A bad book has one truism

This weekend I checked out a few library books, including Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty by Tim Sandlin. This review says it all: irritating characters and a flawed plot. Sandlin takes his unlikable hippies, sticks them in a rest home, and we still hate them.

But there was one gem amongst the rest: A quote to the degree of "Most people wouldn't know the truth about themselves if it walked up and bit them." Yes. So true.

Does this mean I'm the queen of self-awareness? Hell no. But I'm always examining who I am and why I do as I do. I'm always reality-checking myself. I want to understand my effect on the world around me. I don't want people to loathe me because I don't get who I am and wind up generally obnoxious as a result.

Because we're mean like that

ADAM: You think she works?
ME: Yeah. She's enough of a JAP that she's a good girl. So she works. She has some candy-ass job where she doesn't have to do all that much.
ADAM: Some non-profit?
ME: Yeah. And by the time she's 30, she'll be in law school like her brother.

Early morning thoughts

Eventually -- and this is a scary thought after having been here for more than 11 years -- I'm going to want to leave the Bay Area.

If we do, it won't be for another two years at least. And if we do, it will probably be with the intention of coming back.

Still, there are things I will miss should we leave -- things I never thought I'd grow to appreciate with such ferocious affection. Great food and access to amazing, wonderful produce. This makes a difference when you like cooking as much as I do.

I'd miss the natural setting, the trees and the water, the easy access to some of the best views in the world, found simply by driving into the Berkeley hills.

And I'd miss the hugeness and the accessibility of the place. Anything you want, you'll find it here. Drive an hour in any direction and you're in a different world.

I doubt I'd miss the people as much. I've learned there are different kinds of individuality: the kind where people think for themselves and the kind where people walk around with multicolored dreds. There are plenty of both here, but I sometimes feel the dreds win. I'm also terribly over San Francisco's kooky politics. I'd be considered a liberal anywhere else in the world, but in a place that condones and supports juvenile Honduran crack dealers as well as a mafia organization that eventually shot a journalist dead in the street, I'm a little more toward the center.

I've met some of the best people in my life here. I've also met some charming, charismatic flakes who will win your heart and then proceed to break it. Is this a West Coast, Bay Area mentality? Perhaps.

We've got ideas and we've discussed them briefly. For now, I'm going to enjoy this place -- despite its irritants -- and whatever decision process that comes.

ME: Being phony is like fucking throwing battery acid down my throat. Is that extreme?
ADAM: Depends on the person. With some people they can get away with things because they're worth it.

Question: What makes someone worth it? And at what point do you say: Enough?

One of the "project lines"

I have a file called "Project lines" on my computer. That's where I throw things that I think would be good for the project, but have not yet found a home there.

Something I wrote just now:

When the anger comes, it comes as a numbness on the outside of my calves. It comes as a flush of the ears and a tingling of the elbows. All these little things to let me know: Here comes the calvalry. You want to kick some ass, we’re here.

Tonight

ME: Am I too hard on people? I ask out of -- I don't know, obligation.
ADAM: Hey. Some of us rise to the occasion.

I love straight talkers

From a Chron story about Omeed Popal, the nutcase who ran over a slew of people in San Francisco two years ago. Doctors concluded he was too crazy to know what he was doing, but some people disagree:

Mike Mahoney, the now-retired San Francisco police inspector who investigated the case, scoffed at the insanity argument.

"He knew exactly what he did. He told me exactly what he did," Mahoney said.

The most seriously injured of Popal's victims in San Francisco, massage therapist Susan Rajic, was paralyzed from the neck down when she was struck near her home at Laurel and California streets. Mahoney said he would like to bring her before a judge and "let the court see what the hell he did. She has a life sentence to a wheelchair."