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This morning I am, as usual on a Sunday, at Quacks sitting at my regular table and contemplating the graffiti on the wall next to me: “Omens will eat you alive.”  It appeared months ago, barely a week after the new paint job dried, and I’ve been wondering what it means ever since.  Or more to the point, what it meant to the person who wrote it.

The joy of graffiti often comes from its crypticness, though from my experience that’s usually more of a pleasure for the scrawler than the observer.  People love in-jokes as long as they’re in on them and there’s little in this world that’s more an in-joke than graffiti only you and maybe one or two other people will understand.  At least that was my experience back when I fearlessly wielded a Marks-A-Lot.

 Defacing any flat surface of common property seemed to come naturally in my school years – it was, as my brother later said of bumper stickers, “just another way to carry on the dialogue.”  Desks in every classroom and stall-dividers in every boys’ bathroom at Westtown were covered with graffiti and even as a day student I contributed my share – Ramones lyrics, derogatory comments about the Student Body President (the one my senior year weaseled his way into office on a promise of beer in the water fountains), even just the names of the King Crimson members on the first album.  When I first started using the Upper School bathrooms in 7^th grade I spent any number of hours pondering other messages left: who felt compelled to share with the school that “Kintner is burned out on glue”?  Why did someone draw a mangy likeness of a mutt closely modeled on Thurber’s Muggs and title it “Potto’s Dog” (Potto being the name assigned to an Assistant Boy’s Dean who reputedly patrolled the grounds at night with a flashlight, shaking bushes to flush out pot-smokers) when Potto, far as anyone knew, didn’t even have a dog?  And so on.

 Things got a lot more out of hand in college, as they will when you gather a bunch of young people who think they’re just so damn clever.  At first I was content to confine my wall-scrawlings to my own dorm; one winter night left to my own devices in Seymour after practically everyone had already gone home for winter break and feeling particularly nihilistic, I wrote “Is it true as you say that we’re on the eve of destruction?” in peanut butter in the stairwell.  It wasn’t until I fell in with Ivan junior year that I learned the folly of this; Ivan worked part-time for Buildings & Grounds and told me, “They all know it’s you, man, and they’re just waiting for you to fuck up.”  Ivan taught me how to graffiti the smart way like he did, which was every-damn-where else on campus.  Also how to make it cryptic enough so it wasn’t easily traceable to its source; Ivan hated hippies, but no one who didn’t know him well would ever guess that  “No tofu for you!”, which appeared ubiquitously in El Marko throughout senior year, was his handiwork. 

And when I graduated and moved to Boston I viewed the city at first as an extension of Bard.  I took a house in Somerville with Lori, who had grown up in Tivoli and was getting away for the first time; Lori bought a magnum marker, the biggest the art supply stores sold, and proceeded to use it everywhere she went in Somerville – even (or especially) on sidewalks.  She was freaked out by Harry Hood, at the time a pint-size animated spokesman for the area’s predominant line of dairy products, so she tried to exorcise him by prefacing nonsensical statements with “Harry sez:” or often just “Harry gives Hood head!”  I preferred my favored Bard icon, a stick figure with wedge-shaped head.  For us this was only perfectly reasonable behavior and I had no idea how annoying it probably was to the working-class folks around us.

(Actually, I kind of did.  We both hated Somerville.  If we’d stayed in that neighborhood longer than three months and kept that shit up one or both of us would have likely made the acquaintance of the local PD and not in a good way.)

 Leaving Boston though broke me of the habit, pretty much for good.  Greenpeace shipped me to Greenwich, then Philadelphia, and finally San Francisco and in the course of my travels I gradually absorbed the idea that in most of the real world – specifically, the world that I wanted to learn to be a part of - there’s just no place where graffiti doesn’t stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.  And because I never did it as performance art or as a revolutionary act or really for any reason but getting (and hopefully provoking) a cheap laugh, it didn’t seem worth the risk.

 Or maybe joining up with Greenpeace channeled my need to act out into a more socially acceptable (and certainly better-protected) venue.  If you want to call 80s-era GP “socially acceptable.”  I suppose I could have done much worse and gone for Earth First instead.

Whatever.  No here I am 25 years later, back in a college town where the graffiti is good, great sometimes, but mostly still cryptic.  I don't feel any particular desire to join in; cheap laughs are just as easy to come by these days from other sources.  I'll probably always feel the urge to interpret, though, as I'm proving this morning at Quacks.

Nope.  You're not imagining it - after 2 1/2 years on this blog I finally changed the design.  (Too lazy to do my own so this is the "Scribe" theme handily provided by Vox.)  Doing things different in a new month, and all that.  Let's see how long this one lasts.

Every month I need to find something new to blame for not blogging more and this time it’s going to be Evernote.  Since I got back from CA I’ve been working heavy-duty with this program and by now am well into the refinement part of the process referred to back in July.  Problem is, the more I do the more I want to do; delving into your own history can be addictive.  My attention to the outside world has been suffering as a result.  So has, fortunately to a much smaller degree, my job performance.  Time to get focused come tomorrow and a new month.

Meantime, things don’t stop happening in real time.  Sunday night saw me at the Paramount for what was billed as a panel discussion of bicycling in Austin, past present and future, moderated by none other than the famous David Byrne.  Mr. Byrne, who while not exactly closely familiar with the vagaries of cycling in this town (as he graciously was the first to admit), did certainly serve to get the place packed.  I was in the front of the balcony so I don’t know if it was SRO downstairs but I wouldn’t be surprised given how even the most uncomfortable seats around me were all taken.

It wasn’t exactly a panel.  Byrne gave a presentation on what he’s seen cycling in Austin earlier that day and elsewhere in the world (presumably this was a win-win appearance for him given he’s got a book just out on the topic), followed by Rob D’Amico of the League of Bicycle Voters, Annick Beaudet of the City of Austin, and someone else (Jan McCann?) who spoke on the place of cycling in Austin’s civic and commercial development plans.  That all took well over an hour, with about 20 minutes left for questions at the end.  There was no interchange between the panelists which I found a little disappointing, but since admission was free for all there’s hardly room to complain.

One of the best questions came from my friend Michael Zakes, who runs Waterloo Cycles (my vendor of choice for hardware and repairs): “Mr. Byrne, was it you or Michael Stipe who first started taking your bike with you on tour?”  Byrne, unruffled, responded that as far as he knew they were both preceded by Kraftwerk.  Good answer!  I’ve only seen DB once before in public, fronting the Heads in 82, and the other night I was struck by how unexpectedly (no pun intended) autistic he increasingly looked as the evening progressed, nervous and overly tic-y.  I think the man needs a podium or a mike stand to be behind to feel comfortable for more than 10 minutes on stage.

Well… I suppose that’s another one for the records.

Some time back on another blog I did a number of “10 years ago” posts detailing what I was doing at this time, approximate or exact, in 1996 and 1997 and etc.  Those posts were fun and better yet they were valuable but I stopped because reminiscing publicly like that carries a certain risk of inundation.  Those years were fertile and pivotal ones for me, but most of all they were active as hell.  Even I could barely keep track of myself at the time.  (I suppose if I’d been keeping at least a paper journal then it would have helped but I didn’t start that until late 2001.)

This marks a resumption of those posts, which in turn marks a special occasion: tomorrow, September 2, it’s been 10 years since I met Angela.  That meeting was in a way the culmination of much of the activity of the preceding years; it seems now that so much of what I did served to nudge me towards that one little point in time, being at that particular place under those particular circumstances at that particular moment.  Cattle in a chute is how my mind’s eye sees it.  Maybe I’m romanticizing or self-mythologizing or whatever you call it; wouldn’t be the first time I've done that. 

What I do know is if I’ve ever had an hour that changed everything that was to come after, it was on that Thursday afternoon in the Blue Light District, Black Rock City, Nevada, USA.  I think it was about 2:30 but don’t quote me on that.  Maybe Angela noted it in her journal.  She was always the more meticulous of the two of us.

On the face of it, the importance of that meeting is pretty simply explained: leaving California and coming to Austin has been the single biggest influence on my life in the decade that’s followed.  Next to writing and Quakerism, Austin (and the conditions I’ve lived under here) is the only factor that’s mattered this whole time.  And I would have never come to Austin if I hadn’t met Angela.  Two plus two always adds up to four.

Not that I necessarily had a clue as to that meeting’s watershed status when it happened.  It barely rated mention in the next day’s morning pages, the closest thing I kept to a journal then – there were so many other things, heavy-duty things in my little sphere of existence, going on that same day and the ones right before it.  It wouldn’t be until nine months later that I went back and reconstructed that day and its circumstances in full, devoting an entire entry of my new blog to it, and nine months is plenty of time for romanticizing and self-mythologizing to creep in. 

At the time and immediately afterwards, Angela’s appearance seemed like a head-spinning combination of the absurdly random and heavy-handedly miraculous: if I hadn’t offered her my apartment to stay in while I was already on the playa, she’d never have needed to come to my camp to return the key.  If she’d come on that errand a day or even a few hours sooner or for that matter later, presuming I’d even been there I would almost certainly have blown her off or maybe her me.  (Never mind how, I just know: one or both of us would have looked the other over briefly before making a mental checkmark - “Ah, nice but not for me, not with so many other fish on the playa” or something like that.)  If while lounging with Tom Morgan and Lynn Adesko in their camp 100 feet away, discussing old Led Zeppelin records, I’d ignored the sudden, urgent intuitive prompting to for no discernible reason whatsoever return to mine right this very moment, I’d have missed her completely - she’d have just left the key under one of my big brass candlesticks and I’m pretty sure I would have never heeded the note she planned to leave with it inviting me to her camp way the hell on the other side of BRC.

And so on.  What I’m trying to get at here is that us meeting at all, let alone exactly when and where we did, was the culmination of an unlikely series of events in a chain so fragile that any little deviation would have destroyed it completely.  “A series of coincidences on the order of winning the Irish Sweepstakes” is how I believe Stephen King once put it.  That's certainly what it felt like then.

And still does, to a degree.  Yet it happened, it did, and nothing’s been the same since.  I’m guessing such stories aren’t exactly unique in the history of love, but it’s the only time anything like it has ever happened to me.

That'll probably remain the case too.  You’re lucky if that kind of love, that seems-like-fate coming together, that resulting complete alteration of your life’s course, happens to you even once in your life.  That’s what I’m thinking about ten years minus one day later.  That’s why I’m dragging out the hoary old “ten years ago” meme once more.

What gets to me is that I forgot about this anniversary until last Friday, and when I remembered I was afraid it was already past.  A little record-delving settled that but it’s been on my mind ever since.  Can it really have been ten years? is one major question;  What does it mean now? is the other.  Neither really has a satisfactory answer at the moment.

Not that they necessarily need to.  Given all that’s happened since, it’s likely enough to just remember the date, and by remembering honor it.

My friend Myra from Bard has been rummaging around for stuff to post to Facebook and this morning came up with this little gem:

That’s me and Myra in my room in Seymour sophomore year.  Myra thought it was from Barrytown several years later but I know it’s 79 f’shizzle because that hookah belonged to my across-the-hall neighbor Holly Ricker (nee Berezow) and I never saw it again after she moved to Blithewood or wherever she went mid-year.

For the record, I don’t remember conclusively but I’m pretty sure Myra is smoking tobacco only in this picture.  Because that’s all we ever used that hookah for, right?  Uh-huh.

The friendship between Myra and me is a textbook example of how things evolve when you have four years together in a fishbowl like Bard.  Freshman year I only knew her by sight, this brassy redhead with total Flushing style who lived in Gahagan (which in 78 might as well have been off-campus).  Sophomore year Myra ran with my good friend Hannah Bennett who lived upstairs in Seymour (and, I'm pretty sure, took this picture) and Lucy Park who lived in Hopson (technically the same building, connected by a creepy tunnel underneath that also housed our never-clean-enough shower facilities) and she was around a lot but, this picture evidently to the contrary, I don’t remember us getting along all that well.  Junior year she had a house off-campus with Suzanne Schwartzberg, who become one of my best friends that year, and Myra and I came to a sort of truce .  By the end of the year were even somewhat chummy.  

Chummy enough for Myra that spring to introduce me and my friend Stu to her real-estate agent father, who needed someone to look after a property on Long Island for the summer.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Or at least personal history.  That year’s summer, 1981, was a fantastic one and Myra was a big part of it – she dropped by that old ramshackle house frequently, to use our tanning deck or just hang with Stu and me and Mara (Stu’s girlfriend, whose live-in status was definitely not part of the original arrangement with Myra’s father), and we all became buds of the highest order. 

And a year later when I sublet Nancy’s apartment on the third floor of that old house in Barrytown, Myra was my first choice for roommate.  The summer of 82 was in its way just as good as the one preceding it, in part because Myra was perhaps the best roommate I ever had.  I hope she finds some real photos from that period eventually - we had a lot of fun.

Which all goes to show, you really don’t know who your friends are going to be in a few years.  So offer everyone a light when you’re given the chance.  It may pay off later.

(Suzanne, if you’re not keeping track, later married my best friend Michael.  They’re the ones who live in Warwick.  I thought I'd heard Myra's father died but she says he's alive and well and I'm glad because I really liked the guy, not least because he raised such a great daughter.  Lucy Park is in her hometown of Portland OR or so her Facebook page says; Holly Hookah-girl is on FB too.  But Hannah Bennett, Stu and Mara remain unaccounted-for.)

Never made it for the 5-spice chicken, nor into San Francisco at all on this visit.  Instead I went to the former Gray Whale Cove beach near Devil’s Slide and ate a leftover burrito, which was a lot better than it sounds.  Though it was only a token beach visit, it was still a beautiful day for it.

On the way back I stopped at the airport and exchanged the red Impala for a grey HHR, a lot more comfortable vehicle in many ways and none more than not being a speeding-ticket magnet.  Result: no tangles with the CHP the whole visit.  My having learned how to use cruise control might also have something to do with that though.

The mudbath was great, even if I did underestimate the travel time and arrive ½ hour late.  The attendant/massage therapist was very nice and attentive and I gave him a big tip even if I didn’t have the heart to suggest he trim his nails sometime soon.

Next day it was off to the Black Rock for old times’ sake.  I stayed in Gerlach at the Black Rock Bungalow, which is highly recommended if you’re going to be in the area any length of time.  Can’t compare it to the infamous Bruno’s because I’ve never stayed at the latter, but I think I’m probably happier that way.

From there it was a straight shot to the Eastern Sierra and the Writing Highway 395 workshop, and that was a great week.  Side trips to Death Valley, Mono Lake and Bodie were included.  Ate a lot, paid someone else to do the cooking and cleanup, got in a lot of writing – in some cases adding onto pieces I put down 9 and more years ago – and just generally enjoyed being in that part of the world in the clear, clean and not even remotely humid mountain air.

I’ve already published most of my trip photos over on Facebook so if you know me there (and you should) get ‘em from the source.  Otherwise all I’ll say is I wish I could have stayed longer everywhere I was.  Not to mention getting some of that damn chicken too.

Here I am in the Bay Area and totally loving it.  Of course.

The flight in wasn’t all that great but it wasn’t that bad either – just remind me next time to check in online well ahead of time like all savvy Southwest passengers do.  Got a nice shiny red rental Impala and promptly ensconced myself at Evelyn and Bill’s house and went right to sleep less than an hour after arriving.  That’s an exciting East Bay Saturday night for you!

Two days later I’m fairly well adjusted to California time.  Gotten in good visits with my sister, my hosts, a few small-f friends and the Strawberry Creek Friends Meeting;  hit up the Berkeley Bowl and Trader Joe’s as well as my favorite East 14th taqueria; gone for a lovely drive over the hills and down into tiny Canyon; trolled San Pablo Ave. for surplus flannel camping shirts.  And much more.  It’s been a very busy 60 hours already and today is more of the same.

And tomorrow it’s up to Calistoga and Dr. Wilkinson’s, first time there in 10 years.  The day after it’s off to the desert and then the mountains.  Life is good, especially in the first few days of two weeks off.

I will miss the room where I’m staying, though.  It has incredibly views of the north bay, Golden Gate and headlands and Angel Island, and the weather has thus far been quite cooperative in clearing the fog so I can enjoy them.  Temperature doesn’t top 70 and I sleep with the window open.  It’s going to be very tough returning to August Austin, I know that already.

My main plan for today is heading into SF for some 5-spice chicken on Broadway as soon as the Bay Bridge traffic starts to clear.  Salut!

Preparing to get out of town once more, this time back to California.  I'll be there for two weeks starting Saturday, staying with my friends Evelyn and Bill in Berkeley before heading out to the Sierra for a week-long writing workshop with my  longtime instructor (and friend) Clive.  Plan to get in plenty of good road-miles on the way there and back, including detours by the Black Rock Desert, Death Valley and likely Yosemite too.  A mudbath in Calistoga is on the agenda as well.  I can't wait to get behind the wheel again.

The campground where we're staying has no internet and I'm told the nearest town has only dialup from the public library, so any posting of wild locale-pics will have to wait until I'm back in Austin.  Meantime, try not to miss me too much.

As promised from the previous entry:

October 4, 1999

Walking down the street today in the Piedmont Ave. area, on my lunch break I saw a dead TV that someone had left out on the sidewalk and thought Damn, why couldn’t I have seen that last Friday instead.  At Tracey’s birthday shoot Saturday there was only one target TV and we definitely could have used at least another, nothing making my little spirit fill with glee like the sight and sound of a slug punching through a virgin CRT.  The TV that we did have lasted for a couple of firing sessions before the tube and the casing too were completely wasted.  That was fun.  I liked the shaving cream cans too, spouting noxious white stuff while spinning around on the already-littered ground, leaving trails of goo as evidence that some demented minds had been at work for the next party of shooters to find.

Y’see, we like targets that are a little more imaginative – and representational – than regular old paper bulls-eyes or silhouettes.  Cans of bad beer that gout foam; stuffed animals that just beg for a good shotgun blast to the head; watermelons that split open and spew red guts – it’s all grist for the mill.  This time I went with the folks up to public lands way the hell north in Napa County where we couldn’t do any harm to anyone but ourselves and we blow holes in all the aforementioned targets and a few other ones besides that I won’t detail on the internet.  Tracey was fresh off her breakup with Dodger and was blasting away with the PPK that Dodger, formerly loving boyfriend that he was, had given her for her birthday; Sandi her usual elegant shooting self, Jennifer Lopez-style, with her father’s .old 38; Argyre shooting anything he could borrow from others; Foo with various shotguns and Paul’s assault rifle, dressed in a Folsom Street outfit of matching leather cap and jockstrap and not much else; Paul A____ himself giggling insanely at each new desecration of some poor something on the range.  I capped off 3 boxes of ammo for my .45 – fucking expensive, that stuff – and today I feel a whole hell of a lot better for it.  As Tracey and Sandi agreed about during a pause when the range went cold, there’s nothing like the feel of a gun jumping in your hands to help deal with a bad breakup.

Come this December 15 I’ll have been online journaling/blogging for 10 years.  Not all here, of course, and what a circuitous journey it’s been: started on Diaryland, moved to Diary-X, moved again to Typepad (and lost all my Diary-X archives when it later went kaput) and then finally to Vox.  Before I made the first Diaryland entry I practice-blogged for a few months but since those entries never saw the light of day we won’t consider that an anniversary of any sort.*  December is the big one.  I can’t believe I’ve been doing this a decade now, and steadily too.  (Again, just not here.)

Ten years means a lot of words to have spilled, especially since when in the beginning my entries were routinely between 2k and 3500 words.  My biggest source of stress - apart from wondering if what I publish will really piss off people I know (or, equally, people I don’t and never will) - is keeping track of what I’ve said.  I like it when other bloggers know what they've already written and generally don't repeat themselves too much because nothing turns me off faster than a broken record.

Until this year I’ve had to rely on my own increasingly-faulty memory to promote consistency and avoid repetition, with varying degrees of success.  Going into 2009 I determined this would be The Year Of Getting My Shit Together regarding all my written product, and yes, it really is taking a full year.

First part of the project was indexing every OLJ/blog entry I’ve ever written (even those early practice runs).  In the process I found the bulk of my Diary-X archives were still available through the Wayback Machine, which was a huge bonus.  But it still took a lot of time and effort and when it was done I saw why I’d put it off for so long: because, as is so often true elsewhere, an index only scratches the surface of a document.

So in the last month I've moved on to the next stage: combing through each back-entry and extracting any section, paragraph or even sentence that strikes me as even remotely important.  Then dumping it all into a freeware program called Evernote, which is a handy little database for a life’s loose ends.  Been paying special attention to stories and/or memories, because when you’re pushing 50 you begin to wonder exactly what all these piled-up years so far have consisted of and it’s quite comforting to have some sort of answer with a quick keyword search.  It’s a huge project, and right now I’m only approaching the beginning of the Typepad-era entries.  This is a mixed blessing because though I started on Typepad in early 2004, meaning I’ve got well over halfway still to go chronologically, that was also when I first imposed a word-count of 700-900/entry.  Plus Typepad is already searchable.  I’m just about to hit the downhill slope, I think.

Though when I finish sectioning the last entry and upload the last piece to Evernote I still won’t be finished.  After that comes the refinement process: adding tags and supplementary notes, naming names and fleshing out references that I didn’t want visible on the internet, etc.  For years I’ve been frustrated that all of my history has been locked inside my head and I’ll lose it before I have a chance to make a proper dump.  I know I’m going to lose a significant chunk of it anyway but this is the best way I’ve found yet to make sure I have even a partial backup.  And as it stands I suspect I now know what I’m to be spending a good part of 2010 doing too.

*Except for the one I’m belatedly publishing here when I finish this.  See the next entry.