so much to learn about life, love and beer

My friend S said that she wanted to live to be a thousand years old, because she wanted to see everything and know everything to come. That's why she's so beautiful, you know, that and she's constantly exploring and trying to convince me why i should finally let myself go and fall in love with San Francisco. It's all about a lack of boundaries, about poets working with biochemistry projects and women unafraid of working with welding machines.

S. told me not to go to one of the bike shops here, because on seeing her, they treated her as they saw her. "I hate people who think of information as power. I asked them for a simple thing and they won't even bother to say why or how to do it. They don't like to share how to do things there. It's really lame." She pointed us to a better place to go. I'm still intimidated by bicycle shops though, by all the gears and the fetishization of expensive equipment. But at least now I know the right people to talk to.

Well, I have fallen in love with this place, S. It snuck up on my very quickly the past few months. Maybe it's the ideas, all these dreamy ideas. I'm just meeting so many interesting people, and it's nice not to feel out of place for being someone constantly exploring, making things for the sake of making them.

There were some friends visiting from Europe a few weeks ago--well there should be qualifiers. Is there a time when someone isn't visiting this town from any random place? Well, they were nagging me to get a new bag, my bag was hurting my back, my laptop was too heavy, and thankfully they weren't after me this time for working too much. When you're passionate about anything you do, how can you not get into it? It just comes naturally. There are just moments where you have to take a deep breath, slow down, but you have to really care about what you are doing.

Well after this gentle nagging, I got a new backpack, made from the same company who'd made my first good backpack I bought almost 10 years ago in New York. Back then I had been obsessed with other silly things, but was seeking something of quality that would look cool, and I wasn't at the point where I was able to do a lot of things alone. I was still very much concerned with going to concerts with friends, although the process had already begun where I'd go wandering alone through Brooklyn and get emotional phone calls from my friends asking me "Where are you?" Buying the first back pack in Chinatown, the people I was with pointed me in the right direction, and it was a good buy.

That backpack lasted through many years through several different countries, time zones and climates. It was hard for me to let it go but it was not one of the things I brought back with me to the States when I returned from Berlin. I wanted to, but someone pointed out that it was ratty and about to pass out. I had been kicking it underneath plane seats on trips to Egypt, put it next to my bed on overnight trains to Poland, and filled it with bathing suits, work computers, paintings--but it was time for this backpack to go.

So I went to the same store but now here in the Bay area, and I bought a new backpack. The company's very famous for good quality but also very clever. They got to me this way: written along the side is the motto NEVER STOP EXPLORING. What kind of marketing ploy that was in whatever presentation someone gave, well it worked. Are you happy now?

And people in the Bay Area never stop exploring. They're poking their noses into everything, like beer.

You know, I had never thought seriously about how to make beer before. In Germany I was very into these historical museums, they call them Freilichtmuseums, showing how people lived in the past, and why things today are the way they are. I sat this weekend and learned how beer was made; there's something incredible wonderful about a tactile experience, where you hold the ingredients in your hands instead of reading about it.

It is pretty magical, making beer. There aren't so many ingredients to doing it, and it's all about paying careful attention to deadlines and temperatures and making sure things are clean and efficiently done. It's dizzying that so many different variations can be made from basically the same elements.

I had never known what hopps were, that they are crushed flowers used to preserve things, and they make beer bitter, and British colonialism are what have made India Pale Ale and Guiness what they are today. Heavy taxes on various elements of the recipe made people skimp on other portions of the recipe and voila, there you are, something that becomes entrench in tradition. Long sea voyages to India made English brewers ad excessive amounts of flowers to their stews, so that's why india pale ale tastes the way it does today. Guiness was created at the beginning purely to avoid an English barley tax, and so was Scottish beer. And that's why things are the way they are today!

It was never my expectation to be sitting outside watching men joke about modifying turkey roasters and using workarounds to make tools to brew beer, but there I was, and they instilled a very nice value in me that I had been suspecting all along. Tools don't need to be prepackaged, and you can make a lot of things that you need by fiddling around with what you already have, especially if you have some time when you don't have the money.

The men answered all of my naive questions patiently with the happiness that comes from sharing knowledge with a newbie. Sadly there were not so many women answering questions there, although the men told me that originally it was women who did all the brewing until the monks stepped in and took it away. Viking women cooked the stuff in big ceramic pots before the Christians came along and told them they were heretics for worshipping their goddesses. Did I ever know that it takes a year to make mead from scratch?

This is what fermentation is when looked at up close in the reality of boiling bubbles of water. I had read about glycolisis in school, and even now regret not deciding to take that genetics class, because I was so wrapped up in things that were not related to what was really important, which is learning for the sake of learning. When I was younger biology as something you studied so that you could become a doctor, that was everyone's understanding. I regret not taking those extra steps. It was an opportunity. But you know, there's still time to pursue that when I'm older, in a kind of reverse fashion, as opposed to the biologist who decides to take up art later on.

Never stop thinking and asking questions and keep in movement. And please don't indulge in too much good beer when you're not really that alcohol tolerant, especially on a somewhat sunny day when there's a good bbq going on. You'll get really drunk and say something charmingly embarrassing, even if you do have a good time.

lives

I've gotten into the habit of drawing again. When I drew this I was staring at Virgin Mary candles lit up, eating fresh-baked pizza dripping with blue cheese and roasted apples, talking to many different people that night. I like how people get into very easy, rolling conversations here, no barriers. There were many life stories. It just takes so much less time to get to that point here.

There was a woman talking about her childhood in the South, about wandering through cypress trees with Spanish moss and pretty little towns disappearing under traffic lights and suburbs. There was a man after a big change speaking in exclamation points: "I'm still young! But the world is small. Everyone knows each other! Yes! I'm so happy I made this change!" and the bartender speaking in loud rollicking English accented with Russian recounting a bar fight the other night.

It was the night when everyone liked to tell me their hopes. I was especially jealous of a young man about to go travelling for the first time and move to another country; somehow, even though I am still touched by new things, nothing is quite the same as being really young and flying across an ocean for the first time. I wish I could forget a few of the things I have seen that are so wonderful, so that i could see them again for the first time.

Lately the weather has changed...the sky's gone out! The wildflowers blot out the sun and we're plunged into an ashen sky, something that the dinosaurs would feel. I like the mood though, to go from boiling heat into a nuclear winter. We went outside and drew on the chalkboard. It's infectious, this drawing. People called out to me on the street, harmless people, but quite strange. The colors were pale and rubbing on my fingers--I keep meaning to tear myself away from the computer and paint again, get my fingers wet with pigment, but it's never so.

daydream sketches

carnival cotton candy

old detroit, new eastern europe

there is not much I can say about Detroit that has not been said lately by other people before me. Maybe the things I bring to the table, me being myself, are that it reminds me in many ways of the old East German towns abandoned by a world that was moving too quickly. The world moves at a fast pace--that is something you deal with, and the resistance to efficiency and change leaves behind great ruins. 

I'm used to sitting around kitchen tables listening to people who grew up in an entirely different system mourning a way of life in which things were not so chaotic, in which you were taken care of either by the government or some kind of large company. It was something to push back against and at the same time, according to the younger people, stultifying. To blend into the group, resist change, resist the events of the outside world...  

so many human memories and traditions woven into these big factories.  There are human stories here, friendships and alliances and petty feuds. 

But it was this comfort and resistance to change  and blindness to the world outside that made the fall particularly painful. There are many parts of Berlin that look exactly like parts of Detroit--former east German newspaper buildings empty and covered with graffiti, great skyscrapers ready to be demolished because everyone has moved away.

As many people before have told me, there's an eerie Mad Max effect to Detroit that can't quite be duplicated by many places in the world outside of Eastern Europe. You go through East Germany and it's the same story: cities standing half-empty, huge skyscrapers in downtown boarded up and forgotten. It's a ghost town. Even the homeless people move slowly, in a daze, as if there were a nuclear bomb; i saw a woman sitting very, very still staring into space for a long time on these steps. It was incredible. This was in Detroit though. There are not really so many homeless people in East Germany.

The outskirts of Detroit are where you go when you have not seen a fresh vegetable for a long time so much so that you really notice it and realize why San Francisco and New York are not like the rest of the United States. 

This is real hippie stuff, sitting down and chewing real greens between your teeth. Most people in this country subsist on french fries, or so the European media would lead us to believe. 

Here is the largest Arab-American population in the united states. Nobody really knows why (why?), but if you drive out to Dearborn, where the Arab American museum is, there begin the signs in Arabic and neat brick suburban houses with children playing and women strolling down the street in hijabs. If you go here, which is something that I may have done, desperate to eat "real" food after daily assaults of deep fried burgers and deep fried seafood and deep fried onions, you can go, as I might have gone, to a Lebanese grocery store and ask for the directions to the nearest decent restaurant. The men might not speak English as well as they would have wished, but they are all good intentions and directed me as they might direct you down the road, turn right, can't miss it, the best restaurant in town.

And this is change and new life right here, when the tabouli and falaffel are in front of you, and across the street I could see, as you might see, a sign for halal subway sandwiches, which is something I have never seen before, although I have been in many halal neighborhoods in my life. It's something new in a place where I never thought I would encounter something new.

accidental situations

sometimes when you're walking and then something catches you in the corner of the eye; no, no, it was probably a coincidence. How many people have that chin, that way of moving. In San Francisco there are so many waves of women that come into the city that have a certain tone of voice. 

How many really striking woman are there that look so much like someone else? I think I often write it down to a mistaken accident though when it is probably the real thing, and that makes it even more uncomfortable, because then there are two people who are consciously ignoring each other as the world is a very small place and when someone is that important to you you do not forget them.  

It's so hard to see what insecurities people harbor around each other until years later. Did she know that she made you feel unsure of yourself? Probably she didn't, because she was thinking about how you unsettled her and made her question so many things about herself, so much so that it blotted out all possibilities of reconciliation years later. 

There are these angry letters or curt exchanges years later, and it takes a few years after travelling over thousands of miles and then you lean back and say, "Ah, I understand." There's so much pressure to be great, and how can a young woman not compare herself to everyone around her and then react in any way but anger?

There are so many people who look like other people here in San Francisco, because it is one of those physical melting pots. Walking around a provincial town in southern Germany, it was very easy to stand out with my dark hair. Or sitting in a coffee shop in Poland, it was very easy for the many faces and bodies to melt into each other, and then look up in surprise when an African man materialized out of a sea of blonde dredlocks. Of course it's now the fashion for girls in northern Europe to dye their hair black or lay in tanning salons, watch MTV Shakira videos and then I'd blink my eyes and get the momentary illusion that I was in some kind of Latin America country with medieval castle background sets.

So you are in the situation where both of you have been on each other's minds for many years. In the backs of our minds we are both keeping tabs on each other through the soft chattering network of friends and acquaintances.

There are a lot of emotions in young people, and now that we are older, it would seem that it would be easier to sort these things out. At one time an older friend told me that these things settle down, and it will all be better in a few years, as he had been in the same situation in his youth. 

But it has been many years now, and there we are pretending not to see each other. In the mirror we see the weight of age, but on the street we see each other and can only see young girls. Why is it such that all these special women I know don't look like even the younger 30 year old women I encounter in my normal life? Everyone else is filling out and softly wrinkling, but a certain set of women is frozen in time, eternally youthful.  There is some kind of strange logic at play.

So many thousands of miles away from so many places I have lived here in California, and it's so amusing how many people I run into from so far away, even the ones that I want to see but don't want to. Is there a word for this kind of thing?  How can you not recognize each other?  And then is there a word for the point at which you stare at each other awkwardly, surprised at how little either of you has changed, and then walk away?

on the edge of the world in American airports

It takes so long to fly anywhere to get to somewhere that is not San Francisco.

If you have never been here, I would say it's a lot like living on the edge of world, perhaps as I would imagine living in Tahiti or New Zealand would be. For better or worse, you're so far away that all those books and television photographs of the outside world start to flatten out and become less and less real, abstracting into lines of a map of the earth. People live and dream here in the present, and one or twice a year for a week or so they get sucked away to exotic locations where photographs and perhaps videos are taken. Nobody is really sure if those faraway places exist.

There are all kinds of different people in the world, many them with different hopes and dreams but all are shaped somewhat by their environment and the possibilities around them. In the Las Vegas airport I feel such a sense of despair and hopelessness that I hope the city outside is nothing like the airport. The slot machines offered aboslutely no sense of excitement or glamour; they were flat and garish and bleeping late into the night. On these night shifts the tired, older people worked, wearing ill-fitting polo shirts and sloppy nametags at an angle.  

Perfume vending machines pump out sample scents and glow airbrushed photos of Jennifer lopez spreadeagled across 4 planes. I think the city is very close nearby; I hope there is more wonder. I hope that the young women there can explore new possibilities, become something new and beautiful before the world around them changes that.

I would love to see the transformation, like the pretty girl shaking off failed attempts at an acting career in Hollywood who flips out and decides to open a cafe that becomes wildly successful. She starts to eat after many years of starvation, starts to stretch out her legs and take risks and become her own person. It's a wonderful thing, like growing plants for the first time or seeing kittens become cats. One of my friends has a science kit in which you can grow seeds in agaric (?) watching the roots spread out through the clear solution. It's really magical. The former wannabe movie star's eyes light up as she regains her humanity. Remove yourself from the wrong kinds of influences and then surround yourself with the right kinds of ideas and people and nice things happen.

The Chicago and Denver airports have a humming self-confidence that cannot be matched by airports of smaller, struggling towns. Everything is bright, shiny and new. The bookstore at the Denver airport feels uncomfortable. There is none of the arm coziness I associate with the best best bookstores; yet I have to admit, the book displays are surprisingly clever, and I would not expect people to be reading some of the things I see here. But at the same time the airport is stripped of all romance no matter how hard people try. At least there are docking stations tailored for ipods where you can sit squashed next to a businessman making a call. The restaurants try to act like marketplaces in Mexico, but they are not very convincing, although the kitchen staff speaks a happy Spanish in the background.

The restaurants all smell eerily of plastic. In Chicago it is properly international, at least in the airport. There are lots of people who look more or less the same as everyone else, no matter what skin color or shape or gender. The men in suits nursing a beer in the uncomfortable sports bars, watching a game while neurotically tapping away at their BlackBerries. They look startlingly vulnerable there bathed in neon, exhausted boys tired and stressed out from a fast world.



There is so much pressure on men to appear strong, especially these really conservative old-fashioned men, the kind you're really wary of when they travel in packs wearing baseball caps. They've been socialized to pay for women's dinners on dates, marry at exactly a certain age, watch American football, and accept certain responsibilities. In more conservative American circles men regard women as these exotic weird things, and they are at a loss when dealing with cosmetics counters and hair salons. It's like those countries where men and women are raised in separate environments, so that they often forget that they aren't that much different from each other. Socialized the proper way, these men are told that women come from venus and men come from mars, even though humans come from the planet earth. 

When they are alone, you can talk to a guy like that like he's a real person. There are just so many fears and complex things going on down there, suppressed, and I can really feel these things more than most people can, so that, terrified, he backs off and then returns to his tribe. We both realize that maybe this group thing isn't so bad after all and these groups of men being obnoxious to women (who they really yearningly love) really don't want to hurt us, they're just deeply fearful. 

One of the things that really surprised me when I came back to America is that, like many people in the world, a lot of people don't like to move around so much. As transient as Americans are, there are people who enjoy staying put and sink their roots deep, deep into the ground.  Not everyone is an explorer, and a lot of people's social circles began and ended in high school.  There are people in America who willingly hang out only with people they went to high school with. It's such a foreign concept to me, like red bean ice cream. 

Once I moved to San Francisco, I opened my mind a little and tried out hanging out with high school people. It was very cool actually, a little bizarre.  I hang out with another group of people here who are really cool and went to high school together, then moved out here en masse.  It works for them, but I get a sense that they decided to escape all at once together. That's when groupthink is positive and works for the good of the world.

One of the people from high school I willingly hung out with admitted he would never willingly hang out with someone from high school. But there we were, hanging out with each other, facing each other as adults, although we would both admit that escaping and moving around was the best thing we could have done. I hung out with another person willingly and it's become a wonderful relationship, because we are both different and the same as we were when we were teenagers.  We are much more interesting and less awkward now than we were then, but when we look each other in the eye we still see eighteen year olds. My friends from high school (who escaped) travel heavily, almost more than many Europeans or New Yorkers that I know. I am starting to realize that San Francisco is a really special kind of place that attracts a lot of talented people so maybe it's that kind of effect. 

In one airport in a crumbling Midwestern town I was struck at how effortlessly friendly people were. In the Midwest it's genuine, as you can't fake that kind of one-on-one upfrontness. If you are coming there from Europe or New York, it strikes you as intrusive at first, but then you realize it's just  how things are in a small town where everyone hangs out with people they went to high school with. In a 15 minute bus ride to the car rental stop the bus driver will be able to tell you more than you could ever imagine.  The accents are flat and American and offer more personal information than you could hope for in encountering a stranger you meet in the London Tube. You grow to like it, this effortless push of humanity. These people might hang out with people from high school, but they're all right. They wouldn't pull a Dogville on Nicole Kidman, they'd be the ones helping the slaves escape through the Underground Railroad.

In the Midwest, at the big farmer's food markets on weekends, there are big sacks of onions for only $3. People all over the world, even in New York and Paris and San Francisco gather and talk to each other at such markets, but there's something exotic about a farmer's market in a place that still has real farmers. These are not those really hip organic farmers but practical men wearing baseball caps and have unironic beards, who drive pick-up trucks full of tools in the back and hopefully are genteel to ladies at the sports bar. There are no alfalfa sprouts here. Surrounded by fresh produce, tomatoes and corn as fresh as the eye can see, everyone goes in a beeline for the greasy breakfast of corned-beef and deep friend eggs. Corned beef for breakfast! You see signs for it everywhere. They sell vegetables here, maybe someone eats them, maybe if they're fried?

At the airport there are a lot of hockey fans. It's a big shock after going from Los Angeles to San Francisco, because everyone's so sexy in L.A., even the poodles and 6 year old girls, who wear skin-tight t-shirts that say "I'm hot!" and an even bigger shock if you say move from Los Angeles to parts of the midwest, and especially if you are confronted with huge waves of hockey fans. Hockey jerseys hide a multitude of bodily bumps and are perhaps like the veils of modesty that women wear in Riyadh, unrelentingly blocky and large to make room for padding, so that no sign of hard Hollywood six-pack abs would be visible. No chance. 

Female hockey fans are forced to go through a debeautifying routine, the opposite of what happens at the end of a make-up counter visit at a major department store. It's amazing, a brave new world in which people must remove all plumage and accept each other for what they are "on the inside." There are always urban legends going around too about how there is a hockey puck that went out of control and went into a sexy young female hockey fan's face and disfigured here for a year. Then she found out if her boyfriend really loved her for her personality. But you can figure that out way ahead of time if you wear a hockey jersey.