Send Me A Letter

Come down here and be my house monk. Course you can’t do that. Kids and all. And I am so much older than I used to be. I no longer look or feel very foxy, although god knows of course that I am a good-looking woman. Some things never change. I was watching Otis Redding at Monterey Pop, a time seemed to last forever, then. I don’t think I could bear to watch it if I didn’t, in some far corner of my dreams, think it could all happen again. Or never ended. Right, and Otis is not dead. He was twenty-five at the time of those incredible recordings. Twenty-five and bursting with a talent it’s hard to account for, with soul and good looks. Good moves. What if someone like that had lived?

A Real Californian

Mark Morford has a column at sfgate.com—the online presence of The San Francisco Chronicle, which in the daily-delivered flesh is getting frighteningly anorexic—about your average Golden Gate Bridge jumper. A single 40-ish male, just like him. Mark always writes beautifully:

I do know that when I cross the GG Bridge these days, I tend to glance over at those guard rails and safety wires with a different sort of appreciation, awareness and sighing sense of wonder.

In The Arms Of The Angels

Or that’s how it looked to me, when I came upon this image after the recent non-serious but sneaky, creepy, loathsome little 4.2 quake that lifted Berkeley to the top of its P-wave crest and then dropped it, the whole city, with a nasty bang.

I, however, was in the hot tub, so I cannot personally speak to the nastiness. Others, yes. This one, no. I can only report that any number of people were waked from a deep sleep with that sickening heart thump, This is it. Things aren’t parsed, in dreams, except by their extremes. wonderfully irrational means of dreaming. The joys are beyond bliss, extend forever, and fear feels itself naked, without reservation at all.

What I saw in this map of the fault lines in California—the San Andreas , that long red scar up the coast, and our fault, the Hayward, the short red line across San Francisco Bay—what came to mind was an embrace. Which is an odd thought, for these are the two big nasties of Northern California life, the Hayward considered really ready to go off … yet such was my water-logged image, we here held as if in a nest in the notch of a tree.

We live on, ignoring what cannot be helped and will happen, one day, in some horrible way. For now, I commend unto you the view as I write this …

The Pity, Anyway

Replying to Saturday’s rich harvest of Comments: bmo, clearly you do not live in Berkeley or the San Franscisco Bay Area anywhere, where a phrase like “corporate-generated reality” would draw nothing but a yawn or a pang of nostalgia. No, it’s hard going, being a crackpot nowadays. And remember, I teethed on C. Wright Mills; this conversation is old. Come to California (said in the mellifuous tones of whomever, years ago, said, Come to Jamaica.) (Was it Geoffrey Holder?) (See, the corporation lives like a little yammering spider in my head too.)