So the failed run at NaNoWriMo has put a major crimp in any journal activity here, and it’s been hard to get back to work.  After I don’t write here for a while, I enter this weird limbo where I don’t know what to write, and I overthink things, and I start giant essays that I later kill because they become too half-assed or whatever.  If I spend too much time thinking what this is supposed to be, I never write.  The truth is, this isn’t supposed to be anything except writing, and when I obsessively think about what I should be doing here, it’s a lot like staying up late at night with insomnia, and trying to have a focused, quantitative analysis about why you aren’t sleeping; you will just make it way worse.

So I’m here and it’s cold and it’s 49.  But I ran out of the regular aftershave lotion I usually use, and realized I have this face sunscreen Neutrogena junk that is SPF 20 suntan lotion, but it’s also aftershave lotion, so I used that.  And of course the smell is an immediate reminder of the summer, and specifically the only time in the summer when I am outside, i.e. baseball games.  It makes me wish that instead of a cold almost-December day, it was a blistering June day, and I was dragging a ton of photo gear to a 100-level seat to swelter and smell fresh-cut grass and obsess about the best pitch to follow a fast ball-inside,curve ball-outside sequence.  But there are four months until opening day, and there’s a lot of bad trade decisions by the O’Dowds to wring hands over between then and now.

I’m also wondering what will happen to the Oakland A’s.  Right now, it looks like they will move to San Jose, but there are some last ditch plans to throw together a stadium proposal for Oakland to keep the team.  The current plan is down to a location near Jack London square, which is just a couple of miles from our house, and would be a major win.  The bad news is they are just starting to talk about it, which means they are years behind the San Jose proposal.  And I don’t know much about Oakland city planning, but the one thing I am learning is that it’s horribly conflicted, and it’s impossible to get anything done.

One example of this is the grocery store situation in West Oakland, which is considered a “food desert”, because there are no grocery stores except for a few dozen liquor stores, and if you don’t have a car to go drive a neighborhood over to shop at Safeway, you’re eating ring-dings and pork rinds for dinner, which is probably why like 98% of the West Oakland population has adult onset diabetes.  Kroger has been trying to build a store on Grand Street maybe a mile east of here an it has been a clusterfuck of red tape and argument.  A lot of West Oakland is abandoned warehouse property, where it’s cheaper for the owners to do nothing with it and hope for a giant project like this to buy them out, but it started this huge argument about eminent domain because nobody wants to sell out and hopes that if Kroger today asks for a million an acre, maybe if they wait a year, Wal-Mart will offer a million ten an acre.  And all of the pro-protestor groups come out to argue about Kroger sucking money out of a poor community, and the lack of local produce, and the lack of local jobs, and demanding that they have full unions and composting toilets and be LEED certified and have the Dalai Lama design the Feng Shui layout for the vegan organic produce section.

It’s a fucking Kroger, and the neighborhood should be happy they want to build there.  And if they keep up with it, Kroger will eventually come to the conclusion it’s much easier to clear-cut some land in East Oakland or San Leandro or whatever else and go there.  And as far as the “money being siphoned away” argument, it’s not like diabetes medication is locally sourced, and if you don’t come up for a solution other than people eating at McDonald’s ten times a week, that’s where all of the money will go.

[Disclaimer: I know nothing about public planning.  And I was probably exaggerating about 98% of the neighborhood having diabetes.  It’s probably in the low-80s.]

We had Thanksgiving dinner here, which was awesome.  It’s probably the first time we’ve hosted any kind of dinner since New York, mostly because we’ve been living out of boxes since then.  But we got the place cleaned up and cooked a turkey breast and stuffing and gravy and salad and a fruit crisp.  A came over with two pies, and Jason and Al came over with lamb, broccoli, and an awesome curry soup.  I need to have dinner here more often.  The only downside is I’m going to be eating turkey leftovers for a while.

We went to the Chabot Space Center last night, which was pretty awesome.  First we went for dinner at this Indian restaurant on Piedmont which was pretty blah.  On the way back to the car though, we found this newsstand - an actual, real newsstand store - not a book store with a magazine rack, but a store that was just magazines.  They even had print zines, which was pretty amazing and nostalgic, so I had to pick up a few things just to show support and as proof that I had not fallen into some kind of wormhole to the mid-1990s.  The guy working there was pretty cool, and I also got one of those 33 1/3 books, the one by John Darnielle about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality.  (And why can’t I get a copy of that album on iTunes?)

Anyway, Chabot - first, we plug it into the GPS, and it takes us through all of these winding roads way the hell up into the hills of Oakland.  The place is only a couple of miles from us, straight-line, but after a while, I thought we were in Montana by now.  The view was pretty cool, a lot of these cool little houses in the sides of the hills, some with christmas lights already, all of them these cute little single-family bungalows, the places where you’d expect professors from the university to live.  But the GPS’s idea on what constitutes a turn was completely off - like we’d go through some 270 degree Gran Turismo hairpin turn, and it would be robotically saying “keep going straight”.  And then there would be like an 8 degree bear-right, where it would start saying “turn left.  turn left.”, announcing some turn that was a mile ahead.  And then we passed by the actual Chabot sign, with the GPS saying “your destination is 1/4 mile ahead”.

But we got there.  The place is really amazing - it’s way up on the tops of the hills, in an area of old forest, with almost no light pollution and an amazing view of the whole east bay below, with the lights of San Francisco in the distance.  The building itself reminds me of any high-end astronomy equipment, like when you’re in some area of Hawaii where it’s just the desolation of pineapple farms, and all of a sudden there’s this giant steel and concrete structure that looks like a crashed UFO or some part of the Dharma Project.

The whole visit was a constant “how can this be only five miles from our house?”, walking through these giant-ceilinged halls and looking at Soviet spacesuits and giant space capsules with CCCP painted on the side.  I was worried that the place would be overrun with screaming kids, which is always the case when I try to go to a museum like Science and Industry in Chicago, but the place was pretty desolate.  For $15 you get free reign of the exhibits, plus admission to two shows.  So we wandered around the space suits and space toilets and space food (all cool stuff), and then went to two shows.

The first show was in an IMAX-type theater, where you have the dome above you and they project the 270-degree image from 70MM film.  They showed a movie about the sun, which was pretty interesting, and covered everything from how ancient civilizations tracked the sun with Stonehenge-type temples to how the SOHO craft is probing the interior of the sun from its halo orbit between the Earth and moon.  The one thing I liked about the movie was they took great pains to not use any computer imagery for the sun, and did everything with actual footage.  I don’t like when you go to one of these things and it’s a bunch of CGI that looks like a bad PBS program.

We also went to this show called Tales of the Maya Skies in the main planetarium.  I was impressed with the video quality of the screen there, given that in the old days, planetariums were just a bunch of light dots on the ceiling and maybe a dude with a laser pointer, but this was a full-on video.  It was this whole story of Mayan mythology, how the Mayan civilization used astronomy in their culture and calendar.  I found it a little bit cheesy, and sort of disappointing.  I mean, they did a good job of providing this alternate viewpoint, and that’s cool.  But I would rather have a center like this pumping kids with propaganda about how we need to look forward to the future and get our asses to Mars instead of talking about old mythology.  I guess it’s good to have context, but the whole thing was a little too politically correct for me, I guess.  Also, how can you have a 30-minute movie about Mayan astronomy without a single mention of human sacrifice or the theory that aliens gave them the technology?

The last movie got out and we had exactly five minutes to go to the actual observatory, so we sprinted up there and got to the roof just in time for them to close it.  So we absolutely need to go back to check it out.  We did get a glimpse of one of their three telescopes, though.  And while we were on the deck outside, we had a stellar view of the stars, which was pretty damn amazing seeing as we’re only miles from so much light pollution.  It was something to look up and see the big dipper and Orion’s belt, even if I was freezing my ass off.

Going to New York next week, by the way, which will be weird.  More on that later - I will probably just bring the work laptop and the iPad and try to keep writing that way.

[2020 update: Kroger never built the grocery store. The abandoned warehouse they were trying to buy is still empty.]

It’s getting cold here, which is not cold in the sense of North Dakota cold where if you don’t plug in your car, the engine oil will turn solid until April, or New York cold where the wind whips through every seam and zipper of your clothes and freezes every hair in your nose on that short sprint to the subway station that seems to take forever. Here, a winter cold means the low 50 or maybe the high 40s, but when your entire wardrobe is summer clothes and your apartment doesn’t have a huge winter furnace designed to run like a kiln in December, this seems colder than freezing.

It means winter coat season, the time when I finally get out my time machine of a leather jacket and teleport back to 1993 when I got my first “real” leather jacket at the Wilson’s Leather in the Bloomington Mall. I know I write about this every year, but every fall when the time comes to slip on that heavy biker jacket and zip up its thick zipper and smell the smell of leather and feel the almost bulletproof heft, it always makes me feel good. Does it outweigh the feeling of a cold house, especially now that I have to pay for my own heat during the work day? Well, at least I feel good that I won’t be stuck in a broken building whose HVAC system insists on running the air conditioner full blast in December, or even worse, that superheats the offices to a hundred degrees and no humidity during the cold and flu season.  And I don’t spend two hours a day in a tiny coffin of a car with a heater that only works at full blast or off, requiring me to constantly jockey the little knobs between the various settings to approximate the control of a climate.

Oh, here’s a weird journey back: yesterday, Attachmate bought Novell.  First, Attachmate.  I used to work for a company in Seattle called WRQ, and Attachmate was their biggest rival.  I remember Attachmate most not because of the Pepsi versus Coke culture between the two (like various vague “beat Attachmate” propaganda at product kickoff meetings) but because they had this huge Star Wars-looking building on the horizon of Factoria. When I worked for Spry, I had this view of a blighty little strip-mall suburb, a Safeway and a QFC and a Keg restaurant and an Allstate agent and a muffler shop with a too-big sign, but it was all contrasted by a giant office building hanging off the top of this hill that looked like the background scenery in a Quake game.

About five years ago, a VC firm (or group, I don’t know the details) bought both Attachmate and WRQ and fused them into one company with a stupid joint name that was eventually just changed to Attachmate.  It’s the perfect example of how things in my past change and make it impossible to go back, like imploding the Kingdome, or replacing the coolest videogame arcade of my college years with an Urban Outfitters.  Many of my memories from 1996 to 1999 involve my time at WRQ, from the times I’d stay late and work on AITPL’s first issues, to when I’d come in blindingly early after a night of insomnia, so I could leave early on a Friday.  I’d mope through Seattle’s winters and hide in my office, when the sun would be down when I left in the morning and down when I drove home, and the entire day would be the 50 degree, dark grey, misting cold rain weather that made you want to hang yourself.  I spent the bulk of my time in an office that overlooked Dexter Ave, in this huge terraced building sitting in the hill that wrapped around the west bank of Lake Union.  I’d walk to Dexter Deli almost every day and get a BLT, then go back to my desk, put on a CD, close the door, and hack away at this very journal.  This was long before the days of the iPod, and I used to drag in this rectangular nylon case that held a dozen CDs in their jewel cases.  Later, I’d graduate to the MiniDisc player, and haul a much smaller case that held 20% more music, but still required me to spend twenty minutes a morning pondering what I wanted to listen to that day.

I remember my job there, but the job had so little to do with any of it.  I mean, I worked on Java stuff, and we were in the middle of this giant war where Microsoft wanted the world to keep on plunking away at Win32 apps, while a smaller group wanted everything to be delivered on the web through applets.  Our company had a lot of Windows-centric people, those that believed the shrink-wrapped, channel-sold application with a high profit margin reigned supreme, and that any CPU cycle wasted on a VM or a windowing system was pure bunk.  These were the people who worked on writing terminal emulation software for DOS boxes, so they could talk across twisted-pair networks to big iron mainframes.  Things like DLL loading conflicts and command-line switches made their blood pump.  The terms “master” and “slave” applied themselves in many forms to their control flow paradigms.  They all carried leatherman multi-tools just in case they were out on the town and there was an emergency that required the stripping of insulation from some wires.  To them, online help was for pussies, and real products shipped with a thousand page printed manual.  I worked on online help for a Java product and used a Mac, so there were three strikes against me.

But I spent those years trying to define myself as a writer, trying to write these two books that hung around my neck like albatrosses.  I hacked at short stories and tried to run the zine and tried to find other writers to talk to.  I spent every penny I made on used books or CDs that I would play obsessively in my little studio apartment while I wrote.  I took High Fidelity too seriously and assumed I could define myself by owning every Miles Davis album Columbia ever released.  Thinking about the late 90s always brings back all of this, but it also brings back practically living in that weird office in the side of a hill on Dexter Avenue.  And Attachmate is still there, and there’s still a part of me that wonders what it would be like to go there and walk through the giant lobby and up to the 10th floor and see if it still felt like 1997 to me.

And they bought Novell, which is another throwback, to those days of Bloomington when networking was taking over the campus, and the dummy islands of uncommunicative PCs were all wired together with coax cable and things started talking to each other.  I did not fully understand Netware, and I still don’t; but I remember the hardcore DOS gearheads talking about it all the time, discussions of TSRs and NETBEUI and mapping X drives to shares.  I was more of a Mac person, and preferred to just telnet in to some unix machine and have everything located there.  But there definitely was this subculture that was all high on Novell stuff back then, especially with the hardcore business users who religiously used WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 for everything.  Later, Novell bought WordPerfect from Borland, probably right around the time I was using the Mac version of WordPerfect for everything.  Then, I switched to using Word and a PC, and I think Windows NT made all of the Netware stuff obsolete, and Novell just became an annoying little company that insisted that everyone spell unix in all caps.

So you’ve got the leather jacket and the old WordPerfect pulling me back to Bloomington.  And you’ve got the struggles as a writer and the current San Francisco weather (53, raining, dark) pulling me back to Seattle.  And I’ve been hacking at a short story that takes place in Florida in 2001, so there’s a lot going on right now.

I did not realize this until today (when I was googling my own name), but a bunch of the baseball pictures I have posted on flickr (i.e. over here) are being used by a bunch of wikipedia articles.  In fact, several of them are the main image used in the article, which I think is pretty damn cool.  And I was not the person who did this - I just posted them to flickr, set the license to Creative Commons, and forgot all about it; other people found the pictures, cropped them, uploaded them, and put them on wikipedia.

If you go here, you can see all of them that have been uploaded.

Not all of them uploaded are used in articles.  Here are articles that use my images:

• Ubaldo Jimenez
• Josh Fogg
• Tomo Ohka
• Seth Smith
• Brad Penny
• Brad Penny (Japanese version ブラッド・ペニー)
• Matt Daley
• Joe Beimel
• Matt Belisle
• Manuel Corpas
• Manuel Corpas (Japanese version マニー・コーパス)
• Jonathan Herrera
• Jonathan Lucroy

With the exception of the first three, all of the pictures I took were used as the top image for the page.  Most of these were taken with my DSLR.  But the Josh Fogg picture was from my old Fuji, and was taken at the very first Rockies game I ever went to, in 2007.  (They won against the Astros.)  And the Tomo Ohka picture, which is pretty horrible, was taken at my first baseball game ever.  (Astros at Brewers in 2006, with the Brewers winning.)

Anyway, these will probably all get edited and replaced at some point, probably in the near future.  But it’s great and a bit humbling to see my work show up somewhere else.

We went to a pet store on Piedmont last night, and got this cat sitter DVD, which is a loop of various stuff meant for feline viewing: video of rats, birds, squirrels, and fish, with a ton of critter sound and super-saturated colors.  The cats went nuts.  Earlier in the day, we were watching some documentary about Nick Drake, and in a street scene, a pigeon flew across the screen, and Loca woke up from a dead sleep, ran into the room, and jumped up in front of the TV.  So I thought she’s get the biggest kick out of it.  But Squeak (pictured) went completely feral over it.  She immediately ran up and sat in front of the TV and stared at the screen, then jumped up and started swatting at the various food groups in action.  And the built-in speakers on our TV are on the back, so she then jumped behind the TV and started looking all around, tangling through the wires and sniffing the back of the set.

Loca had her own new toy, this little ball that’s a replacement for the same exact one, which is probably under an appliance right now.  She loves playing a soccer-like game, running back and forth across the huge expanse of the new place.  She will also carry the ball around in her mouth like a dog, but she will start meowing with it in her mouth, making this weird “MMMWWMMHH” sound, and she only does that about 20 minutes after I go to bed, or at about 4 in the morning.  So she was crazy with the new ball and ignored the TV for a while, but then she got into the act too, and was baffled by the strange sounds.  She got bored of it after a bit, and went to play by herself again.

Squeak though, was completely possessed.  She was a feral rescue and we think spent some time on her own at a very early age, so she’s more hard-wired for hunting, since she probably had to do it to survive.  Loca, we don’t know if she was a stray or a rescue or what - she was fostered for a while, and is much more adjusted to living with humans.  When Loca plays, she’s crazy, hence her name, but she knows she’s playing, and won’t use her claws.  Squeak goes into this blind rage, forgets she’s playing, and gets into this PTSD flashback mode and will fight like her life depends on it.  Her claws are always out, and she’s always way too serious about it.

So we stopped the DVD and went on to watch Real Time on the DVR, but Squeak still sat there at the foot of the TV, staring at Bill Maher’s head like it was a rabid chipmunk.

Anyway, if you have a cat, check out the DVD at http://petsittervideos.com/.  They have ones for dogs and birds too.  Given the number of birds that fly into mirrored windows, that might not be the safest thing for your TV or your bird, but the dog one would probably be entertaining, too.

I am participating in NaNoWriMo 2010.  I just decided this, and I have the vaguest of ideas for a book, and I really need to flesh out an outline, but I’m having trouble getting the thoughts into an outline this second, and I’m glad my copy of Call of Duty is not in the house, because this is typically the point where I’d switch on the PS3 and spend the next three hours “thinking about my outline”.  This is a story I’ve gone back and forth on for the last year, and reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch earlier this year made me realize I totally need to do it.  So I’ll get there.  I have two days to start an outline, or at least have enough of an outline that I can start typing on Monday.

So yeah, that probably means I won’t be updating on here much for a month.  I’m sure both of you readers will be okay.  If not, there’s a thousand old posts here.  And if you get really desperate, you could always go read a book.

I’ve been listening to Sabbath’s Master of Reality on repeat for the last couple of days.  I think it’s one of their best albums, and for whatever reason, you can’t get it on iTunes.  You can in the UK, but you can’t buy music in the UK iTunes store if you have a US account.  I realized I did not have a copy of this on CD, and it was missing from my iTunes library, even though I am certain I had a CD of it in the mid-90s when I went on this Black Sabbath fit of purchasing and bought everything of theirs I could find.  (I think this was around the time I had my first root canal and got Vicodin.  I also think this was around the time I was interviewing someone for a tech writing position, and the whole thing went south, so I started asking them trivia questions about Black Sabbath.)  Anyway, I got a copy of it - it was re-released in the UK a couple of years ago with more bonus tracks than original tracks, which is great if you want to hear a version of “Orchid” where Tony Iommi starts the track by coughing and then counting in, but maybe that’s a bit obsessive if you’re just a stoner rock fan who wants to hear “Sweet Leaf” because it’s been covered by 84,238 other bands, who probably all think it’s pretty damn original when they decide to cover it.  Probably the hardest part of assembling a Sabbath tribute album is 90% of the tracks submitted are covers of “Sweet Leaf.”

Okay, I really need to do at least a token amount of work on this outline.