Neptune Landing

      Typical Vermont Streetscape   Mauricio at Sunset       Christmas came early this year in the form of a snowstorm that socked central New England the day before Thanksgiving. We had planned, months earlier, to visit Vermont on our annual trip to Boston in order to reunite with a San Francisco escapee, our German friend, Katharina. She had moved to the Green Mountains last summer with her Dutch husband, Glen, to live on thirty acres of virginal pine forest they had purchased decades ago. The couple had tired of the city. In many ways, Mauricio and I are always ready to follow suit, as we seem to eternally live out the fable of "The Princess and the Pea," where no amount of Californian comfort is quite cozy enough. I'm also reminded, when I hear myself drivel onward about travel and restlessness and home, of the joke of the Irish boomerang. Punchline: "It doesn't come back - it just sings songs about how badly it wants to."  Snow Scene 1, phot

      Friends and allies abound everywhere in shamanic living but in the fall harvest season their invitation to play is all the more pressing. In San Francisco, the seasons are quite muted to the in-your-face flashiness of the New England turn-of-clock. Here you feel a noticeable sensation of dryness (as if we needed more of that with our historic drought), a lifting of the fog and a slanting of the light. Days are warmer but nights feel cooler. The leaves in coastal California may stay about 95% evergreen but it's hard to ignore these other manifestations.       With the change in seasons, we've been scoring some real gems in our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box like sweet potatoes, squash gourds, chicory and swiss chard. Occasionally our farmers will pack fresh basil and fennel. For reliable herbal assistance, though, it's best to visit Rainbow Grocery , a cooperative market between the Mission and Soma neighborhoods. Rainbow does not just stock organic herbs a

      Harvest season is fast approaching and that gives me license to talk about food and drink for the next several posts. Gastronomy is our go-to conversational topic in the Bay Area just like baseball is in Boston. In terms of personal diets, the San Franciscans I've met generally fall into two camps. The first smaller camp is the one where members dare not touch certain foods or edible constituents, i.e. maintaining diets that are sugar-free, vegan, meat-and-eggs-free or free from packaging. The second camp is much larger and more celebratory. These happy campers declare at every opportunity how foods at certain restaurants are "So Good!" and need to be lauded, or, at the very least, deliberated.       No show captures the "So Good!" foodie zeitgeist than Check, Please! Bay Area . We watch it on domestic Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. on Channel 9, KQED, the Bay Area's PBS station. The premise: three guests who are local diners (not professional food critic

      More than 3 months have passed since I first started to track the spirit of Whale and much goodness and an ocean's full of serendipity have drifted my way. Around the time of our Mendocino trip, I had picked up a copy of dime-store copy of Moby Dick and dove into the text with a seaman's wanderlust. This avidity lasted just a few weeks (it has since been gathering dust under my bed since early May). Not to worry, methinks, it's only been in print for 162 years so it isn't going anywhere. Whale himself, however, is a highly mobile spirit, one who crosses all cultures and oceans to help guide our dreams and shape our narratives.  New Bedford was a happening place in the mid-18th century.       In early April, I went back to Boston to visit family and felt pulled to visit New Bedford, Massachusetts. The only thing I knew about "Nu'Beffa" is that it was a depressed old fishing port with a high Portuguese-speaking population. And of course, it was w

      I'm wading through another big wave of depression that visits my life periodically. This is made no easier by the fact that the summer solstice is San Francisco's unofficial first day of winter; we may as well exist in the Southern Hemisphere. The cold windy fog is not what I find disagreeable, however, but that feeling of elemental otherness, how we're not in sync with the rest of the country or the rest of the world. Mild depression mirrors this contrarian stance. It deceives you into thinking that you are all alone on this spinning hunk of rock or that the rest of humanity has something good cooking and you're prohibited from entering the kitchen.       Part of this is having to hustle so much in this city and satisfy the needs of the base - or root -chakra (the one that has to do for survival). This is understandable to a certain degree but even though I feel like I'm not hurting financially (even thriving in some respects), I've been so caught up

      It's been a month since I last posted and for that I apologize. The pace of my life has picked up considerably in many areas. April was also a month of travel, ill health and astrological angst. Things happen so fast now; I don't whether it means I'm living a full life in rapid San Francisco or if all of our countrymen are being thrashed about on this wild ride in the spring of 2014 in the U.S.A. or at least feeling like they are being thrashed about.         A week ago, I picked up a fascinating page-turner at Aardvark Books called Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now   (New York: Penguin, 2013) by Douglas Rushkoff. It's about the collapse of narrative since the year 2000 and how art, literature, media and politics has moved far away from personality and emotions and biography to a more austere, scientific take on how systems work. It's a rather heady read. For instance, Rushkoff delves into explanations for pop-culture t.v. series like the wild

During my most recent trip to Boston I was impressed by a sense of unity and purpose that pervades the city from a micro to a macro level. Sure, it's always been there, as part of a missionary zeal from the city's Puritan DNA, but it's become even more salient as the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings fast approaches. More recently, the city was again brought together when a Back Bay fire killed two Boston firefighters - one a family man and another a "Big Brother" who volunteered regularly at Shriners Hospital for Children, a center for pediatric burn care. In fact, when my mother picked me up from Logan last week, we got to witness hordes of firemen from all over the world walking around South Boston, getting ready to attend one of the funerals. It was well worth the wait in traffic to witness this culture of honor. Additionally, as a reporter in the city, I got to know some of the movers and shakers in the social justice realm, warriors i

      Mendocino County lies three hours north of San Francisco on a rocky, moody coastline reminiscent of The Vacation State. In fact, the village of Mendocino (population 894) was settled by "Mainiacs" and other New Englanders who imported their logging skills to this small village and other Northern California towns. Looking at the architecture, it's hard to shake the image of Maine from your perception. The town is dotted with cute, clapboard homes in the mini-Victorian style.       Murder, She Wrote , that quintessential television series which starred Angela Lansbury and ran for 12 seasons, was filmed in the village of Mendocino but "took place" in the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove. I tried to explain the premise of the series to Mauricio, who grew up in Chile. "Think of an even more eloquent Isobel from Downton Abbey tying together all the conspirators at the tail-end of a murder mystery each week and you have Murder, She Wrote, "I expl