The lone swimmer

Flowers open up to the sun, and close to the night air. A different set of things happen in daylight, in the warmth, than at night-time, with its chill.

I've decided to embark on a quest. Since this is such a classic decision for a man of my age, I feel responsible for setting the context.

Many would say that the story of Tristan and Isolde is one of the mythical underpinnings of our Western ideal of romantic love, a quintessential romance emerging from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

We can draw direct lines up to our present time about the roles, expectations, and experiences of real men and women alive here and now, doing our best to live out our destinies while challenging fate in order to make our own mark on our time.



So much of what we think and feel has been thought and felt before, as captured by writers and poets long forgotten to history. The aforementioned love story, for example, is credited to various re-tellers, but nobody knows for certain when or where or from whom it may have originated.

Its power, then, lies in our sense that it is an essential part of our collective past...an oral history of our ancestors' interpretation of the experience of new romances far in our collective distant past.

All we can do now is read the story and feel the chills run up our backs.

For a man, what remains in our time is this ageless need to slay the dragon -- whatever dragon that threatens those he loves. In the name of this urge, young men go off to war, determined to protect their homelands, their families.

Other young people strap suicide bombs to their bodies and venture forth, sacrificing their very existence in the name of a cause.

I am four decades too old to share such fantasies. My position in life, as a man, is to fight and slay my own dragons, internal enemies, so I might remain here for years to come, helping all of those I love.

The battle will be as difficult as any external quest. In our lifeline, a mirror exists -- what challenges us externally in youth returns as an internal struggle in our older years. The oppositional aspect may be stunning; the pain, however, is remarkable in that it is acute and identical.

I can say no more now, here, about my quest, though those closest to me will be able to fill in the blanks. I've prepared myself for battle, and, as always, the numbers will tell my story.

p.s. Thursday 50%, Friday 100%, tonight 50%. The quest has begun. The goal is 100%, night after night, and I will publish here, as a form of accountability. As always, I will be honest. It was so much easier last time, with my sweet ally by my side. Now, I go forward alone, but determined to succeed.

-30-

Eye of the Beholder.1

So many odd stories cross our screens in the news business. Today's catch,
Pentagon once mulled gay bomb to promote love not war was landed by my colleague Kelsey. You really must read it, especially if you are an American taxpayer, just to see how your tax dollars get spent by our dangerously comical War Department(*).

Such is the fate of an editor these days, to sort through thousands of articles, looking for those that can best inform and entertain you, our target audience member.

Meanwhile, I cut away after my last meeting of this Friday to watch my youngest perform in her Circus Camp show. She did some tricks on the trapese, and then did cartwheels around the gymnasium during the final, somewhat chaotic closing number.

Very nice.




I often wonder how others see the world around them, which objects stimulate their imagination, what obsessions (such as mine with color and glass and distortion) inform their nightly days and daily nights.

In my peripatetic manner, I bounce around like a billiard ball, from the intensely serious to the inane, with nary a transitional moment. It's the Information Age, silly, and those of us who are news junkies need some pretty powerful sedatives before we might avert our eyes from the latest headlines flowing through the giant pipe that is the Internet.

Speaking of sedatives, there's a wonderful book about heroin, entitled, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z , by Ann Marlowe. Among my extensive library on addictions, I don't actually see anything about news junkies, but there are several favorites about alcohol, the drug of choice for the masses, including: Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp; and Under the Volcano, a novel by Malcolm Lowry.

(*) Note: I refuse to call it the "Defense" Department as long as it wages war on other peoples.

Dried Fruit, Summer Heat

"Dried Fruit" by DW 2007

Whaddya think? Shall I abandon writing and just try to convey my thoughts and feelings through images? I admit that I love the above image. It took me hours to create, and it represents something essential to me.

Many years ago, when I was young, I dreamed of moving to the country, as many Hippies did in that era, to a peaceful place, where we could grow our food, write our books, paint our paintings, and make love freely out in nature, naked and unconcerned with the noises of modern urban reality.

I tried, over the years, to achieve some of these fantasies. I planted banana trees in our backyard on Sanibel Island, but a non-hurricane storm flooded the yard with saltwater and killed my young plants.

I studied The Whole Earth Catalogue about how to dry fruit. There was a contraption available, but I couldn't afford it at the time. We were poor, my wife and I, very poor. In the early '70s we never put together an income much more than $2,000 a year, and believe me, you can index that for inflation and adjust it over time all you want, but it wasn't much for two people to live on.

Especially since our rent was $1,680 a year. If you do the math, we were subsisting on less than a dollar a day, yet we were able to do that, here in San Francisco, and I have the hand-written spreadsheets to prove it.

One of the secrets to our success was that we walked a lot, my wife and me, and we always were able to find money. I believe we found somewhere around a quarter as much money lying in the streets as we reported on our tax forms.

We ate Chicken giblets.

We were former Peace Corps volunteers. We knew how to make something out of nothing. If someone hit our car, which occasionally happened, we collected insurance settlements. In the social welfare state that was then California, we qualified for Food Stamps.

We knew how to obtain food for virtually nothing at a warehouse called (I think) "Dented Cans." And we knew the edible weeds that flourish in the city.

At that point in my life, despite my college education, I had the outlook of the proletarian class. As I searched for ways to pay my way through college in my junior and senior years, I had applied for factory jobs, just as my father has done, including an iron foundry in Saginaw or Flint that was one of the scariest places in this country I ever have visited.

They offered me a job, at the minimum wage, but I decided not to take it.

***



Almost four decades later, I am a middle-class citizen in the city I alternatively love and hate, raising children and dreaming once again of growing crops in some peaceful place, somewhere far from here. Today, for the very first time, I actually started to believe I have an exceptionally talented athlete in my family -- Aidan, age 12.

All my kids have been pretty good at sports -- strong, fast, and coordinated. But when the African-American coach at the basketball camp took me aside today to tell me Aidan is gifted, I listened to him. A 22-year-old, handsome, big, strong, college graduate who is a basketball player himself, he clearly knows what he is talking about.

"Your son," he told me, "is talented, competitive, fast, smart, and committed." This is the age, he explained to me, where the true athletes begin to show themselves. He recounted his own childhood, and how this happened for him.

My head was spinning. Although I've always enjoyed watching my kids play sports, especially watching Peter hit baseballs and win 100-yard dashes, I never considered that one of them might turn into a competitive athlete.



And then, of course, there is my sweet little Dylan. He is trying mightily to improve his skills so he can play basketball on his school's JV team next fall. One of the other parents at his school, whose son is also in this basketball camp, told me today that she'd never seen him with his Russian Red Army Cossack hat off, and could not believe how different he looks, out in the open with his curly red locks.




He had a discouraging day out there. It is really hot in San Francisco, and even close to the ocean, the temperature was probably 75-80 degrees this afternoon.



I found a bone in my backyard today, near where we dug up those old bottles last summer.



It is big, round, a socket of some sort. Now I assume this is the remainder of one of our barbecues last year, but its size and heft startled me. If anyone knows anything about identifying bones, please contact me.

It's hot here. My windows are open and the fans are on. It's a warm San Francisco night, and I wish you were here to enjoy it with me.

-30-

Wednesday Retraced

Have you ever wondered how many times you may have unknowingly crossed paths with someone who, when you finally did connect, turned out to be a life-changer? One of the fun things about making a new friend is retracing your whereabouts over the years, and wondering what might have happened had you had met them then, as opposed to now.



Well, I didn't meet anyone new today but I did pass the same corner in the city five times, and I shot this photo at the first one, when I was pumping gas into my car at the corner of Bryant and Cesar Chavez around 8:30 am.

I was back here, some 15 miles later, around 9:15 am after I had dropped my daughter at "circus camp." The next time I passed this intersection was about 5:30 tonight with three basketball players in the car along with my daughter.

At roughly 8:45 pm I once again passed this point, driving aforementioned four children to the houses where they will spend the night.

Sometime, after 9 pm, I again drove past this intersection, now alone, headed back to the Mission and yet another night alone.





Near my office, floating on the horizon is the world headquarters of Oracle. My 11-year-old son, Dylan, loves this company's presence on the peninsula.




Here is a good self-portrait of me in the elevator to the sixth floor of my office building, where MyWire is created.




I cut away late this afternoon to "basketball camp," where I had the distinct pleasure of watching Dylan, my non-athlete, playing the game with gusto. Here he is on the sideline chanting "De-fense," while his team had the ball...




For the first time in a long time, I saw the pink cheeks on Dylan's face that are so common on his older brother's face, a gifted athlete who always plays hard.




Aidan was excelling at basketball camp, of course, but today it was Dylan who grabbed a rebound and a basket while I was watching. Later, when I asked him what was different about today, he said, "I guess I was more motivated to succeed."

Thus, in the oldest battles for all men, the internal struggle of opposites remains -- Geek v. Jock. Most of us, ideally, probably wish to be both.

Few of us ever achieve either extreme. If we, and those who love us, are lucky, we eventually find our balance, and are at ease with ourselves.

Such is the life journey of boys into men.

-30-

The first word...

...not the last.

I'd almost forgotten this quote of mine, from a speech in the late '90s before The Freedom Forum.

It ended up on a Free Speech Calendar in July 1999.

My point was that our role as journalists had been profoundly transformed by the arrival of the Internet. Now, we could no longer close the book on any given topic. Instead, we acquired a new role -- to start the conversation.

The community of the interested (my phrase) would show up at our cue to move any story that really mattered forward. It (the story) would acquire a life of its own, virally. We reporters no longer carried the hopelessly arrogant burden of being arbiters of "the truth." Instead, we were more like advance scouts, tipping off the community to new sightings, new threats, new hopes.

Much as, in my imagining, we did in our days as cavemen. The biggest, burliest, fastest, and most violent cavemen no doubt hunted down the animals that fed the tribe. Those of us perhaps of slighter build, with poorer eyesight, less inclined to kill, but more gifted verbally found our place as story-tellers, chronicling the valiant hunt by those big benefactors of ours.

For that reason, they would have kept us around.

I've gotta wonder, though, way back then, how often we got the girl? Apparently often enough, perhaps through subterfuge, that in today's world, the Geek may often prove as successful at acquiring a mate and children as the Jock.

One is probably the average woman's idea of a good reliable father and the other a perfect sexual fantasy figure. I suppose I've been a confusing figure to the women in my life -- an intellectual, able and willing to talk about any subject, rather successful in conventional terms, but also, at 6 feet & 200 pounds, somewhat athletic and extremely aggressive sexually, when I'm attracted to someone, not exactly "safe," comprende?

-30-

Who are we?

And why are we here?

These are the questions reporters never get to ask.

Instead, we cover smaller topics. In my long career as a journalist, over 41 years, I've covered a ton of stories, big and small, but I've never taken on the existential questions, since, how is one to do so, anyway?

In the realm of non-fiction, that is. Non-fiction knows what it is not (fiction) but not what it is. Any writer a notch or two above a hack knows that the presumption that a mere journalist can discover the "truth" is a fiction even more outrageous than fiction itself.

Do you know how it feels to begin a story, say just a little story, about something you know little about? Tonight, I'm recalling my years as a part-time editorial writer for the old San Francisco Examiner, the one founded by William Randolph Hearst.

This was one of my three jobs at that time, the other being my main day job and a teaching post at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.

The newspaper called me into work just a few times a year, often in summer or around a holiday. At that time, I was going through my first divorce and the collapse of job after job in the violent American media economy.

My memory of this particular editorial was that it was due very close to Christmas, and I know I used my earnings from it to buy the kids presents.

The subject I decided to write about that day was loneliness. I had often experienced this feeling, all of my life. In those years, although I had a new girlfriend whom I loved and with whom I would eventually create a family, I always was worried about my first kids and my first wife.

Were they safe?

My fantasies of controlling reality still governed my behavior at that tender age of the early 40s.

One night, my kids were driven into the inner city by their Mom to meet me and haul away a couple boxes of books I'd carefully acquired for their use. They intended to sell these books at a used bookstore to raise money for their "teen center" in Mill Valley.

As I waited for them to arrive, parked across the street, a dangerous-looking man appeared on the scene. Just then, my two precious teenaged daughters jumped out of their mother's car and ran happily to the front door of the old warehouse where I worked. As I watched, with horror, the scary man I'd spotted earlier pulled a knife out from one of his socks and began to approach my girls.

I gunned the engine of my car, honked the horn, and flashed my headlights and drove straight up on the curb of the sidewalk where he was stalking my girls. Luckily, this panicked him and he left the scene, because otherwise, naturally, I would have had to somehow murder him.

I don't think my daughters ever knew why I acted so strange that night behind the wheel of my car. I didn't have the vocabulary to tell them, as they were still so sweet, so innocent, and so very vulnerable.

***

Back to my editorial project.




I figured the loneliest (and to me, the scariest) place nearby the Examiner was the alley running westward between Fifth and Sixth Streets.

So, I went out there at dusk, still in time to hit my deadline, and walked its length, slowly. I saw men shooting up, and exchanging drugs. I saw people passed out, and people arguing. What I didn't see was anyone representing any kind of threat to me.

Everyone there was in the process of self-destructing.



I no longer remember exactly what I wrote in that (unsigned) editorial. Maybe one of these days I'll find it and republish it here. But I do know that I felt at the time: That I had truly found the loneliest place on earth, just next door to our big, shiny office, an alley where men came to die, slowly, and where I, as a writer, came to witness their demise.

That, my friend, is a story we should never cease to tell.

-30-

The Best Life in the World

Well, assuming she doth not protest too much, my youngest child claims to be the person with the best life in the entire world, which is a rather nice message to find among her art projects.

Today, she went off to Circus Camp, while the boys went to Basketball Camp.



Outside, tonight, the birds are chirping; I suspect at least one pair has a nest up high in the apple tree, and that the babies have hatched, because I heard their little cries as their parents swirled around the yard high above them.

One concern was a familiar white cat, who also was tracking the bird sounds from her perch on our falling-down-fence. She and I both craned our necks, following the flight of the parent birds.



"This good feel is for you."

All right. Now, I probably should not make any comment here whatsoever. This image is here courtesy of a sweet site, Engrish.com . Now, we all know that Japanese speakers have a terrible time with "r" and "l." This site is a celebration of that linguistic dilemma.

But this Japanese girl's translation issue is another matter altogether.

-30-

Look at us

After last night's depressing post I owe it to my readers, should I still have any, to say that this is a bounce-back day, and I feel somewhat better. We had a New Zealand leg of lamb roast for our Sunday dinner; my sweet neighbor and I dug up weeds and roots in the backyard, and I ended up having the kids (plus a friend) for the day, because their Mom got sick.

(The cost of this change in schedule was I lost ~25 points in my fantasy baseball league, but I won't bore you with the details, Julie P!)

The kids often have a friend or two over to my house on weekends, and I like that. You see, most of the time, I live more or less like a hermit, locked up inside my own mind, imaging things not likely to occur and repetitiously photographing practically everything within sight.

Think of it this way. At least if you come to visit me sometime (and all readers are invited to come by), you'll feel right at home, because you will have more or less seen everything there is to see here already.

Yesterday Dylan and his friend Mookie made some funny movie shorts on the digital movie camera Dylan's big sibs gave him in April for his birthday.

That photo of a little sticker, "Look at me," was slapped on my kitchen window (where all the colored bottles reside) by one of the kids years ago. I noticed it today for the first time in months. It's funny how even a hermit keeps rediscovering little clues here and there in his cave, clues that trigger the stories he needs to tell.

Before I get to that, however, I have to disclose an oddity: Lately, I've been buying small delicacies -- caviar, Japanese cucumbers, pâté, sugar snap peas, edamame, Stewart's sodas (lime and orange), baby kosher dills, pickling cucumbers, roasted garlic hummus, sweet batard, le pique-nique turkey sausages, and ginger slices candy.

I find it all goes well around the edges of my nightly frozen turkey meat pie, and artichoke, and fresh white sweet corn on the cob.

"Look at me." Isn't that the universal cry? People need to be seen. Our voices need to get outside of our heads. Our attempts, however simple, at art, music, humor, writing, sports, love, all need to be recognized by somebody.

Otherwise we shrivel and we die. I love the photo above of the flower, which two nights ago, appeared in this place hanging low, Sweet Chariot. A little water in the vase, come sun, and she (or perhaps I should say he)
has sprung back to life, erect, hopeful, looking for action.

All (s)he needed was a little attention, obviously.

Just like all the rest of us.

-30-