Snapsounds

I. STREET SOUNDS

The flat, echoless hooting of the pigeons with their raggedy andy button eyes.

The constant beeping of a broken mini ATM set into the wall of a Mission Street establishment, the kind that never works and never gives you the right amount of money.

The rising wail of a siren, each iteration building on the last, the Doppler Effect, then expanding, blossoming into concentric waves radiating off the Victorian houses and the hills of the Presidio and Golden Gate Park, like liquid, like waves sloshing between Twin Peaks and Bernal Hill. Sirens in harmony, different angles converging, a symphony of something is wrong.

A quiet splash as whiskey decants into a short solid glass.

Loud old men speaking a foreign language in the back of the bus, legs propped up on the rear-facing seats across from them.

The rattle of an old sedan, grey with dirty windows, as it grinds down the hill past the cherry trees whose pink blossoms are just billowing open in a puff of air.

The hiss as the train doors slide shut, the vibrations as the train starts again, glides down into the darkness of the tunnel.

Missionaries in nice clothes and ties preaching in Spanish on a sunny late afternoon on the street-level courtyard of the BART station, exhortations in a musical language you don't quite know but can get the gist.

II. MUSIC OF THE CITY


Musicians plying their trade in the acoustic convenience of BART station hallways, voices resonating off the polished floors and walls, steel and carpet and tile and dirt and change depositories. Acoustic guitars, saxophones, a soft fluid sound that permeates everything.

A street woman, mid-fifties, cut loose from the quilt of society, sits against a light pole, jangling change in a red plastic cup, calling everyone "sweetie" who passes. She has two small hoops ringing her nose, and a dark ugly mole on her right temple. Her words are a susurrus lost in the rumble of street noise, cars, phones, conversation, the change in her cup a heavy slosh of quarters, dimes, and pennies, money music dropping beneath everything.

Leaning against a pillar in the BART Station, down below street level, a bulky man in a beige sweater and long dreads pours out waves of sound from his saxophone, reading music from a stand, a folding black mesh laundry hamper on the floor before him, inviting recognition. The music is light and fills the air like the tide filling a cove.

Three happy people sitting on BART, knit caps, baggy clothes, dark hair tightly curled, clumped, knotted, braided. They pull out instruments of wood and horsehair-string, thrumming into the silence, as she starts to sing and the other man begins to slap his palms against canvas pulled tightly over an empty gourd. It's infectious, joyful, a counterpoint to the steady hum and whine of the train running through the darkness.

Baseball '09, Volume II

What, if ever, goes to plan? Before the season, we were stoked up on effusive descriptions of the Giants pitching staff: Tim Lincecum, face of the franchise; Randy Johnson, the legend; Matt Cain, the solid pitcher who never got the run support he deserved; Jonathan Sanchez, another rising star; even Barry Zito, who looked like a $126 million dollar bust early last year, was looking better at the end of last season, and people were talking about more success.

Then in the first weeks we get shellacked by the Dodgers and the Padres, even Lincecum, and again, we were getting no offense, scoring one or two runs a game.

Here-we-go-again syndrome is something to which Giants fans are quite susceptible.

April 18th, I go to AT & T Park for my second game of the season, Giants versus Diamondbacks, Lincecum versus the slow-wind-up Doug Davis. It was a beautiful day, though hot. The classic brick facade of the park feels much more aesthetically pleasing than the Oakland Coliseum, and the sun sparkled off the water of the Bay, and the white sails of the sailboats and the passing cargo ships were fruit ripe for meditation between pitches and innings.

I'm there with Marina, Vaughn, and Tara, a perfect Saturday afternoon ball game, the field bright and clean. And Lincecum has recaptured his dominance. His windup is sharp, the white sphere flashing in towards the batter so fast you can just get a glimpse of it when it leaves his hand, and he is sharp, striking out more than ten on the day, surrendering no runs. When the Diamondbacks do mount a scoring opportunity, he shuts them down, usually with a strikeout.

But the offense is struggling too. In the first inning, Emmanuel Burriss gets a single, advancing to second on an error. Then, taking advantage of Doug Davis' rreeaallyy slow wind up, he steals third base easily. But then, with the clean up hitter Bengie Molina at the plate and two outs, Burriss tries to steal home, and is out by a mile. At the time, we like the aggressiveness, but it would look rash as the game went on, especially because in the second inning, Molina leads off with a single. Burriss hits the ball hard a couple more times in the game, getting a single and a hard line out that only a fine leaping catch by Chad Tracy at first base prevents from driving in a run, and he puts down a nice sacrifice bunt. But otherwise, the Giants offense looks lost, and in the 9th inning, after Lincecum pitches 8 full shut out innings, the Giants go to the bullpen, which promptly and weakly surrenders two runs, and the bottom of the ninth showed no fight from the home team, as they anemically went down 1-2-3.

Disappointing, but Lincecum's strength is encouraging, and the pitching has since done well, and the bats have come alive. This past week, the Giants have won 5 games in a row. One more example that one day at the ballpark does not define a season one way or the other. Which means that the acrid stench I detected as we were filing out of the stadium was not the Giants going up in flames, but merely the smoke of a muscle-bound, tank-topped jerk smoking a repulsive cigar. Probably a Dodger fan. A baseball stadium at our disposal, but not a single bat to be found.

It did kind of ruin my streak, as the Giants had come back to win both of the previous two games I've seen since I moved down here in 2007, and that ruins the premise I had of a short story where a man's favorite team wins every single game he attends in person.

But baseball is back, and that makes me happy. I'm watching the Giants-Diamondbacks game on TV in an hour, maybe getting a beer while doing so, fresh off the Giants winning the first two games of this miniseries, which means that even a loss today wouldn't be the end of the world.

Beats the heck out of worrying about swine flu and the economy on a beautiful Sunday.

A Paper In Crisis

Last Saturday, we were riding the 14-Mission toward the waterfront and the Giants ballpark, and we passed the white edifice that houses the Chronicle, to which I am currently still subscribed, if more tenuously so than I used to be.

It was fitting, I thought, that a long crack runs down the face of the building, right through the middle of the fancy lettering identifying the tenants.

At least the Chronicle doesn't have as blatant a conservative leaning and as poor an editorial staff as the Press Democrat of Santa Rosa. I bought a copy of that paper on my last trip up the coast, and it was awful. Some major typos, and an icky religious/conservative slant.

So I have not got around to canceling the Chronicle yet, but please, Chronicle, fire the hell out of Willie Brown. I glanced at his column briefly this morning to see if there was any improvement, and what I saw in his response to Gavin Newsom's gubernatorial candidacy was the following: "The current knock on our mayor is that he's not at home enough. Let me just say that home cookin' in my opinion has always been overrated."

That's not a relevant answer to the criticism of Newsom's absence from key budget meetings and other points of contention. It means nothing, all style, no substance. He's just trying to be clever, and it is really old. Don't name Third Street after him; find some cul de sac or dead end street.

Am I partly jealous that he gets to write his self-indulgences in a newspaper and I don't? Sure, but that doesn't mean he has anything useful to say.

The Things We Fear, Itself

Kinetic energy equals 1/2 mass multiplied by the velocity squared. This was a lesson taught by my Tae Kwon Do instructor. It sunk in, and I can't help but wonder if I've always subconsciously applied the formula when driving in stressful, high-volume situations such as the freeway.

Leaving aside the question of glass and metal, think about a car from the standpoint of physical energy. A car is anywhere from 1000 to 2000 kilograms. On the freeway, it is driving anywhere from 50 to 80 miles per hour. That isn't really a measure of velocity, because velocity is a vector. But that brings us to the question of vectors, specifically those of all the other cars on the road, and if they have a vector towards you, your relative velocity with respect to each other can be unfun to contemplate, collision-wise.

The thing is, driving certainly requires caution and awareness, as the math proves. The trick is to not freak out over it.

I have spent a large chunk of my life freaking out over the prospect of driving in crowded, ambiguous situations like city freeways, kind of paralyzing myself with doubt and timidity, which doesn't exactly help. Timidity does not inherently equal safe driving.

It was made worse last summer when I got in a collision in my girlfriend's car on Highway 101, merging onto the freeway.

There are these things that lock up many of us, I think, little things that ought to be mostly day to day issues that are just hard. And when there is only ourselves to consider, it is easy to circumvent them. For instance, I am happy to use transit to save energy, but also so I don't have to try to drive and park in the city. I'm willing to pay extra and to make a trip take longer by going on BART or CalTrain rather than driving on freeways I'm not familiar with. It's easy to rationalize these fears, and to dress them up with good reasons.

This fear might manifest itself in wildly different ways for different people. I certainly have other fears too.

The thing is, there comes a time when this fear could impact the people around you, and then the question is which part of you will make your decision?

There is a scene on an episode of Scrubs that I think about at times like this. Zach Braff's character is duct-taped to the ceiling of the cafeteria--long story if you don't know the episode--and he hears his friends discussing how hard it is to be there for him in the rough patch he is going through; subsequently, he decides that he needs to suck up some of the pain he is going through, to hide it from those around him, to not lean heavily on them.

So, a simple question from the girlfriend, asking me if I would go with her to the Emeryville station this morning for her train to Sacramento and then drive her car back to the city for her. "You don't want to take BART to the Richmond station?"

"Not really."

And I knew it was a perfectly rational, perfectly reasonable, and the most sensible plan. I just had to get over being uncomfortable about being in a situation that might make me uncomfortable. So I told her that yeah, I could certainly do that. I kept talking about it with a confident air, as much to instill it in myself as to prove it to her, though she knew better. But really, it isn't that big a deal.

And I know someone else close to me who recently overcome a similar reluctance, and anything she can do, I can do, if not better, then at least just as well. Well, except for acting. Or science. She kicks my ass at that stuff. Power of peer pressure working for good, you see.

A vector is to have speed and direction. If you're afraid to face the things that you find difficult, when they are such ordinary, surmountable tasks, it would be hard to have velocity, and therefore hard to maintain energy in life.

So today I drove back over the Bay Bridge by myself, managed to navigate an exit I hadn't used before, managed to merge and shift lanes and keep with the flow of an early morning traffic, and I didn't collide with a single vehicle.

It made me feel good, like a weight had melted away. Maybe not a huge victory in the grand scheme of things, but it got my day off to a satisfying start.

By the way, any mistakes in my math or my physics are strictly my own, and should in no way be taken as a reflection on my math or science teachers from high school, my my family, my friends, my Internet search engine, President Obama, or the 1969 New York Mets.

Baseball '09, Volume I

Baseball. There is something orderly and precise about the game. One pitcher, one batter. Four balls or three strikes. A perfect diamond of bases, trying to move from start to finish, closing the circuit for as many base runners as you can. Three outs in a half inning, nine innings in a game. Success measured in mathematical statistics. 162 games in a year, broken into home stands and road trips, series of games against individual teams. If you lose today, you can win tomorrow, sets of two, three, or four games to be fought for.

A new season coincides with the arrival of spring, so it co-opts the sense of renewal and rebirth, options for new legends and new myths to be made, as well as tons of money in Vegas, if you're so inclined.

There is the prospect this spring of Oakland having a new offensive je ne sais quoi; having spent years building a reputation for cultivating talent and then selling it off at the trade deadline, they suddenly shocked us all by bringing in some big name bats: Orlando Cabrera, ex-Red Sox star Nomar Garciaparra, prodigal son Jason Giambi (prodigal as much for going to the Yankees as for steroid use), and most of all, Matt Holliday, formerly of the Colorado Rockies, and quite possibly slated to be formerly of Oakland too after the trade deadline, depending on how things go. So I want to see Oakland early and often while I could see them with an offense.

April 14th, I got a free ticket through work, proving that having a job is good for something, even in this economy. I checked the papers, and found that Daisuke Matsuzaka, the highly successful Japanese import from last year, was pitching for Boston against Dana Eveland, one of a group of young Oakland pitchers who are highly regarded. It seemed like a pitcher's duel was on the cards, and I was looking forward to a warm East Bay evening, decor of the ballpark notwithstanding.

The Coliseum in Oakland is not what I would call a pretty ball park, nowhere near the caliber of the Giants' waterfront stadium. It has a somewhat industrial feel to it, all concrete, and the upper deck is almost completely tarped off. It always feels like I have to walk forever to find the right gate for my ticket.

But still, you have the green grass of the field in that distinctive cross-hatched mowing pattern, the white of the foul lines, the dirt of the infield and the warning track, and there was the best seat I've ever had, right along the first base foul line, halfway to the corner. It's like the players were the size of real-life people, right there in front of me. Jason Varitek was warming up Matsuzaka right there in front of me; I'd read all about Varitek in Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan's book Faithful, chronicling the Red Sox' championship season in 2004.

Objectively speaking, hero worship or athletic fanaticism is a pretty weird thing. Subjectively speaking, it is just darned cool. Seeing the players up close and in person, somehow reading the lettering of their names on the back of their uniforms, makes them seem more real.

I bought a $4 pretzel and an $8 cup of beer. Gotta love the economics of concession stands. They ought to charge on a sliding scale based on the number of drinks you've had; the more you drink, the more willing you'll be to pay extra. But the pretzel was really good.

I was happy, though there was a chill in the air.

Then the game began, and the Red Sox drove in three runs in the top half of the first inning, and I felt the cold onset of here-we-go-again. Eveland could not get anyone out, and I had flashbacks of Greg Smith's debacle against the Twins last year.

It turned out, though, that the cold I felt was simply the wind sneaking up to prove that actually the East Bay can be damned cold in the evening. It was 50 degrees and would only get colder.

But then the bottom of the first inning showed up, and Daisuke Matsuzaka did not, or at least his skill did not. Oakland drove in five runs, highlighted by a two run double by Holliday, long and far, that banged against the padded center-field wall above the outstretched glove. Matsuzaka would not be back for the second inning.

Eveland, however, settled down, and the Boston reliever, Justin Masterson, proved to be much more in command. A long and closely fought game was fought in the deepening cold. Holliday made a great tumbling catch followed by an accurate throw to put out Kevin Youkilis at first base for a double play. Dustin Pedroia of the Red Sox made one of the best diving catches in mid-air that I have seen.

Late in the game, the Red Sox scored twice more to tie the game, and we went to extra innings, as the night grew later, the cold grew sharper, and the last BART train of the night loomed closer. Still, I stayed, because, well, it was a free ticket, and leaving before the end? That seemed unthinkable, almost unpatriotic.

At the end of the 10th inning, it was 11 p.m. and I had to go. There was a steady string of other people also trudging to the BART station, and at any moment I expected to hear a roar from the stadium indicating a result for better or worse that I had missed due to a weakness of character, i.e., wanting to go home and get some sleep before work, not wanting to be stuck in Oakland with no way over the Bridge, etc.

I checked my text alerts as I took a mostly full train back to San Francisco, and by the time I was ascending the escalator at Powell Street, I found out that Oakland won in the bottom of the 12th.

All in all, a good game. As I was heading for the bus, a homeless guy named Nathaniel told me he was a gift from god and asked if it would really kill me to have a cup of coffee with him, etc., but this is not his story. This is about baseball, a bit of order to contrast with the decay and sadness and mess of the Tenderloin approaching midnight. So I don't want to write about the sad people I saw slumped on the bus, or panhandling in confused, grim-faced chaos, or the gold-clothed black man who lurched onto the bus, saying, "Whoa, I almost spilled my beer. Slow down, driver. Slow down, baby," as the bus pulled away. People saying 'fuck' loudly at the back of the bus. I got a bit freaked out, and was very glad when the bus got past Cathedral Hill and headed down into the Richmond district.

I don't want to write about that part of the night. Not now.

Play Ball

Summer has set in with unusual ferocity, as well as a blatant disregard for a calendar that implies that it is still technically spring. With this heat wave has come the crazies.

By crazies, I mean that general sense of lassitude and things going off-kilter. For instance, the other night I was riding the 38-Geary down O'Farrell, and it had to make a detour down a couple of blocks and over along Post Street due to fire engines clogging the street; once I got to the BART station, I heard the metallic announcements from the PA system announcing that debris on the tracks near Daly City was causing long delays in either direction; we were stopped in the tunnel between 16th and 24th Streets for a good five minutes, and I was getting slightly antsy, slightly claustrophobic, couldn't quite tell if we were moving or not, because there was that gentle vibration in the walls of the car.

Late Tuesday night, I had a conversation with a homeless man named Nathaniel, whose name, he pointed out, means "a gift from God." That would have meant more to me if I believed in God, I suppose; he also told me, if I heard right, which I don't think I could have done, that he came here from DC for the free HIV, and he wanted me to have a cup of coffee with him, my treat, at 12:00 on Wednesday morning and to give him my phone number so I could call him with job opportunities down the road. All very weird stuff.

It's feeling a bit like the world is coming undone like a baseball whose covering is coming unstitched.

Which means it is time to write about baseball.

This is the first entry to introduce a chronicle of what I hope are at least 7 entries covering baseball games I attend this year, as my goal is to get to one game, either Oakland or the Giants, in every month of the season, April through September. It will give a nice element of structure to the year, I think, and maybe I'll capture some of the magic--in miniature--of David Halberstam's great book, Summer of '49.

I'm already two games to the good this year, with a game in Oakland last Tuesday and a game in San Francisco last Saturday, and a Giants-Braves Memorial Day game planned. I might even get to an Oakland-Giants match-up in June, which might merit two entries, one for each team's perspective.

Baseball is full of so many narratives and meanings. Just to tout a few of my own: the Giants-Diamondbacks game I went to on Saturday featured the team I grew up with versus the team affiliated with the Missoula Osprey, so I have a connection there, and I think I saw the Diamondbacks catcher play once back home. The Giants-Braves match-up is a repeat of the very first baseball game I ever attended with my dad, 1985, a game when Bob Brenly made three errors but won the game with a home run.

When looking for something to write, might as well write about something you love and something that holds your fascination, something to get you into a groove of writing consistently.

Tomorrow I'll write about learning the heartbreaking truth behind the myth of East Bay warmth, the scandal of the scorecard and the hot chocolate, the dissonance of Red Sox fans outnumbering the good guys, and the other details of the Oakland-Boston game from last Tuesday night. Like the baseball season, writing happens every day.

Alone In The Woods

There is a road among the redwoods, paved but blanketed in pine needles, that climbs up and over and down a hill overlooking the ocean. The road itself is set high up a hillside. On spring mornings, mist and fog and bird calls mingle, and the ground is gradually mulching fallen leaves into something that sprouts fungi and moss. I've been up and down this road for the past 29 years, under my own power for the majority of it.

I remember sitting besides a great friendly bear of a grandfather in our rain jackets on a wooden bench beneath a tree at the end of the road, awaiting the mail carrier's jeep to break the silence of a morning empty of cars. I don't remember sleeping in a drawer in a small house at the top of the hill, but I suppose I did all the same.

New houses have emerged from the forest floor, particularly over the last couple of years. New driveways, new fences. It isn't quite as empty and quiet of a road anymore.

This morning I hiked up the road beneath a sharply blue sky with just a few wisps of fog clinging weblike to the upper tree branches. When I had checked my cell phone coverage at the one spot on the hill where I get service, and when I found I had no text messages, I struggled bravely on.

I walked down to the crossroads, turned around, and came back. It was a quiet morning, and I saw no one, until I walked past a man in a cap and jean jacket watering a well-manicured lawn that looked strangely out of place in the wild brown and moss of the surrounding houses.

"Good morning," I called.

"Who are you?"

"Excuse me?"

"WHO are you?"

"I'm ---- --------'s grandson. And I've been coming out here for thirty years. How about you?" I didn't say the last part, but I wanted to.

He shrugged, apparently satisfied that I wasn't going to snap and rob him.

He went back to spraying a fan of water over his lawn, and I walked on down the hill.

It's a discordant note to think that people are moving into these small communities and bringing their suspicions with them. I think that's part of the problem of sub-divisions and development. The more people who arrive, the fewer people you know.

Umm, What? Confessions of a Dangerous Game

Getting in 250 words for Friday would seem to be impossible, considering I'm starting to write at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, but there's a loophole. A friend of mine told me that as long as I write the words before I go to bed, then it totally counts for Friday. There is also a financial precedent which I am co-opting in my defense, which is that you can make a contribution to your IRA for 2008 all the way up until the 15th of this month. Who said time travel needs a De Lorean? All you need is a retroactive imagination.

Speaking of the future and time travel, check out this bit of dissonance.

So here's the thing you don't expect to see from your video game system: Dave-like judgement mixed with a condescending brand of, well, umm, I 'll let you judge for yourself.

The Nintendo Wii is brilliant in so many ways. Super Mario Kart is the latest candidate for the best game to be played while high, especially the Rainbow Road track where you are racing through loops and ethereal hyper-space jumps and down precipitous slopes, and every fifty feet it seems, you careen off the track and plummet in flames to a remarkably well-articulated Earth far below. We kept track of who was falling where; Africa, Australia, possibly Poland. The way we were racing, or more accurately, falling, Earth would be covered in more meteorites than when Kal-El came to stay.

The other game that we sampled recently was Wii Fit, which is a great concept in so many ways. Among many other games and challenges, it lets you try Yoga with on-screen coaching and feedback related to your balance, or it lets you run in place in your living room along a dirt track and grassy fields, and it is rumored that you run freely in a virtual world once you 'unlock' certain training games.

You even create a virtual you, or 'Mii", and the Wii Fit program tracks and tests your fitness, your weight, your balance, etc. It also, apparently, wants to test the strengths of your relationships.

This happened to someone I knew from back east. His girlfriend ran through several training games under her profile, and then my friend logged in to his 'Mii.' Here's the weird disconnect. Whereas when she logged in, the Wii asked how she was feeling, how she was eating, etc. When he logged in, it asked him, "Have you noticed how ------ is doing this week? Is she: a) heavier; b) slimmer; c) more toned; or d) the same?"

Bear in mind there were people in the room other than the two of them at the time the Wii dropped that stunningly bizarre moment into the conversation like a two-ton brick dropped from a three story building onto a five foot square piece of Saran Wrap. Wheee. What a fun question. How do you answer that? And why are you having to answer that to a Nintendo Wii?

When The Game Is Over

Last night, Nick Adenhart, a 22-year old rookie pitcher for the Angels, pitched six scoreless innings in Anaheim with his father watching, succeeding at a game that requires motivation and practice in addition to talent. His career on the grand stage, for money that could help him take care of his family for doing something he loves, was blossoming.

Oakland rallied to win in the late innings, but that would not diminish how proud his father must have felt.

In the early hours of Thursday, a driver ran a stoplight and broad-sided a sports car in which Adenhart was riding. Adenhart and two of his friends died; a fourth remains in critical condition.

What words could possibly express what his parents must have felt on getting that phone call?

There is nothing to say that can do justice to this tragedy.

Life changes so abruptly, predicated on such small details as which street they chose, when they turned the car on, when the game ended and how long Adenhart took to leave the ballpark.

And another example: tonight in the Giants game against the Milwaukee Brewers, the Giants absolutely dominated the Brewers, winning 7-1. But in the top of the ninth, a line drive off the bat of Milwaukee's Mike Cameron caught pitcher Joe Martinez in the head. Martinez is resting comfortably in a hospital tonight, alert and apparently stable. But the subtlest change in the ball's trajectory or how Martinez reacted or where his stride took him, and the results of that line drive could have been much worse.

Are these tragedies or near-tragedies that afflict athletes and other celebrities any more heartbreaking than any of the thousands of other heartbreaks across the world every day? Of course not, but they are a stark and very visible reminder of the fragility of life and the importance of savoring the moments of happiness, companionship, love, joy, beauty, etc.

Tonight I walked home from work in a light drizzle that gave way to a typically-San Franciscan air, not raining but definitely damp. The umbrella I carried was almost yanked out of my hand a couple of times by bites of wind. Work had been long, but I felt light and refreshed by the air; I went into the comforting chaos of Green Apple Books, spent money, walked home, bought a hot drink and cookies.

Inconsequential details compared to the pain suffered by Nick Adenhart's friends, family, and teammates today, but real nonetheless.

What We Live For . . .

is not an endless torrent of calls, one caller with a thousand names and twenty-odd requests, hours of doing the same thing that might help the members, but doesn't feel like it is building anything permanent. It doesn't feel productive; it doesn't feel creative.

I'm caught in this state of mind where I am feeling less than productive, not in the sense of not getting work done, but in a more general sense. It's hard to pinpoint the root cause of this dissatisfaction. I believe in the principles of credit unions, but right now, even knowing how important money is to this society, and therefore knowing that what I do helps the members, that doesn't feel like enough. I think I'm really starting to feel the first cracks in the illusion of immortality, not just in the sense of growing old or not, but in the sense of life staying constant, with the same people populating the same roles and functions that orbit my perception of the universe.

My life is a good one, with many fulfilling and rich aspects: a girlfriend I've been dating 66% longer than my last (and okay, first) girlfriend; good friends who live near, some who are moving nearer; family; the city of San Francisco, the ocean, wildflowers on Mount Diablo, the redwood grove in Golden Gate Park. Nevertheless, I need to do something; I'm just not sure what 'doing something' means.

Up to now, of course, I have defined 'doing something' as writing, which may or may not hold true for the rest of my life, but it is a good foundation.

Writing. I would love to say that I write profound stuff that takes the blank page of the reader's soul, crumples it up, then flattens it back out as best one can, leaving the page almost the same as before, but with interesting crinkles of nuance and feeling. Or something much less pompous of an image.

I've been trying for some time to write short stories on a set schedule, but it does not appear to be happening. I apply pressure where it isn't needed. So for now, I'm going to start simply, a resolution to write 250 words a day. No further guidelines, no demands for brilliance.

We'll see where that goes. In the meantime, I've finished my writing requirement for today. Time to listen to the rest of the Giants game on the radio.

Opening Day, And The Crowd Goes Pfeh

When I was growing up in Santa Rosa, baseball was for me the whiffle ball and the whiffle bat, tossing the white swiss-cheese plastic ball up in the air, smacking it with the hollow tube of plastic, trying to propel it across the yard, over the wire fence with the wooden railing, the demarcation of home runs. It was also baseball cards in their plastic sleeves in albums; it was posters of Will Clark; it was the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge series in 1989, before the earthquake disrupted the whole process. It was accessible; it was beautiful and full of stories and larger than life names and faces.

This year, I've recaptured some faint traces of that same passion. I've been looking forward to the new year, making a pledge to myself to go to at least one game, Giants or A's, every month, with already an Oakland-Boston game and a Giants-Diamondbacks game planned for this month.

San Francisco, I've always been a sucker for the Giants. Oakland, though, I've had my ups and downs of feeling for them. For one thing, their stadium, with the tarped-off upper deck and a decidedly-industrial field to the ballpark, is much less aesthetically pleasing than the Giants.

But in this off-season, a sudden surge of acquisitions reversed the trend of selling the young core, continuing the cycle of short term investment, brief frissons of excitement between selling the stars. Matt Holliday. The return of Jason Giambi. Orlando Cabrera. Even Nomar Garciaparra, Mr. Mia Hamm himself. All this plus the return to health of Eric Chavez promised excitement on the other side of the Bay.

This despite Lew Wolff's determination to move the club to Fremont or San Jose or just about anywhere that is not served by the Oakland Post Office.

So I was looking forward tonight to watching Oakland versus Anaheim on ESPN, especially if the NCAA Final between North Carolina and Michigan State proved to be less than a nailbiter--and indeed, the basketball caused no harm to my cuticles.

Imagine my consternation when the feed on ESPN was actually a sports news show.

Apparently the game was blacked out locally on ESPN, for the benefit of Comcast Sports Net California, with whom the A's signed a special deal for lots of money recently. It isn't that the game was played locally and wasn't sold out, which is the normal reason for a game being blacked out. No, it was blacked out so it could only be shown on one channel available only to certain people, I think on satellite.

It all boils down to money, and not to the fans, and that leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth, and I no longer feel excitement for the Oakland season. Well done, Lew Wolff; you now have my blessing to get the hell out of town. I don't care any more about you. Brilliant bit of Machiavellianism.

Water Hazards

The novel The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk portrays a fractured American society defined in part by water, or the lack thereof. The Bay Area, and the erstwhile-San Francisco in particular, is portrayed as a garden, an oasis of simple living compared to the stark, militaristic, consumptive lifestyle of the Stewards and the religious Millennialists down South.

It's a nice thought, but . . .

We spent the late afternoon yesterday at the Botanical Gardens in Golden Gate Park. It was sunny, a beautiful day with everything in bloom, and we headed right off to the turtle pond.

The water was about a foot lower than normal, so low that the fish were having a hard time not breaching the surface involuntarily, so low that they couldn't help but stir up mud from the bottom. It didn't feel right.

Today I walked through another section of the park, from Lloyd's Lake down to 6th Avenue and Fulton. The waterfall and the creek from the pond at Storybrook Cross down towards the lake were practically bare, just mud and stagnant pools.

I'm not sure if this is a result of enforced conservation, or an actual shortage. But it put into stark contrast the problem we face. It isn't just a question of enough water for humans. We are competing with flowers and animals as well; for example, the demands of agriculture and the population of Southern California have contributed to a collapse of breeding grounds for salmon in California. I wouldn't think that would be a good thing in the long run.

It raises the question, how do we effectively conserve while our population continues to grow? How do we balance?

For starters, abolish golf. It's ridiculous. In Mexico, new golf course developments at 'luxury retirement communities' are sucking up an overabundance of water in a dry environment, while the locals are scrounging for every drop they can get. It is an elitist game--George Carlin has a brilliant take--and it is not worth the expense of water used to alter the environment to make a 'pristine' golf course.

Is there a place for the game in our world? Absolutely. Is it worth diverting vast amounts of water to make a golf course look pretty in, say, the fragile ecosystem of a desert? No, and I'm willing to extend that conclusion to any sport, safe in the knowledge that no one is ever going to ask me to cast the deciding vote on implementing a dry field policy . I'm just saying, when we look at how we spend resources, do we really want to say we poured millions of gallons of water into making some place unnaturally green for the sheer sake of hitting a small white ball into a hole, taking the ball out of that hole and then hitting it towards another hole, ad nauseum?