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.

A little ramble for the rumble

Putting together now the pieces of a recent move, I’m thinking about significance and what constitutes a journal and a blog, and where do the routes meet and diverge, and why? You don’t need me to write about politics, yet I can say that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco has a lot of work to do to fight with the mandate of what we all have desired a voice for – change; however, if change does not come then it’s our responsibility to declare the honeymoon over and to start cracking even our Democratic Party’s skulls. You don’t need me to discuss the idea of Quality, an all-too-Pirsig-esque notion, yet a notion which continues to articulate itself from every nook of my surroundings on every part of the globe, never mind the fact that it’s not the best conversation starter on biergarten nights in Munich though talk inevitably arrives at the idea of quality when deciding where the best ribs are and how the lighting best makes our faces glow to the people across the table. But I digress.

I was part of the exclamation point on Ocean Beach a few weeks ago and I didn’t even know if I wanted the dude impeached, but it also had to do with walking a few weeks prior in Toronto for the 2006 Gulu Walk and standing up (and walking) for the need to understand Africa even a little better, a continent which continues to baffle and entrance me. If this is the year of change in this country… after so many years of sad reluctance of the unchangeable political heads screwing this country in its solitary place, and thus causing a massive shaking of heads, then of fists… we need to be less passive in our actions, but more importantly we must be less passive with our knowledge and with how we gather information to support that knowledge.

Informed awareness. Another good word(s) for 2007.

Drifts of Perspective and a word

The sun shines pretty hard these days as it works to fight off the cold that has gripped the Pacific Coast. Cold always wins, and all heat fleets, thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore. I took a drive up to Ashland Oregon on the weekend to visit some good friends and meet new ones at a coastal house with a hot tub on a bluff, a journey that was decided upon one minute and began the next minute. Two cars left at the same time from two different states, planning to meet at a bar on a Christmas-lit street in the middle, in Ashland, sometime after midnight (Q: At what speed was car A moving?). Turned out it was a ridiculously quick drive in the end, which makes this entire country seem smaller and distances between friends far less, thank goodness for that. But we did hit snow in the high passes, a fact that brought out the SHIT HOLY SHIT YES's from my co-pilot the snowboarder, and instilled slight fear in me because the roads rode like mashed potato beds and the sky filled with shooting stars of white aimed directly at our windshield. Yes, snow certainly is exciting.

It will be a long December. There is much to say at the end of this year that I will never post in a blog, though my mind swells with thoughts and realizations, explanations and words that rise and fall like the wind or the tides. Only with action will better words come that move forward and take all the good of the worst of life into an unknown future. I'm thankful this thanksgiving for an 83 year old father who hears his son coughing from a few late nights in a row and silently lays a shot glass of schnapps next to the laptop, "for the cough." I'm thankful for friends and family who love me no matter how much I screw up and continually tell them about it. I'm thankful for perspective and the knowledge that it won't be the last time I screw things up, but also for the lessons that keep me from making the same mistake again. And I am thankful for hope and love which are all that stand once those words of emotion ebb and flow. I know hope and love in my heart, and no matter what the future holds I will have nothing else but that regarding her. Lots to say. Lots to be thankful for today.

I hope that December and 2007 to follow bring one thing to all of us - community - including but not limited to the neighborhood/political variety, more the wide variety of people that surround you in some form, in multiple forms. What else is there when you break down your joys and sorrows, and who is it that you most want to share these with? What keeps you from being alone whether you want it or not? What keeps you from destroying yourself? What is renewable, and what swells and shrinks yet is always there in some form? When you land somewhere on a lonely patch, what is the first thing you search for, and which searches for you? And if you were to comment on this and leave a one word answer, I know there would be about 100 funny and intriguing words, and only a few of them would be community. So go ahead, post 'em. (Yes, even you, Neil).

But for now, here's to our individual communities, and may you each be enriched and emboldened by the mere fact that people love and support you without having to tell you nor you asking for it.