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.