Mallory's Camera

When somebody asks you for something, and you tell them, No, do you end up feeling differently toward the person who asked for that something?

Serious question.

###

Grey, grey, grey day yesterday. Hard not to personalize. Hard to remind myself, You feel strained, you feel trapped, you feel desperate because there’s no sunlight, just this creepy grey luminescence filtered through ice crystals in thick cloud layers.

I Remunerated mightily throughout the morning & into the early afternoon and then crept off to do some food shopping at the Upscale Supermarket.

The Upscale Supermarket has a couple of greenhouses, and it was these I was really after.

I wanted to lose myself in a warm jungle of tropical plants!



When I got back to the casa, Neighbor Ed was there, doing a jigsaw puzzle with L.

###

The times when Neighbor Ed & spent every morning texting are long over.

I don’t know what really happened with that one.

Did I do something to alienate him?

Did Mrs. Neighbor Ed—verbally or nonverbally—make her displeasure known: A married man should not be spending time bantering with a woman he’s not married to? Social mores in this part of the Hudson Valley, at least, are straight out of a back issue of Readers Digest, circa 1955.

Or maybe we were never really friends. Neighbor Ed is garrulous! Maybe I was but one of multiple channels into which his excess garrulity flowed.

Whatever, it made me distinctly uncomfortable to see him. He’s a social worker by training, and I know for a fact he has no particular fondness for L. In his retirement, he plays pickleball and performs Good Works—TaxBwana-ing, Book Buddies (where adult volunteers read with groups of preschool & school-aged children), and now, presumably, doing jigsaw puzzles one day a week with his elderly neighbor across the road.

I don’t know why I felt so bent out of shape by this.

Probably because I was looking for reasons to feel bent out of shape.

Anyway, I barely acknowledged his greeting. When he said, “I hear you have new cats,” I said, “Yep,” and let the silence moat.

If this were a real friendship, this exchange would be something Neighbor Ed & I would discuss at some point.

But since it isn’t a real friendship, honestly, there’s nothing to say.

###

Back in the Patrizia-torium, I was filled with deep irremediable hatred for all things Hudson Valley.

These are not your people! I thought. This is not your tribe!

Having been brought up by wolves, the search for a tribe, for cosmic littermates, is a perpetual quest for me. I suppose that’s why I like online journaling so much. In my mind, this little band of people who read each other’s online ponderings on a regular or semi-regular basis are all like telepaths, different in most ways, but alike in the one, central, defining desire to beam our thought waves to distant planets.

In the midst of all this teeth-gnashing, I thought, What I really want to do is move back to Berkeley!

There are two things wrong with the moving-back-to-Berkeley scenario, though.

Numero uno: The Berkeley I really want to move back to is the Berkeley that existed in the early 1990s.

Numero two-o: I could never afford to move back to Berkeley.

###

It’s really much mentally healthier for me to feel hostile than depressed! Hostility is invigorating! I get more done when I’m hostile. Though I gotta watch that avenging Kali thing I’m prone to. It’s very unpleasant.

One of the things I’ve noticed about myself is that it’s very difficult for me to ask for things in what a transactional analyst might characterize as an “adult state.”

I either have to go whiney and helpless, or angry—both of which are “child states,” the two faces of the distressed toddler: scaredy-cat or temper tantrum-ish.

Most of my social and emotional support system is in California. What happens if I reach out & say, I want to go back to California! Can you help me land on my feet in California?

Hence the question at the beginning of this post. It’s not rhetorical.

Claude’s intermittently spiking fevers and muscle aches have been diagnosed as Lyme disease.

So, naturally, I’m now convinced I have Lyme disease.

That must be the reason why after half-heartedly shoveling a smattering of compost onto one of my garden plots yesterday, I thought, Fuck this.

Couldn’t be that I’m just incorrigibly lazy, right?

I mean TICKS ARE EVERYWHERE!!!!!!

You may think you’ve gotten them off you, but you are just deluding yourself!



Meanwhile, yesterday was my monthly Food Bank shift.

As ever, I was astonished by the number and Blue Book value of the cars lined up for three-quarters of a mile a full half hour before the Food Bank was officially due to open.

These were not cheap cars.

“People have a lot of misconceptions about who Food Bank clients are,” Deb told me.

Deb is the doyenne of my community garden and a mover and shaker in the community service sector hereabouts.

When I first met Deb, I thought she was one of those annoying do-gooders, but as it turns out, she’s had quite the checkered past and on the one-on-one is delighted to dish the most salacious gossip, whatever lip service she may pay to We’re all God’s children! memes in her public utterances.

I now know all about the former state senator from New York’s District 41’s messy divorce and who’s fucking who in the garden.

“Main clients of this Food Bank are Boomers who didn’t plan well enough for retirement,” Deb continued. “Their fixed incomes don’t stretch far enough to cover food and medication.”

She could be talking about me, I thought.

True, I’m not on any medications.

But that could simply be because I refuse to see doctors.



In the afternoon, I went with L and Belinda to the new Mexican restaurant that has opened in the old Hyde Park Brewery spot.

They had a mariachi band! And an excellent jazz guitarist (that guy on the left.) Cinco de Mayo, doncha know.

Hyde Park now has three Mexican restaurants!

The food was quite good—I had flautas, which used to be my favorite Mexican meal back in my Berkeley undergraduate days when I was a regular at La Fiesta on Telegraph and Haste.

La Fiesta closed in 2011—but I could probably describe its interior in way more vivid detail than I could describe the interior of the restaurant I ate at yesterday, which is one of the ways I know I’m old.



Shortly, I will toddle back to the garden.

Gotta finish laying down the compost and raking planting rows. Nobody else is gonna do it, and it must be done.

The low-pressure system seems finally to have departed. The sky is unbroken blue, the sun is beaming beneficently, and temps today are supposed to hit 70°.

I will begin planting this coming week.

“You have the riskiest house in the neighborhood!” Neighbor Ed told me yesterday.

We’d been discussing Thanksgiving plans. The Neighbor Eds were disinvited from their daughter’s home in Providence because it was thought the grandkids might squeal, and the daughter—a doctor—can’t afford to lose her childcare.

I’d suggested they have Turkey Day with L and C.

Neighbor Ed recoiled at the thought!

It’s true there are far more comings and goings at my house than the CDC looks kindly upon.

Anton routinely has lovers staying overnight.

Zee has CIA classmates.

L has C who drives down from Albany on a weekly basis. One suspects C spends his Albany time in monastic solitude getting quietly plastered, but one doesn’t know.

“And Linda goes all over the place, doing wherever the hell she pleases,” Neighbor Ed continued.

“You’re not wrong,” I said.

We were talking near the garbage cans I’d just rolled down the grand circular driveway for pickup. Sans masks but at a respectable six-foot distance.

“I’m going nuts,” Ed said and sighed. “Wanna go for a walk?”

“Not today,” I said, glancing up at the glowering sky and shuddering slightly in the cold. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Gotta say I am in much better spirits than I thought I would be under the circumstances, which fact I attribute solely to the enormous amount of carrot habanero hot sauce I imbibe.

Nature’s own antidepressant!

Extremely hot hot sauce is something most people don’t like, or I would have pressed a jar on Neighbor Ed.

###

I’m semi-isolating to lessen the chance of spreading the plague when I go up to Ithaca on Thursday.

Yesterday, I watched a few bad movies and did some cleaning.

In the course of the cleaning, I stumbled across several boxes filled with (literally) thousands of photographs and thought, Huh! I should scan some of these.

So, I did.

Childhood photos of moi:









Always trying to make things easy for future biographers! I think I wrote “Me at eight” on that picture when I was nine.

###

Here are George and I, mugging it up for the camera:







George was my Texas gazillionaire.

I really ought to have married him when he asked me; I would have gotten a hefty divorce settlement out of it.

But by then I had already fallen in love with somebody else.

That didn’t deter me from living with George, but it did deter me from wanting the Governor of California’s autograph on a document attesting to the strength of our attachment.

During the first year and a half of our relationship when I was seriously in love with him, George was officially in love with someone called Suzanne Fox with whom I also became involved. The classic romantic triangle!



Suzanne was neither particularly pretty nor particularly bright, but she had this intense emotional charisma: It was impossible not to fixate on her.

She was also teaching me how to drive: Growing up in New York City, driving had not seemed like a skill worth acquiring, but I was living in California now, and you can’t live in California and not drive—well, I mean, you can. But it’s ridiculous.

Suzanne was the empress; I was the concubine. The power hierarchy was galling.

So, one day, I turned to George and asked, What’s the deal here? I’m obviously better-looking and reams smarter than Suzanne, so how come you like her better than me?

Well, Patty, he replied. Thing is Suzanne’s so helpless. And you can take care of yourself.

BAM!!!!

Just like that, I fell out of love with him.

But you know how those things go: As soon as I fell out of love with him, he fell desperately in love with me.

###

This picture is not a modeling picture per se, but it was taken on the set of a modeling assignment:



I wish I could remember what the getup was intended to hype! Persian carpets? Kimonos? I think maybe lingerie—I was deemed too ethnic looking to sell everyday consumer items like shampoo or laundry detergent, so I ended up doing a lot of underwear shots. Yes, I think that was what I was wearing beneath the kimono—some kind of peekaboo bra.

I went to a wedding reception once in Pete Buttigieg’s Wine Cave.

Bill Knutson married Claire Someone-Or-Other there.

Bill was an extremely nice young gadabout. He and I became buddies the spring I was recovering from my heroin flirtation. We used to meet up in downtown Berkeley, walk the length of Shattuck Avenue, cut down Adeline and Stanford Avenue, and end up in Emeryville, which at that time was a single video arcade amidst deserted warehouses and shipping yards. We played Space Defender and Pac-Man for hours.

Back then, Bill wanted to be a writer.

The wine cave is called the Rutherford Winery. It is posh, though not ridiculously so. Claire came from a very wealthy family, and so far as I could tell, that was her chief attraction for Bill since he’d grown up very working class. She’d fallen in love with him, I think, because he was the first guy to give her an orgasm. She would not be denied! Her indulgent parents pulled out all the stops for the marital sendoff.

Bill eventually became an Episcopal minister.

He and Claire are still married.

###

Anyway, Pete Buttigieg was my favorite among the Democrat candidates until yesterday when—frigid temperatures be damned!—I forced myself outside for a three-mile walk and listened to this Freakonomics podcast on Andrew Yang to keep me energized:

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/andrew-yang/

Since the Democrats are gonna lose in 2020, I might as well go for the unelectable candidate who best represents my views on the world at large, right?

###

What else?

Began reading The Pursuit of Love. Oddly enough, I’ve never read it before.

I’m a Decca-ist in the Mitford Sister wars.

Oakland represents! Plus, also in my long-ago and oh! so far away misspent youth, I knew Benji Treuhaft’s first wife (though I’ve long since forgotten her first name) and thus it was that I ended up in Jessica Mitford’s genteely shabby Rockridge home on Regent Street sipping tea across from the grande dame herself.

We sipped from identical cups! A very thin, translucent porcelain decorated with a bluebell motif! Though Decca, I’m fairly sure, was drinking gin from hers.

I wish I could remember what we talked about! I know that I found it very amusing, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

I do remember her voice, which was deep, foghorn-resonant and U (as Nancy Mitford might say.) I’d seen “gels” as a written transliteration of “girls,” for example, but I didn’t understand exactly how that might work until I heard Jessica Mitford!

In the way of writers with unlimited access to the same source material, Nancy and Decca almost came to blows when Hons and Rebels came out, because it appropriates the same Lord and Lady Redesdale material that’s the core of Nancy’s books.

But the childhood belonged to both of them.

And I must say, their writerly voices are very similar.

Decca has the edge in humor; Nancy, the edge in panoply.

Apparently, the fast food chain Wendy’s is the target of nationwide protests.

Who knew?

Everybody but me, evidently!

The subway line that goes up to JFK does not connect to Grand Central Station—poor civic planning on somebody’s part, right?—so I tromped up Lexington Avenue in the rain to the E. 52nd Street E line and along the way got swept up in massive demonstrations:





Finally made it to the subway station.

The E train platform is the first stop for an escalator that goes straight down to hell. I am not exaggerating here! That escalator must be at least four stories high, and I am afraid of heights. I managed to maneuver myself and my massive suitcase on the left side of the escalator, which is, of course, the side that fleet-footed millennials use to run down the escalator; and I could not move, I was that terrified! So, I had to endure lots of Not okay, Boomer! millennial side-eye and the subway ride to the airport was pretty fucking awful, too.

But after that…

###

The TWA Hotel!

Just fabulous.



The Solari Board works!



Connie, a 1958 Lockheed Constellation, is a cocktail lounge where they serve old fashioneds and royal ambassador martinis, plus you can sit in the pilot’s cabin and watch simulated flight scenarios! Vroom, vroom!



And then there was the rooftop infinity pool in the rain with the mists rising and the fabulous view of the tarmac:



The hotel staff was so nice to me! They upgraded my room for no reason whatsoever when I began babbling to them about the history of the terminal and about how super-enormous airplanes had ruined flying for everyone.

And they carried my enormous suitcase to my room and when I tried to tip them, they refused the tip! “You just have a great time,” the guy said.

###

RTT didn’t show up till 2:45am, which was a bit of a disappointment. I figured he and I would go drinking together at Connie, and I would give him Sage Advice, which would solve all his problems so that that years from now, when he’s a mega-rich hedge fund CEO, he would show up at Connie and buy endless rounds on the house for everyone at the tables, in memory of his mother—long dead—who was responsible for all his great success.

But my mantra this trip is, It’s All Good. This girl just wants to have fun. Good vibes, no drama.

###

The flight was cool, too, and the kindness of strangers continued.

The steward apparently thought RTT and I were a laugh riot and kept bringing us free drinks.





We were both soused by the time we got off the plane, and this, no doubt, contributed to what came next. Which is that RTT had a complete emotional meltdown in the BART station.

Max is still in school, and because he is Max, completely overextended, working two jobs—one of them with the ACLU!—doing countless amounts of volunteer work, student rep on several UCB planning boards, etc, etc. I’d known he would be, of course, and I had planned my first week in California accordingly: My main support system is still in California, and I planned to spend my first week here hanging out with dear old pals, connecting with Max closer to Thanksgiving.

I’d said as much to RTT. I figured RTT wouldn't want to hang out with me much that first week anyway, but I wanted to make sure he knew the score: if I paid for his flight, it was on him to make his own plans for the first week we were here.

When I set up accommodations, I set them up for me not us.

“Talk to Max,” I told him. Weeks ago. “I’m sure you can crash at his place, but you need to let him know.”

Of course, RTT didn’t.

So when he texted Max from the BART Station, Max responded, Yes, you can stay here, but this is really short notice—

And RTT went into an absolute tailspin.

Flew into this absolute snit.

“Robin, Robin, Robin,” I said. “Why are you doing this? We were having such a great time.”

“We’re supposed to be family!” he snapped.

“And we are family,” I said. Thinking (a) But you are not five years old anymore and the Unconditional LUV warranty has expired! and (b) whoever planted the fantasy in your head that families aren’t one big hotbed of missed communications, arguments, and pointless feuds? Not your mother!

“I was remembering Dad in California—“

“Robin, I lived with your father for 17 years in California, so I can say this with some authority: Your father hated California. He was much happier in New York.”

“My father just died,” he sniffed.

“Oh, c’mon, Robin. Don’t play the dead father card—“

BEEP!!!!!!

Wrong thing to say.

He got furious and stalked off into San Francisco with only a 2% battery charge on his phone. Although he did do me the signal favor of taking the external phone battery I pressed on him.

Wearisome behavior, this.

We made up 15 minutes later by text. He apologized for overreacting; I apologized for my seeming insensitivity toward his dead father.

It is odd that Robin seems incapable of resolving differences through actual conversation. But, hey! I guess that’s the millennial way.

He stayed at Max’s last night though he did not join Max and I for breakfast this morning. He is texting me right this moment about what a fabulous place Berkeley is.

It IS fabulous, I texted back. I miss Berkeley every single day.

###

Remember my mantra? It’s all good.

Was I gonna let Robin’s impersonation of Holden Caulfield harsh my mellow?

I was not!

I was gonna check in at my airbnb and then spend the evening getting even more soused with the fabulous EB!!!

My airbnb turned out to be this very strange place right next to the Berkeley Public Library.

When I lived in Berkeley, there was a huge, ancient, dilapidated parking garage next to the library upon whose roof I once had sex with Mark Conly in the early, passionate clutch-and-claw-while-you-can-‘cause-tomorrow-the-world-may-end days of our relationship.

The parking garage is long since gone, and so is Mark Conly—it was MS, alas, and very, very sad.

In the parking garage’s place is a gulag-style residential complex completely inhabited by Asian graduate students. The airbnb host, who is in Viet Nam, had neglected to send me instructions for the app that was my only way of getting into the apartment. Thus, I spent a rather stressful hour or so breaking into the apartment.

I prevailed.

(And she sent me app instructions this morning, so I am now perfectly legal.)

“Why didn’t you just call me?” EB asked. “You know you can always stay here!”

Well, partly because EB lives in Piedmont, an upscale enclave completely encircled by Oakland, where no one ever had to worry about public transportation. So, there isn’t any.

And partly because—deeply as I love EB—she is utterly miserable and grows unhappier every year, and this trip is all about girls having fun, right? Or at least, one girl—me!!!!!!

EB was my Best Friend in Graduate School.

And the old connection is still there, the bond of effortlessly and endlessly fascinating talk—

EB sent me back to the gulag with a copy of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

Slept well.

Breakfasted with Max.



RTT is texting me pix of his Berkeley discoveries.

It’s All Good.

Barbara Angell hates phones as much as I do, so I was surprised to find her voicemail: I’ve been thinking about you nonstop for the last two weeks. I figured I should call.

It was nice to know the old psychic bond persists. She is definitely one of the irreplaceables.

We babbled for more than an hour. Barbara belongs to an archeological era that predates my involvement with Ben, so she didn’t know him very well. She was my best friend in nursing school, and nursing school is such a bizarre experience that we bonded on a very deep level despite the fact that we couldn’t be more different, me being brash and, despite my love affair with invisibility, essentially an attention-seeker, while Barbara is cloaked in the psychic mist, impenetrable, and could not care less about worldly enticements.
She knew my first husband Bill very well. Bill and I gave lots of impromptu parties. The photograph above was taken at one of them.

You can’t tell from that photograph, but Barbara was the most beautiful woman I ever met. Masses of honey-colored hair, aquamarine eyes, Ingrid Bergman features.

Here’s a better photo of her though it still doesn’t capture her essence:



I suppose the reason Barbara photographed badly is that she hated being photographed.

Ironically, her daughter Aemilia—who looks a lot like her though not as beautiful—is a professional Fashion Influencer with more than 500,000 Instagram followers.

Anyway, in November, Barbara and I will meet up in Calistoga and spend three days hiking in the Petrified Forest, steeping in volcanic mud, and generally chilling.

This will follow my three days in Mendocino with Eleanor whom I love deeply but who can be challenging.

The timing is perfect.

###

More pictures from that long-ago party:

Me with Bill’s best friend, Jim B_____, and Sandinista, my dog.

Jim was a bass guitar player. A pretty good bass player, too, I thought—though rock ‘n’ roll was never my thing, so I may not have been the best judge.

Jim lived with the band’s lead guitarist Bill Duke and Bill Duke’s Brit girlfriend Debbie Watson in a tiny Oakland craftsman cottage that had somehow survived being razed for the MacArthur Freeway when every other craftsman cottage in the area was razed. It was a very dark and peculiar house, surrounded by the sounds of whooshing cars.

Unbeknownst to Jim and Debbie, Bill Duke was deep in the grips of a major heroin addiction. One night, Jim came home and found every one of his guitars missing plus the stereo system and everything else of value in the house. Bill Duke had stolen it all to go on one last drug-fueled orgy before turning himself in to his parents—who were rich people living somewhere on the Peninsula—for rehab.

Debbie seemed to think that made Jim her boyfriend now. Jim did not agree, and shortly thereafter, decamped for Ohio, his home state. Where he lives to this very day. In a town called Delaware, close to the Pennsylvania border. I fantasize every now and then about visiting him there. But I won’t.

Many years afterwards, it dawned on me that Jim was probably gay and in love with Bill Duke. But deeply, deeply, deeply closeted. Were there any other explanations for the enormous amount of shit he put up with?

I suspect he may also have been kind of in love with my husband Bill, whom he’d grown up with. It was great fun to listen to Bill and Jim talk about their boyhood, which seems to have been one long run of naturalist expeditions and blowing things up.

Anyway, my marriage to Bill wouldn’t have lasted even as long as it did without Jim. I was always complaining to him about Bill’s latest bout of incredibly boorish behavior, and he’d always listen sympathetically, administering carefully Platonic hugs, nodding, sighing, and rolling his eyes in all the right places: “That’s just Bill.”

###

In terms of continuity, this could have been the same party except clearly, it wasn’t because I’m dressed differently:





This was my dear friend Bibbit, who was my bike-training partner. In those days I was a bicycle racer. Three or four times a week, Bibbit and I would cut across the UCB campus to Spruce Street, grind up Spruce Street to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, get on to Skyline, thence to Pinehurst, coast down to Moraga, climb back up Pinehurst—in memory, at least, an exceedingly steep road—and then back down into the city on Claremont Boulevard.

I miss Bibbit more than I can say. You know those memes that ask you to describe the happiest day in your life?

For me, it will always be one of those bicycle trips with Bibbit. I got a flat tire on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, and somehow I’d neglected to bring a patch kit though I had a pump. So we pulled over to the side of the road and began warbling Some Day My Prince Will Come at the top of our lungs, waiting for someone to come along and volunteer to patch my tire.

The day was just so sunny and beautiful and clear.

And we were laughing so hard.

Ah, Bibbit.

She also had a very sad story, one that I don’t have time to tell now because—eye on the clock—I must buckle down and get to work.

You’ve heard of cabbage roses?

These are kale roses.

I bought them as a thank you for Eleanor.

I’d never seen them before. I’d never seen cabbage roses, either.

The guy who sold them to me was the same guy who did the flowers for my wedding to Bill 35 years ago.

So, that was strange.

###

I was exhausted all weekend. Just exhausted.

Jet lag?

Gloomy, relentless weather?

Fatal disease?

I mounted the masks I brought back from California. I went for a walk in the freezing rain. I bickered with annoying clients.

And that was about it for useful employments.

I don’t feel as though I’m all the way back. Although clearly, I’m not someplace else either.



Besides hanging out with Max, the thing I mostly did in Berkeley and Oakland was walk.

This was the place where I spent my youth, and it’s bizarre to me that things are so very different now.

I mean, when I left town, the whole place should have been hermetically sealed off like a time capsule, right?

There’s a tremendous amount of construction going on. Shattuck Avenue, back in the day, was this sleepy little small-town Main Street with single-story commercial properties. Now it’s this stretch of 10-story buildings clustered around the BART station. Retail on the ground floor; residential condominiums on the upper stories.

Of course, this is the most effective way to build when you have population density.

“So, has Berkeley’s population increased that dramatically?” I asked Max. As a public policy student, one would expect him to be an expert on demographic trends.

“Not really,” Max said. “At least the permanent population hasn’t increased that much. What has increased is the number of students.”

The transient, itinerant population in other words.

The University of California is a decidedly mixed blessing for Berkeley. It pays absolutely no taxes on its vast property holdings, and it uses a helluva lot of costly services. On the other hand, student dollars are what keep those small, struggling businesses afloat—at least, for one more year. Then they’re replaced by another small struggling business.



One morning I walked from the city of Piedmont to San Pablo and University. Seven miles or so.

Oakland was only one of many quaint little East Bay towns when the Big One hit San Francisco in 1906.

San Franciscans who could afford to escape the seismic destruction did so by relocating across the Bay. And Oakland, which had received the biggest population boost, began gobbling up the villages around it in much the same manner as the city of Los Angeles did throughout the same time period.

Brooklyn, Montclair, Maxwell Park—all names on street signs and dusty maps, now. Piedmont was the one East Bay town that defied annexation and, as a result, is still its own little city with reasonable zoning laws and great public schools. The landscaping is similarly outstanding.

Couple-a miles outside of Piedmont, everything turns urban and gritty.

This is the part of Oakland that has not changed since I lived there.

Graffiti sharing space with Bad Art:



Feral hippie houses. You can imagine the inhabitants as anachronisms rather like Shakers: ancient and dying out without replacements ‘cause nobody loves hippies anymore:



Those dormer-topped craftsmen cottages are a characteristic Oakland architectural style. Huge numbers of them were constructed to contain the SF earthquake overflow.

One is beginning to see the emergence of backyard entrepreneurism. I'm not exactly what that says about the economy:



I’d bet big money that this guy doesn’t have a business license. The fact that the city isn’t going after him reflects the new transportation paradigm: More and more, people don’t buy bicycles; they rent them off racks for an hour or three or however long they need them. So, this guy is barely eking out a living.

Electric scooters are also for rent everywhere:



I’d never noticed these scooters before my trip to the Bay Area, but as I was journeying from JFK to Grand Central Station the other night, I saw scads of them on the NYC streets, too. So, I guess you only see what you expect to see when you’re looking! At least, for the most part.

For-rent scooters strikes me as a kind of dicey business model because scooters like these need a lot of maintenance—in particular, brake maintenance—and how are you gonna keep up with that when renters don’t even have to return the scooter to the location where they rented it?

So, I’m inclined to see this trend as an evolutionary dead end.

Still. I find the whole trend toward collectivizing transportation units that traditionally have been privately owned very intriguing.

###

There are tons of murals in Oakland and Berkeley, too:







The East Bay still has a lot of charm. When I win Lotto—any day now!—I’m definitely gonna pay $1.5 million for a one-bedroom house there.

And lets hear it for Too Much Pressure – second place winners in Atlas Bowl’s Wednesday Trivia Night!

We didn’t get the one hour of free bowling. But we did get to take home a shitload of designer beer!

###

I was very saddened by the news that a grassfire is threatening to take out Grizzly Peak Boulevard in Berkeley.

All throughout the 70s and the early 80s, this was my stomping grounds. Back then, I rode my bicycle something like 150 miles a week: I’d start out on Spruce Street, cut south on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, come down from the Berkeley Hills on Claremont, and then peddle home on the city streets.

In my mind, this time in my life is suffused in a golden haze – although if I think about it unsentimentally, this was not a golden moment: I had a serious drug problem and the angst, which is always a constant in my psyche, had not yet been shown its seat at one of the tables farthest from the podium.

But in my golden sentimental memories, the Grizzly Peak Boulevard parkland I sped through, hunched over my handlebars, is a place out of time. I just know if I close my eyes and squeeze them hard enough, I can go back there. Bibbit will be beside me, it will be a glorious summer day, and the two of us will be singing, Someday My Prince Will Come and laughing hysterically.