Work to Bike, Bike to Live, Live to Eat, and Eat at Work

A few things that happened before I went to Seattle:

I went back and edited my online review of Andrew Woodside Carter, the furniture guy. A couple of the things I’d written were nagging at me, so I took them out, so I wouldn’t have to worry about AWC coming to punch me out when he sees it. I’ve found a place where I may take the chair to be refinished, but the damage is bothering me much less now that it’s been that way for many weeks.

In other news, I received an email entitled, "Work to Eat, Eat to Live, Live to Bike, Bike to Work," which is a good slogan, almost as good as mine.

Before, after or about the same time, the guitar and I parted company. I was enjoying it, but I don’t miss it. I decided to stop when I got, for the second time, a savage pain in my left hand and wrist. It lasted for a week or ten days and was so bad one day I couldn’t ride my bike and had to take BART to work.

I’m sure that I could have found some way to play without pain, which probably would have required playing for five minutes and then taking a ten-minute break; i.e., it would have been a big pain in and of itself, and no doubt I would have ended up overdoing it at times and ended up in agony again, so I think I’ll just continue to be a listener rather than a player when it comes to the guitar.

Sharing the blessings of guitar music, I sent my mother an email entitled “MUYA,” apprising her that I was going to tell Amazon to send her the new Metallica CD, Death Magnetic, which I like very, very much.

She wrote back, “Wow, that's fabulous. Did you share the news with [your father]? No, he's not cc'd. Thank you in advance.”

I think this was a hint that my father might be not entirely pleased, or might even be dismayed, to find he’d become, through no fault of his own, co-owner of a Metallica CD. I sent my mother the Rolling Stone review of the CD so she could get in the mood before hearing it.

After she read the review, she asked, “What means ‘progged out?’”

Once again, I was glad I’d gotten a degree in pop music, rather than a lightweight subject such as science, math or engineering, so that I was able to explain that was no doubt a reference to progressive rock, or prog rock—think Pink Floyd, Yes, or King Crimson. My mother had a King Crimson album when I was a child. The cover art was very colorful.

In mid-October I went to see Carol Joy in Novato. I missed the bus because just as I got to the Golden Gate Transit stop, they closed the whole street because of an event at City Hall, so Carol Joy told me just to get to the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge and she’d pick me up there. She estimated it would take 15 minutes to cross the bridge.

I’ve never walked across the bridge before, though I’ve cycled over it many times. It takes an hour, for the record, but it was great. I saw the San Francisco Fire Department’s fire boat, the Phoenix, spraying big jets of water.

Carol Joy and I had Thai Food for lunch, then saw a couple of movies, including Blindness, which I thought was really good. It reminded me of It’s a Wonderful Life, in that it vividly brings home how precious the simplest things are: to have friends. To feel the rain on your face.

Late that evening, Carol Joy taught me a card game she used to play with her friends when she was a kid, which they called Sneaky Pete. We played until the early part of the wee hours, then slept, then played again, then had breakfast in Novato, then played again, and then I came home on the bus. Another perfect weekend with Carol Joy.

Some evening along in there, I was parking my bike at El Toro when along came a homeless person with a horrible wound on his foot oozing gooey fresh blood. This reminded me of a similar sight nearly 10 years ago downtown. I stopped and talked to that guy, whose name was Jeffrey and whose foot was covered with fresh blood.

He told me how he’d come to the city to be a chef and had met with bad luck. He said he was going to be moving back to his parents’ place soon, and he gave me their phone number. He told me how his parents missed him and were waiting for him to come back.

When we parted, after I gave him a bit of money, I also spontaneously gave him a rather long hug, probably the first and last time I will hug a homeless person, particularly one that filthy.

When I called the number he’d given me, an angry-sounding man said he’d never heard of a Jeffrey. Very sad.

So here was another fellow with a horrible bleeding foot. I offered to buy him a burrito and he gave me a very particular order: chicken, cheese, no rice or beans. He declined a soda, saying he was diabetic and had to be careful about his health.

When I came out with our burritos, he told me his name: Jeffrey. He was happy to have the burrito and reached to give me a hug, oddly enough, but I backed away and said I’d prefer he didn’t hug me. I felt kind of bad about it, but felt I was within my rights (especially since sometimes I don’t even like perfectly clean non-homeless people to hug me). He didn't seem offended.

Several days later, when I was locking up my bike at El Toro again, there was the same fellow, with the exact same wound, and I now am thinking there must be some way to approximate a ghastly wound like that even with limited means. Jeffrey didn’t say anything to me this time, but while I was standing there, a young couple rushed over, exclaiming over his foot.

So is Jeffrey of 2008 with a bloody foot the same person as Jeffrey of 2000 with a bloody foot?

Normally I do not use links here because I find them a bit dreary, but I will make an exception for this.

I LOVE this woman! She didn’t just say, “I think I’ll dress up like a cow,” nor did she say, “Reckon I’ll go chase children for a bit and then knock off,” nor was her vision for the day limited to peeing on her neighbor’s porch. Her expression is a bit inscrutable here, but it hints to me that her plans were even bigger than we know, and that she would have carried them out if she hadn’t been interrupted. I really like the cut of her jib.