After a Long Hiatus, a Short Missive...

So, not only is my wife Halima easy on the eyes and an avid cook, she's also a bit of a ham. This makes her more or less ideal as the host of a cooking show. So, we made one. Check it out here.

The production could use a little work, sure, but it's a good enough place to start. Next up I think she'll be making Scotch Eggs, which are a perennial fav of mine. I'm looking forward to shooting that one as much I am looking forward to chowing down on those delicious, crispy orbs of ambrosia. Love those things.

zOMG - I Didn't Even Tell You!

So, I recently played a show with my band*, Cracktion, here in San Francisco. It was at a divey little place in the Polk Gulch called Kimo's. I played 'lead' guitar, and the set of 7 songs came in at about 27 minutes long. Not a whole lot of opportunity for me to get off a lot of Guitar Heroics in those 27 minutes, but I did get to knock out a couple of solos and some cool rambling.

This whole band thing just sort of gelled out of a Friday Night jam session I've been attending at work for some time now. The 'practice space' is really just an elevated empty space that my creative director was storing his drums in; someone would go up there and hammer out a beat now and again, and that was about it. But slowly people started to bring other instruments and equipment and leave it up there. At one point there was so much stuff up there that it had to be moved around and organized to allow people to still fit in the space while they were playing. There was a time when an art director I work with was playing pretty regularly with some old friends of his up there, but they both had babies at the same time and that whole thing kind of petered off.

I'm not sure exactly when things got going again up there, but there was a time when a few of us would hang out, share a few beers and make some bad music together. It was low-key, sloppy, and fun. Then someone signed us up for a 'Battle of the Bands' and things kicked into gear.

We were utterly unprepared. In a panic, we all started practicing like mad, asking everyone in the agency if they could play any instruments, and assembling a modest set list for the show. Fast forward two months and we had seven people in the band and a four-song set together. The show came, we played our set, the show went. Good times.

Perhaps more out of habit than anything else, five of us from that band continued to get together on Fridays and refine the set. We added a couple of songs and had a good time with it. One of us made the comment that, "...we only really get serious when we have a show to get ready for," so I booked the show at Kimo's.

And that show rocked ass. We'd expanded the set to seven songs (well, more like ten, but we cut a few that we were less fond of for the show), and got costumes together. We even had a smoke machine there, though we forgot to use it. The show's bill was eclectic, the crowd was enthusiastic, and the house was jumping. The booking agent said it was the best Thursday night crowd the joint had had all year, and offered use another gig at a different club.

So, we'll see how things progress.

*To be perfectly clear, I play guitar in this band. It's not my band, as such.

Beer Science

Here's a sentence I'm overjoyed to have need to write - I've been holding blind beer taste tests at work lately.

About every two months or so, I put on a lab coat and compose a series of verbose and urbane emails about how taste testing beer is the only way we are going to propel humanity into a suitably progressive future. I ramble on a bit about how Science (always capitalized) is an unstoppable collective effort, and how "[it's] hobbled without the fervent participation of a gang of dedicated adherents such as all of you. Together we will heave back the leaden curtain of ignorance and complacency, and reveal a gilded world of knowledge and progress rolling out to the horizon before us." And so on.

This all started during a party at my apartment building here in san Francisco. Most people were drinking beer that evening, and one guy in particular was drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, the hipster beer of choice. Someone gave him a hard time about drinking a beer that was so simultaneously lauded and abhorred, and he shot back, "Man, if you took the labels off this and a high-priced Pilsner, no one would be able to tell the difference." I took that as a challenge and set up a taste-test.

As I recall, it was PBR vs Bud Light vs Stella Artoi vs Tsingtao vs Coors vs some craft brewed pils (can't remember that last one). I set up six cups labeled 'A' through 'F', and made score sheets on which people could record their impressions of the beers on a scale of 0-5. Someone made some pizza, and there were salted nuts there as well, so it wasn't the most scientific thing ever, but it was a good time. In the end, PBR ended up dead last and, somewhat surprisingly, Tsingtao came out on top. Myth Busted, as they say - PBR truly does suck ass.

Fast forward a couple of months to my Creative Director and his buddy enjoying a few cans of Tecate in the kitchen at work. Someone gave my CD a hard time about Tecate being gross, and he said, "Man, if you took the labels off this and a high-priced Mexican beer, no one would be able to tell the difference."

And that is how Beer Science was born. The first challenge was Mexican Lagers (titled the 'Mexican Standoff', of course), but the idea caught on well in the office, and there have been four more 'testing sessions' since then: Stouts, IPAs, Belgians, and Asian Lagers. I approach these 'tests' in a more stringent fashion than I did the initial PBR test; donning a lab coat, upgrading the scale to 1-10, not allowing food other than water crackers to accompany the beer until the testing is done, &c. I've even made a spreadsheet on which to tabulate the results, which I then disseminate among the entire office as soon after testing as I am able. It's a lot of fun, and a good excuse to get the whole office together sample a little brew.

What were the results of all these taste tests, you ask? Well, here you go:


Mexican Stand-off

1 - Corona
2 - Modelo Especial
3 - Tecate/Pacifico Claro (tie)
4 - Dos Equis
5 - Sol

Stout Science

1 - Young's Double Chocolate Stout
2 - Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout
3 - Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout
4 - Sierra Nevada Stout
5 - Murphy's Stout
6 - Guinness Stout


IPA Inquisition

1 - Sierra Nevada Torpedo 'Extra' IPA
2 - Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA
3 - Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA
4 - Lagunitas IPA
5 - Stone Brewery IPA
6 - New Belgium Ranger IPA


Abbey Inquisition (Belgian Ales)

1 - Chimay
2 - Blue Moon
3 - Fin du Monde
4 - New Belgium Abbey
5 - Duvel
6 - Saison Dupont

Asian Persuasion

1 - Tiger (Singapore)
2 - Saigon (Vietnam)
3 - Tsingtao (China)
4 - Kingfisher (India)
5 - Singha (Thailand)
6 - Sapporo (Japan)

What does the future hold for Beer Science, you ask? Probably a Red Ale, then a Pale Ale, then a Porter, but who can know these things? I usually let people vote on what they'd like to taste before I set up a Beer Science, but once we are through all the normal beers I'll have to get creative. In any case, the journey is the destination, is it not? Yes, it is...

How I Survived Sierra Nevada Beer Camp

Every once in a while, Sierra Nevada invites a bunch of beer-industry types out to it’s brewery in Chico, California, for a couple of days of beer tasting and elbow rubbing which they call ‘Beer Camp’. This year, for the first time, they held a contest to select from among NON-industry types to attend this camp. I like Sierra Nevada well enough, and there’s nothing I don’t like about the words ‘Beer Camp’, so I submitted an entry to the contest (link). Happily, my entry was one of ten selected from California, and I subsequently spent a bleary couple of days staggering around the Sierra Nevada brewery, meeting all the brewers, sampling their fine selection of brews, and observing first-hand how they make the magic happen.

I arrived at the brewery on a sunny morning, Golden Ticket in hand* and stupid smile on my lips, and met up with the other Beer Campers. The ten of us stood around for a few moments, introducing ourselves in the steadily rising sun, all excited to be there. We sauntered into the lobby and handed our Golden Tickets over to the cheerful lady behind the counter, who then issued us our safety goggles and earplugs. Shortly, Steve Grossman, brother of the brewery’s founder, came out to collect us and get the day going. After a short welcome, Steve handed us off to the Master Brewers, our guides through the byzantine maze of the brewery. They were a cheerful bunch of guys with sharp wits, quick smiles, and no illusions about the strength of our desire to sample what was in the fermentation tanks.

And sample the tanks we did – standing in a spotlessly clean ‘basement’ under rows of massive fermentation tanks, a brewer tapped each tank in succession and let us sample from each in turn. By the time we got to the end of a row everyone was feeling pretty good, so we lit out for an informational tour of the brewery’s history to clear our palates before lining up under another row of tanks in a different part of the brewery. At one point we all loaded up onto a 12-person ‘bike,’ complete with two attached kegs and a sound system, and pedaled our way around the outside of the brewery, once again taking in the size and complexity of the place before ducking in to yet another sampling room. After another sampler of truly sublime ales, we glided out to the hop fields to pick fresh hops for the beer we would brew the next day.



The first day went by like that in a slow blur; tours of the facility and exposition from the staff punctuated by serial tastings under fermentation tanks in every corner of the brewery, the rhythm of all this broken only by a lunch of gratuitous generosity (and several more beers) in the brewery’s Tap Room. By the end of the day all of us were clouded by stars and ready for a nap – but the Sierra Nevada staff had different ideas. We were instructed to meet them out on the town at a local watering hole, Madison Bear Garden, to sample some of the local fare and further abuse our livers.

I’ll reveal here that my memory will only produce scant details of that evening, but here are some highlights; drinking a further number of delicious pints, playing an inexplicably skillful game of pool, eating something called a Jiffy Burger (An inordinately large hamburger served with peanut butter, bacon, cheese and mayo. Better than it sounds), dancing around in the streets of Chico, singing for a cab driver, and the subsequent nauseous cab ride home (Not paid for in song, sadly. In fact, my singing may have raised the fare). At some point that evening I hobnobbed with a few luminaries of the Sierra Nevada brewery, all of who endured my drunken babbling with admirable patience and all of who were just about as jubilant as I was. In any case, it was a wonderful evening (I believe).

----------------------------

Other than the beer, what’s probably most impressive about the brewery is that it started right there in Chico, in what was essentially one man’s garage. Back in 1979, Ken Grossman, a graduate of CSU Chico, rented a shabby little shack and began to acquire enough brewing equipment to turn his home-brewing hobby into a legitimate business. From there he just never stopped; he still runs the brewery today, overseeing daily operations as well as the numerous facility upgrades and brewing explorations that are constantly going on. The end result of Ken’s dedication is a brewery that is a staggering engineering fete, and a beer that is the strongest selling craft brew in the world.



The Sierra Nevada Brewery is a sprawling place, too: towering copper lauter and mash tuns imported from Germany, thirty-odd acres of hop fields, on-site Q/A labs, a well-appointed taproom with a very impressive menu, frenetic shipping and receiving areas, and a labyrinthine system of levels built around a dizzying assortment of fermentation tanks that would send a Trappist monk into fits. And for as massive as it is, the whole place is remarkably well laid-out and efficient; like one giant, heaving organism that eats semi-trucks full of grain and excretes some of the most delicious beer in the country. It’s all very impressive.

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The second day of Beer Camp was not as easy as the first. Everyone showed up at the brewery looking haggard and somewhat worse for wear, but still in good spirits and ready to enjoy another day. The Sierra Nevada staff, in an impressive and possibly practiced gesture of empathy, provided us with bagels, water, and strong coffee almost as soon as we got there. This was to be our day to brew, and though no one wanted to think too much about the end product of that brewing just then, we were all excited to get the show on the road.

As a matter of happy circumstance, every Beer Camper there with me was a home brewer; a couple had even won competitions with their brews. This meant that we all had a keen appreciation for not only beer, but the process of making beer. As we stood under an oak tree in the mid-morning sun, eating bagels and nursing our headaches away with warm cups of strong coffee, we swapped casual notes on brewing and told each other about interesting brews we’d made. It was all very pleasant, and we slowly began to shed our hangovers and pep up a bit. Suddenly, a brewer showed up to roust us from our coffees and rally us up a laboriously steep set of stairs to start making our beer, so off we went.



The Sierra Nevada Brewery has a small brew house exclusively dedicated to producing seasonal, short-run and experimental brews; the large brew house is where most of the popular brews are made, and this smaller ‘pilot’ brew house is where the brew masters get to go a little nuts. We spent most of our morning in this ‘pilot’ house, putting together our Oaked Scottish Lager (which we have since named ‘Loch, Hop, and Barrel’), and chatting about the business end of things with the Master Brewers. Half-way through the day, however, we were herded down to the tasting lab and given a chance to see how people who make their living with their noses do things.

The brewers at Sierra Nevada are understandably obsessive about the quality of their beer being consistent. Consequently, underneath the ‘pilot’ brew house, in a small but well-appointed laboratory, they have a staff of people who have actually been certified with superior olfactory senses, who they employ to smell, taste, and chemically test every single batch of beer that passes through the brewery’s fermentors. Though their noses are not as large as you might be imagining, their knowledge of beer and what can cause it to smell or taste ‘off’ is certainly huge, and they ran us through a gamut of test strips that illustrated several of the offending bacteria. A taste test was next, which illustrated two things to me; 1) my powers of perception as regard my own sense of taste are, essentially, shit, and 2) there are people in this world that can taste the difference between a bottle of beer that has been properly stored and one that has been set on a sunny window ledge for a mere 30 minutes. I am not among those people, and happily so; I must muddle along every day blithely enjoying things that would make them gag. That kind of sensory acuity is not something I envy.

The taste test was extremely informative, and proved to be a little hair of the dog as well; after it, everyone was a bit more jovial. True to form, the Master Brewers sensed our change in disposition and began once again to ply us with samples from the tanks. There had been numerous other Beer Camps before ours, of course, and we sampled their brews next, all of which were amazing. Then it was off to another lunch in the Tap Room, accompanied by the Master Brewers.

The rest of the day was spent making further brief tours to areas of the brewery we hadn’t gotten to the day before: the hop room, the gift shop, the performance stage, an additional Q/A lab, and so on. Once we’d trod every single tile of the brewery, we were once again ushered into the Tap Room to drink from the never ending fountain of the brewery’s generosity and watch the performance of a couple of original acoustic tunes about the Sierra Nevada brewery and/or beer in general, performed by other Beer Campers.

I limited myself to one pint, followed by two bottles of water, as I still had a four-hour drive back to San Francisco ahead of me. I made it a point to wander around and shake the hand of every Beer Camper and Sierra Nevada staffer I had met, though; every one of them had made my stay in Chico a memorable and very enjoyable one, and I wanted to tell them each that personally. The staffers tried to get me to stick around, using promises of free beer and another night on the town on the brewery’s dime; but in the back of my head I heard a listless keening from somewhere deep in my gut, and knew that my liver was imploring me, begging me not to stay. I thanked everyone once again and stepped out into the sobering heat of a dry Chico afternoon, and headed home.



*Yes, there really was a Golden Ticket

----------------------------

Chico is a small town and bit out of the way, but the Sierra Nevada brewery is really worth a visit (link). Their Tap Room is amazing, their tours are truly impressive, and the staff are a pleasant bunch of people. Chico itself is a college town, so it’s a good day or weekend trip, and an easy drive from Sacramento.

Corpulent and feminine...

Well, my bit's done as far as the Plastiki is concerned. It's a worthy project, nebulous aims and nominal management aside, and I hope the boat makes it to Sydney. They'll have some trouble getting there, no doubt, what with all the ego involved, but they have a few colorful characters pulling for them so I hope they make the news at the very least. Good luck to them.



A girl at work and I have been playing this game that is as juvenile as it is absorbing; we try to flip one another off in slight and ever more creative ways. It started out as a kind of 'disrespect-you-as-a-joke' sort of thing, but quickly became something much greater when I flipped her off by blowing into my thumb and "inflating" my middle finger. While that kind of junior-high antic is old-hat to me, she'd never seen anything like it. She got so excited that she immediately started thinking of funny new ways to flip me off; she pulled her thumb like a jack to crank her finger up, she put a napkin over her hand and waved her fingers like a magician before quickly pulling the napkin away to reveal her now-erect middle finger, she tied an imaginary string to her middle finger and used it to pull the finger up and down, &c. Ultimately we started hiding slips of paper with a middle finger drawn on them in each other's bags, coats, whatever. She hid a picture of that kind in my paystub. She delivered the coup de grace when she drew a middle finger on the birthday cake she made for me. The whole thing's been hilarious, if a bit uncouth.



All this has made me think of two things - 1) How different people make their 'bird' gesture (with the ring and index finger or without, straight up or wilting back, &c.), and 2) that game in which boys (always boys) form a ring with their index finger and thumb, splaying the rest of the fingers out straight, and display this gesture near their penis in an effort to get their friends to look at it. Once viewed, the 'ring gesture', or 'pussy' as it's sometimes called, entitles the gesturer to punch the viewer (or some variant interaction thereof). I ran a youth hostel for a year and took an informal poll of this 'game' and how it's played among people from all over the world. With only 1 (one!) notable exception, ONLY boys knew of this game. NO girls had ever heard of it, and guys from every country knew the gesture for what it was the moment I made it (most acknowledging this recognition with a pained expression and a shoulder offered for punching). During my 'study' I noted only small variations of display or execution of the 'pussy' gesture, and the only guy who didn't know what it was was from Quebec. Go figure.

So, stay tuned, I'm back on the novel bandwagon.

Homina, homina, homina...

The San Francisco Old-Time and Bluegrass Festival is on this week. Halima and I went to one of the shows last night (this one). It was pretty fantastic to get some of that 'old lonesome' sound in my ears after so long away from the south. There was even a guy there doing a sort of shuffly clog-dance thing right in front of the stage that reminded me of how people back in Tallahassee used to get down to a little bit-o-plucking when the mood took them. After the show we were able to thank a few of the musicians for coming down, and they were all polite and enthusiastic (particularly the bass player for the Clampitt Family. She was super-cute). We plan on going to see a few more shows while the festival's on, but what I'm more hopeful for is meeting a few musicians to play with on a regular basis. Maybe I'll go to one of the 'jams' that are set up this week.

After the show we went to Grubsteak, the local Portuguese-American diner that's stolen my gastronomic heart away. We've been avoiding that place recently in favor of cheeper though less delicious and likely-to-kill-you fare, but the siren of linguica and Portuguese Steak was too much for us last night. As we were leaving a whole crew of frat guys and their sorority dupes staggered in, hooting and carrying on in that singularly banal and annoying 'Greek' way. The waiters looked dismayed, and I felt a pang of regret in my chest as well; every cool little nook blows up at some point. What was your private little slice of heaven yesterday catches the ear of the masses today and will be the 'hip spot' tomorrow. The first time Halima and I ate at Grubsteak, in fact, I overheard the good looking couple sitting next to us say, "Man this place is great. I hope the hipsters never hear about it." Well, my friend, rust never sleeps.

Underneath this paragraph you'll see a couple of pictures; the first is the cabin frames for the Plastiki as they were just after I completed them near Christmas. The second picture is Eva crouching near the doorway of the newly covered cabin mold itself. Yay! We've come so far! Now we're starting to work with foams and PET panels to get the actual construction of the cabin skin going, and while that's underway Eva and I have been busily working away on trouble-shooting the bottle-mounting method. I've worked out how to fit the bottles in a nice, laminar fashion, and Eva and I are now trying to translate my full-size tinkering into a workable template for cutting foam panels to size. It's a challenging drafting/building puzzle and very exciting (if you're a nerd like me it is, anyway).





Later this month is my birthday and the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival besides! I'm going to go to Program #3 - Sharks (pft, of course...), and hope to see long, loving footage of those majestic and terrible fish. There's a panel discussion of shark issues after the films show, and you can bet the farm that I'll be there come Hell or high water. Oh, fuck - I love sharks.

Feather duster

OMFG!

I haven't written anything here in a long, long time. I've been very busy lately, it's true, but I've also been either going out to see friends or nerding out with World of Warcraft. Also, drinking too much. It's a slippery rabbit hole, my friends, and I've got at least one leg sunk well deep in it.

Nonetheless, I have been doing a few wholesome and worthwhile things lately as well; I bought a bike, for instance. I've been riding it to work when the weather is dry, and riding it through Golden Gate Park on weekends (Did you know that you can ride a bike right through the Broadway Tunnel if you stick to the sidewalk? Well you can). San Francisco's a famously bike-friendly city, it's true, which is why so many people who ride bikes here have really, really good locks. Thinking that there are a lot of bike-riders in this city shouldn't give you the impression that the roads are smooth though - they are decidedly not, in general - but there is an awareness of the biker's presence among the car drivers here that is both very pleasant and novel (to me). People actually watch out for you here. They know you have as much right to the road as they do and they let you have your space. It's the best.



The Cricket, my loyal and steadfast motorcycle, has been sitting down on the sidewalk below my window, woefully ignored by me*. Every time I walk by her I feel a pang of guilt. She rode me through a wonderful, occasionally harrowing trip. I promised her the world when we got to where we were going, and I've let her down. There is a motorcycle shop not two blocks from my house, and I intend to take her there and get her spruced up, but I've been trying to allocate funds to smooth over some of the debt I incurred on my way out here. So Cricket sits, sad and dirty, victim of the slow pace of America's economy and my own lax attitudes toward motorized conveyances of late. I'll get her back in shape soon though. I have to.

I've been spending a great deal of time near the water lately. Mostly as a result of the boat I'm helping to build (the Plastiki), but also because I've been doing a little sailing with my old friend Mike Rose. We've rented a boat together and plan on taking it around the bay and beyond in the months ahead. Note: it gets fucking cold out there.



Halima and I have been slowly discovering our new city; the surface layer of restaurants and stores, the slightly deeper layer of its people and personalities, its ephemeral past. I suppose that our course here will make itself more evident as time wears on, but for now we are just enjoying everything about San Francisco we thought we would. Spontaneous brass band performances on BART trips, well attended free Lindy Swing dance lessons in Golden Gate Park on Sundays, historical brass plates on the sidewalk denoting where San Francisco used to be (and not be), quirky book stores, stunning restaurants, balmy weather (mostly). It's everything we thought it would be.

Ok. More later.



* But not by the parking cops, unfortunately. I got a $100 ticket on her for parking on the sidewalk. Here's a tip - if you need to park your bike on the sidewalk in San Francisco, put the cover on it and lock the cover on. If the cops can't get to you VIN, they can't properly identify your bike. If they can't identify your bike they can't say for sure how long it's been somewhere, so they can't give you a ticket for anything (and the junkies can't get to your spark plugs easily either). For informational purposes only, of course.

Fennel, Flannel, Funnel, Final...

Dame Darcy's coming through San Francisco. She'll probably sign her comics and pluck a tune or two on the banjo. I'll probably go up to her again and say 'hi', tell her I knew her childhood friend back in the day, give her the news about what her friend's doing, buy any records she's got with her and get her to sign my comic. I know I'll feel dumb for bothering her once I've done it, but I won't be able to help myself. I have a soft spot for Darcy in my heart - she and John Marr both. They were my favorite 'zine authors at the height of my interest in the subject.

Here comes a non sequitur...

I used to go to this Greek joint in Seattle, just next to the laundromat at which I did my weekly laundry. I’d put my stuff in the washer, then walk over to the gryo place and give them my order. At the time I was a vegan, so I’d order a falafel gyro with hummus instead of tzatziki (which is fantastic, BTW). Over time, the owner got to know me because of the frequency of my visits and the unusual order I was placing. He was a stocky Greek guy, dark and hairy and always ready with a smile. He was the local soccer coach for his son’s league, the main chef in his restaraunt and about as Greek a fellow as you could meet outside of Athens. After a time when he saw me coming, he’d just point at me and say, “The usual?” I’d smile and answer in the affirmative, he’d yell the order back to whomever was behind the counter, then he’d shake my hand and we’d chat briefly about our lives. It made me feel as though I were really part of that neighborhood.

One day I went in to place my usual order and there was a new kid behind the counter. I gave him my order, and he looked back at me and said, “You can’t have that.”

“What?” I said back.

“We can’t make that. A gyro comes with tzatziki, not hummus.”

“But I get it all the time,” I replied, “I get it here every week.”

“It’ll be extra,” he said back to me.

“No, it won’t,” I began to reply.

Just then, the owner came out from behind the counter wiping his hands on a paper towel and asked what the problem was. The new kid told him that I was trying to order something that wasn’t on the menu and that I couldn’t have it. The owner put his right hand up between his face and the new kid’s face and made a, “pssshhhht!” sound. “He can have what he wants!” He shouted.

The kid looked at me like I had just peed in his flowerpot, then he skulked off into the back to do God-knows-what (hopefully not spit in my gyro…). The owner extended his hand in appology and said, “I’m sorry my friend. The usual?”

I miss that place a lot.



I have yet to find my 'usual' place here in San Francisco, but I've been working on it pretty hard. Two places that stand out as possible candidates are Asuka Raman on Bush street downtown, and Kennedy's Irish Pub and Curry House, up in North Beach. Both of these places have good, cheep comfort food (if you think of raman or curry as comfort food, that is) and pleasant staff. Kennedy's is the more atmospheric of the two, but Asuka has genmai cha, which is one of my favorites. Anyway, North Beach isn't exactly on my way anywhere, so Kennedy's will probably end up being the once-in-a-while treat instead of my 'regular' joint.

Asuka, you win!

Supergroup

That map up there is the route I took here to San Francisco from Tallahassee. It was an amazing ride, one that I'll never forget. There were the typical ups and downs that one might expect on such a long distance road trip: many moments during which I caught my breath in excitement at something beautiful just off to the side of the road, many times that the hairs on my thighs went stiff and my guts were shot through with a bolt of ice as some yokel narrowly missed destroying me utterly with a careless swerve along the road, many quiet moments spent utterly alone in an unfamiliar place along an unknown road in an almost inconceivably large country, many friendly faces that came unexpectedly out of the gloom to provide me with just the nudge of kindness I needed to get me down the road. There were many times that I found myself asking God for favors, too; asking Him for luck.

You know, there's an old saying that conveys the idea that it's good luck when a bird poops on you. I've always felt that this saying originated out of a desire to stop people from complaining about getting pooped on more than anything else (as in "Oh, fuck! I've just been crapped on by a bird!" "Oh. well, that's good luck, you know. Now shut up, here comes Isabella..."). Anyway, it's a saying not entirely sensitive to the revulsion one feels when defecated upon by a bird.

I was wearing my favorite "fashion/casual" jacket here in San Francisco, a grey turkish sport-coat that I never found much reason to wear in Tallahassee. I was ambling through North Beach, the Italian neighborhood of San Francisco up near Fisherman's Wharf, when I happened to look to my right and lift my arm at an awkward angle for just a moment and for no real reason when a pigeon flew over me and dropped a dollop of wet, white pigeon poop on the back of my right arm. "Ho, fuck," I said, automatically. Halima was walking next to me. She asked, "What?" I replied that I'd been dive-bombed. "Oh, that's good luck," she said. I replied, "Yeah, but it's still shit on my favorite jacket."



If I truly believed that getting shit on was good luck I'd run around under the pigeons in DiMaggio Park. I'd sneak around on the waterfront, scaring seagulls into flight, hoping to collect a poop or two as they jumped up, startled into the air. I'd shuffle around on the flat concrete patio at Union Square, bread in hand, waiting to receive my good fortune by way of avian incontinence. But I'm not so sure it is such good luck to get pooped on. If it were, why would you want to wash the poop out so badly? Why wouldn't people who've been pooped on just leave the poop there in an effort to soak up as much luck as possible? Wouldn't more or larger poop be more lucky? People might stand around behind horses or elephants much more often if it were.

Who knows? Getting shit on is no great fun, in and of itself; but here's to hoping that pigeon poop has a quiet effect on my fortunes that's working in ways too subtle for my leaden intellect to detect. Let's hope pigeon poop leads to something great, shall we? Let's do, lest my revulsion get the better of me and I burn my good coat.

Bright as bright light...

I've just completed a week of 14-hour days, chipping away at a batch of furniture renderings that needed to be re-colored for a presentation. No, it's not a full-time gig (I'm going to build a floor with Captain Mike tomorrow for a little extra cash, in fact), I've just been freelancing some, which feels better in many ways than full-time work, both physically and philosophically. Yes, I am writing this in my underwear.



Halima and I have gotten settled in to our apartment, have had time to explore our neighborhood enough to find out where we'll be buying our groceries for the foreseeable future, and have found our first bills for electricity and internet in our mailbox. Yay, we're residents.

As I've written previously, I've parked Cricket under a neighbor's cupola. One thing I'd forgotten to ship out here was my bike cover, which means Cricket is sitting out there on the street with nothing to protect her from the wind, rain and stray weirdos. I really didn't think this would be much of an issue, but the other day I was passing her and reached out to stroke her gas tank, as I often do, when I noticed that some inconsiderate person had knocked off her right spark plug cap. Investigating further I found that they had also somehow chiseled the porcelain tip of the spark plug off altogether, leaving only the hexagonal nut in place in the cylinder head. I have some dim recollection of hearing that drug addicts do this kind of thing for one reason or another, but can't imagine that it's worth the effort of knocking off the tip of my spark plug to make a crack-pipe or whatever. In any case, not only did this person risk being discovered as a vandal and an asshole-at-large, but if I ever find them they're sure to be found out as a person in need of serious medical care as well. In any case, it's off to the garage to buy a bike cover and a padlock (I already have spare plugs). Some explanation of this bizarre incident here.

In lighter news, we ate at Le Trappe in North Beach the other day. It was amazing; sub-terrine Belgian food and beer and evidently a huge yuppie-hipster spot. We got there before the rush and ate rabbit stew and mussels and pom fritz (an upscale word for French fries), which were all sublime. What'd I tell you? A gustatory nirvana, San Francisco.



Furthermore, I've discovered that four or five of my friends from Guam have been living in San Francisco for some time now. They are from the arty bunch of people I used to hang around with back then, and they are evidently still as arty as ever. I've had drinks with one of them, the chef of the bunch, and she promises to have a little soirée at her place soon so we can all meet up again. Sounds like a plan.

More later.

Nothing but Hornblowers

Way back before the Americans got to it, California was a provence of Mexico*. San Francisco itself got it's name from a mission established by Spanish missionaries that they named after Saint Francis of Assisi (now called Mission Dolores. You can tour it for $5). The Spanish had established a whole series of missions along the west coast of what was then Mexico, and they were appreciably successful in dealing with the natives and bringing some measure of civilization to a very rough culture and topography. Happily, when America won the Spanish-American war and took the west coast as its spoils, they were wise and/or uncaring enough to leave these missions alone. As a result, a person can still see these missions, largely intact, and get a sense of one of the Catholic church's less horrifying intrusions into indigenous culture.

I have yet to go to the Mission Dolores, but I used to tour Mission San Juan Capistrano with school groups when I was a kid. I like the fact that these aged structures are still around, and that you get walk around in them and get a sense of how people used to live. I guess that makes me a layman history nerd, but I'm alright with that.

One thing I have done in San Francisco is walk. I've parked Cricket under a cupola, unpacked most of her bags, bought myself a MUNI pass and gotten lost in my new hometown a time or two as I get to know the place. I've opened all my boxes and put most of my things where they will be for the foreseeable future. I've spread out enough to pick up a bit of work at a local website, and have ambled around enough in my new neighborhood to bump into both the necessities and accouterments that every good neighborhood has. I've even found a local Italian place that does a pretty good linguine vongole - something everyone should know how to get quick access to when the urge demands it. Found a good raman joint, too.



Perhaps because I've moved from somewhere smaller I'm easily overstimulated, or perhaps as a product of my own excitement at being here I've somehow failed to see things that I've walked by several times. I enjoy thinking that my neighborhood has been offering up its secrets to me slowly, quietly letting me in - but the truth is that I'm sort of unobservant and spend a lot of my time looking up at the tops of tall buildings. Last night Halima and I walked a few blocks over to Mel's Diner, a place that recreates a diner from the 1950's a la 'American Graffiti'. On the way there we noticed a small assortment of businesses and structures that we hadn't remembered seeing before - a furniture consigner, a restaurant, a bank, like that. We got to the diner, had some pie and coffee (it was good pie and decent coffee), then walked back home and the same thing happened; the neighborhood seemed newer than it had in the daytime, different without the sun.



I'm sure I'll feel this exhilarating sense of discovery for some time to come, particularly with as curious about our environs and Halima and I are. One thing we've found that we expect will be pretty much the same for as long as we are here is the glut of tourist tents and shops set up down by the Embarcadero. There are street musicians and tents in which you can buy interesting hats or scented candles, and further along the street, up by Fisherman's Wharf, you can buy a whole steamed crab for about twenty bucks. It's an ungainly and messy meal, but worth every penny and every spare napkin it takes to enjoy it. Certainly a tourist trap, but one worth becoming ensnared in from time to time.

More to come.



*Yeah, sure, before that it was a provence of the natives, but I'm talking about structured government, not strict occupation.

Onomatopoeia...

Halima and I have been in San Francisco for just over three weeks and are feeling quite good about being here. We've secured an apartment, have seen a few shows (I have tickets for Jolie Holland at Bimbo's on the 15th of October, too, which I'm pretty excited about), have sampled some of (perhaps too many of, actually...) the cities staggering number of delicious places to eat and have made so much of a habit of drinking a celebratory pint or two that we've gotten to know a couple of area bartenders by name. It's pretty difficult to not be in a celebratory mood in this place though, so much so that every time we set foot outside the house we feel like cheering and running around like loonies.



I ended up buying that guitar I wrote about earlier, and it arrived at the dock this morning. Halima and I walked down to retrieve it, bought a steamed crab and sat on a bench to eat it, then walked home where I sat and played my new guitar until my hands felt like they here on fire. Then I noticed that I hadn't washed my hands sufficiently to keep my new guitar from smelling faintly of the crab I'd eaten for lunch. No matter - it'll make the whole 'musical sailor' thing a bit more authentic (ha).



I've been on an interview at a local advertising agency, helped Mike (the captain with whom we've been staying) by working the tender during test sails of the prototype of the boat he's building, been down with him to Alameda to test material samples at a submersible robot factory (?!?), cobbled a pretty impressive portfolio together and have sent out several hopeful resumes (wish me luck). Halima's been busy handing out a sheaf of resumes herself, as well as helping out Captain Mike and generally being the organizational force behind the two of us. We've been acclimating to the inevitable hill-climbs we're always faced with and have both lost a bit of weight just being able to walk everywhere. We love to be able to walk so much, by the way. After the lacking sidewalks and daunting heat of Florida, it's like being let out of some invisible cage. We take advantage of the opportunity as often as we can.



Talented street musicians, outstanding hole-in-the-wall-pubs and dim sum joints, gorgeous walks in any part of the city, pleasant people everywhere you go, historical markers spilling out a story about almost anything within a stone's throw of you, gorgeous bay views from almost any elevated point in the city, your favorite band or comic playing right down the street from where you live all the time, a massive and varied city park chocked full of energetic people at any given time and weather that is impossibly mild and enjoyable - it's fantastic, hard to believe. There's something about the fact that such bliss is taken in stride by the people who live here that adds to the weird sense of disbelief, too. It's hard to explain.



See that Chinese fiddler up there? He was playing this beautiful Chinese music as Halima and I walked up the street toward him, but when I stopped to listen he suddenly switched to playing 'Oh, Susanna', then 'Deep in the Heart of Texas'. I must look like a rube, I guess. I solidified that notion in this guy's head by giving him a dollar. I like 'Oh, Susanna'.

I'm sure there's a downside to all the good things I'm seeing about this city, but I couldn't care less about that just now. I'm sure I'll have a peek at the other side at some point, but for now I'm staggered, enamored, in love.

I'll write more soon, but I've got an amazing meal to go consume. "What meal is that?" you ask. Well, I don't know yet, but I'm almost assured that it'll be amazing, no matter where I go. Oh, but I'll get over this and start writing more frequently on this blog, I swear. I promise. I'll do.

More soon.

The Last Leg Sticks Out...

I made it. I can hardly believe it, but I made it. In one piece, even.

New Mexico is a hot, arid state - not one in which you'd want to break down. The northern part of the state is distinct from the southern part in both topography and attitude; the former is sparsely populated, moister and pleasingly rough, while the latter is more densely populated, drier and rather flat. All parts of the state, however, are beautiful and the people are prone to asking you if you want your burrito topped with red, green or 'christmas' chilies (I generally choose green).



After a night or two of hanging out with my friend Keith and getting far too drunk, he and I hiked out into Chaco Canyon, an anthropologically interesting chunk of New Mexico that the Pueblo Indians have held sacred for millennia. These same indians built massive, multi-story buildings there thousands of years ago for purposes of worship and pilgrimage. Most of the foundations of these buildings still stand and are intact enough to scramble over and get a sense how grand they used to be. One can still find the odd potsherd here and there, even, as evidence of the previous centuries of religious activity. One can also find caravan after caravan of elderly, pasty white folks there to take in all the splendor of their native land's history and heritage at the expense of a few footfalls of disrespect to the former inhabitant's idea of inviolable sacrament.



I was there to add to the footprints and see what had been described to me as the Pueblo Indian's Mecca. Mecca of a sort it may be, but a Mecca less used by the devoted and more ambled over by the retired. Keith and I took his dog, Cricket, up to the top of the mesa above the regularly visited pueblos and visited the farthest and least accessible sight - Pueblo Alto. The trip was indeed the destination, as Pueblo Alto is nothing more than a pile of rocks. I did, however, find a potsherd, which made me giddy all over. It was a taxing hike, but well worth the effort. The views of the canyon from the top of the mesa were splendid.

I left Albuquerque early in the morning and headed out through the high desert again, stopping in Cuba, New Mexico to grab a breakfast burrito and a coffee. Two cops in the cafe eyed me suspiciously for the entirety of my meal, mostly as a result of a fat black fly that kept buzzing around my head while I ate. I kept swatting at the fly when it got too close and I'm sure the cops were sitting too far away from me to see the little guy, which made me look like I was swearing periodically and batting at thin air. Happily, they were too busy to bother with a drifter nut like me and left me alone. Still, I left the cafe after they did, careful to make sure they'd driven well away before I started up.



I rode for a few hours before getting into Arizona and some of the weirdest country I've ever been to. Large red rocks that looked like petrified tidal waves bulged out from either side of the road in some areas. In others, nothing but flat chaparral plain rolled away to the horizon, broken only by massive spiky rocks that looked like castles made by some malign Colossi. It was hot, I'll say that for Arizona, and dry. Eventually I got to the famous Four Corners Monument, which is the very definition of a tourist trap. There is literally nothing at all there other than the monument itself. State flags form a ring around a squat chunk of granite with a plaque on it telling you that you are in the only place in the lower 48 where you can see four states all at once. That's it. The trouble with this arrangement is that the parts of the four states you can see all look exactly the same. I challenge the park ranger himself to identify one state from the other after being blindfolded, forced to drink four beers and spun around a few times. He'd be stymied. Anyway, it costs three bucks to get in. Skip it.

Carrying on through the desert for hundreds upon hundreds of miles I found one thing to be true of the American west - If the pioneers weren't driven crazy driving their wagons through the monotony of Oklahoma, then the weakest of the hardy souls who did make it through might easily have succumbed to the almost unimaginably inhospitable and difficult to traverse southwest. If the landscape wasn't busy whipping between flat plain and steep arroyos, it was churning itself up into cyclopean spasms of geography too bizarre to imagine, let alone drag a wagon across. And if your wagon was strong enough to hold together over that stuff, you were almost certain to die of thirst or exposure. If you were tough enough to endure the topography, the climate and the company of your fellow travelers, you were about as likely as not to be attacked and killed by indians. Crossing this part of the country gave me a new appreciation for the amazing people who crossed it before I did, and made the western portion of the US what it is. Tough sons-of-bitches, those.

I stopped over at Lake Powell Dam, a stately dam that holds back an inviting blue lake that sprawls it's way improbably through the vast arid expanse that is Arizona. I pulled off my helmet and got out my camera and had a brief and unsatisfying chat with the only other motorcycle riders I saw there; the only unfriendly Australians I've ever met. They were both fat and old and sweaty and may not have been in the best of moods after riding under the sun all day. Still, they still struck me as clipped in conversation and tart in disposition and seemed to be having a terrible time on their ride. I shortly excused myself from the conversation, took a few pictures and left, riding out toward Zion National Monument.

After the dam the countryside just kept getting weirder and weirder, larger and larger. I skipped across the terrain, waving to the odd motorcycle rider going the other way, and occasionally bumping into the same fellas now and again. Two of them were from Mississippi, near where I'd lived when I was 17. They were a couple of buddies riding out to the Colorado River to take a two-week white-water camping trip with a bunch of their friends. I chatted with them for about an hour under a gas station awning while I let the Cricket (my bike) cool down, then bid them farewell as I shot off to Utah and they rode off toward the Grand Canyon.



Zion National Park is a beautiful place. The country gets big just south of it, and as you enter from the east the mountains on either side of you shoot up through the sky in a gorgeous tapestry of geological strata. The roads are well manicured and wind through the park in such a way that you get a pretty good look at the amazing peaks all around you. Then suddenly the road dips into a tunnel that takes you right through the middle of a mountain. Upon exiting the bowels of this mountain you are spewed back out onto a winding series of switchbacks that wend their way down the mountain and are the perfect place to take a snapshot or two of the even more amazing sights that now surround you. Many of your fellow travelers get the same idea, so you spend some part of the trip trying not to run over the breathless pack of Germans in the middle of the road, but I guess that adds to the charm some. On the west side of the park is a little pocket of wealthy-tourist shops and RV parks. It seemed like a bit of an incongruous ending to a trip of such stunning natural beauty and the campgrounds were all full anyway, so I left Zion, shooting down toward Las Vegas and the Valley of Fire.



I read a community weblog a lot that is just chocked full of good people who post interesting things all the time (link), and I'd asked some people on there if there would be any places I shouldn't miss seeing on this trip. One person made me promise to visit the Valley of Fire, and I can report here that I was not disappointed by doing so. Like many places in the American West, the Valley of Fire is composed mostly of interesting formations of unusual rocks, so if you're not into geology or vast expanses of tremendous emptiness broken only by landscapes that look like they sprang directly from the mind of Hieronymus Bosch then maybe you should stick to the cities. If you are floored by natural splendor and the inexplicable randomness of this amazing planet we live on, then visit the Valley of Fire. One note, it is so dry there that hoards of bees will descend upon any moisture they can find. It's true - I poured a small amount of water on the ground and within four minutes it was covered by about thirty bees. Amazing. Oh, I saw an owl in the desert, too.



I camped at the Valley of Fire (our National Park Service does an amazing job, by the way) and in the morning shot out to Vegas and the Hoover Dam. I used to hang out in Las Vegas once in a while when I was a kid (it's a skateboarding paradise), and because of proximity I've been there as an adult enough to know that it's kind of a creepy place, but one thing I've never done there is see the Hoover Dam. It's an engineering marvel that is just crawling with tourists. There is a vehicle check as you enter and tour groups that leave the top of the dam at regular intervals. I don't want to front here so I'll admit that I just snapped a few pix and left, but I will definitely go back for the tour at a later date. That thing is massive and has been out there forever.

Another thing I've somehow managed to avoid my entire life is Death Valley. Illustrations in an old Funk and Wagnals Picture Encyclopedia I had as a child had an entry for Death Valley under a picture of a desiccated pioneer leaning up against a rock and gripping an empty water bag. That picture has always lingered in my head somewhere, waiting for the mention of its association, so I guess I've subconsciously avoided the place out of fear. If there's any time to throw caution to the wind and confront your fears, though, it's on a cross-country motorcycle trip, so I stood in a gas station at a crossroads that lead to Las Vegas, Area 51 and Death Valley, planning a course through Death Valley and taking nervous sips from a bottle of sun-heated water.



Death Valley's fucking hot. Hot as fuck. Let me repeat here, just to be clear - Holy Fuck, Death Valley's hot. Like opening an oven set to 'broil' and jamming your head in there with the fan on. Hot and drier than anywhere you've ever been and more barren than any place you can imagine and harrowingly devoid of life - even plant life. Everyone knows that the pit of Death Valley is a couple of hundred feet below sea level, but as you descend into that lifeless basin, passing withered shrubs and chasms of arid rock and signs that warn you of severe heat damage in the valley ahead of you, warn you to pull over if you need to stop lest your tires melt into the unimaginably hot pavement, your mind flits through your list of supplies, trying to make sure you have enough water to survive even an hour of helplessness in this unimaginable heat barren. The floor of Death Valley is strewn with black rocks and sand. In the center of the valley are sand dunes a hundred feet high. The heat is unendurable, withering in the shade and more intense than anything you have ever known. Once you climb the hill out of the valley, thanking God for seeing you through one of the most trying episodes of your trip, you immediately descend into another God-damned (literally, seemingly) valley, and your heart sinks in your chest in a way you didn't know it could. Mine did, and I'll bet you a dollar that if you rode through Death Valley on a motorbike yours would, too.

In the middle of Death Valley, right in the center of this seemingly extra-terrine expanse, is a fucking adobe house. Remember those intrepid pioneers I wrote about earlier? Well, this is evidence of the craziest of them. Someone a couple of hundred years ago saw fit to build a house in the middle of Death Valley. They must have thought that if things had gotten this bad by this point, they were probably only going to get worse from here on out. Who could blame them after Oklahoma? But, Jesus - to build a house? Turn back, man! Get out of there!

(It is appropriate to note here that I got to San Francisco the same day that I crossed Death Valley, and I weighed myself as soon as I got in the apartment - I'd lost 10 pounds. 10 pounds of moisture, evaporated straight off my body by the unremitting sun of that blasted abyss. Poof! - Gone. Terrifying.)

I called Halima from Bishop, California, to tell her that I'd made it through Death Valley and would be camping in Yosemite that night. She said she was glad I was safe and that she was looking forward to seeing me. We hung up and I had an almost uncontrollable urge to drink five coffees and drive all the way to Oakland as fast as I could. I had another tug from my hot-as-Hades water bottle and headed out again.

I'd intended to camp out in Yosemite for the night, but once I'd gotten there I found every campsite in the park completely full. It was the last week of summer for California college students, something I hadn't even thought about at the beginning of my trip, and I guess this was last-gasp camping for much of the student body. Yosemite has some of the most stunning scenery that I've ever seen, anywhere, and is strangely well built up for camping, hiking and even shopping. The visitor's center is like a mall - a mall by a river under the most gorgeous waterfall you've ever seen in your life. Really, Yosemite is a place I'll be visiting again now that I live so close to it - Yay! - but while I was on my trip it was kind of a bust.

To explain; it was eight o'clock at night, all the campgrounds were full and I was 120 miles from my girl - a girl I love more than anything and who I hadn't seen in two frikkin' weeks. I felt a compelling desire to just suck it up and make the trip the rest of the way out to the coast, you know?

To explain further; riding a motorcycle cross-country is a lot harder than you think. Whether you have visions of Jack Nicholson grinning from the back of a chopper piloted by Peter Fonda, or that dirty biker-assassin from Raising Arizona grimacing as he barrels through the Arizona heat, or Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman mugging from a train in Siberia, riding a motorcycle long-distance is a grueling endeavor and is much harder that popular images portray it to be. The best advice I got was to take an Advil in the morning and wear earplugs all day, both of which I did - but there is nothing you can do about the inevitable pain you will get in your ass from sitting on a vibrating, shambling, lurching, woefully unpadded machine atop of which you can't move too awfully much. It's hard on your ass and ears, yes, but it's also pretty hard on your inner thighs and neck, as the wind tries to whip them around as much as it can while you try your damnedest to not let it. Anyway, it's hard.

So there I was, exhausted, ten pounds lighter from my trip through the Cursed Earth and not fed since New Mexico,trying to wager the risk of riding in that condition against my desire to see my girl and sleep in a bed with my arms wrapped around her for the first time in weeks. True to my dim-witted nature, I chose to press on.

I almost died. Northwestern California is a rugged and topographically varied countryside, chocked full of curves in the road you can't see until you're upon them and drivers who know the terrain so much better than you do that they ride your rear wheel, hard, until you get out of their way. I'm sure the daylight ride is stunning, but at night this stretch of road is a bit less than inviting to the uninitiated. I almost hit a deer, I almost shot off the road at sixty miles an hour because I didn't see the curve coming until almost too late, I almost fell asleep on a straight patch and narrowly avoided swerving under an 18-wheeler, I almost rode off a cliff I didn't see until the last moment, I almost ran over a group of drunken hotties in a little town among the sequoias and I nearly got lost on a poorly marked bundle of highways outside of Oakland. The upshot of all this was that when I rode up the street that led to my girl's place, the apartment of a friend of hers who'd been good enough to let her stay there for the previous week and a half, she heard me coming. I parked the Cricket, pulled my rusty bones off of it and brushed the dust from my now sun-bleached jacket, and yanked off my bug-encrusted helmet just in time to see Halima running up the street to me, squealing and holding her arms out. We hugged for what felt like an hour and I felt the bones in my back creak with relief. I pulled out my flask of Laphroig, which I'd saved for just this moment, and we toasted our reunion, then we took a walk around the neighborhood and filled each other in on what had been going through our minds for the past two weeks. I went to bed that night happy to be with her again and ever so slightly tipsy.

I'd be lying if I said that I was glad the trip was over, however. As uncomfortable as it could be riding that bike, as tiny and insignificant as the massive country in which I live could make me feel at times, as gloomy as the weather and topography could occasionally get, I had an amazing time on the road. I will look back on this experience as one of the best of my life, and hope to do more, harder and longer trips from this point on. I'm so glad that I've done this - it's like a challenge met that I never have to think about again (though I'm sure I will).

So, at this point Halima and I have been in San Francisco proper for about a week and a half. I've done a few days work for a skipper I helped build a boat back in St. Augustine several years ago, and he's been good enough to put us up in his place for a couple of weeks while we look for an apartment. I've reconnected with an old friend or two, seen a couple of shows and begun to get a general sense of the lay of the land. Too much has gone on already to write about, really, until I have time to digest a little and make sense of it all. I will write here that San Francisco is a massive and amazing city, and I can see myslef being happy here for a very long time. that's a pretty bland thing to write, I know, so I promise you here, friends, that I will get much more detailed later on. Suffice to say for the time being, however, that I made it and am well.

Thank you so much for reading this. More to come soon, I promise you.

Everywhere that I go...

The best thing about being on the road, I find, is that every day is new and unique and full of interesting things that you've never seen before. Looking back, I see that I've been on the road for just over a week and already I'm halfway across the country. It's hard to believe it hasn't been longer; it seems like a month at least has gone by.

Before I get into the run-down of where I've been and what I've been up to, let me just say this - Ours is a huge country. You see a map and know that it's a big place full of lots of different kinds of people and terrain, but it's a hard thing to appreciate until you actually try to cross it how big and how varied it is. It's staggeringly big, that's how big it is. It's Huge.



My friend Kevin and I drove up to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and spent a day walking around among sunburned tourists on antique streets. Eureka Springs was hailed as a curative wonderland at the beginning of the last century, and a relatively large and well-polished town grew up around the handful of little brooks that trickle out of the rocks there. It's a sort of anachronistic gem, really; every building in the downtown area is on the national historic register and great pains have obviously been taken to keep evey fleck and chunk of this place as original as possible. The period hotel atop the mountain is as authentic and intact as the period houses that line the craggy streets, and I had as much fun walking around the neighborhoods as I did taking in the galleries. The whole town has a relaxing, holiday feel to it and even atracts the odd street musician or traveling vendor. Make no mistake, this place is deep within the Ozarks and the surrounding area is as wild and lush a place as any - but the town of Eureka Springs is a quiet little gem of dichotomous culture. Next week is a Bluegrass/Volkswagon festival up there, which should tell you something. Sorry to be missing that.

The following morning I said my goodbyes to Kevin and his family and shot up to Fayettville to eat a quick breakfast before making for Oklahoma and what would turn out to be two of the most boring days of my life. Appologies to anyone who knows and loves this planar state, but I have to wonder how the pioneers made it across Oklahoma without completely losing their minds. The sage brush plane extends to the horizon in every direction for hundreds of miles on end without facet or blemish - it's striking, really, but there's so damned much of it. I won't go on about it, but I will say that Tulsa has bad roads and no good coffee houses.



I rode under a steel-grey sky for the entire day, getting sprinkled on here and there and covered with mud-spray that a steady stream of semi-trucks kicked up at me. The bleak weather and mind-numbing monotony of the ram-rod straight road made for a hard day. Eventually I stopped for the night at Boiling Springs state park, which I was directed to by a cheerful old gentleman by the name of Rob Digman. I met him in a gas staion near the park and he told me I wouldn't be sorry I went there, which my bleary eyes and vibration-numbed hands took as endorsement enough. And he was right - it was a lovely little oasis of forest on a plane of prarie. Six or seven deer jumped away from my bike as I rode in and fat little squirrels rooted around through the underbrush at the edge of my campsite. I set up my tent near a quietly moving creek that wound its way through a thicket of oak. I spent a comfortable night listening to coyotes howling, owls hooting at each other and rain spattering hypnotically on the roof of my tent. Might not sound too nice, but it was great, I'm telling you. The next morning I got up early and packed my gear, then headed out for the second half of Oklahoma. That's right, it took two days to get across that one state.



I eventually got to Black Mesa, the highest point in Oklahoma and right on the border of New Mexico, where I pullled over to look at my map and try to decide if I should take the dirt road to Fulsom or the paved road to Clayton. Once I'd crossed over from Oklahoma to New Mexico the scenery changed almost immediately, becoming more dramatic and interesting, and I wasn't sure if I should risk getting trapped in a muddy pocket of this interesting new terrain or go the safe route to the next town. As I was sitting there a guy pulled up in a truck and asked me if I was alright. I explained what I was doing and he warned me off the dirt road to Fulsom. "That road's hard," he said, "Gets kind of muddy and rocky. I wouldn't take it." Man, am I glad he convinced me not to go that way - I got a look at it from its other side when I rode through Fulsom later on and it would have been a hard and muddy trek indeed.

The road to Clayton is placid and gorgeous, though. I saw a giselle of some sort spring across the road, which was puzzling but cool, rode by several cattle ranches and over several cattle guards and some very attractive arroyos. After Clayton I took a different, paved road to Fulsom, which I had to go through to get to Raton and my campsite for the night. This road took me right by an extinct volcano (Capulin Volcano), which I took the opportunity to ride up and take a few pictures of. Then I rode through field upon field of cattle, dodging the stray cow now and again until I got to Fulsom.



Holy crap, the road from Fulsom to Raton (highway 72) is one of the most remote, stunning roads I've ever been on. It started out as single-lane black top and didn't widen for many miles, and I didn't see a soul on it until right near the end. As I rode down this tiny little country road, these little grey birds kept springing from the underbrush and flying balls-out at eye level right in front of me for a few seconds before darting off. I rode past old adobe houses and a stone church from God only knows when and field upon field of lush, green grass. It was was gorgeous.



Raton is a weird little high desert town. I camped outside of it in Sugarite Canyon for the night, right next to a guy named Jesse and his wife. They were riding their bike from Colorado back home to southern New Mexico. We shared a fire and chatted for a while before going to bed. The camp host came by my tent before I went to sleep and told me that the campsite had a resident skunk that would come by every day looking for food. "We've never had him spray anybody so far. Well, maybe a dog or two, but no people," he said. I got in my tent without seeing the little guy, but I did hear something snooping around just outside my tent during the night. Who knows?



Up early again today and got out across the high desert toward Taos. Stopped briefly in a small town and got the worst breakfast burrito yet wrought by the hands of men from a couple of demure mexican ladies running a deceptively good looking restaurant in some little town that's not even on the map. Continued on down one of the funnest roads I've yet ridden on - all kinds of switch-backs and tight little turns snaking through the low mountains - up to Eagle's Nest, then rode into Taos. Taos strikes me as a cute little tourist town more than anything else. Maybe I don't know enough about it to say, but I couldn't see any reason to stick around too long. I chatted up another biker and hit the road to Santa Fe.



Santa Fe, now, is an interesting little town. Same kind of gallery/restaurant/old pueblo set up as Taos, really, but bigger, nicer, and more active. I rode around the town square a few times before pulling over and getting a superbadass chipotle burrito at a little place called Bumble Bee's (I was looking for a place a friend had told me about called Cowgirls, but couldn't find it until I was on my way out of town. Boo.). Got kind of lost looking for highway 14 south, and when I did find it it had a stop light every fifty yards, so I redirected on over to the freeway and shot on down to Albuquerque and my friend Keith's house.

Keith and I go way back - he was my first navy bunkmate. I don't get to see this guy nearly as often as I'd like, but when I do it's always a good time. I've only met his wife, Victoria, once before but she's a proper sort - She's pregnant now, too, so there's another good person on the way. I'll try to convice them that 'Kele' is what they should name their forthcoming child.

Keith and I went downtown last night to play pool and drink a few beers. What company you go around with really makes all the difference, but I think I'd like Albuquerque pretty well even if I hadn't been hanging out with a good friend. We checked out a few places - Chama microbar, where we got a couple of their very tasty IPAs; Burt's Tiki Bar, where we drank a couple and listened to the resident DJ; the Astrobar, where we had a couple and left just before a hair band started up; the Launchpad, where we drank a couple, and played a quick game of pool while listening to a native band sing bad nu-metal; and finally the Anodine, where we both had scotch and beers and played pool and I developed a crush on one of the waitresses (I couldn't help it - she was wearing saddle-shoe high-heels). Keith has a steadier hand than I do and he spanked me at pool. Grabbed a taco on the way home and chatted until 4 am. It was good to catch up.

I'm going to roll around here for today, then tomorrow Keith and I will travel up to Chaco Canyon together and do a little hiking and camping. The following day Keith will head in to work and I'll move on to Mt. Zion national park, which by all accounts is gorgeous. I probably won't get a chance to write again until I hit San Francisco, but I'll be stopping in Bishop to see a friend of a friend, so I may get a chance to throw down a paragraph or two there. In any case, I'm a few days away from the west coast and very ready to see my girl over there. Not entirely sure I'm that ready to stop traveling yet, but I have had an amazing time so far this trip. Anyway, more soon.