May 14, 2008
For those who come here mainly for the occasional dose of maudlin, self-indulgent misery, bad news: The Girl and I are back together, have been for about a week and a half, and things are going swimmingly. I am, and I trust she is, cautious about the future — we’re not assuming all is well, but we are having a good time now and keeping an eye toward building toward the future. It may be that the period of crisis brought out some problems that we’re going to be able to tackle head-on now. Or not. But it is definitely the case that this period of woes-y blogging has drawn to a close.
Funny thing: Whilst we were definitely separated, she planned a vacation to visit her sister, now in Ecuador, without consulting me about the plans. I decided I didn’t want to be left in town while she was gone, so I slated my own vacation to a little Spanish-speaking country for the same period, again without comparing notes with her. We’re both flying out of SFO on Friday, at the same time, to LA (from which she’ll continue southward). Hers is American Airlines, mine is Alaska-operated-by-American, so despite different flight numbers, we’re pretty sure we’re on the same plane.
“Destiny!” I cried. “Can you imagine if we were still split up this week, and had never even compared intineraries? It would be like a bad romantic comedy, and I’d see you across the crappy airport gate, and you’d see me, and there’d be a swell of orchestral music, and we’d drop our bags and we’d rush –”
“But now we can just go to the bar and have a beer before takeoff, right?”
“Right.”
May 13, 2008
So yes, I’m way behind here. Let’s see: There have been books. 
The Old Man & The Sea lives up to its reputation (as much as anything can live up to a freakin’ Nobel Prize for Literature). First ‘graph is ridiculously perfect, and the rest of the story sizzles along. It is not a subtle story, but it is short and powerful and honest, and I’m glad I finally read it. Probably wouldn’t have liked it as much had it been shotgunned into me in high school.
I’d wanted to read Reynaldo Arenas’ autobiography, Before Night Falls, but could only find a short story collection, Mona and Other Tales, which cover everything from his life in post-Revolution Cuba to a science fiction thing in his later American years, in which the figure in the most famous portrait on Earth comes to life at night and roams as a voracious sexual vampire. So, mixed bag, but very interesting.
I also read Adios, Hemingway, a contemporary murder mystery set in Havana, written by Leonardo Padura Fuentes. The book creates a murder that happened during the great writer’s last years, at his estate, and a detective some thirty years later (Fuentes has a series staring this cop) has to piece it together even as he considers his literary love-hate relationship with “Papa.” 
I read it on a short plane flight and the train home from the airport. 
It was light, engaging, but nothing to write home about. Despite this paragraph.
Strangely, I’m reading another culturally interesting murder mystery set in a communist country: Red Mandarin Dress, by Qui Xiaolang. The writer gives a really vivid account of Shanghai of about ten years ago, when the changes of capitalist liberalizations were completely remaking the city. Friend of mine is moving there next month, and I gave her a copy because, while the mystery is turning out to be a little too pat (the convoluted plot in which all things must connect is coming together now, as I read the last couple dozen pages), the cultural insight is fascinating. I’m hoping to visit her and her new husband there before they leave, about a year from now.
Speaking of leaving, I’m desperately rushing to put together my vacation. I leave Friday for LA, for a weekend wedding and a visit with mi amiga Francesca, and then I fly to Mexico on Monday as the first stage of a trip into points, if not unknown, then merely hinted at, for now.
April 18, 2008
There’s too much to write.
I left work around 6:45 just to get some air. Walked with Petra down to a Walgreens, then we went up to the Borders in the Westfield Mall on Market Street so she could flip through magazines and I could find a moleskine notebook for my upcoming vacation. Given the destination, I’m willing to play to the cheesy Hemingway connection.
I got back to the office a little before eight and logged in to my freelance gig. Once a month I do the newsletter for a company that connects freelance workers to them what hires ‘em. One of the site’s main features is that it provides software that in essence has the worker punch in and suffer random screen grabs to prove he’s actually working and not, you know, surfing bikini pictures of Kristen Bell, or something. So I have to log into the same software. Which I guess is okay, though I’m not without certain minor qualms. It has worked out well so far, though. I spend ninety minutes slamming through key chunks of that project, and then spend two hours writing and posting two reviews for Badmouth, one of which I think has a fairly clever hook, and the other of which has a bikini picture of Kristen Bell.
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April 14, 2008
Saturday afternoon, I’m in the back yard of Larry’s house, with his not-quite-three-year-old, Asher, splattering around in a quarter-filled inflatable wading pool and yelling, as is his nature, at the top of his voice. 
Larry’s a good friend, dating back to college. He performs all my weddings, and I was best man at his. So as Asher and I are making with the splashes and the whatnot, I’m talking to Larry.
For narrative purposes, it must be emphasized that Larry and his lovely wife Danielle are Jewish. So is Asher (I witnessed the Minor Surgical Procedure involved, an occasion that was a little more celebratory than this unchosen person would’ve expected).
“I saw something weird at the gym today,” I tell Larry, as Asher fills a sort of caulking-gun-shaped thing with water and squirts it around. “Couple guys talking Arabic, I think, and one’s got a T-shirt with a line of Arabic on the back, but the front says, in English in, like, block letters, ‘Intifada,’ with an image of a man rising up out of bondage or something.”
“Really?” Larry says.
“Yeah. I had no idea they were, you know, marketing that now,” I say. “‘Intifada-brand sportswear, for the fashionable protest statement.’”
“‘My Cousin Threw Rocks at Israeli Soldiers and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.’”
And we chuckle, yes, how funny it is to merchandise a popular uprising of any sort. And that should’ve been all.
“Intifada!” Asher yells. “Intifada!”
“Oh, crap,” I say.
“Intafadda!”
I’m picturing this being yelled next time the in-laws sit down to, like, Passover dinner (only a week away!) or something. “Kid, your mother is gonna murder me.”
“Intafadda! Innnntafaaaadaaa!”
“Oh man, really –”
“Intafadda! Intafadda! Intafonda!”
“Yes!” I say, picking him up out of the pool. “We’re very into Fonda! Jane Fonda!”
“Intafonda!”
I spin him around like an airplane, yelling, “Jane Fonda! Jane Fonda! Jane Fonda!”
I set him on the grass. He totters back and forth, dizzy, and falls on his ass into the pool.
“Jane Fonda!” he says. “Jane Fonda!”
Crisis averted. Unless the kid somehow discovers Barbarella.
April 7, 2008
Things are interesting with the Once and Future Girl and me. Told her this morning that what we’re really doing is teaching me to need her less, and her to need me more. “When we meet in the middle,” I said, “All our problems will be solved.”
But what I’m here to record is the lunch we had this weekend, en route to the Springsteen show, with her mother and mother’s boyfriend. We’re loadin’ up at the Fresh Choice there in Mountain View (selected, I think, in deference to my vegetarianism) and having a wide-ranging conversation about everything from contrasts in American and European cultures to the ins and outs of estate taxes. Wacky stuff. But the best line of the day was at some point where Petra was saying something that was, in the context of whatever we were discussing in the moment, a little conservative (”I just don’t see how people can …”), humorously so, I think, and her mom chides her, “You have to learn to think ‘outside the box.’”
Petra looks at her. “You built my box.”
I just loved that line.
April 7, 2008
I’d heard the second leg of the Magic tour was looser, more upbeat and unpredictable. That’s often the way with Springsteen tours: The first half-dozen shows are a real search for the heart of the show, the structure of the message, the integration of the new material with the old.
Then the rest of the first leg, usually, is very much in dedication to that message. With Magic being a fairly political album with strong themes of the average person feeling hopeless and disconnected from larger society, that put a relatively somber edge on the still powerful, still hard-rocking show. This new leg is more typical of his summer stadium tours, the second wave of concerts, which still serve the material but are more freewheeling affairs, drawing deeper from the band’s catalogue of more than 200 songs.
What really struck me, seeing this second version of the Magic show less than six months after the first date, was how much better the E Street Band is. They’re already the best live show on the planet, but this time, I recognized differences in every song (except “Born to Run,” which was perfected a long time ago) that showed the band was playing it a little harder, a little smarter, with a little more feeling. The commitment from this group to the music and to the audience is really staggering. I’ve seen really good shows from great veteran bands, but nothing on the order of what this band brings night after night after night.
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April 4, 2008
(Coming up with that barely serviceable title, it occurs to me that this should be the official label for a group of unknown humans—you’ve got a murder of crows, a herd of sheep, a pack of wolves and a kindness of strangers. Everyone start using that one next week.)
I am writing, tonight, in the Whole Foods cafe, just two and a half blocks from my apartment. Place always looks like locusts held a cub scout jamboree. I was just getting started on a difficult chapter—two characters are going to wake up in bed together and probably conclude that they’d made a harmless mistake. Writing about sex in a way that’s neither clinically detached nor lurid is really, really hard. This post is me, 691 words into it, taking an ill-deserved break.
I’m sitting at a table against the wall under the suggestion box and the bulletin board where they post suggestions with little management replies. A woman is sitting at the table with her boyfriend. The better dressed of the two, she’s wearing old sweats in haphazard layers, has dirty blond hair and a nearly microscopic stud through her left nostril. She gets up and walks over to me, reaching right behind the back of my head, standing so close I could flutter my eyelashes into her armpit.
“Don’t feel threatened,” she says lightly, pulling a comment form out of the slot above my left ear.
I looked up at her. “You’re not so scary.”
She smiled a little, thin lips stretching across angular face, and said, “No one’s ever said that to me before.”
I shrug. “If you had a pen, then I’d be protecting my neck.”
She laughs and goes back over to her boyfriend. She gets up a moment later and comes back to me, skinny slip of paper still in hand, and I just know it’s coming.
“Do you have a pen I can borrow?”
April 4, 2008
I went book-shopping today because I’m taking a vacation in mid-May and I wanted to do some reading that will give me a little flavor or inspiration regarding my destination, which is a small island that Shall Not Be Named.
However, for those who can’t resist a mystery, I’ll be reading Rienaldo Arenas’ Mona & Other Tales, Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and a Graham Greene spy novel whose title is too much of a giveaway.
April 3, 2008
Francesca sent me a belated birthday present that arrived pretty much on her birthday. Since when do we do birthday presents? My revenge will be to give her her birthday present on Dec. 23. That’ll teach her.
Saying that it just seemed like this would be a book I’d like, she sent me Zeroville, the latest and tenth-est novel by Steve Erickson, whose work I’ve never encountered before. 
The guy lives in LA and also works as a film critic, and he seems to have poured a wealth of cinematic knowledge into this seriously quirky book. That may be the part that made France think I’d want to read it. I hope it’s not the bit where the narrator is described as being, essentially, an inspiration for Travis Bickle.
Anyway, I really liked the freakin’ book. Erickson produces great prose and a lively narrative (a good-length excerpt is here) full of Easter eggs for those with cinematic or musical knowledge, especially of the period of the novel—the late sixties to early eighties.
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