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North Park
Sunday, September 26 1999
Inhaling odd-smelling smoke of depraved decadence, something I never thought I'd be doing, not even a minute before, I awoke to resume the "party" of last night.
Kim and I spent much of the morning having one of the best conversations of our relationship. Sometimes it's useful to change the framework around the system we use to resume our lives.
A spitting drizzle fell occasionally from the sky, bringing misery to all the fussy people (such as Jenna the German Girl) who came to San Diego specifically for the sunny beaches. But other than that, it was actually kind of pleasant. Kim and I sat outside beneath the gloomy clouds in front of the Zen Bakery when we went there for bagels. I was amused enough by passersby, birds and dogs that I had no interest in reading anything.
In the afternoon Kim and I went to North Park, a working class neighborhood of San Diego south of Normal Heights and West of Hillcrest. It sits directly under the landing flight path of the San Diego International Airport (in line with Ocean Beach, under the takeoff flight path). Back in the big-haired 80s a big airplane fell out of the sky in North Park and lots of people were killed. What a shame to never outlive your love of Rick Springfield!
In an ongoing effort to find a pleasant boarding situation for Sophie during our occasional vacations, Kim had found a highly recommended place called Four Paws in North Park. When we arrived all the carpets and furniture were out in the lawn being cleaned while the dogs being boarded (there must have been a dozen) were in the back yard romping beneath orange trees.
What a wacky place! It's a fairly large house with good cross breezes, expensive wooden floors and chewed-up doorways. The woman running the operation, "Dog Lady," must be an absolute dog nut. Not only does she give the dogs the run of her house, furniture and yard (thus the frequent need for furniture and carpet cleaning), but she even sleeps with the smaller dogs who want to. (She used to sleep with all the dogs until one day a grumpy Dalmatian stole her pillow and growled at her.) The "Dog Lady" lives by herself and this boarding operation is her only job, but she does have a boyfriend who occasionally shares precious moments amongst the dogs.
Sophie was somewhat intimidated by the grab bag of dogs all standing at the back door eager (within the refinements of their various social skills) to meet her. Eventually she did get to meet a few of the least aggressive ones, though their friendliness was also something of a threat and soon she was jealously chasing them away from both Kim and myself. Everything was just dandy as we discussed the way the dog boarding operation was run. The only glitch came as Kim was filling out the form and the Dog Lady asked what she should do in case the unthinkable happened and Sophie needed to be put to sleep. Kim had to go to the bathroom to stop her unseemly crying.
Next stop was downtown North Park, if you can imagine such a place. It's about as Hopperesque as San Diego gets. In a strip mall we found a rare gem, a 20 year old Italian restaurant that had somehow kept up with the times. Judging from it's mid-day crowd it had become a hangout of the young, pierced & trendy overweight scene. We got our pizza slices and as we were about to drive off we watched a plump woman in front of an adjacent diner catatonically chugging a cigarette, oblivious to the inch long ash that was forming, breaking off and falling all over her (see picture below).
Next stop was Trader Joe's in Hillcrest, the only good place to get the kind of high-fibre/low calorie dogfood that can keep Sophie pooping six respectably-formed yellow-brown shits each day instead of backing up with Pancreatitis and constipation.
Our Sunday night surrendered to Fox animation. It tasted so good we had to eat the whole thing. Futurama was decidedly better than the Simpsons; I think the Groening and his boys are gradually losing interest in the latter.
Steph and EJ hung out with us for a time in the evening. They're freshly back from states as diverse as Colorado, Florida and Massachusetts. They're staying in a unsavoury dive hotel in Ocean Beach called (appropriately enough) the Ebb Tide.
Sophie poses with a "Diane's" mug, which is uncharacteristically in my left hand as I drink coffee in front of the Zen Bakery. You never know what random mug they'll give you there.
A plump woman in North Park chugs a cigarette while a man obliviously reads a magazine.
A creepy bridge defines the border between North Park (foreground) and the gay neighborhoods of Hillcrest (beyond).
I finished the painting I've been working on, which you see photographed at right. I started on it back on Thursday. All comments so far have been positive, though there are always some people who need explanations for the seeming violence represented in my dissected ruins of extemporaneously conjured corpses.
The other day I dreamed I ordered a pizza via the internet (or perhaps some 80s manifestation thereof with a user interface that required me to position drumsticks horizontally on a disk). Though I ordered some sort of interesting pie with vegetables on it, the pizza I ended up getting was that most Schteveish of all pizzas, the pepperoni, complete with little pools of grease in each vaguely concave slice of sausage. I was so outraged I vowed never to take advantage of E-commerce again.
On Friday I decided, on a whim, to take apart my CoolShot digital camera (vintage 1997). Sometimes you just have to know what's going on inside. In this case, however, I was making a serious mistake. All these little pieces came falling out as I peered at the nondescript high-density electronics and optics. My main justification for opening it up was getting rid of the sand that's been in it since the summer 1998 trip to the northern Michigan sand dunes. But after the sand was gone I quickly came to feel that I'd gotten in technologically way over my head. Figuring out how to put all the pieces back in (especially while drunk) was a serious mental challenge. It was like playing some sort of Japanese martial art/chess game in three dimensions. There was a very precise order to putting the parts back, and I fucked up numerous times as I explored the maze of possible action sequences. Amazingly, though, somehow I succeeded; not only was the camera fully functional, but all the parts were accounted for.
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