Here I Sit
The view from the windows at the desk is mostly of these three buildings, names unknown to me, and of a hotel farther in the background to the right which adds a bit of movement to the scene with four external elevators that shuttle up and down its side, little glowing pods in the fog of the evening.
This, hopefully, will be my city.
The idea to relocate to San Francisco occurred to me within hours of our arrival. I'm not sure exactly when...probably not during the wine tasting party that we attended on Sunday night at the house of the parents of a friend of Doug's. That event's greatest entertainment was the sheer oddness of being in pristine rooms, white-walled, filled with objects d'art and well-off people who I didn't know, with not a tree or pile of pine needles to be found anywhere and three months' worth of beard and sun on my face. Further entertainment could be had by watching Tom and Rich try to make sense of the idea of sipping from many different bottles of wine and then filling out little cards with their opinions of the anonymously-wrapped vintages. Tom's method was to find one he liked and have a big honking glass of it, then find another he liked and repeat the process. Rich's was to drink the beer he'd brought along. Mine was to drink water and enjoy the novelty of remaining sober at a social gathering.
There is something here, and Doug probably put it best: many of the people who are here just want to be here, and have stories similar in nature to my own. That is, somewhere along the way they've made a decision to try for the storied Fresh Start, and when they arrived in this place, it seemed to welcome their intentions. I've got more checking to do into the practicalities of it all, but so far the job prospects (via Dice and elsewhere) look good, and - perhaps more importantly - I've got a sensation of moving gently along my life's currents that has been missing for quite some time.
Actually getting here took some doing. On Friday morning, as we pedaled out of Bodega Dunes State Park, I had to stop and replace my rear derailleur cable, which had become frayed at the shifter to the point of unusability. Because I am a mechanical genius, I routed the cable housing so that it passed between the upper and lower portions of the chain under the seat, which resulted in the housing getting chewed into a ragged mess by the idler wheel in the parking lot of the grocery store in Bodega Bay. Fortunately, a fellow in an RV who was planning on re-cabling his mountain bike was able to give me the old housing right off his bike, and Douglas from the Candy and Kites store across the street also showed up with a length of housing from his garage, in addition to a pound of taffy for the three of us. I spliced two pieces of cable housing together, and braced the joint with small lengths of the old housing, wrapped up in a bolus of electrical tape. By the time we got that all sorted out, it was after two PM, and we ended up riding until seven in the evening, arriving at our RV park destination just as the sun disappeared behind the veil of thick clouds to the west.
The next day, Saturday, we decided to ride just eight miles to Samuel P. Taylor State Park, because a) our original destination turned out to be a "walk-in" campsite on top of a whacking great mountain and b) we needed a bit of a rest day, as we'd been pushing hard since Monday. At the park, we found some decent places to pitch our tents in the redwoods. We also found Johnny, who showed up after we'd been there for a couple of hours, along with a couple of other cycling characters who together created a trifecta of the weird that sent the three of us to our tents early. One of them was an enormously fat man with a somewhat disturbing affect who, despite claims of "working locally," turned out to be a homeless fellow who stayed the two-night limit at the hiker-biker sites in the state parks around the San Rafael area. He cooked up a couple of pounds of ground chuck as burgers over a fire made from brush, pine needles, and the styrofoam the meat was packaged in, then liberally applied chunks from a wobbly oil-sweating block of cheese to them. He slept on one of the picnic tables and snored like a herd of oxen. The third fellow was in his fifties, seemed to have a speech impediment of some kind, smoked a tobacco pipe, and, apropos of nothing in particular, made sure we all knew that he was thinking about buying a house in Bulgaria.
Johnny was more subdued than he'd been the last two times we saw him. This may have had something to do with our near-total lack of response to anything he said. We didn't want to encourage him, lest he park himself at our table, roll up fat stinky joints, and annoy us by being his usual pseudo-raconteurish self.
We fled the park before ten the next morning, finally crossing the Golden Gate around three or so. There was some group dynamic friction after we'd crossed and got a bit turned around on the other side of the bridge...I'd been fairly grumpy and short-tempered over the previous three days, snappish, and Tom finally got pissed off enough at me to object. He was right about it...I know I can get impatient with people, so I apologized, and by the time we'd arrived at the hotel, met Doug, showered, and gotten ourselves to a local mart for some snacky foods, all was well. Ups and downs of the group, I suppose. But I also must admit that I'd been sharing some of Tom's smoky things with him, not too much, but consistently enough, I think, to affect my overall mood in the usual negative fashion. It's a mistake I won't be repeating...it seems that I really can't get away with anything like that. It's a shame there isn't a safe smoky alternative to weed, so that I can have the cannabis equivalent of 7-Up or tonic in social situations.
This evening we attended a baseball game, where the Oakland Athletics beat the Boston Red Sox 2 to 1. Tomorrow's activities are as yet unplanned, but on Friday we'll be taking a night tour of Alcatraz.
Now, it's time for me to head bedways, maybe for a bit of reading, while the ringing of cable car bells filters through the windows.
