Apart from attending a street fair and sleeping and junk, we were at the beach. And, then we were at the beach some more.
Here’s why the street fair out here in our new community is the bomb.
It rivals Cambridge’s many street fairs for variety, people watching and street food. But, it kicks it’s ass with the availability of not just wine and beer but actual booze in the form of a fog cutter. Cocktail on the rocks in a commemorative glass and tzachkes, including the new toe rings I had put on my right foot to replace those lost in a tragic foot rubbing incident. (OK, foot rubs are necessarily good not tragic.)
Also of interest is that the Hells Angels of Daly City maintain a booth. I never suspected motor cycle clubs for street fair esprit.
This year included the new and exciting sand castle contest. Silly me I expected it to be on the beach, where the sand is.
This time of year is the sweetest for our town, reputed to be enshrouded in fog pretty much all the damn time.
Actually, when we were shopping and thinking about this place and this town, we listened skeptically as the locals told us that what would become our neighborhood was immune from low-hanging cloud formations. They alleged that the curve of the mountains behind our house and the beach cove down the street oceanward created a doughnut where the sun glinted pretty much 25 hours a day. Local pride and hyperbole we thought.
Sho’ nuff, though, many a morning as I head to my work-a-day toil, I don sunglasses in our bright and sparkling driveway only to drive into dank gray two, three blocks down the street. And, this fog is John Carpenter fog. Scary, dense, pea soup stuff that has you tapping your brakes and fearing the bogeyman jumping out in front of you.
Perhaps the best part of the doughnut effect and the surrounding fog is its defensive powers. Driving into town from cutting over the San Bruno Mountains and headed to Highway 1, with the sun blotted out of the sky and clouds all around you, it’s impossible to believe there could be sun down below. So, at sea level in my backyard, the crowds stay away.
M. likens his commute to the Mists of Avalon. (Not clear if he fancies himself King Arthur.) I call it Brigadoon.
This weekend, they (or we) celebrate the mists with the Fog Fest. It’s the only street fest I’ve encountered on this god-forsaken coasts that puts me in mind of my days back wandering Mass. Ave. in Cambridge. Most of the street festivals here are precious and cloying in a particular California style. Lots of chardonnay and the kind of art for sale that includes evocative, colored door ways from distant lands snapped on someone’s world tour arranged to maximize the opportunities to see ‘exotic” brown faces and evocative doors. At the Fog Fest, the art is more driftwood and beads and sea glass; homey junk I would make myself.
As we gear up for this adventure that shall be followed by a frolic in the sea with our boogie boards, I checked out photos I forgot I had taken of a surf contest last month, the Kahuna Kapuna. When I paddle around with my meager, and they are seriously meager, sponging skills, which make me unworthy to share the ocean with the likes of Kelly Slater, it’s inspiring to watch people who know what they are doing. What you can’t tell from the photos is how unrushed and stock still some of old timers looked. Apart from the fact they were floating on a board at the top of a crashing wave, they stood as though they could have been waiting for a bus.
Now, in a free society, this post would be heaping full of links to the interwebs. But, for the sake of lessons learned and any kind of fall out for anyone that is not me, you’ll just have to trust in the story without the link love.
Tuesday of this week, as I am wiling away time clicking through budget spreadsheets and maintaining the meager daily existence that is my employment, M., an occasional diversion through electronic data transmissions, shoots me an email. The email was a forward from a dude who is a consultant at his company or, as you will read, was a consultant at his company. The contractor man had a nose that was full on disjointed, because, I gather from the corporate-wide email to which he appended his message, that consultants aren’t invited to some parties.
Now, here’s a side note. I actually have to work with contractors where I work, and actually have to work with the lawyers and the consultants themselves to get the terms of the contracts just so. One way my employer manages that whole blurry line of corporate communications among the folks that aren’t on the payroll is to refuse to recognize them. Consultants ain’t got no email. Period. No questions. One answer, and no question then that they just don’t get the corporate-wide messages. It’s up to us folks on the ground that work with them directly to point out the passing free lunch.
But, back to M.’s company. It’s much larger and much more corporate, business-like. They have consultants woven into the landscape doing all those kind of things that independent contractors might do at a corporation. In this case, the guy’s a graphic, web design dude. Like any number of graphic, web design dudes, although judging by a photo on one of several of his websites, perhaps a tad douchier than your average dude.
So, this guy, this avenger of the right and just, stands up for contractors everywhere and takes it upon himself to “Reply All” to the corporate-wide announcement for the shindig to gripe that it specifies “Contractors Excluded.”
Full disclosure. I’ve been that administrator who has to send out emails to a wide group and maybe make some negatives like “Contractors Excluded” known. I pride myself on two things in this life, not writing all sucky and shit and not being a total dick. Lucky for me, then, I’ve mostly been able to finesse the language away from full-on offending anyone. But, I can tell you from the real-life experience I’ve lived, people have an infinite capacity to find something to bitch about in any mass mailing. It’s the law that at least one person will complain, with a geometric progression growing to n+1 as the size of the recipient list grows.
People suck, and in my work lifetime, I’ve seen that suck grow alongside the popularity of email. You used to have to get up out of your seat and walk over and talk to someone or maybe pick up a telephone to get your complaint on.
So, you can probably guess as to where my allegiances were when I read the dude’s email. Mistake Numero Uno, the first, he called out the woman who sent the invitation email by name. He also called her out by deed, indicating to the entire corporation that he had tried last year (presumably for the same end-of-the-year party) to address the “Contractors Excluded” language. Of course, though, like all self-righteous pricks, he didn’t actually say how he tried last year.
Why is that mistake the first, the premier, error? Because, never, ever, ever fuck with the administrator who’s so close to the top of the food chain that she is the one sending out corporate-wide emails inviting folks to a party. The one who arranges events for the whole company probably sits within rock-throwing distance to people with Cs in their titles, those Cs stand for “Chief.” The email sender wouldn’t have chief in her title, but she’s bound to be on a first name basis, and know the names of the husbands, wives, children, dogs and hamsters, of the people who do. She talks with them; you, angry consultant, probably don’t.
The Number 2 mistake, but perhaps the mistake that truly removes you from naive crusader for a good cause to King Douche in a land of douchebags, hit my lizard brain before I fully understood the weight of the words of the email. Apparently, to you, angry contractor, not getting invited to a company party by a company that doesn’t actually employ you is the same as Jim Crow. Yup, the dude actually wrote to the entire company that his lack of an invite was just like separate bathrooms and water fountains and being sent to the back of the bus.
Let’s review that one. You work as an independent, self-employed graphic artist/web designer. You, per your grinning douche picture on your website, which it is fucking killing me not to post here or at least link, you are very likely of the Caucasian color scheme and be-goateed to boot. You work at a large, diverse company in one of the most racially diverse counties in the area. And, YOU, fucking compare yourself to people who ACTUALLY SUFFERED in our recent history?
Godwin’s Law talks about the frequency by which internet arguments devolve into Hitler comparisons. There needs to be a corollary law of wrongness for martyrs who compare their tiny inconveniences to Rosa Parks. Personally, I think it’s OK to turn a fire hose on anyone who makes a false comparison to the Civil Rights Movement. Being a contractor not invited to a party is not anything at all like having a separate bathroom, you fucking asshole.
It was from that metaphor alone I predicted that M.’s company would soon have one less contractor.
The much lesser mistake, mistake # 3, which for me was the big comedic pay off was the email sig. If one is to send an email to some where in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 people, based on the company’s size, one might want to pause and really think about what your email sig says about you. In this case, it says all of your several fucktarded online personae with links and names of multiple Facebook, AIM, Twitter and ‘blog identities.
Of the many, my fave was the Twitter feed for the account that seems to be your official company site for your business under which you contract. Early in the Twitter feed, around the same time M. forwarded your email to me, and we laughed at you, you predicted it would be a fun day. Thank you, it was. Then there are cracks about contractors “Included,” because, yup, hardy har, they excluded you. The denouement, of course, your bitterness about the company eliminating the complainer instead of fixing the problem.
Oh, so hard, to be so right, in such a cruel world.
As a companion piece, was your personal, casual Twitter feed. I don’t know what I’m digging more. Your conviction that you were martyred for “doing the right thing,” or that them turning off your remote computer access. That VPN note might win the funny by a hair, because the rumor was already out in M.’s company that they had indeed cut your computer.
It is so wrong of me to laugh. I have been fired. I have made mistakes on the world wide webs. I’ll probably continue to make such mistakes. But, at least, all of the company-wide emails I have ever sent have been mildly amusing and professionally worded. Although, i might have made an exception and something around excluding you my name.
Work. That’s all I feel like I do. Work. Toil. Plod. Struggle. Grind up hill and watch the boulder bear back down upon me.
For a few nights I brought spreadsheets home only to save some creeping insanity. Sometimes you just have to bring the tools of your destruction home and face them. Full on immersion, kind of like bathing in your enemies blood and coming out stronger on the other side encrusted with dried corpuscles, only with Excel. Encrusted with dried cells and formulae.
The truth is I’m just burned out. I can feel the funk of endlessly facing the same shit different day blues. I know it’s called a job for a reason, but I’m getting tired of feeling worked over. Maybe, when a whole lot of shit linked to the approaching year end, and I’ll feel my chipper self again. Or maybe, it won’t. Right now, I can’t tell.
So, for now, I’m writing very little, I’m performing not at all and I’m sleeping on the couch, weary when the sun sets.
Tomorrow, I’m going to hope for a little more energy.
I was just now dozing on the couch, when I was shaken out of my torpor by scanning Facebook. That is some sad shit, torpor-shakingly speaking, given the banality that presumes, but what are you going to do?
Regardless of the intellectual worth of my pursuit, here’s what I found:
An original work by an undiscovered filmmaker, my aunt, chronicling one of the places that is a touchstone, I think, for most everyone in my extended family. In fact, I think because of Scituate, I will always prefer the ocean as the go-to place for getting gone. Vacations should either involve being in an ocean, being near an ocean or flying over one. Or, it’s not really a trip, is it? Some day in my life, I may make an exception to that rule to visit Chicago, but they tell me, the theys that say things, they say that Lake Michigan is like staring at the ocean with no end in sight.
We didn’t go anywhere for this long weekend. I labored a little on spreadsheets, but that was more of a sanity measure, because shit at work just keeps piling up to shit levels I cannot stand. It was fucking therapeutic to almost feel like I’m not drowning in paperwork.
But, the important part is we didn’t go anywhere, because we don’t fucking need to go anywhere. We live at the beach. Yeah, my touchstone from childhood on for happy is less than a mile down the road. Granted, it’s the other ocean on the other coast of this continent, but saline and rolling waves and I’m a proverbial pig in shit. Cold, wet shit. Oh, fuck, that’s not the metaphor that really sells that one.
In the ’60s and ’70s, though, the beach for me was south of Boston, north of Plymouth, where the rock isn’t actually on a beach, at the end of what felt like a long ride, including a pass on “Old Oaken Bucket Road,” in the Sand Hills section of Scituate. Scituate, AKA the Irish Riviera, where the riffraff from the big city, like my people, bought summer cottages to escape the heat and wile away the summer hours on beach chairs dug into off-white sands.
Google Maps (which wasn’t invented back in the olden days of my youth) says it’s about 21 miles door to door and under 40 minutes. But, in July, packed up in the station wagon for a month’s stay, Pat at the wheel and five kids sitting in the pecking order that used to be when it was legal to cram as many children as you could in a regular car, it was remote. The youngest, poor me, was either on the hump in the middle, or the way, way back with luggage and food. (I was thrilled when the oldest began getting their licenses and their own cars or traveled in teenage packs with friends. It meant breathing room.)
The thing about Scituate was it represented an oasis from all the other suck in a typical hard-working suck life. Pat, the mater, as a school teacher, was completely free in July. She had no responsibilities other than to ensure we, her children, didn’t succeed in killing ourselves or each other. If I ever remember her happy, and maybe I do a little, the memories would mostly be in Scituate.
In Scituate, she could read books for hours endlessly. In Scituate, she could dig her chair in among the circle of moms on the beach in bathing suits with zippers and terry cloth “beach coats” and talk to adults who weren’t co-workers or the dreaded “Superintendent.” Of course, Pat, being who she was, that also meant she could have the joy of deconstructing the generally banal chatter of the beach-based coffee klatch and moaning about it. The Algonquin Round Table it was not, the great wits of the day must have been assembled on another beach, and I think Pat enjoyed complaining, Dorothy Parker-style.
I think everything was just a little bit different in Scituate. Take, for example, our cousins. My mother’s older sister lived, still lives, and raised her family in the same town where we lived, but we didn’t see them much around town. But, the time-honored tradition, which had to do with geography and who in Pat’s family stayed in Massachusetts and ages and families, was laid down at some point by my grandfather, his oldest daughter got August at the cottage, and Pat got July. The other folks in the clan visited around our two families, including my grandfather himself.
I really don’t know the history or how that fateful decision was made, but it was immutable law that we would be there in July, and in the planning and execution no minute in July could be missed. Then, in the transition on July 31/August 1 the keys were tossed to the eldest daughter of Pat’s clan, and we headed back to town. Because of this time share, the two sisters and their families actually talked some of the time, in Scituate.
In fact, one fateful summer, I was even allowed to stay on into August with my cousins. That’s when I learned the mysteries of hip huggers and halter tops and smoking in the dark of the beach. I hadn’t actually outgrown my childish ways, as yet, but I tagged along after my worldly cousin and her beach crew.
That was kind of the best part of Scituate. A little bit of lawlessness. All rules were relaxed. A chunk of the time you were sharing beds with some combination of sisters, cousins and friends, children packed into a few rooms without any school or work schedule to dictate terms. Late nights of giggling, followed by long summer days at the beach. Waking up was just as stop gap before grabbing a towel off the clothesline and walking to the waves. Even meals, while planned and cooked just like in town, seemed more casual and on the fly. Hotdogs and maybe back to the beach for one last dip.
There were rituals you couldn’t ever do in town. Like the next door neighbors, the Towers, that was their name, the Towers had an outdoor shower. That shower was occasionally a perfectly allowable alternative to a Saturday-night bath in the claw-footed tub. And, that shower was more fun than bathing could ever be.
There was no heat. None of the cottages had heat. So on the right, cool nights, that meant fire. Nothing rivals marshmallows or grilled cheese sandwiches cooked up in a fireplace, not to mention the chance to play with fire.
Here I am, now, thousands of years later with my own home near the beach, a fireplace AND a wood stove. Of course, inflation and real estate costs being what they are, I have to walk almost three times further to get to the beach. But, we were spoiled way back when, where the beach was 0.3 miles by road to our address, which was the “long” way without the path by the Beach Association. With the beach chairs and towels and food for snacks and lunch and stopping at Thorton’s Market and traveling in a pack, it felt longer.
It still relaxes me to spend a day at the beach. Or maybe just an hour or two. Today, it’s crushing Pacific waves in water that today the surf report tells me topped out at 59 degrees. It ain’t surprising that surfing caught on in this neighborhood in a big way.
Likely, I will never surf. The control of centrifugal force and wax sticking an upright homo sapiens’ feet to a long chunk of fiberglass or wood is beyond my philosophical imaging. I can’t stand still on solid ground, so fuck standing on a log. But I can grab a board none the less and manage some fun “sponging.” I’m too old to worry about cool, but just like a the owner of our favorite surf shop pointed out (in a hushed mystic, you had to be there Californian tone) there isn’t any other feeling like the energy of a wave pushing you onward.
I think last weekend we actually may have converted some friends from Boston to our new, weekend, wave-based religion.
