Category: san francisco

Wandering around

Posted on by Liz

In the morning I did some house cleaning and then worked at looking at my expenses and money to think about how to save more and all that kind of thing. Then off to Rockridge BART which I will review later. The ride over was enlivened by some kids with their aunt, going to Antioch which was going to be a long ride. I showed them Pokemon on my phone and then let them play it (they did trainer battles while I provided a running commentary) And they were just adorable – the younger one, maybe 5, was very into trains so we had discussions about which station we were at, excitement at coming out of tunnels, etc. and he liked he BART stickers (old boi, new boi) on my chair. Their aunt was nice and also hilariously trying to get them to bet her money they weren’t going to stand up for the entire hour and a half long ride. “How much do you want to bet?” “A thousand dollars” “Show me…. show me that thousand.” “A hundred dollars” “OK, show me that hundred” “5 dollars” “You’re gonna show me the five, right? Lay it down” Super charming kids.

I wandered around Rockridge & then over to my sister’s house, ate more cake, went through some piles of stuff for donating and had a fish taco & then back to the city for a party at Queerious Labs which is a new hackerspace in SOMA. Had nice conversations with people about hacking yeast to make it produce insulin, inserting genes into plants to make them glow and how you can special order send stuff off to labs to have them insert stuff with CRISPR (??!), some people having a meeting about their Julia project which uh, something LISPy that um something with AI or I couldn’t really hear and it was over my head anyway, but neat and I think it was tentatively called “Fifth”; lee’s monome and accompanying norns gadget which was extremely beautiful, and which you can program with supercollider; another sound and light project which I don’t remember the details of; icelandic sagas (!!!!!! ) me and claire being very excited to find anyone who would talk about sagas at all !!! (That giant red book with the eagle thing on the cover with all the norwegian ones! Grettirs saga! Njal’s! I enthused about Freydis and her beating her breast with a sword in battle while she was like 9 months pregnant. We then all talked about culture and dreams and how queer migration is with san francisco and the bay area in general and the sort of tech dreams people pursue or just wanting to be in a center of culture and art and creation and how to be a good home for that.(kill rock stars; no gods no masters)

On my way out of 24th St. BART going home at midnight, I was rushing to go across 24th and so were 3 other people, a young woman and 2 guys with her and they were saying “we won’t make it and she was saying “we’re gonna make it!” As I whooshed past them I said “We’re totally gonna make it” and we did. She then (a bit drunk or high, joyous, anyway) was like “SEE! SHE KNEW! SHE BELIEVED ME” and the guys were like, . . . wut ? She then veered off laughing like she was going to cross the street with me where I was about to cross mission while they were continuing down the sidewalk. “We don’t have time for this!” they told her. “I’m just saying there’s a GENDER THING” she yelled, giggling. “RIGHT!?” (turning to me again). I started laughing. Dudes faces were so confused. This girl is sick of their bullshit! hahaha! I was like, “Don’t worry, you’ll teach them how!” She high fived me as we crossed the street. “Well yes I will but i’t going to TAKE A WHILE” she yelled into the night to the dudes who were confusedly following us across Mission. “What… are you insulting us? What is this? What??” said the guy who was probably her boyfriend. “HAHAAH!” she said. “HHAHAHAAHAHAAH” i cackled uproariously, veering off to get into position for the approaching 49 bus. Argumentative whinging from both young men. “CACKLING WITCHES IN THE NIGHT, YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE!” I hollered cheerfully, still doubled over in wild laughter. “WEIRD LITTLE PURPLE HAIRED CYBORG LADIES! IT’S WHAT THIS CITY IS ABOUT!” “THAT’S RIGHT!” yelled my drunk friend in our amazing consciousness raising session!!! (another high five) Giggling bystander getting on the same bus as me thru the back door: “Oh my god. Thank you for making this city fun.”

I can rest easy tonight knowing I have nobly done my part.

Calle 24 Cultural Crime #9823468

Posted on by Liz

Really hating how the McDonald’s at 24th and Mission blasts classical music all hours of the day. It ruins the beautiful soundscape of both BART plazas which normally have several flavors of latin music going at once.

They’re doing it to discourage “loitering” but this is a public space specifically designed for people to enjoy being in! It’s extremely obnoxious – offensive!

I kind of get doing it at midnight but…. just no!

MUNI poems!

Posted on by Liz

I was so excited to see on Twitter that this guy Mc is writing a poem for every MUNI line in San Francisco! They’ll be in the Bay City Beacon. He then said he was going to read poetry on the sidewalk over in Cole Valley on Sunday morning. So I hopped on the J, then the N, went through the cute little East/West Portal tunnel, and found him declaiming some Mary Oliver outside Cafe Reverie.

He had a whole foot locker full of books & read me his poem 37 Corbett. I was squawking with delight to find it was not only a good idea but he is also a good poet. (whew!) I also liked his elevator repair shop poem. Read him back one about a road trip from My Lai and then we talked about loving and seeing beauty in city infrastructure. “I LOVE SIDEWALKS…. I mean…. they’re so beautiful… ” *wild poet babbling* He listened to me talk about my BART game a bit & my feelings about getting people to see all the layers of history and future and stories in their daily experiences. Felt nice to meet a kindred spirit.

sidewalk poetry reading

We promised to send each other some sort of links but if I could only remember what it was… O yeah! Diamond Dave’s & Global Val’s Friday afternoon pirate radio show from Mutiny Radio. And he was going to send me something on the spot in the Dogpatch where they launched the pieces of the BART tunnel under the Bay.

Bus poetry

Posted on by Liz

Very excited about this bus poetry project by Mc Allen:

“Some news: I have been given a poetry column in the @BayCity_Beacon. I will write a poem for _every_muni_route_ in San Francisco. If you followed #TotalMuni2018 or #SummerofMuni this will be up your alley.”

I’m so going to show up on Sunday on the sidewalk and check this out. And maybe bring my own Ode to the 14 and the 49 (it needs to be written!)

Anyway …. I just wanna be friends with all the bus poets. So much love!

The logo is so clever, too, it’s the gorgous, swoopy MUNI logo but reworked to get the letters POEM into the swirls!

Two hours in Chutchui

Posted on by Liz

Though I’ve been here on and off since 1991 I have never been to the actual Mission building in the Mission. I set out in the late afternoon to visit, feeling sad and solemn. I wanted to see the grave markers for Jocbocme and Poylemja aka Obulinda and Faustino. I hadn’t realized they are thin slabs of redwood and not gravestones from 200 years ago. The building, well, it was an old adobe church, I’ve seen a few and it was just like the rest of them. The big church, I couldn’t get into. There was a tiny kind of sad museum with minimal signage and a diorama uneasily juxtaposed with gilded religious things – in separate glass cabinets. The cemetery was a moody place with an untended air; the Ohlone tule house replica and “indian memorial” was full of water and trash inside. I read the gravestones, and a long list of all the people with grave markers there. Some were marked as killed by vigilantes. There were some french names, italian, lots of irish, many spanish including De Haro, José de Jesús Noé, the Bernal family, Captain Arguello. I was wondering if there would be a grave for Francisca, one of the first to die at the Mission (no.) Of course, the entire Dolores Park was a giant graveyard as well. I wandered around and thought of the unmarked graves of the thousands of Ohlone, Miwok, and other indigenous people who died at the Mission. The little statue of Kateri Tekakwitha, engraved “In Prayerful Memory of the Faithful Indians.” (WTF?!!??!!) Moss and grime on all the names in stone. As I went around the streets outside, I tried to see the landscape without rows of houses and pavement and see the landforms, creeks, arroyos, dunes, reed beds, and oaks that were there and the villages or camps of the Ramaytush people moving around the peninsula, including Chutchui. The banks of the creek were familiar to people, particular trees, good places to sit and look out from the hills, all familiar and homelike. As I went past the Maxfields cafe I was debating going in to write up some of my notes and also do some more work for the day. Ada and her friends were inside & ran out to fetch me! A nice surprise. They continued working on their D & D game prep while I got some work done. It was just nice to be around them. Waiting for the J, I was still looking around trying to see into the past several layers deep, my mood quite strange as well from having been reading the book “Ishi’s Brain” on top of the creepy Mission visit, when I realized the next train wasn’t going to come for 40 minutes (weird) so we trudged up to Castro to get the 24 home. The kids got on the back of the bus but the front was too crowded for me to get on. I tried to yell to them to just go without me but they hadn’t noticed so all was well – I would just get the next bus and use the interval to keep thinking my thoughts and take more notes. On the ride over the steep hills of Castro I was trying to re-think Chutchui into an alternate modern existence. The creeks open to the sky and rather than parks, camping sites as part of the infrastructure of the city, interspersed with buildings, the transport mostly underground, marshes and cultivated reedbeds and dunes still there, and people magically inoculated from disease, coexisting messily, much like now but with some different foci, different languages, power centered differently. As we turned onto 30th I got a phone alert on the Citizen app that a man had been stabbed in the back at the bus stop that I was about to get off at (30th and Mission) and traffic was stopped and would be rerouted. People were streaming live video of a woman in a red hat screaming at the police. Two men had run away from the scene, leaving in a white car. As my bus neared the scene we could all see that the block was swarming with cops. At least, I knew the kids were ok. It was their bus empty and parked a few blocks ahead at the corner of Mission and 30th. I got off the bus (explaining to the driver and the people at the front what was going on) and went home, skirting the cordoned off block and feeling so glad for my leather jacket covering the itchy places between my shoulderblades and more moodiness underneath as I thought of my girlfriend who was stabbed there in the 80s. Violence & ghosts are built into our landscapes as familiarly as anything else.

Dinner with friends

Posted on by Liz

I had dinner with seelight and friends and her parents last night at her parents’ awesome condo overlooking the Bay. Delicious food! Whiskey soaked cake! (Make a gluten free cake mix, Bob’s Red Mill preferably, then make a syrup with a quarter cup of butter, a half cup of bourbon or whiskey, half cup of sugar. Take the cake out of the oven when it has about 5 minutes left to cook (it should still be soft in the middle), poke holes in it with a chopstick, pour the syrup on, put it back in to finish cooking. (I think. Or, just take it out and poke the holes and then let it stand after you pour in the syrup.) I’ll have to experiment with that.

At one point while we were discussing trees on the sidewalk which while they may be nice, may also not be nice, as they are cracking the foundations of the house and/or completely shadowing a building from any sunlight, seelight’s mom went, “Easy. Put a little poison every day, no one will know. Not all at once, just a little. Listen to your mother.” Very dryly. We kept doing callbacks to it in later conversation (applied to cars, people, etc) and every time it just got funnier.

Epic journey to the south

Posted on by Liz

This morning I took the bus to BART, changed trains in Balboa Park (having a look around as I waited), onward to Millbrae, to Caltrain, then I had thought I was going to take light rail to the Mountainview office but the stop was eliminated in 2015 so I caught a small shuttle bus (happily, accessible.)

I took notes ecstatically on the weird concrete wall patterns (different in every station) and which ones were like deep canyons; the bronze statues in their narrative cement cocoons in Millbrae; which stations were above ground; and lots of notes today and last night about the Ramaytush and other Ohlone people of the areas I was traversing.

Interspersed with Ingress and Pokemon catching it made a pleasant ride. On Caltrain I was even able to work a little bit as it wasn’t crowded and just felt OK to do, while it would seem obnoxious to me on BART. So, in between all that I started the process of releasing Firefox 66 beta 10 and answering bugmail.

Happy hour with some nice people from the office on Castro street – then all the buses and trains in reverse order, this time whenever I wasn’t in tunnels, looking up the art and artists and architects of some of the stations.

Some random observations – the platform floor in Balboa Park is very smooth marble, pleasant to roll across. The Millbrae complex (largest intermodal station west of the Mississippi!) is beautiful if you take a step back from it and admire its soaring winglike structures of steel, glass, and fiberglass.

Also noted: There should be more high density housing on the Peninsula near the BART and Caltrain stations. Some high rise apartments will not ruin your lives, NIMBYs!!

Neighborhood mural goats

Posted on by Liz

I just met my neighbors who have the goats and it was so nice to chat with them! It turns out they have goats because they’re firefighters and they don’t want their yard to be overgrown and be a fire hazard. Therefore, goat gardeners! I suggested a goat window in their fence so we can all admire the adorable beasts.

Another neighbor is giving me a ridiculously nice end table (I am going to offer to pay though) As I was passing by when he was putting stuff out on the sidewalk & I asked about the table (not yet out but looked like it was in line.)

Had a nice chat also with Matthew from Bernalese as i obtained the perfect glasses to put inside Danny’s silly fake antique globe thing in his office (Inherited with the office I believe — and the same kind that I had in the houseboat, inherited from the houseboat owner.) There are tall straight glasses and then a nice cocktail or wine glass with a stem called a Nick and Nora glass.

I went out looking for Bob who lives across from the Safeway on the street to give him a good World War II book I got out of the free bin at Dog Eared Books. He wasn’t there so I will just keep the book in my wheelchair undercarriage till i see him next.

Also!! I heard a rumor the fabulous artist Crayone is going to paint a mural in our neighborhood. omgggg!

Random encounters in the rain

Posted on by Liz

Little bursts of heavy rain and the streets nearly deserted in the evening. Walking out of La Taqueria (the quality has sadly fallen off lately) we went by a couple of people huddled in a doorway, me hunkering down under 3 different scarves looking miserable. “Unnnnnnnnngh!!!!” said one of the huddled people, in a comradely way. “NNNNNNNGHHH!!” I answered, cringing back at them as we fought nature, red in tooth and claw or at least brutal in trickling wetness down the back of your neck.

A bit further on a guy came out of The Knockout just another spate of giant raindrops clattered down. “Nooooooo! Cold!” I shrieked. “Wet!!!!” “RIGHT!??????!!!!!!” said the guy, sharing the general outrage and dismay, a terrible sense of betrayal.

We ducked into the bar hoping it would pass. Emerging again 5 minutes later into slightly less of a downpour, we passed a girl in a woolly hat coming out of Pizza Hacker. She looked around as if she could not believe what was happening to her. So unfair!

How can our city do this to us!

I think it’s a thing now to play up our surprise as if we never fucking experienced rain before. It’s kind of cute.

NERT graduation and a couple of hours in dressing rooms

Posted on by Liz

Got my certificate, hard hat, vest, gloves, and ID card signifying that I have gone through Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training. Tonight was fun – it was all exercises like doing a search & rescue and triage, setting off a fire extinguisher (in the street, on a gasoline fire in a big metal box) and rescuing a CPR doll trapped under a pile of debris by shoring up a plank and levering it off her.

I also did a bunch of stuff for Firefox 66 beta 8 and then went shopping with a friend in the late afternoon, had a blast taking her to my favorite mens consignment shop then to a thrift shop on Market where there was a VERY drunk blonde lady (size 4) trying on pants while my friend was trying on shirts in the dressing room next door and I was just chilling out on a bench. Blond lady would come out and strut around and shake her butt in my face “These pants are totallly sexy they’re a yes! don’t you think!” I would agree and she would go “HOTTTTTT” and I’d go “yes, totally HOTTTTTTTT with TTTTTTTTTT on it” And then alternately admire or mildly disparage the fit of the button down shirts on my friend. Then at one glorious point the drunk femmy lady came out in a punky jacket, rejected it, but intersected with my friend and was like NO… YOU need this… this would look GREAT on you. And it did! High fives all around. She kept coming out of her little cubbyhole only in underwear to see what my friend had on next.

Very entertaining! I was really feeling like a fabulous fairy godless-being and very knowledgeable about pocket squares and so on. Super reminded of this, the best thread: https://twitter.com/trans_tho/status/999924229624639488