THE ARTICLE

I figured out how to avoid spending too much time on Facebook. The trick is to post something there so seemingly ill-advised that you avoid looking at the site for a week or so. I think I did that. I think it is going to be about a week.

I used to get bad colds after marathons. Now I get like this.

It was a great marathon. San Luis Obispo, a course that started at the high school, wound through town, then south and east, then back again. Hills, but if it had been a baseball stadium you would have had to say it played fair. It was a TNT event. Hills and forcasted heat had everyone running carefully, and as a result everyone did well, including me. It was a fun weekend besides, victory party at the Madonna Inn. Clouds convinced me to skip the coast road home, but 101 is hardly the ugly superhighway alternative, especially after a mostly rainy April.

I brought the good camera, but did not take too many pictures. I need to make myself take more pictures. I worry about taking pictures of people. I worry that they will not want me to. I am a writer who does not write journalism, either/also. I wonder what this site would be like if I had any readers besides you all.

Mission San Miguel is still there, and still old. They built a new community center church building structure next to the mission, and they did a nice job with that. It fits with the old without looking like stagecraft. Someday I will pull off the road there and get some real pictures.

Almost so I would be reminded I did not visit, last night I turned on my TV to images of Mission San Juan Bautista from the movie Vertigo. Tivo got me the movie and I think I will actually watch it at some point. The way he kisses her in the stables across from the mission, and the way she does not want to be kissed, is harrowing. Her makeup all over his face before the cut.

Hope I get to the valley this summer. Really want to take some good pictures. Sunset, or early morning. Either way, the open space preserves for sure, and down to San Juan Bautista in person, maybe out to the Pinnacles. It is an 8GB memory card. There need to be more interesting reasons why it is always more empty than full.

Last week they broke ground in Santa Clara on the new Forty Niners stadium. Made me wonder if they have turned over any dirt for the new Apple campus in Cupertino yet. Wonder if dad will go to a game, when the 49ers start playing down here. He has seen games at Kezar and Candlestick, seems like you would have to go three for three. It is going to be hideously expensive though.

Quiet, and too warm for April. Looking forward to the weekend, after only one day back from the last one. Great marathon, but nothing left from that, or something.

Not saying I’m especially way into zen or anything, but I did, without even actually trying, drive by the airport on 87 at exactly the right time to see the big five o’clock FedEx DC-10 (DC-10? Gotta be a DC-10) smoke its tires on landing.

Just like last spring. No time for anything right now. Everything pulling away from everything else.

Yesterday I marked the course for the TNT run with a friend. She drove, I hopped out and marked the miles on the Coyote Creek Trail.

When we got to Bailey Road, it required running north for about 0.7 miles to mark mile 6, then running a mile south to mark mile 7. At mile 6 there’s an angry dog behind a fence. It’s always there, every time I run there, making me worry about the fence, as the dog chases me from one end to the other. Yesterday the dog wasn’t there. I got to mile 6, placed the marker, then ran to mile 7, and placed the marker.

For mile 6.

I’d placed the markers in the wrong place. I had to run back to mile 6, correct it, then run back to mile 7 again, and mark there. I left my phone in my friend’s car, so couldn’t let her know what was happening.

Later, I tried to run 20 miles, and it didn’t work. Ran 6, then ran 4, then just stopped. It felt like i’d never run before.

I always get lost in South San Jose, the margin between San Jose and Morgan Hill. Especially when I know where I am. When I was in music school I studied with a teacher I met at the Music Tree in Morgan Hill. Trying to make life interesting, I’d avoid 101 as a route down, taking Monterey Highway, even McKean instead. Monterey Highway is a true backwater, having been replaced as the route to 152 decades ago by 101. There’s a couple of bait shops, lots of long alleys or driveways that Google Maps knows as unamed streets between large lots, but mostly nothing, where there had been less mostly nothing before.

We mark the trails with placards, letter-page sized signs that stand on their own, with a front and back tilted towards each other at the top and connected by those zip-tie things you bind up cables with. One of the other volunteers had swept the course of these last time, and I picked them up from him on Friday where he worked. He works in Cupertino, and everything is changing there. The strip mall on 9 and Stevens Creek that used to have Mervyns and Marie Callenders is being remodeled, and there’s other new construction where older construction used to be. Lots of things that might just be closed in the daytime, or maybe really closed permanently, cyclone fence only around some of it.

Not so Montery Highway. It’s very still down there. It changed when 101 went in, and never changed again. When I go there I lose myself, and not in a good way. It happened yesterday again.

Not enough sleep, bad run, bad mail, frustration.

Gary Snyder wrote an Arbor Day poem. That’s cool.

Yes, the Jobs biography: Apparently, when Apple was choosing between Be and Next, Amelio wanted to use Windows NT. Now that’s an alternate history. And a disaster averted, but interesting.

It is called Flint Center, not “Flint Auditorium” at De Anza College.

Skipping over others too, like on page 162: “The ad cast Macintosh as a warrior for the latter cause—a cool, rebellious, and heroic company [sic] that was the only thing standing in the way of the big evil corporation’s plan for world domination and total mind control.”

I wonder if anyone really read this book before it went into production.

Today, came home from my parents’ place down Moorpark to Bascom, then down Bascom to Hamilton. I could see the railroad crossing arms at the creek all the way from Valley Med, vertical, one catching the late afternoon light like some kind of flaming sword. It was my own neighborhood Horsetail Falls.

The book about Jobs continues to disappoint, but no more hanging offenses to pardon, so I will probably keep reading. Isaacson, even when writing about Jobs in college, can’t help but say “and that’s why such and such about the last five years from Apple was the way it was, is the way it is.” Even if some of his readers wouldn’t make the connections, he should make them try. He is going to cover the last five years somewhere in the next 500 pages, after all, hopefully. There is other editing I would have done differently too. He mentions Pong, Atari’s early hit, and parenthetically smirks to the under-thirty set that they can ask their parents what Pong is. As if all the counterculture stuff previous to the Pong mention would be crystal clear to the kids—because no referral to their parents there—but not Pong.

It is his book, not mine. Whatever. This is my blog, not his. I spelled his name right.

Ran a 10K today up in San Francisco, Dolphin South End Runners race from Fort Point to Fort Mason and back again. My cousin is in the club, and it was his turn to organize. Great race. Over to the Marina proper, after, to visit a friend who works at a running store there, then back to the bridge, figure-eight took us under the toll booth, then back on 19th Avenue and headed home. My brother spent a couple of years in Jamaica, says my car rides like a Jamaican taxi. The iPod started playing Elephant Man and that was the whole thing together in a multimedia experience for him.

Started the Steve Jobs biography today. It’s interesting. I’m only on page ten though, and Isaacson is telling me “The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley…stretches from South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose…”

No it does not. Not in any sense of the word.

No one reads this but you, so I’m just nitpicking, instead of making a valid point. Credibility and audience are a chicken-and-egg thing anymore, and I’m playing to empty chairs. Still, no. The valley, maybe, straining with the reach, maybe includes southern tracts of Palo Alto, maybe. But the rest is between two ranges like any other valley.

Ranting, but in my minds eye: on the west side, follow from down around Mine Hill in quicksilver country north and further west past Umunhum, Lexington, and the range through to Saratoga Gap, maybe to the intersection of Alpine Road with Skyline on the northwest end. In the east, Mission Peak is too far north, but that is the range, the ridges in front of Hamilton south to where they front on Coyote Creek and the rest of the watershed for the Guadalupe River.

South San Francisco, Burlingame, San Mateo, Redwood City, Menlo Park—none of these are in the Santa Clara Valley. Period. “The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley” is not a description of a political or geographical entity that goes by that name. It stretches “Silicon Valley” past breaking to apply that term to the peninsula and the valley, for that matter.

Page ten.

I really must write a book. Seems like they will print anything.

I’m not kidding.

Ginsberg:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

Me as much as the rest but maybe not, the way everyone’s calling everyone a hipster these days, and I don’t think it means what they think it means.

There’s a movie about Howl, and it’s good.

I haven’t read this all the way through yet. Still. You should probably read it too. Especially if you know where Modesto, California is.

Traffic was heavier than usual after work today. I don’t know why. I came home almost the whole way on surface streets. Each time I went past a way to get on a freeway it was backed up enough that I didn’t want to bother. First was Montague Expressway from Zanker. Backed up. Then Charcot getting on 87, backed up far enough to back up the light before the ramp. Then down First Street, same story at 101, at Skyport, at 880, at Taylor. After Taylor I’d finally convinced everyone that I wasn’t trying to sneak onto the freeway, and the traffic south relented. Made the compulsory left that becomes Julian after Coleman, and followed that past Stockton to the Alameda. Gave up and got on 880 there. Took almost an hour.

The rest of the day was like this:

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.”
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot