Neptune Landing

      A San Francisco old-timer recently told me that the transients seek to consume this city while the tried-and-true seek to build it. Consumption has become the American past-time in this most American of cities but we've also been on a building spree (as evidenced by the slanted spines of cranes along Market Street). Richard Florida, the new urbanist, would pat us on the back as a premier lifestyle city that is making space for the depressing concept of  twitter apartments while nabbing the title of happiest city in America . But, surely, there's more to this place than laughter on the street and hunger in the fog.        Casting the world into producers and consumers has always seemed an impoverished division to me. Deep down, in my writer's vanity, I've subscribed to a third class of humans: that of connectors/interpreters. Right: Patio Garden         Gardening has...

     The hardest part of last week for me was feeling the existential angst of my home city and feeling like I had very few people to turn to in my adopted one. I felt heavily what Boston was suffering but only from afar. The nerves of the whole city were shot I'm sure (mine surely were) and yet we were so blessed to have a medical team placed so near the finish line. Thank God for our bevy of world-class hospitals and the particular can-do-spirit of everybody in Boston, Massachusetts on our very own Patriots' Day. It's a small but mighty city that left no nook and cranny uninspected.      I admittedly became a little unhinged with guilt and monomania. Housesitting in Twin Peaks starting on Monday afternoon, I became glued to the cable channels (a novelty for me) and clung to one of my chocolate labs for comfort as the news spilled out over five days. Many men in my family work for law enforcement or security. Heck, I...

     Mauricio constantly marvels at the lexical depth of the English language. It seems we have a word for everything while Hispanics use meandering oxygen on describing the English equivalent. Three examples are h eel as the end piece of a loaf of bread, serendipity as the joy evoked from the happy accident and the utilitarian verb outfit , to provide one with the necessary equipment. English, it seems, is a very rich language without the phoenetic beauty while Spanish is a very beautiful language without the linguistic richness.      In my new goal of learning Spanish, Italian and Irish, I've started to first practice Spanish as it is the lowest-hanging-fruit (a beautiful English phrase that has no Spanish equivalent, fyi). But it seemed like Spanish always seemed deficient in the vocabulary department. This morning, however, Mauricio and I started rapping about time and schedules. He described the gem trasnoch...

       Let's not kid ourselves. When people hear the word California, they imagine what Southern California offers with neat lines of solo palm trees (whom John Updike once described as "isolate, like psychopaths"), action movies, celebrities behaving badly and rollerblading, lots of rollerblading. Most Bay Areans recoil at the slightest mention of the second-largest city in the U.S. and fall over themselves in worshipping the largest (but that's another blogpost). It's a mixed case of good old-fashioned jealousy and a struggle for water rights. But for me ...        I like L.A.        Or I should say I like L.A. in small doses. Earlier in March, Mauricio and I drove down the coast to spend a few nights in a hippie cottage (named "StoryBook") in Topanga Canyon, a forested enclave fifteen minutes outside of Santa Monica where you couldn't hear a moving car if you tried. Over three days, we rented bikes ...