A Cunning Trap

Rhythm & Code Blue

2006-07-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

Twang, thrum. Thump, thump. "Cough. This on?"
These were the sounds of trouble. A cover band was warming up, tuning up, doing a sound check. Whatever it was, it portended bad noise in the mall.
Every Sunday this upscale Marin County mall provides electrical outlets so some jokers with guitars and microphones can visit their fantasies of superstardom on folks who just want to spend the day shopping and sipping lattes. Or maybe the idea is to drive the crowds into the stores where they can at least hear CD compilations of the original versions of corny old rock 'n' roll songs.
If that was the idea, it wasn't working. People actually sat around listening to this graying group of buffoons hacking away at their instruments a few miles from the homes of real graying rockers like Huey Lewis, Bonnie Raitt and a couple of the living Grateful Dead. There were three guys and two women, average age 53, and they were inappropriately unashamed, as my wife put it.
Between all of them they might have hit an average of two notes right in each song, but in the wrong place. You had to grit your teeth and listen real hard to tell if they were covering a Stones song or an Airplane song. The drum solo sounded like the janitor carting away a barrel of litter, only without the rhythmic broken wheel. Yes, there was a drum solo.
We moved as far away as we could without going into the parking lot, but everybody else stayed put, swaying erratically to the beatlessness and occasionally applauding. Dozens of people in the crowd were old enough to belong to AARP, which meant they were Boomers who grew up on rock, or they were Boomers' parents who condemned it when their kids listened to it. Either way they should have hated this stuff.
So there we sat at the far end of the mall, too old to let go of our music and too young to be totally deaf. Too bad.

Photo credit

Happiness, pursued and caught

2006-07-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

Maybe we should celebrate independence every day, and not just for the fireworks and barbecues. This is the day we liberals, radicals, progressives and moderates (traitors, as the unlikeable likes of Ann Coulter would define us) wear the red, white and blue. We take the flag back. For one day, at least, it doesn't belong to the supporters of a mean and mad monarch.
I'm wearing my red-white-and-blue striped T-shirt that comes out of the drawer once a year, matched this year with white jeans, blue belt and red ball cap. I look like some kind of superpatriotic mime, but hell it's only once year. Still, maybe we should lay claim to the flag for the whole year, every year.
In the early '60s, the reactionaries had the Confederate flag, which they displayed when Civil Rights marchers showed up with the Stars and Stripes. Somehow, later on in the '60s, the reactionaries took our flag and defaced it with the slogan, "America, love it or leave it." The Tories probably had a slogan like that to go with the British flag in the 1770s.
Abbie Hoffman fought back with his American flag shirt and Peter Fonda rode easy with his American flag helmet and leathers. That was the right idea then (even if all that colorful acid wasn't) and years later a whole lot of liberals and I are eating hot dogs and watching fireworks in our patriotic colors.
Once again, we hold as self-evident the truth that it's our country too. Love it and stay.
Good dog!

Flying burrito, brother

2006-07-02T18:36:00.000-07:00

Young 'uns on the West Coast may not believe this, but I didn't have my first burrito until I was 30 years old. It was the mid-70s and I lived in the Boston area, where there were exactly two restaurants that served Mexican food. One was a sleazy bar in Brighton and the other was a hippie dive in Somerville, and neither served burritos, just plateloads of melted stuff. Then, on a trip to California, I picked up a hitchhiker going to Santa Cruz and he took me to a seaside burrito joint. I gathered that burritos were big with surfer types, probably because they were tubular food.
I've eaten thousands of them since, both the giant, slathered ones you eat from plates with knives and forks and the much more satisfying taqueria kind swathed in tinfoil. Now I tend to eat my own quicky, cheaty burritos.
Recipe: Lay one flour tortilla (or two or three) on a plate and put a big blop of refried beans in the middle right from the can. Sprinkle with cumin and garlic powder, slop on hot sauce and then mix it all up, right on the tortilla. Top with a couple of pieces of whatever kind of cheese you have, as long as it comes from a rectangular block. Then fold three sides of the tortilla over so the result looks less like a tube and more like a cardboard fries packet from McDonald's. Cover with a damp paper towel, so the thing won't have the texture of cardboard, then microwave for a minute. Cheese should roil out the opening and stick to the paper towel. That's how you know it's done. Remove towel, let cool and enjoy.
Pretty good for not leaving the house.
And another thing. I didn't have my first fast-food hamburger until I was in college, when on a midnight drive a friend took me to a cult place off the Connecticut Turnpike called Burger King. I thought it was the only one, and it might have been the only one in New England in 1967. And McDonald's was a farm when I was growing up. We were forced to eat real hamburgers, the kind that dribbled juices. E-I-E-I-Oh, my.
If McDonald's is so popular, how come people don't try making Big Macs at home? That's right, you can't make anything that bad at home. But you can't fail with burritos. You don't need carne asada or a hot tortilla press. Mm, mm, there's something about the magic interaction between the flour tortilla, the damp paper towel and modern microwave technology.
Yes, that is a burrito toga party. Remove tinfoil before microwaving.

It's a dry bleat

2006-06-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

The heat is on in the Bay Area and I hate it. Forget any idea we might have had about moving to Davis, where housing is cheaper but it's 100 like this all summer. I hate air-conditioning, too. For a few years I lived in Florida and hated that, too. It was a wet heat, a wet heat that came with bugs, snakes and gators, and it's much worse than our dry heat, as folk wisdom confirms.
But here's what's wrong with a dry heat, at least in the Bay Area. Unlike other dry heat places in America, like Phoenix, we don't have universal, car-to-home-to-mall airco. And unlike places like Phoenix, or Florida, the populace in the San Francisco area is never prepared for heat. Folks here don't even know enough to get in the shade. When the temperature hits the upper 90s they mutter about global warming and oil companies but continue to drive around in their convertibles.
Then, a day into the heat wave, the wildfires start and everybody acts as if there's something unnatural about them. When the smoke rises, the first question always is "Who started it?" Somehow no one ever understands that fire is part of the ecology, and the kid with the bottle rocket is too. Fires are nature's way of ridding itself of the brush that grew in the rainy season and the McMansions that grew in the money season.
Say this for the Bay Area, though. Unlike Phoenix and Florida, people are meant to live here. There's water, unlike Phoenix, but not so much that it makes the place a swamp, unlike Florida. It's just that the water only comes half the year. The other half is divided into days of heaven and days like this, days that make you cranky. And I'm Cranky.

A glass of Jack and a cup of Joe

2006-06-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

I should take up drinking again, scientists say. Love those "scientists say" headlines. The latest is that scientists say coffee drinking counteracts liver damage caused by that other kind of drinking that's so popular in America. Man, I'm wasting all those cups of Joe using them only to wake up. I could be deducting $1.80 each morning, and sometimes $1.80 each afternoon, as a medical expense.
These scientists that newspapers love to quote are always saying something completely intuitive or completely counterintuitive, as in Woody Allen's famous future finding that deep-fried fatty foods are good for us. This coffee thing is completely intuitive.
In the movies, folks are always pouring coffee into drunks. At AA meetings, I'm told, reformed drunks never take a step, much less a twelfth step, without a Styrofoam cup of brew in their hands. Coffee and booze may be the same for Mormons, but in the rest of this culture they're matter and anti-matter.
We just never knew how much it mattered. It isn't a matter of sobering up anymore, which scientists told us coffee couldn't do anyway. It turns out it's a matter of life and death. Live it up on champagne at night, and in the morning liver it up at Starbucks.
Suddenly those ventes don't seem so expensive, do they?
The issue for corporate coffee chieftains isn't so clear, though. Right now in Seattle guys are wondering how to build a marketing plan around this latest scientific finding. If they sell coffee as a morning-after pill for binge drinking, will they be encouraging drunk driving, slurred pick up lines and the Duke lacrosse team? Can they sell coffee as pro-liver without seeming anti-life? No, and furthermore no one's going to order something called a Cirrhosiccino.
Meanwhile, here I sit drinking a cup of Earl Grey, and not just because Earl doesn't have to take on Jack, as in Daniels, anymore. Tea is good for you, too, in its precious way. The United Kingdom Tea Council, at the top of Google's "tea" listings, encourages people to have four cups of tea every day to fulfill their "daily fluid requirements" and provide certain unnamed benefits to heart and health. They're also encouraging English soccer fans to bring their own teabags to Germany for the World Cup because they claim the Germans only put half as much tea in their bags. Damn those Jerries.
Seems to me the average British soccer fan has other ways of fulfilling his daily fluid requirement, which is a lot more than other people's. His brain may be dead, mate, but his liver is crying out for coffee.
My liver's listening to Lightnin' Hopkins singing Coffee House Blues.

Eye, eye, sir

2006-06-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I went for an eye exam. The first stage of the exam was as follows: I drove to an unfamiliar destination, the city of Davis, and realized I couldn't read the road signs. The second stage was making an appointment at LensCrafters and having an optometrist shine lights in my eyes and make me play video games with flashes of light and the alphabet.
Normally, I like eye exams because it never happens that the doc says, "Good news, your prescription hasn't changed." Thus I get to buy new glasses, which is like picking out a new identity. I never understood the appeal of contact lenses. If Clark Kent had contacts, what fun would that be for Lois or anyone else?
Unfortunately, this exam wasn't as much fun as usual. After making me zap a bunch of peripheral vision space invaders, the doc dilated my pupils and discovered two bad things. One was an incipient hint of a cataract in the right eye. However, he said it wasn't really so bad because it probably wouldn't grow very large until I'm in my seventies (which is only my next decade, but Al Gore says by then I'll be drowning in liquid ice cap, so what the hey.) The other thing the doc discovered is that there's a small hole in the retina of my left eye, which may or may not get worse, so he gave me a referral to an opthalmologist.
Funny the metaphors doctors use. This guy said the retina is "like wallpaper" and you never know when a small hole is going to turn into complete detachment with the wallpaper rolling right off the walls of my eyeball. You know, I've tried to remove some wallpaper in my time, and I don't remember it rolling off that easily. Still, I'll make that appointment with the opthalmologist.
In the meantime, I bought a new pair of glasses and refitted my old ones with new lenses. I plan to look good, and see well, until the day the wallpaper rolls up and the room goes dark.
I'm not depressed about this at all, strangely enough. My mother-in-law went through several eye procedures with great courage, despite the temporary loss of her astounding ability to paint. I don't have any visual talents to lose, except chick checking, couch potatoing and escaping into books, so I'm just going around soaking up the sights with my new prescription while I can.
And if worse comes to worst, and both eyes go blank, I'll look on the bright side and show great musical ability. Well, I won't be looking on the bright side exactly, but maybe I'll be swaying to my bright keyboard stylings. (Although I couldn't play before I went blind.)
At least I'll get to take my dog into restaurants. The world's first seeing-eye Maltese.
Yeah, I'm a hypochondriac.

Auto autopsy

2006-05-29T18:45:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend, and I remembered the nation's war dead and bought a car. After all, what are people dying for in Iraq but our God-given right to drive cars?
I came to my senses and gave up the idea of buying a mega-horsepower luxury sports sedan. I bought a safe, sane and sensible Subaru Outback that's surprisingly nimble and luxurious. It has plenty of room for all the crap we haul around on trips. But I promise, this time, not to overload our car with permacrap. You see, when I traded in my old Honda CRV I suddenly had to empty it out right in front of the salesman, in the middle of the parking lot at the Subaru dealership. Despite weeks of research, here I was making a spur-of-the-moment car trade.
It was like an archeological dig, one that descended into the deepest layers of my paranoia and slobophrenia. Naturally, the car was littered with old napkins and empty water bottles, and the cup holders were crammed with salsa packets from Taco Bell. (Medium hot isn't bad at all, and worth stocking up on). But my, oh my, the hats. I had a hat under the seats for every possible personality shift, from preppy yachtsman to camouflaged lone gunman. And then there were the jackets, and sweatshirts, and raincoats and umbrellas. Be prepared, that's my motto, and be messy.
Then there were the earthquake supplies: gallons of bottled water, rolls of toilet paper (yet only one can of chili), flashlights, batteries, bags of spare clothes, hiking boots, medications, a first-aid kit, a sleeping bag and a crowbar. Just in case. To my way of thinking, if the Big One hit, I could live in my car and even launch the occasional rescue mission. When the Pretty Big One hit in '89, I had one measly flashlight, yet that made me the richest man in the office building. If an earthquake struck while I was in that Honda, I'd be the Bill Gates of emergency gear.
So I had to dump all this embarrassing stuff in the back of a squeaky clean Subaru in front of a witness, the salesman, who was a veteran of the Korean War. He probably got through that with one extra pair of socks. Honor our veterans, all right.
Anyway, the contents of the old Honda are back in the garage, the closet or the trash. All I put in the Subaru were jumper cables, a flashlight, two small bottles of water (for the dog, mainly) and one hat suitable for any mood and shade from the sunroof. Finally, I have a sun roof, and the sunny side is where I'm looking. When the Crankette is not yelling at me to keep my eyes on the road.

Driving Miss Crankette Crazy

2006-05-23T18:01:00.000-07:00

Works every time. If you roll into a Toyota dealership on a bicycle, a salesman comes out and says, "Are you looking for a hybrid?" It's almost as if I was hugging a tree on the handlebars.
No, I'm not looking for a hybrid. I am a hybrid. I ride a bike for most of my miles, which are around town, but when it comes to highway and back road driving I'm a typical doofus American. I want a car that handles well, looks good and doesn't blow around like a golf cart. I have car disease, and I can afford to have it because I personally average about 75 miles a gallon, counting both my vehicles and the dabs of grease I put on the chain of one of them.
My car disease is full blown right now, because I'm car shopping, even if I stop in to look at the spiffy new Camrys on a Specialized commuter bike. The Camry comes in a hybrid model, but there's also one with a potent V-6 (rated at 31 mpg, so there.) You can see I'm far gone here. For once in my life, I want a car that can get on a freeway without a tail wind and I want to be surrounded by more airbags than a buffet table at a political convention. And I don't really want a Camry, which is Japanese for "AARP." I want to step up to an Acura TL (29 mpg and, hey, a Consumer Reports pick).
It would be nice if the car had safety restraints to prevent injury to my marriage, but that's my problem. I'm bugging my wife, the Crankette, with constant car talk.
This car disease runs in my family. My father bought a car every time his old one bored him, even though there were very few places to drive his cars on Cape Cod, except to drive my mother crazy, and to the refuge of her old Dodge van. The old man's last car was a BMW that was fast enough to get him to the pub and back before his oxygen tank ran out, and in previous years he bought, among many other vehicles, a Mustang convertible, a Miata, two Mercedes, a Rolls Royce (used and mostly not running), an International Harvester Scout and a Pacer. He was probably the only man in the history of the world to own both a Rolls and a Pacer. He was a genuine car nut, and when he walked up to a dealership the salesmen came running.
Don't worry, this will all be over soon. My old Honda, which handles like a turd on a roller skate and needs major work, will soon be replaced and I'll have to shut up and be happy with whatever lovely metal box I've chosen to sit in for the next decade.
I know I'll still be happier on the bike.
But, vroom-vroom!

Join the Army and See a Doctor

2006-05-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, newspapers tell you something astounding, and I don't mean that a man can be hated for hitting as many home runs as Babe Ruth. Consider these stories from our two big California papers:
"Amid war, troops see safety in reenlisting," is a Sunday headline in the Los Angeles Times. Faye Fiore reports that Army reenlistments are running well above normal, largely because of the "generous health coverage" soldiers and their families receive. Sure, 18,000 troops have been wounded in Iraq, but they get the best medical attention and prosthetic limbs our tax dollars can provide (if they don't get discharged too soon). And soldiers' wives and tykes can go to clinics for free. In the civilian world, 46 million Americans have no health care at all, and still run the chance of being wounded in the streets.
Joining the Army to see a doctor is a trade-off. But hope you don't see too many doctors all at once.
Meanwhile, reporter Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle drops this jaw-dropper of a statistic: "Roughly 10 percent of Mexico's population of about 107 million is now living in the U.S." They generate $20 billion in income that heads south of the border, and experts say it's unlikely that any alliance of portly Congressmen and Minutemen in folding chairs can make them go home.
So this is our United States: Just generous enough to attract Third World peasants, but mean and stingy enough to keep Americans going to Iraq over and over again. Uncle Sam wants you to work cheap.

Hey, Do I Work Out?

2006-05-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

If we all hated gym class as kids, why are we paying to go to gyms as adults?
Maybe it's because the modern, well-equipped gym doesn't have rope climbs or sicko gym teachers who make you play dodge ball in shorts that are best accessorized with wedgies.
Gym clothes are still an issue, as far as I'm concerned. This rainy winter I joined a gym, but only after taking a tour and ascertaining that there weren't uniforms. The men didn't all wear stretchy tank tops and the women weren't all tightly coated in Danskin. Plenty of folks were wearing baggy sweats or XXL T-shirts over their 36-pack abs.
Furthermore, the exercise machines weren't installed behind plate glass along a busy sidewalk. What genius invented that? Let's see, we'll get people to pay thousands of dollars to run in yuppie cages in a zoo that's cruel to observers.
No, my idea was to get in shape, and getting in shape is ugly. My gym embraces the young, the old, the delt-enlarged and the cellulite-pocked. That's because it's not a commercial gym run by the kind of people who loved gym class in school. The gym is part of a nearby community center where fitness is not a competitive matter and nobody's trying to pick anybody up. Or maybe I'm just too winded to notice.
Working out is working out.

bad case of blogger's right not to blog

2006-05-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

Why am I stuck in a blogmire? Why is writing these things so hard?
Partly, of course, it's because I don't do much. I could write about what I had for lunch, but the Crankette already has that beat.
It isn't just inactivity that keeps me from writing, though. That never stopped me as a newspaper columnist. Nor is it the lack of deadlines and scary editors. The blogging block lies in the very nature of the medium. You can write anything you want. You can write as long as you want. You could update readers all day long on every belch and sigh.
Or you could sigh and write nothing at all. This infinite empty space just sits in the computer like a non-directive psychiatrist, waiting for words.
Um-hum. Tell me about it.
Phew, the 55 minutes are up. Time to go to the gym. Or somewhere, anywhere.

Gas is not this gasbag's bag

2006-05-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

Here's one thing I don't get about the incompletely gilded place I live.
Marin County is a hotbed (oops, almost said "hottub") of anti-Republican, pro-environmental activism. Or inactivism, since most of the politics takes place around morning lattes in coffeehouses. It's also the capital of mountain biking and road biking. But most of the bicyclists end up nowhere but coffeehouses to shoot the breeze about gears and global warming.
So how come I see so few people using bicycles as actual transportation, to work or to stores, instead of as $3,000 quadricep-building devices?
Every day I bike a few miles to downtown San Rafael, maybe to pick up some wine or go to the bank. (And always to a coffeehouse, I admit.) Once or twice a week I bike to the farmers market to get vegetables, fruit and cheese. Most days I'm the only person at the market who arrived on a bike. And this market is the belly of chard-hugging, petroleum-hating Marin liberalism!
Instead folks roll up in SUVs and BMWs to fill their hemp sacks with organic produce. What is the math here? Three gallons of irreplaceable hydrocarbons for five pounds of sustainable veggies?
Then, when I'm out in the bike lane, heading to town in my sweatshirt and jeans, the bicyclists who pass me (they all pass me) are wearing Vegas-colored Spandex and heading only to the blessed world of lower body fat. Why doesn't anyone actually use bikes as transportation? When I used to bike to work via the Sausalito ferry only a half dozen regular cyclists would be aboard.
In fact, there are those in these parts who use bicycles, the world's most efficient form of short-range transportation, as means to get to work and stores. They are the invisible people of Marin. At least they were invisible until very recently when they took to the streets en masse.
When I'm out on my bike the only others out there pedaling with a purpose are struggling, hard-working Latinos. They don't wear helmets or Lycra, or ride bikes worth more than most people's cars. Bikes, cheap bikes (which is what bikes used to be) are how they get around.
Now, I'm sure most of these guys, like everyone in America, would like to own a nifty car. And more horsepower to them in achieving the American dream.
But what's with all the liberals who say they hate cars but drive expensive ones three miles to the store? Get a cheap bike. Maybe you can even quit the gym.

My Lunch at Joe's Place

2006-04-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

How often do you go to a local burrito shop and see the greatest person in a particular field of human endeavor? Usually you just see a bunch of guys in old T-shirts and jeans.
So there he was at a small Mexican market and restaurant behind the garage where I take my car for tuneups — ta, da — the greatest quarterback of all time, Joe Montana.
He was wearing an old T-shirt and jeans, and of course the other four people in old T-shirts and jeans in the forlorn restaurant noticed him. My wife the Crankette said she felt an urge to run into the dusty parking lot, throw her hands in the air and yell, "Joe, I'm open!"
But this is the Bay Area, and we try to pretend we're cool. We don't want to disturb our living gods when they're satisfying an urge for a burrito.
We tried to remember where Joe and Jennifer Montana lived. (She showed up a few minutes later, resplendent in her gorgeousity). We seemed to recall that they have a ranch in Wine Country, and it's hard to picture them agreeing to meet for burritos 60 miles south, in Beer Country, behind that garage that does $39 fluid changes and brake checks. But then, Joe always did such great work outside of the pocket.
Flash back to 1996, and a party in honor of the 49ers' 50th anniversary as an NFL team. Montana had retired from football two years earlier, and I overheard Jerry Rice ask him what he was doing.
"Just hanging out," said Montana.
So there we were, Joe and me, just hanging out. Of course, as I mentioned lamely to the Crankette, he has a lot more money to invest in hanging out than I do.
She put her lips together and blew me this line: "But you both have the same amount of nothing to do."
Ah, the democracy of retirement. And burritos.

Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinero

2006-04-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Williams-Sonoma catalog arrived and I finally figured it out. Why do rich people build 2,000-square-foot kitchens, yet can't and don't cook? The catalog contains the answers. They need the monster kitchen to store all the shiny gadgets they'll use once, if at all.
Here are some of the items the culinary imagineers at Williams-Sonoma have invented for May, 2006. Quick, build an addition to the house so you can install more cherrywood cabinets.
You must have a $149.95 thermo whipper so you can make food foams like that crazy guy at El Bulli in Catalonia. Choose savory or sweet foam, or better yet, fly to Spain.
And how can you have a simple plate of asparagus without a complete set of "asparagus tools"? For a total of $151.90 you can get the All Clad asparagus pot, asparagus double boiler, asparagus tongs, asparagus peeler and asparagus colander. Hey, I just use a $2.95 pan from the drugstore and my pee doesn't smell any worse than yours.
I could go on about the $40 Calphalon pepper roaster that saves you the inconvenience of roasting peppers over a burner with a fork, or the $36 batter dispenser that squirts perfect circles of pancake batter onto the griddle without messy drips. (Rich people hate mess, another reason they don't cook.) But what I really want to go on about is the $199.95 electric vacuum marinator, pictured above. Knock out a wall, we must make room for one of these.
As the Crankette once pointed out, most electric kitchen appliances either spin (the Cuisinart and all its ilk) or they get hot (like George Foreman's grill or Williams-Sonoma's croque monsieur maker). The electric vacuum marinator does more. It rotates and sucks.
Just toss the meat and marinade in the machine's plastic barrel, hit the button, and the air is expelled while the meat rotates. Not only is it supposed to infuse meat with a "deep, rich flavor," but it looks appealingly like the device that turned Jeff Goldblum into a fly-man.
Nobody who really cooks would use any of this crap. It's just stuff you'd have to wash afterward, and find a place to store. And you wonder why the take-out sections of gourmet supermarkets are crammed with so many rich people. Their designer kitchens are just too cluttered and it's so hard getting a contractor who can keep up.

Rattletrap rattlings

2006-04-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

Gasoline prices are going through the roof and we're going out of the house every day to shop for a car. We don't really care what kind of mileage a car gets because we only drive a few thousand miles a year. I bicycle more miles than we drive. But here's the thing we care about: Will a car fit the petite Crankette?
By fit, she means can she get an idea of the general location of the front and back of the car. You know, so she can park by sight rather than bumper sonar.
First problem: Almost all cars nowadays are built with their noses sloping to the ground and their butts proudly held high. You might as well be trying to park J. Lo in a marriage.
Second problem: Car salesmen don't understand the problem, or the problems, women have buying a car — small, smart women particularly. They want me, the man, to get orgasmic about the car's speedy lines and its boinky booty.
Today I dragged the Crankette to a Toyota/Scion dealer to look at a couple of new models. First we looked at a Scion Tc, a sporty, inexpensive kid racer that I thought might be to Crankette's scale. The salesman looked at her and said, somewhat condescendingly, "Have you ever driven a sports car?" (As if this car was in the league of an Austin-Healy 3000.)
"I just sold a CRX," said the Crankette, referring to her old pocket-rocket Honda two-seater.
"That's not a sports car," said the salesman.
"It sounded like one," said the Crankette, getting to the guts of what sports cars are supposed to do.
This guy wasn't getting anywhere with her, but he proceeded to throw open the Scion's doors, hatchback and hood as if it were a splayed lobster about to be served under a silver dome. The Crankette said she didn't care what was under the hood, just whether she could see where it ended, and then showed the salesman where to stow the hood-holder rod when he couldn't find the little plastic latch.
The downshot was, the Crankette couldn't see past the windshield wipers and had no idea where the front of the car was. "How will I park this?" she said.
"You'll get used to it," said the salesman, with the same tone shoe salesmen use when they say the shoes will break in.
No sale for that guy.
Well, I could go on, perhaps about the moment when the Crankette said she wanted to do a test sit in a Camry and the salesman looked at me as if for permission.
But I won't go on, for now. Tomorrow we'll go to the Honda/Acura dealer and take some other cars for test sits. And show some salesmen who's boss. The Crankette, that's who.
That's right, I'm no better than that Scion salesman. I couldn't convince the Crankette that it's easy to see where the hood ends on a Mercedes because of that convenient, $40,000 hood ornament. She said she'd rather glue Barbie dolls on top of each headlight.

Coffee, Fair Trade for a Social Life

2006-04-23T16:42:00.000-07:00

I just returned from my third trip out of the house to get coffee. Why would anyone spend six bucks a day for coffee when financial experts say to save the money for retirement? Because I am retired, and that's how I choose to spend my retirement money instead of flushing it into a convertible or a yacht.
I'd rather flush it into the toilet, in other words.
What does coffee do for me? It keeps me awake. It counteracts wine. Mainly, it keeps me in the world. Even if I go to Starbucks, I'm in the world, albeit a chirpy corporate corner of the world that always asks if I want a pastry with that.
Make fun of Starbucks and other foamy-Joe emporia all you want, but the main reason people go there isn't for the caffeine but for the warm feeling of loneliness in company. I'll have a grande Alienationocchino, please.
Folks exit their armored SUVs, their mole-whacked cubicles and their neutron-bombed gated communities to drink weak and yet somehow overroasted coffee for the purpose of huddling together, watching each other and listening to halves of cell phone conversations. It beats being totally alone. And sometimes one sees neighbors and friends one doesn't normally see across the toxin-drenched lawns and outside the pasteboard of the cubicles.
It's even possible to make new friends, coffeehouse friends, the kind of people who make good conversation without the obligation of learning names or trading business cards. Even at Starbucks (which best be avoided even though it's unavoidable) it's safe to bitch about George Bush with strangers, because the strange Bushers are working themselves into a red state in the donut shop across the street.
Give me a cup of fair-trade tooth-stain, and instead of the transfat pastry I'll take the casual friendship, the easy people-watching and the total buzzy alertness. It's a bargain at 30 bucks a week.

Market Value

2006-04-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

We're well into a three-day drought here in Northern California as the prodigal sun has returned — to steal a couple of phrases from the local media. I found myself sitting at the Marin Civic Center farmers' market Thursday drinking coffee (organic, fair-trade, etc.) that had gone up 25 cents since the last time the sun shone. Everything is going up in price. The egg man said he hadn't raised prices in years, but he will soon. A woman asked why, and he spoke one word: "Fuel."
It just may be that farmers at the market are the canaries in the coal mine (mixed fuel metaphor?) telling us what is about to happen. To get to Marin from Santa Rosa or the Capay Valley they have to shell out so we can shell their beans and eggs. In high school many years ago, my history teacher, Mr. Raphael, said the Great Depression didn't start when brokers started plummeting toward sidewalks, but when the farmers went broke. Thank God, here in luxo-Marin we still have a few farmers who head our way with their bounty and their realism.
This morning the front page of the SF Chronicle said, "War costs approach $10 billion a month." And the band played on.
Worse than all that money soaking into the desert is the blood. Blood for no oil. Is that what Halliburton and Bechtel and the Great Decider have given us?
Well, the sun was out and I spent some time with my friends, my neighbors and the farmers who faithfully visit twice a week, no matter the cost. I can get there on my bicycle, but who else in America can do all their business on 20 pounds of frame, chain and gears with a smidgen of grease?
The sun was out. I was out. I was out $2.25 for the coffee, but it was great.

Hello, Planet

2006-04-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

Hello, I'm here. Spreading joy, peanut butter and my waistline. Spread it, Bushboy. Up against the wall, muthapucka. Hey, I don't have much else to say today. Took all my energy to find a blog name that wasn't taken.
Tomorrow we get organized, and set a Cunning Trap for the Heffa-W-Lump.