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Lisa Williams and Amy Gahran and Susan Mernit had what looks like a pretty good time hanging out over hte last few days. When Amy said they wanted to get some shots of them hanging out, I met them in a corner in Temescal and took a few pictures.

It was salutary and instructive. I don’t have very many similar shots myself, and the rare ones I do are usually from my days at South by Southwest. Perhaps it’s time for me to do something about that.

After meeting up with them and going off to choir practice, I found myself over by 19th Street and Telegraph Avenue.

I don’t know what happened to our old base station, but years and years of use over several different households had to be a factor. Suddenly it wasn’t working anymore, and I was trying to follow Amy’s advice on how to repair or work around it, diagnose its issues during an extraordinarily busy working weekend.

So finally it’s Apple Store visit time, and I lay my money down to make everything better again. With a little help and a little brainpower, I’m up and running and ready to not have to think about connecting to the wider world for the next few years.

I stayed up late last night watching tweets from Occupy Oakland. Today I wanted something to do that didn’t have to do with the double murder down my block, the union gathering at the hall just over from my front door, or the clash between police defending the empty building on the edge of Lake Merritt from protesters (and then kettling them in Uptown and arresting them en masse on the steps of the YMCA).

I wound up in Old Oakland, watching Susan Mernit and Amy Gahran and Lisa Williams and a bunch of local bloggers visit the newly rebooted Caffe 817.

I live in this city. I love it here. I get split sometimes between not feeling obligated to defend it to people who want to take cheap shots or talk about the city as if it’s something it isn’t or reduce it to its simplest, least nuanced perspective or symbolism.

And then I wake up and read about a story like this. This is not something I expect to have happen on my block, right down the street from me. So many people live for years and years in places without being able to point to a house they could walk to, a house they’ve walked past for years and years without thinking too hard about it, about anything at all, and say, there, that’s where it happened.

After the week I’ve had, and with the weekend ahead, it was wonderful to be able to stop by Beer Revolution and pick up one or two containers of something absolutely delicious.

I haven’t gotten very many parking tickets to San Francisco. But when I’ve had to shovel coins into meters, they haven’t tended to go tilt as often as they have in Oakland. Sigh.

An hour and a half wait for a brunch place? I don’t have that problem. Never had it and never will. Maybe less than half an hour for, say, a really popular sushi spot on Piedmont Avenue, but that’s it.

Black friends in New York? I believe it, all the segregation-index census statistics aside. S.F. is a different world than where I come from.

Smell that herbal bouquet on the breeze, but you ain’t no Oaksterdam so don’t even front. Heh.

Here’s a long day, full of doing what has to be done to make things work. I couldn’t have predicted what it would take to get through it.

I shouldn’t have skipped lunch. I was ravenous by the time I got over to downtown Oakland. There was just enough time to find a hot chocolate and head over to Nile Hall in Preservation Park, find Mario Sevilla and Marnette Federis setting up and find a spot off to the side to take it all in.

A lot of talk, and a little consensus. A meeting about Oakland’s future, and more than a few recriminations about the present. And then we were done, and I said goodnight to Dori Maynard and Martin G. Reynolds, and went home to Ankita’s dinner.

Getting up early and pedaling around the lake to lock up outside Farley’s East for a good reason: curiosity. What’s a good gathering for discussing downtown business models look like? I went to see for myself. Besides, I had to get up eventually, right?

It was well worth the ride just to see how Susan Mernit and Kwan Booth and Amy Gahran of Oakland Local held court in the cafe’s second floor, to listen to the give-and-take among the folks who turned out. I don’t yet know how the Bay Area News Group’s community media lab model is going to work in practice, but it can’t hurt to attend and maybe learn from gatherings like this.

It’s taken me several months to get my hair long enough to be able to do this. I thought briefly about doing it before, but I knew I’d need a certain thickness at the base of my Mohawk to make it work.

It’s just twists, nothing holding them in place but aimless and distracted manipulation and a little palm-rolling action. They can be teased out pretty painlessly with just a few comb strokes.

I don’t think I’ll stay with it for much longer than a week. It’s not that I get bored too easily. It’s more like I remember just what kind of commitment waiting for twists to lock up took, and I don’t think I have that in me anymore.

Here’s an idea: singer-songwriter house party! I wish I’d thought of it. But I’m glad Jessi Phillips (member of the Oakland Soft Rock Choir, and leader of her band Eight Belles) did, and gladder she said I could go. Knock on the door, come in and sit down on the wood living-room floor, get up and go to the kitchen to sign up to sing on the list, sip from a beer in the fridge.

Then resume sitting in the living room, and start listening to one person after another unspool lovely covers and original songs. I don’t think Neil Young was supposed to be a theme, but two folks wound up covering him anyway.

Today was a short haul up I-80 to Dale and Adrienne’s Lewis Carroll-themed baby shower in Vallejo. Turns out they’re having a girl! Ankita and I got dressed up and found our way off the highway and into the city, one of a few in the Bay Area that I couldn’t remember ever really visiting. Leaving my laptop behind (d’oh!) after we’d crossed the bridge back into the East Bay meant having to come back into the city yet again.

I remember cupcakes and witty repartee and cocktail “construction elements,” but mostly what stands out is the whimsical and wondering sense of expectation: that here, among these adults and their children, is a sense of community, and a welcoming attitude to a coming member.

11:22 AM me: Seeing any producers on duty?

11:23 AM coworker: No. Not yet. Will check tho

11:24 AM me: RT @OccupyOakland: OCCUPY THE WALK FOR LIFE! fight corporate funded populist fascism, Today 1pm at Powell & market in SF #oo #osf

  Not even a championship game will draw some folks.

11:25 AM coworker: Ha! You’re right!

Here’s this sort of daily split I run across: I see something, I say something, and something happens or doesn’t happen. Watching Twitter means viewing little items that pop up, and thinking, hey, this could be significant, I wonder if we have someone nearby or who can get there.

My ability to follow along with Ray’s presentation was complicated by his focus on Gingerbread; I installed Team Hacksung’s Ice Cream Sandwich build on my phone a day or two ago.

Mostly I listened, but I remember chiming in to share a few things about must-have apps. At some point, I think I’ve passed along a list, and I’ll post it.

Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does give us something: familiarity, comfort, muscle memory propelling us asymptotically toward and beyond competence. I’ll take that over perfection in service to the song, once familiar, then ignored, then dusted off and reanimated.

After practice comes karaoke, for the second time this week. I’m hoarse by night’s end, joining in without benefit of a microphone to add harmonies to music not even the strangers singing can hear.

Someday, my co-worker Patrick Cant is going to get his own site, and when he does, I’ll have to go to him for clips just like this I shot with him about fifteen minutes before leaving work for the day. You find the strangest things floating through newsrooms, and now I’m just talking things, not, say, people.

Straight-forward karaoke: You show up, write out the song you want on a sheet of paper and hand it in. You wait your turn and eventually your name is called, you’re handed a microphone and you sing.

I dressed up, partly out of some silly feeling of respect for the venue, and partly just because I could, even though I ought to get my hat re-blocked or repaired, or maybe even just replaced.

Maybe it was a Sunday thing, as I’m more used to the rare Monday or more likely Tuesday evening at the White Horse, and I can still remember when I used to hit the Hobnob on Thursdays.

Earlier in the evening, I went over to Orange Street and waited outside what I’m sure was the exact apartment building I helped a co-worker move out of the Haight and into back in 1995.

Tonight the Oakland Soft Rock Choir had a gig there, so five of us showed up to sing at a house party for about two dozen folks. Our hosts, Nate and Misa, got married two weeks ago in Bellingham, Washington, and will party there again in June, but tonight was a get-together for their friends in Oakland where they now live. Turned out they know the guy who makes beer in his garage on MacArthur Boulevard (where we sang last August), so he brought over some beer in their honor. I flubbed an few notes on the back end of “Everytime You Go Away,” and I was kicking myself a little bit about that. But nobody seemed to mind.

Afterward, I drove into the city to pick up Ankita after a party, and I found a parking space on Mission Street next to a closed storefront and I took pictures of people walking past.

In the car, the radio keeps pumping out hit after hit. But it’s just programming. Stuff that used to be popular. Gold, platinum, whatever ore the oldies are made of. Not stuff that’s going to be popular, about to be popular, on the verge.

It’s like the stations’ keepers know I’ve pulled into one of the ever-emptier parking spaces in the business park. But there’s still work here to do. The music will be there whether or not I turn it off and go into the newsroom. So I’d better start looking around to see what’s happening out in the world where there’s actual live news.

I wound up working from home today, and it was weird. Not “weird” weird the way it can be when you’re being pulled in twenty different directions by watching feeds and listening in to an editorial meeting and passively eavesdropping on a copy editor’s rant a few desks over, but a hyperfocused kind instead. I wound up hauling the huge dresser I’d had for several years out to the Dumpster by the side of our apartment building and going absolutely “Office Space” on it. What have I been missing all these years? Everybody at a desk should spend at least half an hour a day busting up a chifforobe — no, not like that.

Biking again. Twice within two weeks! It’s a good start, even if I don’t keep it going. It’s something to do that gets me out of a car, that lets me people-watch completely differently from when I’m, you know, walking or driving around. Measuring my tuchis against that of the world’s, and saying, yup, I’m skinnier, I’ll grin until I win it, and I can hold my own against you with a little help from one of Mr. Bianchi’s finest products. And the autonomy? It’s a drug with a great high, leaves me breathless in a great way: this is what I can do, how far I can go under my own power.

So it begins anew, this process of feeling our way forward in the choir. Kicking the tires on new material, keeping in mind what’s good to keep singing from older material. Figuring out how to raise our voices so that we can continue to use them together. What about this song? Hey, guys, remember this one?

Dissent is important. You’ve got to have it, as it turns out, before you can reach some form of assent. It’s even better when people show up in order to offer dissent, voice their suspicions, shape them into opinions and share them. Then you’ve really got a shot at getting somewhere.

I met you at the party on a Friday night
You sit right by me at the bar
Talking of the trailer for a naughty film
The unusual debut for a movie star

I say how much I enjoy living right now
surrounded by our technology scene
You say you like getting it so I ask you
if it is the technology you mean

You remember how I sit there folded
comfortably posed but flummoxed as ever
Holding up my share of our conversation
a well-placed tongue in my cheek for a lever

We chat at cross angles & purposes
You say baked goods, I hear operating system
Admitting you liked me was unexpected
Any early warning signals, well, I missed ‘em

I say how much I enjoy living right now
surrounded by technological toys
You say you like getting it so I ask you
if it is the technology you mean or boys

I remember jewel-toned argyle stockings
Blunt cut bangs over bemused eyebrows
Heated hauteur beside a half cracked window
A breeze hoping it’d get to brush your blouse

We got to Dale and Adriane’s house late, several hours after other friends had come and gone from their Sunday open-house gathering just south of the Mills College campus. It was getting dark, but there were still refreshments in the kitchen and people chatting and hanging out. I went straight for the hot tub in their back yard.

I’d visited and seen other folks flinging their clothes aside and gleefully piling in to hang out in previous visits, but I’d never been first-in-the-water before. I sank into the water, let out a sigh and said to myself, this. More like this, please.

Brad Bird makes human beings just as compelling to watch as he does his cartoon characters.

Simon Pegg was ridiculously good as comic relief and as an actor. Sneaking around in the Kremlin hallway was worth at least half the price of admission alone.

The other half? Probably the Burj al-Khalifa bit, particularly the sandstorm chase afterward.

Pretty Paula Patton is pretty. Also funny in stretches, especially with Anil Kapoor.

Jeremy Renner handled his part of the heavy lifting just fine, creeping me out when he was supposed to right from from the start and settling in as the odds got longer and the plot got sillier.

Oh, yeah, and that other guy? I think he’s got a future in moving pictures.

The first gig of the year is like the first everything-else of the year. You feel novelty for novelty’s sake, keenly sharpened senses for the jostling crowd, and wildly oscillating senses of irritation and camaraderie for its members as you battle for an easy line of sight from the back or the sides of the house where you stand and wait for the music to start.

When it finally begins, you don’t want it to stop. You resent the twenty-odd minutes you lose waiting for a drink at the bar because you can hear the room you left behind you filling up with noise, rhythm and energy. When it ends, you hope you got enough of a dose to carry what you remember liking out and away with you.

I can dream about swinging my legs over the thin metal frame of my bicycle, or I can do it. I can conceptualize the paths and sidewalks and routes that connect the buildings where I live and work, or I can actualize them. I can count off the hours it takes to steer and lean and pedal along them, or I can make those hours count.

Here at the high end of the year, when habits still harbor some magic and resolve some resonance, the day comes to a close and the light drains out of the sky deliciously early and everything I might want to capture in motion between my fluorescent-flooded cubicle and the parked car in the basement garage is right there, all around me at the edge of my skin

On the way over to the Tribune Media Access Center inside the West Oakland branch of the Oakland Public Library, I biked past Frank Ogawa Plaza. I saw a couple of dozen folks standing around in the chilly afternoon air, studiously talking to each other and mostly ignoring the pair of police cars parked along 14th Street next to them.

I took a few pictures before moving on and spending the rest of the afternoon working and talking with Martin G. Reynolds, who greets visitors at the center three days a week and says he looks forward to holding classes that readers can attend.

After black coffee for me and black tea for her, Ankita assembled our year’s first meal: black-eyed peas with tempeh bacon, swiss chard with onions and vinegar, and rice with saffron (this time without turmeric, as we’d forgotten to get some to add to it). It never gets old, sitting together food that looks like both of us, and that draws on who we are and what we choose to be and how we choose to live.

We found our way later on to the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco and saw “Pariah,” the debut movie from director Dee Rees. It’s a powerful story, one you must see if you get the chance.

• REVIEW: Dee Rees’ “Pariah” (boldaslove.us)
• A Brooklyn Girl Who’s Just Not Frilly (movies.nytimes.com)
• ‘Pariah’ director Dee Rees confronts disapproval (sfgate.com)
• ‘Pariah’ review: Brooklyn girl heeds her heart (sfgate.com)
• Film: Movie Review: Pariah (avclub.com)
• Kim Wayans and Adepero Oduye discuss ‘Pariah’ (thegrio.com)
• ‘Pariah’s’ Scene Stealer (thedailybeast.com)