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just another crazy in Berkeley
Wednesday, December 13 2017
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Last night the original plan had been for our trollish housesitter to sleep in our bed (with its clean sheets, etc.) while Gretchen and I would spend the night before our trip to Northern California in one of the basement bedrooms. But it was so cold down there that Gretchen decided to sleep on the couch in the teevee room, while I decided to sleep with Clarence the Cat (and eventually Ramona the Dog) on the couch in front of a roaring fire in the living room. That all worked great until this morning, when Clarence's presence kept me from rolling over. By then, Charles the Cat was perched on top of me and Oscar was purring like a lawnmower from atop the couch's backrest. I finally got so fed up with this arrangement that I reloacted to the bed in the master guestroom in the basement. It was could down there, but under the blankets, I was soon comfy and cozy. That room had been closed for weeks to keep out the rogue pissers and poopers, but last night when it had been briefly open, Celeste the Cat had plopped herself on the bed and made it home. Cats like new real estate, especially when it is familiar and they've been banned from accessing it for a time. So this morning when Celeste heard me go into the master guestroom, she wanted to come in and join me. But I ignored her plaintive meows outside the door.
I never actually fell asleep down there, and when I heard human voices and movements upstairs, I got up and joined the morning activities. By then it was a little after 8:00am.
Our trollish housesitter had brought us bagels from some urbanized place with bagel expertise somewhere between New York City and here. She's Jewish and knew enough not to get, say, blueberry bagels. But the caraway seeds on Gretchen's everything bagel soon had us swapping hers for mine so she could eat one without a flavor she despises (caraway is not a good flavor in the bagel context, but it was less offensive for me than it was for her). A couple times the trollish housesitter tried to engage me in conversation, but every time there was an awkward, nerdy inadvertent hostility to her engagement that made it impossible for me not to relate in kind. It was good to get out of there and on the road for the Newark Airport (less than two hours away).
In the Newark Airport, Gretchen tried to check us in at a machine, but an orange screen came up when Gretchen said she would not be checking any luggage. The concern persisted that there was no way anyone could travel in the basic economy service tier without needing to check luggage. But when we eventually found a human (which was needed to clear the "they think they can board without checking luggage" error code on the machine), they took one look at our tiny backpacks and cleared us for takeoff. To Gretchen's surprise, my massive copper pipe menorah had no trouble getting through security. "They probably see menorahs all day long," I said.
It seemed our flight had been delayed and we had time for almond milk capacinos (which Gretchen said we never paid for). But after fucking around for awhile after that, when we wandered over to our gate, we found our plane was mostly already boarded and was no longer delayed. Does that actually happen? We were among the last three people aboard the plane. Happily, because the flight wasn't full, the guy in our three-seat side of the aisle could find a better seat. As a bonus, I found that my lightly-packed backpack did indeed fit under the seat in front of me. It doesn't seem as if basic economy is a problem for people who travel the way Gretchen and I do.
I spent some time experimenting with a calendar javascript library. Regular expressions look like gibberish to me, and without the internet to help me make sense of one, I relied on trial and error, feeding data into it and seeing what it would do while drinking bloody mary mix with gin from my smuggled booze supply. At some point I discovered that there was a 120 volt outlet available at my seat. Laptop batteries are becoming less important with every passing day!
I had a window seat and the flight to San Francisco unfolded entirely in the daylight, with few clouds to block the view of the ground. Initially there were clouds, but when they thinned out and vanished, they revealed a snow-covered the eastern midwest. Maps weren't loaded on my phone for some reason, so I could only get my coordinates to research later when we flew over interesting things. At 39.5344N, 94.84961W, I saw a large river cutting a flat swath much wider than itself through a region of low hills. It later turned out to be the Missouri River in the vicinity of St. Joseph (near where Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri all meet). This region is heavily agricultural, and it was interesting to note that many of the hills had been artificially terraced.
The first sight of the Rockies is as dramatic from a plane as it is from the ground. They're a black swan in topography. Just before they appeared, I was noticing that the intensive farming of the Great Plains had given way in places to regions of apparently unworked soil (almost certainly being used for grazing). These places generally took the form of low mounds of sediment (see, for example, 40.160994N, 103.344970W near a location called Xenia).
West of the rockies, I was treated to several hours of sunset, as the low winter sun lit up the lines of west-facing red cliff faces across something like 500 miles of eroded desert landscape.
While occasionally looking out the window to behold the beautiful endless sunset below, I was also watching the movie Baby Driver on the airline-provided screen in front of me (and Gretchen was watching it simultaneously on hers). It had a gorgeous stylized quality to the acting and production and a quirky anachronistically chaste quality to its love story, but the final third of Baby Driver was wrecked by endless chase sequences and the worst qualities of the first movie in the Terminator franchise.
After we landed, we found a BART (Bay-Area Rapid Transit) station right there at the San Francisco airport, and, after experiencing a little learning curve with the card machine, we were on our hour-long ride to Oakland, today's destination. Gretchen had heard good things about Oakland, and it's also the home to several of our favorite podcasts (99% Invisible and Snap Judgment).
Once out of the BART station and on the streets of Oakland, we walked a few blocks to our motel, the Inn at Temescal. Gretchen had selected it specifically because they offer free loaner bikes. But when we checked in, the super-chatty guy at the desk told us the inn was "transitioning away" from offering bikes, because they are just too much trouble to maintain. Besides, there's a massive rental bike station ("Ford Bikes") on that same corner. Oh well! Our room didn't really have a window, but it was clean and fairly modern and had everything we needed, including a Keurig coffee-making robot (which Gretchen was willing to suspend her eco-horror about, but only because we were on vacation).
With the legalization of marijuana in California, wacky tobacky can just be another option when you're taking a smoke break. Evidently that was the case for our chatty inn desk manager, who kept us so distracted that our Lyft driver had to call us to remind us he'd arrived (around the corner; Lyft doesn't seem as geographically accurate as Uber). Gretchen was a little unfamiliar with ridesharing protocol and lingered for a beat in the back of the Lyft wondering if she was supposed to tip. But that's all handled in the app.
We'd decided to try a Tibetan restaurant (Café Tibet) one city to the north, in Berkeley (which, like Oakland, I had never been to). The dining room had very high ceilings and a long table in the middle that nobody wanted to sit at. We started at a tiny table and graduated to one that was somewhat larger when it opened up. Meanwhile a couple lovebirds tied up the best corner table in the house, infuriatingly flirting over their unpaid bill while the tiny table we'd been at struggled to accommodate four diners. Gretchen had been excited about the various handmade noodles on the menu, so we both ordered noodly soups following a tofu momo appetizer. The momo had been pretty good, but the soups were almost completely devoid of any flavor. With salt, soy sauce, and hot sauce, they improved. But then there was the problem of the noodles, which were gummy and, well, perhaps a bit too healthy-seeming. Every so often the cute old Tibetan woman running the place would come over to tell us how everything was handmade, healthy, and organic. That all might've been true, but it wasn't very good. Gretchen was so sad to have missed an opportunity to have a good meal in the Bay Area that she later bought a greasy samosa from a store whose entrance was staffed by an unseen robotic greeter that cried out "Hehro, wercom!" to everyone who entered. (They apparently couldn't find native-speaking English voice talent at the Chinese robot greeter factory.)
After dinner, we walked east on University Avenue as far as Oxford Street, where the University of California at Berkeley began. Along the way, we encountered numerous homeless people taking advantage of the relatively balmy climate. Many of them had set up makeshift homes wherever they could find a smooth, somewhat-sheltered surface. But many otherwise-smooth surfaces had been punctuated with little studs or ridges to render them unsuitable for this use. There were more examples of such "unpleasant design" here than anywhere else I'd ever been. At one point a crazy guy came up behind us shouting belligerently ("nigger" being the main thing I heard). He proceeded to overturn every trashcan he came upon as he rampaged towards the university while an observer clapped ironically. As soon as he'd passed, the shopkeepers emerged from the stores to right the trashcans and clean up the mess. They didn't even look angry; in a place with so many homeless crazy people, it's just another part of the job. That incident, and the presence of so many muttering homeless people, lent a bit of stranger-danger menace to the streets that I haven't felt since perhaps the 1980s.
A youngish Asian woman was driving the Lyft that took us back to our room in Oakland. Her car smelled like the kind of air fresheners popular with people who watch Fox News and she flitted irrtatingly between radio stations, usually settling on those that played Christmas music. [REDACTED]
Back at the inn, we watched a little teevee, as one typically does when in a motel room on vacation. I also had the uneviable task of threading a drawstring through the waistband of my swimming shorts (which, on this lightly-packed trip, doubled as sleepwear). It must've worked its way out in the laundry. Never having faced this challenge before, at first I had no idea how to proceed and thought perhaps I should attach the string to a straightened coathanger (not that our room had a coathanger that could be straightened) and jam it through. But "inchworming" the drawstring's hardened tip (the "aglet") seemed to work. When I mentioned what I was doing to Gretchen, she said she'd had to do this many times. She was actually the one who came up with the term "inchworming" to describe the process of advancing the drawstring's aglet by a series of small steps through the material by touch alone.
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