From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume VI

Introduction

This is the sixth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, and Volume V is here. But the different volumes have nothing to do with one another.

Yes, it’s another slow news day. So, taking a cue from writers like David Sedaris and Lydia Davis, I’m assembling and posting some excerpts from some old letters. If I too were a famous writer, these micro-dispatches could be gathered into a handsome printed volume sold in bookstores everywhere (i.e., I could basically print my own money). Instead, since I’m an unsung blogger, you can read them for free!

These ones were all written while I was a student at Berkeley.

October 26, 1990

My schedule is so weird, I have to do my cycling indoors sometimes, even when the weather is great. I don’t ride my rollers in the basement laundry room anymore, though. Here’s why. They have this timer knob hooked up to the overhead light, to keep it from being left on. I was riding my rollers in there in the pre-dawn hours before work, and gave no thought to the timer. So I was riding along and suddenly there was this loud “DING!” and the lights went out. I crashed instantaneously. My Walkman went sailing across the room and broke into like three pieces. So now I’m keeping the rollers in the apartment and riding them there. I have this headwind accessory that makes them harder than actual riding. Good complement to all the hills around here.

February 12, 1991

I suddenly find myself in the terrifying position of going head-to-head with the most depraved, cruel band of thugs the free world has ever known. These miscreants have no regard for peace of mind; they loot solace and tranquility like a roadside gas station or liquor store. Meet Mr. First‑and‑Last‑Month Rent: wanted in six states for Financial Burden with Intent to Ruin. Mr. Damage Deposit: known to be armed and dangerous, wanted by federal authorities for Monetary Assault on a College Student. A recent stakeout found that these two are operating with an accomplice: Kid Tuition and his gang, the Three Installments. What could all this mean? Only one thing: I’m laying it all on the line by finding a new apartment. Which means raising a lot of cash in a hurry. Got any quasi-legal, or (what the hell) totally illegal hustles you can bring me in on?

July 16, 1991

Our local sales tax has been raised to 8.25%, and extended to cover snack foods. This is interesting: candy bars and potato chips are taxed, while fresh produce and wheat flour are not. It gets complicated: all crackers are taxed, except Saltines. Popped popcorn is taxed, but not un-popped. (Do you get a rebate on the un-popped “old maids” in the popped popcorn?) At the bike shop [where I work] these items present some complications. Powerbars, for example, contain 100% of the U.S. R.D.A. of most vitamins and minerals, and have only a gram of fat: hardly typical snack food. Yet, they still don’t really qualify as grocery. So today, in my capacity as shop manager, I put the following notice on the Powerbar display:

DEAR CUSTOMERS:

Recently enacted tax legislation requires us to charge the new tax rate (8.25%) on all snack foods. Since Powerbars and XL 40 bars are “great anytime as a snack” they are now taxable items. But since Exceed High Carbohydrate Source “supplies as much carbohydrate as 6 cups enriched spaghetti, 8 medium sized baked potatoes, or 11 slices of white bread,” it qualifies as a grocery item and is therefore not taxed.

September 19, 1991

Here is the opening passage of the article I was supposed to have read for today for my Honors English seminar: 

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural or structuralist thought to reduce or to suspect.

Keeping in mind that the opening sentence is supposed to lure the reader into further study, I find this beginning atrocious. But amazingly, it gets worse:

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as the episteme—that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy—and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.

For me to be reading this might suggest that I’m some kind of elite student who can grasp really complex ideas. But the sad truth of the matter is that I am no better equipped to handle this than you are. Probably less equipped, actually, given my youth and naiveté. This essay rages on for twenty-six pages, getting increasingly obtuse, and I never made it past the first five pages, with zero percent comprehension. Thus in one day I have fallen hopelessly behind, since the rest of the reading for this course (one such essay per class day) is doubtless based on this foundational essay.

So I walked into class this morning very ill prepared, and thought to myself, “Self, don’t despair, the rest of the class is probably as overwhelmed as I am.” This day I happened to be early, for—having given up my attempt to read the essay—I had nothing better to do than to make a big breakfast and leave for school well ahead of time. I ask the first fellow student I saw what he thought of the essay. “I really enjoyed it, how about you?” he said, apparently with perfect sincerity. I told him that to be perfectly honest, I had found it somewhat difficult. He frowned, as if surprised to hear that, and said, “I found it similar to Beckett, didn’t you?” I vaguely remember a Sir Thomas Becket who wrote some religious thing, maybe about people flogging themselves or something, but couldn’t make a connection. [I realized weeks after writing this my classmate meant Samuel Beckett.]

I spent the class period realizing that for perhaps the first time, I’m hopelessly outclassed by my peers. I start to fret and sweat, it gets hot, I can’t get away, the prof rolls, I’m popped. How’d I get into this spot? I played myself. But why am I facing off against this fierce foe? The faculty’s fault? No. Nobody signed me up for the course; nobody enrolled me by force. I thought I that I could excel at this big school? Fool. I played myself. [Apologies to Ice-T.]

February 27, 1992

I was studying yesterday in Sproul plaza, sitting on a bench, and an old man came and sat down by me, with nothing to occupy him but people watching. Eventually we had some conversation: he’s 85 years old (didn’t look it!) and from Russia. He didn’t seem to recognize Lolita, which I was reading, and was surprised at my choice of the English major, having studied engineering himself. He says in Russia, those with a college degree are admitted to a special grocery store that those without a degree are not. Same prices in the alumni-only store, but much vaster variety and availability of goods. He didn’t say how the store vets these people, and I didn’t ask.

During the big rains we had a week or so ago, I parked my bike under the bridge between LeConte Hall and Birge Hall, just east of Sather Tower, before going into Doe Library (through the back entrance, as a construction project has blocked the front and snarled most paths through campus). It wasn’t raining that afternoon but my precaution was well taken: when I finally left the library in the late evening, the rain had started up again. Groggy from my scholastic haze, I was shocked to find that nature and weather and the out-of-doors had all continued without me. Riding down Bancroft, I was impressed by the electrifying effect the rain had: extra-shiny reflections on the cars, and extra-black asphalt with a neon-like red reflections of taillights.

In five minutes I’ll leave go to tutor at Malcolm X school. My student, “Eddie,” is trying to imitate my out-loud reading by going as fast as he can. This means the words come out at the same pace as before, but with a tone of frantic urgency and almost no pause between words. I sometimes worry that he isn’t retaining what he has read, but last week we worked together on a book report and I found he’s getting most of it. His dopey teacher had acted like he’s a hopeless case, totally checked out, etc. but I find he works pretty hard if someone’s around to help him focus.

May 25, 1992

Doesn’t it piss you off when you get a defective band-aid? At the bike shop we have Curad. As you know, these are not the band-aids we grew up with, and I find myself somewhat hostile to them. Their lack of quality control is one of the small but nagging travesties that plague my employment at the shop. I would say about one in three Curad band-aids is defective. The little sanitary cotton pad is skewed, and sometimes has missed the center of the adhesive portion, so you get just a little triangle of pad, and the rest is free to stick to the wound. I really can’t believe the bandaging public tolerates Curads at all. At home I use Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid brand. This becomes expensive since I’m constantly washing dishes or taking my contact lenses out or something. I’m tempted to just leave the wet band-aids on and let them dry out, but I called Johnson & Johnson on their toll free number and asked about this. “You know how the box says they’re waterproof?” I asked. “Oh, yes, they certainly are,” said the lady earnestly, in her charming southern accent. “Well, does that mean I don’t need to change them once they’re wet?” I asked. “Oh, no, you should always replace them—that’s the only way to prevent bacteria from infecting the wound,” she replied. Puzzled, I asked, “Then what’s the benefit of their being waterproof?” A long pause. Finally she said, “Well, if you’re swimming you won’t lose them in the pool. And, they won’t go down the drain.”

September 12, 1992

I have purchased Lila - An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig, author of the classic Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hope this second book is good, but I have little faith that it’ll live up to its predecessor. I really loved the Motorcycle book, but the really lame Epilogue, which Pirsig attached to it like a decade later, irritated me so much that I tore it out of the book. This act was, I’ll confess, tantamount to destroying knowledge and human thought itself. Even worse, it loosened the cheap glue binding on the whole book, so that eventually all the pages started falling out—a disaster, especially since this is the one book I really wanted to pass around among my friends. It’s a really shoddy paperback to begin with, from the imprint “BANTAM NEW AGE BOOKS: A Search for Meaning, Growth, and Change.” Other Bantam New Age editions include Ecotopia, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, and The Complete Crystal Guidebook. What bothers me isn’t so much the nature of these books by themselves—although that alone is annoying—but rather the very idea that Bantam could integrate so many conflicting and discrete books into a single group, as if they could all be united as life philosophies. Like somebody is going to just go right on down the list, finding Meaning, Growth, and Change in every one of these. It’s tempting to think that when Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he would have winced at having his work co-opted into the Bantam New Age menagerie. But actually, the epilogue that he added later totally smacked of the easy, wildly speculative, faux-spiritual sentimentalism that the “NEW AGE BOOKS” line can be presumed to have. Who knows, maybe Pirsig got cocky; after all, his book sold like crazy and impressed a lot of people, many for perhaps the wrong reasons. Anyway, I still have the decrepit Motorcycle paperback, and without the Epilogue it is a work of pure genius. I’ll let you know how Lila ends up going.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume III

Introduction

This is the third post in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here and Volume II is here. In the spirit of (among others) John McPhee with his “Tabula Rasa” series, that being bits of writing that never got published before, I’m posting excerpts from old letters here. These are little stories or updates that I always felt deserved a wider audience than just the friend or brother who originally received them. I’ve provided, for each snippet below, the locale I was writing from. Enjoy please enjoy.

September 23, 1990 – Oakland

I almost died. Here’s how. 

December 2, 1990 – Oakland

L— came over to borrow some money. We talked for a while, and he was all bent out of shape because his girlfriend back in Dallas dissed him for some new guy she met. He’d been waiting for her to move out here for months, and now she’s history, and he’s not going to try to compete with her new beau across all that distance. We both gripe for a while before hitting the ATM. Then we stop into Avanti, a coffee shop and pizza place across from my apartment. No sooner do we sit down than this funky looking guy at the next table starts looking at us and summons the waitress. He’s wearing a camo shirt with a leather jacket over it, and a straw hat. Kind of weird, but not entirely out of place in Oakland. The waitress looks a bit confused talking to him, and then comes over and says, “That guy over there wants to buy you guys drinks.” I say that’s fine and she brings over a couple of beers. I look at the guy and he nods and says, “Merry Christmas.” There are a few bottles on his table and I figure he’s doing some forgetting or something. Then he motions for L— to come over, and hands him five bucks. L— takes it, thanks the guy, and sits back down. “Kinda peculiar,” he says. Then the guys starts talking to us.

      “I’m a jolly good fellow, right?” he says.

      “Uh, yeah, that’s right. Uh, Merry Christmas.”

      “Yeah, Merry Christmas, but can I tell you something?”

      “Uh, yeah, sure.”

      “Okay, I’m gonna tell you something. How old are you?” (That always happens: dudes “tell” you something that turns out to be a question.)

      “Twenty eight,” says L—.

      “Twenty one,” says I.

      “You guys students over at the university?”

      “Uh, he is,” L— says, nodding towards me.

      The guy takes off his hat. “Okay, I’ll tell ya something. I’m old. Look at this hair. Look at how short it is. It’s getting grey. I am forty-four years old.” (There’s not a grey hair on his head.) He continues, “I’m an old fool, that’s what I am, but in 1983 I was a student at Berkeley. I was gonna be a lawyer. I was gonna graduate, but do you know what?”

I’m giving him my full attention, because I’m afraid he’s about to go berserk. I’m thinking about that psycho at Henry’s a couple of months back, who opened fire on the bar crowd with automatic weapons. But this guy doesn’t appear to be armed. Or even violent. Just drunk. I’m looking right into his eyes, though, like he’s about to give me the secret to life. Which, it turns out, he’s entirely convinced he’s actually about to do.

      “Do you know what happened to me?” he asks. “I was gonna graduate. But I didn’t graduate. Do you know why? Huh? Do you know why?”

L— and I shake our heads.

      “It’s on accounta I got sidetracked. Sidetracked by a woman!” He pauses. “So I’m gonna tell you somethin’, and I’m only gonna say it once, so you better pay attention.” (Whenever a drunk man says he’s only going to say something once, don’t believe him.) “I’m telling you that what you got, all you got, is your dreams, and they’re right up here” (he taps the side of his head). “And then a woman is gonna come along, and she’ll sidetrack you in your dreams. And then you’re finished. You’re through, and that’s it, so don’t you ever, ever, ever let a woman sidetrack you from your chosen path. It don’t matter if she’s tall, if she’s shaped real fine, if she lies next to you and is there with you in the morning, all that don’t matter because your dream is gone, like my dream is gone, and you’re nothing.”

He hammers this point into the ground for a long time. L— is picking up a magazine, and I’m starting to worry that he’ll tell the dude off or something. But then the guy, as if a light bulb went off over his head, tries a new approach:

      “Hey, what did you guys order? You ordered a pizza? Hey it’s on me. Merry Christmas. I’ll cover it.”

      “Oh, no, you don’t have to do that.”

      “Hey do I look that bad? Huh?” He takes off his hat and inspects it.

      “No, no, not at all,” we insist.

      “Then it’s on me. But hey, I’m not gonna lecture you or anything, but listen to me for a second. You read the Bible? I got one but I don’t got my reading glasses. But I can tell you somethin’. It says right in that book, and this is true, now, that man is king. You got that? We’re all gents, all three of us here. We’re men. Do you know what that means? It means we’re king. We are right up here” (he points to the band on his straw hat), “we’re right here, on top, ‘cause we’re king, and the woman, she is below that. She’s queen, see? Queen, and that means she’s below king. Says so in the Bible. God, see, he made man himself, he put us right here, and then the woman—I say it was the woman, not the man—the woman who was tempted by Satan, and just like she did with Adam, she’ll do to you, she’ll ruin you.”

He goes off for a while longer, and meanwhile the cook has screwed up on our cheese pizza and we get some really wild thing with artichoke hearts and chicken which turns out to be really good. This whole time L— is trying to explain to our drunk friend that we have to talk amongst ourselves because we work at a bike shop and it’s our job to decide what bikes to order, because we have to place the order tomorrow and if we don’t have our decision the boss is gonna kick our asses. None of it is true (we’re just rank-and-file mechanics), but I think L— wouldn’t mind if it were. Of course the ruse isn’t working, the guy’s just promising to buy a bike from us, saying repeatedly “You just made a sale!” and before long he’s going on again, repeating his story over and over.

       “See this hair?” he says. “It’s short, now, and getting grey, but it used to be long, but that don’t matter now ‘cause Delilah is a crafty bitch, and I know you’ve read in the Bible, how she’ll strip you of your strength,” and goes off some more. He keeps saying he’ll cover our bill and then going on and on. I figure, he’s so eccentric, I’ll just have to assume he’s a prophet of some kind, or else he wouldn’t be here, and pretty soon I figure it’s God himself sitting over there, warning us about throwing our lives away. Soon the guy is standing over our table and kind of weaving back and forth, and L— is covering up our pizza because he’s just positive the guy’s about to throw up all over us, as the guy keeps coughing and gagging, yet hardly missing a syllable of his lecture.

       “The most important thing, you see, is your dream. It really is. And you need to always have your brothers. Fraternity! The fellowship between men, that’s what we need, forget the woman, even if she lies beside you, brotherhood is what we need!” Finally he restates his thesis for the hundredth time “Don’t you ever, ever let a woman sidetrack you from your dreams,” and then he’s gone, staggering off into the night.

It’s been about forty five minutes, and finally we can kick back and laugh. L— says, “All I kept thinking about was that guy in Henry’s!” We talk about our chance dinner guest for a while, and then L— says, “You know what though? A lot of the things he said make sense, and a few things I really needed to hear right about now.”

I tell L— that get his point, and in a very strange way I almost kind of do. I’m not saying you should always listen to what a drunk stranger tells you, of course. L— and I both agree that somebody shut him down hard. I think some more about what the guy said, especially since it probably really was God over there. But for all its length, the lecture just doesn’t seem that enlightening. Myself, I’d still like to find a girlfriend … being sidetracked might be kind of nice.

The guy comes back in about fifteen minutes later, but we’re not about to start the ball rolling again. We pay our bill (the guy never quite got around to covering it) and split.

May 25, 1992 – Oakland

So what did I sit down to write to you about? Well, there’s always band-aids. At the bike shop we use Curad. I consider this one of the small but nagging travesties that plague my employment there. I would say about one in three Curad band-aids is defective. The little sanitary cotton pad is skewed, and sometimes has missed the center of the adhesive portion by more than half its own size so you get only a little triangle of pad, and the rest would stick to the wound if you actually used the bandage. I really can’t believe the bandaging public tolerates this blatant quality control problem. Perhaps you feel I’m overreacting, but you should consider the details of my bandaging needs. I will often cut, rip, or gash my fingers on some chainring or cable strand, and need to dress the wound, and then every time I finish a repair or want to wash up before lunch, I need to redress. (The wound, not myself. We have aprons for that.) Even when I’m at home, I have to put on new band-aids every time I do the dishes, take out my contact lenses, or want to cook something. This is really bothersome since I have to pay for these band-aids or I should say Band-Aids, since I’m talking about the actual Johnson & Johnson product now. (You think I’d use Curad at home?) Anyway, I’m tempted to just wait for the wet Band-Aid to dry out, but I wasn’t sure so I called Johnson & Johnson on their toll free number and asked them. “You know how the box says they’re waterproof?” I ask. “Oh, yes, they certainly are,” says the lady earnestly, in her charming southern accent. “Well, does that mean I don’t need to change them once they’re wet?” I ask. “Oh, no, you should always replace them. It’s the only way to prevent bacteria from infecting the wound.” I reply, “That puzzles me. If I have to replace my wet Band-Aids, what’s the benefit of their being waterproof?” The gal pauses for a moment. “Well,” she replies, “if you’re swimming you won’t lose them in the pool, anyway. Oh, and they won’t slip down your drain!”

October 27, 1993 – San Francisco

Well, November is off to a slow start. This morning, I literally couldn’t get out of the house: the doorknob was stripped. I turned and turned it, but the door wouldn’t open—the knob just spun on the shaft. I took these two little set screws out, and popped the doorknob off, but this was fruitless: the mechanism was still in place, unreachable. I tried a credit card on the bolt/latch thingy, but that would only work from the other side of the door. Finally, I went to my toolbox and found a Reach toothbrush, which has a square-cross-section handle that I hoped would fit in the female end of the latch mechanism, in place of the doorknob shaft. (It’s remarkable I even had this Reach, because normally I use Oral-B). Well, it worked like a charm, and after finally exiting the house I brought the toothbrush with me so I’d be able to get back in.

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