A Pleasant Present Interlude

Amidst all of this reminiscing, the present continues to eat up the future and quickly digest it, leaving only the past behind. I'm nearing the end of yet another week of working nights, although I'm quickly approaching the time when I'll be switching back to days.

The eruption of frog song this week is nearly overwhelming in its intensity. Our pool has been neglected for awhile now, and resembles a murky, green pond. Yesterday evening, I managed to capture three different amphibian species there: several chorus frogs, a small toad, and an equally diminutive newt.

On Tuesday, I went with Jeanine and Eva to see Black Sabbath, getting to work a bit late. This is balanced out by the fact that I've been staying later than I'm supposed to in the mornings due to some ongoing schedule snafus.

The sunrises have been nice too, especially this morning.

The kids this week have been perfect sleepers. I haven't seen a single one of them during the overnight hours. I did see a Gray Fox rooting around in an overturned compost bucket on Monday night, and actually had to intervene when the fox spotted our fluffy little feral cat nearby. The fox suddenly got very interested in the cat, and its whole demeanor changed. I got in between them and scared the fox away. I'm not sure if it would have attacked the cat, but I have a soft spot for cats, so I didn't let things escalate.

I'm always impressed by how alive wild animals are. They always seem to be quivering with potential, their senses straining to perceive the slightest changes in their surroundings. The fox moved so quickly that it seemed like a ghost, teleporting from shadow to shadow and then finally vanishing back into the woods. People are never this alive. Maybe we should take inspiration from this fox and its kin. I've been thinking about this all week.

Church St.

That's my old window in the upper left hand corner of this rather dull looking building. Looking at it now reminds me of the time when the roof was replaced. Due to the fact that I worked nights, there was a period of several weeks where I was awakened every day by the sound of hammers directly above my head.

This cookie cutter apartment complex squatted dolefully at the end of Church St where it abuts Highway 237. I moved into a two bedroom, upstairs apartment with Laura and her daughter, Kelly, who I think was then around 12 or 13 years old. Before we moved in together, they had previously lived across the complex in a one room apartment. Also living with us was their cat, BJ, who was one of the smartest cats I’ve ever known. He was constantly trying to get outside, so opening the front door always had to involve a quick motion with a leg to block his inevitable attempt to dart between the doorjamb and the opening door. Years later, after moving out, I had to break myself of the habit of swiftly inserting my foot into the widening space as I opened the front door of my new residence.

Laura worked at Tower with me, she in receiving and me out on the floor as shift manager. Our relationship was the only workplace romance I’ve ever attempted, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it was an on again/off again affair. Our differences in age, personality, and life experience were profound, with her being 14 years older and having a background that can only be described as harrowing. She was also in chronic pain, and had bad days where it was all she could do to get out of bed and sit in her chair.

Kelly was a strong-willed and intelligent child. In a way, she was like my first stepdaughter. Not that Laura and I were married, or even in that kind of relationship most of the time. I helped teach Kelly to drive (she reminded me of this last year, when spent an afternoon together with our kids), and was generally there for her when needed.

My friend, Ellen, who had also briefly worked at Tower, moved into an apartment in the complex for awhile, and so did at least one other Tower employee, if I remember correctly. Jeff, my housemate from the first couple of houses in this ongoing series, lived in an apartment complex on the next street, accessible by a gate between our complexes.

Living with Laura was rewarding, awkward, frustrating, occasionally profound, and provided me with multiple opportunities for growth, some of which I took, and others which I didn’t. She was a woman for whom the words “I love you” were easier to utter than the words “I trust you.” I was a relative innocent. She was anything but. More than once, she said aloud that she wished that she could have what came so easily for “normal people”, but while we were living together, she never quite managed it, and I didn’t know how to make it work either.

During the “off again” moments of our time together, I saw other women, whose names all began with the letter D. I met D#1 through Ellen. She was a good deal younger than me and would eventually, long after our brief fling, become the co-owner of the Bal Theatre in San Leandro. D#2 was another Tower employee, and her claim to fame was that she had once been a model for Frank Frazetta. D#3 was somebody who I met through Jennie (yes, an ex-girlfriend, playing matchmaker). I might have taken this last relationship farther, but I was still emotionally confused about my non-relationship with Laura, and Laura, sensing that I was drawing away, turned on the heat, drawing me back in. She often admitted that she had a “come here/go away” problem in her relationships, both wanting and not wanting one at the same time. All of these brief “relationships” were overshadowed by the fact that I had unresolved feelings about Laura and my living situation.

There is a strange addendum to the story of D#3. My inspiration for starting this blog came from my first wife, Jen, way back in 2002. Jen became fascinated by the art of blogging, both reading and writing them. To this day, she makes a living working for a company called Blogher, so she managed to turn this fascination into something sustaining. Back when we were married, I happened to notice that one of the author photos attached to a blog she was regularly reading looked really familiar. Sure enough, it was D#3, who had become a Unitarian minister down in Texas. Being amazed at this coincidence, I briefly contacted her, which given Jen’s jealous nature, probably wasn’t a good idea. In retrospect, I think this might have been one of the first wedges inserted between us. I’m not sure if Jen continued reading that blog afterward, or if it exists. Maybe I’ll poke around and see.

I also did the majority of my international traveling while living on Church St., going to France and England several times. I also went to New York a couple of times during this period, and Texas as well. It was a busy time. I was young(ish), and between my two jobs, I could afford to travel, as long as I did it as cheaply as possible.

Laura eventually quit Tower, and was jobless for awhile, making me the sole provider. She eventually got a job at a paint store, and then one at Trader Joe’s. I quit Tower as well, and after my friend Matt mentioned that he had a friend who worked at the Children’s Discovery Museum and that I would be a good fit there, I got a job at the museum.
While working at the museum, I met Jen one day in the early childhood center. Remembering Laura’s tendency to pull the “come here/go away” card, I resolved that this time I wasn’t going to hold back from exploring the possibility of a new relationship which, as things developed, led to me moving out.

Later this month, I’ll be attending Kelly’s baby shower, held in expectation of the arrival of her second child. She’s in her mid-thirties now, which makes me feel elderly.

Reed St.

I can't remember how I ended up on Reed street. I think that the impetus was my aversion to living in a studio apartment. It might also been yet another move inspired by a break-up, because this was around the time that Jennie and I called it quits. I had a number of housemates in this house, including Chad who, while we were living there together, was my companion on an epic, 8000 mile road trip. Chad, with his band, The Earles of Newtown, ended up singing at our wedding when Jeanine and I got married a few years ago.

Another housemate, who shall go unnamed, tried to overdose on pills and ended up moving out. Yet another housemate, who I think was named Sheila, came home one day with two black eyes, looking like she'd been attacked. When I asked her what happened, she said she'd fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a bus.

We had a small garden in the front yard, but every time something started to ripen, it got stolen.

The house had two bedrooms, although we ended up converting the front room into an additional bedroom. That's where Jesse lived. Jesse collected hub caps and was a bit of an artist, if I remember right. He also liked having barbeques on the front porch,which was okay as long as uninvited people didn't show up, like this crazy homeless guy known as Mundo. I seem to remember Mundo leaving some graffiti behind.

I'm pretty sure that one of our neighbors was a prostitute, if her mode of dress was anything to go by. She would emerge in the evening wearing shiny, short, skin-tight skirts and wander up the street.

There were illegal aliens living in an old airstream trailer out back. They made a living picking fruit, and would sometimes share the bags of fruit that they brought home. Somebody ended up calling the cops on them, and our landlord suspected it had been one of us. Our response was something like, "no! They give us fruit!"

There was also a converted garage at the back of the property where some other people lived, but I don't think any of us ever had any interaction with them.

When we lived there in the mid nineties, the rent for the whole house was $800.00, which won't even cover a studio apartment these days.

While I lived there I was going to San Jose State (for the second time) to get my Environmental Studies degree. I also still worked at Tower, where I was on again/off again (mostly off again) romantically involved with a coworker named Laura. I could walk to school, but the commute to work was much longer. I was still delivering papers at night too.

We briefly had a housemate named Stacia, who had just moved away from her parents' house. Often, the only indication that she was living there was the pile of empty bottles of alcohol that built up in the kitchen. Once, she came home drunk and passed out in the front yard, where she slept all night. She was lucky. It wasn't the kind of neighborhood where a young, attractive woman stood a good chance of emerging unmolested from such a judgmental error. She sure liked her alcohol.

Next door, looming over our driveway, there was a building that looked like it was about to fall over. I remember once getting blocked in my the mail truck, and having to drive down the sidewalk in front of our house to the next driveway so I wouldn't be late for work.

Like all of my other similar living arrangements, this one eventually fell apart due to the nomadic nature of twenty somethings. People moved out and moved on. I was the last one to go. When we vacated the premises, we left our couch (which we had bought for $15.00 from the neighbors) on the front porch. We naively thought that whoever moved in next might want it. I can't remember how much of our deposit we got back. Probably not much.

Villa St.

This building, yet another casualty of population growth, was at some point subdivided into studio apartments. The window on the right was the one I peered out from while living there with Shoggoth the cat and an assortment of reptiles. The reptile cages took up most of the space in the living area.

The apartment consisted of two similarly sized rooms, one being the living/sleeping area and the other being the kitchen. There was a bathroom abutting the kitchen, but I can't picture it in my head now.

Shoggoth was an illegal tenant, and I used to sneak him outside when the property manager wasn't around, just so he could touch a tree or smell the grass. The property manager breathed through a hole in his throat and spoke with the aid of technology, making him sound like Darth Vader.

My friend Josh, who was a co-worker at Tower Books, briefly lived in the apartment across the hallway, but soon vacated it because part of his room was under the stairs. I lived there long enough to have several upstairs neighbors, all of them annoying in their own ways. One neighbor made noises that sounded like he had a typewriter on the floor, with which he frantically composed letters during the nocturnal hours. The worst upstairs neighbors were a pair of roommates who fought (I once distinctly heard, "Ow! You didn't have to cut me!". Plus, they had a car with an uncommonly sensitive alarm. It went off every time a truck went down the street.

One day, while I was standing out near the curb (putting something into my trunk, I think), a large sedan whipped around the corner and a hand holding a baseball bat shot out the passenger side window just long enough for the bat to swing into the rearview mirror of the alarm car. The mirror was a home run, bouncing away down the street. The guy upstairs popped his head out of the window and asked what happened, and I had to refrain from laughing while I told him. It seems I wasn't the only one who hated that alarm.

Once, I decided to defrost my freezer at a late hour. It was well and truly iced over, and I attacked it with a hammer and screwdriver. The next day, the property manager told me that there had been complaints, and asked if I'd heard anything. I innocently shook my head and said, "no, because I wasn't home." He immediately concluded that my upstairs neighbors must be the culprits, since they were habitually loud to begin with. This was admittedly a passive-aggressive way of getting back at them, but it worked.

I wouldn't live in a studio apartment again until after my divorce, and my experience living in a small space with a bunch of reptiles inspired me to find a different solution the second time around.

Up the Creek

Today, I'm taking a detour from writing about places I used to live so I can reminisce about the creek near my parents' home in Cupertino. I still have to go and take a current photo of that house. I haven't seen it in a few years, and it has changed ownership again since my dad sold it.

Near the house, behind Wilson park, is a creek. I can't remember exactly what the creek is officially called because we always just called it "the creek". Like many children who grew up in the seventies, we often played outside until the streetlights came on. The creek served as a porthole to adventure. We caught toads, found interesting trash, and generally had a fine old time. I remember once seeing a Tiger salamander in the creek, which is still the only time I've ever seen one in the wild. Strangely enough, we didn't catch it and bring it home, as I did with so many other creatures we found. I remember once catching so many toads that I had to take off my socks to carry them in. At my current job as a naturalist, I discourage kids from exhibiting this kind of behavior because it's a sure way to depopulate the wild. I can understand the impulse though. I loved the creatures I found and had no conception of the potential harm that catching them and keeping them could cause. This early fascination with wildlife eventually led to the job I have now.

I remember my best friend Steve accidentally dropping a nail-studded board on my head. Blinded by blood, I did my best to take revenge, but my mom (I think it was my mom) stopped me.

I remember our excursions upstream toward the beckoning hills, through tunnels and around half submerged shopping carts, up embankments and over boulders, ever onward. I think we only made it all the way to the hills once or twice. We were still pretty young. I remember stopping at the railroad tracks to lay down coins on the rails. Once, we even put a good sized log on the rails, which the train made short work of, turning it to kindling in an explosion of wood.

Once, I almost drowned when I jumped into a rain swollen creek and nearly got swept into a long tunnel with water filling nearly the entire space. Lesson learned.

Another time, during the dry season, we decided to walk through one of the long tunnels but didn't have flashlights. One of us had a lighter though, so we fashioned crude torches by wrapping some old clothes we found around two or three stout branches. It actually worked.

Mariposa St.

After our Clark St. living arrangement became deranged, Jeff and I ended up moving to nearby Mariposa St., along with Jennie and Jennie's friend Paul. The house on Mariposa St. was built in 1903, making it the oldest house in Mountain View, or so we were told (although the picture above was taken last weekend). This meant that it has survived both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes. Jeff's friend, whose name I've forgotten, was the property manager, in return for which he either got free rent or a deal on rent in one of the apartments out back (which originally housed the "help", back when the house was the only one in the area). This friend also filled us in on the fact that a previous tenant (or perhaps the original one, as details are now hazy) blew her brains out inside one of the upstairs walk-in closets (the one in the room that Jennie and I ended up living in). The woman reportedly left a note downstairs warning her kids not to go upstairs, but they did, of course. Several people who stayed the night in the house said that it had creepy vibes, and that they had weird dreams. I never noticed anything like that myself, but then again I never do.

Jeff took over the master bedroom, and Paul lived downstairs. During our time there, a succession of other housemates came and went, many of them Tower employees (Josh and Tigger, at least). Paul ended up losing his job (he was the biggest procrastinator I've ever met) and stopped paying rent. Jennie dumped all of his stuff out front. The last time I saw Paul, he was on well on his way to becoming a woman, and now answers to "Pam".

I remember a girl getting assaulted in our front yard. We called 911, but by the time we got out into the yard, the perpetrator had vanished. The girl didn't really speak English, but fortunately one of the responding police officers spoke Spanish.

Here's what our room looked like. The pictures behind me were painted for an art class at SJSU.

A bookshelf and posters:

Inside the suicide closet:

I remember one of the neighbors calling the cops on Jeff because he was using one of the trees in the yard for crossbow target practice. She might have called because of all of the people coming and going as well. Once, Jeff invited a bunch of deadheads over, and when Jennie and I got home late one night, we stepped on several of them, perhaps harder than was warranted. The whole downstairs smelled of patchouli.

We had a couple of cats, Lolapaloozakersplat (Lola for short), and Shoggoth. We also adopted a poor crippled cat (one leg stood out at right angles to its body), but we had to return it when it started terrorizing Lola.

At some point, after Jennie and Jeff butted heads one time too many, Jeff moved out and my friend Wayne moved in, as did Stefany. Jeff's friend Danette also lived there for awhile. Jennie ended up getting into it with Wayne and Stefany as well, which by that time I'd realized was her pattern. They ended up moving out too. Since Jennie was planning on going to UC Berkeley, that left me as the only person remaining, which meant that I ended up having to clean out all of the crap left behind in the root cellar, which was a kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind storage space. I seem to remember moving back in with my mom for a month or two until I'd sorted out a new place to live.

This was a great house, except for the fact that it was horribly hard to heat. I was almost as if there was no insulation. It might also been because the rooms were so large. The street was (and still is) a real mixture of nice homes and seedy apartment complexes. It was close to downtown, and not too far from Tower either. I think the rent for the entire house was around $1275.00, although my share of it was sometimes as low as $150.00 (Jennie and I split a $300.00 room).

Clark Street

This is the house I briefly lived in at the end of the eighties/beginning of the nineties. The impetus for moving out of my parents' house was the end of my first real relationship. I'm most likely to make big life changes when I'm feeling upset about things, and being dumped is pretty high on the list of things that upset me. It ends up being a time of reflection and forward progress. I wish I did this kind of thing when I was happy, but the motivation just isn't there. If things are working, why change them? Or so I tell myself.

I moved in with my friend Jeff and a woman named Dela. Dela lived in the garage, which she had converted into a bedroom. She had a dog named Dave who liked eating my socks and escaping. The neighbors who continually brought him back weren't so fond of this second habit. I wasn't so fond of the first one. Dela also had a cute Canadian friend named Val who, while visiting, helped me feel better about being newly single, although that didn't last very long since she was, after all, a resident of a different country and jumping right into any kind of relationship wasn't what I needed to be doing at that moment in time. There was a third bedroom inside too, but I can't remember who lived in it. Dela built a skateboard ramp in the backyard, or had one built. I can't remember where exactly she got it. She didn't skate, but liked skater boys, or so I remember.

Before I moved out, I had started a new relationship with Jennie, who worked at Tower Records. I soon got a job next door at Tower Books, which was a good thing because my other job, delivering the Wall Street Journal at night, barely paid enough to cover my rent, let alone buy groceries or pay bills. Speaking of paying bills, there was another house down the street populated by Tower employees that everyone referred to as "The Cave" because nobody ever payed the electricity bill.

It was during this time that Jennie almost died in a car accident after she got hit on the freeway by a Coca Cola truck (the first paramedics on the scene actually thought she was dead). Her car was a rattletrap with its hood held down by a bungee cord, and I seem to remember it was the steering wheel suddenly no longer working that caused her to spin into the path of the truck. She spent some time in the hospital, and emerged from the other end of the experience with a case of post-traumatic stress which gradually led to her reevaluating her whole life. She went on to become a lawyer, going to UC Berkeley and then Harvard. Again, bad experiences often result in good changes. I'm still friends with her (at least via Facebook). The last time I saw her was when she came to my wedding.

This living arrangement fell apart when Dela and Jeff had a falling out. I can't remember exactly what caused it, but it ended up being Dela against the rest of us (including Jennie, who didn't technically live there, but loved a good fight). We ended up all moving out, leaving Dela there by herself.

Gilman

One more music-related memory, and then I'll move on to something else, at least for awhile. Music was and continues to be necessary part of my life. We all have ways of emotionally navigating the fearsome maze of modern culture, and music is the foremost among mine. Getting the hell out of the city and into the woods is another. This is how I draw some sort of spiritual sustenance into a psyche bleached by contact with the hostile non-environment of concrete, greed, and the general rat-in-a-cage strangeness of city and suburban life.

Of course, being infected with modern culture, lately I've taken my music consumption levels too far, so this year one of my goals is to stick to a budget. So far, I've succeeded, but it is only February. My willpower will be tested.

As I mentioned in the last post, I spent much of the late eighties at Gilman St., aka the Gilman Street Project, in Berkeley. It was basically a youth club where like-minded individuals would regularly gather and experience wave after wave of punk and hardcore bands. Most of the bands that played regularly enough to almost be considered "house bands" were of the humorous variety. Once, the singer from an out of town band, Slapshot, complained that the crowd was like "Romper Room". He didn't get it. Punk is often viewed as being somewhat macho and edgy, so we tipped that perception on its head and acted like a bunch of sugar-addled little kids. Most of the time, anyway.

Here's a photo of the crowd at an Isocracy show, probably from 1987. Isocracy's schtick was to raid dumpsters before their performances, and then rain trash down on the heads of the audience. This was huge fun. We also sometimes had leap-frog pits, rode bigwheels, and in general subverted the public perception of what punk was supposed to be about. For us, it was about rebellion, fun, and served to help develop a social consciousness that I still retain today.

I'm the one with the backwards hat. I think veteran punk photographer Murray Bowles took this. I could be wrong though. Like the photo in the last post, I grabbed this photo from Facebook. This one was posted by my friend Devon, who was my friend back in the eighties, and is still my friend today.

Musical Eighties

Starting in 1983, I started going to a lot of metal shows in small venues, and about a year later, discovered punk. Currently, I thoroughly document my musical obsessions, but back then, I was just soaking it all in and throwing myself around in a never ending series of pits (I've always hated the word "mosh", used to describe this singular form of dancing - why is it that I'm always reluctant to use new words?). Some of my friends from that time regularly cough up detritus from the past on Facebook, which leads me to believe that they were a lot more organized that I was, or at least a lot more obsessed with the past.

I was going to write about something entirely different today, but my old friend Wayne, who was pretty much my constant companion in those days, pointed out my presence in the following photo, posted on Facebook by local guru Ron Quintana (editor of the infamous Metal Mania 'zine, among other things).

That's me in the upper left, wearing a D.I.Y. Exodus shirt and facing away from the camera. I think I silkscreened that in a high school art class, although I might have done it at home. I made a few shirts this way, and this was far from the best. I think the Celtic Frost and Acid shirts I made were much better. The Celtic Frost shirt is now part of a quilt I had made a year or two ago.

I'm not even sure what show this was. Our usual haunts were The Stone, Ruthie's Inn, The Farm, New Method, On Broadway, Mabuhay Gardens, and a few others. In the latter half of the eighties, Gilman St. eclipsed the other venues. I could write endlessly about those days, but I'll save that for another time and my other blog.

Let it suffice to say that these were my people during my formative years. In a lot of ways, they still are.

Your Freudian Slip Is Showing

And then there was the time at an elementary school assembly when the third grade teacher, Miss Campbell, mispronounced the name of the fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Schmidt.

Yes, like that.

Middle School Present and Past

Eva's ex-middle school is up at camp this week, with predictable results. For multiple reasons, middle school students always present more behavior problems than elementary school kids, and for some reason, the kids from Eva's old school are more prone to misbehavior than most. To add another layer of difficulty, we didn't have enough cabin leaders to cover the cabins, so three cabins were leaderless overnight.

One boy was reported to be sitting up in bed after bedtime, and not responding to requests to lie down. A boy nearby accused him of trying to scare people. His teacher and I pulled him out of the room and questioned him about it. He said that he felt "weird" and that he thought he might be possessed.

Okay then...

In the end, we decided that he was just feeling anxious about being away from home (he told us he feels that way every time he goes camping), and took him back to bed. That's when he discovered that he didn't have a sleeping bag or pillow. A boy nearby had an extra pillow, and another boy had an extra postage stamp-sized blanket. The teachers this week brought their own supply of extra blankets, so we added a bigger, warmer blanket to the bunk.

In the morning, the boy's sleeping bag turned up in the hands of one of my co-workers. I'm not sure where she found it. Maybe it was in the lost and found. Some kids just seem checked out of reality.

The other overnight issues were more pedestrian, and mostly involved people not shutting up and allowing their classmates to sleep.

This morning, since Scooby, who usually tells stories, is sick, I told the kids a story before breakfast. It was raining, and our usual rainy day spot is slated for demolition and inaccessible, so I told it inside the dining hall amidst the clattering of plates and silverware and tables were set up. It wasn't quite as distracting as I thought it was going to be.

Since we're on the subject of middle school, I guess I'll share a memory of when I was in middle school. The one that pops first into my mind is the time that our universally disliked vice principal, Mr. Boothe, had to put out a locker fire with fire extinguisher. I have no idea who started the fire, but it was grand entertainment watching our unhappy vice principal grimly applying the foam to the flaming textbooks and papers.

My train of thought has arrived at another memory involving Mr. Boothe. A friend and I were called into the office to talk to a couple of policemen who were investigating a nearby residential burglary. We were suspects because we had a paper route in the area (I can't remember now if it was my route or my friend's), and their line of questioning was pretty brainless. It consisted, in part, of showing us items of jewelry and asking if we'd seen them before, as if we'd actually say "yes" if we had. Of course, neither of us were guilty, so we honestly said that we hadn't. Mr. Boothe, jaded drone that he was, acted as if we'd already been tried and convicted, often admonishing us with statements like, "you had better tell the truth now!"

There seems to be a theme to my memories so far. I tended to get into minor trouble a lot, although for some reason school authorities often seemed to think I was a major criminal.

That said, I'm glad that I don't have to supervise a middle school like mine. By my adult standards, we were pretty out of control. At the time, we didn't think twice about how we behaved, and we got away with a lot. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol on campus, not to mention fighting. Perhaps some of those stories will appear here another time.

I have half a mind to drive by my old school, just to see what it looks like today. I'm not sure what the site is used for now.

Memory Month

The sky is blue, and I'm being attacked by a kitten as I try to type. Lately, I've been playing with a free app called Dreamscope, which turns phone photos into "works of art" by running them through various filters. Here's an alternate Brian.

I'm glad I'm not actually being attacked by a kitten who looks like this. That would be horrifying.

AS I mentioned in the previous post, each day this month I'm going to wind back the clock and share a memory. For the most part, it will be whatever memory pops into my head on the given day. Today, I'm remembering the first time I got sent to the principal's office at school. I was in the first grade. I remember waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and getting impatient that the guy in front of me, a redheaded boy named Doug, was taking too long to finish drinking. My solution to this problem was to bite him. We both got dragged to the principal's office. Doug was crying, and I seem to remember being somewhat unrepentant. The principal yelled at both of us for some reason, or that's how I remember anyway. He even mentioned rabies, as if rabies was commonly spread from human to human through bites. This made Doug cry harder.

Looking back on this now, I have to wonder what in the hell the principal was thinking. When a kid is crying because he has just been bitten by some asshole classmate at the drinking fountain, it's not a good idea to scare that kid into thinking that he might also now have rabies. That said, I don't think I broke the skin, so even if I had been foaming at the mouth, Doug would have been safe. I don't remember anything else about the principal, but based on this one memory, it's pretty obvious to me that he wasn't a very good one.

I just looked Doug up online. It seems he lives in Melbourne now. I wonder if he remembers this incident.

Photo Excursion

We spent a windy Sunday driving and walking around Mountain View, taking pictures of places we used to live. Jeanine was born in Mountain View, and I lived in two houses and two apartments there (not at the same time - that would be weird). I got the idea to photograph all of my old addresses after deciding that my writing challenge for February would be to share a random memory each day. I figured that having photographs to go along with some of the posts would be fun. Plus, I was curious to see if any of my previous dwellings looked any different. Of course, now that I've taken these pictures with the intention of writing about them, the memories I'll be sharing are no longer quite random. Also, they're most likely to be of interest to nobody but myself, but I'm writing this for me, not you, so too bad.

We wandered through the downtown area too, stopping in a book store and eating at the crepe place across the street. Downtown Mountain View has a bit of an edge over downtown Campbell (which is our nearest downtown area of any note) because it has two book stores instead of one.

The photo above was taken on the way back. The sky to the north was quite striking this evening.

Skate Party

Months after her last game of the season, Willow finally had her end-of-season soccer party, which included skating at Downtown Ice and receiving a couple of trophies (one for the season, and one for the tournament).

Now, she says her feet hurt, so she's sitting on the couch and watching bad TV while scrolling around on her iPod.

Incomplete Explanation

Sometimes, I get to work and discover abandoned notes written by kids who got caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing. Usually, the notes are apologies, but this one seems to be a mere explanation. Perhaps he was leading up to an apology, but never got a chance to get to that point. I have no idea why this was left unfinished.

Just another of life's little mysteries.

Divine Sunrise

I take too many photos of sunrises and sunsets, but in my defense, each one is different. I've always been drawn toward landscapes and skyscapes, and the evidence is in the photos I choose to share here. Very few of the photos I've posted this month (or last month) have people in them.

Last night, while I was reading Algernon Blackwood's "Pan's Garden" (the book that I pulled a bunch of pressed flowers and leaves from awhile back), I discovered that I'd missed one interesting thing:

It makes me wonder about the past owner(s) of this book. The spaces between the pages have proven to be a cornucopia of strangeness. Taking my cue from Jeanine's quick tracking down of the last quote I'd found wedged in the book, I did a quick online search for this one and discovered this site of quotes by an interesting historical personage known as Father Divine. The Wikipedia entry for Father Divine reveals that cult leader Jim Jones once claimed to be Divine's reincarnation, despite the fact that Jones was 34 years old when Divine died.

Music For Cats

As I was walking around camp last night, I was listening to Cat Power. Turning around suddenly, I discovered that our resident feral cat was following me. The only conclusion possible here is that he wanted to let me know he approved of my musical choice.

Or, he may have wanted me to feed him. Cats tend to think with their stomachs.

Other than that, the night was uneventful. A raccoon was hanging out near the walk-in freezers, and later,a mouse darted across the hub. The kids slept. In the morning, a string of planets was visible, laid out across the sky like some sort of cosmic beaded necklace.

Our new gate has been installed, but the finishing touch of an electronic entry system still remains undone. The old gate is still in place as well.

Corvid Points

Looking to the west this morning, I saw this:

This was my view to the east:

The kids this week are the low-maintenance type, so my night was easy. I walked a couple of miles around camp, and got a little farther in Algernon Blackwood's "Pan's Garden". Life is good.

Back On the Night Shift

This is the campfire currently burning down to ash and memories out in the middle of camp. The campers are in bed, the night is cold, and the moon commands the sky.

I wish I could have gotten a photo of the moonrise earlier. It was huge and orange, but partially veiled by dark clouds, making it look eaten away, like a hastily abandoned peach. The photo wouldn't have been as good as the real thing anyway.

Simply Walking

Today's photo was taken during a walk through the neighborhood. These days, Jeanine can't stray too far from home because she needs to stay close by to help her mom, which means that if we want to go on a walk together, it has to be pretty local. No hiking in the hills for us for the time being, at least not together.