217. Insomniac City - complete

Link to Table of Contents

A new book

Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
Bloomsbury 2017

This is my next book and I've really been looking forward to it since I first heard about the book some months ago. Not only is there an Oliver Sacks angle, but Hayes sounds equally interesting and more visual. And it is also as much about NYC as anything else. And how could I not be interested in a book about what is in some ways the ultimate city. 

I almost said "ultimate American city," but I think that would be shortchanging NYC. Though I should also make clear that when I give it this exalted status I don't mean simply the city as it is today, but also the past incarnations. In particular, the Edith Wharton NYC and the city around the 1940s -- before Robert Moses became de facto dictator after 1946.


Anyway, I'm only eleven pages in and the book is already living up to my expectations. Hayes moved to NYC from SF after his partner died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack while only in his forties. (As with Ficre, your forties and fifties are the worst time to have a heart attack. Since heart disease runs in my family, I was relieved to make it past sixty, when your survival chances are supposed to be better.)

Hayes, when he moved to NYC, did what I did moving here, brought only the most basic necessities and moved into a tiny place in a decent location. This almost forces you to live in the city rather than to stay in your apartment. And then his insomnia both drove him out, when I would be deeply asleep, and made sure he had lots of free time to pursue his interests. And, as a photographer, you really couldn't have a better subject.

I haven't been to NYC in over twenty years, but I still remember it with fondness (and I was there at possibly the lowest point in my life). What strikes you most, coming from SF, is how mistaken you were. SF refers to itself as The City, and when compared to the rest of the Bay Area, or even the rest of the American West Coast, this is apt. We are dense and our streets are busy at times other cities have gone to bed... or died. But the moment you walk out on a Manhattan sidewalk, or cross a street there, you realize that your definition of "density" and "busy" was really pretty silly. Compared to NYC, SF is like a Disneyland version of a city... or at least this was true before we added the overlapping "Insanityland" operation.

How is it everyone in books about NYC has a view of either the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, if not both? The prevalence of terraces on NYC apartments in magazines is actually easier to understand. I know one person with a view of the TransAmerica Pyramid. The place I stayed on North Ave in Chicago did have a great view of the Hancock Building, but how could you not see Chicago's towers in pancake flat Chicago.

p9 One day I met a man with the name of an angel. He was French. His accent was so think it sounded fake. We got to talking and I told him what had happened. [This is in SF shortly after his partner of 25 years had died.] "You're going to be fine," Emmanuel said right away. "Something bad always leads to something good." He spoke from personal experience. His partner had died six years earlier. But he did not use the word, died, as he told me his story. Nor did he say passed away, a euphemism I had come to hate. Instead, Emmanuel said, "When my partner disappeared . . ."

... I had to say something. "You said 'disappeared'__"

He nodded.

"That's exactly how it feels for me, too."

Now, this is a book that exists because "Something bad... [lead] to something good." But I still think this phrase is as objectionable as "passed away." It's even dangerously close to "God never gives you more than you can handle" -- which I think should rank right up there with self-defense as a justification for killing someone.

Actually, the reason this caught my eye is that I just read, through Medium, a piece on Stoicism that emphasized amor fati -- if you are flogging Hellenistic philosophy it helps to connect it to that trendy new kid, Nietzsche. (I don't want to be critical here, I'm pleasantly amazed to find people pushing Stoicism.) 

amor fati is a more general, and more profound, conception than looking for something good to come from something bad. It's closer to "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" And this is also why I don't try to sell it to my friends, along with vegetarianism and pedestrianism (which I just coined to mean not owning a car.)

Also, Nietzsche's conception of amor fati has a back channel to de Sade which is hinted at, though people tend to ignore it, in the meaning of "Good" and "Bad" in "Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?" At most, good and bad expresses our subjective perception of some event. de Sade, Nietzsche, and the Wisdom of the East all agree that this subjective perception does not accurately describe the objective reality, which is neither good nor bad. Looking for something "good" to follow something "bad" misses the point. What would be the virtue of embracing Eternal Recurrence of something "good?" It's saying "Yes" to whatever life throws your way that makes us a super person.

What's odd is that this has more than a little in common with the bliss of Zosima's dying brother and of the grace Frank Osteseski was arguing for. I really can't imagine all these people being happy forced under the same tent (I'm imagining them as charged nucleons, or wet cats, held in close proximity by the strong force) but who knows? 

"O"

He's still in SF and just met Sacks, who we will be calling "O," while visiting NYC. Usually people leave SF when they want to start a family -- not always, as the small horde of rug rats across the street from me in Noe Valley's new "downtown square" can attest. Or they go to Portland for a more laid-back, Portlandia experience. So I approve of Hayes's change of scenery to a more seriously urban location. If I were one to regret things, never moving to NYC would be the thing I would regret. (I could also make an argument for regretting Toronto and especially Montreal, but those places are not at all the same thing, despite their various appeals. Not to mention the winters.)


On Becoming a New Yorker
p24 I had gotten here just like millions of others before me and since: on a one-way ticket and with only vague notions of how I'd make it... 

From Kennedy [Airport], I took an A train headed for Far Rockaway. That was the wrong direction for getting to Manhattan, as New Yorkers will recognize and as I eventually figured out. But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays, and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns are inevitable to any journey really worth taking. One learns to get oneself turned around and headed the right way.

This is both the identical way I arrived in SF (though on a Greyhound) and my approach to travel... though I have to say I'm better with maps than Hayes appears to be. 

He writes wonderfully about riding public transit. Though I wish he would contrast NYC with here, as I'm not sure I see the difference aside from the scale and that it runs all night -- which I do envy.  

Subway Lifer
p29 Perhaps he's just presenting the good aspects of riding NYC subways here, I can't imagine this is really the whole story. He makes it sound like Disneyland.

I still remember my love for NYC subways when I first visited the city way back in 1971 (or 1972?). And those were the bad old days. I was enchanted by the scale and the decrepitude... the wabi sabi was overwhelming in those days. When I was back twenty years later I spent more time walking -- an even better way to see a city -- so all I recall was that the trains were shockingly cleaner. 

I like to think that New Yorkers wouldn't permit some of the nonsense I see on trains and buses here, just as I did see rush hour crowds sweep confused tourists out of their way like the wind would blow away trash. I imagine them tossing miscreants not observing the common sense rules of using public transit off the vehicle or into pits hidden about the stations. I wouldn't say anything in such a case.


p52 Hayes is giving us the intimate details of their relationship, that O never mentioned. I'm more like O than B in this regard, but I was curious. I'm getting a much better idea of what Sacks's life was like both before and after they got together. If you wrote a character so out-of-his-time as Sacks was -- no computer, no exposure to popular culture, so dedicated to writing with his fountain pen -- no one would buy it. While I respect aspects of it, how someone could be so curious about so many subjects yet turn his back on the internet is a mystery to me. As much as I love books -- and reading them slowly and repeatedly -- I would never give up the ability to read so widely (the internet is the worlds largest library, if you want to think of it that way) and to sample multimedia presentations like Feynman lectures and the various Crash Course and Space Time YouTube series I'm addicted to. 

Feynman's QED sits on my "favorite non-fiction" shelf at home, but if I want a blast of Feynman goodness I will find a lecture instead of grabbing the book. 

p52 On the roof of O's building. This doesn't sound like City Island, did O move? I don't recall that from his memoir.



Taxis in NYC
p104 I suppose NYC is different in this respect as well, but in both Phoenix and here in SF I had repeat customers on a regular basis. Often more frequently than I would have liked. And while you do find different sorts of people in any neighborhood, they are also sorted to some degree. There are people you would be surprised to find (or are surprised to find) in a given context. 


Björk
p111 If Björk makes diner and dessert for you and Oliver Sacks, you pretty much have to write a book just so you can describe the evening. Everything else here is just padding.

Sacks makes a long list of elements that are not present in the human body, but I'm not so sure about this. Perhaps this doesn't include the GI tract as I would think there would be at least trace amounts of nearly everything in the gut, especially of meat eaters. This is a question Sacks could have answered but Hayes probably can't.


p127 The day after Sandy, O is lying on the couch, I am in the easy chair... We have opened the bottle of Veuve Clicquot left over from his birthday; we figure it will get warm otherwise...

The 28th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake was this week. Consuming perishables was such a part of that experience. In the hours after the earthquake we cleaned out the free ice cream from our neighborhood ice cream shop, before it all turned to soup. Then, after night fell, we turned to the contents of our freezer and refrigerator (fortunately, we still had gas for cooking.) A few days later there was a big social gathering (in Cow Hollow, of all places) where the power had yet to return and friends were called in to polish off someone's even larger freezer and refrigerator food supply. With candles for lighting, of course. 

It wouldn't have been as nice if we had been caught under falling brick or concrete at the time of the quake, but we weren't, and life goes on.



Lauren Hutton
Now this is something I would never have imagined running into in this book. I can imagine how a young person might not know or recognize Hutton, but for O this is one of the most astonishing examples of how he lived in his own strange little world. 

Hutton was my first model crush, probably about the time I started finding Playmates freakish looking. From what little I've learned about her over the decades, I'm a little disappointed she didn't get the black-eye in a motorcycle accident.

Still Insomniac City

Hayes has formatted his book into tiny sections which I'm taking advantage of to read the book slowly. To savor it taste by taste. I'm now at page 238 and I think we've come to the end of the fun part, the part where you can let yourself forget how the story has to end.

This should actually be interesting, if not fun. Hayes got off easy with his previous partner, will he appreciate the greater amount of time (and bother) this time 'round? O is such an observer of everything his take on dying should be particularly valuable. Though his passing is also particularly painful due to all he knew. And it isn't really just because I recently rewatched Blade Runner that I'm reminded again of the poetic climax of that film, delivered by the dying replicant, Roy, 

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

This is the essence of the tragedy of death, all the moments lost in time but also the memories -- including the memories of other people -- and the knowledge unique to that person. 

You can think of life (what is experienced in life) as a multifaceted collection of perspectives. And over time perspectives are subtracted by death until in the end there is nothing left except, in some cases, visual imagery or a written account. 


Yes, I did read the ending of that section of Insomniac City correctly.

p252 O rejects adding explanatory info for scientific terms used in In Motion preferring that the reader look it up. Which I did, and he's right. When you look up one thing, it always leads to something else and you learn even more.


Near the end of O
p271 This morning: A bowl of blueberries for breakfast. "Each one gives a quantum of pleasure," O says with delight, then reconsiders, "if pleasure can be quantified."

That's an interesting thought. Can other things be quantified like that? I kind of think not. Blueberries, for example, are not limited to a positive ground state. There's always a under or over ripe one that drops below zero. Anything perishable has this problem. Off hand I can't really think of anything that never drops to or below zero pleasure. 

Even if you add ideas or thoughts, as I think O would at least consider pleasures, they too can drop to or below zero.

p272 O no longer wants any visitors to the apartment unless he expressly invites them: "I don't have time to be bored!"

When he is not resting, he is working on new pieces nonstop.

This is actually one of the things I would most fear if I were dying in a hospital setting, say. You would need a gate keeper. 

In the end, we get very little about O's actual death, and certainly nothing from his perspective. As with The Five Invitations, there is no compelling argument for subjecting yourself to an elemental death. There's no suggestion here that even Oliver Sacks was able to learn something useful or interesting from the experience of slowly dying.

I think it's a good decision, but it is a little odd that we get the effect on Hayes of the death of his SF partner but not the effect of O's death. 

Next Wednesday there's a celebration of Sacks's life and books here at the Commonwealth Club, with Hayes and (for some reason) Victoria Sweet in addition to other people more obviously connected to Sacks. I now want to read the book he was writing at the time covered by this book, but I think I'll probably skip the "celebration."

216. Photos around town

Bonus photos

I've been writing but not publishing of late. Don't know why. At any rate I have a bunch of material stored up now, which I'm going to hold off on and give you photos instead.

I was determined to get a bad photographic record before I cut off my hair... mission accomplished! 

But that's not why I'm including this image here. See the vertical array of photos on the extreme right? That's my foot-deep photo gallery leading to my bathroom. While doing my shoulder stretching exercises the other day I happened to notice that I helped the people in those photos move on thirteen different occasions. Some people I helped move two or three times. One of the best things about getting older seems to be that either your friends don't move as often or they pay people to move them instead of enlisting their friends.

I've always loved this building in North Beach. And since it's on Lombard I have to show the view to the west:

Yes, crooked street at the top of the hill.

I can't decide if this is a tiny construction crew or a tiny chain gang -- for when a "time out" isn't enough.

And here's the current state of the top of Salesforce Tower. The envelope is essentially complete.

215. Post street

Mid-century Dwell

Today I'm at a Peet's I rarely visit, on Van Ness (it is of the old, oak and granite style, but so small it's hard to get a seat.) For a time I was blinded by the sun, so had to abandon my laptop for the Dwell magazine I had almost forgotten about in my backpack. 

I have mixed feelings about Dwell magazine, but you have to admire their dedication to Mid-Century Modernism. The "finishing touch" this issue (the little stand-alone feature on the page before the penultimate page, if you're counting the back cover as the final page... I'm confused now) is about Jean Prouvé and a recently published monograph cunningly titled, Jean Prouvé by Raymond Guidot. 

Prouvé is another of those outstanding figures with formal training in neither architecture nor engineering. Seeing his work does take me back to that time, but while I like the strength and simplicity of his furnature, it seems to me to lack the grace one finds in the work of the Eameses and in some of the Scandinavians and Finns.

The final regular feature in this (September-October 2017) issue is of a condo unit on the 31st floor of a Chicago building on the lake. Here they've done a splendid job of recreating everything about Mid-Century Modernism I hated at the time, and I find my taste has not changed. I think it's one of  the most ghastly dwellings Dwell has ever presented. Turn this unit over to me and I would be the one bringing in the crew to gut the place and start fresh, something that usually drives me nuts.

Another feature in this issue shows a smallish apartment in Buenos Aires where the owners (he an architect) gutted the place and found, of course, interesting floors, ceilings, and battered masonry walls in the entry -- all of which they preserved. Now I would have preserved them too, but I would have had mixed feelings about it. The ceiling is interesting, but busy and impossible to keep clean. Ditto the entry. 

It's just as well I can't afford to take on a project like this as I would inevitably be confronted with either preserving something I liked -- but didn't really want here -- or spending money and bringing in more building materials to cover that thing. This would be in some hypothetical space, not my own place. 

A couple days later...

Bank Cafe

My original plans for today haven't worked out, and so I have been pulled here by my desire for a Bun Mee crispy tofu sandwich later this afternoon. On my way home I will hit the Chinatown branch library to return one book and pick up my next. This rarely works out so well, and it would have been even sweeter if the library had opened before 1pm, so I could have hit it on my way here.

This location on Kearny has always been marginal. Kearny is the seam between Union Square and the Financial District -- which works perfectly for a bank cafe but this block of Post has been in transition for years, ever since the Rizzoli Bookstore next door closed. But that is about to change again.

Shreve's (our premier local jewelry store) recently moved from their temporary location where Rizzoli had been, to their new location across the street. And now Britex Fabrics (our premier local fabric store) is transforming the old Rizzoli space for their new location. And since that is next door to (actually the same building as) Gumps (our premier local expensive housewares emporium), this block is suddenly turning into a major destination for people with money. 

I don't know if this has anything to do with the bank cafe's plans to remodel next month, but it might. Honestly, I don't see much overlap in the Gumps/Shreve/Britex crowd and the laptop dependent crowd here in the cafe, but at least the block should be without urine attracting gaps for a change.

All this change might be better for the Mechanic's Institute, which is in the next block down Post toward the subway station. I do expect to join there at some point, but I suspect you would be more likely to find their members in those three other SF traditions than here at the cafe. 

And I do wonder how this retail location musical chairs will play out once the subway under Stockton Street is complete in 2019 (or whenever). Businesses have been chased from Stockton like nervous rodents, causing the retail heart of Union Square to shift to Grant Street. When Stockton Street returns to civic life -- and with another subway station spurring the flow of people at both the Market Street and Union Square (proper) ends -- Stockton will suddenly return to being the most desirable location in the area. Will the shops reshuffle again? 

I don't expect the new subway station (on the Central Line) to do much business at first, so the main benefit will be easier access for people who have been avoiding the construction zone for all these years. Eventually, in ten years or more, Rose Pak's subway will make economic sense and businesses that can afford it will try to cluster around Stockton. Assuming retail shops are still a thing in ten years.

They are now talking about opening just the section of the Central Subway from Union Square to the south in a couple years, to provide better access to the Warrior's new arena (which project has hardly even begun but will probably happen faster than the government projects.) This makes total sense, but I don't think anyone would have suggested it prior to Rose Pak's sudden death this year. I hope her coffin is well secured as I'm sure the thought of her subway opening without the connection to Chinatown proper would have driven her wild. 

I've never been a fan of zombie stories, but I understand there are fast and slow zombies. Rose would be a nasty zombie. 

214. Fire, light, and literacy

Magic light

I feel guilty about this, but I am so loving the light we are getting in SF thanks to the catastrophic wildfires to the north. I'm sitting in the front window of the Market Street Peet's, and the light is shining parallel with the sidewalk, hitting the people walking toward the west full in the face. It is what is known in cinema as "Magic Hour" light, usually what you get just before sunset -- the movie Catch 22 used this light to the best effect. Only, because of the smoke in the air, we are getting it all day, or close to it. 

The around the equinox light here is pretty great anyway, but this just makes it transfixing. I can't stop looking at the faces of people walking past. A cinematographer would be so envious of this light.

Literacy

On Medium, I keep running into (thanks to an algorithm that has noticed what I click on, I realize) pieces by young people arguing the importance of reading widely. Sometimes there are lists, which can be revealing in any number of ways, but other times they are just saying you need to take the time to read as much as you can.

Of course I see in this support for my belief in a constant "10%" (Alan Kay's term) of people who actually think about things. Some of the newer books suggested would not make my list, but that doesn't mean they don't belong. One recent list surprised me by including Xenophon's book about Cyrus, which I haven't read! I am shocked and appalled that some Millennial has read a Classic I haven't. And I know he really has read it since he launched into an unnecessary defense of/preference for Xenophon over Plato. (My guess is the SF Public Library didn't have this when I was plowing through their Classics section. I read both the Anabasis and his Symposium.)

That's life

This Sunday La Cucina is back with a San Francisco Street Food Festival -- after skipping 2016 due to an overabundance of response from the public in 2015. Unfortunately, Sunday is not only the day of our next book club meeting (The Five Invitations) but I'm hosting. 

When I finally learned that the food event -- very much my kind of thing, as it is all food and in the past has been overwhelmingly busy -- I requested a special, four hour shift at the end of the day. This would be after our meeting but would only run an hour past the close of the event. My boss told the scheduling person to post this, but she never did. I let it slide as Mary was so busy the past week and more, and then the fires hit this week and two other events happening this weekend have now been cancelled (one was a half marathon). 

(And speaking of breathing, a percentage of people on the sidewalks are wearing some kind of face mask for protection against the poor quality of the air. Honestly, I haven't noticed it being that bad. I turned on my air cleaner at home because I just bought it last year and might as well use it, but this air quality would have been great when I was growing up in the Valley. The Valley equivalent of Monty Python's Yorkshiremen, "Oh, I wish we had had smoke polluted air like this when I was a lad...." I imagine there's a small poison oak component to the smoke, but it can't be that bad at this distance. Seem to be more East Asians with masks, possibly because they're used to wearing them at home.)

So now I'm thinking it's just as well my shift was forgotten, as they can now plug in some of the people who lost shifts at the other events. Sadly, this is unlikely to end like the Berkeley Kite Festival -- the other event where they screwed up and didn't give me a shift -- because I still worked the second day there and got to hear how much I had been missed the previous day. I'm unlikely to hear any feedback from this end-of-the-season event.

213. City streets

Life resumes

My day-after-HSB rest day is now past (I really didn't have any kind of cramps or post event distress, yay!) and I started the top-to-bottom cleaning of my building. It's still a little smoky here due to all the wild fires up north, but the wind is changing now and it's getting cooler -- good cleaning weather.

There's actually a number of HOA tasks on the near horizon. End of the year documents to create, our annual fire inspection to schedule. When I get home I'm going to test our emergency lights again. Really, it doesn't amount to that much. I need a new book.

Some things that have been sitting in my notes for a while now...

SOMA

Sitting at the 4th street Peet's, needed a little oak and granite. Walked here the long way through the middle of the Financial District and the new "Downtown" SOMA. Work is progressing on Salesforce Tower and the Transbay Transit Center but neither is on the cusp of opening. 

Walking past some other projects that are still in early stages of construction, I was thinking that the best thing about the over budget Transit Center is that it gave the authorities political cover for going higher-density than SF is usually comfortable with. It's still too soon to be able to envision what this new neighborhood will look like when built out in (maybe) ten years, but it will be something new for SF.

And while I'm downtown, here's something I wrote about cities. 

Why I love cities

And by cities I mean truly urban streets. Yesterday my plan had been to eat lunch and work in a cafe out by Lincoln Park, but I had forgotten they only accept cash and I didn't have enough cash for lunch. I had enough for iced tea and a snack, and that was fine.

But today I walked down to the Peet's on Market (because I also need to buy some more septic-tank-cleaning-enzyme-stuff) and, when I got in line I realized I had even less cash and using a card for under $5 is just silly. But this is downtown and my bank has ATMs directly across Market, and there's even one of the grand, older branches a block away. In fact, I have the option of at least a half dozen Wells Fargo ATM machines within about a block radius. 

Yesterday I could have paid a fee and used a third party ATM machine if I was desperate, but in a proper city the services you want tend to be magically available thanks to the "invisible hand" of the free market. (I'm misusing Adam Smith's concept here, but just a little. And, while not affirming his theory, my variation -- that business entities, while attempting to maximize their business, end up providing services where they are most wanted, I think is true and is particularly visible in urban areas. Starbucks -- I'm looking at one directly across the street -- is the best example of this at the moment. A block from here there are two Starbucks locations directly across 4th Street from each other. One has been there forever and serves the convention trade and people flowing in and out of the massive parking garage that houses the cafe. The other is new and associated with the Target store. They both look busy every time I'm in the area.)

This is why it drives me nuts when neighborhood interests reject increased density for fear of traffic. Yes, "traffic," in the sense of cars on the road doesn't effect me personally because I don't have a car, but traffic in the sense of people, foot-traffic, on the streets is the main factor in determining the value of urban real estate. 

And, Yes, developments like La Defense are a spectacular and indefensible waste of foot-traffic density. But here, around Union Square, most of the buildings and the urban design is 19th century (pre-City Beautiful!) and the exorbitant cost of real estate has driven landlords to maximize rents by creating as much retail space as possible accessible to the sidewalks. The best example of this being the Metreon, which had to be completely redesigned to take advantage of all the sidewalk frontage they were wasting.

The worst frontage wasters in the area now are the convention center and some of the newer hotels, but even the Hilton is attempting to do what Macys did and rent out spaces on their perimeter to retail tenants. Unfortunately for them, they are on the Tenderloin side of Union Square and, for the moment, much of their foot traffic is interested mostly in their chemicals of choice and social services.

212. The power of pain

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2017

In previous years I've literally limped out of the park at the end of my Sunday shift at HSB, totally spent, but not this year. In sports, this would be called "peaking at the right time." My back, wrist, and all my various body-parts were perfect at the crucial moment and I could have worked longer if I hadn't run out of bags and if idiots weren't taking apart the area where I was trying to work. I can't even explain how my feet were so much better than normal at the end of 27 hours of working hard on uneven ground.

Take that being-a-senior-citizen!

As I expected, things did not go according to plan -- always a safe bet. The new Arrow vendor row -- on the opposite side of Hellman Hollow (Speedway Meadow) where the Arrow Stage was in previous years -- was both smaller and more contained. Aside from a lack of shade, it was easier to work than the old location... until the end. 

The only act I always catch is Emmylou Harris's final set on the Banjo Stage. I take care of as many stations at the back of that crowd as I can handle -- this time just one as I couldn't see any others in the crowd. By the time I returned to my vendors, they had filled my well-ordered compost cans with way more compost than anyone could deal with and, to make things really interesting, they were in the process of taking the whole area apart -- something that previously didn't happen until the following day. 

I had to create order in trashed stations and sort the usual black vendor bags, while the stations themselves were either blocked or being shifted around. If I hadn't run out of bags, I would have stayed even longer than I did, but between the lack of bags and being unable to get to some of our cans, I finally just gave up and went home. Still, I think I got all the vendor bags -- though there may have been some in areas I couldn't get to -- and I did the best I could with the huge volume of heavy, high quality compost the vendors left behind as they shut down.

If it had gone any better, I would have been suspicious, so I can't complain -- despite the complaining and suggestions-for-next-year emails I've already sent out.

But where, you ask, does "the power of pain" come in? As I said, I felt great last night after I arrived home and, was a little stiff, but otherwise still surprisingly good when I got up this morning. None-the-less, I got my ass up and went to the gym this morning for an abbreviated session. The year old memory of my double hamstring cramp from the Monday after HSB last year was sufficiently motivating to get me to the gym even though I felt fine and was taking a bunch of other steps to avoid cramps. 

And here's the show and tell:

Our HQ between my food vendor area and Banjo Stage with a smaller eco-station in the foreground and my boss, the Mary in Green Mary, in the background:

"My" compost dumpster Before:

Same dumpster at 4pm on Sunday, with three hours of concert and more hours of dumping still to come:

The before of the recycling dumpster: 

Again, the After at 4pm on Sunday. Note the comparatively empty landfill in the background. This is why we do what we do:

(This is one of our two smaller dumpster locations. I pestered Mary until she finally went along and got the event to go along as well. Previously, all this waste would have been hauled much further away in golf carts and truck to our main dumpster/sorting location at the stables. This saves a huge amount of time and some gas.)

Emmylou Harris on stage at the end of the festival. The face in the center of the backdrop is Warren Hellman who started and funded the festival:

My view from the back of the crowd with some of our compost cans in the foreground:

I wanted to get the last of the sun at the top of the trees, but my station got busy and I missed it. This was the last shot I took:

HSB related...

The Arming Scene

I've written before about the scene in action films (like Predator 2) and possibly originating in The Odyssey, where the hero puts on his armor and gathers his weapons. (There are similar scenes in The Iliad, but I like the one with Odysseus the best.) It occurred to me as I dressed for day one of HSB that I have my own little arming scene. Here's how it goes.

The evening before I lay out my cargo pants and fill the pockets with the personal items and gear I will need for my work. Now that I'm carrying a backpack, most things go there, including spare rolls of bags, marking pens, energy bars, 1st aid supplies, my headlamp, and camera. I still put my work gloves and water bottle in my cargo pockets. 

I also assemble my hat, picker-stick, lifting belt, and the Green Mary t-shirt I wear over my long-sleeved undershirt. And I write out any notes I need for the event -- who's the crew chief, where we are to meet, any transit notes including a time schedule for when I have to leave to arrive on time.

The next morning I apply sunscreen (magical ointment as protection against Apollo, the Sun god) then put on my UPF 50 Apollo resistant undershirt (I only have two of these so I went with a thicker cotton shirt on what was supposed to be the coolest day of HSB), my thin under-socks and heavy outer socks, and then put on my cargo pants, one leg at a time. Then I put on my heavy work boots -- because I knew I would be working on uneven ground, for this event I laced them all the way up for extra support -- before putting on the lifting-belt and then the Green Mary t-shirt on top.

Finally I put on my UPF 50, wide-brimmed hat and firmly grab my tool... I mean my picker-stick. Thus equipped I go forth to sort and haul and dump.


Not for the first time, I'm almost certain, on Saturday -- the busiest day on the Speedway Meadow portion of HSB -- I noticed a similarity between managing our Greening operation and fighting a battle. It is so satisfying when you are busy doing something else and you suddenly get this visceral understanding of military strategy, relevant to most any era and region. I'm going to start with the military version and return to the Greening.

Napoleon lived and died by this strategy and usually it worked for him -- this is one of the things Tolstoy found incomprehensible in War and Peace. But I'm going to take the instance I know best (this one didn't work either, but it almost did) Gettysburg in the American Civil War. First you attack on a flank, in this instance the Union right flank. The enemy is forced to reinforce that flank to prevent a breakthrough. Next you attack on the left flank forcing the enemy to throw in even more reserves and even shift units over from the center. Finally, you launch your main assault at the center where the enemy is weakened, and after most of his reserves are committed elsewhere.

At HSB, besides Speedway Meadow, where I always work, there are additional stages in Marx Meadow and in Lindley Meadow. Mid-afternoon on Saturday we started getting calls for help from Lindley and sent some people over to help. Mary would be an awful general as she over-reacts to any situation like this, but in this case she was already off and it was other people who left us with very few people on hand when the crowd surged back in our direction at the end of the day. I had to leave my vendors unattended (like leaving toddlers alone with balloons filled with gasoline and a bunch of lighters) and go out on the field to keep the stations near the food from overflowing. My constant whining about how great the large, blue recycling toters lined with heavy bags were for dealing with situations just like this, payed off this year as we had these all over the field. 

It takes a great deal to fill one of these toters, and even when that happens one person (me) can dump out about half the contents into one of these spare bags to keep the station functioning. (You can even sort out the compost and landfill at the same time so you end up with a fairly clean bag of recycling next to a fairly clean toter, or two toters since they are usually paired and I can dump twice into the same bag.) This method worked perfectly on Saturday. But back to my analogy...

In our case we are not opposing an enemy general but, in the HSB case, the person who scheduled the events on the various stages. It is very easy to end up playing whack-a-mole with crowds that shift from stage to stage, meadow to meadow. And anyway, the worst that can happen is that some eco-stations over-flow for a period of time until someone can get to them. We would rather this didn't happen, but it's also inevitable when the crowd gets to a certain density, regardless of staffing.

But as I watched (listened) to this developing on Saturday, I could completely understand the over reaction of a general being attacked by Napoleon. In the heat of the moment you are trying to be strong everywhere and end up being weak at the critical point. 

Meade, at Gettysburg, had the advantage of a numerically larger army that was still arriving at the battlefield so he could keep sending new units in to fill in the gaps in his line. 


My favorite sight of the festival
In that crowd watching Emmylou Harris, a man walked past me carrying, or rather embracing, a dog. The dog was a Beagle and they were chest to chest, face to face. The Beagle and I locked eyes as they went past and seemed to communicate "Don't judge us" -- instead of the "I wouldn't mind eating whatever you have in that bag" I usually get from dogs when I'm working.

211. pre-HSB

Living with the animals...

I needed a Peet's interlude, so after my mid-afternoon shower I walked back downtown to the Market Street Peet's. I walked in behind a streetperson/crazy I quickly identified by the bright blue Ross (Dress For Less) store cart he was dragging behind him. I was afraid I was going to be in line with him, so I wasn't sad (or really surprised) to see him veer off toward the bathrooms where there was a substantial waiting line. But this is where it gets worth writing about.

Imagine you were really desperate for a toilet, or simply sociopathic and didn't care about other people. Regardless of your need or your ruthlessness, you would have to time your arrival just right to be able to jump the line and walk directly into a bathroom. This guy did just that. Someone was coming out just as he walked up and he bolted in -- leaving his Ross cart behind.

The poor Peet's staff tried to get him to come out, but you know how well that worked. I wasn't waiting in the line, but I'm pretty sure I would have been as impressed by the guys timing even if I had been. But my question is, How do you end up a crazy street person when you have that kind of luck?

An atypical week

Not only am I working weekdays, instead of my usual weekends, but I worked three straight days with a double shift (two, four hour shifts) on the middle day. Three shifts were at Oracle OpenWorld here at Moscone Center. (The reason I signed up for this was to see how they were going to manage working around the construction zone in the middle of the convention center. It was blocked off with a green wall -- not a living wall, but a wall covered in what looked like AstroTurf. The area was constrained but people who hadn't been here before wouldn't even notice.) 

So I spent three hours each day standing on the carpet in the sun showing people where to put their trash. 

Then last evening I also worked "Taste of Temescal" in Oakland -- a nice little neighborhood event where a bunch of restaurants serve food on the sidewalk and we put out our eco-stations to collect the resulting trash. The event was easy to work, the only problem was that it was spread out over more than ten blocks. We sorted all the trash and hauled it back to a truck near the middle of the area. There were only two of us, which made me nervous, but it worked out fine. It's amazing what two good people can accomplish -- and equally amazing how more useless people can do so little.  

The event audience was annoying. An odd combination of dense and patronizing. Maybe it was because I was always in a hurry since we had so much space to cover. 

And this whole week all of us "greeners" are mostly just getting ready for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which is looming on the horizon. Today I did laundry so I have all the clothing options for this weekend. At least I will be in control of what I'm wearing (clothes and gloves and hats) because I have no control over the changes going on at the event, which I already know will be extensive. I tried to sort out some things online, but haven't heard anything back since Saturday -- I'm expecting lots of "fresh hell" when I arrive Friday, late morning.

The most fun viewing at Oracle today was the sniffer dogs. There were three of them, two yellow Labs and one Black, and one of the Yellows was younger and got excited when he saw the others. He had to be calmed down. The Yellow female was very well behaved. 

It still looks like the weather will be perfect this weekend -- not a cloud in the sky and in the 70s F -- though I think there's going to be less shade in my area than in the past so it's going to feel hotter. I'm reviewing my hydration plans. Already stocked up on enough electrolyte water for the weekend. (I'm glad I just checked the forecast again, now they are predicting tomorrow will be the warmest day at 75 with it dropping down to 69 on Sunday. This is good news.)

Also, John Prine (another of my favorites) will precede Emmylou Harris on the Banjo stage at the end of the day Sunday. I would have preferred their being spaced out more, so I could move closer to the stage for both sets, but I'm hoping I will be able to hear Prine from the area where I will be working. 

Astrophysics

Since I had lots of time on my hands while working Oracle, my mental subject was the observable universe. Thinking about the universe on this scale is as mind boggling as thinking about reality on the quantum scale. The most distant galaxies we can see are composed of stars consisting almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, and they are over 13 billion light years away (and the universe is less than 14 billion years old.)

These early galaxies exist (as I understand it) in every direction we can look, so that we know the universe was a big place even then, and that we are not on an edge of that universe. We also know, based on the redshift of the photons coming from these early stars, that space is expanding in all directions. There's a way of describing space as being like a ball of bread dough with raisins distributed throughout the dough, that is intended to help us understand the concept of expanding space. As the bread bakes, it rises and the distance between the raisins gets greater. This works fine when you think of bread dough when you can see it all rising together at the same time. But with the universe that isn't the case.

We see those distant, early galaxies not as they are now but as they were 13 billion+ years ago. As the photons reaching us passed from there to here they passed through space that was more and more expanded. The center is now baked bread -- to continue with the metaphor -- but the surface of the ball that we can see is still cool dough. (In fact, we calculate the current location of the most distant stars as over 40 billion light years away, but we will never see what's happening at that distance now. And that would be true even if we lived for 40+ billion years, as the continued expansion of space means the light from those regions will never ever reach us.)

But, with all this, what I have trouble with is the expansion of space at the center of the ball we are looking at -- which is really just our observable universe, not the universe as a whole, since we have no idea how big that is and we never will know.

Talking about time on this scale is even worse that talking about geological time. I don't know, off hand, if life will be seared off Earth by the Sun before or after parts of today's observable universe start disappearing. But, let's say that stage of the expansion of the universe precedes major changes to the structure of our Sun. How strange it will be to know you are seeing a galaxy -- maybe with a spectacular quasar at it's heart -- for the last time. Will the news media report this the way they report the passing of rock stars? Or maybe like they report the passing of much lesser celebrities. 

Will we rage against the dying of these lights?

210. Surrender to the Sacred

Link to Table of Contents

Surrender to the Sacred

From The Five Invitations

This is the part of the book that most evokes the transformative aspect of death that makes me think of Dostoevsky. And yes, I do agree that thinking about death can lead you to live better. To think about what is really important, even if you don't go all the way to "surrendering to the sacred" and leaving shallow earthly concerns behind.

And yes, Ostaseski does include some stories where we can see ordinary people making spiritual progress as they "actively die." But I don't recall any tales of already self-aware people gaining essential knowledge as they pass through an elemental death. 

There's no doubt in my mind that Zen Hospice is the best place to die slowly, but is there any reason to believe that a slow, Zen Hospice death is preferable to a quick death like Ficre's in The Light of the World?

Or to put it another way, isn't the ecstatic, spiritual peace people claim to experience in near-death experiences the same -- or very similar to -- the excruciatingly won sense of the sacred people sometimes gain through active dying? 

Or, to put it yet another way, why would anyone opt for a long slow death if given another option?

And that brings to a close the initial reading of this book.



Hospice and morphine are the two great magics reserved for "the end" in our times -- in the past it would probably have been religion in the sense Dostoevsky has in mind. Morphine is not the panacea people (like my mother) imagine -- though, in her case it really was a panacea in that it killed her within the hour. Both my parents were open to the notion of hospice and would have benefited from the experience Ostaseski describes. My dad was even accepted for "hospice," but there was no place he could get to on a weekend, so he received "hospice" care in the hospital which just meant that they gave up trying to cure him and tried to keep him comfortable without having actual hospice training. His final days would have been so much better if he had been at Zen -- or any other -- hospice.

My mother's doctors never accepted that she was dying, so hospice was never on the table. 

But here's the thing, I think my parents experience is actually a better guide to dying than the wonderful accounts in this book. Whatever control you think you have over how you will die is an illusion. Forget "Surrender to the Sacred," dying most often involves Surrender to Fate and very frequently to the Whims of the Hospital Industry. People want to die in their own bed or in a grassy field overlooking the Pacific, but if you're smart you will prepare for the worst death you can imagine. 

And that is actually a reason to read this book. So you can bring your hospice experience with you wherever you are. Frank, after all, is almost certainly going to miss your passing, so you're going to need to be your own spiritual guide.

Henry Ryecroft

I already referenced The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft once in connection with The Five Invitations (the Pascal quote), but I need to do it again. Gissing sometimes went off on tangents, but the core of the Ryecroft book had something in common with Ostaseski's book. Ryecroft, too, was facing the end. (As was Gissing.) Ryecroft left his life, the person he had been, behind and simplified so that he could focus on what was really important to him. In the book, it was the classic Victorian bequest that set him free, but you can imagine someone acting the same way as a response to the ideas in Ostaseski's book or a near brush with death.

The section on the Port Royal writers was as close as he got to talking about the sacred, but his endless walks and reading and gardening were Gissing's path to a life worth living. As I said in that blog, I wish Gissing had described more at the end. We don't get any of the hospice part of the tale, but we do see how Ryecroft's confrontation with death changed him.

Tenants

Our building is once again majority rental. A new resident moved into a previously owner-occupied unit and, in the process, managed to create a long gouge in the low ceiling above the stair landing. (No idea how.) I hesitated to patch and re-paint it as I wasn't confident our new paint was a good match for the older paint in that part of the building. But the landlord of the newly rental unit in question offered to buy more paint if there was a problem, so I took a shot at it. 

My first pass was spectacularly crappy. I had to sand it down a lot and apply a second coat. Looked fine when I left, but we'll see for sure after it dries and I view it in both day and night lighting conditions. Worst case, I'm thinking, is it will be something I might notice but no one else ever will. And I don't go up those stairs that frequently.

Our seismic retrofit is now a year in the past (the re-painting of the retrofitted walls is only six months in the past) and I still get a feeling of overwhelming relief every time I think about that whole experience being safely in the past. And, now I think of it, you could make a few quick find-and-replace changes to Ostaseski's book on death and turn it into a book on surviving a huge building project. Maybe Ostaseski and Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs could get together and co-author a book.

Greening

Starting tomorrow, my life is going to get crazy for a solid week. Like an ass, I signed up for three shifts at Oracle OpenWorld to see how they are going to work around the construction site in the middle of Moscone Center. I'm already regretting this. 

Then HSB starts on Friday. I have no idea if I will be blogging or not. I could have lots to say. I could just want to hide under the covers. The weather looks to be fair and mild -- perfect. We'll see.