Remember Bill

Perhaps it was a little strange to spend the first day after leaving my job by going to a memorial service for someone I had never met. Maybe sleeping in or going through my tivo recorded list would be more appropriate, but funerals happen at unexpected times, I knew I could make both the service and then go to a wedding that afternoon, and some of the most influential people in your life are the ones you never meet.

Bill Walsh was a childhood hero. Growing up the two mentors I wish I had were Bill and Obi Wan Ken-obi (the Alex Guinness version. The Ewan McGregor one I keep expecting to burst into song). There is a similarity of type between the two; at a deep level I believe that they were intellectual boxers, the ones who survived on their wits but knew how to battle when the time arose. There are the other kinds of fighters, those that use superior strength or unchecked emotion, to their advantage and in a given battle these types can win. A strong punch can triumph over a well thought out one. But I think to have a successful career is to know when to fight, to grasp the rhythm of a battle and set its tone, to understand and maximize the talent you have, to be ruthless in the brief times it is needed, and to be gentle every time else. Bill Walsh did all of these things.

“The Catch” is the “Stairway to Heaven” of football plays in that it is both overplayed and still is impressive. In the history of leaps Dwight Clark floated in the back of the end zone the way that Neil Armstrong did on the moon. The moment has been used extensively as a highlight from pre-game shows to sport drinks commercials. It was the YouTube football moment of the eighties.

Yet to shorten a decade down to a clip is to widdle its importance. A few months ago ESPN Classic replayed the entire game on television, and I was transfixed once again.

In 1982 San Francisco had an inferiority complex. The seventies weren’t kind as the drug use hardened, the Vietnam war raged, the presidency changed from paranoid to ineffective, and this rage now aimless without a fixed or easy concept to rally against (the war) or for (civil rights) manifested itself in the craziness that lead to the assassination of a mayor and soon afterwards the drinking of cool aid in the jungles of Africa.

We also sucked at sports. I don’t know whether as a pacifist city, San Francisco was doomed in a game that used war metaphors, but the Niners were bad not so much in the Charlie Brown sense where the ball is pulled away immediately before being kicked, but more in what used to be the Red Socks Way where the team would do well for most of the season until they would get crushed in the playoffs.

Bill Walsh would change this, but we could hardly expect it at the time. More Odysseus than Hercules he looked less like a classic hero than the tweedy professor who teaches classics. His boxing approach to football wasn’t going for the massive punch, but instead to use a series of dinky passes to grind an opponent. It was a strategy based on adverbs - “consistently” and “eventually” - rather than verbs such as “pound” and “crush”.

This was fine and good for the regular season, and to get a winning record was an achievement for a team that had gone 2-14 a couple of years earlier. But the question remained how would such a thing work against a powerhouse team with superior talent.

Texans breathe football the way that San Franciscans breathe fog. Any place that boasts they have “America’s team” has to have the talent to back the claim, and other than Steelers of Pittsburgh no one was as ferocious in the seventies, the battle orcs of red state America.

The Niners weren’t as talented then. They had a series of cast offs - Fred Dean, Hacksaw Reynolds - a few up and coming youngsters - Ronnie Lott, Dwight Clark - and one quarterback with a soft arm but a steady poise that slipped to the third round. Joe Montana would become one of the greats, but against this Dallas team it looked liked he was going nowhere. With three interceptions in the game, Montana looked mortal.

The local crowd felt it. The announcers kept mentioning it. When the Niners got the ball late in the fourth quarter, my memories stirred that “this was the drive,” but they went three and out. Dallas got the ball back, but a receiver dropped a ball on third down. If he made that catch then perhaps the West Coast Offense doesn’t dominate football strategy for the next twenty years. If he made that catch everything changes. But Dallas punted on fourth down to give the Niners the ball on their own 11 yard line with 4:54 left to go.

At this point watching the game I was ready for the greatest passer in history do his stuff, but what I had forgotten was that Bill Walsh was coaching. The counter puncher had to set up his final blow by doing something quite unexpected: run the football. This seems even more insane in hindsight, but the little runs by Lenvil Elliot, a player who had been cut during preseason, were available. To me, the definition of someone who can successfully do the unexpected, who achieves victory by the unanticipated, is a genius.

Finally the ball got down to the six yard line, and well, you know...

And so it was twenty five years later that I felt I had to go to the funeral. Small and with bad hands I was never going to play football well even on Nintendo. I have seldom had the courage to run when the world thinks pass. But I want to. I needed to say thanks to someone who showed that even the most physical of things can be won on wits.

Leaving Mellon

It was my seventh time doing the swim from Alcatraz, and the third that had a run afterwards. On any Alcatraz swim there is a point (usually about three minutes into the race) where the body goes numb. Perhaps the neurons grow indifferent to the danger and stop sending messages that “this cold water is a bad idea” to the brain so that the body can focus on stroking towards the shore. But what might also be the case is that after a few of these swims, my brain has been numbed to the point of thinking “Alcatraz isn’t really hard at all. It is only an hour swim.” Fear was a great motivator for training and to stop respecting the distance led to a little bit of slacking on my part. My twice a week master classes were reduced to just showing up occasionally to the pool. My series of progressive Aquatic park swims this year became just a single dip on a particular sunny morning. My crafted nutrition plan had been morphed to a couple of beers the night before.

I had no idea how strong my shoulders were, but I felt great going into the race.

The prerace portion of Alcatraz swims have the most nervous collections of athletes I have encountered. There is a constant anxious vibe about the day that causes chatter amongst the participants. Though the Alcatraz Challenge is my favorite of the swims that are held because it does not have the agro triathletes of the other events (something about having a bike brings out the worst of people), it still scares. I tried to my best with my prerace karma and offered a spare set of goggles to someone who had forgotten theirs, joked with a couple of Irishmen about the swim while waiting in line, and sat next to a man from Arkansas as he waved good bye to his indifferent children. The woman next to me on the ferry giggled hysterically

The captain announced that he would take the boat to the lee of the island and what we didn’t realize at the time was he meant that the water was too rough to position the boat normally. This fact became apparent as we hit the water in sets of three. We were push and rolled by the swells. It wasn’t the biggest ocean I have seen (that honor remains with the Maui Channel 2006), but it did feel like we were trying to swim on top of elephants.

I am more of a tug boat than a speed boat, and I did my best to trudge against the waves. This time around I found swimmers near me for most of the race which was unusual because often in the past a kayak would have to come to point me towards the expensive housing that is San Francisco. I don’t know whether this year I had better aim or there were few kayaks but I plodded alone through the waves as I learned how much I really need to respect the Alcatraz swim: one mouthful of water at a time.

Life isn’t sports.

Or if it is then it is the kind far away from Barry Bonds’ pursuit of fame. Sports are hobbies with a bit of health care thrown in. They are the distraction from the rest of our struggles whose score isn’t kept. There aren’t points given for being a good friend or responsible worker. Most of the time we toil anonymously without ever getting a medal for our efforts. But that morning swim wasn’t really about sports either even though I was quite proud of my catching a tattooed man during the run. What I will keep from my seventh crossing is an entirely different thought:

I never saw the body.

There was an ambulance at the finish line, but I assumed it was the usual precaution, the same modern notion that causes three release forms to do any activity, the one that wants not just air bags coming from the front but the sides as well. One of the reasons that we live longer now (other than we are washing ourselves more often) is that we are much more careful. It is easy to be cynical of our nerf like existence; the race t shirt itself mocked the danger with the words “swim or die.”

This was the first time the Alcatraz Challenge had someone in the second category. Sally Lowes of Houston never made it to the shore alive.

I was shocked when I discovered this after going home. Death isn’t what we expect on a Sunday morning. Granted I probably never saw Sally Lowes alive, but there was a part of me that felt it could of. How different was she from the guy who borrowed my goggles or the one from Arkansas with his kids still on the shore? There are the random people of our encounters – the extras in the cinema of our lives – that we catch briefly in a single moment perhaps tying a shoe or giggling loudly and we remember them briefly as the giggler until that moment too fades.

Looking at it now, I don’t just fell I should have respected the race more with both an awareness of the sea could do and the foresight to try to prepare, but I also feel that I should do that for life. It is easy to wander through things half numb to the world.

The race itself isn’t why I have decided to leave my job and spend 9 months trying to write. That decision was made a few weeks ago when the project I was on was canceled. But it does stem from a similar notion that I need to relearn passion again and find warmth as I get rolled by the waves. Because the one truth from yesterday is that there will be a time perhaps distant but perhaps too soon that we aren’t going to reach some shore.

French Lessons

I am not sure whose idea it was to offer French 1½ at my junior high, but I now see the concept as the great compromise between the parents who believed their high priced tuition would actually cause their children to learn the language and therefore be promoted after a year to French 2, and the reality that there was a group of us who would never cease the struggle between whether you should être or avoir for the past tense of a particular verb. My father in particular couldn’t see why we needed to learn the past tense; his great hope was that I could one day translate menus for him in front of the perpetually condescending waiter, that I would learn the great French lexicon of cooking temperatures, sauces, and animal parts, and I know it troubled him that the best I could do was to muster whether a dish came with fries or cheese.

I like to think my small band of French ignoramuses were good in other things besides the subjunctive. Several joined me from the upper math class as we made our journey down the hall to French 1½, a journey of shame only surpassed by the long walk across the gym to ask a girl to dance. It wasn’t that we were unaware of Pascal. It was just that we thought of that more as a computer language than as a philosopher.

The class couldn’t have been easy for the instructor either. She must have longed to be with the gifted ones in French Two, the students who basked in the wit of Molière, the insight of Voltaire, or the humanity of Hugo. Our class, on the other hand, had the speaking skills of Marcel Marceau. Our teacher did her best to come up with little activities to distract us from our lack of progress. We had a couple of field trips which were a great way to get past the ennui. The first was a trip to a French restaurant, and I told the kid next to me the joy of ordering something au gratin.

The second was a trip to see a French film. The good news she told us beforehand was that the film would have English subtitles, a tool that would have helped our homework in general. Having a sense that we might get to see a more authentic Peter Sellars, we were quite excited when we poured into the vans and drove to the local art house.

I think what we got wasn’t really what the teacher had expected. It was for a lack of a better word, explicit. The first part of the film was full of unbuttoned garments, sweat, and armpit hair; and at one point in time a swing was used. I kept hearing the cries of “Mon Dieu. Mon Dieu,” in the theater.

That turned out to be our teacher.

Needless to say at that point none of us were looking at the subtitles, and we felt quite relieved when the teacher said we didn’t have to write a report on what we saw. She added it was probably best that we didn’t discuss this trip with our parents.

The second part of the film was a long discussion about the ramifications of what happened with the first part. It was the opposite of American romantic films in which most of the journey is about the prelude; this French film was about the consequences. Years later when I had my first experience I was a little nervous that afterwards I would have to do a ninety minute discussion of socialism and the destruction of the modern artist. I was relived when this wasn’t the case, but it also came with the sad realization that a swing wasn’t probably ever going to be involved.

I am not sure if that field trip alone kept me motivated to learn French, but I did try. After three more years of it in high school when I got to college, I was placed once again back into French 1. I scraped by the first two terms to get to go abroad in my college’s remedial language program in the wonderful town of Blois in the Loire Valley.

Our instructors there, too, had to figure out how to help a motley bunch who had a hard time figuring that a tie must be feminine. We once again had field trips, but this time we harvested grapes, visited the local chateau, and took the chocolate factory tour. One teacher thought it would be a good idea if we had a touch of culture and knew of this one play called “Hair” that would be coming soon to town. It turns out the second thing the play is known for is the anthem “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” that spoke to a generation of draft dodgers, lovers, and smokers, in the way that musical theater only can.

But perhaps the best thing the play was known for didn’t make its way across the Atlantic to our teacher’s attention. At the end of the first act as the entire cast sung about freedom and personal grooming, they disrobed entirely. My classmates and teachers’ jaws dropped at the fleshy display. But having come more experienced from French 1½, I could sit there confidently and say to myself, “Ah, yes. This is French.”

Fillmore Jazz

The Fillmore Street Jazz Festival is a séance to the older neighborhood that disappeared slowly one store at a time. The doughnut shop left a decade ago. Mi Burrito became Zao Noodles. The street became the place to buy luxury soap and curved furniture: the store Design within Reach defines reach at about 800 dollars for a chair. The crime left, but music disappeared as well having been evacuated into white ear buds and cell phones.

What makes the Fillmore festival different is the jazz. I think the same pottery vendors and rhinestone artists travel street by street in the summertime, but few places have keyboard jams drifting through the air in the same way that the smell from the garlic chicken wafts through the fair.

I watched Sira and the Afro Funk band put down a wicked baseline. The bass rift is the most stolen parts of a modern song. Higher Ground can sneak into Under Pressure and then get completely transferred over to Ice Baby Ice. There is a part of the bass that stirs the animal in us. If the summer in the city forty years ago was about love, then the bass that arrived thirty years ago in seventies funk was something far more sweatier. It is the difference between soft kisses and the wordless grind.

The crowd slithered in front of the stage. Women in tank tops gyrated as their boyfriends drank tall Budweiser’s. A homeless woman circled to pick up the empty cans with a coat hanger, and it seemed that we were back to that culture collision that happened long ago: the desperate and the decadent sharing the same place for a couple of sunny afternoons. There was the horror of the clashing lifestyles, that we are not too isolated from anyone. A homeless man came up to me and he carried a flask for something to anesthetize the differences. He called out to me and I recoiled out of the instinct that comes from too many days of just trying to walk down Market Street.

"Did you go to Dartmouth?" he asked, and I realized he could tell by green sweatshirt.

"I just got back from reunion." I replied. "Great place"

"I was the class of 64" he said as we drifted in different directions. It must have been a hard forty years since them for him.

I would like to say that I was compassionate, but I am not much better than most of the newcomers in this town who want their jazz disneyfied. It saddens me that I have lost such a charitable instinct. I felt wrong to have gone into a store and have the sales person pitch for ten minutes a cartridge system for an espresso machine instead of talking to that rather unbathed fellow alum. I realized then that Fillmore Street isn’t the only thing to have changed, and while I might occasionally get to listen to the music of the street I am still along way off from getting its soul.

Gear Check

I once dropped a shoe. With running there is so little gear - a pair of shoes, some lightweight clothes to whisk away moisture, perhaps a water bottle - that the mind can wander from a simple gear check that sports like hang gliding or parachuting require. In those more dangerous pursuits an untied knot has deeper repercussions.

It was the first cross country race I ever did in high school. The course was a mile up a hill, a mile down, and then a half mile along the flats. I was more of a climber then and was in front for the uphill portion of the race only to be passed on the downhill. When we hit the flats my left shoe which had been dangling fell off, and I scooped up it with my hand. I felt pretty good and passed the four people ahead of me while still carrying the shoe in my hand across the finish line.

My coach did not know what to do with me. He didn't want to stifle the enthusiasm, but he shook his head about the race. "Never seen anything like that," he began, and after a slight pause added "It is a little easier if both of them are tied."

I thought about that as I headed south to my high school reunion.

Reunions are those times to check our gear, to examine what we carry. My friends came back with new business cards. They came with stories of honeymoons and grad schools. They came with diapers and strollers.

I returned with a few good rambles about endurance events (including my last 50k ski race coming soon to a winter team near you). There is a part of going to these types of events that makes one long to be able to tie more tightly those long ago memories, to fix just a few things - the "If I only knew then what I knew now" syndrome of regret for those times when it mattered more to be tender or brave. Granted the other parts of reunions are the drinking and the boasting, so perhaps in the end not much is either remembered or forgiven, but I wanted to believe that I would come back and share.

I like to think I did well, that my stories brought back those warm moments, but this, like the missing shoe, went a little bit off course.

During the first night of the reunion, I went wide to hug a mutual friend (who happened to be one of the stars of the show Top Design), and as I expanded my arms to say nice going, another friend leaned forward. The net result was a margarita pile up worse than any happy hour at Chevy's. After I quickly returned with towels, the drench friend didn't seem too upset, stood there half smiling and acknowledging that, of course, this would happen to us. "Oh, Arthur. don't worry about it," she said gently with a slight laugh, but in my heart I knew that there must be an easier way to relive the awkwardness of high school.

I can't say that that the Alumni Mesa Race the next day was my comeback attempt at grace for the reunion. Only a good dry cleaner could do that. But the hope was that I could relive some of those memories running through the gentle warmth of a Santa Barbara day. The old track coach has since left the school, and his replacement was someone who just finished 15th at the LA marathon with a time of 2:47. He would be racing. It was clear at the starting line that I wasn't going to win this event, and my only hope for dignity was to try to come ahead of the guy pushing his two children in a stroller. I figured that my unencumbered lifestyle gave me an edge. "Just beat the stroller," I mumbled to myself. Just beat the stroller.

It turns out the guy could push like an expert shopper in an after Christmas sale. For the first part of the first lap he was right behind me, and as it looked like I would drop him since he had to navigate the steps next to the science building, the LA marathon guy offered to help carry the stroller up the stairs. My big gravity advantage was neutralized. After helping the parent, the track coach burst past me (I think he could have made a sandwich or composed a haiku in the time differential of our races) and I was left to the man versus chariot competition.

I spent the next ten minutes hearing the wheels behind me rumble while two kids felt the breeze of their father's efforts. Somehow I managed to hold onto second place. Though the head of alumni development is going to send me a t-shirt as a prize, what I will remember more was that chance to go back to the paths from long ago and finish them this time with shoes on both my feet, that somehow I am starting to make it around this world a little more complete.

The Warriors' Tale

When I was a child, a friend of mine, Andrew Brigham, took me aside and told me he knew who the tooth fairy was. As a child this was need to know information, the currency of youthful trades that involve sandwiches or baseball cards. We arrive in this world almost as bewildered as we leave it, and we spend most of the time in between searching for universal truths. I wasn’t sure who the president was at the time, but I knew that one of the most powerful people in the world had to be the Tooth Fairy.

In a hushed voice and making sure that there weren’t any observers, Andrew let me in on the secret: “The Tooth Fairy is my mom.”

When I made it home I immediately told my brother, George, and for two years we believed that Mrs. Brigham had this special secret life. Other parents might have had cool stuff like a car with squishy seats, but only one was in charge of the massive dental recycling program.

I still want to believe that legends can be local, that there just might be magic somewhere in the neighborhood.

Perhaps the only thing more foolish than holding out for the Tooth Fairy is rooting for the Golden State Warriors. It is a doomed organization with a constant barrage of wrong trades. Nothing ever seems to work, and whatever brief flickers of a good idea disappeared as quickly as New Years resolutions. They were at best semi talented players who for instance skipped practice to play golf (Mookie) or decided to let the coach know about their approach to management style (Sprewell). At worst there were bench dregs of the league, the kind that get the articles about “what is wrong with the NBA”, the contract albatrosses who didn’t even look happy that they got to stay at four season hotels when they traveled..

The experience of going through the drought is a lonely one. People stop talking about the team. You have to ask a bar or sport club to change the channel just so you can watch the game instead of bass fishing, and when your team is getting crushed by twenty and your players are laughing on the bench you don’t mind as much when they change the channel back.

And then out of nowhere for the better part of a month things suddenly started working. Three point shots started going in. The team actually enjoyed playing together. There was a vibe coming out of Oakland, a funk with a seventies swagger.

When that miracle hits your own sports team you are almost too stunned to be ecstatic. Over these years your heart has been cauterized. I looked at the game peeking through my hands, because I wasn’t sure if this could possibly be the truth. How can a bunch of guys who gleefully given up by their former teams make a run to get to the playoffs. It wasn’t just that nobody made the all star team; nobody argued that anyone should. There were three teams ahead of them for that last slot and they would have to be near perfect just to possibly make it. How can a team learn how to play defense this late in a season?

I noticed that everyone else is starting to pay attention. A cute girl on the bus talked into her cell phone that she is going to watch the Warriors, and it was the first time I could remember a woman discussing the warriors ever.

The Warriors then got the matchup: an absolute heavy weight whom somehow they played really well against, a 67 game winner with the MVP. Someone calls him the next Larry Bird. Everyone said that team is hungry having lost in the finals. Everyone said Dallas would win.

The Warriors showed what true hunger is. They played great basketball. The kind you dream about at the YMCA; the energetic, frantic, emotional hoops that had been missing in the league. It isn’t the most graceful, but it is pure hoops and the rest of the city knew it.

The rest of the country started too as well.

The arena rocked. Steve Kerr said this is the best basketball crowd he has ever seen. This was Steve Kerr who was the basketball equivalent of Ringo Starr. The best crowd he has ever seen? A team playing gutty pure ball? A 67 win team getting pounded?

It was surreal. Archeologists use the fact that every now and then the magnetic poles of the earth reverse to date strata, and the world felt like it had turned upside down.

But as the Warriors drew another opponent it became clear that fairy tales do end. They ran into the big bad wolf named Boozer. In their last pages of any story we learn whether we are Red Riding Hood or her grandmother; we find out if we were the pig that built a house of brick or the one who used straw.

So it comes down to one night, one more time to put something under our pillows and hope. There will be time later to analyze my misinformed delusions, but for a few more hours in May, I want to believe by the skin of my teeth.

Go Warriors

Sushi

The secret to making sushi is saran wrap. Or at least that was what I thought for a while. Preparing sushi is less about the temperature dance of ordinary cooking (with the rice being the only thing that gets hot), and more about structural engineering combined material science. The rice must be sticky, the seaweed must wrap, the fish needs to flop, and the watsabi must glue. Squeeze too tightly and everything gets a rock texture. Relax and everything falls apart. It is a messy balance and in my beginning sushi class my ingredients either spilt across the table or clung to my fingers. I made mounds of sushi shrapnel.

This is why you need saran wrap. Safe sushi employs the same principles as the safe sex kit I got my freshman week: spend a great deal of time figuring out if you have the right ingredients and if you decide to go for it, wrap everything in plastic to prevent accidents.

There wasn’t much advice about what to do with the smell.

Our instructor, an elderly Japanese man, hopped around on one leg that almost seemed like he was the losing teacher in Karate Kid XII: The City College Years. He was the same combination of firm yet supportive discipline that his own sushi must have. He was also a genius with a knife to the point that whomever did something to his leg probably hasn’t been heard from again.

He wasn’t too pleased with my saran wrapping of the sushi mat, and I was quite worried not just from a personal safety perspective but also that if I couldn’t actually fold the mat correctly I feared I was going to be useless when it came to real fish. My first two rolls came out okay, and I grew needlessly arrogant. My third roll exploded and I cheated by using a second sheet of seaweed. I don’t think the instructor caught me.

Somebody asked him where to buy fresh fish, and I, too, wondered having visions of an exotic fish market at the edge of town with seagulls flying about and rows of aquariums with strange tentacles things pouring out of them like props in a Star Wars movie. In my imagination the place would be run less by a Jabba the Hut figure, but more with a small woman with long fingers who had a dozen or so cats. Perhaps she could be missing an eye in the same battle that caused my instructor to break a leg. You would have to knock three times just to enter such a market.

The place that my instructor actually recommended was a supermarket about four blocks from where I live. I felt like and idiot having paid thirty dollars for someone to tell me, "Oh, by the way you live at the edge of Japan Town." I think there are times where we want things distant, where we cherish mystery. That sushi is better when you haven’t translated what the piece is you are eating and just hope it comes from something that has a tail. That you can see the perfectly arranged plate and have no idea the guy behind the counter still has rice stuck on the back of his hands. Of the places that I had hoped sushi came from, aisle three wasn’t one of them.

Still any good mystery has a denouement. You don’t need an entire reveal, but a sense of how some of clues came together leads to an appreciation of the structure and deeper pondering of what else is there. Exploring is good.

But if you do go out into the world keep that touch of caution. Adventures need structure where even as everything seems to be falling apart, there is a safety line that pulls things together. Bike, but carry extra tubes. Jump out of a plane, but make sure you have a reserve chute. And if you want to try making sushi remember the saran wrap.

Leather

Leather. While denim might be San Francisco contribution to the world of fabric, the city’s has a long history of bovine appreciation. I grew up in Cow Hollow, a neighborhood before real estate agents swallowed it into the Marina and Pacific Heights. The city has bars that specialize in hats, festivals that bring out vests, and parades that show off chaps. The stench of this cow town has long since been replaced with the scent of coffee shops and day spas, but there are the remnants of this western lifestyle. This weekend I went to one of the largest leather gatherings in the city – the annual Grand National Rodeo at, of course, the Cow Palace.

The last time I went to the Palace was for the wintertime Dickens fair with the exotic costumes, salty shanties, and quantities of mead. The Grand National rodeo harkens back to the same century but a different continent. The same percentage of folks wear hats, but the shanties are more about god, dogs, and country, and the mead tastes like Budweiser. Buckles aren’t used for shoes, but are meant to be status codpieces worn on belts. The fans’ devotion to the event remained the same.

The level of pure earnest at these festivals seeps deeply into the spectators. Most have such a strong desire to participate in a pulp genre lifestyle where the poor are dirty, villains are real estate crooks, and the women wear copious amounts of undergarments. There are times when I think everyone clings fantasy of a simpler time when there wasn’t email or downsizing, but the past that is cherished has been bleached by Disney in the same way that tomorrowland doesn’t ever have homeless. There is an absence of London’s cholera and Native American small pox at these festivals. The notion of an ambiguous past is not meant for those who need to worship it.

The real difference between the Dickens fair and the rodeo is that at the end of the day of the rodeo somebody has to ride the bull.

The rest is prelude. The show has horses being spun as if they were dogs chasing their tails, and dogs rounding cattle into corrals as if they were horses. A perky Miss Grand National dressed in a satin shirt and a bouncy hairstyle that suggested that Mane 'N Tail shampoo wasn’t only used for her steed. Quite a few events were about getting a calf to the ground either by jumping on them, having a couple of buddies lasso both the front and back legs, or a soloist lasso then tie the fallen calf. Boxers get ten counts; calves only get six. The fasting roping of the night was by the security guards who caught a drunk hopping the fence to take a short cut to the Montgomery Gentry Concert. The time remained unofficial.

There was a small laser show before the bull riding that was reminiscent of Jordan’s Chicago championship team introductions. This one was followed by real cattle. Bull riding is one of the few things that is tougher than it sounds. The sport has long been a source of metaphors. Middle management is constantly being told to grab the bull by the horns. From the standpoint of someone trying to last 8 seconds this is not a very good idea.

A better approach is clenching braided rope and kick in the opposite direction of the creature as it bobs and weaves. It might be too simple to say that a bull is an elephant injected with caffeine, but the truth is that leading rave drink isn’t called "Red Dumbo." A good bull has a variety of moves: a midair twist, a double down head fake, and a back side shimmy. Bull riding is the battle between the last two of Newton’s laws: the bull’s seeks "force is mass times acceleration" to his advantage, while the rider must counter with "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Bull riding is equal parts physics and prayer. To project their cognitive abilities, most riders now wear helmets. I don’t know if the outlaw shells come in black.

When I saw the first bull ride I thought that the show must have been sponsored by the National Chiropractor Association, but the lead sponsor of the Grand National is a workman compensation insurance company, Andreini & Company. There must have been an actuary a few booths over from me drowning his night with Budweiser and mumbling "We insured what?"

No one finishes a bull ride easily. A few can hop on a nearby horse and then bounce to the ground, but everyone limps out of the arena. The unlucky ones are stamped or speared, which I think in the variety of workplaces has to be the worst exit interview ever. All of the riders on my night made it out on their own accord, but I have no idea whether they will make it to thirty.

It takes a sport so old to crush men so young. As they hobbled they had the physique of rookie baseball players but the posture from playing football against someone twice your size. They carried not just the weight of their own rides, but the collective need of nostalgia.

The Lorax in Concert

The Beatles played their last paid concert in San Francisco. As did the Sex Pistols and the Band. It isn’t so much that rock stars don’t come to the Bay Area; it is that we get them after their peak – the entertainment equipment of a baseball player after too many off-seasons eating hot dogs instead of weightlifting being told that from now on he will a designated hitter. There are parts of the performance that remain, little bits that can still amaze with the energy that came from the younger self, but the complete concert is reduced to at best a greatest hits compilation with the occasional song of the new album that serves as a reminder of how the new work is vastly derivative. Few have good second acts. Last Wednesday I saw one of the great exceptions.

It had been 19 years since I had last heard him speak, and after all these years the first thing I noticed is that we are both about 30 pounds heavier than the time he visited my college. Whatever effects there are from global warming are exasperated by the extra layers we ate into ourselves. Physical charisma isn’t as important to him now; no longer a heartbeat away from his boss’s job, he has moved on from the power that comes from an elected official to a new role of his defining, our environmental designated hitter. He is, now more than the last decade, our political rock star. He is Al Gore.

There was a buzz at the Masonic Auditorium on Wednesday night for Al Gore’s City Arts talk that is usual reserved for sport events or half off Christmas sales. If there is a city that longs more for a few hundred votes going a different way in Florida, I don’t know it. David Remnik in the New Yorker captured this angst about how different the world would be as did a skit on Saturday Night Live. The sketch shows a future with each 2000 presidential candidate. George Bush’s world is in flames, and Will Ferrell played him as a bumbling maniac. There was a time when the show made fun of how incompetently Bush spoke, but it stopped after that September as if the planes not only collided with the towers but their sense of irony as well. What was supposed to funny now actually came true: America was burning.

The skit of Gore’s possible future was of a bored nation. He had the country open up text books, and spoke like a disappointed history teacher to the state of Iowa. In real life he speaks with monotones and sighs. He hesitates to form the right sentence, and in these pauses I could feel he was weighing the choices; considering the balance between environment necessity and human urges, educational reform and television regulation, between Nuclear power and carbon offsets; and examining each item as is connects to the fabric of understanding that comes from a life that not only gained access to scientific experts, but also the far harder choice of seeking them out and listening. Al Gore is a rock star.

At first I thought crowd around me murmured only agreeing giggles when he talked, but it came clear in the word of Mark Anthony that some came not praise him, but bury him. The woman behind me bristled every time the interviewer asked Gore about the greatness of private schools. She seemed oblivious that she was sharing a lecture with the rest of the crowd, and the experience she had hoped for the $15 was to ramble loudly as if she were watching the former vice president on television. Perhaps she just had a couch mode where politics were meant to be drowned out by sound of ones own voice.

The hard part is that she wasn’t alone.

A third of the way somebody else started screaming about how 17,000 scientists didn’t believe in global warming. I was taken back by how anyone could heckle Al Gore. The sentence about Al Gore that use the word “polar” should it before the words “ice caps” and not “’izing figure.” Being against Al Gore is a bit like being against Smokey the Bear. Both are against C02 from forest fires.

Somebody else right behind me was ejected for yelling about carbon offsets crushing the third world. There is an angry showmanship side to San Francisco politics; there is a point when radicalism shifts to a destructive force, a time where a good concept such as making San Francisco more bike friendly shifts into beating up people in minivans. Sometimes it seems we are city of bull horns instead of Boy Scouts.

I do believe strongly in free speech but have a larger hesitancy about free shouting. It isn’t so much that someone yells fire because in that case at least the expression is being heard, but it is more the conundrum that if everybody yells then no one can hear what is being said. The strength of a political argument is not measured by the volume of sound, but by the analysis of its points. It needs dialog. It needs people who are willing to weigh the information of the world. It needs Al Gore.

At most of the lectures in the City Arts program there is a book signing afterwards, but Gore disappeared quickly once the talk was over. It is much harder for him to mingle than say his predecessor Dan Quayle (though granted his successor isn’t coming to San Francisco anytime soon). Without the epilogue the lecture seemed short.

I left knowing that screaming “encore” wasn’t going to help anymore than “four more years” did at the start of the millennium. I believe that my voice is bettered used to talk about his points with smaller groups of friends. My voice isn’t meant for the big stage; we can’t all be rock stars.

Beyond Lemonade

I believe there is a similarity between cooks and air traffic controllers. There is an art of keeping dishes airborne, a skill of precision timing and temperature memorization that keeps at once vanilla soufflés rising, lemon candies glazing, and canollis deep frying in a moment of controlled culinary struggle between trying to get the highest quantity of perfectly flaky deserts and not setting off the fire alarm.

I was a bit lost in my Saturday “Cooking with Lemons” class.

It might have been the deception of title of the course because the truth of pastry cooking is that it is never about lemons; it is always about the cardiac trio of eggs, sugar, and flour. From a construction perspective they form respectively the cement, paint, and wood of the structure being built. Lemons are more the furnishing, a few nice chairs being added to the room or the vase in the corner that distracts the eye. It is what you remember about a place. But without a context it would be lost like junk at a yard sale.

The instructor just assumed that we would have ten large eggs separated into whites and yolks. He actually insisted on extra large eggs for a better protein ratio. I lost the reason as he then went into how you should put racks at the bottom of the stove and then on to another point about how to butter a pan. My notes couldn’t keep up with his constant shifting dialog.

Perhaps at my best I could do one pie at a time, but he was determined to do four deserts at once: A chocolate dipped canollis with lemon marscarpone toasted almonds; a Mexican lime, mango and tequila cassata; a lemon and white chocolate tart; and a lemon and strawberry crème fraîche torte. He made the caramel for one at the same time as he worked the crust for another. A sous-chief in the background kept stirring and kneading, and a dishwasher came in halfway through the demonstration to wash the entire Williams Sonoma catalogue of whisks, graters, and bowls he used, but these were meant to be background players to his egg orchestration.

“Remember to get the sugar and water to exactly 238 degrees,” he said. “Sometimes it will get to 231, and you think you are done. But then it will shoot to 238 and if you don’t pay attention you will have only a film left,” he gave as a warning.

I think that was about the mango cassata. The truth is I understand the various cooking temperatures about the same way as I grasp Ashcroft terror levels of green, yellow, orange, and impending doom. Nervous about botching my recipe I highlighted the importance of 238 like it was a universal constant such as the speed of light or the number of phone calls it takes get a girl to go out with you. He then said if it was foggy outside it might have to be slightly higher. I now had fears about having to be a meteorologist as well.

Pastry cooking is hard.

With the kitchen aid blender whirling egg whites, he summoned us over to give us a better sense of when sponge cake has proper texture. We each poked into three sections to measure the bounce.

Perhaps this is the solution of how to manage the process. Perhaps we need to learn how to bake by feel. The thirties for me and my friends has been a constant balancing of hopes and hobbies, of relationships for some blessed with trying to navigate new additions and for others brutal conversations about falling apart in therapy, of careers that rocket up a management ladder or wind up being a never ending series of interviews for third rate companies. It seems at times we have been separated into our own egg parts with one batch for those who look like they have made it and the other that is a deflated soufflé.

It is not so much that our generation wants have our cake and eat it too; it is that somehow we are trying to do four deserts at once. And in this struggle some have figured out how to manage the mishaps of the world when there is still time to adjust the heat. Some are still trying to figure out the dough.

Watching our cooking instructor I still how no idea how he could have so many pots going much less figure out what spoon went with which dish. I thought he must be some savant, a figure that had time going much slower the way the pitches must seem slower to Barry Bonds or the end of Bush’s presidential term for the rest of us.

And then he made a mistake. He was finishing up the Mexican lime, mango and tequila cassata and was about to put into the refrigerator when a woman seated in the row in front of me asked “Shouldn’t you add the mango?” He was human after all.

He quickly apologized for missing the fruit. The desert without the fruit would have just been lime and tequila which certainly is good on a tropical vacation or a memorable second date, but not the art he had hoped.

The sous-chef who had been quiet mentioned that she would not have let him put the cassata in without the mango, and I realized that the only way we can make it through this busy world isn’t just on our sense of feel. We make it with the help of others. The world isn’t quite Netwon’s idea of standing on the giants who came before us, but I believe it is more of a place where we are elbow to elbow with each other in the kitchen (and with global warming we have kind of left the stove on). We need each other to check to see if something is burning. We need people to remember our mango.

And while I can’t say I left the demonstration with a deep grasp of how to make pastries I can say that not only did I get four wonderful deserts for lunch, but also learned the answer to the deeply philosophical question of how many does it take to mango.

Gliding Through the World: Gold Rush Race Report

I came in dead last again. The first time I came in last in a race with TNT in 2005 it was kind cool in a complete beginner way. But after a couple of years in the sport I had hoped to make some progress.

The race for me was over before it started. Not only was everyone was dressed in spandex, but they had the body types that suggested this wasn’t a bad idea. The pro teams (Salomon, Fisher, and Subaru) made up the front row. The next row was the local club teams such as Far West Nordic or the local high school. I was in the third row and was dropped faster than Donald Rumsfield after the midterm elections. There is a rule of poker that if you can’t figure out the idiot at the table, it probably was you. There were only about five skiers around me down the first hill, but I had little doubt who was missing a screw.

At least I thought that was only a metaphor going down the first hill. When I was putting on my skis, a spectator on the balcony above shouted that something dropped of my left ski. I quickly picked it up, put it in my pocket and told the guy that it must have been garbage. I had brought my skis in the day before to the shop to have them waxed and then figured it must have been something they had put on the ski. I didn’t think much of the Greek chorus on the balcony. In retrospect it was a bit like going to the beginning of a bike race and someone shouting out that there seemed to be a few gears left on the ground.

The release lever on my left binding was broken. It could not lock and as it was hit by snow would raise into the eject position. A small bump would then discard the ski, and I would be left with a single ski heading down the slope. The good news for the first lap was there wasn’t much loose snow on the trail. The course was a solid layer of ice having gone from temperatures in the mid sixties to freezing overnight. Snow plowing wasn’t any more affective than prayer on the descents. It was, as they say back east "wicked fast," and I gained strong momentum barreling down the hill.

The first ski ejection didn’t happen until the second turn. As I skidded first on my knees then on my belly I watched the last five skiers speed off into the distance. It was the final time I saw a fellow racer on the same lap. I ejected once more on the first lap, but for the second lap the snow had started to soften and I ejected six times. I started to make a routine of slowing ever so often to press down on the release lever and knock out what ever snow had accumulated. This worked well for the third lap.

I don’t want to make an equipment excuse for the race. I believe that you are responsible for your own gear. The race field was so strong that I doubt it would have made that much difference in overall placement. While I was recovering and putting on my ski I was resting and that had to have helped ski stronger in other places. I figure the net of equipment loss combined with a misplace turn was about five minutes which would have gotten me close enough to see other racers.

It was, however, a great day to be at Royal Gorge. With clear skies, the sierras were majestic, and the snow was so fast that I wound up with a personal best for the distance. Everyone did well; the course record was broken by a US Olympian who was the year behind me in school. It is an odd sport that sixty bucks gets you 81 spots behind Olympic competition. The only good news is that racing against the pros (other than watching amazing form) is that the equipment representatives are at the race as well. The wife of the Salomon rep was at the finish and was actually amazed that I had gone 30 miles on a broken binding. She offered to get me a new set of bindings and then commented how I should get better skis.

Still I am frustrated that I couldn't have done better. There is the notion that we should continually improve, that we learn from our mistakes and strengthen from our training. I don't want to be the "Charlie Brown" of skiing who constantly gets the football pulled away from him. I don’t want to be the replacement skier for the Wild World of Sport’s "Agony of Defeat." I want there to be joy in Mudville. I want Bill Buckner to field that grounder.

But the nature of sports is that there are those who finish last. Champions need people to thwart. I know that I want the reputation of a hero who wins gracefully, but that doesn't seem to be my casting in these endeavors. Instead I am out there both overmatched and under-equipped trying to make it around long after the glory has passed. I am there to give context to the struggle, to give the benchmark of the ordinary. I am out there to seize the best of what I have and to keep going even if means gliding through the world on broken skis. I am there to race.

California Dreaming on Such a Winter's Day

The legal boundary for gambling is the state line between California and Nevada, but for those with a keener sense of risk, the real challenge is the wintertime drive on route 80 as it heads over the mountain pass. Like all bets the drive can look deceptively simple. On a clear day traffic speeds along at times great than seventy miles an hour on two lanes: one that is almost reserved for the 18 wheel trucks and the other for their smaller gas guzzling cousins, suv’s. On those good days the mountains are less than four hours away from San Francisco, and the allure of spending weekday life at sea level and weekend life skiing on Olympic quality resorts has created a Gortex migrant class. Thousands go to the mountains in hopes of a weekend concoction of deep powder, blue skies, private hot tubs, and micro brewed beer. Most weekends this quadriceps indulgent lifestyle can be achieved.

But there are those other weekends when the gamble goes the other way; sometimes it snows. The book, The Perfect Storm, was about a series of weather coincidences that lead to massive waves in the Atlantic and George Clooney to try to speak with a Maine accent. Storms along Donner Pass up this ante; as bad as it got for Clooney he never decided to eat Mark Walberg. The mountain ridge is a jagged comb that clouds from the pacific scrape against as they head west. The week before the Great Ski Race it snowed 18 inches on three consecutive days, and I tried to do my best to make it over the pass.

I had rented a four wheel SUV from Hertz and decided to splurge on the $25 dollars worth of insurance. I was at a friends 40th birthday party and when I woke the next day and realized the combination of margaritas I had the night before wasn’t going to mix very well with trying to hit the slopes I got in the car and headed home. I was waved through a highway check that mad sure all vehicles had either chains or four wheel grip.

They don’t check, however, if the drivers have any understanding of physics because my journey home was filled with answers to high school problems of what would happen if a large mass hit a frictionless surface at a certain velocity. The times I slid were moments of chance. As I headed toward the snow bank on the side of the road there wasn’t much more I could than simply hope that something caught the pavement. I was lucky. Once the wind caught the truck directly ahead of me and pushed it one lane over. Another time with a different truck it sent it diagonally down the road before the truck managed to pull out and just avoid the 18 wheeler coming over the hill.

At least these were the times I could see. There were a couple of instances when the wind was blowing so strong at the drifts on the side of the road that I could not see the truck a few feet ahead of me, a white out. In one of my perhaps dumbest driving moments I tapped on my breaks because I wasn’t sure if the car a few feet behind me could see me either. I don’t know what it is like to drive through smoke at the Dayton 500, but I will admit that I was stupid enough to try to drive blind.

I think this idiocy of trying the pass might be the sieve that makes Easterners think all Californians are kooky. Those from the older states grew up with Snow Days and approach such conditions with the concept of there are times that one should not be out driving. This practical philosophy doesn’t occur to the Golden State where the ability to drive is almost in the state constitution, and the horror of missing a Monday meeting is almost unforgivable. The thing about being snowed in at the East is that everyone is. On the west coast, there is a good chance that your clients aren’t.

I did finally make it home in time for my father’s 71st birthday and was bright eyed enough for my banking job the rest of the week. A little bit of fear still lingered though as I knew I was heading up the next weekend to go once again over a mountain pass. Only this time, I would do it without a car.

The Great Ski Race goes 18 miles from Tahoe to Truckee. In its thirty second year it is a fundraiser for the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue, an organization that aids those skiers who have made extremely bad turns. It did seem a little strange to have a race that was about helping people get out of the wilderness would send just under two thousand into it, but this is the kind of irony that my brain shutdown in elevation.

Since the route is a point to point, there is a bus that takes those who park at the finish to the start. The weather looked liked it was going to be gorgeous as I waited in the parking lot. I watched slow moving sunrise was a dark shade of amber and then turned around to catch the moon set under the mountains.

With my weather fears slowly dissipating, I quickly found a new source of anxiety: the competition. Someone shouted asked the guy four people back from me whether he was planning on doing Western States, the 100 mile race through the mountains.

“No,” he replied, “not this year,” as if there were other years that he would have thought this was a sensible idea. The guy seated next to me on the bus ride was an ironman triathlete which took him about three minutes for him to mention in the same way that people from Harvard name drop their alma mater. He then talked about how he done really well at a twelve hour adventure race and how great his training was coming along. I do not know why I tend to be the recipient of these types of discussions, but I do think the khaki pants and 49er sweatshirt I wore as an outer shell before the race started didn’t really intimidate enough.

I did discover the one subject that will go on longer than a triathlete discussing his bike: a cross country skier talking about the wax on his skis. The largest example of how I am hack skier is that I really don’t have an opinion about wax; I just go to the ski shop and ask them to put on the race quality stuff. In the race skiing world this is as blasphemous as a Trekkie not having an opinion about who was a better captain between Kirk and Picard. The wax comes in skittle like color schemes suited for precise range of temperatures, moisture content, and snow age. There is usually a base and then a layer on top. The expensive stuff, the high fluorocarbon, needs to be applied in a well ventilated room, and at the Olympic is a closely guarded secret held by teach team’s wax technician, the skiing equivalent of porn’s fluffer. The guy on the bus next to me went on about his diagonal grooving and I was lucky enough to escape of the bus before he started into how he rescrapes his skis.

Standing in the starting coral after dropping off my sweatshirt and pants to be taken to the finish, I was able to get a glimpse of the other competitors and it was the largest collection of big beards I have ever seen in a race. Prospector chic never seemed to left the area, and I wondered how much warmer these mountain men would be in their home element than me.

Still there were a few reassuring moments that even though it was suppose to be a race, the most important part was to have fun. A group of women dressed up in Wizard of Oz costumes and another had a rabbit costume. Right before the third wave started a guy came out wearing only his bib and a Speedo. I began to think that this race was going to be the skiing equivalent of the bay to breakers if it were, of course, twice as long, held at altitude and went over a pass.

As the race waves went off, I had worked to get towards the front of my wave only to discover that I had misread the sign and that my wave was the one right ahead. I quickly jumped the rope and found myself at the back.

The course description is rather simple: you go up for eight miles and then you go down for ten with some rolling bumps to keep you honest. The eight miles is never super steep the way some bike rides throw stuff at you with names like Nasty Grade or the Marshall Wall. But while there are no deep moments of panic, there isn’t much of a break. It is a steady constant push like the opening chords of Led Zepplin’s Kashmir, a constant pounding as if you plugged yourself into a stair master at frappe setting for over an hour. Then after your legs have squeezed every last atp molecule out, you ski down the backside with the same kind of hope I had in the storm crossing with my car, of sliding correctly though not necessary at all stable around the switch back turns.

The good news is that they serve soup on the course, and the view is spectacular.

It was a great day to be outside, and I did my best to push myself up the slope. It was the first race that I have actually had skiers near me; on one prior race I was dead last at forty minutes behind the next skier . I have not learned how to ski while avoiding the person next to me polling territory faster than the land grant in Oklahoma and hope I was kind to my fellow racers. Once the starting frenzy had subsided, I was with a polite crowd for most of the day though my main competition wound up being a couple of junior high school girls a third of my age. At the very end of the race is a steep chute and I did a quality face plant before watching those two finish ahead of me. My only consolation was that instead of their red wristband, I got a green one that let me have one of the free beers at the end to help anesthetize my pounding legs.

The Great Ski Race lived up to its name. There was an abundant friendliness in the after party where it seemed everyone knew everyone. I saw the guy who wore a speedo clothed and warm, and the group of Oz characters finished the race with arms linked together like the movie’s Dorothy and Scarecrow. It was nice to bask just a bit in the local scene and the satisfaction that comes from the lunacy of a mountain crossing before I hopped in my car and headed home.

On Email

I promised I'd write. I think everyone in the yearbook signing frenzy does. And it wasn't just in true good friends’ books that I pledged to communicate faithfully, but it also happened to those strange connections like "shared a good laugh backstage during a musical," or "sat next to in AP Bio," and most often "had a crush but really didn't do much about it" people’s yearbooks that my ink touched. Graduations (and their lesser photocopied cousins, Reunions) are the wakes of adolescence complete with eulogies for the victims, a few tunes of nostalgia for the audience, and snacks afterwards for everyone. Though it is a time to say goodbye, most are unwilling in the way that we chant encore at the end of a concert in the hope that just maybe there could be one more song, one last chord. And so we promise we will write.

The letting go of this notion happens weeks or months later when perhaps new friends push out old memories or the hobgoblins of everyday life catch up with us. We get too busy to send a simple note. I didn’t write much for years after high school. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. I have at best an improvisational sense of grammar and am medically certified at skipping words. To write was to be afraid of exposing these inadequacies. As a math and computer science major most of my words were variable names.

At the fifth reunion I promised I write though I was unaware of how hard grad school was going to be. The conversations at fifth reunions are about how you can’t believe you are drinking with the faculty on the Mesa (the ones for the tenth are about marriage, and the fifteenth are about kids). Writing was a drunken promise, and these are seldom kept.

It was in the after moments of the tenth reunion when a small group of us were at a diner in Carpentaria, and as we lingered over pancakes and that the concept that one of our classmates came back with a sex change I promised once again that I would write. Technology had changed to the point that most of us were excited by having email accounts (it was early enough that we didn’t know that we would spend a good portion of our careers going through our in-boxes). Instead of hand stamping envelopes we could to string a few names together separated by semicolons and click send. The effort level to correspond had been lowered; it was possible to be a lazy writer.

And the writing became lazier too. Full sentences became optional as did capitalization and spelling. Exclamation points grew like weeds. In this grammatical haze, I felt that my own insufficiencies weren’t that much different than everyone else’s, and I did something quite unprecedented.

I wrote.

The first few emails about an improv class were clumsy and my most recent about my water heater still missed words, but over the last ten years I have sent every few months to a handful of friends and other assorted random people from Cate pieces about life. I believe that everyone should have an adventure every couple of months. Each of us has a good story about what happened last week. Looking back at mine there were probably a little too many about exercise and not enough pieces about how exactly I did something about the crushes, but a past can’t be edited. It can be forgotten though.

Writing is our civilization’s memory. It is our notes to our future selves. It fills the need to share what we feel is important.

Write.

Be mindful of the gatekeepers to the written world. I don’t want to minimize the importance of grammar. Our current president has shown the danger that comes from opaque syntax (I wonder if he accidentally spellchecked Iraq into Iran). Clarity matters. Bad grammar deflects the reader from the piece’s trail of logic and minimizes the acceptance of an argument.

But I also believe that sometimes you need to chuck whatever poorly constructed ideas you have out into the world. Writing is about hitting the send key and then dealing with the consequences. (Blogging is about hitting the save key and hoping someone browses). Sometimes these half formed thoughts collide with someone else half formed ideas, and they fuse together briefly before decaying like uranium in a reactor or the Police getting back together for a reunion tour. Sometimes people are actually helpful with giving you grammar suggestions, though sometimes you get comments back that you should use fewer metaphors in business communications.

Write.

It might be only ever so often. It might be only about a field near your house (this worked well for Robert Frost). It might offend (and if counter argument seems reasonable then write it again). It might be ignored. But write and hit send anyway.

Society has always had a class of professional writers. They used be called scribes, then later monks, and finally communication specialists. Steal their techniques but graft on your own thoughts. There will always be the need for the professionals because they are so much more fun to read, but in the last decade the internet has created a world where amateurs can contribute. Take advantage of this but play nicely.

Write.

I promise I will.

From the Department of the Interior

I have trust issues with my water heater. We had many good years together sharing my apartment in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. Its grumblings and hissing were the purring of a pet I never had. Its warmth comforted me on foggy summer mornings.

But all relationships have their struggles. I came home one day and discovered that it had burped a small lake in my kitchen. Perhaps it wanted more independence, that it felt tied down as just being an appliance, or that it wasn’t getting enough attention for taking care of the homestead. The plumbers said it was an issue with the vents. I knew something brewed deeper.

I caught it again a week later in an angry hissy fit. The plumbers came back and replaced the pressure gauge and assured me that everything would be fine. But after you are twice soaked how do you back to the happier times? How do you not hear a grumble and wonder if there is a tantrum coming soon? As Al Green would ask: How do you mend a broken valve?

I don’t believe that we are the sum of our possessions, but I do believe that we carry their weight. Whatever interior decorating style I have can be described as "bachelor cluttered." For me a remodel is installing the new version of Microsoft Vista (the Paris Hilton of operating systems – attractive through serious cosmetics, but fundamentally neurotic underneath). My living room is a snake pit of cords, unread magazines, and clothes; all of which do not mix well with water.

A television dominates the far wall, and last week I stumbled into a new program called "Top Design" that is about interior decorators battling for a $100,000. Though I have a certain love for the Bravo shows where talented people compete (Project Runway, Top Chef), interior decorating isn’t exactly something I know quite much about. I started watching the program and saw several of the usual personality types – a couple of bitchy artists, a few theorists who lacked the hands-on-skills, a few blowhards, and some general exceedingly creative people who let their work speak for itself. What I didn’t expect was seeing was someone I knew.

Andrea Keller, one of the contestants, had the same "Ally Sheedy in Breakfast Club" bangs that she had in high school. With her eyes half covered she is just as mysterious now as she was then. As opposed to my very much on the surface ramblings, you always got the sense with her that there were deep wheels turning. Her website bio (http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Design/bio/Andrea ) says that she now speaks twice the number of languages than she has sons, and I do believe that if she were a verb tense she would be the subjunctive with its way of dealing of possible worlds and tricky conjugation.

She needs this sense of possibilities to deal with the program's challenges. For the first contest they gave the designers five objects from a mystery client, and in teams of two they had to turn a blank three-walled space into a sanctuary.

As I cheered deeply for Andrea, I learned how to root for home designers. The first tip was that they were given a $50,000 dollar budget that I really think would have helped with my living room cord problem. Her electronics were putting lights underneath a bed, which I think would make me find a few socks that have been missing for years. http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Design/rate/episode_1/ryan_andrea.shtml

As to picking colors, the secret is to use schemes that no football team would ever use. Andrea had this shade of green that looked like healthy kelp. She used red shelves and a chair to bring contrast and guide your eyes in a circle around the room. It balanced the bed on the left, and the white edges she painted along the edges of the room framed the whole thing like the picture in the television she was given as an inspiration.

The judges thought of it more as a field goal than a touchdown, but it was good enough for her to move on to the next round. I breathed a sigh of relief and was quite content to have something to root for now that football season is over.

I don’t know what the next challenges will bring – are they going to do a dorm room or a taco stand, a dot com space or a post office? Will the new clients be supportive or demanding? But I do know I will be watching on Wednesday nights on Bravo just to see the bravery of someone from high school making it in the world creatively. And if they happen to have a show that helps in dealing with temperamental plumbing I will be cheering hard for a dry tranquility.

Happy New Years

I know that it has been over a month. December is my busiest for work and something has to pay the bills. I promise to write more.

In the meantime I did my favorite run: Arch Rock on New Year's.

Click to see map.

The Arch Rock Long Course

The Simmer

Yesterday was the first dinner date with S_, a wonderful blind date set-up who is intelligent, sporty, and cute. I went home at my early time. In a large bit of optimism I wanted to make my apartment smell nice and the best way to do this is to slowly simmer soup. I chopped up the usual assortment of cauliflower, potatoes, and mushrooms, added both apples and brussel sprouts for a bit of oomph, and let the concoction simmer in chicken stock. The smells of a healthy lifestyle wafted through to my living room that the house cleaners had just attended.

With the soup slowly reducing and feeling the need to relax a little before the date I decided to a small workout at the 24-hour Fitness down the street. There were a couple of exercise bikes available and I picked the one farthest from the window. The pedals had the straps that go across the top of a foot and let you pull up as well as push down. About a minute into my routine the strap on my right side became down and I reached down to buckle it back. This was a bad idea.

The buckle had a metal hook that attached it to the strap, and this spike went deep into my right thumb. I tried to pull up but the metal had been clamped in by the plastic part of the buckle and pulling sideways was going to take off most of the flesh. I politely asked the head trainer a few machines over "Could you please help?"

He came over and looked incredulous about how I did that. He and the other trainer quickly removed the entire strap from the exercise bike and equally quickly came to the same conclusion that the spike was hooked in deeply. It was 6:15, the date was an hour and fifteen minutes away, and while I think it is important to show that you exercise I don’t think you should show up to a dinner with actual equipment still lodged inside yourself.

I went to the emergency room. Normally there is a quite a wait to be seen, but if you are bleeding with a hook in your finger they don’t make you fill out as much paper work. I was quickly given a tetanus shot, but had to wait a bit to get x-rays. The technician was a bit of an artist and constantly wanted to shift the angle of my hand for the perfect exposure, but the movement caused the spike to shift around my thumb and the pain chilled me. Thankfully a few minutes later I finally got a local anesthetic. A few minutes later a doctor using a clamp unlodged my thumb. It was 7:15. All I needed was the nurse, Ian, to come over to clean and dress the wound.

I waited and kept watching the clock.

7:20 Nurse Ian goes down the hall.

7:25 Nurse Ian chats with the front desk.

7:30 S_ is probably at the restaurant.

7:35 Nurse Ian goes down the hall again.

7:40 S_ is probably a little upset that I haven’t shown.

7:42 Nurse Ian comes into dress the wound. He tells me that he would rather take his time and be thorough rather than patch me quickly. Since infection is a real risk with a puncture would I am not in a real position to argue, but it is slowly becoming

7:44 ...

7:46 Nurse Ian is finished and I run to the restaurant

7:51 I arrive at Chez Nous, but S_ has left. There would be no date.

I lumbered the few blocks home and realized I missed my opportunity. It took two weeks to get a day that S_ was available, and she is not unusual for people in this city. We are perpetually burdened by work or hobbies. The scant openings in schedules occur less often than rainstorms. The city is not a place where relationships build slowly with continuous stirring; there isn't enough time to let things simmer and instead we have microwave dating, the brief intense meetings arranged by the radiation of cell phones or email messages. The city is hooked on speed.

I made it home and rushed to the phone to apologize to S_. I promise if we go out again I will spend the entire day beforehand away from sharp pointy objects. She might be available sometime next week, but I can feel the hesitancy in her voice. I am sure that when she dreams of her ideal man, the word "klutz" isn’t mentioned much.

We chatted briefly about her Minnesota thanksgiving, and then said goodbye. I am left in my cold apartment and I realize that the burnt smell coming from my kitchen is what happens when things don't correctly simmer.

Someone Like You

Normally during my lazy Saturday morning breakfast I stick to the sports section to learn how our local teams are either heading south in the standings or location, but this last time while nursing my mocha I stumbled across in the entertainment section a particular event, Couples, Computers, and Gaming day. I almost spilt my mocha. For a late thirties single guy, hearing that there would be an all day event at the Ruby Skye featuring among other things a female Swedish Quake team who all lived in the same house, was a discovery somewhere between finding money that it made through the laundry and stumbling across that the cable company had accidentally unscrambled the Spice Channel. Ruby Skye is one of the hippest nightclubs in San Francisco, a place known for its DJ's pulsating out techno music into a room filled with epilepsy inducing strobe lights, a place where the acid trips of the sixties morphed into the ecstasy raves of the nineties, a place where just perhaps a group of Swedish women would be for an afternoon of coupling and computers.

This could have been the best day ever.

I arrived anxious. The club had the velvet ropes out in front, the traditional barrier separating the cool from the unworthy, and a larger bouncer worked the door. I tried my best to work the nonchalant geeky chic, the kind of confidence that comes from having the finest wireless devices stashed in one's pockets. Granted I didn't have the latest technology, but I doubt this mountain of a man was going to know.

The ticket booth was harder to pass. Two women worked the counter, and when I started to buy the ticket they asked the tough question: "Only one?"

"Yes, only one," I muttered feeling the same way I do when my parents ask if there was anyone special I want to bring to a holiday dinner. I hadn't realized that the event was BYOP (bring your own partner), and had sort of hoped that it would have more of a Burning Man kind of vibe, a day where cables weren't the only thing being hook up. With my palm pilot turned off and my cell phone set to vibrate I quickly went into the main dance area. There I saw something completely unexpected - a panel discussion.

It was a talk about games.

On the stage four women sat in folding chairs as a moderator passed a microphone between them. In front of them on the floor a crowd that was at least 90% male if not also 90% wearing sweatshirts watched the discussion. I felt I was not the only person there who wore a Star Trek uniform for Halloween.

The eldest of the panelists began by telling how great it was that Laura Croft had a breast reduction in the new version of the game, Tomb Raider. She added that if publishers wanted to attract female gamers that they should have a way to skip the combat sequences and to have options where there isn't as much score keeping. I think she was going to continue about how there should be more cuddling after game play, but the next panelist started her session.

She was the publisher for the Desperate Housewives game that mimics the television show and allows the gamers to redecorate there own suburban home, gossip with characters from the show, or hook up with the pizza guy (tastefully off screen). Apparently there wasn't an option that lets the self-absorbed yuppies get crushed by a bad mortgage (or preferably space aliens), but there is always hope for the sequel. She talked about how she met her husband through gaming and that every week they host a Halo party. So far only guys attend the parties.

The next panelist began that she met her ex-boyfriend through gaming. The use of the "ex" couldn't have made the crowd more excited unless it was followed by the word "box". The bliss was short lived; the speaker lost 80 pounds by playing Dance Dance Revolution and then dumped the guy for an upgrade. She now hosts Star Wars fashion shows on the massively multiplayer version of the game where Wookies compete in the best evening gown or swimsuit. This to me seemed to be a complete waste of the furry creatures, because I thought their perfect use would be gunning down the Desperate Housewives, and I am deeply hoping for some conference synergy.

The last speaker was the Swedish Quake player, and the crowd had long given up that she might be single. She talked about the house and how she and her friends crush guys in tournaments. She went into the training that sounded triathlon-like in terms of commitment. Her wrist has been injured, and she wore a leather brace that Billy Idol would have if he ever got carpal tunnel syndrome. I have no doubt her team destroys everyone.

The panel was then open up to questions. I missed the first one, but the first panelist answered with how sexy a plain white shirt could be and repeated how great it was that Laura Croft had a breast reduction. The moderator then went out into the audience to the mid-thirties guy seated a few rows ahead of me. As he stood, he wiped the top of his balding head. After a quick "test" into the microphone, he began his question in a soft voice to the Swede.

"Where can I find someone like you?"

The Maps of Our World

There are later stages of an origin, the ones after the moment is no longer innovative but still interesting enough to be spread out into the world, that can matter. Our universe began with a Big Bang, but the longer simmer was equally fascinating.

John Mather and George Smoot won 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in cosmic background radiation. In 1964, Penzias and Wilson had unexpected noise when conducting radio experiments. This disruption caused by the prevalent background radiation of the cosmos, was the first evidence to support that the universe was expanding as opposed to being in a steady state. If the universe was expanding then it would cool as it grew since atomic particles would have further to travel before collisions. When the temperature dropped enough to allow protons and neutrons to form hydrogen atoms, roughly 400,000 years after the start of the Big Bang, radiation became transparent that caused the noise discovered Penzias and Wilson. In 1989 this radiation was better mapped by satellite called COBE that John Mather and George Smoot were the principle investigators. The world indeed looked to be expanding.

The Internet also has had a simmer after the great bust.

Its beginning came out of the defense department and existed for a couple of decades to mostly connect scientists with the people who gave them grants. The origin was more like the beginnings of eukaryotes. The primordial soup long had been fermenting for a billion years and testing out various evolutionary recipes until it stumbled across a combination that worked like Johnny and The Moondogs kept trying new drummers until they found this guy named Ringo Starr and changed their name to the Beatles. They had early hits like “She Loves You,” just the Eukaryotes who billions of years earlier formed their own super group called multi cellular organisms had early hits like “Mitosis”) The internet’s big hit, a web browser, was remarkable in that it was the first piece of technology to come with a built in metaphor about arachnid domiciles already built in. Technologist and hack writers, like this author, have been abusing language ever since. The first major linguistic abuse was putting the letter “e” in front of words like commerce, bay, or pets. This lasted for a few years until the venture money ran out or Bush got elected, and quickly the visionaries shifted by switching to the letter “i” in front of words like tunes and pod. Only a brave futurist will guess whether the next Internet wave will start with the vowel “o” or move into a more exotic constant like “h.” or “j”

For the less brave futurists, the Internet is harder to grasp. It seems to exist everywhere in a constant hum of emails, text messages, podcasts, pictures, and videos – the background radiation of our modern world. One of the great cables that is used to extend it is Ethernet, and the term captures the umbilical chord nature of the wire that goes out of our machine into a place that we really aren’t sure. It is ether.

But what has been happening recently is that there is a branch of the Internet that is being tied to maps. Granted driving instructions have been around for a while, but with Google Maps it is now possible to create your own version of world and link the markers and routes of your existence. (This is a good set of instructions). This technology is being combined with blogs (Outside.in), events (eventpedia.net ), and cute girls in Colorado(hottiespots.com). http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com// has a more complete list.

I have started to add my own such as haikus made about cheering marathon runners and a race I did in Alaska. But I am a relative latecomer compared to those who have built out maps for the world of warcraft or where Oscar winners were born. The new branch of the Internet is more of an Intraweb with the ideas of the world now mapped to physical locations. We had that kind of context before in yellow pages, but what makes it different other than being able to search for everything near a given location is that anyone can contribute. The world has expanded to where the information has been broken down into protons and electrons, and people are free to build out new mashups of their own by mixing particles of knowledge and geography.

Now if someone could just create a site that could find my keys…

Epilogue

The great meteorologist Mark Twain once wrote, "If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes." And while that is true for the North East, the more local version is if you don't like the weather, just run a few miles. On Sunday for the Nike Marathon we were blessed with a sunny start and a foggy finish - climates that were wonderful for both runners and alliteration enthusiasts.

Life should always be served on a sampler platter.

This is the last email of the season, and my final bit of advice (other than after a marathon it is helpful to walk down stairs backwards) is to encourage you to continue to seek new experiences. For most of you, this has been an introduction to the world of endurance sports. Welcome. Please stay while.

At this point I don't need to tell you that marathons are hard. They are harder than anything else I have done with the exception of grad school. You should be deeply proud of how much you have accomplished and how far you have gone.

They are hard to the point that is common to have post event depression, to feel that the rest of ordinary life isn't as meaningful. This is quite normal in the same way that crying at a finish line is. Marathons toy not only with your quads, but also with your emotions.

They are also hard to the point that there is a difference between marathon "the lifestyle" and marathon "the event." I truly believe that everyone had a marathon in them. It might be a slow one. It might be foggy one. However, frequently running marathons is tricky. Constantly training at that level is when you start to hit major issues like body type and technique. I don't want to discourage you from trying, there are people who run all fifty states or 100 miles in a day, but realize that most of us have about three marathons in us.

Make these as special as you can. Running for a cause is a great thing to do.

But it is also good to try other endurance sports as well. My favorite Team in Training season (except, of course, Summer Run) is cross-country skiing. It does have the logistical issue of being away on Saturdays from 6am to 8pm, but it is such a beautiful sport. It combines the grace of the wilderness with a cardio workout equal to running while being far more forgiving. The race in Alaska has a wonderful vibe. It is the only time I have gone to a pre-race info session to learn about how to handle moose on the trail.

There is less chance of that in triathlons, but you will need to learn how to handle other riders on the road. There is an intensity to triathletes that is different than single sport junkies. I think it stems from the nervousness of balancing all three sports. The great danger of the sport is that it is quite addicting. You feel great doing triathlon training (at least at the half ironman distance or below. I have not gone further than that).

Bike touring and distance swimming are fun on their own.

As for me, my biggest cross training this season has been writing. During our first coaches' meeting I asked April if I could write the occasional piece. I have in the past written something about every two to three months, and I thought I would try something as daring as writing monthly. April, ever the wonderful coach who will push you farther than you think, of course, said something about writing weekly. This felt the same as the start of my first marathon season when I knew I signed up for the bounds of what I could possibly do, but that I was a long way from getting there. I knew I had one piece about clothing and one about my brother, but the rest I would have to improvise.

I like to think that some of them worked. I want to say thanks so much for the positive feedback you gave me during the season. I have gathered them along with my older pieces at http://LifeInRestAndMotion.blogspot.com .

The discipline of writing is similar discipline of running. The secret to both is to have a good calendar. I learned by doing both not to get too disappointed when having crappy day, but to try harder the next.

I want to continue to write and will admit that my next few pieces won't be about running at all. After these months I, too, need to sneak in a bit more variety. I plan to continue to post to the blog.

And after a small break I do also plan coming back to the road. I would love to see you there sometime as well. Mark Twain also wrote about San Francisco, but I think he had it backwards. I know that the warmest summer ever I spent was the season running with a few good friends.

Thanks for a great season. Take care.

Click to see a day of Nike haiku's..