from NYE '06

Oohhh baby. Mountains.

It's the dawn of a new year, so it's time to get the hell out of town. I took my little streetwise car on a long overdue 1200 mile air-out east in order to find my brother and sister and nephew in their small alley-filled prairie town in Montana in time for Christmas. Haven't been on an American road trip since 2000, and I looked forward to the early morning wakeup in a hotel room, wandering the city I would choose for the evening, and a long long road with CDs.

I pulled out of SF and was in Sacramento by sunrise, shooting past Schwartzenegger's villa and just up to the edge of the national forest where I slid between two parked semi trucks and slept before climbing up through unknown weather to the state line with Nevada. Air horns woke me and the blue sky above was good news, and the roads were good to me and I climbed up and over into Reno without problems. The only real problem after that was the road across Nevada, a flat two lane jobbie that offered no climbs, shorn trees, few views, endless casinos and countless places to buy sugar-filled energy drinks that make my pee fluorescent. Also very bad, the Christian rock and country music radio stations, and even worse those stations that played bad country Christian rock for Christmas. i could barely hear the classical music CDs I brought over the rumble of the cold asphalt, so I was left to hearing songs like "Me and God" while sipping sugar bombs and focusing on the perpetual perpendicular angle of the road meeting the horizon, for ten hours.

My intended destination of Jackpot, Nevada, was more a blip of dreck than a bounty of boon, and I accidentally drove out of the town as I looked for a hotel, which led me to Twin Falls and its Motel 6, a smelly room in the freezing cold of Idaho. It's not what I had planned on but with only my quick one night stand with this town I realize I cannot say much about Twin Falls. But the best thing happened the next morning when I left and drove on a bridge over a 1/4 mile deep gorge carved by the Snake River on my way out of town. It was the day of the winter solstice so the sun darted up and down and soon I was on a dark road in Montana with a few hundred more miles to go and more Christian and country on the radio. Luckily I had consumed about 6 cans of sugar-robusto and my face tingled enough to keep me awake.

Winter in Montana now. New Year's Eve 2006. Heavy snowfall brought us a white post-Christmas, complete with skidding tires and slipping people, animal tracks leading to and from my car, now buried a week by a foot of powder. We are planning a quite night tonight, though we wanted to land in Denver for three nights of bluegrass with new and old friends which the snow decided we could not do, so here we are. Tonight will be different from last year when I sat with a recovering Dotty in a pair of recliners sipping schnapps and watching the ball slide down the pole (the ball just doesn't 'drop' anymore... safety issue?) I trust that Dot is staying away from emergency rooms, but I liked our quiet celebration last year. I can't say 2006 was a good year for me, it had sporadic joys, sad passings, and some deep frustrations. But these last few months I have learned more about myself and how close I am to making 2007 a year for the ages, at least in terms of what I can control and create. So I can resolve to be resolute in my resolutions, which are simple: to learn, to listen, to work hard and well. That will set me up in every part of my life as I enter my 33rd year on the planet. New Year's Eve is the one night we all feel the same anticipation, that moment when (if we are coherent) we feel the clock in our veins ticking toward something unknown and full of hope, and we know that everyone around us is feeling something the same. We're all part of it. I hope we all can feel that anticipation more than just one night of 365, maybe once a week, once a day, just more often.

So hang down your head, Tom Dooley. Listen to good music, fall in love a couple times, sing, walk, wrestle, relax, and love and know yourself. Happy New Year.

Friends, Links, and Friend's Links

To be back in the Bay Area, land of the cold and the heated, minus snow and plus earthquakes, with a smattering of disappointing sports teams which are causing me to be totally disillusioned with whatever obsessive rooting interest I had nurtured, there remains to be celebrated: the beer.

My Only-and-Therefore-Top 5 Breweries I've Had Wireless Internet and Good Beers at since returning to the Motherland:

1) The Park Chalet on Ocean Beach on edge of Golden Gate Park has the closest thing to a biergarten I have found, tall beers with your strong wireless signals, and $1 beer Monday evenings under tall ceilings and a huge fireplace. Its neighbor, the Beach Chalet is an old favorite, surf and sunset with your garlic fries, bartenders have 24-hour view of ocean, but I would choose the Park Chalet because it tends to treat you like a friend rather than a customer. Beach Chalet likes to make money off its view.
2) Magnolia Pub - hiding in the heart of hippiedom on Haight Street, can't beat the view out the large windows of the neo-grunge strolling by, nor the beer list or the murals memorializing the 60s and 70s. Food is sparse and hearty, but what else would you need in the Haight-Ashbury?
3) 21st Amendment - a nice balance of 1) and 2) in the warehouse district of San Francisco, destined to be the center of life when and if this area of the city becomes what it thinks it will become.
4) Cato's Ale House - not a brewery, not in San Francisco, without a website, but many good beers on tap, small, old tables with knife carvings, live folk bands each night, a bartender who really couldn't care about making you feel warm and fuzzy...
5) Gordon Biersch - too chainy for me, too many people speaking loudly about very little, but easy to lose yourself in its pair of wireless networks and its vast shallowness.

There are links to cute/important/lively distractions, and then there are links to actual friends with a point to write about. Announcing quickly a few bloglinks to read:
Nat Kent Post-Oxford & Post-Munich writes some highly thought-provoking words with the fine vocabulary that he exhibited Pre-Oxford & Mid-Munich when I knew him, and
Ben Salles old pal old friend needs to write a book someday with his imagination and verbiage and new family and his dogs,
while my 3 brothers in Holden Village arms show their skin:
Kent Gustavson seems to live 36-hour days of music, words and Adobe Products, just as
J. A. Blyth, playwright and monkey, continues to pen daily observances of life from Guyana with wife Miriam Adelaide, and
Jeshua Erickson's guitar hums his civil thoughts along with personal lyrics from his own treehouse in Minnesota.
All are good people and have good places to visit, read, browse, move on from, and revisit again. And more links will come!

Lots of technology at our fingertips, but I still need to take 35mm photos and wait for their development, and write in my journal and hope to read it someday and learn something. The instantaneousness of our communication moves faster than the river I wish I could fish on and write from. Do you get busy livin' or get busy faxin'? (sharktank redemtion!)... can you smell the roses and text message that experience as well? I hope to keep a nice balance of tech and treehouse and thought. The surf rocks the beaches here, the people wear too little clothing for this weather, and in the mountains there are people sleeping tonight with heaven pushing down on them. Lucky bastards. Hope you are all well.

One more for the Vault.

Taking into account some preordained need to write with a beverage, I can’t say I know what I am doing typing on my cute Mac or penning within a leather journal on such a consistent basis from brew pubs with a free wireless connection. I wish everywhere here was filled with huts and strangers drinking tropical dandies with umbrellies and conversation taking itself out for a walk among locals and new faces, if everything around me had an air of wellness with a breeze and time on your hands, then I think you may understand why I do it, but this is San Francisco, the same place which dulled my senses for a good few years, a place where there still is no biergarten nor chestnut trees above and gravel underfoot, where folks tend to speak much louder than necessary. Yet for now I feel like I’m in a little Shangri La. Magnolia is a brewpub on Haight Street that subtly memorializes in fresco and watercolor a culture that is giving way to what I can only see as a cleaner version of dirty hippiedom. In short, things are more intentionally odd than randomly strange here. But I’m not a hippie so what do I know. I’ve also typed and written at the Beach Chalet, a metrosexual/surfer brewery joint with fantastic garlic fries and deep-fried calamari and the sunset-on-the-ocean each evening, or at the Java Joint coffee house that looks like a beach bungalow set under a five story apartment building across from the ocean. And once I went to Gordon Biersch’s brewery on the Bay Embarcadero but the people there were far too proud of their business-talk and I didn’t get the point of the expensive beer. I am making the rounds of breweries and am actually getting work done all at the same time. How not like me is that?

I’m also realizing how quickly customers feel the need to get up and out of a restaurant here in San Francisco < California < perhaps the entire USA. What I notice: the VISA card is thrown down or the wallet is reached for, on average, when at least half of the group is finished eating; this of course makes the eating-stragglers feel they need to wolf their remaining food or leave it, and in around five minutes of the wallet’s appearance they are up and leaving. And this is totally OK; the average meal for four lasts about 30 minutes, and the average meal for 2 people about the same. In and out – WHAT??? Do we have someplace to go? I have nursed two beers for 2 hours here and I feel like I own my seat, perhaps can call this my Norm-spot (from TV’s Cheers). The waitstaff are partially to blame, but customers can just as easily display a total lack of hurry as much as they play along and feel rushed by an urgency of service. Why do Europeans tend to take time out for eating? So very few people there come and go so quickly as USA-ans. Are Americans so much busier, or do they feel some guilt at spending their time allowing someone else to cook for and serve them, or do restaurants just generally turn US people off, to the point where they just can’t wait to get back to their cats, their satellite TV, their families, onto something else... I mean, single people leave just as quickly as married people, unless I have the whole wedding-ring-finger thing wrong, which I don’t. Do certain people just plan about 5 things to do each night, in order to feel like they are keeping their promises to a busy lifestyle? Can you just simply commit to sitting and hanging out, or is everything so UNplanned that we can never plan to stay long enough to hang with people we are eating with?

The sun is setting once again in a brewpub on the water’s edge, only this one has a view of the sunset against the sky, water, hills and houses to the east, so the real magic is behind me. Here’s to harmony.

I will try to add some audio to these links... Aural hints of my senses.