Trick or treat

The kids were out in force this evening as I walked home from work, and many of them were costumed in terrific disguises. But what's with all the lazy jokers wearing street clothes and carrying a plastic grocery bag? So what if you put a little glitter in your hair, what kind of costume is that? It isn't just free candy night, people, you're supposed to hold up your end of the bargain and at least try to put some effort into it. If trick-or-treaters actually came to my doorstep, the ones without a detectable costume wouldn't be getting any of my candy, that's for sure. Little moochers.

In other news, I went out amongst the hordes in the Castro tonight. That'll be the last time I do that. 100,000 drunken people in disguise jamming the streets with other rowdy revelers just isn't as much fun as it used to be. It took me over an hour just to catch a cab home. Although it could've been worse since at least I narrowly avoided getting shot, I guess.

I sound like an old coot, but what ever happened to the good ol' days of homemade costumes, popcorn balls, and peaceful drunken revelry?

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.

I'm BAaack

So, obviously I've been on a little hiatus here. As summer rapidly drew to a close (happy Autumn everyone!) I had other things to do. Like a Labor Day trip to Kansas City*. And the weather has turned nicer, so the outdoors needed enjoying. And last weekend was Paul's wedding - which I was in as an "usher" but which really meant I was one of the groomsmen so I got to wear a tux.

The highlight of the past week, by the way, was being mobbed by the Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I was walking home on Sunday after returning my tux, and veered towards a little park on the edge of downtown where I heard the familiar cacophony of the flock. There was a woman with sunflower seeds who offered some to me, and before I knew it there were parrots on my shoulders, arms, and hanging off my hands. They were raucous and rambunctious, curious and cautiously friendly, and I feel like I've ticked another uniquely San Franciscan item off my list.

Anyhoodle, I'll try to get back on task with more regular postings.


* "Kansas City?" you may ask. "Why?" Well, a few years ago I finally joined the ranks of the Labor Day Gang - a few folks and extended friends from college who have gotten together every Labor Day weekend for the past 8-ish years. They've been meeting in random places we might not ordinarily go (Memphis, Austin, etc.) to experience someplace new. Remind me to tell you sometime about the Spirit of Texas. But anyway, KC was great - barbeque, baseball, fried chicken, rotating lounges... who'd'a thunk?

Old news

For the record, it's actually the 23th of September, but this back-dated post was sitting half-finished from several weeks ago, so I felt obligated to pick up where I left off.

Finally, a weekend that struck the perfect balance between busy fun and abject lethargy. It began Friday night with a "bachelor" party for my friend Paul - a former coworker with whom I applied for The Amazing Race. I use quotes only because there were as many women there as guys. And it was at a karaoke bar, which held about as much appeal for me as lap dances at a strip joint. Which is to say, none.

The main focus of the evening, since the singing kept Paul occupied, was trying to determine if one of his cute friends is gay or straight. You'd think shouldn't be a tough challenge, but even with some of the best evil minds working on it, it remains a mystery. Dumb faulty gaydar anyhow.

Saturday, I did absolutely nothing save nurse my headache, but made up for it by getting up before sunrise on Sunday, walking up Telegraph Hill to the base of Coit Tower, and waiting to meet my friends Nichole and Lea for a photo-taking date. They were late, but it was foggy anyway, so sunrise was a bust. Plus, a Pepsi commercial was being filmed there, which caught me by surprise as I walked around from the peaceful south side right into the middle of the shoot on the north side. I came around the sidewalk into the glare of lights, bustle of equipment, and all these faces looking right at me. A guy on a megaphone was saying, "Can you hear me at the top of the stairs?" and, frozen at the top of the stairs as I was, I thought for a moment he was talking to me until he said, annoyed, "No, sir, not you." At which point I ran down the steps and out of the shot they were setting up. Awkward!

So from there, we went to the Presidio to take photos in the fog, and then made our way through Dim Sum brunch to the Legion Of Honor for the Monet exhibit. But there was a huge line to get in, so we gave up. I then went to the Giants/Reds game with another friend and porked out on garlic fries and bratwurst.

And finally, back home to help the roommate load up their car with 8 tons of crap for their week at Burning Man. (Hooray! I have the apartment to myself for a few days!) Overall, a very satisfying weekend, don't you think?

Like floating questions, why?

I ended up walking home by myself this evening, and was mostly lost in thought and the music coming from my ipod. But as I turned up Columbus at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid, where the dark canyons of the Financial District suddenly give way to the open sky and building height restrictions of North Beach, I was faced with a most amazing sight.

It was marvelous. The sun had mostly set already, leaving the sky something to behold. First, there was a thin layer of gauzy cirrus in the upper atmosphere, still lit up by the sun, shimmering and pale. Much nearer to earth was a 2nd layer of clouds, rippled in long undulating pink strands across the heavens, like choppy seas of unraveled cotton candy. Below that, rolling over Russian hill was the fog, breaking up in swift-moving puffs of grey lavender. Adding to the drama, all three layers were moving at different speeds and in slightly different directions across the darkening sky to dizzying effect.

It seemed as if no one else bothered to look up or take notice, like I was enjoying my own private private show on a grand scale. The rest of the walk home I barely watched where I was going as I was staring skyward, smiling the whole way.

The Cookie Divine

Every afternoon around between about 2:30 and 4 at the office, I'll start to crash. Sometimes I'm truly tired. Sometimes I just get the munchies. Sometimes I zone out from the tedium. Sometimes I'll be in the post-lunch food-coma phase. But pretty inevitably if I'm sitting at my desk working (as opposed to running around the office flailing my arms, or sitting in a meeting. Although sometimes even sitting in a meeting...), my eyes will start to lose focus, my eyelids droop, my fingers start typing half words. And every once in a great while, my brain will helplessly slip into that limbo la-la land where it can't tell the difference between responding to an e-mail and rolling through a field of poseys while covered in peanut butter and being chased by cows mooing in cockney accents.

I'm sure you could probably argue that this is caused from too much sugar in my diet already, but on the worst of days, I find the only solution (since actual power naps are frowned upon in the office) is to get up from my desk, walk the 3 blocks to Specialty's bakery, and buy myself a warm chunk of gooey chocolatey chippy heaven. Partially this is about getting the blood flowing with a brisk walk in the fresh air. But mostly it's about the dense blood-sugar-spiking buttery heart-stoppingly delicious cookie. Seriously, the things are like crack. You can smell the bakery a block away and be rendered helpless to resist.

Specialty's, I praise and curse you.

These pages must show

Not that I claim to know his original state of mind, but David Copperfield has clearly gone insane:

Copperfield Says He Owns 'Fountain of Youth'

Can't have that upstart media-hog David Blaine stealing all the spotlight.

On the other hand, he does look like he's been around an unnaturally long time..

To the place I belong

Somewhere in my dad's basement sits a disorganized collection of slides and negatives, amongst which are pictures of my sister and me sitting on a log. Taken every August save a few, they're not terribly thrilling separately, I suppose, but when viewed in chronological order they're like a time lapse of the two of us growing up from the time we were toddlers to the time she had a toddler of her own. The photos also chronicle the changes to the place: trees growing, trees cut down, the disappearance of our fallen log (chainsawed for firewood), etc.

For as long as I can remember, my family has been visiting the same campsite up in the Snowy Range of southeast Wyoming, along the Medicine Bow River where it flows out of the woods and into a large meadow called Stillwater Park. But surprisingly, perhaps, for all the added wear and tear from countless other campers, the place remains largely as I remember it. I hadn't actually been there in 5 or 6 years, so I was glad it worked out to join the family there again. I could still practically navigate my way around in the dark, from the bowed Douglas fir at the edge of the slope towards the water to the patch of wild huckleberries near the old 4-wheeler trail, from the sentinel tree in the meadow through the knee-deep grass to the wild strawberries by the willow thicket, from the fish-cleaning rocks in the stream to the Black Forest around the first bend upstream, from the rough entrance off the road through the old clear-cut area to Little Creek. In some ways, it feels more like home than anywhere else.

Time has certainly had its way with the family, though, and the nuclear unit has sort of detonated all over the place. But despite the potential for conflama, the weekend went smoothly with my dad and his wife in their trailer tucked away amongst the trees, Mom and her boyfriend in a tent nestled behind the pop-up trailer housing my sister and her family nearer the water. Across the small dusty clearing a gaggle of cousins on my father's side had also set up camp - none of whom I had seen since Grandma's funeral 4 1/2 years ago. And I borrowed a tent from Dad which I set up in the middle distance.

So even though my tennies didn't hold up so well in the wet grass with all the rain Saturday, it was a lovely weekend. I didn't want to leave. If I could figure out how to live up there, I'd totally do it.

Oh dammit, we forgot to take another photo of Nikole and me.

I'll be what I am

So, anyhoodle. I actually had a good trip I think. I mean, despite the chaos. I could have fared much worse. I mean, I made it where I needed to go, eventually my luggage did too, there was plenty of room on my flights so I could choose window or aisle depending on my mood and even angle across 'em all to prevent my knees from being crushed by the reclining seat backs in front of me. And, weirdly, I think I'm getting past my landing anxiety.

(Landing never used to bother me, having grown up flying around in a little single-engine Cessna piloted by my Dad and all, but I never really used to think about it either. That changed on a puddle-jumper flight from DC to New Haven while I was in college. I swear the pilots forgot where they were going, because I was looking out the window thinking, "hey, that's campus clear down there... shouldn't we be...?" when suddenly the bottom dropped out from under us as we began to plummet out of the sky. Seriously, I could see Tweed Airport out my window not actually going anywhere, just getting larger and larger as we dove straight down. That was the first time I was ever terrified in an airplane. I honestly didn't think we were going to be able to pull out of the dive in time to not leave a smoking crater at the foot of the runway.)

Anyway, now it's more the people that scare me than the flight. A true sign of my burgeoning curmudgeonhood, perhaps. It began at 4:15 in the dark and cold morning when SuperShuttle picked me up. The next to get on was a wet-haired sorority sister just past her prime and looking a little worse for the wear. She smelled of stale beer, cigarettes and shampoo, and wheezed out a throaty "sure is early" to my nod of acknowledgement. I couldn't think of a single thing to say for fear of striking up an actual conversation.

Next, standing in the ridiculously long security line, drinking my bottled water so it wouldn't go to waste and surrounded by people frantically rummaging through their carry-on, was a pleasant older gentleman with a woolly cardigan and nothing but a leather satchel. Of course everyone was feeling chummy because of the unusual circumstances so he struck up a conversation, and because it's hard for me to be completely rude, I learned all about his early days with punch-card computers and the cutting edge of engineering computing technology at Stanford during the 50's-80's. Yes he was perfectly nice and harmless, but I find it difficult to waste energy connecting with strangers I'll never see again. Which is probably pathological, given the magic of being human and blah blah blah, but still, it was 6 in the fucking morning, I had just parted with my Chapstick, and all I wanted was some personal space.

Also, the beautiful broad-faced brunette woman in line behind me on the jetway, as we were waiting to have our carry-ons searched again: she couldn't stop talking about how much she needed to pee since she, too, had downed all her water before security so it wouldn't go to waste. Ok, so she built up to that revelation with some giddy chitchat about trying to decide if she should throw out her favorite Aveda/BodyShop/Sephora products or miss the flight, but hello? TMI.

I certainly can't leave out the obnoxious blond tween twins and their brute brother in front of me on one leg. I feel sure this was their first airplane experience given their level excitement and ignorance, but sadly their enthusiasm was mostly exhibited by pummeling each other, arguing loudly in ogre-speak, and slamming their seats back into my kneecaps. Also, who takes off their shoes while the plane is still at the gate and places them in the overhead compartment? Who?! It took me at least 20 minutes to adjust the overhead air properly to keep from gagging at the smell of seriously sour feet the whole flight.

Most alarmingly, though, was the big-armed guy who sat next to me en route back to Phoenix. He still had hospital tags on his wrist, and some amber iodine stains beneath his well-formed (but soul-patch adorned) chin and streaking across his clean-shaven jawline and veiny neck. I couldn't see any actual surgical signs, though he still had gauze taped on the back of his smooth hand and in the crook of his arm. He didn't actually speak to me, or show any signs he knew I existed, which was just was well - the last thing I wanted was to become Patient One, because Patient Zero had breathed on me. But he kept falling asleep with his leg in the aisle, so the flight attendant kept asking me to poke him so she could get her drink cart through. I was not thrilled at this. For all I knew, he had just escaped from the psych ward and was on the lam. I mean, who gets on a plane directly from the hospital without even taking off the wrist tags? I did relax a little later when he pulled out a paper with the header "Post-Procedure Discharge Instructions," though he could have snagged that from the nurse he strangled.

So yeah. Maybe I need a car. I like driving. By myself.

Maybe they've already won

Well, that was something. Lessons learned from my latest travels:

1. Don't fly on days that terrorist plots are thwarted causing the TSA to raise threat levels to orange;
2. Don't check baggage because it may get lost... twice;
3. Just plan on buying all new gels and liquids when reaching my destination since I can't carry it on and it'll get lost anyway if I check it;
4. When the ticket stub says "US Airways by AmericaWest for Mesa Airlines" you're asking for trouble;
5. Perhaps it's worth the extra money to fly direct;
6. Phoenix is fucking hot and anyone who chooses to live there is clearly not right in the head.

Should I be worried?

Huh. So this morning, long before I needed to be up, I started to emerge from dreamland in the quiet of the predawn morning, when my bed shuddered and the apartment rattled and I felt another earthquake. I looked at my clock and it was 5:57. This one was dinky (a mere 2.9 acccording to the USGS), but eerily reminiscent of the last one.

I'm a little alarmed for several reasons. First of all, I find it a little strange that I should have awakened a few minutes immediately prior to both of them. Not that I'm claiming psychic abilities or anything, though that would be useful. It's just disconcerting is all. Second, after going several years without feeling any earthquakes, it seems there's been a slight uptick in their frequency. And lastly, this one was directly under Berkeley, along a stretch of the Hayward fault that has been quiet for long enough that the seismologists are worried. Was this the first sign that the Hayward is going to slip? I shudder at the thought. And think I'll get to creating that little earthquake kit for the office.

Yeah yeah yeah

I was going gangbusters there for a bit, at least retroactively, but y'all's gonna hafta wait a bit longer for sumpin new. It's not that I don't have schtuff to say, because I do (how's about a Happy Birthday leonid roar out to my mom, sister, and nephew Caden, for example). But you see, things have been busy. I've been busy. And I took up reading again -- which was nice while it lasted -- so when I wasn't busy I was still occupied. And now, dear ones, I'm off for a weekend in the Wyoming woods. I'll write when I get back.