That's Empress to You

Velcro

Just one word. Velcro. My future is in Velcro. Literally. I’m surrounded by the stuff, more and more of it. Surrounded by its harsh ripping sounds; the tattered sweater surfaces it’s destroyed; the scratchy texture like the hide of an animal you never ever want to meet, I have reconciled myself to the fact that, unpleasantness aside, Velcro is holding me together.

It holds the microwaveable heating pad around my waist to strap 180 degrees of comfort onto my lower back. It keeps a smaller, bead-filled heating pad attached to my shoulder and neck because my entire right arm has gone numb due to age-related disk deterioration. (Thank you doctor, but I might have guessed deterioration was age related.)

It also keeps that flattering chinstrap in place so I don’t snore like a sailor or an old lady, thereby keeping my husband awake. The chinstrap (upper right) is a like a jockstrap for the face. Imagine how beautiful I look in it. Keeping John from seeing me wearing it requires lightning fast reflexes on the lamp switches and a magician’s prestidigitation skills to whip off the strap in a hot instant.

My next purchase will be the Velcro face-lift, a device that attaches to all that sagging stuff on your face and fastens it all up at the top of your head, under an attractive hat. Then there will be the Velcro-strapped IV for portability. And the Velcro-fastened sneakers when I can no longer tie my shoes. (Dear Jesus, please forgive me for not letting little Jackson wear them because children need to learn to tie a damn shoelace; what, they’re going to wear Velcro shoes when they’re 35?)

But yesterday as I was complaining about all the catching and snagging and horrific noises that come with the, yes, age-related encroachment of Velcro, John pointed out that it was the very thing that keeps your leash attached to your surfboard and to your leg.

So yeah, despite the fact that its increasing abundance in my life is overall a bad sign, I say there’s a great future in Velcro. Think about it.

(Fun fact: A Swiss engineer named George de Mestral, inspired by the burrs that got stuck on his clothes and dog after a walk in the woods, turned this annoying sticky attribute into a system of fasteners.)

 

Post-election

We went to the beach yesterday, to try to survive. Our first instinct, and a good one, was to go to the coast and watch huge waves crashing on the Northern California shore.

A wave doesn’t favor or forgive, nor does it seek to injure. It has no antagonists or allies. It just rolls in, as it is destined to do from its inception. From miles and hemispheres away, it simply moves, unstoppable. A surf teacher once advised, never fight a wave; it only seeks the shore.

They were enormous and deadly. They gained height and surged forward, line after line of swelling energy, rising breathlessly, their faces sometimes ominously dark, sometimes whipped white, then releasing a cargo of whitewater to spill toward the shore. The roar like a phalanx of engines charging, invisible, from somewhere back there where the sky meets the water.

But they were also comforting. They came in on Wednesday the way they came in on Tuesday—the day we showed what we are as a country. The way they’ve come in for eons, and the way they’ll come after we’re a completely lost nation, or one strengthened by experience and wisdom.

Waves only seeking the shore. Undeterred by human ambition or folly. Constant. Inexorable. We don’t matter. We can struggle vainly against them, possibly to our death. Or we can understand what they are and wait for the moment when a lull will allow us to get out past where they’re crashing.

So this was comforting, Wednesday of all days.

(Which is not to say we’re going to roll over and take any of this shit.)

Post–Burning Man Questions

Does breaking your fingernail attaching LED lights to your bike count as radical self-reliance?

Why is it called Electronic Dance Music when no one can dance to it and it’s not really music? (I suspect the answer lies in the phrase “white people.")

Does radical inclusion mean ordering someone to drop to the ground to do a snow angel in the dust and then ring a bell and shout/say/whisper in abject mortification, “I’m a virgin.”?

Can you really burn 5000 calories an hour sitting in the passenger seat of an RV, cowering in terror and bathed in sweat because you’re sure you’re going to be sideswiped by or tip over onto every approaching vehicle? (And approach they do, since you’re driving 40 MPH.)

Is setting up a Burning Man campsite 10 times or 20 times more stressful on a relationship than renovating a house?

How do you and your spouse erect a shade structure using two entirely different principles of geometry?

What possible response is there to the following statement: “Everybody dies, you know.”?

Would your 7-year-old child have participated in the naked parade of bicyclists? Would you have let him wear underwear, as these parents did?

Why are there so many Kappa Alpha bros here?

Are all of these once-a-year iconoclasts hedge fund managers, or only half of them?

Last and important, I think: Is radical self-expression valuable if what you’re expressing is wholly uninteresting? For example, is expressing nakedness—physical or emotional—of use to others if what’s under there is simply the ordinary stuff you’d expect to see? Of course the answer is that there is merit in simple self-expression without regard to communal value. So I guess—Long Live Burning Man. Or maybe You Go, Burning Man. Or yeah, something like that.

That moment

I love this photo my sister took of me hugging Jackson at his graduation. I look old and seriously ugly but I see a lot of his life and our history in those wrinkles and that scrunched-up expression—all the days and moments from his opening-number first five weeks of nonstop crying because was literally starving (thanks La Leche League <sarcasm), to the toddlerhood during which he would not stop talking, to the adolescence where he wouldn’t bother, and finally now to the transition in which we are learning to communicate like actual adults.

You can’t see from his back—and maybe no one else can see in my face—the friends who shared and shaped his childhood (thanks Genevieve and Carmen, Liz and David, because we may not have survived without you); the Legos that saved my sanity (see above: “would not stop talking”); the hundreds, maybe thousands of fantasy/science fiction books that I refused to read but he did with a frightening appetite (thanks Alan and everyone else at Borderlands Books); the countless hours driving, flying, and fencing (me not so much the latter, but thanks M Team and Greg Massialas); the fire that burned down our house when he was seven (thanks SFFD for rescuing us off the balcony); the divorce that he claimed bothered us but not him (maybe he’s right, and if so, thanks Steven Okuhn); and the melding of a wonderful new family (thanks don’t begin to cover it, all you Danforths). I look at this photo and see that this is the moment I truly realized that he is an adult who’s going out into the world equipped with all his life has given him: openness, intellectual appetite, strong principles, sweetness and generosity beneath a healthy skepticism, and love, lots of love. *Also, this is the last f-ing graduation posting, I promise.

Prince 1958-2016

Maybe every generation can make this claim, but I think Prince embodied, anthemized, and shaped the young adulthoods of me and my now quite ripe middle-aged cohorts. Just as we were emerging into the world, suddenly there was this glorious man making glorious music, celebrating all we had to celebrate: our dancing bodies, our sexuality, our voices, our weirdness, our hotness.

It feels a little wrong to feel this bad, like we're conscripting something—some pain that someone else deserves more, and that doesn't rightly belong to us—but I sense that we are all mourning very deeply.

All I've been doing all day is watch videos. Here are some that NPR posted. And one I really love, from Good Morning America, with the fabulous Sheila E. I can't stop dancing. And we shouldn't.

Suburban Security

I don’t mean to keep banging on about the lock-up policies at Safeway (and other SF stores, namely the Castro Street Walgreen’s), but in news that celebrates the timeless complacency of the American suburb: the Menlo Park Safeway does not lock up its toothbrushes. You can go in day or night and choose a toothbrush based on its color, bristle configuration, softness, size, and price. You do not need to summon the toothbrush warden and try to select your toothbrush quickly while he taps his foot in a way that makes you feel like he’d otherwise be fighting crime or saving the world. You can stand there forever if you wish. You can pick up every toothbrush and weigh each in your hand to see how it will balance. You can choose a color that will complement your skin tone. It will be a delight.

And then you can go over to the liquor department and join the Stanford sorority girls in Uggs and gym shorts filling up their shopping carts with vodka and chardonnay. And you can fill up your cart with vodka and chardonnay, and you can tool around the supermarket for a while—soup aisle, meat (so to speak), even back to toothbrushes, where you can rethink your decision and choose green instead—without being followed by a security guard.

When you get to the checkout counter, the checker doesn’t have to remove the large plastic security lock from the tops of your vodka bottles because there aren’t any. She also knows the scan code for cilantro and can tell it’s not Italian parsley.

Then, get this: when you go to your car you do not have to figure out which bag has the most valuable stuff in it and put that one in the car first, because you never know if someone is going to run up and steal your bags out of your cart while you’re moving shit around in the back of your car to make room for all that chardonnay and cilantro. Which has never happened, but based on the kinds of conversation overheard in the Church Street Safeway lot—“You touch my shit and I’ll rip your eyes out.” “I don’t want your shit, man, I’m heading back to Bakersfield.” (Shit being a drenched sleeping bag and a stroller filled with crushed cans.)—you’re probably right to put the vodka in first.

On the other hand, "Identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the nation—especially in the suburbs." – Melissa Bean

Rage

A 180-pound guy threatened to beat the shit out of me the other day, and then in a sputtering and redundant coda, to kick my fucking ass. I was surfing at Sharks and a fat, middle-aged man paddled up to me, grabbed my board, and started screaming, “You can’t do that! You can’t do that!” Befuddled, I said, “What? What did I do?” He got way up in my face, splashed me with water (ow, ow!), and accused me of dropping in on him, wiping out, and then spitting out my board.

I didn’t realize I’d dropped in on him, but if I did, and if I shot my board out, I totally deserve to be yelled at and mortified into the day before eternity. But threatening to beat the shit out of me? This kind of thing happens in the lineup, of course, but I was frankly shocked to have that out of-control anger directed at accommodating, smiling, let’s-keep-the-vibe-mellow me. I was also genuinely curious about how this ass kicking would happen, and seriously wanted to ask him whether he was planning to do it in the water, or if he’d ask me to paddle in to that little patch of sand that’s available near the cliffs at lower tides.

The fact is that I was not even slightly afraid. I could be so unconcerned because I was surrounded by a bunch of other (male) surfers who would never in a thousand years let this happen. I shrugged and said to Purple-faced Screaming Guy, “Well, I guess that wouldn’t be hard, since I weigh like 95 pounds.”

You see the same kind of uncontrolled rage online. Sometimes these angry online responses are deserved, just like I deserved to be berated for dropping in on the guy, if that’s what I did. But he blew his entire life savings of justified moral outrage by threatening to kick my ass. When he paddled up to a group of other guys to complain about me, they turned their backs, and one said, “You can’t beat up a girl, dude.”

Similarly, I’m pretty sure spewing online vitriol and heaving death wishes at those who have wronged you isn’t going to help much. Offensive people are often unfairly protected by their privilege and position, just like I was protected by my gender and size. But threatening physical harm squanders any righteousness—earned or not—and people are just going to look at you like, you need to chill, bro.                                        

Parenthetically, playing the girl card is a related but different issue. As is the fact that men have to deal with physical threats entirely differently. More troubling yet is the fact that women have to deal with them in private settings entirely entirely differently.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Free Advice

Today’s highly localized advice:

Count to three-Mississippi at the stop sign on Church and 19^th Street, because that Rectitude Cop guy is lurking, waiting to chase you up or down the hill, siren whooping, smirking with glee under his motorcycle-cop issue moustache. And if you tell him you think the SFPD should better allocate its resources, he’ll lie to you that there were two fatalities at that corner.

Water your Christmas tree more than you think you need to. A seven-footer seems to drink water at the rate of four liters a day. Bonus advice: have John Danforth string the lights. He places them deep in the branches and it makes the tree look like a magic forest.

Don’t let your cat out. There’s an enormous red tail hawk flying over Dolores Park. His wingspan is about three-and-a-half feet. Or if your cat is Pie, open the door and tell him there’s a nice cashmere scarf out there just waiting to be mauled.

The 38^th Avenue Surfline cam is down. Don’t bother, unless you want to see a still photo of this morning’s sunrise.

Slice cauliflower rather than breaking it into florets before roasting. It crisps up better. More advice gained during dinner at Lisa Thompson’s house: a Spiralizer creates fantastic zucchini pasta. They're on sale at Williams Sonoma.

Number two pencils make you write more neatly than do pens, and they feel good on paper. Also, when you make notes in books, you can erase it, so you don’t find stupid shit like “honor=folly” in your college copy of Love’s Labour’s Lost. More bonus advice: writing really small doesn’t make what you write any less moronic.

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to barrage you with penile enhancement ads.

I read a recent piece by some San Francisco tech guy in which he presents a mathematical equation that compares the attractiveness of San Francisco women to that of San Francisco men, and seeks to plot, also mathematically, why women pay him and others like him no attention in bars. His conclusion seems to be that because there are more men, unhot women get to hook up with hot men, like himself, even if the women’s attractiveness quotient doesn’t come close to the hot men’s.

Problematically, from a scientific standpoint, he never defines attractiveness. That aside, my reaction, after, “I’m sending this to Jackson to see if the math is correct,” was to lament the fact that when so many brilliant, beautiful, and interesting women hit the sell-by date of 50 (tops) so many men suddenly decide their own hotness is best appreciated by much younger women.

Next, following my natural scientific bent and exercising my keen reportorial skills, I Googled  “older men dating younger women bay area.” What popped up were paid sites like EstablishedMen.com, whose tagline reads, in part, “The Only Site With A 6:1 Girl Ratio,” and Craigslist ads like “Any young girl (of legal age) that likes to be seduced and used?” I immediately closed my browser window and slammed my laptop shut. 

Like that’s going to help. I am really looking forward to the ads that are going to start popping up on my Facebook feed and in other corners of my internet world. I think I will Google prostate massagers next. 

We’ve Moved! The seventh circle of hell is now located at the Potrero Center Safeway.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, they have one regular checkstand open. There’s an express line for the crackheads buying a 40-ounce and a pack of gummy worms; and several self-checkout stations, which invariably require the assistance of an employee anyway. The checker at the one open stand slams a bag filled with bottles into this poor guy’s cart as we hear over the PA system, “Emergency cleanup in the women’s room.” Another employee walks by, reaches out, and flips the braids of the woman standing behind me on line. She’s peering at her smartphone and doesn’t notice and I elect not to tell her. An old lady keeps punching in the wrong Club Card number, and the checker, instead of scanning his own card, which they keep near the register for just such occasions, lets her continue for 10 minutes, then tells her she has to stand on the interminable customer service line to get a new card number. He spends a full 30 seconds trying to read my name off the receipt, not listening at all as I politely try to help. As he’s gagging on the admittedly difficult letter combinations I see that at least, thank God, they lock up the dandruff shampoo.