Bay to Breakers, a California kaleidoscope
For Sunday, May 25, 2008



Went to the San Francisco Bay to Breakers Race again this year. This is my sixth tour of duty. I’ve never run, except to get a photo of a costumed reveler before he or she disappeared.

This year was a survivalist year. Our group has always numbered six to eight people. Schedule conflicts, age, exhaustion, and injuries left the responsibility of chronicling the 2008 event to Gino and me alone.

As we strolled amidst the crowd of 60,000 people, 33,000 of them ING registered to actually race, we could not for the life of us understand how our friends could possibly skip this most momentous celebration of life, liberty, and licentiousness. How often does one get to share the streets in a seven-mile stroll with happy, laughing, friendly gorillas, gladiators, salmon, men in hula skirts, Little Bo Peeps of every gender, a 100 Elvis impersonators, Smurfs, genies, Tele-Tubbies, tubbys, robots, zombies, men in dresses, women in undresses, and every other costume devisable by the human mind?

Bay to Breakers is a combination foot race, Mardi Gras, Rio Carnival, Burning Man, Kinetic Contraption conglomeration. For Gino and me it’s a party we wait impatiently for all year long. We were not fazed by our peers’ cancellations. For us it just meant it was harder to get lost from each other. I brought extra camera batteries and for the first time a movie camera so I could capture the spectacles for our missing spectators.

We began the Sunday race, as usual, early Saturday morning. I rode over on the ferry and Gino took a cab from his girlfriend’s house on Laguna to meet me. Saturday is our day to stroll aimlessly about the city, sort of get in shape, mostly explore, and ultimately settle on a place to banquet.

Last year we rode Bart to 16th and Mission and explored the shops and sites on the south side. This year we zigzagged up to Union Square. There was a restaurant I very much wanted us to eat at on Taylor called Fish and Farm.

Three months ago I expanded my Comcast to include HD and On Demand. I immediately fell in love with the On Demand option called Bay On Demand. It does 3-4 minute infomercials of Bay Area restaurants and night clubs and changes them every couple of weeks. Ever on the prowl for a new experience, I pour through the Bay On Demand options frequently, notepad and pencil in hand.

I found Fish and Farm two months ago and pinned the address to my den wall. It is totally organic, right down to the décor. Doors come from old farm houses and such. They serve beef, pork, fish, and fowl with their vegetables. Even the bar serves organic tequilas, beers, wines, and liquors.

Our 2008 annual banquet was all I’d hoped for. We had one of the greatest meals of our adult lives. We racked up a $125 tab, but we sampled most everything on the menu – octopus, prime rib, sardines, duck liver, short ribs, chilled potato-leek soup, steamed fava leaves, salt-brine fries, and onward. We departed two hours later, stuffed, and climbed the knob to the top of the city. Our crawl ended in North Beach shooting pool at Gino and Carlo’s.

Early Sunday morning we suffered briefly finding a cab to the start line. Union Street was lined with costumed revelers all looking for rides to the same place.

The race itself doesn’t fit well into words. It’s a multi-sensory experience the defies capture in mere prose. At the Chieftan Irish Pub, three blocks from the start line, it was standing room only as runners in jogging gear, wearing numbers and foot timers, stopped for Bloody Marys. This would definitely bite into their finish-line times.

At Hayes Hill, the uphill section, the tempo definitely rises with the patrons. Residents mount industrial-size speakers on their porches and pump Sweet Home Alabama and other irresistible dance music over the crowd. Like marching bands pausing to perform before judges’ booths, the procession pauses for a spontaneous street dance before proceeding a few hundred feet and doing it again. This goes on all the way to Golden Gate Park. Fell Street was all Cab Calloway and the Beatles.

The floats are like no others. Some brought bouncing rooms on wheels with battery blowers and invited pretty girls to step inside and set themselves free, which they did. We saw tiki huts, pagodas, cardboard Bart trains, and portable dance floors. One group pushed an over-sized beer pong table seven miles, never once playing pong.

Gino and I are low key. We wear Hawaiian shirts and colorful hats. We have no desire to push anything heavy, amaze others with our brazenness, or break any land speed records. We go just to watch, take pictures, and walk amongst the human kaleidoscope of free spirits.

Frenzy and friends
Sunday, May 18, 2008


Frenzy. That describes this week. What frenzy there was to it. Lots of frenzy. Wait. How can such a beautiful, sunny week be labeled with such a word? Perhaps frenzy is not always a negative term. Hmm. Let me look it up. “Violent agitation of the mind. Madness and rage.” OK, not frenzy. Fine. But it felt like frenzy.

Frenetic. Maybe that word works. Let me check. “Transported with rage and violent emotion.” That’s not it. Ah, nuts.

Really busy. That works. The phrase lacks flair. It’s wordy. It’s got that annoying, parasitic adverb attached to it. But it works.

I think I’m not alone. It seems like really busy is going around. Everyone I talk to has it. It’s like a disease. It’s the anti-disease, actually. A real disease gives one some bed rest. “Take it easy. You have a disease. Stay in bed. I’ll bring you some soup.”

No one brings you soup when you’re really busy. You have to get your own darn soup. And you don’t get any, either, because you’re too busy to heat it and eat it.

I have this class of adults over at Chapman. They are all suffering from being really busy. They are student teachers learning technology. One assignment is to create and maintain a weekly Internet blog. That’s nine entries times 21 people. I read them and comment each week. There is one prevailing, overriding theme. Everyone is really busy.

I hear every permutation. Someone is holding down three jobs, student teaching, taking classes, caring for a family, prepping for exams, dealing with health issues, rocky relationships, puppies being born, moving to new communities, moving to cheaper apartments, and on and on. I feel guilty giving them big assignments. Will it be the straw? Two students dropped the first two weeks because they couldn’t handle the work load on top of the rest of their lives. Another dropped today, five days before the end of the course. Too much on the plate.

We do all this busy work and we have less money, more bills, higher expenses, greater responsibilities, and less fun. No wonder people don’t take the time to get more involved in social issues, like war protesting and such. We’re all too busy just staying afloat. We don’t have the luxury to rail against injustice. Perhaps this all intentional. “Distract them with exhaustion while we rob them blind.”

I’m a fan of extremes. If it’s going to rain, let it storm. If it’s going to be hot, break a record. If I’m going to be busy, being moderately busy is boring. It’s so baroque. If I’m going to be busy, make it really busy. Then it becomes absurd, hilarious, giddy. I want to be so busy I don’t have time to think. I want to run amok, here and there, pockets full of notes, shirt partially tucked, phone beeping, people calling my name as I rush by.

My home answering machine is blinking full. Actually, it’s beeping. I let it beep. My computer power supply is beeping too. Let it. We’re out of cat food. My cats are meowing at me. Brooks, the old one, keeps clawing me. The other cat, KC, is faking nice. They follow me from room to room. “Meow. You’re letting us die. Meow. Ow. My empty cat gut.”

“Send back these Netflix, honey. We watched them last month.”

My unread emails go back five pages. They are full of questions and favor requests. My unopened mail is spilling off my desk. Student projects are pouring in, or not pouring in and I’m calling parents. I have tests to write. I took a last-minute field trip to San Francisco on Tuesday. I will take another one to Sacramento tomorrow, Friday.

Currently, I’m in my classroom with my student journalists rushing to meet an 8:30 p.m. Thursday deadline. Typos are cropping up like toadstools. Lines are crooked like earthquake rails. Ads are missing like missing ads. It’s hot. It’s really hot and we’re really busy. I like it.

Summer is just ahead, like the Mona Lisa behind bullet-proof glass, like oxygen just above the ice, like the Free Game slot under the pinball glass. I can’t get to it without a tilt, but I know it’s there.

Speaking of, for anyone who might be interested. Friday is Pin-a-Go-Go Festival in Dixon. Pinball aficionados from all over the land bring their classic pinball machines to the fairgrounds and set them all to Free Play.

On Friday I will drive to Sacramento, attend an Adobe InDesign Training Seminar, drive home, pick up my son, drive back to Dixon, play pinball until 10 p.m. and drive home. Saturday morning, I have a date with the DMV, then off to Bay to Breakers.

It’s frenzy. No doubt. But it’s a happy, kinder, gentler frenzy.