August 25, 2012
324.2: Fifteen.

Dear Linc,

I’m in possession of a stolen library book. The story behind this is a bit roundabout, and an accident.

Clara had reserved a book at the library, and at the same time it became available, my hold came through as well. On her day off, while I was at work she decided to pick up both books — except that she was so enthusiastic about her book that she stuffed mine in her purse while she read hers, and then she forgot all about mine. The alarms did not alert her to this oversight.

“Hey,” greeted her voice on my cell phone. I was in the break room of work, reading on my fifteen.

“What’s uuup?” I sang. I was in a good mood. My coworkers were cracking good-natured jokes, as if we were extended family. There had not yet been any trifling customers, and the e-mails I’d received had been composed with, dare I say, reason and civility, which are all too infrequent. Also, the book that I was reading was good — as of late, they all are.

“Guess what? I got our books,” Clara said.

I smiled. “Sweet.”

Clara reads in theory. What I mean by this is that there are many like her, possibly like you, who do not outright deplore the notion of reading; but that, though they claim to not do much of it, every so often they find engagement with it for a variety of reasons that could take shelter beneath the sturdy umbrella shared by and enlightenment and entertainment. When Clara told me that she wanted to reserve a library book, I was nerdishly joyful for her, for she hadn’t even realized that there was a library branch just a few blocks away. My revelation to her that she no longer had to trek solely to the downtown main was momentarily life-changing.

“But here’s the thing,” she began, and then she told.

At first, I laughed. I truly thought it was funny, even cute. I told her no problem, just go back in and let the librarian know what happened.

“Really?” she asked, and her incredulity was breathtaking. Already, before she launched into anything else, I knew that she was proposing I take advantage of a library book free and clear. But though I can just imagine your contemptuous snort at the coming revelation, I cannot tell a lie: at her aversion to going back, I was appalled.

I did not escalate the conversation into what was going through my mind, which was You’ve gotta go back and tell them and — yes, really, Linc — That’s not nice. The latter was not meant to reprimand her so much as it was a defense for the public library system and the institution in general. I really wanted her to go back and put the book on the record, but instead I moderated that it was OK, I will just take it back when I have the chance, thanks for picking up my book!

When I hung up, I put the phone down. The break room has the small, dingy dimensions so often mockingly depicted on TV and the movies. With that shift’s smallish staff all on the sales floor, I had shut the door to the break room to relish in the peace and quiet of delicious silence. But when I put down my phone, I, too, was breathless — at the heat in my cheeks and, yes, my racing heart, all over the notion of a stolen library book. I thought to myself that I couldn’t be that much of a nerd, and a goody-goody on top of that, but when the alarm and amusement abated, I proudly accepted the facts. The thing is, Linc, anytime now someone loud and obnoxious will point out that the public library institution is socialist in concept and will wield the power to terminate life support. With the way the world is going, the power to delete libraries from the national forecast is very real. Nothing free can possibly be good, is the argument. If everyone can get to it, it must be socialist and the rest of us who dare to identify as middle class are thieves and scoundrels who don’t do shit to earn our keep. They will think of us: these people won’t return the books anyway, so why bother spending money to keep their libraries open? But I do, Linc. I return my books. There are many things that I have done that may or may not be the right thing, but I always return my books.

Joe

10:22pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyS9XS0E
Filed under: public library reading literacy lit middle class economy politics San Francisco Public Library System SFPL 
May 17, 2012
Dear Linc, If this happens, the nonsense that makes up these never-to-be-sents and the Our Ballpark visits and whatnot all can be declared officially incurable. Donna Summer died. I have to write a longer never-to-be-sent about that at some point later on. Joe

Dear Linc,

If this happens, the nonsense that makes up these never-to-be-sents and the Our Ballpark visits and whatnot all can be declared officially incurable.

Donna Summer died. I have to write a longer never-to-be-sent about that at some point later on.

Joe

10:37am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyLe_bVh
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: Tim Lincecum popchips gamechangers San Francisco Public Library SFPL public library 
April 1, 2012

Dear Linc,

It’s April Fool’s Day! I used to take this day seriously. In college, I would give serious thought to what kind of silly thing I could say to my friends to make them believe me. Once, I got Wolfie really good. I called him up on my cell — this was shortly before the era of smart phones and unlimited text messaging — and when he picked up, the noises of traffic were in the background, and he sounded like he was in the middle of something, or out somewhere. So, I asked him if he had a moment to talk, and despite whatever it was that he was doing, he said sure.

“You know how I’ve been depressed about my writing?” I said, gravely.

(This was true. A few days before that phone call, Wolfie had come over to my place and discovered melodramatically torn manuscripts littering my floors. I had announced to him that it was time to give up trying to get published.)

“Yeah,” Wolfie said on the phone.

“I think I know how I can get over it. I just need to find myself, man.”

“Okay.”

“So, I’m going to Botswana. I just got out of a Peace Corps interview. It went great. They loved my transcripts and my writing. They said that they want me to teach English, but that if I’m willing to be trained on a lot of other stuff, then they’d take me. I said of course I’d be willing to be trained! I don’t want to go down there as just an English major!”

“What…?” Wolfie trailed off.

“Yeah. A lot of practical stuff. Farming. Irrigation. You know, contributing to their daily lives. The interview went so well that they’re putting me on a plane tomorrow. They said they’d take care of everything else.”

“So…” Wolfie began. “Wait. You’re just… taking off?”

“Don’t worry. It’s only a 3-year term.”

“Three years… Joe…!”

“A threee yeeear teeerm,” I sang, invoking the Gilligan’s Island theme.

“Wait…”

“APRIL FOOL!”

A pause.

“Fucker,” said Wolfie.

For a while, I was horrified that I’d dropped my phone (some bulky Nokia thing that landed with a dangerous-sounding thud) but as soon as I retrieved it and discovered that it was still functional, complete with Wolfie cussing up a storm on the other end — “Wasting my goddamned time…” etc — I returned to the tremors of laughter that had caused me to drop the thing in the first place. Perhaps that’s why, over the years, his teasing has escalated into the inclusion of light physical violence. I swear, if he weren’t married and straight, I’d consider filing domestic violence charges…

April fool.

Anyway, do you remember that old saying “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb”? Yesterday, Saturday, which was the last day of March, definitely went out like a lamb, although it didn’t start out that way. I was very tempted to stay inside and sleep in, especially considering that I was so tired from the work week, but also because it was pouring outside, yet again, on another (consecutive!) Saturday. It was so bad that the wind was rattling the windows and my first thought when I groggily rose from bed was to say, “Uh uh” — and then collapse back onto the pillows. Unfortunately, I had a doctor’s appointment to get to (routine INR check, and nothing related to my respiratory drama) plus a bunch of other errands to run. No sleep for the weary. First world problems… sorry, veered into meme territory for a moment.

But by mid-day, the rain had vanished. The temperature was mild enough that I found myself getting gelato at your old stomping grounds (the Marina), which was where I’d randomly decided to take shelter later that afternoon. This was after I’d finished my errands, and then browsed at the library for a little while before meeting up with Clara for lunch. I haven’t seen her in a fortnight — sorry, on Friday after work I went with Spencer to watch the English play Maurice — and it was great catching up with her. She was working the rest of that day, so I headed to the Marina to do some escapist reading at said gelato shop. By “escapist reading,” I mean something that I could read for fun without being weighed down by worldly problems of my own and of civilization in general. So, I borrowed some Star Trek books from the library and also bought one over my Nook, the ancient first generation that I got for a song from Spencer but, hey, it still works perfectly fine.

The book that I got on my Nook wasn’t available at any library branches that I could get to, and I really wanted to read that one first. I was disappointed when neither Green Apple nor the Books Inc. in the Marina had the book that I wanted, and even more bummed that their respective science fiction sections were so thin. Sometimes, you just need a chain bookstore. Yanno? Their business was to stock a wide variety of materials with which you could walk out of the store. I found myself momentarily missing the likes of Borders and Barnes & Noble, neither of which exist in San Francisco anymore, but I guess that’s what a Nook is for…

The rain did make a comeback by dinner, which was when I again met up with Clara. Along with one of her coworkers, a delightful gay man who is in his 40s (otherwise, I might think of going out on a coffee date with him, but my cutoff age for a man has always been mid-30s, at the most), we were strolling around Japantown when we felt the pitter patter of droplets that became a full-fledged downpour. Clara’s coworker raced home and then Clara and I raced back to her car.

We were on our way to Patxi’s in the Inner Sunset for some deep dish cornmeal pizza when, while hunting for parking, Clara decided that the search might take longer than expected — Saturday night in San Francisco is hell for parking — and she turned on the radio. It had been switched to a local jazz station. The rain splashed sleepily against the windshield, and even the wipers seemed to be dozing as they cleansed sluggishly, left to right, right to left. I stopped short of reclining my chair, as I knew it was only a matter of time before we’d find parking anyway, but I did push my head against the headrest and shut my eyes dreamily. Dinner was still to come, but it was already a perfect day.

Wish you were here,
Joe 

8:11am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyIvGbXz
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: April Fool's Day Barnes and Noble Borders Inner Sunset Nook Patxi's Chicago Pizza SFPL San Francisco Thelonious Monk Ugly Beauty deep dish pizza e-reader jazz lit public library longreads 
December 11, 2011

Dear Linc,

Hard to believe that this time last week I was coming down with a menacing cold that would send me into hiding for the next week. I have a lingering cough and some congestion but otherwise I feel nearly 100% back to normal and dare I say much, much better than I did last week. The worst of it is over: the wheezing, the struggling to breathe, the sleepless nights and long, aching days.

Here is some video that I took from the Parol Lantern Festival that I attended tonight. Apparently, Ray and Wolfie had been involved with volunteering since ten in the morning — a great feat, considering that the festival did not even commence until six that night. As I’ve already written, I had a blast at the festival, even if I didn’t volunteer (something that I may do next year, which will be the tenth anniversary of the festival and they will need lots of volunteers for such a celebratory occasion).

Ray and Wolfie didn’t finish wrapping things up with the festival until close to 9:30, and even though they were wiped, they were also hungry enough that we scooped up Spencer and we went to dinner. (Spencer’s fiance is still out of town on business, although I was a little alarmed when I was watching the parade at the festival and this white dude wandered up next to me. He looked exactly like Spencer’s fiance, except by maybe eleven or twelve years younger, an astonishing teenage duplicate.)

As for the rest of the day, it was all mine. I left the house a little after noon and grabbed a bite to eat at Panda Express, the place that most of my friends judge me for liking so much, but I can’t help my whitewashed Chinese food ways. Nothing has ever hit the spot quite like the orange chicken at Panda Express. There’s a really good Chinese place on Sixth and Clement called Wing Lee, and back in college I discovered that they have a chicken dish that I thought would be similar to the one at Panda Express, and Wing Lee could be considered a bit more authentically Chinese. (They have meat hanging in the windows and the whole place does look like a hole in the wall.) But the chicken dish at Wing Lee is much too sweet and drowning in that sweet sauce, whereas the Panda Express orange chicken is just right.

Or maybe I’m just whitewashed — Whitey McWhitey, as Spencer sometimes likes to say. That’s what she was whispering to me for shits and giggles while we were at the festival and visitors and non-Filipino visitors, maybe tourists, mostly white, would wander up to the festivities with wondering looks on their faces and asking out loud, “What is this?” Spencer is Chinese, but she understood when I told her that sometimes I just felt like facing them and answering snarkily: “It’s a celebration of the commingling of my culture’s traditional identity with your western societal matrix, bitches.”

After lunch, I hunted for a book at the library that Spencer had mentioned to me the other day. Recall that when I first got into baseball back in 2009, my first instinct was to read all I could about the subject. That summer, I even ordered my reading list into a “syllabus,” remember? Nerdy, yes, and I’m still doing it now, picking up whatever baseball-related book that is both interesting on a general level of entertainment as well as enlightening for my continued, and perhaps lifelong, education of baseball. (This is not something I would have ever expected to happen in my life: to discover that baseball is entertaining, and to want to learn as much about it as possible, in all my spare time, and even when I am supposed to be busy with other supposedly more pressing things).

Becoming a baseball fan was a new stage in life for me, a belated coming-of-age, and so when I am faced with another life stage, my habit is still to read all about it. I’ll probably spend a long time thinking about what happened in September, and for the benefit of my continued introspection, Spencer came across A Billion Wicked Thoughts, a book that she’d skimmed enough of the other day for us to engage in a fascinating dinnertime conversation about, among other things, fetishes. For a long time, even before September, I didn’t want to admit to myself that I had a fetish — and, well, quite frankly it took September for me to realize that the fetish was real instead of a nice idea from porn. This is what I’m getting at, Linc: I like feet. Okay? I have a thing for feet. I don’t know why. Well, I do know why, and I explained it to Spencer, who met my explanation with the mixture of amusement and restrained horror that I’ve come to expect from her in reaction to my antics through the course of our long friendship. But this feet thing probably takes the cake, and I will have to write you about that some other time, in another never-to-be-sent.

I sometimes wonder if my habit for using reading to seek answers is something that other guys wouldn’t do. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that I feel that when other guys, other males, want answers, they resort to experience. Action. Actions speak louder than words, right? Such a deterministic statement is so typical of guys. To want to read for the answers, to process them, devote time to thinking about those answers as well as their implications, well, all of that strikes me as an aptitude that totally eludes men. Reading for the answers is a womanly thing to do, it seems to me, and in this context — my context — “womanly” is a term that is not derisive, but rather one that deposes the authority long associated with “masculinity”.

The great thing about the San Francisco Public Library system is that it can get you almost any book you want to read. If it’s not in the system, then you can connect to a bunch of different library systems all over the state. And you can have the book delivered to your nearest library branch. But I didn’t want to wait. The book was listed as being available for checkout at the Chinatown and Glen Park branches. I decided to go to the Chinatown branch because I haven’t been there in a long time, and the walk there involves a very invigorating hike up the Powell Street hill and then a breathtaking view of the bay near the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, Linc. That area around Chinatown — Nob Hill and the Marina — is one of my favorite places in the city, and how I do wish I could live there someday. But I digress…

It turned out that the Chinatown branch didn’t even have the book. Though it was listed in the system as available, the book wasn’t on the shelf and none of the librarians could find it. I was undeterred. I marched back down the Powell Street hill, hopped on BART, and made my way to Glen Park, where I let out a little “whoop” — I even popped a fist and spun my arm around in the air — when I found the book. Alas, I did this just as a librarian was pulling into my aisle with a new cart of books. “Uh, found what you were looking for?” she asked. “Yes,” I whispered, less out of courtesy for my surroundings and more because I’d been caught in the act of nerdgasming. So, I’m hoping that A Billion Wicked Thoughts will be the launch of a syllabus not unlike what I concocted for my exploration of baseball, except that now I am exploring sex. Which is something that I never thought I’d ever be doing, either.

The commute between my neighborhood, downtown, and then Chinatown, and finally Glen Park and back to downtown for the Parol Lantern Festival ate up nearly my entire afternoon. I got back downtown about an hour and a half before the festival was scheduled to begin, so I ran two errands that I’d long been meaning to get around to doing. Pop taught me that a man should always wear a watch, but my favorite watch died ages ago and I never replaced the battery, until tonight. It cost 14 bucks, and I did it at the place where I enjoy going for watch repair: Macy’s. I don’t know if I’ve ever written this, but I love Macy’s. I love that it’s an old-fashioned department store that has survived to this day, and that it’s the kind of full-service store you can go to for something like getting your watch fixed, just like shoppers would do back in the heyday of department stores in the early twentieth century.

After I got my watch fixed, I also ducked into an eyeglass shop to have my eyeglasses adjusted. What they needed was a good tightening, as the frames had gone loose a long time ago and not even the way they constantly threatened to flee from my face at just the slightest hint of wind had ever been enough for me to make the necessary trip. Not knowing that eyeglass adjustments are routinely provided free of charge, I took out my wallet when the optometrist handed them back to me good as new. “It’s a thousand dollars,” he grinned. “I don’t have that today,” I quipped back, to which he said, “I’ll let it slide this time.”

I have to admit, too: I waited until today to get my watch fixed and my eyeglasses tightened because I’d just gotten paid a pretty good paycheck. When you’re at the bottom rung of the middle class ladder, your perception is skewed and these things become luxuries. It was a treat for me to get my watch fixed and my eyeglasses tightened. Along with getting the library book that I wanted, I felt uncommonly accomplished today. And then there was the festival, and being with my friends, which made it even better.

Joe

4:40am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLyD6AFtt
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: Parol lantern festival San Francisco Filipino Christmas longreads A Billion Wicked Thoughts SFPL public libraries Macy's department stores 
June 13, 2011
Jesus H. Christ (his middle name was Herman).

early-onset-of-night:

My ask box is full and I have over a 100 new followers.

Many, many people are pissed at me.

The picture is from Fooducate: http://www.fooducate.com/blog/2009/08/03/guess-whats-in-the-picture-foodlike-substance/

The info is from the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is a book. I’m not looking up the page numbers for you, you lazy fucks.

I know everyone always talks about how they LOVE READING AND BOOKS on Tumblr, but maybe you should stop saying it, put down the tv remote, and actually read Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Now, blow me.

:)




Dear Linc,

I really like Michael “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” Pollan. And I like this guy, too.

There was some letter I wrote you about how I was really craving a good science book to read. Nothing interesting had come my way for a while, besides listening to Science Friday. I’ve read most of the major Michael Pollan-s and Mary Roach-s. I thought about revisiting The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, but then when I went to hunt that down at the library, I came across The Best American Science Writing series. I read the 2010 book and then the 2008 book, which was the next one I could find on the shelf that I didn’t have to put in a special request for from another library branch or otherwise wait around for.

I don’t know why I love this kind of stuff. I guess I am questioning why I love reading that stuff because a part of me wants to do something beyond a sole (and selfish) purpose of infotainment. For example, when I first read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I really wanted to go foraging for wild mushrooms like Michael Pollan did in the book. It seemed like something cool to learn.

Well, that was in 2007. And you have to get up at the asscrack of dawn to go mushroom hunting. 

Joe

5:21pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZzzsLy63k4KN
(Notes: 57)
  
Filed under: Michael Pollan Michael Kindt Mary Roach D.T. Max Science Friday SFPL 
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