Well I’m back in the Bay Area for a couple weeks. It was a beautiful windy drive through the flourishing greenery of springtime Nor*Cal. Wine vines are just starting to get rolling and all the hills are blowing up with new life. Radiolab kept my brain active for a few hours, its infectious spirit of inquiry lingering after along with some good music. It made for a nice mood to see the sights.
When I can give it a whole afternoon, I really do love that trip. Everything down to Cloverdale is a series of bucolic treasures: the rich north coast flood-plain bottoms, the redwood curtain through to Willits, the northern Russian river watershed and wine country. It’s a great stretch of county, and feeling more and more like home these days.
Last night we held a great dinner party w/family of the Girth, uncles and cousins and all that jazz. Good excuse to break out the china, scotch, etc. There was a great spread of chicken and pesto and salad and bread.
This week should be busy busy bizzy. Making it come together never comes easy, and it keeps coming (and it keeps coming; and it keeps coming) until it stops.
…But I’d give up my soul for just one of them now…
It’s been a packed week down in the Bay. Wheeling and dealing, painting and sanding, whooping and shouting; the whole nine yards.
Went and saw The Avett Brothers on Friday night. They’re pretty great showmen as expected, and I got me a t-shirt — a much more effective way of supporting working musicians than paying for their music, btw — but I felt the concert could have been more. Slims is not my favorite place to see a show, and the crowd vibe was a little off. That and I had great expectations, which is generally unfair and I try not to do for the sake of giving artists a chance, but c’est la vie. That’s what you get for being real good.
They were touring on 2007’s Emotionalism, which is a great album, the first one I heard — coming via Pickathon and Chelsea late last summer — and probably the most natural cultural fit for SF. But having been exposed to their entire catalog, I celebrate the mo’ twangy stuff a bit more fully than that which leans indie. The crowd was on the other side of that leaning, didn’t seem to know a lot of the other/older stuff, and just wasn’t as lively as I’d hoped.
I suppose I was looking for something really wild and free, like when we saw The Devil Makes Three at the Starry Plough last month. That was hot and packed and foot-stomping scream-along-singing until you got light in the head and then another song would start up that was even better and more worth jumping around to; lather-rinse-repeat. By contrast, the crowd’s energy at this gig made it tough to even break a sweat. I also felt the encore was a bit too scripted, and there wasn’t sufficient demand in the room to draw out a spontaneous second round.
High expectations, see? Still, well worth it overall. They’re touring forever and I’ll bet next friday’s Portland show will be a real winner. I’d be really curious to see what a home-town Carolina crowd is like:
I attended with LGD, the designated-driving Lande-man, and another sociologist friend of theirs, a pretty lady from Mexico headed to a Cambodian/Vietnamese border town this summer on a grant, getting the kids together via soccer. Pretty neat. They swung by the office to pick me up which is the first time I’ve been able to show it off to any of my friends, which I found myself kind of proud to do. We had Hardnox (soulfood) and then SparksPLUS (dangerbooze) out behind the loading dock before heading to the show; a pretty pitch-perfect evening in the dogpatch if you ask me.
After the concert, me and the boys retired to the Cornell Club, where Lande and Luke played guitar while I tried to stay lucid in the living room. I feel like I aught to learn to sing some songs. I’m not likely to pick up a very good instrument other than maybe the tambourine, but I want to participate in the whole music thing when my friends get into it. I’m no Sinatra, but I had enough training to front some folk tunes. Even if I’d known some, Friday night probably wasn’t going to work out owing to the late hour, etc, but in general it’s something that I could probably do a decent job at.
After staying up until around 4:30am with the guitar and shenanigans, Saturday’s sun was a harsh wake-up call five hours later. I try to resist the narrative of aging, quarterlife crisis (will I live to 116?), or whatever you like to call it, but there’s nothing that brings it down on you harder than realizing you’re totally spent after only one night out on the town. You grows up and you grows up and you grows up, I suppose.
The Girth is gone at a wedding this weekend, so it’s just me and LGD. We got it together for Yemeni coffee from our spot around the corner — good stuff from bright eyed smiley guys with awesome beards — talking about various strategies for meeting pretty ladies, etc. This is something I’ve lately been trying not to think about, seeing if the “watched pot never boils” adage might work in reverse. As an antidote to overthinking everything, I’ve been letting myself get carried away with work, tipping down the parabolic descent into what looks to be a very busy couple of months.
That’s probably a poor tactic (as opposed to, say, hanging around the Berkeley campus more, which is what I suggested to my man) but my hope is that there’s some kind of crucible to be had, that maybe I’ll emerge on the other side with a new brand of mojo. I feel that a confident and loving perception of self is a vital component to any romantic success, and being into it with the job — as opposed to grudging or beat-down — is a step in the right direction, even if it does put me at the particularly American risk of conflating career with life.
In keeping with that, after Yemeni coffee, I rallied with the Zacker and we did some handyman work at the office. Our big goal was to patch a hole in our bathroom wall which was made when we tied into the water/drain lines to add a kitchen sink on the other side. It wasn’t huge, but it was vaguely of peeping-tom-ish, which nobody really wants. Victory achieved: fiberglass tape and spackle are a powerful combination. We also cleaned up the network and the conference room. Ready to start adding more people now.
Upon returning to the East Bay it became readily apparent that Saturday night would be a mellow one, grand schemes for getting out on the scene notwithstanding. We watched Talladega Nights, which I thought was kind of amazing. Adam McKay and Will Farrel learned some lessons from Anchorman, it seems. The writing here is vastly less self-indulgent (if still fairly undisciplined) and aims much higher. At it’s best it achieves a kind of highbrow/lowbrow synthesis that’s rarely attempted and hard to pull off, but highly rewarding when achieved. I’m not sure how it was taken by racing fans, but the parody here seemed both respectful and deep, which is in keeping with the overall idea. I had relatively low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised. Compare and contrast, yaknow?
Anyway, that and an early bedtime was Saturday. Sunday is now, and the week begins again. I’ll probably spend most of the day nerding-out, maybe watch some basketball, get set for the days to come.
We billed our housewarming party as an opportunity to join us in “staging the end of our youth.” The crowd was smallish but high quality, and packed dense enough to make the occupied rooms seem full. Mix in a little SparksPlus, and it felt just about right.
Most importantly, a representative social network sample was achieved: academics from Berkeley, drupal developers from the Mission, lawyers from all over, Sixto, friends from Humboldt county and Oregon, and perhaps best of all Nick’s cousin in a positively outlandish basketball outfit rolling in and supervising the cooking of much bacon. Serious meatboxing. The mix works, and there will be dinner parties to come in the same vein.
Later in the evening, when things got whittled down to the inner circle, the truly regressive behavior began to emerge. There was some unsupervised mixed-martial arts in the living room, and in the back yard the great ritual of “cutting beers in half with a machete.” What started as a feat of immaturity is one cycle away from tradition.
I don’t know what our neighbors thought about this, especially as it was 3am and things eventually moved on from cans to bottles, which is a lot less safe and a lot more messy; but we cleaned things up good in the morning, and it probably won’t happen again soon. Hopefully there are no hard feelings.
I did a riff on Ken Kesey for my outfit, and my friend Molly Keogh came through with an amazing hat for me: the classic pinstripe train engineer number (which Kesey rocked, and has been appropriated and evolved by hipsters everywhere) with a “Software Engineer” emblem on it. Amazing! I’m still wearing it now. LGD dressed as one of the Kingsmen and the Girth simply hicked it up with an Oregon license plate around his neck, Flavor-flav’ style. A surprising number of others heeded our “Oregonian costume” suggestion, and it seemed to be fun.
The final hours were a long drunken singalong — me popping in between brushing and flossing for the chorus of Easy Money — culminating with The Wild Rover:
And it’s no, nay, never! No, nay, never, no more,
will I play the wild rover. No never no more!
It’s been ten years of shenanigans with these guys. I wouldn’t take any of it back, and I hardly think it’s true that we’re through. Not even close. People dip into various pools of nostalgia from time to time, and growing up happens whether you like it or not — tomorrow’s adventures will be different than those of yesterday, for sure — but I’m a big believer in Fun of the Now, inconsistent practitioner though I may be. The best has yet to come.
So after we got back from the show — which we left a little too quickly, forgetting my credit card and possibly a couple phone numbers from dancefloor neighbors — we faced the consequences of a crisis of collective action: “bachelor fridge” presented a problem.
We’d shouted and clapped and stomped and sang along with the band for a good hour and a half, which works up a powerful appetite, but we returned home with nothing to eat other than a small amount of (delicious) Indian food from ‘round the corner, which was quickly consumed.
Crisis stimulates the creative imagination, so I invented some Mexican crepes, basically:
Flour tortillas
Peanut butter
Cream cheese
Butter (just a bit)
Jam (just a bit)
Make up your tortillas with the PB and CC, folded over like quesadillas and then fried in a cast iron skillet with a little butter, flipping two or three times. Serve with a spoonful of jam for dipping.
It’s not a meal by any stretch of the imagination — sort of the culinary equivalent to pornography, really — but for that kind of moment it’s perhaps the right kind of food. Certainly hit the spot after a jumpin’ night out.
I’m starting to get a good feeling for things going forward. Change has been needed for some time, but I’m beginning to grasp the specifics, the habits of action to change, cease, institute, etc.
More on all this later, I’m sure. But I figured I’d share the recipe.
The new house is called The Cornell Club, which is a nod to the Girth’s parents and their young days as Berkeley grad students. It’s also a touch classier than “Man House.” I like it. We’ll have a warming party in about a month, which I’ll send out invites to in a while. Hopefully some girls will show up.
I think there’s a lot of potential here. I’ll have a more or less set-up room in a bit, and it’s going to be open to our friends and extended family any time I’m back in Humboldt or otherwise on the road. It’s a little like my coworkers’ love of CouchSurfing but more private.
We’ve got big maps, a garden started in the back yard and a huge amount of meat in the freezer. Nick and Luke kee[ a chess game in progress, and we sample Mao’s little red book for inspiration from time to time. This week we discovered the threat to the revolution posed by “the petit-bourgeois and their individualistic aversion to discipline.” That’s a keeper.
Last night we had Interesting Times running a raucus poker game with four public defenders, another law school buddy, and myself. I managed to hold my own against men on leave from their wives — determined to make the most of it, they were — and managed to break even in spite of the massive quantities of high-quality scotch on the scene. This is better than I usually do at cards, and it was a nice unique way to spend an evening.
Things are shaping up. I remain, as ever, vaguely unsatisfied, ritually fatigues, and plagued with concerns that I am becoming — to quote another tired old hack — “all dead inside.” Beautiful weather helps. I think getting back into a physical exercise routine will also. My foot is still a little messed up, but it’s to the point where I just need to do my thing and be sore. I can feel my body jiggle when I go down stairs; my whole system is over-ripe, ready for some strong and steady running.
I’ve been sort of in a funk for a while, which is generally obvious when I have a hard time getting out of bed even with eight hours sleep. I’m not clear of this yet, but the clear night air is doing good things for my sense of the possible. Just got to keep pushing the good habits, and working on those philosophical breakthroughs. One of these days I’ll fall back in love with my life, embrace the responsibility of being awesome, get on my flying shoes and hit the scene with gusto. Until then I’ll settle for incremental progress and simple good times.
Super tuesday! Obama has a narrow lead in delegates. Neither he or Clinton are likely to “win” based on primaries. Basically, if Clinton can keep a virtual tie, she can probably choke him out at the convention w/superdelegates and committee maneuvers. However, if Obama can open up enough of a lead to make that choke-out sufficiently unDemocratic, he could keep the nomination.
On that note, I’m working on my first real decent think-piece on politics in ages. I’ll post it on one of those kinds of websites and throw a link up here soon. UPDATE: here.
Cornell Club: I’m more or less moved-in to the East Bay bachelor pad. It’s pretty cool, actually. We have a nice dining room with an impressive scotch bar, are proximal to both the BART and a couple good night spots, and with a little more set-up should be ready for some kickass housewarming activities soon.
On the downside, after two separate trips to Ikea, I still don’t have all the parts to build a bed. Screw you, Swedes!
It’s been productive to be back in the office, and we’ve got pieces of paper up all over the place with bullet lists and schedules. Feels good!
All in all it’s been busy but in a refreshing way. I’ve been getting up early and coming home late, which if not exactly how I want to spend my time in a perfect world, is decidedly a change in my habits of action, and is as such refreshing.
I’ve got a lot of things to do, phone calls to make, bed-parts to buy, etc. I think once I get out from under a number of remaining responsibilities it’ll be an interestingly free feeling.
Later in the evening, when things got whittled down to the inner circle, the truly regressive behavior began to emerge. There was some unsupervised mixed-martial arts in the living room, and in the back yard the great ritual of “cutting beers in half with a machete.” What started as a 
