Just the Beginning

Friday after work I went to see my acupuncturist. I told him that Thelonious is on Prednisone and expected him to say, “That’s terrible stuff,” but after I added that I wasn’t sure it was going to do more than suppress symptoms, he said, “Comfort.” As for me, I told him I couldn’t think of any more symptoms and that I was there for general health and well-being. We chatted about earthquakes and drag racing (plus he put needles in me).

I came home afterwards, turned on my PC, and snatched up Steve Hagen’s book. I read the instructions for seeing the cow, and I saw the cow, but even then it wasn’t like a bolt of lightning. The next couple of times I looked at the picture, I still had to kind of work at it.

This morning I got up early and did a couple of little projects and then went over to the East Bay to shop for fabric for baggy pants. It’s been hard finding anything good in recent years, even at Britex (and if you do find anything at Britex, it’s really expensive). A coworker recommended Poppy in Berkeley, so I took BART over there.

At the stop before mine, a woman of about 55 with long grey hair, neatly dressed, got up to leave the train and as she passed me, she told me that I wasn’t making anyone laugh and that I was arrogant and obnoxious. Getting angrier and angrier, she spat that I was a stupid fool and that that was “just the beginning.”

I have many judgments about the people I see. I might think, “Good, get off the bus and take that boombox with you,” but I won’t voice a criticism to a stranger unless I am positive that, by any standards, the stranger has done something egregious that threatens me personally. Even then, I don’t call the person names (though I did once threaten to kill someone who gave every sign she was about to hit me with her car deliberately).

So this person must have felt I had so obviously transgressed that a scolding was necessary, and since I was pretty much just sitting there reading my New Yorker, I concluded that she was mentally ill, though her appearance (before she opened her mouth) didn’t hint at it.

I like to read the New Yorker’s long pieces of reportage, but my memory is such a sieve that one paragraph after I read a person’s name, I completely forget it, and so never have any idea who anyone is who is being discussed. I read the pieces anyway, assuming some stray fact or other will probably be retained, but it’s like wandering in a dreamscape, so I have just started circling all names when I first encounter them and that is helping tremendously. It helps me remember the name to begin with, and if all else fails, I can easily go back and see who the person was.

I walked from the BART station to Poppy and found a disappointingly small collection of cotton prints. Many of them were charming, but too big. I told a worker there that I was interested in small prints and she suggested Stonemountain and Daughter Fine Fabrics (yeah, that’s in Berkeley), which specializes in cloth for quilting. I was pretty sure I had been there before and found nothing, but since I was already in that general area, it seemed like it couldn’t hurt to go by there again.

I actually had not been there before and they have a vast collection of small prints. Nothing I actually completely loved, but I’m a bit desperate at this point, so I bought six pieces of cloth that I think will be good enough. It cost probably half what I would have spent at Britex, or less. One piece of cloth has large goldfish on it (not at all a small print). That’s going to make an eye-catching pair of pants.

I had lunch at a Thai restaurant and came home and took a short nap. I woke up to find Thelonious sitting right near me on the bed, looking at me. She doesn’t like sustained eye contact, so after I’d looked back at her for a moment or two, she looked away and affected to have spotted something very interesting over her left shoulder and then over her right shoulder. Then she stood up and hopped off the bed. I put my head back down and closed my eyes. The next time I opened my eyes, she was sitting in the same spot, looking at me.

I was going to take the bus downtown, but it got to be 13 minutes before I was supposed to be there with no sign of the 26 Valencia, so I took a cab instead and met Lisa and David at Ananda Fuara for dinner. Afterwards, we went to the latest Last Planet Theatre production, of Anthony Neilson’s The Censor, which I thought was incredible and the best Last Planet production I’ve seen.

After the play, I was sitting in the Civic Center Muni station when a man backed up to me and lifted his shirt, revealing a fresh abrasion and bruise on his back. He asked how bad it was. He said he had been mugged by several people upstairs who had taken a chain his father had given him more than 30 years ago. I told him he wasn’t bleeding and that I was sorry to hear about his father’s chain. I was sort of glad when he got on the next train, which wasn’t my train.