From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXXIII

Introduction

This is the thirty-third installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, Volume XXIX is here, Volume XXX is here, Volume XXXI is here, and Volume XXXII is here.

What are Bits & Bobs? They’re longer than tweets, shorter than essays, and slightly more formal than graffiti. Back when people wrote letters, and then treated email as a way to send letters, and there were no blogs, I got my literary ya-yas out by stretching the epistolary form into something almost bloglike. This old correspondence is what I now mine for literary snippets that, on a slow news day, can be assembled into these posts.

The different volumes of Bits & Bobs are not organized numerically, alphabetically, or taxonomically; nor are they assembled in order of priority, importance, urgency, or applicability. You can peruse them randomly, sequentially, or as directed by your Ouija board.

The following dispatches were written when I was a Berkeley student.

October 12, 1990

Today’s vocab word is “frame,” in the phrase “frame yourself.” I don’t have the etymology, and it’s possible my roommate B— coined it himself, but I’m quite certain it will see widespread use from here on out since it’s such a useful term—and you read it here first! Anyhow, framing yourself is when you say something really stupid and there’s nowhere to hide. Like when B— and I were in the San Francisco Centre, this huge nine-story shopping center, and checked out this really fancy shoe boutique, not because we wanted or could afford the shoes there but because of the really fly saleswoman. We walk in, expecting to sort of drift away naturally at any moment, but then the saleswoman says to B—, “How’s it going?” He looks at her, totally shocked, as if he’d assumed we were beneath her notice, and doesn’t know what to say. Finally he stammers out, “What?” She repeats her innocent greeting, and he trips over some words and then, to cover, picks up a display shoe and starts asking questions about it. He’s just making it worse, but she is pretty fly so I take a seat and pass the time comparing all these Italian dress shoes to my totally thrashed Nike Air Solo Flights. B— is asking now about whether these shoes would be resolable, and the saleswoman is getting really confused—”Why would you want to? Don’t the soles look durable?”—while B— begins to blush. That’s how you frame yourself. (I could give you numerous examples of this from my own life, but what would I want to do that for?)

November 3, 1991 [from a letter to my mom]

Tonight my homework was reading America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, and it triggered a random flashback of memory from just over four years ago. You [my mom], Geoff, Max and I were at the Wells Fargo Bank on the corner of Santa Rosa and Foothill in San Luis Obispo, late in the summer of 1987. All of my belongings—which we had miraculously crammed into your VW Jetta for the trip out—were already at Geoff’s old apartment on McCollum where we’d be staying briefly before moving into our own place. Now we were parting ways: you and Max would drive the thousand miles back to Boulder, and Geoff and I would bike to our apartment where I would start my adulthood.

The moment held oddly little emotional intensity for me. It seemed completely unrealistic—not because I was beginning a completely new life, but because this lifelong separation originated in a bank parking lot, of all places. Geoff showed all the signs of experiencing a big moment, and you began crying. As I sit here recalling it tonight, I am waiting to see if I’ll finally respond to that sendoff, from so long ago. Back then, I was like the kid in the Bulosan book, too wary of the new struggle I was beginning to bother looking back at my old life. In that parking lot I had slipped into some kind of emotional coma. Riding off, and seeing you drive away towards Colorado, I might as well have been biking to a friend’s house, sure to be back home in time for dinner. But what home? Home was not home anymore.

The impact of the moment never did catch up to me; the delayed reaction I expected never came. I simply wandered off into my future, looking around half-interestedly as though browsing at a garage sale, never thinking to look back over my shoulder. But for one long moment tonight, during which I closed my eyes and almost dropped my book, the accumulation of long-neglected responses almost overwhelmed me. Perhaps if I were a faster typist, or more swift in contemplation, you would be reading a more impassioned letter. As it is, the moment has already passed and I’m ready to get back to my book.

January 8, 1992

Did I ever tell you about The Iciest Chick in the World? This betty is cold fresh, man, we’re talkin’ straight-up stupid-fly. I first saw her last spring on the first day of English 139, and decided to bust out on the extreme extrovert tip. (That worked reasonably well with H—, at least until I took it a bit overboard, right?) So like I said, this chick is totally rad and offhandedly mentions how she was just in Kenya hanging out. Then, another totally dope freak sits down next to her. If I had seen her first, I would have called her the Iciest Chick in the World. But as it is, the friend is relegated to a close, yet also breathtaking, second. Then this dude sits down with them and starts talking, as if continuing a conversation from earlier, so he’s obviously their friend. As near as I can figure he’s not a boyfriend since he doesn’t show one of these fly betties more attention than the other. So now the trick is to kind of chat with all of them, even though my attention is drawn completely to the Iciest Chick. (To give you the idea of her look, she has short, dark hair, kind of like the Zachary’s waitress my roommate and I affectionately refer to as “The Lacrosse Player,” and the stylin’ clothes—and body—of a J.Crew model like we used to gape at in the catalogs that would arrive in the mail, unbidden but totally not junk mail.) Well, I never made it on time to English 139 again, despite my most earnest efforts, and thus never got to sit next to the Flyest Chick in the World again (until the day of the final exam, when she sat right next to me just to mess with me). But all semester long, from across the lecture hall, I’d surreptitiously check out the Iciest Chick during class, whimpering inwardly in hormonal agony, like a dog in heat trapped in a kennel. Since that final, I hadn’t seen her since last fall when I was riding my bike through campus down this hill. As she walked up the other way, I did a double-take, was totally distracted, and almost crashed my bike. Seriously.

Well, I recently saw her again. At the end of the fall term the professor of another English class threw a party at his house, and I attended with my friend H—. And who should show up but The Iciest Chick in the World! So I finally have another opportunity to strike up a conversation, and I feel like the situation is more in my favor now. I have a girlfriend, so I’m free from that stigma that lady-less guys seem to have: you know, that invisible sign around the available guy’s neck that says, “DEFECTIVE,” and the built-in kill switch that gets flipped whenever he screws up and lets on that he’s interested in a chick. You know, how he says “Hey” to her and she thinks, “Oh my god, I can’t even believe this desperate putz is trying to hit on me.” So not only do I have the poise of a guy who is spoken for and not on the make, I’m also there with H—, who is frankly gorgeous. Even though H— and I are just friends, nobody would necessarily know that. So a girl might take a slight interest in me, or at least might not be repelled by me, for the simple reason that I seem unavailable. Not that I intend to capitalize on any of this; it’s just nice not feeling like a pariah.

With all this in mind, I have the confidence to approach the Iciest Chick, who’s standing with her guy friend—the same dude I’d encountered the first time I met her (and whom I only remember because the fact of his friendship with this girl was a source of bottomless envy). I offhandedly remark, “Say, weren’t you two in English 139 last spring?” The dude laughs in my face and says, “Yeah, but how come you remember? There were like 150 people in that class!”

My poise is shaken seismically. What can I say? That I remember him only because he was with her, and I remember her because she’s the Iciest Chick in the World? I’m rescued by J—, a classmate from English 180A, who shows up out of nowhere and gracelessly butts in to the conversation. Even though we’d spent the past semester arguing in class, I suddenly treat him like an old friend. That’s me, Mr. Social. Turns out J— knows the Iciest Chicks’ guy friend, so I’m saved. The three of us chat, just as though the whole point of me saying hi wasn’t the chick.

Next thing I know the food has been served and I’m sitting on the floor at this coffee table, across from the guy friend, pretending to carry on a conversation. My real attention is of course on the Iciest Chick, who is sitting right next to me, fully enjoying my appreciation of her. Just by her presence she’s essentially teasing me, albeit aimlessly, like a cat sharpening its claws on a scratching post. Every time she brushes up against me I think I’m going to pass out. I am hoping this isn’t noticed by H—, who is at a nearby chair, because she’d probably give me endless shit about it later. 

H—, meanwhile, seems totally unaware that J— is transfixed by her, pining for her like he did all semester. He gets up and offers to get the Iciest Chick’s guy friend a beer. The friend says, “Thanks,” and I, not having received the same offer, venture a joke and say, “Yeah, thanks” to his back as he walks away. It comes off perfectly—the Iciest Chick even laughs—except for one thing: as I deliver the line, a small particle of food flies from my mouth. Whether or not the Iciest Chick saw the flying particle, the mere prospect that she did is enough to trample my mojo for the remainder of the evening. I’m just as paralyzed as I was ten years ago when I was chatting up the flyest girl in my junior high school class and my retainer fell out of my mouth. I end up pretending to practically ignore the Iciest Chick while shooting the breeze with the two guys. This always happens. Of course, this is actually the most appropriate thing to do anyway since I do have a girlfriend, after all. My interest in the Iciest Chick is like that of a hunter who shoots big game merely for sport, leaving the carcass to rot in the wilderness. Except that (to correct the metaphor) I realize I’m not a big game hunter at all, just some dumb tourist driven into the savanna by a local guide to look at a lion.

January 14, 1992

Remember summers as a kid? Imagine: it’s a hot day, and without thinking you drop by the neighbor kid’s place and ring the doorbell. Without so much as a greeting he strolls out, maybe you slap each other around a bit, one guy slouches into a lawn chair in the garage where it’s cool and the other rides around in circles on his little brother’s bike. Finally somebody says, “So whaddya wanna do.” There’s no answer and nobody cares, so you just hang out and maybe five minutes later (though nobody’s keeping track), the other guy says, “I know, let’s make some Kool-Aid and go up on the roof.” You get some towels and if you feel like it you actually climb to the roof. Otherwise you set up in the street and lie around in the sun. Most of your attention, what little of it there is, centers around making sure there’s a constant supply of Kool-Aid and ice and maybe that the towel’s damp at all times ‘cause it’s so hot. One moment slips into the next and no plans are made more than a minute or two in advance. Those days are never coming back.

February 25, 1992

We had a spate of vandalism on our street [in a sketchy part of south Berkeley]. Car windows broken out, and tires slashed, including the ones on my girlfriend’s scooter. Eventually the lady next door caught the vandal red-handed. He’s a student at the elementary school across the street, just ten years old.

In other news, my roommate and I went mountain biking and were heading up Ashby toward the trails when we encountered these two grade-school-aged kids riding as fast as they could, one on a tiny BMX bike and the other on a cheap, beat-to-hell Miyata ten-speed. We rode with them for a while, kind of making sure they didn’t get run over, because Ashby is a busy thoroughfare. The kid with the ten speed, who was wearing a dark wool cap that gave him the aura of street cred, which clashed comically with his youth, was really stoked on our bikes and asked if we raced, etc. I noticed his bike’s fork was bent, and told him to come by the Square Wheel and I’d write him up an estimate and fix his bike. He actually did bring the bike in, and I went a little easy on the labor charge. Get this: the bike had a sticker on it advertising the shop it came from: The High Wheeler, in Boulder, Colorado. My first full-time bike shop job!

So you might be wondering if there’s a point to these stories, and there is: turns out both are about the same kid. Days after picking up his bike from the shop, the kid happened to see me in front of my apartment, ran over to chat, and learned that I lived there. I mentioned the vandalism (without letting on I knew who’d done it), and described what a hassle it was replacing the scooter tires, etc. He looked so ashamed I felt bad for him.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXXII

Introduction

This is the thirty-second installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, Volume XXIX is here, Volume XXX is here, and Volume XXXI is here.

What are Bits & Bobs? They’re short essays and other missives I wrote ages ago, usually taken from letters to friends and family. I wrote these long before I had a blog and (in the case of this week’s batch) even before I had email. When writing them I tried to be all literary and highbrow, whether or not I had any faith my words would even be read. In that sense these letters were a whole lot like albertnet…

The different volumes of Bits & Bobs are not organized chronologically, thematically, spatially, or in fact at all. You can read these in numerical, alphabetical, sequential, or temporal order, or according to your religious, philosophical, ontological, or spiritual ideals. Are some volumes better than others? I have no idea … I only wrote and compiled them.

Note: albertnet makes no warranty as to the quality, utility, readability, or applicability of these Bits & Bobs. By reading, skimming, scrolling, or gazing upon this post you agree to be bound by the albertnet Privacy Policy, which exists entirely to protect you, but not from every threat. You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the author of this post from any feelings you may have of inadequacy, superiority, awe, or ennui arising from the consumption of this material. If you are a bot, kill yourself immediately. If you plan to read this post aloud, please do so in a firm, authoritative, but friendly voice, and if you sing it, feel free to dance along—but no twerking, for god’s sake.

Today’s Bits & Bobs are in chronological order, and all happen to have been written when I was a Berkeley student.

July 28, 1990

A couple weeks back, a bunch of B—’s Santa Barbara friends came up to visit for the weekend, and we went to this San Francisco bar, the Savoy Tivoli. Everyone was ordering cocktails. I’d never had a cocktail in my life and didn’t even know their names. I felt tongue-tied and almost panicked. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to note what the person before me ordered, and parroted “gin and tonic” as my order. It felt weird to hear this phrase come out of my mouth—like a lie, almost. I mean, I didn’t even know what a gin and tonic was, so to suggest that I actually wanted one was somehow fundamentally untrue. The drink went down easily enough, but I had no idea what it had cost, and you know how broke I always am, so it was the only drink I ordered all evening. (That ended up being a good thing because the entire rest of our party got completely clocked, and it fell to me to be the designated driver.) It was pretty funny: Fat Head started hitting on this girl in our group he didn’t know, somebody’s friend, and he thought her name was Connie but he wasn’t sure, so he was kind of introducing this “H” sound into it, like “CHonnie,” so that if he had the name wrong she’d think he was saying “Honey.” (I wouldn’t have put this together at the time; he explained the strategy the next day.) Well, the girl’s name was actually Alicia and she didn’t buy his BS for a second. So anyhow, B— and I have noted how soft and wormlike guys can tend to get when they’re overly smitten by a girl, and we are perennially on our guard against that. So now when one of us is talking about some fly chick we’re into, we refer to her as “CHonnie,” as a way to downplay our interest, kind of like saying “what’s-her-name.” As a linguistic innovation, it’s right up there with “Hector.”

Speaking of trying to maintain our dignity in the face of beautiful, terrifying girls, B— and I try to balance things out by turning the love interest into a foil for our own joking around. For example, B—’s “friend” M— came to visit, and I knew she wasn’t just a friend, he totally pined for her as he’d described in great detail prior, without even remembering to refer to her as “Chonnie.” Yeah: that smitten. As I was introduced I said, “It’s so nice to meet you M—. Gosh, B— has told me so much about you.” But I made sure to get her name slightly wrong, as a little inside joke to B—. And then when B— left us alone for a few minutes, while he finished styling himself out before they left, I took M— aside and spoke to her in a hushed tone: “Sorry if B— sort of embarrasses you when you go out tonight. I keep promising I’ll take him out clothes shopping so he won’t look like such a dork, but I haven’t gotten around to it. He’s cool though, I mean seriously, except when . . . well, sometimes he acts kind of cheesy. He can’t help it. But you guys will have fun, trust me.” I delighted in wondering how M— would recount this little pre-apology to B— later. Ideally, they’d share a laugh over my “clothes shopping” comment, since B— dresses better than anyone I know, and I shop at Ross Dress for Less. [Note: you can read here how, not long after, B— turned the tables on me. –Ed.]

June 20, 1991

Seems I’m finally getting some acne, after having been mostly spared as a teenager. (Who knows, maybe I’m finally hitting puberty.) But I don’t get a lot of zits all over my face, like a lot of other people. I get one, and only one, except that it only seems like just one, but really it’s like five—four of which are beneath the skin, right underneath the visible one, burrowing deep into my face. Only one makes it to the surface at a time. So it gets good and ripe, whitehead and all, and I go to pop it and the seed comes right out, springing clear of the skin of my face in a valiant attempt to reach the bathroom mirror, sometimes even making a distinct “poip” noise, but to my horror there’s still something there. And that next one lures me into a false sense that it’s ripe, and I invariably try to finish it off, and the whole thing gets red and bloated and really sore. This has happened twice now, once on my forehead where my hair kind of covered it up, and again right near my mouth. I cannot convey to you how pissed off this gets me. Near my mouth, I resisted the impulse to pop the zit, but then when it finally went away, the zit beneath it dropped right down the little pimple-tunnel into exactly the same place as the first. So much self restraint is required here that I’m not sure I can take it. At least it’s not as bad as that forehead one: that one had so much zit-puss behind it I could feel a raised section on my forehead the diameter of a quarter. And you know what the worst of it is? None of my zits has ever been as bad as the ones I see every day, on all kinds of people. On the way to a haircut in the San Francisco Castro district the other day, I was taking Muni, which is this really scummy subway, and I saw this old guy with about seven or eight huge warts on his nose. It was so hideous I could only look for about a second at a time. I got to thinking, what would happen to me if my nose began to grow warts like those? First, this would destroy my social life, as nobody would be willing to subject himself to the heinous sight of me. I would honorably remove myself from people’s sight and become a hermit. I’d only venture out via shitty big-city subways where everybody’s too busy rushing around everywhere to notice me, except for maybe some college kid who thinks he can boost his own self-image (tarnished by a towering whitehead zit, perhaps) by noting the physical deformities of people like me.

September 10, 1991 - Berkeley

I’ve finally mostly got my health back after that heinous, endless strep throat business. There’s just one symptom remaining: I can’t open my jaws more than like a centimeter, because of the residual swelling. So I’m eating a bit slower lately. A friend had me over for lunch at her sorority house and all we had to choose from was roast beef sandwich or salad (which, as you know, is ideal for rabbits and chicks, but not guys like us). So I’m there dipping this roast beef sandwich in the “au jus” and kind of smashing it into my lips and sucking it through the narrow gap between my upper and lower teeth. My parents would be shocked at such table manners. For a moment I worried that the sorority sisters were grossed out, but then quickly grasped that nobody was paying any attention to me. I mean, why would they? I need to get over myself.

I had some totally heinous nightmares when I was sick, dude. The last one I had, maybe a week ago, was that I was with my family at this weird place, sort of a cross between a hotel and a museum, and there was this exhibit on the top floor where you would walk through and see the corpses of all these people who went crazy (some sort of mass hysteria) and killed themselves with scalpels. So I went through and all these people had sliced themselves to ribbons and a few of them weren’t even dead yet. Yow!

Today I was riding my bike through campus (a highly illegal activity, for some reason) when I saw The Most Intensely Beautiful Woman in the World. Have I told you about her? She was in one of my English classes last semester. She makes the second most beautiful girl in the world (her friend, actually, who sat with her) look plain. I’m serious, if you saw her you would instantly reorganize your hierarchy of most attractive females in the world, with her at the top. I’ve never even seen a picture of a model who’s as attractive. At the final exam last semester I arrived a bit early, to make sure I had all the time I needed, and she came and sat right next to me. It was a huge lecture hall, still mostly empty, so there was no need for this; I’m certain she was just messing with me because she’s probably caught me sneaking looks at her. So the lecture hall filled up and then the exam started and for like twenty minutes I couldn’t even think. She’s that fly. I should have waited after the exam and gone up to her and said something really suave like, “Insofar as you totally distracted me just now, and my grade in this class will probably suffer, can you at least tell me your name?” Anyhow, when I saw her again today I almost passed out. I’m lucky I didn’t crash my bike. Damn.

October 1, 1991

Some of my friends are older and have already graduated, and since I’m in my senior year, I’m starting to worry (just a little) about joining the workforce and what that will be like. Here is my composite of what my friends’ stories suggest: the “real job” is distinct from a “summer job” mainly by the level of decorum. Even if you mainly sit in an office talking on the phone all day, you have to wear a necktie. Why the tie? Beats me. Maybe it’s like a collar and leash, to remind you of your submission to your employer. And then you have to drive incredible distances on the highway to get to work, which sucks because of traffic, and then when the traffic finally clears up and you want to make up time so you’re not late to work, you see a highway patrol car and have to slow down again, cussing and moaning about how you’re going to be late now and why doesn’t that cop get the hell out of here and let you be, and then you get to work and whenever the bossman comes around you have to speed up your work, and why doesn’t that jerk get the hell out of here and let you be, and then you drive home and bitch about the traffic, and about the cop, and then you drink a beer and figure out a way to fill in the time before you go to bed, wake up the next morning, and do the whole thing over again. On the weekends, exhausted, you need to get away so you do a trip somewhere, and drive along the freeway and cuss and moan when you see a cop cruiser, and then hang out at a beach and go to a few bars and visit old friends from college and then have to part ways and drive back across the highway and get ready to begin another five-day grind. Man, I can’t wait.

November 5, 1991 - Berkeley

I’m taking this Native American literature course and it’s pretty rad. First we read lots of trickster tales, which bear an interesting resemblance to the African American Brer Rabbit tales. The Native American trickster is usually a rabbit or at least rabbit-ish. The really weird part is how often these stories mention his penis—either its being extraordinarily long, or detachable, or getting badly injured. This is one of the benefits of being an English major: I can regale my roommates with what I’m learning, and they’re actually interested. It doesn’t wash the other way. E— can’t really talk about Political Science because everyone (including he himself) knows that’s pretty boring. M— is getting a PhD in Mechanical Engineering which I suppose I’d find interesting except how could he possibly dumb it down enough for me? The other guy, J—, is majoring in Forestry, and maybe that could be interesting if described by a bright guy, but J— is just a dumbass. When challenged about having the easiest major there is, he replied, “Dude, there’s a lotta trees!” (I didn’t make that up, he really said that.) In contrast, when I recount a tale of the Trickster sending his incredibly long penis across a river to achieve sexual congress with the daughter of another tribe’s chief, I have my roommates’ full attention.

I’m reading this hella dope book called Fools Crow now. I didn’t grasp the point of the title at first because I thought it was “fool’s crow,” like some fool had a pet crow or something, like maybe he’d have been a falconer if he wasn’t such a fool. But it’s actually a verb phrase, “fools Crow,” as in he fooled the Crow tribe. Turns out the Native Americans in the protagonist’s tribe (and probably others) had this convention of giving you a really lame name when you’re young—the protagonist’s was “White Man’s Dog,” i.e., very derogatory—and then if you do something impressive, like using cunning to kill the Crow chief, you get a cool new name honoring your achievement, hence “Fools Crow.” I have been trying to turn this into a new tradition for my roommates and me, giving each other lame names based on our lack of achievement, e.g., Wets the Bed or Chases Bimbos. This didn’t take hold, but then I happened to mention that White Man’s Dog called his wife “nothing-woman.” That immediately stuck, and has become something we invariably call one another (e.g., “Stop leaving your wet towel on the floor, nothing-woman!”) and is also a way to refer to one another’s girlfriends (e.g., “So are we riding this weekend or is your nothing-woman dragging you off somewhere?”).

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXXI

Introduction

This is the thirty-first installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, Volume XXIX is here, and Volume XXX is here.

If you’re new to the Bits & Bobs series, it’s really not that complicated: they’re snippets of past correspondence that I think could amuse any audience. Back in the olden days—before blogs, doomscrolling, podcasts, streaming, Youtube, and TikTok—certain oddballs, such as myself, actually took the time to correspond with friends and family. As you yourself may recall, people used to write letters, on paper, and send them through the mail. And originally emails were more like letters and were widely exchanged among humans, before email became mostly useless (e.g., solicitations from a retailer you bought something from five years ago). And get this: people used to actually read emails, or at least that’s what I told myself when I worked pretty hard at writing them. Now my old correspondence has a second chance at an audience, as I string old snippets together into these Bits & Bobs posts. The different volumes are varied in time and place and can be read randomly, rapidly, repeatedly, reluctantly, resentfully, resignedly, reverently, ruefully, and/or religiously.

Today’s Bits & Bobs are in chronological order, and I specify where I was living when I wrote them. You can try to guess whom I wrote them to (but honestly, good luck with that). And as you will gather from the dates, these were typed, printed, and mailed.

March 8, 1990 – Santa Barbara

[My brother] Geoff came down and visited last weekend to watch the races our UCSB cycling team hosted. A couple of years ago, some racers complained that our criterium course was boring. Well, we showed them! This year we set up a course on campus with eleven corners, including a hairpin. Traditionally, not my kind of course. (Aren’t you glad I have health insurance? I’m not—the premiums just went up to $60 per month!) It seems like maybe all the weight training I did over the winter came in handy: the race come down to a field sprint and I took fourth. Somehow the team had conjured up a speed radar with a giant display that was positioned at the finish line, and we broke 40 mph in the final sprint! I’ll confess I was extra motivated trying to impress this girl who came to watch me, but it turns out she got bored and left before the finish, unbeknownst to me. Oh well, at least I got a good race out of it, and Geoff was stoked for me. I have no idea how else to try to impress that girl … I’m kind of out of bullets now.

October 1, 1990 - Oakland

The main reason I’m writing you is that I have a puzzle which I think you may be able to help figure out. Suppose that for dinner I make six servings of mashed pota­toes (hypothetically speaking of course; I would never eat such a boring meal in actual life, at least not without also making a huge burrito . . . okay, we’re getting less hypothetical here) and in making these six servings I use two cups of water, a cup of milk, and two cups of potato flakes (which, through a miracle of science, turn out better than real potatoes, just like Cool Ranch Doritos taste better than anything that actually exists in nature). The question is, how can my six servings only be 1/2‑cup each, like the box says? I mean, I should have five cups of potatoes, which would be ten 1/2‑cup servings. Where do the extra two cups go? Steam? Heat? It would have to make five cups. Hell, it looked like five cups, and it’s sitting in my stomach like five cups (and a burrito).

Anyway, I thought you might know the answer. But don’t feel like you have to rush a response back to me or anything; I mean, you mentioned how self-conscious writing makes you feel, since you’re worried about your spelling and punctua­tion. So (whoops, this box of potatoes just leaked flakes all over my lap) if I get too accurate with my grammar, etc. in this letter, will you get stressed out and decide writing is too much hassle? I don’t want that to happen, so I is gonna start scrweing up my spelings and grammers so if and you will deside that mabey its all cool and I’m perty stuppid and not so dangrous to rite to at alll. Maybe that won’t be convincing since this is still a typed letter instead of casually scrawled like yours, but obviously there’s plenty of really dull typed stuff out there that wouldn’t intimidate anybody and I should try that mode. In fact, maybe I should adopt a scientific writing style:

Certainly it is noteworthy that the dust, lint, and flakes of dehyd­rated potatoes in this Oakland resident’s apartment tend to gather around the exterior surface of his high‑fidelity stereophonic audio speakers. This is doubtless due to the static charge effected by the main B‑type DryWatt FlipFlop magnets in the speakers, combined with the relatively dry air of the Oakland region. The tendency of the speakers to simultaneously repel said dust and lint as a result of the air displacement, effected by the vibrating speaker cones, is also notable. The point at which the magnitude of the sound (adjusted by the resident by means of the volume control knob found on his receiver) repels the dust and lint to an area beyond which the static electricity will attract it is left as an exercise for the undoubtedly intelligent science enthusiast reading this article.

Is that boring enough for you? It’s still risky—my dad and one or two of my brothers would probably be fascinated by that whole paragraph. Actually, my dad would probably be really disappointed in me due to some inaccuracy.

I have to say, your letter was pretty confusing. What are Little Debbies? And what’s Greasy Tony’s? I can’t believe there’s an all-u-can eat joint I don’t know about. And are Spener and Spencer the same guy, and am I supposed to know who this guy/these guys is/are? Maybe I met him/them at Nationals and forgot, since I tend to do that. When I was in Boulder this summer on my way to Wyoming for a bike race, I was at a restaurant and a whole group of people called me over, and I didn’t recognize a single one of them. They were talking to me and everything, using my name even, and all I could do is play along and think, “Who the hell are these people? I’ve never seen then before in my life!” What do you do when that happens?

December 1, 1990 – Oakland

One of my English professors, for my Chicano Literature class, decided to be a dick and make our big paper—80% of our grade—due on the Monday after Thanksgiving. I had planned to spend the long weekend writing it, but somehow managed to let my brother Geoff talk me into driving to Boulder for Thanksgiving instead. The worst part is, it took him a good while to convince me, so by the time I embarked on the trip (starting with a Greyhound bus to his place in San Luis Obispo) I not only hadn’t made good headway on the paper, but hadn’t even figured out my topic and thus hadn’t checked out the books I’d need. I figured I would have to wait until I got to Boulder and borrow my brother Bryan’s University of Colorado library card; check out the books there; and write the paper on the Friday before driving back home. So, Friday afternoon, I go to the CU library with my friend P— (a student there) and wander through the rows and pull out every book I can find. Then I read the table of contents of each book to figure out a good topic to write my paper on. Suddenly, there it is, a shimmering topic shining down on me from above: the social growth of the Chicana (Chicano female). I found like ten good books.

So I study those a while, until this library staffer comes and says the library’s closing early, what with the holiday and all. So I go to check out my books and the dude at the circulation desk tells me, “Sorry, it’s after 5:00. I can’t check anything out to you. Regulations.” I tell him how bad I need the books (though I can’t mention I’m leaving to go back to Berkeley the next day since I’m supposedly this card-carrying CU student). He won’t budge so I go back into the depths of the library, which is dark now, and tell my friend P— to go down and wait under this window. Without a word, he understands my situation: my back to the wall, I have no choice but to drop the books down to him.

Unfortunately, in putting my brilliant plan into play I feel less like Sean Connery and more like Peter Sellers. The windows are literally welded shut, with grates over them. I go down to the second floor, stumbling around in the dark, and all the windows have padlocks on them. Colorado Maximum Security Corrective University. So I devise another plan: I’ll make a run for it. So I find an exit, with a red door handle and a huge sign, “EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY! ALARM WILL SOUND!” and a smaller but equally ominous sign beneath it, “Those misusing this exit will be prosecuted.” I have no idea where the exit will dump me, and what direction I’ll have to run in. Plus, I’ve got a duffel bag with 10 hardback books and a bunch of other crap in it, and I’m not much of a runner. But on the plus side, I’ve seen the guy who’s patrolling the library and he’s a big fat guy with only one arm. Seriously. So I take a deep breath and push through the door.

I’ve always wondered what those alarms sound like—and I’m still wondering because nothing happened. For a second I was really stoked because I thought I was home free. Then I realized I was still indoors, in some storage room or something. I stumble around in there but it’s seriously pitch black and I can’t find an exit. So I go back into the stacks and look for another exit, really stressed out by now, and then I make a wrong turn and the one-armed man sees me. He’s even less sympathetic than the circulation desk guy, and makes me put all my books on this little cart and leave. And that’s why before I left for California on Saturday, I had to go back to the library and check all those books out, and bring them with me to research and write my paper on Sunday, after the trip.

Of course we managed to get on the road late. Right around Utah, I figured I’d done my share of the driving, and turned the wheel over to my brother’s roommate, J—. (Geoff doesn’t have his driver’s license.) I got maybe half an hour of sleep before J—woke me up and said, “Dude, you gotta keep me awake. I keep hallucinating trees on the road.” I guess I can understand that, since he hasn’t slept in a while, and it’s dark out, but he goes on to say, “They’re sage trees, and they’re talking to me. Talking trees, I’m serious. You know what they keep saying?” I guess I nod or mumble “uh-huh” or something, because he says, “You do know? What did they tell me, then?” I play along: “They said that sleep is a myth, and that you don’t really need sleep, just lots and lots of coffee.” So we keep talking, and after a while I’m only half awake. Suddenly J— shakes me real good and says, “What did you just tell me?” I confess that I can’t remember. He says I was talking about a green hotel where I was writing Christmas cards, and this huge doorman with a big zipper who kept harassing me. I remember the part about the green hotel, because in Las Vegas we’d passed this creepy looking Holiday Inn, painted white but bathed in green floodlights (neither of us could figure out why). Finally J—’s driving shift was over, by which point Geoff was awake and able to help keep me awake for the final leg.

I finally got home at like 11:00 p.m. on Sunday and started my English paper at about 11:30 p.m., giving me about twelve hours. I was definitely hurting, this being basically my second all-nighter in a row. On a hunch, I phoned my friend H—, who’s in my class. She picked right up. “Working on your paper?” I asked. “Of course!” she laughed, “I just got started!”

During the night as I pounded out the paper I hallucinated about people in the hallway outside my apartment; talked to them a bit before realizing they weren’t real; and discovered that coffee, UpTime, and NoDoz are altogether inadequate for postponing sleep. The only thing that could help now was adrenaline. I got that by accidentally falling asleep, and waking up twenty minutes later thinking it was morning already. Once the panic subsided I found I could function again. At about 8:00 on Monday morning I remembered I had a paper in the works for my 9:00 Rhetoric class; finished it; went to class; and ended up falling asleep during my small group discussion. Evidently I was talking in my sleep, because I awoke to this girl laughing her ass off. Then I headed home and finished the big paper. It was due at noon, and I finished it at 12:35 and brought it to class. Nobody was there: class had been cancelled. I managed to track down the professor and he took the paper. Whew.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXX

Introduction

This is the thirtieth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. (No, XXX does not mean it’s rated X … it’s more like PG-13, maybe R, we’ll see what makes it in. If this ends up being my most popular Bits & Bobs post, I’ll know why.)

Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, and Volume XXIX is here. Are you thinking “pump up the volume?” (Didn’t think so.)

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re generally passages from letters I wrote friends and family back in the days before email (or excerpts from emails, in the days after). If this sounds boring, bear in mind I’ve always wanted to be a writer so I tried pretty hard to be interesting. Also, these snippets are pretty candid, and in my youth I was socially clumsy and also tended to ride my bike at speeds some would consider dangerous … so read on because there’s always a chance you’ll enjoy some schadenfreude, righteous indignation, or relief that it wasn’t you.

The Bits & Bobs in this post are in chronological order. The different volumes are all over the place and can be read sequentially, simultaneously, serially, seriously, surreptitiously, scrupulously, sensitively, and/or sanctimoniously.

All of today’s dispatches were written when I was attending UC Berkeley.

September 17, 1990

Today I was out on my new Guerciotti, just having the time of my life riding. It was early evening, starting to get dim, when I barreled down Claremont Ave, this wide, smooth, slightly twisty road, something like a 9% grade. (The low bottom bracket of the bike makes it really stable—although I did hit a pedal yesterday at like 45 mph which was kind of scary.) Anyhow, I’m flying along and suddenly I slam into a pothole or something. There’s this incredibly loud noise and for a split second, I’m completely blinded. I still can’t figure this out; I really couldn’t see a damn thing. (My best theory is that both retinas detached from my eyeballs because of the impact, and then they reattached. Or maybe it was like a cartoon of some kind and my eyeballs spun around in their sockets.) Anyhow, when I can see again, I’m in the left lane and there are cars coming towards me. Not like right in my face, but approaching pretty fast because I’m doing 50 mph. (I noted this later, of course—it’s not like I was looking at my bike computer at the time.) Did I mention that both my wheels were basically caved in at this point, and my back one was a potato chip? It felt like somebody had removed my rear wheel and replaced it with a jackhammer. I actually didn’t have a chance to be scared; my mind was totally tied up trying to respond. All in a split second, I’m aware of several things: 1) My rear tire, and maybe my front, are absolutely guaranteed to explode at any moment; 2) The chances of crashing are so high that all I can really do is cut my speed and try to get back into my lane so that at least all I hit is the ground, instead of the unforgiving windshield of a ‘73 Plymouth Reliant; and 3) If I use my back brake, the rear wheel will definitely slide out from under me as soon as the tire blows, if not sooner. So, I slam on the front brake, which grabs on the caved-in section of the rim and lurches the bike around even more, but somehow I get my speed down to about thirty and get back into my lane just before my rear tire blows up, then the front.

From here on out it’s easy; I mean, hell, people bring bikes down from 30 mph after dual blowouts all the time, no problem. God, what a rush. Both wheels are completely totaled. The bent sections of rim look like beer cans that a party animal has flattened against his forehead. I couldn’t even roll the bike home; I had to carry it. I feel lucky to be alive, or at least lucky I’m not dead. But at the same time, I feel cursed that this freak thing happened at all. Half of me says I should go out for pizza to celebrate still being alive, while the other half says I should save my money for the new rims I have to buy now. One thing is certain: I’m not going to spend my evening studying. I’ve been through enough for one day.

September 23, 1990

It’s taking a while to make friends up here; as you know, for most of my life I’ve been pretty shy. In the last couple of years I’ve become a lot more outgoing, but because I was shy for so long, I don’t have nearly as much practice socializing as, say, you. At UCSB I had the benefit of being on the cycling team, where I had a leg up socially because I was a fast rider and people respected that. That should help me here, too, but the Berkeley team isn’t nearly so social and we won’t really get together much until the racing season starts in February. So I need a Plan B, and I have one: my strategy is to show up early to class, plop down next to any random person, and strike up a conversation. Now, the only way this could backfire is if I chat up some dude and he thinks I’m coming on to him. This could be awkward if he’s straight, and even more awkward if he’s gay. I figure I better not risk it. So I only chat up women, because if they get the wrong idea, that’s totally fine—women are really good at guiding would-be romance into mere friendship. I mean, it’s practically a cliché, right? Of course, there’s the remote possibility that this failsafe process will go astray and some woman will not only think I have romantic ambitions but she will, too. So just in case that happens, I only chat up really good looking women. I’m not on the make … just trying to gin up some friendships and I gotta start somewhere, right?

So, at the beginning of the semester I chatted up this gorgeous girl in one of my English classes, and again the next time the class met, and so on, and eventually I tossed the dice and invited her over for dinner. (I guess going for coffee would have been the more logical next step, being a bit more low-key, but I don’t drink coffee, and last time I went for coffee with a girl, I didn’t know what to order and got all flustered. I mean, I could have had hot chocolate but then I’d come off like a little kid, right? And tea is so fussy with the bag and the string and the little paper wrapper the bag came in, and the milk in the tiny pitcher, I mean, I don’t know, it all seems kind of twee. I don’t even remember what I did order that time, but I never had coffee with that girl again, which is a shame because she was fly.)

Damn, where was I? Oh, right, dinner. So I made H—, the girl from my English class, dinner at my apartment. My friend B— (who graduated from UCSB last summer and moved to Oakland with me) was there, at least for a bit before finding an excuse to bail, assuming I would want privacy, like this was some romantic thing. He subtly razzed me about this: when H— complimented our apartment and furnishings (most of them B—’s), particularly our couch and its pillows, B— said, “Did you know these are throw pillows?” He didn’t actually wink at me as he said this, but it was obviously a subtle reference to “throw the ho’s,” a phrase in surprisingly widespread use by me and my Santa Barbara pals. We will say, for example, “Call me Hector. Hector Throw-da-Ho’s,” or we complain, “No meet da ho’s, no throw da ho’s,” or simply “No ho’s.” Of course we don’t mean ho as in actual whore; “ho” is just a handy synonym for woman, or perhaps for attractive woman, just like “freak.” And the “no throw da ho’s” lament is mostly true; most of us have nobody to throw most of the time.

Well, dinner went fine, and then H— and I randomly started watching “Akira,” a movie B— had rented, which was this Japanese animated thing that started off pretty well, with young attractive people zooming around on cool motorcycles, but at some point the main character has some kind of weird bodily mutation with his arms growing insanely and becoming like tentacles. I could tell H— was pretty freaked out so we shut that off and went up on the roof. It’s not that high up but had a great view of the Golden Gate and all that. Then it got a bit late and we went back to my apartment and the phone was ringing, which doesn’t happen that often, and it was H—’s roommate, calling to see if she was okay. I was surprised that a) her roommate would worry, and b) she was resourceful enough to find my phone number. Or was this a precaution? (“If I’m not home by 10, check on me, would you?”) So anyhow, I walked H— home even though it’s a pretty good neighborhood. It was a nice night and when we got to her place, she invited me in.

Well, this was unexpected. I figured I’d just see H— to the door, and then head on home. I don’t think I was even speculating about a friendly little peck on the cheek because this wasn’t really a date, not as far as I could tell. I mean, how do you tell? Was she inviting me in just to be nice? Or was this like in the movies and was supposed to lead to (dot dot dot)? Obviously I was over-thinking things, as usual. Anyhow, eventually it came to pass that I found myself sitting down in her apartment. I don’t remember what would have made me decide to sit down other than perhaps our conversation was ongoing and I didn’t feel like standing anymore. So now it didn’t look like my departure was imminent. So what was I supposed to do next?

It occurred to me that H— might be waiting for me to bust a move, and if I didn’t, she might take that as an insult. I sure didn’t want to insult her, and besides, she was super fly as I believe I mentioned already. The opportunity (even if it’s only a perceived opportunity) to bust a move with a fine betty doesn’t come along every day. A decision tree formed in my head: if I don’t bust a move and that hurts her feelings, that could jeopardize our friendship. But if she’s not waiting for me to bust a move and considers us just friends and then I do bust a move, that could also jeopardize the friendship, though honestly she must know she’s fly so how could she possibly blame me for wanting to bust a move? I figured, worst case, I bust a move when she’s not actually expecting—or wanting—it, in which case she’ll just turn her head suddenly to deflect the kiss, and I’ll immediately get the message, and then I can quickly blush and stammer out an apology, following which there’ll be no hard feelings, and then she and I can go on being friends. Right?

The scenario that I didn’t actually even consider, for some reason, was that she’d actually respond favorably and we’d suddenly be making out. Why didn’t this cross my mind? Who knows. Perhaps I’ve just been shut down by girls so many times, to auger in yet again seemed almost inevitable, scripted even. So imagine my surprise when I busted the most awkward move ever and it seemed to work. I said something totally inane, like “I like your sweater” and then I guess I must have reached for her, or maybe she read my mind and came forward, but next thing you know she’s sitting on my lap and we’re making out! Pretty thrilling stuff and she paused a moment to say something similarly inane like “I like your sweatshirt, too,” but mostly we’re just mashing faces. And then I become aware of this strange kind of rhythmic pulsing—not a sound exactly, but not exactly not. Kind of like a hydraulic rushing you might say. And I realize I’m hearing her pulse through her chest, which is proximate to my ear. This didn’t occur to me right away because the rhythm was pretty high for a heart rate. I mean, I wouldn’t expect a typical resting pulse rate (e.g., 60 or 70), since making out is kind of exciting, but we weren’t running stairs or anything either. Since my arm is around her, I can see my watch out of the corner of my eye, and what the hell, I decide to track the second hand and measure her pulse. Granted, in all the excitement I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my calculation, but it seems like her heart is going at about 130 beats per minute. Is she just super excited? Or maybe frightened? Or could she be having some kind of seizure?

After a few minutes our embrace subsides, as explicably as it had started, and we say goodnight and I head home. As I walk along up Alcatraz Avenue, I ponder the strangeness of recent events, this sort of hybrid between a romantic comedy and “Telltale Heart.” The song in my head (there’s always a song in my head) is “Walking On the Moon” by the Police. By the time I get home I just kind of shrug the whole thing off as just another of those strange things that happen to me.

I saw H— in class the next day, and afterward as we walked across Sproul Plaza chatting, H— seemed just a little off, perhaps a bit stiff, certainly not behaving like somebody who has just embarked on a sweet romantic adventure. Honestly, I’d have been a lot more surprised if she did seem all excited about the passionate turn our evening had taken, though I’m not sure why. I guess it’s because I wasn’t that excited either; I was feeling strangely ambivalent about it all, probably because my excursions into dating so often end badly, so why would this be any different? And thus it seemed, like I said earlier, almost scripted when she finally came out with it: “About last night. I like you and want to be friends, but I don’t want to be … well, I don’t want to get involved.” I didn’t need to ask “involved in what”—the answer was “it,” as in “it all.” Which was fine with me. From that day forward we were just friends. Which, as you might recall, is all I’d really been looking for anyway.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXIX

Introduction

This is the twenty-ninth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, and Volume XXVIII is here. If that seems like a lot of volumes, rest assured it actually isn’t. Why not? Because I say it’s not.

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re brief bulletins I wrote to entertain family and friends when I was young and brash and just didn’t know any better. This is back when people actually wrote letters. Wait, did I say “people”? I meant me. Anyway, within each volume these are in chronological order, but the volumes jump all around through time and space. Read them in order, out of order, in alphabetical order by Roman numeral, in numerical order by word count, or according to whatever your preferred algorithm dictates. All of today’s dispatches were written when I was attending UC Santa Barbara.

January 18, 1989

There’s a girl in my French class whom I’m trying to “get to know.” Today it hit me how ridiculous the whole thing is. First, I’d arrange it so that I would sit by her, and chat her up, and then when that routine seemed to be established I’d show up early and sit somewhere else to see if she deliberately sat next to me. And then today—bonus!—we had a conversation after class that lasted all the way down the stairs and out to the bike racks. So I was basically gauging my “progress” through some kind of spatial measurement system. A real man wouldn’t bother with all this incremental BS, he’d just ask her out to coffee or drop a clever line like, “Women pay to go out with me.” At least this girl said something pretty interesting today: she said if she could buy a new car, she’d buy a Dodge Ram Charger. That seems sort of cool. In fact, I just realized she’s probably out of my league.

April 5, 1989

Today I slept throughout my first Physics lecture, then forgot about my Psychology class, and then slept through my English class. Why? Well, there are several factors. Like the weather, for example. It has been in the mid‑90’s here all week, not a cloud in the sky. You know, that dependable heat that isn’t going to leave you out in the cold all of a sudden. Even the evenings are nice and warm. So I’ve been riding more than ever, to enjoy that, and then when I’m not riding, the tropical torpor tends to induce a lackadaisical lifestyle which doesn’t involve being bright-eyed and bushy‑tailed when I get to class.

Today we got our cycling team sweatshirts –now that it’s 90 degrees in the shade. They’re way bitchin’. They’re like a grey heather, like with the white fibers running through the fabric? And with the big hood, and the white pile lining, and they weigh like 500 pounds. And the best part is, if I’m wearing it and fall asleep in class, which happens a lot because I’m so exhausted from training in the heat, it sort of holds me upright.

April 28, 1989

The cycling team meets once a week (in addition to all the rides, of course). The meetings don’t really get going until about half an hour after the scheduled time, so that’s when I show up. Meanwhile, the location of the meeting changes from week to week. It’s really hard to figure out where they’ll put it next. A veritable wild goose chase, if you’ve ever been to one of those. So anyhow (I’m not boring you, am I?) I showed up yesterday evening in front of the UCen, which is sort of a plaza, and everybody was there just sort of riding around. Naturally, I joined them. This guy M— was there on a totally rad Schwinn beach cruiser from the ‘50s. M—is pretty cool because he works at a bike shop and races pretty well, but he’s also kind of annoying everybody lately because he started one of those dreaded cycling team romances we all hate so much and has basically turned into a total sap. Every time he sees his little woman (who, incidentally, isn’t much of a looker) he drops everything, even if in mid‑sentence, to go pal around with her. But his old Schwinn is a total gem. The coolest part? It’s a two-speed. Not a back‑pedal kind, either. It’s got a brake lever sized shifter, made by . . . guess who? It ain’t Sturmey-Archer. It’s Bendix. Yes, the very same Bendix that makes the aerospace stuff. I asked Mark how often he had to adjust the shifting. He said never. And I tried it. It works flawlessly, 35 years into its life. So anyway, after about half an hour of bike combat, general socializing, et cetera, I realized that maybe the meeting wasn’t going down at all. I asked somebody, and he nonchalantly said, “Oh, yeah. It got moved to tomorrow night.” I almost asked, “Then what are we doing here?” but realized that I knew exactly what we were doing: hanging out.

Eventually we all decided we’d better study and a bunch of us headed over to the library. I never get much done there when I’m with friends, but I had to try—my Physics midterm was the next day. I have a knack for test preparation, I think. I start by going through my notes to try to guess what the teacher will put on the test. Most of my notes are written for my own amusement, because if I’m not amusing myself, the professor sure isn’t either, which means I might fall asleep and not write anything. Here’s an example from my actual notes:

4/27/89 Thurs: WAVES

Waves are characterized by speed, wavelengths.

• “Heat wave”: if ya got a heat wave, then ya got temperatures soaring into the nineties for days on end
• “The Wave”: a certain dance characterized by wobbly arm movements
• “Rad wave”: a 20‑footer or bigger that’ll take you all the way to the beach, dude
• “Permanent wave”: a hairdo characterized by tight curls that don’t require styling or setting gel

October 6, 1989

This friend of mine doesn’t have a mountain bike so I loaned him mine so we could cruise around the beach and some nearby trails. I rode my commuter death bike. Everyone calls it that because I have these bolt-on cantilever brake bosses (aka Moots Mounts) and to make them stiffer, I have a section of steel chainring spanning them (custom-cut to fit). They look really cool but everyone’s like, “What if you crashed? Couldn’t they, like, puncture you?” So we rode on the beach for a while, and then on these really sandy trails, and suddenly my tires washed out, and then the handlebar and the wheel stuck into the ground and I almost went over the bars. By “almost” I mean that I almost made it out okay, I mean I should have gone all the way over the bars, but my groin caught on the end of the handlebar that was sticking up and it impaled me. I was up there for like a couple of seconds, with all my weight concentrated on the plastic handlebar cap, right in my groin. Then the whole bike toppled on me and something raked across my leg. It was the chainring brake stiffener. It gave me this huge gash in there. It actually would’ve been funny as hell if it didn’t hurt so bad. [I still have a scar, over a quarter-century later.]

You know how you always wish you could get a crash on videotape? Well, I did. Later in the ride I spontaneously decided to ride down this big concrete driveway that goes right down to the beach, to lower boats into the water on trailers. There was a guy standing at the top making a movie with a little VHS camera, and I asked if it was cool for me to ride down. He said yeah, so I went down, taking advantage of its being sandy by doing this big gnarly zorro [where you lock up the rear wheel and do big fishtails]. What I didn’t know was that there was like a foot drop-off at the end. But hey, no problem, I had plenty of speed, so did a big jump and made a perfect landing, rear wheel first. Thing was, once the front wheel landed it bogged in the sand instantly and this time I made it all the way over the handlebars. I tucked and rolled and landed in tons of sand so it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, I rolled all the way over in a complete somersault and came up on my feet, throwing my arms up in a victory salute. Like 20 people were out there sunbathing and all cheered. I wonder how many times the guy with the camera will watch that footage, laughing his ass off.

October 10, 1989

A couple of days ago Andy, our Korean neighbor who’s in the ESL program here, came over and hung around while I made Spaghetti Francisco. He seems lonely – he often cruises right into our apartment, and starts looking around, picking objects up and inspecting them, and talking. His English is surprisingly good, considering he’s only been in the U.S. for eleven days, and (he says) he was really bad in his English classes at school. He doesn’t get along with his roommates very well –one is Japanese and barely speaks a word of English, and other guy, who’s Swiss, only bothers to speak German because he always has at least half a dozen other Swiss guys couch-surfing in the apartment and borrowing Andy’s stuff. Anyhow, earlier that day Andy’s cousin had come to visit and smashed her car into one of the pillars, shaking the building. I think she was planning to have dinner with Andy, but was so upset she left and got a motel room or something. Now Andy asked if he could use our microwave, and had this big package of meat, and I figured he needed to defrost it in a hurry or something before taking it back to his apartment and cooking it on his stove. It was in there forever, and I got the Francisco in the oven while Casey heated up some chicken noodle soup with little round noodles. Andy said, “They look like little doughnuts.” Casey said, “Yes, they do indeed look exactly like tiny miniature doughnuts.” I replied, “Yes, it’s in fact rather astonishing just how closely those noodles do resemble diminutive doughnuts.” If Tesh had been around he would surely have made a similarly astute observation employing equally precise vocabulary. Suddenly Andy pulled out the big plate of meat, set it on the table, and said, “Dig in.” Wow! I’d had no idea it was for us!

Man, it was so good. I guess it was a cross section of the cow where all the ribs stick through, all sliced up so that there were three little discs of bone in each slice. I don’t know how meat can turn out so well in the microwave. It wasn’t just plain , but prepared with some Korean recipe, swimming in a spicy, fatty sauce. Once we started eating nobody was talking, just grabbing the meat with our fingers, picking the little round bones clean, smacking our lips, and grabbing another piece. I was worried Casey wasn’t moving fast enough to get his share, but he hardly eats anything anyway and I end up finishing off his last piece. Then we dug into the Spaghetti Francisco. Poor Tesh never showed up—too busy studying, I guess—so he missed out.

November 13, 1989

The stupidest trend has caught on here. All these students buy mountain bikes, and all these bikes have quick-release seat posts [the idea being that you should lower your seat before gnarly descent]. As if any of these people ever rode off-road! Since the QR post means your seat can be stolen in five seconds, these students take their seats/seatposts off and take them to class for safekeeping, down on the  floor under the desk. So their bikes out in the racks have this exposed frame tube so rain can fall in there, and I occasionally see trash stuffed in the hole by some mischievous passerby. Worse yet, the students look like idiots carrying around these seats, with the post getting grease on their clothes. I was in the library with a friend and we just had to laugh, watching all these students milling around with their bike seats.

February 19, 1990

Last Thursday there was a lab due in my socioeconomic geography class, based on a research article we had to borrow from the reserve book room of the library. (I guess that’s what makes it a “lab” instead of just another paper.) I kept putting off the assignment and then Wednesday rolled around and I forgot to do it because it was Valentine’s Day and for the first time, I actually had a date. The next day, the reserve room opened at 8:00 a.m., and the lab was due at 9:00. So I showed up there just after 8:00, got the article, ran over to the microcomputer lab to use their word processor, pulled out the article, and started really stressing because it was super fricking long. I couldn’t even read it in an hour, much less write a paper on it. But some student before me had left all these notes in the margin and totally outlined it! This guy knew what he was doing, too. So I wrote the damn thing without even reading the article and finished by about 9:10. Then I ran to my class, and the T.A. hadn’t even shown up yet. He walked in two minutes later and I turned it in like I’d done it in advance. Sometimes I think I lead a charmed life.

March 1, 1990

I’m completely broke. Go figure. S— always sent me my monthly support check, but now that she left my dad, I haven’t been getting it. I guess he figures since his wife left him and he’s all full of woe, he shouldn’t have to support his son anymore. My mom’s on vacation in Hawaii and forgot to send a check before she left. [My parents’ divorce settlement decreed that my dad would pay 5/8 of whatever I got, and my mom 3/8, but no actual total amount was specified; I was generally pretty strapped even when they didn’t forget.] So I’ve been eating nothing but pasta (with Ragu Old World sauce from a gallon can), and burritos that are just beans and tortillas—I can’t even afford cheese. And I just got my tuition bill: $550. Plus I need to get glasses because I’ve finally admitted to myself I’m totally nearsighted. I was sitting in the front row in a lecture and asked the prof to focus the overhead projector, and everyone around me was like, “Dude, it’s totally in focus.” But I guess I’ll have to keep squinting until I start working this summer. Man, how did I get here? And how will I get out?

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