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where's that confounded bridge?
Sunday, May 27 2001
This morning Jen Wade announced that she'd be doing brunch with Marin online diarist
Lunesse, and that John and I could come along if we wanted to. It wasn't clear at first that we were supposed to say yes (Jen's cool detachment often has the effect of contradicting her desires; no wonder she needs advice on how to flirt). But I just took a leap of faith and said sure, we'd come. And it turns out that the brunch had been specifically planned by Lunesse so she could meet me.
As we were waiting around for Lunesse and her husband to arrive on their motorcycles from across the Golden Gate Bridge, Jen fixed me tea and, in hopes of helping me with my hangover, fetched me some over-the-counter painkillers. Jen spends her working days methodically medicating, vivisecting and euthenizing lab mice to study their serotonin levels, but the only painkillers she keeps in her house are designed for humans unlucky enough to lack prescriptions. For his part, John is dismayed and alarmed that someone with access to so many veterinary medicines wouldn't keep a substantial stockpile around the house.
While John was briefly out of earshot, Jen and I compared notes on our journal writing techniques. For me, writing is not an especially pleasant experience. It's something that hangs over my head like an assignment and I only feel good about it when I'm finished. Oftentimes I have to force myself. In other words, according to Jen, "it's a compulsion." She implied at this point that she's pretty much the same way. Our method is to just get it out and move on with our lives until the compulsion drags us back. By contrast, she said, her erstwhile internet boyfriend Grinder (a glumly sardonic diarist based in Leeds, England, who maintains an incorrect link to http://www.whatever-whenever.net) would take hours mulling over his often-brief entries, teasing the words and tweaking the syntax until his entries met his exacting standards. Maybe it would have been better not to know that; I was always particularly impressed with the agility and exactness of his entries. This is yet more evidence that quality is a function of time. Most of the web was built in a day and it looks like it too. It's a chaotic shantytown, a fragrant Tijuana, and little of it would pass firecode if it were real.
When they arrived, Lunesse and her husband were outfitted head-to-toe in heavy motorcycle gear. The helmet, the aluminum-girded boots, the gloves, the jackets, the leather pants with thick knee pads, it all had to come off before they stopped looking like superheroes. The process of outfitting and de-outfitting seemed like an awful lot of trouble to me. I'm the sort of person who likes to be spontaneous in my actions (ie: pantyhose more than justifies the glass ceiling), and having to spend fifteen minutes shoehorning myself into bulky leather clothes just to go drive a few miles is not my idea of fun. It's this bother, this fussing around, that ensured that I never came to view horses as a viable transportation option (despite the best efforts of my horse-crazy mother). Still, in San Francisco, driving a motorcycle definitely comes with its own set of rewards. They can be parked anywhere, they're relatively immune to traffic gridlock, they use inconsequential amounts of fuel, and they go Brmm, Brmm, Brmm in a serotonin-affirming way betwixt your legs.
Brunch. I've never been particularly fond of breakfast food. All my preferences are arrayed against it. I don't wake up with much of an appetite, I have a biological aversion to eggs, eating greasy food makes me crave a shower, and I don't much like sweet food. Usually when I eat breakfast with my friends, I try to order some non-breakfasty meal like a burrito or a sandwich. BLTs are okay too, depending on how much grease I feel I can handle. But while many restaurants proudly proclaim the fact that they serve breakfast all day (but why?), it's often difficult to order real food in the morning. I've even had waitresses look at me like I'm crazy. What am I talking about? Everyone looks at me like I'm crazy.
But we were going to a crêpe place. I haven't eaten many crêpes in my life, but they're enough like Indian food or burritos that I can happily eat them in the morning. The place we went was called Crêpe Vine and it was within easy walking distance of Jen's place near the UCSF (this neighborhood has the vaguely new agey name of "Inner Sunset"). Unbeknownst to me, crêpe and omelet places are nearly as numerous as Starbucks franchises in San Francisco. I'm not a frequenter of such places, so I had no idea what the protocol would be, and it was rather different than I expected. The first thing that happens when you come into the restaurant is you enter a slowly-moving line of people running down the middle of the restaurant. As you approach the front, one of the staff people come to you and ascertains the size of your party and, in some cases, even takes your order. By the time you get to the front of the line, all you have to do is pay. Your seat has been reserved, and from then on there's little waiting and no further concern about unpleasant realities like money, tips or dividing up the check. The interesting thing about this method of service is that it increases the functional size of the restaurant. Most of the waiting happens while you are standing in line. You only sit down at a table once you've paid and picked up your drinks. This means that the tables are occupied for considerably less time than in a conventional restaurant. Another benefit of this method is that it gives the staff a better sense of the size of parties in queue and they can juggle tables and direct diners to squeeze as many people in as possible. Even at the time I could see it as a form of "human tetris," one with a long preview. When we finally took our seat, we sat at the most interesting table in the place, one made from the cross section of a giant stump.
Despite all my excitement at the process of how we were served, I wasn't especially impressed with the product. The crêpes we ordered were pathetic little things, too flimsy to be picked up like a burrito and too inconsequential to satisfy any normal human appetite. I found myself eating my tofu crêpe with a fork and a knife wondering what the hell the point was. Presumably to make up for the paltry size of the crêpe, my plate was stacked high with a huge pile of potatoes. I've never much liked big pieces of potato and I didn't start liking them today just because of their juxtaposition with a meager little crêpe. San Francisco might well be a genuine city filled with interesting, substantial people, but if crêpes are typical of its cuisine, I think I'll stick with RicearoniTM. I jokingly asked the table if there were any restaurants in San Francisco that specialized in RicearoniTM, and Jen suggested there should be one downtown beside a cable car line. The San-Fran-Cisco Treat. Ding Ding!
Back at Jen's place, as Lunesse and her husband prepared to wriggle into their motorcycle gear, the conversation took an unexpected turn for the sexual, mostly under the direction of Lunesse's husband. Just when you thought the conversation was about to not go there it did. Let's see, there was the topic of vibrators and then there was the big question still unanswered from the Monica Lewinski era, "What exactly is sex?" Penetration? Orgasm? Sitting in the same classroom in eight grade? I did what I could to bring things back down to geeky reality by shepherding the conversation towards a discussion of the interface and a markup language for the internet-mediated control of vibrators. It could have been much worse, of course, but John was definitely uncomfortable; he's not used to hearing such discussions while sober in front of strange women.
Lunesse and her husband seemed like a compatible unit. They're earthy, jovial and unusually bold. He's sort of wiseass with a tendency to talk before thinking, and she's sort of the same way, although while the talk that most gets him in trouble seems to be boil up out of the id, hers seems paradoxically rooted in the superego. For example, while my charity work is largely restricted to the occasional answering of my email, hers actually involves giving free belly dance performances for seniors.
After Lunesse and her husband were gone, John and I packed our things and hit the road back to Los Angeles. We could have stayed another day I suppose (and, surprisingly enough, I don't even think we wore out our welcome with Jen), but sometimes you just know you've had enough of a place and it's time to go home, especially when home means a bed, a DSL connection, and a wide selection of rooms to walk around in.
We didn't really know how to get out of San Francisco, so we simply headed East down Haight until we saw signs for "the Freeway." (You'd never see a sign for "the Freeway" in Los Angeles; it would be as useful as a sign for "the restaurant.") The Freeway we ended up upon was the 101 heading south. This was Fandango Matt's suggested way, but we didn't find ourselves in any mood for scenery and indirection, so at our earliest convenience we busted a left across the San Francisco Bay. Unfortunately, this didn't come until we'd made it down to San Mateo. I don't know if it was a hangover or what, but John was, even by his own estimation, not driving especially well. "I'm off my game," he said later in the trip. Just getting to the other side of the bay, we narrowly avoided death on two occasions. The first was when John was distracted by an annoying eucalyptus leaf stuck to his windshield and nearly rear-ending a ponderous Lexus SUV. We were saved when he saw me cowering out of the corner of his eye. The second near death experience came when we nearly missed the 92 exit in San Mateo and had to swerve across a low barricade into the exit ramp at the very last moment, almost into the path of an oncoming big rig full of diesel, Jake brakes, good buddies and caffedrine pills. The rig driver leaned on his horn as he swerved out of our way and nearly hit a couple driving another car. They slowed down and gave us the double-middle-finger salute and screamed at us silently through their rolled-up windows. "I've never seen an Asian that angry before," John remarked.
In all fairness, though, the directions given by the signs were anything but clear. We had a heck of a time just finding the San Mateo bridge, even though it's probably the single largest manmade structure in all of California.
Later on, heading westward toward the Central Valley on the 580, we found ourselves stuck in stop and start traffic. It turned out that there weren't even any blocked lanes; the slowness was the result of people rubbernecking, first to see the rootin' tootin' happening at a rodeo and second to gawk at a motorcycle accident entirely restricted to the shoulder. In the aftermath of meeting Lunesse, John had been sort of reconsidering the idea of buying a motorcycle. This was all he needed to switch decisively back to anti-motorcycle mode.
The 805 traverses a gentle-sloped pass into the Central Valley of California, and evidently strong winds are common along this corridor because for several miles it is host to rows of large electricity-generating windmills, similar to those I'd seen near Palm Springs, but largely restricted to ridgetops. There are two radically different kinds of windmills in use. The most familiar kind is the three-propeller horizontal-shafted model, built like a fan facing into the wind. Its movement has a ruthlessness to it that borders on the frightening, especially when you see a row of them turning in relentless unison. The other kind is mounted on its back, with the rotating shaft pointing directly upward with ribbons of metal bowing outward from the shaft. I don't know how this design works ærodynamically and what its advantages are except that it probably requires less mounting infrastructure. Regardless whether or not this latter design works effectively or not, it looks enough like something out of Dr. Seuss to give me doubts. John made the observation that, in his head at least, such windmills make a whimsical "whoop, whoop" noise as they turn. In the remoteness of the yellow-grass-covered hills, the combined movement of all these windmills seemed good-intentioned but pathetic nonetheless.
We pulled into a dusty outpost just to find a place to piss. It was the first time we'd been out of the car since the Bay Area and we found the air warm and dry but perfectly comfortable. I sat outside and videotaped several blackbirds going through some sort of complicated mating ritual right there on the sidewalk. They'd fluff up, dance around, and squawk, mostly oblivious to me, even when I got up to go inside. John was in there flirting with the hot cashier chick. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a hot cashier chick living in the remoteness of this godforsaken place, among these endless rolling hills of yellow grass, only rarely punctuated by the black swath of a recent grass fire.
The 5 skirts the southwestern edge of the Central Valley for most of the drive down to Los Angeles. For awhile it looks pretty much the way the Central Valley used to look, a vast endless expanse of flatland occupied by that peculiar yellow grass. I'm used to the yellow grass; I've seen it in many other parts of California but I've never seen it east of the Rockies. And prior to now I'd never been in any part of California that was particularly flat, so it seemed almost surreal to behold this characteristically Californian grass extending as far as the eye can see across land every bit as flat as the plains of Kansas or northern Ohio. The Central Valley is probably the flattest terrain you can expect to find west of the Rockies.
But the sense of virgin wildness that comes with the yellow grass doesn't last long in the Central Valley. This Valley is, among few other things, the breadbasket of the West Coast. As the largest place with a Mediterranean climate outside the Mediterranean, it is ideal for growing a wide variety of western crops. For most of this trip the plain was a fruited one, serving host to vast fields of bantam fruit trees. I couldn't tell what kind they were, but the one place selling fruit to weary travelers was advertising apricots.
For a brief moment there was parting of the fruit trees and one could see, extending as far as the horizon, millions of cows milling around in boredom, each individually awaiting its demise. The air assumed the smell of their manure and I knew right away why they call this place "Cowschwitz."
John pointed out a plane that was hanging nearly still over the freeway. It was rather high up, painted white, and difficult to see, but it was there. John kept pointing it out to me and then losing track of it, finding it again and giving me sky coordinates until we both could see it. Periodically it would break out of its nearly-fixed location, buzz around in a big circle, and resume its position over the freeway. What could this be about? There was only one explanation: this was an airborne speedtrap. And sure enough, as soon as we got beneath the plane we saw two cars pulled over by cops on the side of the road. Unlucky bastards, they should have been watching the unfriendly skies! Of course by now John had dropped his speed to 75mph, so we weren't in any danger ourselves. On this long stretch of freeway, the only signs one sees about traffic enforcement warn that it is done by air. Since setting up such an operation would be difficult or impossible at night, I wonder if perhaps The Man even bothers except during the day. Speedwise, at least, it seems we got away with murder on the nighttime drive north to San Francisco.
Beneath every overpass I noticed flocks of small flying creatures coming home to residences fabricated from plastered mud. They looked sort of like bats, but it was the middle of the day and I wasn't aware of any bats that build their own homes, so I decided they must be swallows. But Marc Siry wrote to me swearing they're bats, so now I don't know.
After climbing up out of the Central Valley on the Grapevine, we were treated to a stunning view of Pyramid Lake below. Part of the mountainside above Pyramid lake seems to have been sliced away, leaving a vast triangular cliff face. I suppose this is how the lake came to get its name. By now dark clouds had gathered over the Los Angeles area and a spitting rain was falling. We were listening to Terry Gross interview Paul McCartney on a Central Valley NPR station.
As we approached the intersection of the 5 and the 405, we found ourselves stuck yet again in traffic. There wasn't much to do except turn off the Nic Harcourt and endure the gridlock in silent misery. We knew it would take forever to get through; it always does. Eventually we started talking about the customizations (some of them rather subtle) that John could see in the vehicles around us. John has become something of an expert on car customization ever since he began frequenting the VW spare-part trading messageboards on the web. Some of these customization people are like junkies, spending all their disposable income on subtle tweaks to their rides. Anything but stock! It's a cry of personal expression in a world of mass market uniformity. I am me, and my car is distinct! Still, John was skeptical of the people who had dropped the suspension on the Honda Civic in the lane to the right. "Why do people do that?" I asked. "It lowers the center of gravity," said John, "but most people do it because they don't like the way the gap in the wheel well looks."
When we finally made it to where the traffic was flowing again, we could see that all lanes of the 5 southbound had been shut down. Large trucks were parked sideways across all lanes preventing anyone from even entertaining the notion of getting through. What was all this about? We couldn't tell for sure, but we could see the charred remains of one car that had been smashed, caught fire, and burned to a crisp.
Today viewed from different angles:
Jen Wade |
Lunesse
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