October 2011
31 posts
1 tag
A visit from the plumber
The note taped to the front door of our apartment a few days earlier said to expect an inspection. It didn’t say when.
That meant staying home in case any questions needed answering. A knock on the door came, and a genial man with a patch on his shirt pulled a bunch of things out from under our sink before leaving to poke around somewhere on the first floor below us.
Shortly thereafter...
September 2011
31 posts
1 tag
Cupcakes
I’m pretty bashful about foraging in the newsroom. I’ve gone through periods where I get in a mood, pick up a bag of chips and a jar of salsa and leave it over where I know people will get it, or a packet of cookies for the production crew. Not that people can’t get it for themselves, but it is something good to leave it out or to share it if it’s nice. That’s what...
1 tag
To Uptown and back
The firetruck went wheeling past me before I could get it full-on, take it all in. Here I am, standing on a corner, looking at cars and people going by and traffic signals flashing on timers nearby and stretching out around me in warren-like tunnels instead of grids.
There’s a young woman talking on her phone and sitting near me on her cruiser bicycle. She nodded at me earlier, but...
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Tweeting John Paton
Every time I forget how things change, I get reminded — and then re-reminded: o_O
(When I move, you move. Just like that.)
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Forgiveness
Saint and Kings - Forgiveness by allaboutgeorge
I don’t remember exactly what I was doing with my electric guitar, but I kinda want to do it again and soon. Maybe I’m not done with this version. It’s so spare — just the tambourine loop — that I keep thinking it needs more, there’s simply not enough going on. Maybe vibraphone or tremolophone or some other...
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Falling satellite
“Hicks: Watch out for flaming satellites”
So why can’t we hit a button and blow these things up, before they ruin “Jersey Shore” forever? At the very least, why can’t we build satellites so when it’s time for them to come down we can steer them where we’d like them to hit, like maybe the Sahara Desert or the Kardashian compound?
We have far too...
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Expecting Lisa Rein
It’s always fun when Lisa Rein comes over to play music, usually to rehearse in the run-up to gigs. The front-door buzzer rings, I check to see who it is and it’s her. Hauling that huge hard-body case up to my second-floor apartment from wherever down the street she’s been able to park, she comes upstairs and in and makes a beeline to get briefly reacquainted with Shamsher....
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Autumn again
I have no reason to feel as good as I do about seasonal change.
I see other people around me. They seem intimately cued to respond to the gearing-up of professional football or the winding down of the baseball season.
Either they’re rueing those long hours of daylight leaking out of the evening skies overhead, or they’re simultaneously praising the virtues of summer and complaining...
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Post-newspaper-career rehearsal, pt. 2
I went to another one of those meetings where some of my co-workers and I talk about that possible future that’s on its way toward us. This one happened at the Communications Workers of America union hall around the corner from my apartment. I got there late, but I still managed to take in the panel discussion by former co-workers who had either left in previous downsizings or taken...
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One dozen
I married her a dozen years ago today. I couldn’t have seen a dozen years into the future back then, and I’ve not gotten any better at prognostication since. I’m a slightly better listener, maybe. On a good day, when the light hits me right, I may even appear to have been improved or upgraded.
She’s pretty much the same as I found her. That’s understandable, I...
1 tag
A billion wicked thoughts
It began as all bad things do in a bookstore, with an open outstretched hand caressing a comely spine, caressing a comely spine. I count them as they pass, a billion wicked thoughts, slow and then too fast, a noise so loud it shatters glass, a billion wicked thoughts till my future in my present is my past. Minds turning toward one another for hours or more, with a coolly composed closed-off...
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Three-minute news throwdown
Karim Amara, one of the multimedia editors at the paper, has been on fire for months to get columnist Tony Hicks and I on video.
Karim has labored under the impression that Tony and I’d play off each other well. Tony has this laid-back suburban-absurdist approach seasoned with an experienced take on parenting and relationships, and I’m, well, me: the shirt-tie-and-Mohawk...
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Round and round we go
The day began with direction-hunting and a little bit of overdressing. It was too warm to wear something as dressy as I wanted, so I wound up yanking off the sportcoat and tie I had on and tossing them across the backseat. I couldn’t remember ever having visited Tilden Park before either. But we figured out how to get there, and found the parking lot near where a dozen or so folks were...
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Locked out
As soon as the lock clicked shut behind me, I started cursing myself out. It’s like I don’t know what to do with my own front door. I’ve done really, really foolish things: left my own keys in the door before, and had to have friendly, thoughtful neighbors knock at all hours to make sure I got them back. And of course, this is the one day of all days that I’m not the only...
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Repo men (and women)
I was pretty happy about being able to make it down to Mountain View on time in July for the first Journalist Repositioning Initiative, so it would only make sense that I ran late getting to the S.F. Public Press headquarters on Mission Street in San Francisco to meet up with folks again.
I was late this time, but still managed to contribute. Not as many people were able to make it, but those...
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You know our love was meant to be
Tell me, back in early June, on the day that I win a trivia contest by the briefest of cocktail ingredients, that I will sing a brief solo at the start of a choral arrangement of Chicago’s “You’re The Inspiration” before several dozen people gathered just after dusk in the courtyard atop the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — tell me this, and I would have told...
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Post-newspaper-career rehearsal
I want to work. I want my co-workers to work. I want things to work. But things don’t work, or aren’t working anymore, or need to be re-worked. So I went to an employment seminar at the Shadelands Arts Center, just around the corner from the Contra Costa Times newsroom in Walnut Creek. I listened to an awesomely prepared East Bay Works counselor explain a few very important...
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Sheets
Once you crossed the line, decided you would be fine. Then you turned around to find me gone to ground. You’re not my problem anymore. You’re not my problem anymore. You’re gonna need to dream about me to make me appear between these sheets. It’s been your call all along. You don’t have to write a song in order to face the music. Find a lesson you can use. Find a...
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Meeting John Paton
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/tackable/status/113321699570749440”]
I looked up from my laptop in my cubicle at around 4:15 p.m. and saw Dave Butler walking him over to the desk next to mine where Virginia Griffey was working. As Butler introduced Paton to Griffey, I took out my phone and snapped a picture. Then I sat back down. Looking up a moment later, I saw Butler...
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Two towers, ten years
There was a post-apocalypse theme party in honor of one Oakland Soft Rock Choir member moving out of a building and another member moving in. The party started yesterday evening and ran into the wee hours. Attendees were invited to dress up (“Tank Girl,” zombies, steampunk) but the only costume that made sense to me was to dress down, don all black, carry a Good Book (the King James...
1 tag
Fleet Foxes
The other stroke of luck in the last two days came from a rarely used Twitter account and a contest thrown at regular intervals by a certain transit agency. I had no ideas those tickets were going to be waiting for me at will-call, honest! But there they were, and there I was, after I’d somehow parked all the way in the rear of some lot above the Greek Theatre downhill from a Hearst...
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Google SF
I didn’t plan on visiting another office so soon after last month’s visit to Mountain View. But when one notices a Google Places tweet and responds as directed, any manner of strangeness may result. So it was that I found myself exiting the Embarcadero BART station and walking down to Google San Francisco.
I had a good time meeting other lunch invitees (the developer who likes...
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Grandeur
I remember how it felt back in late July, finding myself seat-belted into a Southwest flight rolling along the runway at Oakland International Airport, my phone camera aimed out the window, my stomach gathered up under my ribcage, my inner ears bouncing like orchestra tympani, and then the juddering bounce that comes when leaping up off the ground, wings outside doing their Bernoulli thing,...
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Brand new day
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I don’t know what to think. I woke up this morning, and there was a note from Amy Gahran with news I never thought I’d see, on a scale and with a potential to upend or at least slightly bend a bunch of things I’d...
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The price of gas
Here’s the 10th picture I ever posted to Flickr on July 31, 2004. I took it with my first cameraphone, a Samsung flip-phone model on Verizon Wireless whose name I can’t remember — only that it had a camera lens built into its hinge. I think this was a gas station somewhere in Oakland, maybe the Shell at the corner of International Boulevard and 5th Avenue. I figured I’d...
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Some city summers never end
I should be sick of making everything look like this. Not everything looks like this when it is happening. It is just a setting on an app, a way to make things look washed out and slightly degraded and marginally more interesting than they were when they were happening.
[…] One side-effect of the digital turn in music culture has been our relationship to the objects that populate it....
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Limpiamos y comemos
Sundays are for cleaning house. Sometimes you do it on your own when you wake up and you feel sickened enough by time’s passage, the marker of a new week and the mark of not having done something to earn, let alone observe that newness. Sometimes you welcome help, or you offer it.
And when you’re done, or you’ve moved and sweated and waited and paused and listened enough,...
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QR aesthetics
Ankita and I were going to Bay Street to see a movie, probably “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” at the Bay Street multiplex in Emeryville, and I remember coming out of the theater and seeing this promotional lobby ad. I’d not heard of “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” or its actress Elizabeth Olson, and I vaguely knew of John Hawkes. But I sure know what a QR code...
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Room for improvement
It’s the end of Sean Maher’s Oakland Tribune story, “Handicapped drivers outraged by Oakland’s new parking enforcement,” that sticks with me:
[…] This isn’t the first time store owners on Grand have been outraged by parking policies. Many owners protested a short-lived effort by the City Council in 2009 to extend paid parking hours from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m....
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Around the office
Jeff Faraudo came over to my cubicle to figure out some phone posting stuff with multimedia guy Ray St. Germain. That’s Ray on the left, hunched over Jeff’s Samsung BlackJack II running Windows Mobile 6.5. Jeff also wanted to get set up on Twitter so he could start posting about San Jose State University football he’ll be covering and so he’ll have the hang of it once UC...
