Things Consumed

 

December Greetings

I am alive! Really! Truly! And I hope you are, too. (If you're not, you're not reading this...)

The last 5 weeks or so have been a chaotic whirlwind. I'm in the mood to post, so let me tell you about them. From most recent to least, more or less, here's recap.

BOOKBINDING. The weather hasn't been conducive to sun printing, and the winter solstice celebrations that pass themselves off as Xmas are approaching, so I've been putting my obsessions with pretty paper and blank books to use by engaging in making handmade books. The first book was a mess, but each one since then has been surprisingly better than I expected. I made 4 last night as good as some I've bought. So I'm terribly pleased with myself. Whenever I feel insecure about what I'm doing, I refer to Cover to Cover: Creative Techniques for Making Beautiful Books, Journals, and Albums by Shereen LaPlantz (Lark Books, Asheville, NC, 1995), which covers all the basics and then offers some extremely far-out artwork as examples of where you can go. My paper fetishism now knows no bounds.

WINTERFEST. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition throws a huge, annual party in December which is one of those not-to-be-missed events. It is fun beyond belief, if you happen to be a bike person who loves chatting, eating, and being thoroughly entertained by other bike people. The company is great, and the entertainment is always fabulous. In past years, there have been burlesque troupes like the Cantankerous Lollies, the famous pogo-stripper Rocky Roulette, (yes, just try to explain his act to your friends) live bands, scary extreme bike movies, impressive bike-related art, and a fabulous live auction. (S and I are in the lower right of this picture.) My favorite part of last year's show was an appearance by the President of our Board of Supervisors, Matt Gonzalez, whose campaign for mayor I'd been volunteering for. Dinner with Matt was auction item in the exciting live auction. His self defense against the two friendly Coalitionistas who kept trying to undress him as he stood onstage was a hoot. (Gary Fisher won the dinner.)

I volunteered a bit on Saturday and early at the party, and then enjoyed an amazing performance by Circo Zero. Contortion! Incredible feats of balancing in improbable positions! Aerial acrobatics! Extraordinarily graceful dancing while swinging from ropes! One of the most impressive and non-conventional clowns I've ever seen! They rock. (And they provided those of us t-rex shaped cyclists an opportunity to see what women with really fabulous upper body strength look like.) They also provided entertainment during the auction, which vexed and distracted the professional auctioneer volunteer beyond belief, which somehow made it even better.

I left just giddy with joy that I've been there. And I left with a new, proper messenger bag from the sales table. They always have good stuff, and it always benefits the SFBC, so there's no point in resisting.

NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH. Fall was settling in, and I was taking photos, developing and scanning my film, practicing cyanotype printing, outlining a book proposal, looking for stock agencies who might be a good fit to represent my landscape and botanical images, and planning to travel. What better month to also enter a contest to write a 50,000 word novel? NaNoWriMo is a contest/support group that encourages people who always say "one day I'll write a novel" to DO IT, by getting that terrible first novel out of your system in one month. It builds confidence. It keeps you focused. It provides discussion groups on procrastination techniques. It provides forums where you can ask all sorts of weird questions about facts that come up in your novel that you'd never figure out on your own. It keeps your novel ideas from haunting you, unused, when you're wondering why you're a passive consumer of entertainment made by others, or when you're reading a book and are convinced you could do a better job with the story. It's a great way to share the insanity of a month of frantic writing with others similarly situated.

My November was rather eventful. S hurt his leg rather dramatically, in a manner that required me to change his dressings twice daily with the professionalism that my first aid certificate provides, and wanted company while he convalesced in front of the TB with a stack of DVDs. We had an uninvited guest, a relative of S', who was a hard core smoker of filterless cigarettes, and who made my eyes water whenever she was near. She hung out in the room with this computer, where I needed to write. Then we went on a fabulous vacation. Then we went to visit relatives, both his and mine. So I wound up writing my entire 51,036 word novel in 12 days.

It was mayhem, but it was a happy, delirious sort of mayhem.

Ruthless Batty and Swaziloo are the friends who talked me into participating, and I will be forever grateful. It was an incredible creative exercise, and an exhausting and fun way to spend November.

What? The story? Oh, that. The story is about a woman who dies and learns that the afterlife is a vast bureaucracy, which is why things don't make a lot of sense on earth. She has a job managing certain aspects of the way the world is run, and does some tampering with the way rules are applied to fix it, which results briefly in 'instant karma' for everyone before she has second thoughts. I described it to my father as a combination of Asimov's "End of Eternity" (a story of a time bureaucracy) plus the story of the carjacker who tried to steal a van with a karate team in it. The world is a fascinating place when people actually get what they deserve.

I am making experimentally bound hardcopies of my oh-Shiva-please-edit-me first draft available to selected friends upon request.

Swaziloo posted this pretty photo from the Thank God It's Over party here in the City. The TGIO party demonstrated to S, who very kindly attended and was given his own "Novelist Groupie" badge, that I am insane in a similar way to other insane local people. Which frightened him a great deal.

THANKSGIVING. My mother laid out a big feast at her home in Riverbank, 'City of Action' in the 'greater Modesto area.' (I can now say that without laughing, after 10 years of practice.) It was fun to get together with my family. Even though it took me away from my novel. Which I was outlining plot twists for in a little notepad whenever my family wasn't around.

TRAVELS TO FAR, FAR, FAR NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: EN ROUTE. On the way north, we stopped in Willits at Burrito Exquisito (42 S Main St, (707)459-5421), which is our favorite Highway 101 resting spot in Willits. Organic veggie burritos. Mmmmmm.

We also stopped in Eureka, where S lived for several years, and ate at Hunan's Restaurant. The food was delicious. The veggie potstickers were not as interesting as I'd hoped, but everything else was just perfect (spicy eggplant, spicy tofu, mmmmm). We also stopped at Los Bagels in the cute old part of town for a light breakfast of seeded bagels with cream cheese, tomato, and minced onion. And OJ. Which was just right.

TRAVELS TO FAR, FAR, FAR NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: REDWOOD NP. Redwood National & State Parks are incredible, lush, massive groves of redwoods in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties along California's cold and foggy coast. The world's tallest trees live here, some of which are the height of a 35 story building. Nearly half of the old growth redwoods in the state are protected within the boundaries of these parks.

There were once 2 million acres of old growth redwood on our west coast. Now, there are just 85,000 acres. Just 4% of what we used to have.

[This is a sad example of what happens when natural resource extraction industries are allowed to do whatever they want: if they had been replanting, their entire industry wouldn't have collapsed so spectacularly, and they wouldn't be ranting about how environmentalists are trying to restrict their activities now. Folks, if you had managed the 96% you took properly, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Put back 46% of what you took, and then we'll talk.]

We stayed at the very charming ReQua Inn in Klamath. They make the best pancakes I've ever tasted: incredibly fluffy, with vanilla and nutmeg. Mmmmmmmm. Our room also had a claw foot tub, the perfect place to relax after a wet day of hiking.

We hiked in rain, fog, and blinding sun. Every grove we visited was different, either in the undergrowth, the terrain, the spacing of the trees, the degree of lushness, the moss...

Prarie Creek Redwoods State Park, within RNP, provided our first hike, in rain. We hiked along a creek and back along the west ridge. The trees were enormous, the ferns were taller than we were, and the light was soft and almost eerie. It was absolutely beautiful. And almost impossible to photograph decently in without a tripod and an umbrella. Near the end of our trip, we returned to visit Gold Bluffs Beach, which is an amazing, wide, peaceful beach that was wrapped in mist, and Fern Canyon, a vertical channel lined thickly with five-finger ferns. Beautiful beautiful beautiful.

Jedediah Smith Redwoods SP on the Smith River, east of Crescent City, offers beautiful walks. The Simpson-Reed Grove is filled with ferns, and is especially damp, cold, and dense. The Stout Grove is right beside the river, and offers widely spaced, wide trees in an amazing and easily accessible grove. The undergrowth was turning gold, and the light from the river was amazingly pretty. There's a compacted dirt road through part of the park with several names, including Howland Hill Road, and the scenery is BEAUTIFUL.

Crescent City isn't bad, either. They have an adorable lighthouse that's only accessible during low tide at Battery Point, and another far off the coast that doesn't look real.

The part I especially want to visit again is RNP's Lady Bird Johnson Grove. This grove, on a steep ridge, is filled with tall rhododendrons!!!

TRAVELS TO FAR, FAR, FAR NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: WEITCHPEC. The road that leads east from the Lady Bird Johnson Grove eventually becomes a packed dirt road, and leads to Weitchpec, a town near the Klamath River on the Hoopa Reservation where S' biological father lives.

S' and his 5 siblings have a complex relationship with their father ("G"), who abandoned the family when his wife was pregnant with their sixth child. (S was a baby, #5.) The family was forced onto welfare, and lived in a crumbling home in a bad neighborhood after his departure. G turned up when S was about 7, in order to demand a divorce and half of the crumbling house. This didn't go over well. [understatement] But he also demanded that his kids come visit him in his new home about 8 hours north, for a week or two each year in the summer. This resulted in complex interactions in which it became clear that he often didn't know how to deal with his offspring. S' stories from that period are vivid, and generally involve his siblings being left to their own devices while his father entertained adult friends. All of this led to years of estrangement between G and all but his eldest child, who had run away from home to live near him.

After S' mother's dramatic death two years ago, S decided he had some things he wanted to discuss with G. So he re-established contact, and went up to visit him. This led to some factionalism among the siblings, who were torn over whether or not to befriend someone who had failed them so completely as a parent, and betrayed their mother so dramatically. This is complicated by the fact that G's recollection only includes the times he was around, and so the hardships of his absence don't exist to him, and he speaks as if they had a happy, ordinary family existence. This is further complicated by the fact that G is a heavy drinker. But S broke the ice, and there is more routine communication between S (and a few of his siblings) and G now.

I did not want to be involved in this situation in any way. But I had consented to the theory of visiting some day, and so found myself standing in the driveway of his nursery business for an unexpected two night stay for which I had not packed, on our way back from Redwood. I was tired, and I wanted desperately to work on my novel. I wasn't sure how our trip had come about, and was uncomfortable with the idea that S had invited himself (us) over unexpectedly.

But it all worked out fine. In addition to growing plants, G and his wife are food people. They especially love to grow and cook with chili peppers, and so we had a lot to talk about right there. G's wife made a fabulous soup of garlic, onions, roasted/peeled sweet peppers, deep fried corn tortillas, avocado and lime that was absolutely heavenly. I ate until I wanted to pop. They also fed us fresh, homemade pasta with pesto and eggplant marinara sauces they jar themselves, and roasted sweet peppers stuffed with cheese. Their home was very cozy, with lots of 1970s-Sunset kinds of touches (high ceilinged bathroom the size of a bedroom with huge windows, all exposed wood, locally made ceramic sink, etc.). S didn't discuss any controversial family issues, and I didn't flinch whenever G referred to something that happened in S' childhood. There were no cocktail-related accidents. We stayed in a small guest house/potting shed with a wood burning stove, a loft, and an outdoor running-water bathroom and shower, paneled for privacy but with views of trees. I played with their friendliest dog, wrote in my journal while S went for a walk around the greenhouses, and fell asleep while everyone else was watching Cirque de Soleil shows on the generator-powered TV. (They'll have phones -- the ugly telephone poles have just been installed on their dirt road and on their property -- and likely wired electricity in their area soon.) They were not only kind enough to make vegetarian meals during our stay, but packed us off with a crate of fresh produce they've grown, including fresh, sweet carrots, leeks, zucchini, butternut and acorn squash, two sacks of peppers (one hot, one sweet and sweet-hot), and several bottles of the hot sauce they bottle themselves ad sell locally.

TRAVELS TO FAR, FAR, FAR NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: RETURN. On the way home, we stopped in Eureka again to visit one of S' friends and eat at Amiga's Burritos. Mmmm. Burritos.

The wine country was beautiful to pass through in both directions. The vines are turning red and gold. It's quite lovely.

FOOD EXPERIMENTS. I tried making a cornmeal crust pizza topped with lightly stir fried leeks, zucchini, garlic, smoked gouda, and tomato sauce. It was pretty good, but the crust need some adjustments.

I had S roast some of the large, long, green poblano-like peppers his father had given us, peel them, stuff them with pepper jack cheese, and bake them until the cheese was melted. I served that with a hot black bean salsa. That was HEAVENLY. I may provide instructions for that at some point. Maybe. Everything else I've made has been described here earlier, especially those wonderful feta quiches.

SO. My hand is going to fall off, so I'll stop for now.
posted by Arlene (Beth)11:38 AM

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