notes taken over a weekend

Dinner with R and O on Friday in city. Blind restaurant. Dining in complete darkness. Ate food with hands. Dropped pants just to make a point. Communicated by dictating. My hand is reaching toward the bread. I'm handing you this glass. Poured wine by ear. Made predictions for 2010.

Morning jog with R and O. Talked about our ideal partners. We listed the things people always list. Shared interests (R needs outdoorsy), humor (can't take self too seriously, can't be pissy about camping in the rain), intellectual compatibility. "At this point, I'll settle for living and breathing," I said afterward, only because it is something the clown always says. We jogged the loop of the Baylands slowly. It was very hot. There were many unhappy dogs. Face turned red all over.

Afterward biked to the train and took it up to the city. I wanted to go to the MOMA to look at different things. I wrote in my journal on the train, and then I read a few pages of A Gathering of Old Men, but wasn't captivated. MOMA was good; biking there was good. To remember: curatorial description of Andy Warhol screens of skulls as "portraits without the flesh?" LMAO. Old man chuckling and rhythmically thrusting pelvis in the dark, at his lonely end of the bench in screening of Bruce Connor's Ray composed of images of naked writhing women set to Ray Charles song. Diane (Dee-ANNE) Arbus photos...seen them before, but they're old friends good for a visit. One nude shot of herself in bedroom mirror she sent to her husband. Twins from Roselle look weirdly like KF. Portraits could be gothic mockery; in college I thought they were beautiful, ruinous, and indifferent; now I think that she must have made these people believe she cared about them but must also have known that to document them as they were would be to betray them. I noticed how direct the titles were. Ewen Gibbs' fine line drawings (finer than pointillist) of San Francisco city scenes - WOW. Exhibit of photography of California. A state photographed since its inception; photography invented ten years before Gold Rush. Staged photography used to counteract San Francisco's deserved reputation as lawless land of unwashed testicles. Early photos show lumberjacks with axes in front of 63-foot circumference redwood sections. This one felled to be a single-piece dinner table for a party of forty in Europe; this one to serve no apparent purpose other than making grinning men feel triumphant. Later photos of unassimilated Chinese grocers selling yams. Chinatown. Handpainted signs with terrible calligraphy. Some description of the "exotic pageant of America," a cliche but for the first time I thought about the reference, and imagined a slow-moving parade of weirdos of all different skin tones, heights, and nose shapes. Liked photographs that Ed Ruscha took of giant empty parking lots in Los Angeles; lines looked like leaves. Walked through Yerba Buena on way back to Caltrain and read about the carousel that had escaped 100 years of fire, earthquake, and destruction and made it from the heavy hands of the German craftsman to the sticky fingers of two boys shouting "I want the camel! I want the camel!"

Took train home listening to C grouse about seven hour Saturday CLE and then me making hurtful uninformed declarative statements to S. Biked back feeling bad, went to dinner with family.

Sweet Tomatoes salad buffet restaurant, Santa Clara. Across the street from Costco. Completely filled, even the plastic-penned outdoor seating area. 100% of patron population was multigenerational East Asian and South Asian families, and large white people. 90% former, 10% latter. Servers Mexican. Tomato-print carpet. Bedlam in salad line, broken windows theory, tuna tarragon and Asian Chicken Salad and shredded beets spilling out from serving bowl onto tray onto floor. Crusts of bread missing single bites left on trays to be cleared. Unskilled balloonist making swords and dogs for tips but popping every other balloon, startling patrons. Zero to fourteen year-old children everywhere. Dad looking so wistfully at young Chinese families I thought the teeth were going to be wisted right out of his beatific head. Remind R and A to hurry up and reproduce. Shuttling soups back to Grandma, who sat next to her cane. Uncle Five making fun of Dad for (1) carefully composing salad, then deliberately upending bowl of steaming New England clam chowder on top in lieu of dressing; (2) carefully spreading vanilla soft serve on pumpernickel bread and urging us to try the same; and (3) shouting nervous admonitions re: not getting into car wrecks from the bitch seat of the car. Mom using hand sanitizer before filling salad plate, then again after filling salad plate. Me rolling up four cupcakes and a fistful of sunflower seeds into a napkin destined for the ziploc in Mom's purse. Helping Grandma to car. Getting home. Getting on phone. Feeling bad, feeling stupid. Slept like dead dogs under dead logs.

Run at Crystal Springs cross country trail. Fifteen degrees colder than Palo Alto, windy, foggy. View of San Carlos (?) on east, reservoir, hills, and 280 at west. Mud splatters everywhere, inside shoes. Few people. Enough elevation that I had to think about running while I did it, self-berating for motivation. "Sheep Camp Trail" that started promising but was merely a straight half mile of gravel downhill to a turn-off from 280. Drove back to sunny Palo Alto slowing on highway to look at absurdly picturesque gathering of oblivious cattle sunning on bright green grassy hillsides with no structures but highway and gigantic steel satellite dish in sight; thought of driving up 280 holding S's thigh and telling her that I resented these particular cows for their simple happiness. Sat outside Wahoo Fish Tacos with bag of dimes and nickels growing warmer in my hand and naked thighs cooling to subzero temperatures while attempting by telephone to restore S's confidence in her fickle lover. Work on Sunday afternoon: a metaphorical fire, a panic, fire squad runs in circles with hands waving overhead, fire miraculously dies. Home, work, phone, journal.