [of concealing one's] faith in order to protected from being absorbed and prostituted in our voracious secular culture [during this] strange, postmodern era." yes, the poor persecuted Christians are being forced underground, beaten down by reality, forced into submission by scientific inquiry and the continued search for a tangible, useful truths for the improvement of human life and the understanding of the universe and us. yes, things are really getting ugly for the Christians now...the time has come for them to make like the jews during the Inquisition, stay quiet, pretend to be one of them, pretend you don't believe in talking snakes and virgin births, but at your secret underground church meetings in the abandoned rectories of those gone glory days, practice your (symbolic?) cannibalism by eating the flesh of your earthly deity manifested in the form of bitter and crunchy little wafers handed down from a man in a robe. you know things are getting rough for Christianity when americans are shying away from christmas. don't you know it's a sign of the apocalypse when WalMart sales start going down when December comes along? might as well be the four horses! yes, it's time for Christianity to go secret. good. i'm all for it. to good health! l'chaim!

this one's great. "Unlearning Protestantism". obviously, if you're a protestant, you're a problem. obviously. apparently Protestantism is no longer useful, has become a vice that "corrodes community life" through encouraging individualistic soap-boxing in the name of conscience. instead, good Christians ought to embrace "the right and faithful roles of authority, stability, and loyal dissent in Christian communal life." my favorite part of that quote is by far "loyal dissent". what in all hell does that mean? if dissent has to be loyal then how can one actually dissent? is that like agreeing to disagree? what it really means is keeping problems to yourself instead of becoming a problem yourself. don't question the church, dude. dissent is fine, so long as it does not frustrate the stability of what has been established. you can disagree, as long as you don't revolt, otherwise you'll get eternal damnation in the fiery pits of hell. blah. this is a load of bull. not that i'm a Protestant.

well, it's been at least two hours, and i've written a shitload of opinionated, self-indulgent nonsense. i could go on. but i won't. enough is enough. more when the mood strikes.

another day

2009-07-26T10:17:00.001-07:00

first thoughts today are of what it's like to be a mother in San Francisco. maybe a funny thing to be thinking about, but i've seen more mothers at this job...not just women, but mothers, deeply involved in their motherly roles, in a world of mothers and children and raising those children, being among others raising children, and having that, if nothing else, in common. one of the things i notice day in and day out in this place is how fearful mothers tend to be of becoming embarrassed, of their children doing foolish things that will make them look like bad mothers, bad people. this morning i walked into the gym with my bike behind a family there for a 3 year old's tumbling class. as i went to pass them, the little boy was right in front of me, and the mother seemed to blush, hurrying the boy out of my way, and apologizing briefly but, somehow, profusely. i looked at the boy and sang out, 'excuse me' as i passed.

mothers and fathers, i wonder what it's like to be in your shoes. i saw a father today, drawing a frog on the chalkboard by the front desk of the office, only to have his 2 year-old son shrug and walk away. he wanted so badly for his son to be delighted by his drawing, but the boy was more interested in opening and closing the door. maybe the kid knew his dad was just trying to impress...'yeah, nice drawing dad, i'm gonna go back to the door.' the look on dad's face was one of momentary defeat. it soon passed though, when the boy called him over to look at the door. he felt wanted again.

funny though, how we see children as so dependent, and yet we can become emotionally dependent upon children. it is something to be aware of.

anyways, parents, yeah.

bored at work

2009-07-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

so here i am, bored at work on a cool and foggy saturday morning, nothing much to do but listen to the low hum of the copy machine and the laughter of children in the gym. i was in the middle of writing another blog post and feeling good when it suddenly disappeared for some unknown reason. it was quite good, i swear. poo.

it's almost fitting though, that it disappeared, as i had been musing about what this building used to be, and what it has become, the change that happens over time, and that we are always in the middle of it all, between what was and what will be.

this building used to be the East Gym of the old San Francisco Polytechnic High School from when it opened in 1890 until it was torn down in 1987. now it is a small school of circus arts for people in the community, and the West Gym has become a professional circus school. the rubble is now a cookie-cutter housing complex, mostly condos, complete with tree-lined walkways and the occasional bay window.

out with the old and in with the new, i guess. that's the way it goes. life's an unfinished puzzle, the pieces all swirling around in the wind. blah.

this is just about where i was when my last post disappeared. i had connected all this somehow to the hard economic times the world has found itself in, the Great Depression 2.0, the way i find myself scouring Google for cheap recipes, checking the per unit prices at the supermarket, going on Yelp in search of cheap organic produce, posting on Facebook that we've got a room for rent in our place. it's all too weird. everything is becoming so precious, so dear. i was thinking last night as i shredded several carrots for a salad, that i might end up the sort of grandfather that despises wastefulness in resources and wasteful spending. (how gloriously jewy of me.)

i recently heard some guy say, "trick is just to want what you need and be grateful for what you receive." i feel like it was in some YouTube video. see what i mean? YouTube is the new Woodie Guthrie, Craigslist the new St. Vincent DePaul--it's bizarre. it's all happening in the wires, zeroes and ones. out with the old and in with the new.

anyways, i'm pretty hard up for cash these days, staying in when i'm not working, borrowing movies from the library, baking my own bread with storebought yeast that cost me seven bucks (i only bought it because i figured it'd last me a year), eating simple, eating cheap, eating less. all this week i was playing the How-Little-Can-I-Play-Today game, putting my unnecessary wants behind to focus on what i need.

it's all very new to me, to be honest. i grew up in the lap of luxury, compared to this--never had to worry about money, never had to scrimp and save. my grandmother--whose family lost just about everything in the Great Depression Beta Version--always warned me: put money away in a savings account...well i did, and most of that is gone.

don't get me wrong, i'm not complaining. things are actually all right. work is great, i love where i'm living and who i'm living with, and, while i'm not living extravagantly, i'm living, and that's good enough for me. after work i think i'll go to the buddhist temple on my block, or maybe go fly a kite in the park. something free and easy and simple and wonderful. the sun is out for the first time in five days, and i can hardly wait to take off my coat.

that's all for now.
more when the mood strikes.
phone's ringing!

robot mashed potato?

2009-07-22T18:03:00.001-07:00

untitled

2009-07-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

there is a park
where i go sometimes
to fly a kite
in the sunshine
i like to watch the shape
of the strong
cool wind,

it's a neighborhood park
with a row of very old
yet freshly painted houses
and with a panoramic
view of downtown
from the sky-high penthouses
south of Market Street
to the Maytag Chapel
along the edge of Japantown,

and i think it's funny
or maybe even a little bit
strange
that we come here
to see the works
of humankind
that tourists come here
for a glimpse of our
highrise temples
blocking what was once
a view of the bay
and the hills beyond,

that we come here
to snap photos
of our lovers on grass
laid over pavement
laid over the earth

it is like a worship of steel
and plaster
or maybe of ingenuity
and wit

but do like to come here
every once in a while
to fly a kite
and to see tourists
from the outside
and to watch that low
inexorable fog
as it rolls in from the sea

and i might even take a moment
to admire the mess of men
which covers all things here

because it is as natural
as the wind that holds
my kite aloft
and even simple
guilty pleasures like that
are tolerable
if only from time to time

Writing Inspired By Writing

2009-07-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

I have written the first two paragraphs of more novels than I have fingers on my hands. It is a grueling process that begins with a sentence. That takes a good month, after which I decide to move on to something else--the second sentence, for example. Then I get something for the first sentence, but by the time I get back to the second, the first has festered to long, and gone rotten. Words get moved. Punctuation changed. A thesaurus is consulted and the process begins anew. I tend to be very short winded when it comes to writing. I used to write short stories until I would get tired of a character, and let them walk away out of my imagination. Poems come out like sneezes. Haiku like hiccups.

The real writing, though, comes out on its own. It seeps out of you like sweat from the skin. To say that there is something special about it is to sensationalize. It is a byproduct of living. There is nothing cosmic about bodily functions, so why should there be something holy about writing a few words down on a page? The trick is to go about it that way, to let it come from the fingers, not from the head. Life happens without any sort of outside intervention; everything happens on its own, all the processes of nature--from the migration of birds to the growth of a fingernail. (There might be something magical about fingernails...I'll get back to you on that.)

I understand what it's like, and sometimes I can do it for a little while, but the feeling rarely lasts. The rest of the time, there are too many hard vowels in a phrase, or I get stuck thinking of what to say, or a hundred other blocks keep everything corked up. And yet I hope that all the fragments will fit together somehow, eventually, into something fine. Well, they really haven't yet. I don't mean to build a jigsaw puzzle from my imagination, but to follow the Woozle through Neverland, if you know what I mean.

The Battle of Easter Sunday -- A Pirate Story

2009-04-12T22:01:00.000-07:00

Why is it that, even though the kidnapping of a US freighter captain by Somali pirates is a very serious situation, I'm somehow filled with a strange and seemingly unjustified sense of romanticism? A man has been taken hostage, threatened with death, held for ransom. His family sees his face on television, hear that he is fighting for his life and for his freedom. His life is in danger. The President of the United States has personally vowed to return him to safety, and sent warships equipped with military helicopters to the "anarchic and impoverished Somali coast" in the hopes of overpowering the rogue, nationless gunmen. All this, and I just can't decide whose side I'm on...that of reason and decency, or that of super awesome pirateness.

That we still have a "pirate problem" in the year 2009 A.D. is simply amazing. In a strange way I find it almost comforting that there should be people with no allegiances but those to their few dearest comrades of the high seas. These are men without nations, who fight and steal and kidnap to survive, who owe nothing to a soul but to themselves and to those who treat them with the respect they deserve but sense themselves never to have received. The world has wronged them and so they will wrong the world in return. I feel like as long as there is order and reason and decency, there will be those advocating mass chaos, hysteria, and seeming lawlessness. Just like Good and Evil, they are two sides of the same coin, coexisting, influencing one another in ways that perhaps need not be resolved.

But why is it that I have this romanticized idea of piracy as something the least bit worthy of admiration? On the one hand, they are maritime marauders, holders of endless grudges, ruthless murderers. And on the other, they are outsiders, challenging all things established, creating something new, on their own, by collecting artifacts of the predominant world culture of the times--munitions ships, food and cargo ships, and so on--that they might maintain their own power over those who would invade them, and that they might live as is their wont. In that way, the drama that unfolded today on the western shores of the Indian Ocean--however serious it may be, and whatever the consequence in terms of human life amid the age-old tides of history--is a symbol, perhaps of resistance, but more importantly of the power of the individual to make his or her own reality from the ground up, using the tools at their disposal to build a world of their own, regardless of what anyone or everyone else decides they have to be. In the case of the pirates, that most likely meant living in one of the most severely impoverished nations on the face of this vast green Earth.

Still though, it's serious shit. I know that my romanticism is mostly the product of Tom Sawyer and Peter Pan, combined into a starry-eyed dream of something free and fine. Today a man, who had been taken captive against his will, held from his family and from his country, was freed by a government that swore to protect him from a nationless enemy. It's a good thing, too. But just a same, pirates are fucking awesome.

2009-03-11T18:35:00.000-07:00

what the hell am I doing here?

2009-03-01T02:11:00.000-08:00

wow, it's late. I just got back from my friend Qarly's birthday party, where I was surrounded by a whole slew of Burning Man people who I've either never met, or just never connected with on a human enough level for them to remember my name. Well, I was pretty anti-social the whole time, which is pretty much par for the course as far as when I'm in large groups of people. Anyways, there was some pretty decent seitan and tempeh, plus cupcakes--and Qarly's band Corpus Collosum played a quite amazing set of odd surrealistic tunes in her living room, with everyone watching from two gigantic beanbags in the hallway. Needless to say, I was tucked into the edge of the room, uncomfortable, my back hurting from the contorted position in which I was sitting--half on the beanbag and half on the floor. But the music was awesome. I would love to hear more of this kind of stuff. They even had a stylophone, which is only the most awesome little synthesizer ever, I dare say. Oh, and at the party I also was priveleged enough to see a male stripper in a thong use his junk to ring a bell hanging from the ceiling. Also, moved an old broken piano a block and a half, heard an amazing story about this girl working for Ringling Bros. as a clown jumping off a moving train in the name of love, and also had some tasty ice cream. Oh, and I got to peel some ginger, which was nice. All in all, it wasn't so bad. I just get anxious in crowds. I've noticed this about myself.

but what I really want to talk about, if only briefly before I go to sleep, is a little bit more insight I had into this whole Jewish heritage business. nothing big; in fact it's really quite obvious. see, I got a ride back to the city from one of Qarly's friends, and, in the full car, we had a brief conversation about last names. one young woman, who goes only by the name "binx", was discussing the common mispronunciations of her German last name, and eventually--about halfway across the Bay Bridge--this turned into a discussion of Polish culture...namely, Easter eggs.

this is where it got interesting for me. I found that I knew nothing about Polish culture, especially making Easter Eggs. I have always thought of myself as Polish, since that's where most of my family had been living pretty much immediately before coming to the U.S...I've even been to Poland, and I had that distinct feeling of being "home". but the traditions and the culture I know from throughout my life have so little to do with Poland itself, but rather what had come from the dynamics of being Jewish in Poland...strangers in a strange land, in exile, in diaspora, driven from their home. Of course, they were driven from Poland too, obviously. But Poland is not the homeland of my ancestors. It was their home, it was where they made their lives for a while, where they survived and maybe even thrived for a time, but it was not their homeland. though I have been to the nation from which my great-grandparents had fled to come to America, it was not home.

Their homeland was Israel. Call it the Holy Land, call it Shangri La, the Garden of Eden...whatever. It's land, the same as any land. It is made of earth and stone. Nothing special, aside from the history of it. The historical importance goes back, more or less, to a book, handed down through the ages, written by men. The meaning is created, constructed, fabricated. It is a dream that was dreamed up by dreamers. It is a fable, a tall-tale, a book.

But the meaning is there, somehow. It nags at me the way my grandmother does over the phone. Here is my history, my heritage, traced back to a place on the Earth, an area slightly larger than the state of New Jersey. I am here in the U.S., more or less by accident.

And yet here I am: a Jew by blood and by heritage. My people have a nation the size of Vancouver Island--after almost 3000 years of wandering aimlessly, being repeatedly rejected and abused, sent collectively into exile. Through the social bond of this heritage, the ability to be resiliant, and the stringency of a moral code that frowns upon procreation with goyim (my grandmother shudders at the thought), a certain purity has been retained, and a community has lasted through the ages.

But damn, I'm not just a Jew. Holy shit. Let's not get caught up in too much sentimentality. I am a man. I am a human being. I have arms and legs and a head of my own. I can walk as a man, not as a Jew, through the streets of San Francisco. I can walk however I want. I can go to church if I want to, pray to the lord of Potato Salad and shriek in heavenly tongues on the streets. It's not so much a desire to rebel as a need to be more than just part of a common ancestry. I'm a Jew but I'm also an American. I'm an American but I'm also just a person, living on the Earth.

All this is true. None of them negates another. Like I said before, it's so obvious. But I've been hiding from it. Why, I don't really know. Maybe because I thought it meant that I had to be a certain way, to act a certain way, to be a certain kind of person. But I'm always thinking that. Trying not to these days. Maybe I'm getting better at that.

My great-grandfather was from Poland, but I'm absolutely certain that he never painted an Easter Egg in his life. Bless him for that. It seems almost like a form of resistance--we don't need no stinkin' Easter...no, no, no, we're fine with matzo and pickled herring...go, go, have your fancy schmancy meal, fine. Enjoy!

thank the mormons!

2009-02-27T20:39:00.001-08:00

So my friend Alex is holding me to the promise that I'd do this more regularly. "Here, there, anywhere," he says. Damnit, I'm trying to watch Sealab, but I guess I'll do it anyways. Yes, Alex, I see...you update your blog everyday. I'm trying.

So I'm gonna start this paragraph with the word "so" as well. I quit my job today. If you don't know, which you probably do, my boss accused me of stealing just about two weeks ago now, and, after fighting him to the death, I convinced him that I hadn't taken a cent. Well, it's all over now, and I can attribute the whole thing, basically, to me pressing the wrong button all the time on the cash register. Well, I quit today, because I decided not to work there anymore. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do from here, but I think that's alright.

I was talking to my uncle over Skype about a distant cousin he's discovered through years of research about my mom's side of the family. This distant cousin lives in Australia now, but as an infant was expelled from her village. Her father was killed in a concentration camp, but, while on a train to Treblinka with her mother, her mother jumped from the train with her in her arms. The mother was shot in the head, but survived. They lived in the woods with the Yugoslavian guerilla resistance until the war ended. This woman's father was my great grandfather's first cousin, which makes me...distantly related.

This is a good test of what I was talking about in my last long post, about my heritage. Here I am, suddenly finding myself connected to someone I've never met who lives on a distant continent and survived the most deadly conflict in human history. It's kind of amazing.

AND, who, other than my uncle, do I have to thank for this information? The Mormons. After the war, they micro-fiched all the Jewish records in Europe...so they could try to baptize the dead. Sure, they baptized a bunch of jews, which is kind of sneaky, but now this lady from Australia is gonna go to Seattle to meet my uncle later this year. Thank you Mormons!

Anyways, I'm looking for a job. Or maybe I'll go back to school. Still thinking about that. Also thinking about going to Ireland, also maybe Israel for that free Birthright trip thingy. All this and I'm not sure where I'll be working, whether I can get time off, or whether I'll still be living in the city...and if not in the city, then where?

So now you see what I mean when I say that I'm not sure where I'm going from here. But right now, I'm really feeling alright. Comfortable in my lostness. Interesting. Now I'll add some picures throughout this post to spruce it up a bit. There, happy? Ha ha. Badda boom!

Jewy Roots

2009-02-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

After attending the In Search of Roots Presentation today on the third floor of the Chinatown Hilton, not only am I stuffed full of yummy fried Chinese American delicacies such as chicken chow mein, potstickers, and pork buns--but my brain is also teeming with the buzz of wondering...wondering about who I am and where I came from. The presentation was among the culminating events of a yearlong internship that a high school friend had participated in, which included tracing her roots back to the Guangdong Province of China and visiting her ancestral home to meet with relatives she never knew she had. It was clearly a life-changing, identity building experience, and I couldn't help but wonder--what ancestral forces have made me who I am today?

I'm not exactly going to go on that Birthright trip or anything like that, as I don't really have much interest in Judaism proper, but rather how my jewish heritage has played a role in shaping who I am and the ways in which I function as a person. Know what I mean? I hope you do. Well, I don't really care, because I'm gonna go on writing anyways as if you do. As long as I'm unemployed, I might as well go on writing.

Maybe it will help for me to look up "Jewish History" on Wikipedia, which brings me to both a Timeline of Jewish-Polish History, and the History of the Jews in Poland. Well, it looks like there have been Jews in Poland since somewhere around 960 CE, or AD, or whatever you want to call it. PJ (Post-Jebus)? Maybe.

History is too much for me right now. I'm gonna start with what I know and build from there. So let me put off the history for the time being and jump forward to the pogroms of 1881-1884, the period in which, somewhere in there, my great grandfather, or my father's maternal grandfather, Abraham Baratz, left Poland at the young age of 8 or 9 ish, his parents both dead (why or how, I can't remember...better look that up). He went on his own to France--god knows how he made it there--and from France he took a boat to New York. In NYC, I can only assume that he encountered a good deal of antisemitism, but also a thriving Jewish community.

My great grandfather opened a textile business, made a lot of money, made a family with his wife Sarah, who--in old-skool, prefeminist lingo--"gave" him five daughters, that lived in a fancy house with maids and housecleaners and a cook. The Great Depression came and they lost most of that, and my grandmother eventually married my grandfather (I can't remember what either of them did for a living. is that bad?) Grandma's still alive. I'd better investigate before she "gives up the grand piano" so to speak. (She has a grand piano in her condo, down in San Diego.) My paternal grandparents raised my dad and his older brother in such a way as to stress that they attend college and become "professionals" so that they could be their own bosses and not face the same degree of anti-semitic discrimination that they, and their parents, and THEIR parents before, had experienced.

So much of Jewish culture, it seems, consists of a striving for control in a chaotic and hateful world, as if trying to compensate for an imbalance of justice in the cosmos.

And so my dad became a lawyer--after dropping out of school a couple times, whether on account of my mom or his own disdain for the profession in which he ended up spending the majority of his adult life. It's work for him; it has little or nothing to do with a degree of passion for what he does, but rather he funnels his passion into it by way of utilizing his own set of personal values (which tend to be pretty black & white, kind of like Superman...another Jewish figure) in order to secure a living by which to support himself as well as the family was creating, while also rising up above anti-semitism through a degree of assimilation...just like Superman, whose real costume was that of the mild-mannered reporter, Mr. Clark Kent.

What this led to for my dad was to raise children, not only with the opportunity to live without fear of serious antisemitism, but also with the opportunity to find something to be passionate about, and perhaps to make it their living. Through a whole bunch of messiness in the middle there, this manifested itself best in my going to music school because I thought that it's what was expected of me, which is the same reason my dad first went to law school.

But I'm almost turning this all into something negative, in a way repudiating my heritage, passing it off as a source of personal oppression, which is in large part taking it for granted that I'm not an idea held within an idea held in a pile of ashes strewn across a field in Auschwitz to feed the grass. I did not have to see my parents die, whether in a pogrom or by the horrendous living conditions forced upon my ancestors by their Russian oppressors, Spanish Inquisitors, Ottoman accusers in Damascus, the Roman Catholic Crusaders, Byzantines, Babylonians, Egyptians--all the way back to their own self-oppression in the Garden of Eden, my ancestors have been victims...and now, now that I have a bit of opportunity, I find a way to victimize myself, by taking that very opportunity for granted, because I have had the freedom and been endowed with the ability to do so.

All this is not to say that I'm going to join a synogogue, go to rabbinical school, and become a regular Maimonides, it just means I'm starting to get some perspective on how I ended up here, jobless and depressed in San Francisco.

In fact, these days I really don't consider myself very Jewish at all, aside from enjoying the jokes and decidedly neurotic. Today I ate several pork buns and it didn't bother me a bit, I heard about a friend of a friend who had been on the Birthright trip and thought it was amazing, but I honestly have very little interest in going. I'm not very interested in becoming more Jewish, but rather in how my having been raised in a Jewish household, and coming from a Jewish ancestry, has shaped me as an individual.

I don't know where I'm going with this. My roommate says it's going with me. I like that.

If this is what it's like to be unemployed--sitting at a computer writing a blog about what's going on in my head--then it really isn't so bad. Problem is, I don't really know how I might go about getting paid to write a blog, since there are as many blogs at this point as there are 20-somethings with too much time on their hands, of which there are plenty. Maybe I'll look into that though. Getting paid for catharsis. Sounds alright.

They say that looking into the past can give you a clearer view of what's ahead. Maybe that's true. But I've been writing for an hour and a half, and my neck is starting to get a crink from all this backwards-looking, if you know what I mean. Maybe you don't. That's alright.

2008-08-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

My Trip to the Dentist 7/22/08

2008-07-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

streetcar stopped at embarcadero

Life Ring with railing and Treasure Island

the man behind the curtain

a ferry worker chillin' with his gloves

boat in desolate gray

boat and buoy in gray

the back of the ferry

boat with converging hills

bird on a post

a young fella sitting by the water

houses on the water

now hold on a minute...what kind of zone am I leaving?

I don't remember why I took this photo, but it seemed important at the time

an anchor weighing 10,000 pounds

a photo

it looks like the West...wait, it's California!

some abandoned stuff in the mud, which made me think of someone I know who has a predilection for abandoned places, and it made me ponder the reasons for that

a space

two older men out fishing under the 101 freeway overpass, also they were arguing, with emphatic hand-gestures

was listening to Grizzly Bear's song "Chin up Cheer up", lifted my head, and took a picture of what I saw

mother and child

a tree where I sometimes nap if I have the time

the playground where I like to go down the slide on my walks to the dentist

another space

little boxes made of ticky-tacky

old car

where the Senior Center employees go for their cigarette breaks

The Storm

2008-07-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

Driving into The Storm

Driving out of The Storm

Sunset in Eugene, OR

2008-07-20T03:03:00.000-07:00

after the flood of 2006

2008-07-20T02:53:00.000-07:00

After the flood,

the streets were strewn with mud.

and the young men lit their cigarettes

amid the debris,

Traffic Light

2008-07-20T02:48:00.000-07:00

Oh no! What am I supposed to do?

Right turn only? WHAT?

...and for all you pedestrians who don't get the joke...

Eggplants on Eggs

2008-07-20T02:45:00.001-07:00

Bananas in the Brussels Sprouts

2008-07-20T02:43:00.000-07:00

The Future Is Now

2008-07-20T02:37:00.000-07:00

(In the future) city parks (will) have commuter trains running through them!

Mysterious Parked Taxicab

2008-07-20T02:33:00.000-07:00

oh the mysteries I could ponder!

Bird on a Pole

2008-07-20T02:30:00.000-07:00

Street Vendor

2008-07-20T02:27:00.000-07:00

overtone

2008-07-20T02:23:00.000-07:00

blue on blue, found on 18th between Guerrero & Valencia

Fence and Landscape

2008-07-20T02:18:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of a fence with some stuff behind it.

INtersection

2008-07-20T01:32:00.000-07:00

Market St. at Dolores

2008-01-25T15:13:00.000-08:00

here's what's happening with me: I am sitting at a sewing-machine, making an image of some stairs in a doorway, and I asked myself: Why am I doing this?...and then I realized: for the pure delight I get from the process of it! what will come out? will it be useful? will it be beautiful? maybe it will be worth something.

none of this matters. It is raining outside, and I have nowhere to be, and nothing to do. So I am sitting in my room with some music playing and making something with my sewing machine, something that I am making for the pure delight of it.

says Thierry, in French-Canadia:
Well my friend sew your soul and make a picture of it ... and then wear it as pants. You'll never be naked again.