Yesterday we took a little drive to Treasure Island, which is a strange little man-made island that’s between the two sections of the Bay Bridge.  (I say “the other” because I’ve taken a few trips to Treasure Island, Florida, so it was interesting to see the west coast one.) The two sections of the bridge actually hit at Yerba Buena island, which is a natural island, a hilly little stump of a place that’s owned by the Coast Guard. They dredged and built Treasure Island in the 30s for this big expo, and used it as a seaplane base.  There were plans to put the San Francisco airport there, but they got Mills Field instead, which is where the current SFO stands.  TI was used as an army and a navy base since WW2, but that all got closed down in the nineties, and now you have about a square mile of antiques and weirdness.

First, it’s odd that this whole thing did not get carved up into McMansions and giant condos. You have the perfect view of SF and the water, nice weather from the breeze off the bay, and a horizon that extends from the Bay Bridge to the city to the Golden Gate and Alcatraz. But the island has this weird Chernobyl-like desolation to it, with a bunch of government-issue buildings boarded up and surrounded by rings of barbed wire.  If you’ve been to any other decommissioned base, you know the architecture type I mean - identical brick shitbox buildings thrown up by the lowest bidder, with institutional features, stenciled government signs, and the strange anonymity that means the building could be a warehouse for unused cots from World War I, or a stash of refined plutonium, and you can never tell what it is.

We parked in front of the Admin building, which was used as the Berlin airport in an Indiana Jones movie.  The island has a few weird showbiz connections, probably because of the large amount of abandoned warehouse space.  All of the Battlebots shows were taped here, and the bullettime fx for the Matrix movies happened in one of the warehouses, too. I don’t see how the logistics of filming a production would work, on an island with no gas station, no restaurants, and probably limited electrical production. But maybe if you need a big open space and you don’t want to pay a million dollars a second to rent the Moscone Center, there you go.

We walked along the water a bit, and then went to this weird set of buildings that looked like they used to be dorms of some sort.  They were all boarded up and completely abandoned, with broken windows and graffiti, but otherwise looking like they’d sat since 1963.  I think the military used to have some training there, like radio operators or something, and they did nothing with those buildings since the place shuttered.  It was so odd, because we live in a city where a square meter of real estate costs six figures, but here were acres and acres with old-growth trees and what used to be landscaped paths and water views, and it all sat completely abandoned.

They did still run some of the dorms, as some kind of job training school, where you could go to get your GED and take culinary training, or learn to be a plumber, or something like that.  The open buildings looked entirely institutional, like a military school, and we saw pretty much nobody there.  We also cruised around a bit more, and found a bunch of what used to be family housing, which you can now rent.  There are still people living there - I guess it’s fairly cheap, and you can get like a three bedroom/two bath with a garage for like $1700/month.  Sounds like a lot in rural Indiana, but this is on an island overlooking a huge city where that wouldn’t get you a studio apartment.  Driving through the streets (all named B Lane, C Lane, and so on) reminded me of all of the times we visited my dad’s Air Force buddy when they had on-base housing, because the buildings look identical everywhere, the way they were laid out, the construction, the look.  If you’ve spent any time on a base, someone could show you a picture of the same 1972 row house of four apartments with a carport, and if it was Anchorage or Grand Forks or Tacoma or Tampa or anywhere else, you would instantly recognize it.

And some of the houses were boarded off.  I guess they are not taking new leases in some places, probably to level the buildings.  And one group of houses were completely fenced off with radiation signs on the chain link.  Another huge problem, as with any other decommissioned base, is there are huge contamination issues all over the island.  I mean, you’ve got the standard lead paint and asbestos issues, but there’s also radium and plutonium contamination in places, which involves a bit more than some fresh paint and removing some fill dirt. Passing by entire rows of houses boarded over, with broken out windows and abandoned playgrounds and landscapes really emphasized the Chernobyl feel.  So did the radiation warning signs.

We circled around and saw the yacht club, one of the only things actively running on the island.  There was also a big hanger, and inside it looked like they were building some kind of amusement part floats or rides or something.  And a group of doofuses on segways circled around the giant asphalt parking lots, too.  We cruised from there to Yerba Buena, which is nothing but incredibly steep, curvy, and narrow rows cutting through old growth forest.  We saw a few Coast Guard officer’s quarters buildings, the kind of shacks built in maybe the 40s, all abandoned, some boarded off, some just empty.  There was also what looked like an old restaurant tucked into a hill, and the whole thing made me wonder if they would ever sell or develop the land there.

Turns out there’s no private housing on the island, and there are huge arguments going on about the city buying the land from the Navy, and what will happen.  Pelosi and crew want the Navy to hand over the land so it can be turned into some kind of low-income housing.  I’m sure others would like to turn it into super high end real estate.  I don’t know that much will happen in a place where you have to pay a bridge toll and drive 20 minutes to go to a Safeway or fill your car up with gas.  And let’s not forget that this is all artificially built on ten feet of compacted garbage, so when the big one hits, the entire mess goes straight into the bay.  I don’t foresee anything happening for decades.  Until then, it’s a strange little place to visit and look at some peeling and abandoned work by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Anyway, go to flickr or click here for the pix.

[2020 update: they are building a bunch of high-end housing here now. The big barracks dorm building is torn down, and bulldozers are everywhere. Stay tuned, I guess.]

I was so stretched for reading material in the Denver airport on Sunday that I actually paid money for a copy of GQ magazine.  In it, I read this giant article about the pot stores in Amsterdam, by some guy who worked there for a week or two and reported his findings.  (I am researching this not because I smoke pot - I don’t - but I’m thinking of starting a dog medical marijuana clinic for dogs that have arthritis or glaucoma, since I think if I did this in California, I could probably charge like four times as much to rich people with little neurotic rat-dogs.  I don’t know what to call it, but something with the term “dogstafarian.”)

I spent a week in Amsterdam in 2005.  Random observations:

• It is acceptable to wear blackface during the winter season, but little kids might ask you for presents.
• The people speak English, but also converse in some strange moon-man language called “Dutch.”  If you are white and of Germanic features, someone might come up to you and start talking in this weird language.  If you start screaming “I VOTED FOR GEORGE BUSH” they will stop.
• A Turkish Airways 737 overshot the runway at Schiphol airport in 2004 because the pilot, copilot, and first officer were in a dispute over whether or not the Black Sabbath song “N.I.B.” implies that Ozzy Osbourne or another member of Black Sabbath was an employee of Procter and Gamble, because of the line “The sun, the moon, the stars all bear my seal”
• You can buy hash in Amsterdam, but if you go into a pharmacy and ask for any cold medicine stronger than a Hall’s cough drop, the clerk will look at you like a crazed drug addict.
• Anton–Babinski syndrome is a rare symptom of brain damage to the occipital lobe in which a person has complete visual blindness but insist they can still see.
• Anne Frank’s attic was wired with cat-5 cable 60 years before the TIA/EIA-568-B standards were adopted.  Her father, however, used copper clad cable runs instead of 100% copper, which explains why in her diaries she mentions so much trouble getting her power over ethernet Cisco phones to work consistently.
• You can hire the services of a prostitute in a McDonald’s, but they don’t have the shamrock shakes there.
• I looked at all of Van Gogh’s paintings at his museum, and sketched out an entire idea for a Playstation game similar to Grand Theft Auto based on his artwork, but I lost my notes when I tried to use one of those public urinals.

I also went into an Apple Store while I was there, but this was before they had the iPad or the iPhone, so it was not that interesting.

In 1998, I got a new credit card in the mail and after thinking about how many photocopies I could make for $1500 or if that was enough to buy like one sixtyfourth of an acre in some deserted forest, enough to build some kind of treehouse-esque unabomber shack, I suddenly realized that I had the insane desire to buy a MiniDisc recorder.  So I rushed over to The Good Guys, this old Best Buy-esuqe electronics store, and bought a Sony MZ-R50 and rushed home and recorded Joe Satriani’s Crystal Planet onto a blank disc.

(Reasons significant: 1) Joe Satriani recorded his first album after receiving a credit card in the mail; 2) He was signed to Sony, and I think a song of his was in a MiniDisc commercial, not that there were tons of those in the US; 3) I had recently broken up with a girlfriend, and the reason I broke up with her, or the catalyst at least, was driving two hours to Portland with Ryan in his Miata to see Joe Satriani, listening to CP the whole way there, and both of us bitching about our respective girlfriends and vowing to somehow escape the situations, only I did and he did not.)

I did not have a good way to record digital to digital for a long time, and the MiniDisc required you to record stuff in real-time - you didn’t just download a bunch of MP3s and dump them to the disc.  You also had to carry around however many discs with you, and if you brought three and went to work, you were guaranteed to be sick of all of them by the time you got to the train station.  I vividly remember going on an awful first date with a lowtalker who produced feminist programming for cable access and still lived with her mom and wanted to go to dinner at a soup restaurant and then go to see this movie about white supremacists, and then I really fucked things up because the movie interviewed all of these white supremacists in Bloomington, Indiana, and while they’re talking to these guys about the evils of Jews, they’re all drinking out of Pizza Express cups and I’m like HOLY SHIT THOSE ARE PIZZA EXPRESS CUPS I HAVE LIKE 90 OF THOSE IN MY APARTMENT.  She was still somehow interested and kept calling and I eventually told her I was in love with someone who lived in LA, which was partially true anyway.  So after this first date, I had to walk her to her car at the cable access thing, and it was like eleventy billion blocks from the train station.  And the only MD I had with me was a best-of from Millions of Dead Cops, which is like 27 songs, a dozen of them being “John Wayne Was a Nazi” and the rest being entirely unintelligible 22-second long songs.  And I think I listened to it nine times on the walk back to the train.  And that’s why I got an iPod.

I have an 80GB iPod and it’s almost full, and it’s also lasted longer than any other, which means it will fail soon.  It is my damn lifeline for morning traffic though.  Is there something that will hold more music that I need to get?  Maybe I need to get a bunch of iPods and put them on a bandolier like Chewbacca.  If they made an iPhone that could fit 80 GB I would just do that.  Maybe when the drive dies in this (inevitable) I will find a way to hack it into a socket that I can hot-swap a bunch of different drives.  Maybe I will just wise up and say “why the fuck do I have all of these Charlie Parker albums and I only listen to two of the songs, so fuck it” and get the collection down so it will fit on my iPhone.

I’ve still got all of this MiniDisc crap in my storage locker.  I think if I had infinite time I would make some kind of art project out of it, like make a MiniDisc-based mellotron keyboard. Someone did a movie about the mellotron, a documentary, which I guess is a lot better than my last attempt at a documentary.  I got blindingly drunk in Laguardia airport, then had to fly to Pittsburg via Cincinnati Ohio (which is really in Kentucky, the airport I mean) and so I got to OH/KY and had a few more beers and decided I was going to make a concept movie about the moving walkways in the airport and started filming The Walkway is about to end, which is basically me sitting on the floor by the end of the walkway, and every ten seconds, a robot voice says “the walkway is about to end!” and every single person that walks past ignores it and stumbles when the moving ground becomes non-moving ground, and the whole thing is an important metaphor for something, but then I started to sober up and had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh and that’s the end of the story.  (The footage for that is in my storage locker, too.)

So Brad Hawpe got let go this morning. What a bummer.  I mean, the guy was not doing well statistically, and the Rockies have a deluge of outfielders that are outperforming him, and they need to clear the roster spot to get some kind of pitching relief.  But still, it bothers me.

Hawpe’s one of those ghosts of 2007 that remind me of why I became a Rockies fan in the first place.  The very first free t-shirt I got at Coors Field was a Hawpe shirt.  He used to be an incredible hitter, the kind of guy who always batted well north of .300 and would sky almost any shot that was left up.  Between him and Holliday in right field, you had this incredible one-two punch that would do serious damage to weak pitching.  I went to a lot of lopsided games that were chiefly his fault.

He’s been on a downward sprial, though.  He almost won the 2008 All-Star game with a robbed home run, and now he’s hitting in the mid-hundreds. It’s so strange how all of the 2007 alumni have just fallen apart. Garrett Atkins got released from the Orioles for poor plate performance (just showing up is average plate performance for Baltimore); Kaz Matsui was batting like 0 for 29 for the Astros before getting let go.  I won’t even get into Aaron Cook.

I just saw Hawpe play on Saturday, and didn’t really think it would be one of his last games.  I thought since he made it past the trade deadline, he’d coast until winter.  Guess I’ll have to get used to seeing him in a White Sox uniform, or where ever he goes.

This happens to me constantly.  It also happens to my Mac.  I don’t entirely know what the phenomenon is called, other than “why the hell does my computer keep doing this.”  But I wrote about it in a story I was working on, so here’s my best explanation:

I opened the laptop, but it wouldn’t boot.  I didn’t know if it got zapped, or if this was one of those Windows dance of sleep things, where the computer is sleeping and you hit the power button for 1.7 seconds and not 1.9 seconds and it wakes up and asks you if you want to put it to sleep, but when you try to hit the button again, it does sleep, or it reboots, but if you hold the button for the same amount of time because you want it to reboot, it doesn’t reboot and then it asks you if you want to make it sleep, but sleep is different than suspend, because for suspend, you have to hold the button for 1.8 seconds and then not hold it for 1.6 seconds and then hold it for 1.7 seconds, or it won’t wake up and/or it will ask you if you want to suspend.

I think after I make my first million dollars, I am going to shut off all of the sleep options on my laptop, and physically remove the power button, and then hardwire the power cord into a Yamaha generator, and then pay someone to constantly add oil and gas to the generator and haul it around 20 paces behind me like guys in Saudi Arabia haul around their wives but no burka and then I will get some kind of BOSE headphone so I don’t have to hear the generator and maybe I will have to hire a second guy to constantly swap out the AA batteries in the BOSE headphones and maybe have a second set with fresh batteries so I can hot-swap them and not have to hear the generator while I’m swapping out the batteries, although that’s probably not a full-time position, so maybe I’ll get that guy to also transcribe the thousand or two spiral notebooks of hand-written garbage I’ve hand-written over the last two dozen years, provided he can read my handwriting, and good luck, because I can’t even read my own fucking handwriting at this point.

Here’s a picture of me making candles in 2002.  You probably use a similar setup when you’re making meth, which I’ve never done, but apparently the state of California thinks everyone does, because I spent twenty damn minutes trying to buy some Claritin-D at Safeway yesterday, and it probably takes less paperwork to buy dynamite.