Information Blues.

Instead of playing pinball as is my Tuesday lunch norm I’ve taken to sneaking to the Berkeley Pvblic Library for a read. I sit in the magazine room under the tall vaulted deco skylight scanning ZYZZYVA. I feel like a proletarian hummingbird sipping life redeeming fiction from a tall wooden chair.

The ceiling is southwestern deco, oxidized copper and peach. The magazine room at midday is full of freaks: the intellectually disabled rocking vigorously while listening to tapes, a psychotic white powdered black geisha, a class full of kids in Michael Jordan jerseys. It’s a splendid room piled with proto-people and human wreckage. I wish the library was open later; I’d love to be there at 10pm engaged in a psychedelic reading experience. Sitting with a room full of strange readers under a high ceiling is almost like prayer: you can feel the concentration floating.

On the way back to work there was a man crouched in the gutter bending coat hangers into prehistoric bird sculptures. Big brass ostrich. Nickel wire emu. It seemed like a strange place to work.

I don’t think I’ll ever grow tired of seeing friends play rock and roll. I saw Bella Vista tonight and it was such a fun thing, a raucous ball of energy. You can tell it’s a good show when your thoughts drift out of your forehead and you’re up near the ceiling, drawn up to the stage and out of your body, into the same third person that the band inhabits.

I wasn’t necessarily going to ride my bike today. My shoulder has been clenched up in a knot; it happened after work when I hopped on my fixed gear. The past fews days have felt like I had a sea urchin living underneath the blade. Furthermore, the A’s were playing on TV at work, right at 5pm when I might mindlessly ooze from desk to couch…

Well fortunately the A’s looked shaky playing in the Terrordrome that is called “Ameriquest Field” of Arlington, Texas. And the computer stoners were threatening to take over the leisure room with their stupid new homemade, padded poker table. So I figured fate was instructing me to go ride, to buck off ambivalence and hit the hills.

I was climbing Butters Canyon when it started to get really good. Butters is a shady, verdant watershed. There are forest cave sections, covered in perfumed bays, snaking up the canyon in mellow single lane switchbacks. But geez, I hadn’t ridden my road bike in a while. I’ve been mountain biking, which involves fooling around, hotdogging, doing jumps; it’s half wild arcade game, half workout. When I get back on the road after even a week away it feels a bit like a torture device, a cruelly efficient machine designed to test my resolve at its fountainhead. The thing runs on will, and if you let it, it will drain you.

But you know what, we’re all much stronger than we think! So I powered upwards, rode the crest of Oakland into Berkeley, ridged up to Grizzly, and in doing so burned through my first, second and third winds. I was moulting away laziness by way of exhaustion. In the parking lot at the Steam Trains I sucked down a ration of gu kicked down by dmo the racing fiend (he’s sponspored by Clif, after all) and realized it contained “Belgian Chocolate” and tasted like melted confection. Hmm.

Riding the spine of the hills feels so lucky. I grew ecstatic to see the wide expanse of the bay and bridges spread out in late afternoon light. Lake Merritt looked like a wading pool, a pretty little postage stamp.

I thought about going home by Sheperd Canyon but figured what the heck, I just ate some liquified chocolate, I can make it up one more rise. It was then that I happily stomped through my fourth wind, at the sprint point near Chabot Space & Science. When I rounded the open corner coming out of the redwoods I felt a lightning bolt of satisfaction; I couldn’t help but yell a little, say a few yeahs. I wanted to do a wheelie at 30mph. A big bunch of happiness chemicals in my head had popped and I felt high.

What could I do next? I carmelized onions for a fake rib sandwich, ate a bowl of arugula, then slipped into the bathtub with my Rolling Stones collection playing on shuffle. That’s when I ate a bowl of ice cream, followed by fine bourbon. Sure enough I feel half satisfied, and that feels pretty good.

Wow, it’s going on three weeks since I fed my journal. Things have been moving quickly. But it’s so common to complain about lack of time, I feel that I have no right; I cannot overwhelm this cliche with any originality to make it mine. Furthermore the other day I also took away my right to claim I’m not writing as much fiction as I’d like to. That’s so boring. Nobody wants to hear that, including me.

I spent the weekend playing cultural translator for some good old San Diegan high school friends. I walked around feeling like c3po, interpreting Oakland and its surrounds, trying to break down its brilliance and bleakness into palatable fragments. My empathy swelled, pulled me out of body; I led them through my life like it was a museum tour while they jived and ribbed me, as good old high school friends should.

I took them to an A’s game where I attempted to explain the nuance and the drama, what makes the A’s a different kind of team. What I really succeeded in doing was pissing off a regal old black lady sitting behind us (she looked like Big Mama Thorton) by throwing debris in her daughter’s XL Sprite. I was telling Jeremy I try to place my peanut shells in a trash bag I bring along, to potentially increase my galactic tally through saving a stranger from some pointless work. He responded by flinging his shells at me, flagrantly far from the bag, so I fought back. I bounced a shell off his face where it ricocheted into the girl’s soda. This was immediately brought to our attention, causing me to pay a short visit to concessions for a new lemon lime.

We also rode my quiver of bicycles around the Lake, ate spicy pan fried Thai noodles, wet thigh sized buritos, watched some ships come into port and saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the eight story tall imax screen in San Francisco.

And I attempted to explain myself, perpetually, tried to explain where I am. Because they were tourists, visiting my landscape, and they were interested to know, and I hate more than anything to be misunderstood.