SB sojourn, halloween stories

big rains storm drains, ocean silt
bright, cold winter sun
no surf kayaking
no figure drawing
no free beers at soho
yes melted together organic truffles & chilled languedoc
and beanbag & fleece blanket & good friends
black mink feral cat
saba with daikon, keola beamer dinnertime serenade
spine-altering featherbed

*

(and the writing continues. next story.)

what should i be for halloween? must be something that will facilitate getting me in and out of the castro, quick like. because the charming and talented miss j is performing with her hip-hop dance group, who will be doing 'thriller' in full zombie garb. the only reason i will go anywhere near that mess.

my last (and only) two halloweens in SF streets:

1. walking towards the mission to a party, i watched a cop car speed past our group of three for no apparent reason, then crash into a temporary chain-link fence, which hit one of my dearest friends in the legs, throwing her off her feet and landing her flat on her back in the street. she was fine, the third in our group was a doctor, and i filed a complaint with the SFPD that never received a response although i provided a detailed interview with an investigator (which was recorded over the phone and is now in their permanent records to be used against me at some future juncture).

2. another of my dearest friends ate a bad brownie – apparently it was EXTRA special, not just regular special – and believed she was going to die/go blind/lose her mind/have a heart attack. after we had walked her back to the lower haight, she puked for about five hours as we loaded her with water and debated whether or not to subject her to the ER only to probably receive a couple of tranquilizers. she made it till the break of dawn, and then we all had brunch at the squat & gobble.

wwbd?*

not that i'm keeping score or anything, but the idea of losing my stuff (including my HAIR) in a fire sort of bothers me.

three of us share this converted warehouse space, where one of us – me, because sometimes i need to take a timeout – has a room with a door that closes. flatman and firehazard have open lofts built on beams above the main space. the openness of the lofts and main space makes privacy a respect issue – not something we actively discuss, but simply do. one of our habits around here is take phone calls out in the hall, so we're not all forced to listen in on each other's conversations.

the other night, firehazard put a pot of chinese herbs on the stove to boil. then she rang someone up and roamed out into the hall to talk. eventually i was drawn to the kitchen by a subtle change in the boiling noise, and then turned off the flame when i lifted the lid off the pot to find that, of course, all the water had boiled off and the herbs and shell fragments and rocks were now cooking.

so i'm not feeling too warmly (a little hot-headed, though) towards this girl, especially since she finds these episodes charming and amusing. a third strike and maybe we need to talk... unless that third (match) strike burns the building down.


* what would buddha do?

[full disclosure: i, too (before i turned twenty, though), have forgotten a pot on the stove until the metal bottom bubbled and warped off and sustained massive black third-degree burn-flakeage. how this happens without the pot bursting into flames or melting or sticking to the burner itself must be some kind of engineering technology forged by people who know that people are stupid.]

(un) for tuna tely

fortunately, flatman built us some new shelves in the bathroom to replace the ones destroyed in last weekend's little fire. unfortunately, the roof started leaking during the big storm earlier in the week. fortunately, we have a lot of big pots and pans to catch the water. unfortunately, i still had sprinkly leaks above my desk. fortunately, it stopped raining and my desk has dried out. unfortunately, it's supposed to rain some more over the weekend. fortunately, there are piles of gigantic paper snowflakes adorning our space and small paper stars blooming on many of the plants, providing festive cheer. unfortunately, i'm still working. fortunately, i received a reprieve on my deadline and some lessening of my ridiculous workload. unfortunately, i'll still be attached to the blue desk for some time. fortunately, there is coffee. unfortunately, i'm about to run out.

blazing bottles

i think it's healthy to take time out of my busy writing schedule to write some more.

today, after i woke up and was waiting for my coffee to infuse darkly in the french press, my housemate and i small-talked in the kitchen.

at some point she wandered over to the bathroom and i heard some high-pitched screaming and yelping. is there a cockroach in there or something? i thought. 'are you OK?' i asked, going towards the bathroom. she flung the door open with one hand while attempting to smother a two-foot-high flame with a bathtowel.

kids: do not leave a burning candle unattended, especially if it's sitting on a PLASTIC shelf. geez.

i ran into the kitchen and filled a pitcher with water, and we took turns dousing our toiletry shelves, putting the fire out after a few minutes. (burning plastic has a slothy, lethargic reaction to water being splashed on it.)

there was a smoke stain crawling up the wall and plasticky soot floating around the bathroom. since we live in a warehouse, there are lots of construction eccentricities about the space, like an exposed gap about twelve or fifteen feet up the wall that opens into the 'foyer' area of my bedroom (which used to be a freight-elevator shaft). so now, on my shelves of clothing and ceramic bowls of jewelry and junk, there is plastic ash speckling everything like a light dusting of black snow. how christmasy!

our other housemate's toiletry stuff melted into the top shelf. i had a black horn of plastic growing out of one of my tubes of facial scrub, but i twisted it off. most of my stuff was salvageable, and she cleaned the bathroom, and now all our windows are open to air out the burnt plastic smell. a blazing start to the weekend.

today's soundtrack for writing writing writing: highway 880
setting: cold, cloudy, gray oakland day
upside: eventually i got to take a shower and there was no plastic on my soap

work days at studio 5

instead of selling my return ticket to pay another month's rent in old geisha district kagurazaka, i took the boring route (which will allow me to pay rent for months, plural) and caught my plane back to SFO on a sad, sad, rainy, rainy day.

so now my next two weeks is a bleak, coffee-fueled, chained-to-my-blue-desk existence wherein i struggle with awful software and japanese-script challenges while attempting to rustle lively and intelligent prose out of my bleary brain and onto the page.

on the plus side, i have an excuse hang out in PJs all day with my hair uncombed and eat cereal for lunch and dinner and no one has to know. except i think i just told you.

kazoku / family

sunday, rainy sunday. it's such a respite from the nearly unbearable humidity like when i got here (hottest summer EVER, in case you missed that report). today was devoted to buying a few gifts, mostly tiny things that will fit into my already overstuffed backpack. i resisted the temptation to blow a bunch of 100-yen coins in the plastic bubble dispensers – a la bubblegum machines – that contained cute but junky junk, like keychains featuring goth cartoony bears with fangs and blood dripping from their mouths, or anpanman figures (anpanman is an azuki bean-filled bun man who saves hungry people by letting them eat his head). so i think i ended up with a balanced batch of practical and impulse buys that don't take up too much space.

at three i had a date with my uncle, my mom's youngest brother who i hadn't seen since fifteen, sixteen years ago on my last visit. i hadn't had a lot of time to socialize while i've been here, but it would be a shame and bad planning if i didn't see any relatives while here. my other two uncles, and my aunt, all came to SB to visit my mom within the last year or so, and i got to spend quality time with all of them: very open, bright, lovely people i'm lucky to call my relatives. so because uncle snail (a childhood mispronunciation of his name) was the only one i hadn't seen, and because he lives in tokyo, i called him and we arranged to meet in front of a big department store in ginza.

i wasn't sure who would be with him, since i'd only called a few days ago and didn't really know whether his three kids would be around. but i got to the fancy department store early and pressed into the crush of people swarming around the brightly-lit food hall in the basement, looking for some kind of sweet to give to the family. department store food halls are amazing: packed with counters lined with boxes of treats impeccably wrapped in printed paper, appealing displays of european-style fluffy cakes studded with fruit, japanese sweets like blocks of yokan (a hard gelatin-like dessert based on azuki beans, i think, and marbled in different colors and flavors: tea green, pale purple, dark chocolately brown), anpan (remember anpanman? see first paragraph) with their outer pastry molded with stamped flower designs. it's wonderful just to roam around staring at these gorgeous edibles. plus, there are samples, and i made sure to pick up a thimble-shaped piece of incredible chocolate rolled in cocoa, a little bite of anpan.

in the end i decided on some mochi-like pieces of art. in a box of six, each one was mochi filled with azuki bean paste (called anko) and shaped and colored differently. one was a fat orange persimmon with a green leaf on top, and another one was a purple flower shape with petals folded around one another. if someone gave those to me, i probably would never eat them – just put them on display somewhere until they got moldy. hope they don't do that.

so by the time i got my box wrapped up, i was right on time and went out to the entrance. no uncle. there was a tall, lanky, sort of scary-looking kid standing in the corner but our eyes met and he didn't really look like he was waiting for anyone. having seen another entrance when i'd arrived, i wandered over there with my umbrella bumping into everyone else's crowding the rainy sidewalk, and no one was over there, either. i figured the first entrance, on the corner, was a better bet and went back. standing next to the lanky kid was my oldest uncle, the photographer who once backed up to get a good shot of something and fell down the edge of a cliff and lost the ends of two fingers as a result. he's gray-haired, jolly, and the oldest sibling so he usually takes charge of family gatherings and such. i broke into a big smile and went over to give him a hug. i hadn't expected him to be there – but, as it turns out, uncle snail had called everyone, and fifteen people showed up (including one woman who i've no idea who she was): all my mother's siblings, and several of my cousins.

the lanky kid he was standing next to was the baby of the family, the littlest (um, youngest) of all the cousins, who now towers over us at 6'2" or so. last time i saw him he was three or four. then a whole bunch of people showed up and i started crying, which everyone ignored or pretended not to notice, because this is very embarrassing for everybody. they just kept talking to me like tears weren't pouring down my face, and so i tried to hold it together and eventually we all went off to have some coffee, and then went to dinner at a gorgeous traditional restaurant where each party gets their own room with shoji doors and a sunken floor covered with tatami. they ordered a ton of food: sushi, sashimi, oden (soup with winter vegetables and tofu), daikon salad, soba, and weird stuff like soft chicken bones on a stick. bones.

it was wonderful and amazing and somehow we all managed to communicate pretty well. i must sound like an idiot, but they complimented me all night on how well i speak japanese. i know this is patently untrue; for example, when the older uncles visited SF last year on their california-in-a-week tour, i was driving them around on their one day in the bay area. we did the lombard street crawl, we visited the berkeley campus, we went to the marin headlands to snap photos of the golden gate bridge. at some point we headed for the richmond bridge and the oldest uncle pointed at san quentin, asking, what's that? i didn't know the word for 'prison,' so i said it was 'where the bad people go.' they didn't even crack a smile, but said, oh yes, the prison (in japanese) and then gave me a few alternative terms for it – all of which i've already forgotten. like i said, wonderful and amazing people i'm lucky enough to be related to, and they took turns snapping pictures, trying to stuff me to bursting with delicious food, telling stories and asking if i remembered this time at the matsuri (summer festival), or that time when we lit fireworks in the yard.

at the end of the evening, my aunt and cousin had to catch a bus back to their hometown near mt fuji, a couple of hours away, and the other families had to start their own journeys home. we took some last photos on the street, laughed with each other, and then said our goodbyes. small gifts were put in my hands. i got walked to the ginza station by the lanky baby cousin and his gorgeous older sister who i will always remember as a chubby-cheeked little girl. we said our goodbyes, i bumped into a tiled column as i backed away trying not to cry again, and then i stood on the train rides back home still surprised at having seen everyone.

one more day left of research and then i'll fly back to SF the day after.

...or will i?