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basic enconomy blues
Sunday, December 17 2017
location: Room 227, Silverado Golf Resort, Napa, California
This morning, we had another delightful makeshift brunch over at Gretchen's parents' room. It consisted of bread from the Oxbow Market and fixings (including hummus and a strangely tough form of marinaded tofu) Gretchen bought from "The Market" (an unimaginatively-named but strangely vegan-friendly store located there on the grounds of The Silverado). Once we'd taken care of our morning nutritional needs, it was time to say goodbye to other members of the wedding party at the nearby restaurant called "The Grill." When we walked in there, it smelled like cooked spinach, and not in an especially good way. Mos of the people in there had come to The Silverado for the golf and were not, as Gretchen had taken to saying, "my people." In general, they were eating a lot of food that is so disgusting that I cannot bear to see it, let alone smell it. So there I was, doing that wallflower-without-a-wall thing, breathing through my mouth and staring at blank spots on the wall while Gretchen went around chatting enthusiastically with her many relatives. I had almost nothing to say to anyone, though there were the occasional hugs, handshakes, and how ya' doin'?s. This went on for a surprisingly long time, and at some point I tried to figure out how to score a cup of coffee without starting a tab. (This looked impossible, so I abandoned the idea.) Just when I thought we were leaving (and Gretchen's father seemed to be right there with me on the excruciating nature of today's goodbyes), some trollish long-lost cousins showed up. They'd been estranged from Gretchen's mother's family since a scandal that happened in the 1940s, and I'm not sure exactly how they reconnected. In any case, I wasn't all that interested.
Gretchen had arranged for us to ride back to Berkeley with her cousin Jessica (the one we'd chatted with on Friday night), who lives there. We met up with her at The Market and rode in her sporty little Honda, listening to her music beamed via Bluetooth from her phone to the car's stereo system. She was initially apologetic about her taste in music, but the song in question didn't seem to be anything to be apologetic about. It was some unknown pop tune with hip hop and electronic dance music influences that Jessica absolutely loved, though she cautioned that it was this particular artist's only good song. Later we got to talking about television shows, and Jessica was similarly apologetic about her taste in those. But it turned out they weren't any trashier than ours. She went on a tear about Catfish: the TV Show, which I actually had seen a couple episodes of. Nearing Berkeley, the conversation turned to family matters. This all began when Gretchen talked about how she had burnished me into a dazzling gem from the semi-polished stone I'd been following my relationship with Bathtubgirl (who had, she thought, done most of that work). This led me to make the observation that Gretchen was always straight forward with me, telling me directly about the dysfunctions in my family that all my other girlfriends had overlooked (perhaps to be polite).
[REDACTED]
Gretchen gave me the option of hanging around Jessica's house for yet more time with the fam-fam or heading directly into San Francisco for the next leg of our adventure. As you can imagine, I gladly chose the former. Jessica completely understood. She too may have been a bit fam-fammed out, though her family is close in a way that Gretchen or mine has never been.
We caught the BART in Berkeley and had a long ride under San Francisco Bay to the city after which it was named. We emerged on Powell Street and walked to Union Square, where we sunned ourselves on the concrete steps near a prone transvestite with arms festooned with thickets of grey arm hair overlooking the an ugly geometrically-perfect Christmas tree. It was at least 50 feet tall. The weather was perfect, and it provided yet another opportunity for me to take off my shoes to let my feet breathe.
We'd be staying tonight in the Kimpton Sir Francis Drake, a gorgeous old hotel on Powell Street nearby. (An unlucky gentleman in flaming-red 16th Century garb stands at its entrance to help people get their luggage into and out of the hotel.) We tried to check in, but were an hour early, so we decided to wait in the lobby. Somehow as I fumbled with my baggage, my laptop bag slipped out of my backpack and hit the hard marble floor with a not-good sounding thump. I took my trusty laptop "Hyrax" (a HP Elitebook 2740p) out of the unpadded bag (which coincidentally commemorates the 1997 "24th Annual Symposium" at San Francisco's Embarcadero Center) to see what damage it had sustained. It took awhile to find it but there it was: the floor at left a dent in the metal keyboard surround in the lower right corner. The blackened aluminum chassis had flexed and cracked a narrow bridge across a plastic hatch covering a tiny electronic circuit board, popping the hatch loose. None of this affected the functionality of the computer, but it was sort of a bummer; despite being used when I bought it more than two years ago, it's been nearly perfect all this time. And it's a great little computer. This minor catastrophe caused me to spend a good part of our lobby time checking eBay for old 2740ps from which I could salvage replacement parts. eBay is full of 2740ps.
I also had a programming idea in my head that I wanted to work on, and since I had time to kill and a good WiFi connection, I decided to work on it right there in the gorgeous high-ceilinged lobby of the Sir Francis Drake. A lot of the tools I build allow for the direct editing of JSON objects, and I want that to be as painless as possible. One of the problems with JSON is that certain characters must be escaped inside JSON values, even in cases where it should be obvious that the character in question belongs to the value. I'd been building out a system to escape those characters automatically when saved by a user and then unescape them when displaying them again. To do this, I needed a parser that only concerned itself with the quoted parts of a string (I've built such parsers before) and had specific cases for all the characters that JSON requires to be escaped (particularly carriage return, linefeed, tab, and forward slash; double-quote would have to be escaped by the user, since it was the only remaining indication of the beginning and ending of a value).
Our room up on the 11th floor was smallish, and (based on all that we could hear from room 1114) one of its walls must have been a recent, cheaply-made divider. But it had a bathtub, of which I would take advantage later tonight. But first I would have to stuff my gut with food.
Gretchen did some research and found a fun-looking bar nearby that served esoteric beers and french fries. It was called the Mikkeller Bar, and, since there were no open tables, we sat the bar. Gretchen wasn't sure what she wanted and asked for samples, some of which couldn't be provided just because the servings themselves are so small. But Gretchen managed to talk her way into getting samples later, after effusively praising the beer (some sort of fruity sour) she had ordered. Meanwhile I'd picked a Nine Trizzay Imperial IPA and, for my tastes, it was about as good as an IIPA gets. We also enjoyed a delicious order of herb-flecked french fries. Otherwise, the menu didn't have much we could eat.
Our ultimate destination tonight was a burrito place in the Mission called Papalote Mexican Grill, a place Gretchen's friend Phil had taken us to when we'd visited San Francisco in 2008. It required a BART ride to get there. Happily, Papalote still had plenty of vegan options. I went with Soyrizo, uncrushed black beans, and guacamole, while Gretchen opted for the marinaded tofu. For some reason, Papalote now lacks a salsa bar, though there is a big barrel where one can fish out pickeled jalapeños, so I took two of those: one to eat with my chips and salsa (so good!), and one to cut up and incorporate in my burrito once it arrived. Having grown accustomed to crappy little restaurant burritos and the somewhat-larger Chipotle burritos, I'd totally forgotten how ginormous a proper Mission burrito is. My mouth was agape when I saw it, sort of like Melania must've been the first time Donald J. Trump took off his trousers and adult diapers. Not only did it look good, but it tasted good as well. The only fly in the ointment, so to speak, was the cheap disinfectant smell wafting out of the bathroom, whose door would not stay shut. I went in there at one point and was amazed at the dense layers of accumulated graffiti; it looked like the bathroom in the old CBGBs, though probably more sanitary. My father used to say a number of vaguely racist (but hilarious) things about other cultures and their cuisines, and one of these was that you never really knew if a restaurant was authentic Mexican or not until you went into the bathroom.
There was so much burrito to eat that I was forced to abandon about two ounces of my Negra Modelo. The restaurant around us was fast closing up so they could have their annual holiday party, and we were the last customers to leave.
Gretchen had wanted to walk into the Castro neighborhood, but we were too uncomfortable from overeating for that, so instead we wandered up the street to a few other burrito places to see if perhaps vegan options were a common thing in the Mission. It turned out that they are decidedly not. Papalote is the place to go if you want to split your gut open without directly supporting the factory farming of your fellow vertebrates.
Back at the hotel, I took that bath, sipping vodka occasionally as I noodled around on my computer and Gretchen browsed bits and pieces of various television shows (including Catfish: the TV Show). The equipment in our room, including the television, were somewhat antiquated, and Gretchen found the user interface of channel browsing to be so ponderous that it made teevee watching a chore.
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