If your friends jumped off a bridge...

So, as you've no doubt realized if you've flipped through my Flickr photos, I kinda have a thing for the Golden Gate Bridge. Not exactly an obsession, but it's a) nearby; b) kinda hard to miss; c) moody; d) freakin' gorgeous. I've been over it and under it and above it and on it and near it and on sides of it hundreds of times and it's always changing despite it's stoic immutability. It happens to be one of the few man-made landmarks that not just fits into, but actually enhances, the surrounding scenery.

But I have now seen another side of the Bridge, which, while somewhat tainting, adds yet another dimension to its complex place in the landscape. A few friends and I went to see "The Bridge" on Friday night - a documentary ostensibly about the engineering marvel, but actually about something quite different. With cameras trained on the Bridge over the course of 2004, the filmmaker captured 24 people climbing over the rails and leaping to their deaths in the cold hard waters 24 stories below.

Rather than an exploitative snuff film, though, it turned out to be a fascinating, if disconcerting, look at the diversity of human experience. Through uneasy interviews with friends and family we learn about several of the jumpers - the mentally ill woman who stopped her meds, the exasperated man who never caught a break, the once-happy guy who hit a rough spot, the kid who had felt trapped in the wrong life for its entire duration, the outwardly jovial man whose suicide note exposed a deep self-hatred and unhappiness. And equally interesting were the people left behind - the friend who felt responsible, the brother who refused to believe his sister jumped, the parents who shrugged and said there was nothing they could have done, the woman who encouraged her friend to at least put her name and number in his pocket so she would know when he was found.

One woman described her elaborate planning so she could travel from Texas to meet her end here, while in footage you could witness the very moment one man made his decision, took off his backpack, set it gently on the sidewalk, and leapt. There's no reason to think that 24 suicides in one year is out of the ordinary, which is heartbreaking enough. But when set against the interview with a kid who survived, describing not only the drawn-out period leading to his decision to jump, but the 4 long seconds he had to regret it before he hit the water... well, it makes you pause. Or it should. And maybe hope that you yourself never reach that point, no matter how impossible it may seem now.

And the Bridge goes on standing there, and I suppose I'll go on taking pictures.

Welcome to my new home

I decided to mix things up a little here at the blogspot. I never was all that happy with my old "wyomingbruns" moniker since it really didn't relate to much of anything beyond an imagined Indiana Jones alter-ego that has nothing to do with my current or foreseeable sitch. Nor did it match the "Work In Progress" title which, while a more apt description, was importunately weighted with pressure to actually make some advancement. Plus, the address was already taken.

I toyed with various nicknames I've been called -- Zach attack (too taken), Zach-mandu (too nonsensical), Zach-a-doodle-doo (too silly), Zach-osaurus rex (too mortifying), Dru (too personal), Ziti (too obscure) -- but none seemed precise enough.

And so we arrive here. May you, as I do, forever hear my name in everyday conversations when someone indicates agreement.
It's annoying, isn't it?
Exactly.

Looking for someone to let you go

I'm not sure why I'm the one who gets called on when there's a wild animal on the loose -- maybe it's because people know I grew up on a farm, so they assume I'll know something about critters. It's a myth I don't mind perpetuating only because it's a convenient excuse when I'm an oaf... "Oh, oops. What do I know about etiquette, I grew up on a farm."

Anyway, I was called on when my friend's cat brought in the live mouse. I was called in when the lizard emerged from behind the picture frame in the hotel room in Mexico. I was the one the freshman girls came to when the bat came out of their fireplace in their dormroom. Believe me, in all cases I wanted to be standing on the bed squealing in terror too, and it's not like I actually have a clue how to proceed. In the case of the bat, I cornered it in the bathroom, and spent several heart-stopping minutes gently lifting each towel and robe from their hooks steeling myself for a flutter of membraneous wings in my face, before finding the poor creature flailing helplessly in the toilet bowl. I then donned winter gloves and plastic bags to pluck the thing out of the water and place it in a cardboard box to dry out before setting it out on the windowledge while it gnawed furiously at my finger with its sharp little rabid nippers. The other times mostly just involved a broom and some fancy dance moves.

Tonight was only upsetting because I felt so bad for the little critter. I got back from my jog and my roommate casually tells me, "there's a hummingbird stuck in the back room." He'd apparently tried to swat it gently out the window with a towel, but gave up for fear of injuring the little thing or forcing it to expend its energy and sputter out. I know they can fly non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico and all, but they sure seem fragile. Especially when tapping lightly against the window glass or resting in the ficus chirping pitiably.

Fortunately one of the back windows isn't painted shut or jammed, so I pulled the top down, leaving the opening up near the ceiling. I then put a little red jar on the sill hoping it would be drawn by its resemblence to a feeder. After several more minutes of confused buzzing about, out it flew into the night. I hope the thing can see in the dark.

I'll take this as a sign that my apartment is lush and inviting. And thank god it wasn't a pigeon in the house; I'd have to install screens.

Call me Ishmael

Having grown up in the heartland, I'm not all that comfortable around large bodies of water. I mean, I can swim more or less, thanks to summer morning swimming lessons as a kid (one humid whiff of chlorine today and I'm immediately whisked away to the cold rough concrete on my wet bare feet with my clothes in a wire basket as I slap my way from the cement shower stall to stand shivering in the lineup at the edge of the frigid outdoor municipal pool). But aside from the occasional dunking while river rafting, my exposure to large bodies of water is fairly limited. So the vast immensity of ocean at my doorstep is especially intimidating with its hypothermic chill, crushing waves, and unfathomable depths.

It was not without some trepidation, then, that I stepped aboard the 56-ft Salty Lady on Sunday. Now, I've been on plenty of ferry boats of course, but crossing the Bay is to the open ocean what fetching caulking at the hardware store is to browsing at IKEA on a Saturday afternoon. Yet that's precisely what I was up against as my friend Beth and I were going on an all-day whale watching trip to the Farallon Islands, which sit at the edge of the continental shelf some 27 miles due west of the Golden Gate.

The Farallons are a National Wildlife Refuge in the midst of a Marine Sanctuary and off-limits to everyone but researchers. Eerily beautiful barren granite crags, they're the largest sea-bird rookery in the lower-48 and are home for thousands of seals and sea lions, including some endangered ones. The surrounding waters are filled with great white sharks and 18 species of whales and dolphins, and were the site of the famous footage of an orca attacking a great white a few years ago. Intriguing, right? I've been wanting to visit since I first spotted them on the horizon in the rare glare of fair sunset air.

I've never really suffered from motion sickness before, but I've also never spent time on the high seas, so I took no chances and dosed up on Dramamine, ate a "high protein low fat" breakfast as recommended, had my little pressure-point wrist bands, and packed snacks of ginger snaps, ginger granola, and candied ginger. Of course, the nice weather probably made the most difference, and the Pacific uncharacteristically lived up to its name as, for much of the trip, the waters were calm and glassy smooth.

We greeted the beautiful sunrise (along with 15,000 women running a marathon), boarded our boat, and disappeared into the fog as we motored beneath the Bridge and out into open water, hitting the large swells of the Potato Patch shoals and crossing the calm waters of the gulf beyond, accompanied by dolphins and gulls and the vast expanse of steel-grey sea and sky. The deck-hand caught a beautiful turquoise rock cod, the naturalist got giddy at the site of a tropical brown booby, I nearly fell off the boat as it braked for a mola mola, and I vowed never to release a helium balloon into the air again since we literally saw more of these littering the sea waiting to kill a sea turtle than we saw wildlife. The humpbacks we encountered were indifferent to our harassments and we were never thrilled by close encounters or breaches.

Still, alone amidst the blinding vastness it was easy to understand the lure of a life at sea (though romantic notions fade somewhat when imagining sailing for 3 years at a time, eating hardtack and saltpork, getting in a little dingy to row out and harpoon a leviathan, or butchering and rendering the blubber onboard. What a peculiar piece of history, that). Had there been swells or chop, I surely would have been wan and wretched, but as it was, I had a luminous adventure and plan to repeat it periodically... especially if the food supply rebounds and the blue whales return... If for no other reason than so I can shout, "There she blows! Off the starboard bow -- there she blows!"

We're Number Three! We're Number Three!

The 300 millionth person arrived in America today. Because there's a birth roughly every 7 seconds, a death every 13 seconds, a new immigrant every 31 seconds, there's a new American basically every 11 seconds. And we just passed the 300 million mark.

Discuss.

Why do you ask if I drove here?

To conclude, for now, the ongoing upper maxillary saga, I went to the Ear/Nose/Throat guy yesterday and he doesn't know what it is either. But he knows what it's not, and that includes sinus infection, tumor, egg sac, and bone irregularities. So that's good, I guess. And now I've had a CT scan of my face and skull, which was pretty interesting.

I'd been wanting one of those just because it seems like I've had a lot of sinus issues over the past few years, and I was picturing my sinus cavities as these crowded gunk-filled mazes ready to flare up and wreak havoc at the first sign of a virus or pollen. Apparently that's not the case. I have a lot of air in my head.
[Insert joke of choice here]
He said my sinuses looked large and healthy and it was obvious that I grew up in a rural setting and never suffered from sinus problems or infections as a kid.

Anyway, since nobody has any idea, and it's more just annoying than a problem, we do nothing now. And if it doesn't go away as mysteriously as it arrived, then he'll either blame my dentist or send me to a nerve specialist. Neat.

As long as it's not a tooth problem, cancer, or an egg sac, I'm fine. And now I know what the bones in my inner ear look like. And that the CT-scan technician validates parking.

Leader of the Plaque

My gums hurt. My jaw is sore. And feeling has just recently been restored to my nose, tongue and palate. Yes folks, I just spent two hours at the dentist, one of my least favorite places on Earth. No offense to my current dental professional. You'd think that years of orthodontia, tooth-pullings, etc. would inure me to the torture of the dental chair. But you'd be wrong. If anything, it's made things worse.

Now my current dentist is actually a pretty good guy (though anyone who chooses dentistry as a profession is automatically somewhat suspect). And he knows I'm not a fan. My white knuckled deathgrip on the reclining chair is a dead giveaway. He commented today while propping open my jaw that I seem to be more at ease than I used to be -- which... may be true but isn't necessarily saying much given that our first shared experience involved a root canal and pain that I can only describe as twanging my nerve endings like guitar strings, to which he responded with a casual "Hmm, the higher acidity from the infection tends to reduce the anesthetic's effectiveness. I'm going to need to inject some directly into your nerve."

So, given that I hadn't been in, even for a cleaning, in a couple years (yes, I know. I haven't exactly reconciled the necessity of regular visitations for the prevention of future such traumatic horrors with the vile loathing. It's not an easy balance to strike), we scheduled this one after last week's verification that my weird sinus issue wasn't a crippling tooth problem. And at that time we discussed a problem area I have with flossing that he said he'd take a look at and maybe replace the filling if necessary. Well it turns out he tricked me, the evil bastard genius.

After enough x-rays to give me brain cancer, as I tensely settled back for a little scraping and polishing, he instead pulled out this ginormous needle and, before I could object, shot me full of Lidocaine so I could go numb while he cleaned. On the upside, I was mostly droolingly deadened during the cleaning. However, he then proceeded to replace not one but three fillings. On two different sides.

In fairness, the extra two were ones we'd talked about years ago. My last remaining old amalgam one, for example. But since there was nothing actually wrong with it -- you know, other than the mercury -- I had balked at the time. So frankly I gotta give him credit since, as he assumed, I'd have run for the hills with any advanced warning. I guess I should be relieved that now, in one fell swoop, the last bit of necessary dental work has finally concluded. Barring a freak popcorn-coated carmel-apple accident or an unlikely-unless-you're-me leaky root canal tragedy, I can settle in to an uneasy routine of biannual cleanings with little to fear.

Or so I'm led to believe...

Primal [Jet Engine] Scream

In other news, the weather has finally sort of turned not so cold. Whoo-hoo Indian Summer at last! Or, you know, something like it. At least the sun is shining and the fog has rolled back briefly.

Just in time for Fleet Week! Apparently there's all sorts of stuff that goes on during Fleet Week, but the only part I never miss is the annual Blue Angels air show. Rather hard to miss it, frankly, what with the scream of jets roaring low overhead. Which, if you can imagine, some people actually complain about. For reals!

I mean, yes it's noisy and distracting. But it only happens once a year. For 3 days. And the planes are only in the air over the City for 30 minutes, tops. Please. Bitching about it is so lame. The ground-shaking roar of motorcycles sets off more car alarms than the Blue Angels, and I don't see anyone whining from their couches that they can't hear their precious TVs and writing editorials about banning them.

Also, because this is San Francisco, there's always the people who bitch about needless displays of military power. But come on, people! How can you not feel that roar or see the jet streak overhead and just jump in giddy glee? I mean, that's a heavy chunk of metal and stuff defying gravity up there! Humanity is capable of creating that! And there's a person inside! The things fly faster than sound! They can stay airborne upside-down! They can nearly stall out, then disappear into the wild blue yonder in the blink of an eye, level out, streak towards the earth, and roll sideways, slicing through the air like, like... like an F/A-18 Hornet, I guess.

But how freakin' cool is that?! I don't know how you can watch and not get chills. It taps into something deep and primal for me, and I just can't stop grinning like an idiot. Thankfully my rooftop has the perfect view, up above the crowds. Comically, almost every rooftop in sight was crawling with people. Love that.

So yeah, Fleet Week. Yay! Plus... Sailors!*

*Jered, I assure you there are sailors. Friday was an aberration in the neighborhood's social scene; the rest of the weekend was packed with people. Anyway, it was terrific seeing you & Paul and hope you made it back home safe! You're both to come back and stay any time!

So clearly I lied

I wasn't really back at all, there, was I?

Not for lack of things to talk about, but for all sorts of other good excuses. Like internet being down at home. Like being busy. Like good weather. Like being lazy.

Anyway, let's try this again, shall we?

For the last few weeks I've had this odd pressure behind my face, on the left side, directly below my cheek bone and about halfway closer to my nose. Now, I've had sinus infections before, and besides usually being quite painful, they've usually started with an allergy attack or a cold or something that involves a seriously runny nose and a lot of gunk... or, you know, "post-nasal drip." What's weird about this is that it's just a strange feeling; there's no pain, there's no snot, there's no feeling of general ickiness.

Also, when I poke at this point on my face, the feeling goes from pressure to serious discomfort, though still not exactly painful.

Now, I know better than anyone when something isn't quite right with my body, having lived with it for a few decades. And while I'm admittedly a complete hypochondriac about certain things (what if that tiny little tremor in my hand was this first sign of Parkinson's instead of a sign of too much caffeine?!), after that heart thing, I've learned when something's not right enough to get the doctor involved. As I have done in this instance.

Of course, as it turns out, neither my doctor nor my dentist know what's up any more than I do, nor has an x-ray elucidated the matter any. Nor has a full course of antibiotics made a difference. So now it's up to the specialists.

On the one hand, I'm glad they don't think I have a tooth problem, because there's no way in hell I ever want to experience anything remotely like a root canal again. On the other hand, if it's not that or a sinus infection, I'm left with something tragic or mortifying. Like brain leakage or a spider's egg sac in my maxillary sinus.

Oh god I feel woozy.