On The Road, 1

We have been on the road for a few days now, and, this evening, after three nights in a rented North Beach apartment in San Francisco, we are at the Cardinal Hotel in Palo Alto. Shelagh and I just played checkers in the lobby after walking back from watching a movie at the Aquarius Theater on Emerson Street. Tomorrow we will walk around the main quad at Stanford, drop into the bookstore to look for some Christmas presents, and then head south for Monterey and Carmel.

North Beach
We've been to Alcatraz. And Caffe Trieste. We shopped at Al's Attire. We had breakfast at Mo's, lunch at Fisherman's Wharf, dinner at Frances. We've moved by foot, cable car, boat, and Mustang convertible. We sat in Washington Square. We walked by Jack Kerouac Lane and down Haight toward Ashbury. We took pictures of the Joe DiMaggio playground.

The sound of unseen cables running beneath the streets, the hot smell of the hydraulics, the thrill of cresting a hill while standing on the running board and seeing the downtown lights and bustle below with a beautiful hint of November cold in the air. Ding-ding. Ding-ding. This is San Francisco. I love the cable cars.

Vallejo. Green. Columbus. Union. Powell. Stockton. The names of the streets are different, exciting in themselves.

I stood in front of Jasper Johns's Bridge at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. How do we see? Why do we see the way we do?

North Beach
It's a holiday. Being away. Getting away. Seeing new things. Buying a San Francisco Chronicle. Drinking good wine. Reading the Rushdie memoir. Driving the 101. And it all means that all senses are alert, because none of this is ordinary life. Of course, ordinary life, as the narrator of Joseph Anton spells out, is the biggest fiction of them all, an illusion woven by those who choose blindness over the marvels and monstrosities of life on earth. We are all, it appears, storytellers.

But we get in the way.

Bridge
Because all of this would happen, is happening without me. Maybe not all. Not the particular conversations and observations, not the particular checkers game. Not the order of southern fried chicken with mashed potatoes and seasonal veggies (good!) and chocolate milkshake (yikes!) that go within, but everything else that goes on without.

The Beatles gave us many equations, many of which were some version of  all you need is love, or the  love you take is equal to the love you make. But George gave us this:
And to see you're really only very small/
And life flows on within you and without you.
Lately, I have been transfixed by the thought that my memory of Caffe Trieste, my memory of the crumbling courtyard at Alcatraz, all my travel memories are from my perspective. They are replays of, riffs on what I have seen.

What would it mean to get a better grasp on the fact that at this moment life is happening everywhere? That is something I want to work on, to see what work it would do on me.



Alcatraz











Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more